Henry F. May: 1915-2012

Henry F. May, one of his generation’s most distinguished historians, died Saturday, September 29, at the age of 97. May was Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley, where he had taught from 1952 until his retirement in 1980. He was a prominent campus citizen throughout his tenure at Berkeley, and served as Chair of the Department of History during the Free Speech Movement of 1964. He was honored by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 1981 as Faculty Research Lecturer.

 Two of May’s numerous books still help to define scholarly discussion of the two periods of American history to which they were addressed. The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917, published in 1959, argued that the cultural rebellions of the 1920s were well underway before World War I and that these rebellions were less dependent upon the that war’s impact than earlier scholars had assumed. The Enlightenment in America, a book of 1976 that won the Merle Curti Prize of the Organization of American Historians, persuaded a generation of scholars that the Protestant culture of late-18th century America rendered the American version of the Enlightenment strikingly different from its European equivalents. May was honored by the Organization of American Historians with its Distinguished Service Award in 1997. He was also an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 May’s passing trigged an outpouring of appreciations from historians throughout the nation. Bruce Kuklick of the University of Pennsylvania described May as “the most prominent American intellectual historian of his generation, a caring mentor, and a gentleman of the sort that we sorely miss in today's academic world.” According to Charles Capper of Boston University, “May virtually created the field of American intellectual history for the post-World War II era as well as trained more of its practitioners than any other historian of his time.” One of these many doctoral alumni, Berkeley’s David A. Hollinger, remembers May as “indefatigably conscientious and fair-minded.” Another of May’s students, Daniel Walker Howe of Oxford University, said “May's most important and distinctive quality was his intellectual integrity--his determination to be accurate and fair, to get the story right, not only in its factual specifics, but to recreate and convey the authentic spirit, purposes, and values of the people whom he studied and taught about.”

 May was born in Denver, Colorado, on March 27, 1915, but spent much of his youth in Berkeley. He was a 1937 graduate of UC Berkeley, and a classmate of Robert McNamara, later Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson. In an autobiography published in 1987, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History, May wrote extensively about his Berkeley youth and his experiences as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s, where he was involved in the left wing political activities common in that era. In 1993 May wrote a detailed study of the cultural and intellectual life of the Berkeley campus in the early years of the twentieth century, Three Faces of Berkeley: Competing Ideologies in the Wheeler Era, 1899-1919. A legendary raconteur about local life and times, he liked to tell stories about Berkeley’s great Wimbleton tennis champion of the 1930s, Helen Wills Moody.

 May completed his Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 1947, having first served as a Japanese language translator for the United States Navy during World War II and in the post-war occupation of Japan. He taught briefly at Bowdoin College and Scripps College before coming to Berkeley in 1952. His first wife, Jean, died in 2002. He is survived by his second wife, Louise Brown of Oakland, by his two daughters Ann May of Berkeley and Hildy May of Guerneville, and by three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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Editor's note: The above obituary notice was released this morning by UC Berkeley.  Our thanks to Prof. David Hollinger for helping us pass this notice on to our readers.  Hollinger notes that along with himself and Daniel Walker Howe, quoted in the obituary, Henry F. May's doctoral alums included Samuel Haber, Laurence Veysey, Nathan Hale, Jr., Peter Gregg Slater, David Bailey, Donald Harvey Meyer, and William O'Neill.  

Michael Wreszin (1926-2012)

I'm not going to be posting much today, but I did want to note the passing of the historian and biographer Michael Wreszin at the age of 85.  Although Wreszin died on August 12, his family announced his death this past weekend, which is when the New York Times published its obituary of him.

Wreszin, who was a professor of history at Queens College, is best known for three biographies of iconoclastic American leftists:  Oswald Garrison Villard: Pacifist at War (1965), The Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock (1972), and A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: the Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (1992).

Although I consume a lot of biographies (and parts of many more), biography is not a genre that I'm naturally drawn to, either in my own work or in my reading for pleasure.  So I am perhaps not the best person to hold forth on what makes for a good biography. Nonetheless, Wreszin's biography of Macdonald remains one of my favorite biographies of an American intellectual.  I approached the book having read a fair bit of Macdonald's writings from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, but knowing only the broadest outlines of his life.  Wreszin brought Macdonald to life in a way that illuminated  both the man and his work, as well as the broader worlds that he inhabited as, at various times, a Troskyist, a democratic socialist, a pacifist, an editor at Fortune, The Partisan Review, and politics, a New York intellectual, a film critic, and an activist.  Having read Rebel in Defense of Tradition, I felt that I had really understood this peculiar and important thinker.   And I can't ask for more from a biography.  I should add that it is also a very good read.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wreszin or even to hear him talk.  Consider this an open thread for discussion of Michael Wreszin and his work.

Earl Shorris and Popular Anti-Straussianism

Earl Shorris

Last week, author and educator Earl Shorris passed away at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His New York Times obituary rightly focuses on his creation of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the program he created in 1995 to bring a broad, liberal arts curriculum to the economically disadvantaged, which earned him a National Humanities Medal in 2000.

But the first thing I thought of when I heard of Shorris's passing was a piece that he wrote for Harper's, published in June, 2004, entitled "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (.pdf available here).  Shorris's piece was one of a series of popular works from the middle of the last decade that sought to blame Leo Strauss and his acolytes for all that had gone wrong during the Bush years.  In May, 2003, Seymour Hersh had argued in The New Yorker that a Straussian cabal was responsible for cooking U.S. intelligence on Iraq to bring about war, a charge echoed that same month by James Atlas in a New York Times op-ed.  This flurry of articles, in turn, inspired the actor Tim Robbins to write Embedded, a play that premiered in L.A. in July, 2003, which dramatized the notion that Leo Strauss was pulling the strings of the Iraq War from beyond the grave.  Shortly after Shorris's article appeared, in the fall of 2004, the documentarian Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares premiered on BBC television, arguing that Leo Strauss had not only been the intellectual font of neoconservatism, but had also inspired American policymakers to invent Al Qaeda.

How do these attempts to argue that Leo Strauss was the power behind the Bush throne hold up almost a decade later?  How does Shorris's piece fare among them?




My provisional answer is to the first question is that these articles, plays, and documentaries explained both too little and too much.  On the one hand, they were part of a much larger tendency to see the Bush Administration--especially post-9/11--as representing a much more radical break with the past than it in fact did.  The too-little-acknowledged continuities have become clearer now that we have had three years during which a Democratic administration has not, in fact, reversed many of the policies that critics found so appalling during the Bush years. Discovering a previously obscure, foreign, reactionary thinker as the secret cause of an administration's actions nicely fit the view of the Bush administration as a radical break from the past.  The focus on Strauss and his followers as the secret power behind the Bush administration tended to produce elaborate explanations for fairly historically common phenomena, like administrations' lying to the public about wars, while providing far too shallow critiques of other phenomena, such as long-standing problems with the national security state that had developed during the Cold War and lived on long after its end.  Stories of the trahison des Straussians also uncomfortably resembled a long tradition of anti-intellectual counter-subversive narratives, the most famous modern examples of which involved Communists during the Cold War.

All that being said, Straussians have played a smaller, but nonetheless important, role in modern American conservatism. The fact that some false conspiracy theories have been constructed about them no more makes them unimportant on the right than the falsity of most anti-Communist conspiracy theories means that Communists weren't important in the Old Left.

In the context of the popular anti-Straussian writings of the Bush years, Shorris's piece is measured and interesting, if nonetheless off-base in many typical ways.  Shorris makes his share of sloppy mistakes, some of them understandable and basically unimportant (e.g. identifying Strauss's hometown as "Kirchheim" rather than "Kirchhain") some of them significant and less defensible (e.g. identifying Grover Norquist as a Straussian).

To his credit, Shorris sets his critique in a world in which Leo Strauss did not invent public dishonesty:

It is safe to say that neither Ronald Reagan nor the Bushes have read Leo Strauss, and certainly no politician needs to be taught how to lie by a professor of philosophy.

Nevertheless, as Shorris notes in a footnote to this statement,

we need not be concerned with proving direct lines of influence. A brief summary of Straussian doctrine suffices to demonstrate its affinity with what one might call the "mind of the regime," whether any particular member of the Bush Administration has read Strauss or not.

But Shorris is sensibly uncomfortable at leaving the matter at merely identifying similarities between the behavior of the administration and (his understanding of) Strauss, so he continues in the main text of his article:

Perhaps William Kristol, while serving as Dan Quayle's chief of staff, tutored the vice president in the finer points of Platonic politics. But it is unlikely. The step from philosophy to action is almost always circuitous, Machiavelli being one of the rare exceptions. Strauss's ideas about ideas took the usual path, picked and poked and punched, mutating here, understood selectively there. At one time, Strauss wrote a sentence in which he opposed preventive war. How disappointed his followers in the Department of Defense would be to read it now in light of the wreckage they have made!  

The career of Strauss's teachings is one of the wonders and the dangers of the book, as the master himself might have said, knowing that the long life of books, unlike newspapers or television, is bound up with history in a process of indirection. The ideas in books somehow manage to wiggle through the morass of individuals and information in large modern societies and become effective. The way is not clear, but the fact of it often gives surcease to the pains of laboring in obscurity.

Two things are notable about this passage. First, it shows a much subtler understanding of the actual ways that ideas affect society than the sometimes Dan Brownish intellectual conspiracy theories that have been written about the Straussians. Secondly, there's some suggestion that Shorris sees Strauss himself as similar to Prof. Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, whose Nietzschean ideas are transformed by a student into an act of murder.  In fact, around the time Shorris wrote his Harper's piece, a number of critics of the Straussians, including both Anne Norton and Mark Lilla, began to suggest that Strauss was not a Straussian and that the master should not be blamed for the sins of his acolytes.

Shorris himself, however, is not clear on this point. One of the striking things about his article is the poignancy of his (essentially negative) portrait of Leo Strauss.  Shorris has virtually nothing good to say about Strauss's writings (which he sees as intentionally impossible to decipher and largely dedicated to bad writing for bad writing's sake) or about his political commitments (which he sees as reactionary, hierarchical, and anti-democratic).  Yet he also sees Strauss as an essentially tragic figure, whose politics were almost entirely determined by his intellectual hero Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, and who seemed (somewhat like Stewart's Prof. Cadell) to have had little desire for the powers sought by his followers:

Without question he was a brilliant professor, a frightened man whose ideas, having been battered into hiding by historic events, were eccentric. He had produced some journal articles, delivered the Walgreen Lectures, never to my knowledge appeared in the "public press," made no radio or television appearances, and during his lifetime found but a small group of readers for his books. He died obscure and far from home.

Ultimately, Shorris's take on Strauss's life and ideas is overly reductive, though much of the blame no doubt lies with the format--a seven page magazine article--as well as the unavailability of decent secondary sources about Strauss: although the situation would change drastically over the next five years, at the time Shorris wrote, not a single scholarly biography of Strauss had been published in English, and there were still very few scholarly monographs dedicated to explicating his thought.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Shorris's article on Strauss is something that goes unstated in it.  Early in the piece, Shorris notes that Strauss

had but one core idea: read old books carefully. It was a stroke of genius, and nothing more invigorating or enlightening could be said about education, but it was not news on a campus run by Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the inventors of the Great Books curriculum.

What Shorris doesn't mention is that he himself was very much a product of that curriculum.  Shorris attended U of C in the late '40s and early '50s, arriving there as a thirteen year-old (Chicago was known for accepting very young undergraduates) within a year or two of Leo Strauss himself.  Though he left before receiving his degree, Shorris was deeply influenced by his university's commitment to the Great Books, as his creating of the Clemente Course some four decades later attests.  As Tim Lacy has written on this blog, there were many flavors of commitment to the Great Books at Chicago.  And Shorris, like Mortimer Adler, was deeply attached to great books liberalism. As the Clemente Course suggests, Shorris saw the Great Books as documents of democratic empowerment.  But he saw Strauss as attempting to wed these books to a doctrine of elitism and obscurantism.

Shorris's piece ends with a call to resist the "Nietzschean dreams of power" that he saw as regnant, thanks to Strauss, in the Bush administration.  He's largely silent--other than those passing words of praise in that last blockquote, which could incorrectly be read as ironic--on his own abiding commitment to the Great Books.  What is clear is that Shorris saw ideas as mattering and feared not so much a conspiratorial cabal (though his article is not entirely free of loose accusations about who were Straussians in the halls of power) as the potentially catastrophic effects of bad philosophy.  And this, too, was something he shared with Leo Strauss.

Paul S. Boyer (1935-2012)

The New York Times has reported the passing of Paul S. Boyer on March 17 at the age of 76.

As readers of this blog know, Boyer was one of the most important U.S. intellectual historians of his generation.   Unlike many others who have earned that title, however, I don't associate Boyer particularly with any distinctive methodological, topical, metanarrativistic, or stylistic shift in the field or sub-field. To put this another way:  I can't think of any time that I've read someone else's work and have thought "that reminds me of Boyer"... and I'm not sure what would remind me of him.

But Boyer is one of that small group of historians who wrote three books that have made a real difference to me. And in Boyer's case, they are three books on very different topics:  Salem Possessed (1974), By The Bomb's Early Light (1985), and When Time Shall Be No More (1992).




Salem Possessed, co-written with Stephen Nissenbaum, applied the tools of the (then new) social history to the case of the Salem witchcraft trials and made an ingenious, if ultimately not wholly convincing, case that the witchcraft scare could best be explained by looking at land-ownership patterns and the distribution of wealth. By the time I encountered it in grad school in the late '80s, Salem Possessed read as a kind of object lesson in both the possibilities and limitations of the kind of social history that had exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s.

But by then, Boyer had moved on to other things.  By The Bomb's Early Light was an extraordinarily well-written and fascinating look at American view of atomic weaponry and power in the years immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.*  Boyer's interest in this topic reflected his own lifelong pacifism (he had been raised in one of the traditional peace churches).  Analyzing an extraordinarily broad range of materials, the book conveys both the hopes and the fears that Americans felt about the bomb from the start.


By The Bomb's Early Light would eventually serve as a kind of preemptive strike (albeit an ultimately politically unsuccessful one) against the nonsense that befell the proposed Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian a decade later, when various politicians and veterans organizations attempted to suggest that only recently had a small group of pointed-headed revisionists questioned the goodness of the atomic bombings of Japan.  In fact, as Boyer had told us, many Americans had been skeptical and fearful of the use of atomic weaponry from very early on.

When Time Shall Be No More grew out of By The Bomb's Early Light, but concerns a seemingly very different topic: premillennial prophecy in U.S. culture since World War II.  Boyer first realized the shear scope and significance of premillennialism while working on By The Bomb's Early Light, as atomic weaponry quickly came to play a role in premillennial prophetic understandings of current events in the mid-20th century. In taking premillennialism seriously as a strain in American culture worthy of real historical attention (rather than dismissing it as a kind of cultural neurosis), When Time Shall Be No More anticipated both the enormous growth of interest in religion (and especially vernacular religion) among American historians in the last two decades and the growing interest in American conservatism.

Yet the book does not (as far as I remember; I read it when it first came out and used it several times since in a classroom setting, but haven't taken a look at it for at least five years) present itself as boldly leading American historiography in a new direction. Boyer had simply found a fascinating and important topic and chosen to write about it. And like By The Bomb's Early Light, When Time Shall Be No More has an almost effortless feel about it.  In Boyer's hands, the thought of modern premillennial Christians comes alive as historically important and intrinsically interesting in a way that is neither celebratory nor dismissive.**  The book is an excellent work of history, but also a very good read.

When thinking about great historians (I almost put "great"...and then "great historians"... in quotation marks), I think we are most often drawn to revolutionary figures in a Kuhnian sense, authors who shifted the paradigm in one way or another. I don't think Paul Boyer fits this model of historiographical greatness.

But I do think it's fair to call Boyer a great historian.  He wrote a number of significant and enduring works of history on a wide range of topics, some of which found themselves on cutting edges that had not even yet emerged when he started work on them.  Both By The Bomb's Early Light and When Time Shall Be No More are models of serious scholarship written in a way that might reach broader, non scholarly audiences; I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either one of them to non-academic friends interested in their subject matters (and in fact have recommended both to non-academics over the years).

This is a career worth remembering and celebrating.

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* In between working with Nissenbaum on Salem and publishing By The Bomb'e Early Light,  Boyer wrote Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1978), which was also a very important book at the time, but which, I'm ashamed to say, I've never read.


** The first time I taught When Time Shall Be No More, one of my students happened to have come from a premillennialist background and he found the book familiar, in certain ways, but fair, interesting, and accurate.

David Montgomery, 1927-2011

David Montgomery, one of the leading labor historians of his generation, passed away this morning at the age of 84.

I got to know Montgomery's work as a graduate student. The Fall of the House of Labor was one of the most brilliant--and daunting--things I read as a first-year graduate student.  I don't think I ever had any aspirations to be a labor historian, but I remember feeling after reading Montgomery's book that I would simply be incapable of producing anything like that.  The sheer amount of knowledge about the particulars of various late nineteenth-century industrial trades was staggering to me.

I got to know David himself when he and I were among the founders of Historians Against the War (HAW).  Though David's academic work alone is enough to seal his reputation as a major figure in our profession, he also distinguished himself as an activist.  When I first met David, I remember being struck by what an extraordinarily down-to-earth and practical person he was (qualities which were, frankly, sometimes absent from my generation of academic leftists).  Getting to work with David was one of the great pleasures of my years in HAW. 

I heard the news of his passing in an e-mail communication to the HAW membership that included this nice recollection from one of our first co-chairs, Van Gosse:

David wrote the founding statement of HAW, huddling in a small group at the end of our first meeting, at the AHA in January 2003 in Chicago.  He was a very active member of the Steering Committee for some years, always a reasonable, steadying person, but also always up for more action.  He will be much, much missed.  David Montgomery, Presente!

There aren't many obituaries up yet, but there's a nice piece by Jon Wiener about David Montgomery at The Nation.

Two Deaths: Whiggery vs. "Great Men" in Contemporary US Public Memory

Last Wednesday, October 5, 2011, two Americans of great historical significance passed away: Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Steve Jobs.*  Shuttlesworth's death was announced in the morning.  His memory was quickly framed by his relative lack of fame compared to the one civil rights leader that all Americans know.  "Marching in the shadow of Dr. King"--which would serve as the title of Diane McWhorter's NYT op-ed the next day--was the theme of most of the news stories that morning about Shuttlesworth, which rightly focused on his crucial importance to the movement in his home base of Birmingham, Alabama. If Shuttlesworth seemed--then and now--to be in King's shadow, he shouldn't be remembered that way.  For it was Shuttlesworth who convinced an initially reluctant King to take the movement to Birmingham following the SCLC's failed 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia.  And when the focus finally did shift to Birmingham in 1963, the clashes between peaceful protestors and the violent police force under the direction of Bull Connor helped galvanize national opinion in favor of civil rights.

But if Shuttlesworth in life marched in King's shadow, in death he would soon find himself in Steve Jobs's.  When Steve Jobs's death was announced in the evening, the news coverage immediately began to focus more on the entrepreneur and technological innovator than the civil rights leader.  Jobs's fame had been greater--and more recent--than Shuttlesworth's. And the changes that he wrought in American life were also more recent.  Most Americans take the lack of racially segregated public facilities entirely for granted.  We are, for better or for worse, more amazed by our iPads. 

Rather predicatably, Jobs dominated the frontpages of the nation's papers the following morning. The traditionally staid Wall Street Journal gave him a six-column headline.  But from the moment that Jobs's death was announced, a dissenting view began appearing online that Shuttlesworth was simply the more significant figure...and that all the focus on Jobs revealed what a hopelessly materialistic, shallow, and/or forgetful culture we had become.  Certainly a common theme among African American writers online rang true: without Jobs, they wouldn't have their MacBooks; but without Shuttlesworth they wouldn't have their freedom.  But I was most struck by a notion that I saw in a number of comments on websites and on Facebook to the effect that, while we'd still have personal computers without Jobs, African Americans wouldn't have civil rights without Shuttlesworth. I found this argument fascinating precisely because I think it takes a Whiggish attitude I find from many of my students about the Civil Rights Movement and applies it, exclusively, to the technological revolutions of the last several decades. By positing that a change was essentially an inevitable result of inevitable social or technological progress, the contributions of (potentially) "Great Men" can be ignored or downplayed.  

Both the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century are the kinds of changes that so transformed American society that they are very easily naturalized and made part of the kind of Whiggish narrative of progress that constitutes the backbone of American public memory (when it's not in the jeremiad-laced apocalyptic mode, at any rate).  In such stories of inevitable progress, the risks taken by important historical actors can easily get forgotten. But they are both also precisely the sorts of stories that we like to tell in terms of a tiny handful of Great Leaders who are imagined as bringing them about. What Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were to the turn of the last century, Jobs and Bill Gates are to the turn of this one.  And King (occasionally assisted by Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and, once he became a major motion picture, Malcolm X) plays a similar role in the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.

My own view is that virtually nothing in history is inevitable.  Movements and social and cultural forces, featuring many important actors beyond the tiny handful of leaders let into the pantheon of public memory, are necessary to produce changes like the civil rights and technological revolutions.   While it is as wrong to understand the modern personal computer as the creation of Steve Jobs, Solitary Genius, as it is to see the phonograph and motion picture as emerging fully formed from the head of Thomas Edison, that does not mean that the real contributions of either should be ignored.  And the nature of obituaries is that they focus on individuals and their contributions, not movements and social forces.  It's certainly unfortunate that Fred Shuttlesworth's extraordinary and often under-appreciated work in the black freedom struggle once again became overshadowed on the day of his death. Like Jobs, his extraordinary individual accomplishments deserve to be remembered and celebrated 

But in a sense the greatest importance of rescuing Shuttlesworth from (public semi-) obscurity was that doing so encouraged the public to look beyond the leaders they already knew, not simply to a larger handful of leaders, but to the civil rights movement as whole. And to foster such a richer public memory of a social movement we will never be able to rely on obituaries. 

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* In fact, a third significant American also died that day, legal scholar and critical race theorist Derrick Bell.  Like Shuttlesworth, Bell was a figure of some importance in the ongoing civil rights movement. Though early in his career he was, briefly, the only African American in Eisenhower's Justice Department (he was asked to resign his membership in the NAACP so as to avoid appearing to have a conflict of interest; he quit his federal job instead), he became best known as a legal academic, who reached his greatest fame as a scholar--and protester against Harvard Law School's hiring policies--in the 1980s.  But it's taking little away from Bell to say that he was a less consequential figure than Shuttlesworth.  And even more than Shuttlesworth, public memory on the day of his passing fell victim to the coincidence of more famous men dying on the same day.

Sen. Charles Percy (1919-2011) and the Straussians

This Saturday, September 17, former Senator Charles Percy (R-IL) passed away after suffering for years with Alzheimer's disease.  Percy, who served in the Senate from 1967 to 1985, was a leading example of a now extinct breed: the liberal Republican. Within months of being elected to the Senate, Percy was spoken of as a likely GOP Presidential nominee. But his meteoric rise within the liberal wing of his party came as that wing was rapidly losing influence. In 1968, rather than run himself, he endorsed Nelson Rockefeller's Republican presidential primary bid.  He had planned a run in 1976, before Nixon's resignation meant that a GOP incumbent would run that year (in fact, Percy, no fan of Nixon, had been the first Senator to propose an independent prosecutor to investigate Watergate). So Percy endorsed Ford's reelection. In 1984, he lost his Senate seat to Paul Simon, in part due to AIPAC opposition to Percy, who had supported the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia.  Percy's career, first as President of Bell & Howell, and then in the U.S. Senate is covered well in his New York Times obituary and elsewhere.

But I want to focus on a little noted aspect of Percy's biography, one that links him to a strand of U.S. intellectual history that is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same sentence as liberal Republicanism: the legacy of Leo Strauss. 

A key figure in Chuck Percy's move from the boardroom to the hustings was the political theorist Robert A. Goldwin.  Goldwin did his PhD under Leo Strauss at Chicago. And though he spent about a decade in the academy (at the University of Chicago, Kenyon College, and St. John's College, where he served as Dean, replacing Strauss's closest intellectual friend, Jakob Klein), Goldwin made his biggest mark as a public intellectual, putting leading figures in business and politics in contact with political theorists, especially Straussian ones, at the Public Affairs Conference Center which he directed, first at Chicago (1960-66) and then at Kenyon (1966-69). After a stint working in two presidential administrations, he finished his career as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.*

Percy had been President of the Bell & Howell Corporation since 1949. By the late 1950s, he had begun to consider a move to politics, apparently encouraged by President Eisenhower, among others. In 1960, he chaired the Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention.  But his first run for office would be in 1964, when he was the Republican candidate for Governor of Illinois, eventually losing a closely fought race to the Democratic incumbent Otto Kerner (who would later chair LBJ's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which popularly bears his name).

In the run-up to this foray into electoral politics, Robert Goldwin played a key role, an account of which can be found in David Murray's Charles Percy of Illinois (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), a campaign biography for a presidential run that never was:

One day in Pittsburgh, where he had gone for a Republican function, he met a young professor of political science from the University of Chicago, Robert A. Goldwin, a man with a basically conservative turn of mind, who talked with Percy at some length--then and later--about the theory that lay behind the everyday business of the ordering of man's life.  For Percy, Goldwin's book learning and philosophy filled a need; the successful pragmatist had to know not just the how but the why.  He and Goldwin talked more in the months that followed, and Goldwin was hired on a more or less regular basis, to come to [Percy's hometown of] Kenilworth each Saturday for several hours to conduct a one-student seminar.  It was the latter-day fulfillment of the definition of ideal American education--Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

"He's the only businessman I know who has read all The Federalist papers," Goldwin said once.  "We used to have assignments--reading that he would do and essays he would write about what he had read--and we'd talk about the ideas that he had found. . . ."

Another Percy associate who was with him in those days with Goldwin said later: "Those talks and those sessions with Goldwin filled a gap in Chuck's approach to the world. He knew that some things happen which shouldn't happen and that other things that should happen don't happen. This told him some of the reasons for things.  He knew, for example, that he was a Republican; he'd always been one because his family was.  Now he knew what the philosophy behind his thinking really was, that there was, in many instances, a Republican way of getting at a problem and a Democratic way of getting at it. He found out why the two were different and--I think this is even more important--that the Republican way might not always be the best way to go about it." (pp. 44-45)

Goldwin apparently worked on Percy's unsuccessful 1964 gubernatorial campaign, though not on Percy's successful run for the Senate in 1966, when Percy defeated longtime Democratic Senator Paul Douglas (Goldwin had, by the fall of 1966, moved to Kenyon).  Percy, for his part, contributed an introduction to a book by another Straussian, Harry Jaffa's Equality and Liberty (1965).

But while Goldwin's connection to his other major political advisee--Congressman, and later Ambassador to NATO, Presidential Chief of Staff, and Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld--would be much more public, the connections of Goldwin and his fellow Straussians to Charles Percy apparently continued.   Nathan Tarcov, who is in the next intellectual generation of Straussians, told me that when he took a break from academia at the beginning of the 1980s, he put out feelers to Percy's office before eventually accepting a post in Reagan's State Department Policy Planning Office.

I find Percy's connection to the Straussians fascinating, in part because it violates so many clichés about Straussianism in American politics.  Percy was neither Jewish nor Catholic (he was, in fact, a practicing Christian Scientist).  He was a moderate liberal, not a conservative (let alone a neocon).  In the midst of the Watergate scandal he distinguished himself by opposing the Machiavellian political maneuvering of a President from his own party.  And his eventual political defeat came about in large measure because he was seen as soft on Israel.

None of this should lead us to see Percy as a typical Straussian (or, perhaps, as a Straussian at all). You may have noticed that even David Murray, in the passage quoted from his 1968 campaign biography of Percy, made a point of correctly stressing that Goldwin--unlike Percy--was "a man with a basically conservative turn of mind" (though interestingly, but not at all surprisingly, Leo Strauss's name never comes up in Murray's book).    And Jaffa, who had fallings out with many of his fellow Strauss students in the 1970s, wrote a bitter letter to Goldwin, during the latter's stint in the Ford Administration, mocking Chuck Percy and Goldwin's attempts to tutor him.

But Percy and his connection to the Straussians should lead us to realize that the legacy of Leo Strauss and his students in American public life is more complicated and polyvocal than it is often portrayed as being.
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* I've previously blogged about Goldwin in his later capacity as the "White House Intellectual" of the Ford Administration.

Owsley Stanley (1935-2011)

Since I've mused in the past about the intellectual history of the counterculture, I wanted to note the passing of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley Stanley (or "Bear" to his friends).  As the San Francisco scene's most famous manufacturer of LSD, Stanley was responsible, in some sense, for an important aspect of the intellectual history of the Summer of Love.  He also served as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer.  He was killed on Sunday when he lost control of his car and hit an embankment in his adoptive home of Queensland, Australia.  The New York Times obit is here.

Owsley Stanley (1935-2011)

Since I've mused in the past about the intellectual history of the counterculture, I wanted to note the passing of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley Stanley (or "Bear" to his friends).  As the San Francisco scene's most famous manufacturer of LSD, Stanley was responsible, in some sense, for an important aspect of the intellectual history of the Summer of Love.  He also served as the Grateful Dead's sound engineer.  He was killed on Sunday when he lost control of his car and hit an embankment in his adoptive home of Queensland, Australia.  The New York Times obit is here.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell passed away yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.  Bell was, of course, a leading sociologist and public intellectual, whose long and fascinating career is, and will likely long be, of great interest to U.S. intellectual historians.  A leading Cold War liberal thinker in the 1950s, Bell later became a founding co-editor of The Public Interest which eventually made him a charter neoconservative, though Bell's version of neoconservatism was always idiosyncratic. Irving Kristol declared that his college friend and co-editor represented the "social democratic wing" of neoconservatism. Bell, for his part, referred to himself as a right-wing social democrat, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell passed away yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.  Bell was, of course, a leading sociologist and public intellectual, whose long and fascinating career is, and will likely long be, of great interest to U.S. intellectual historians.  A leading Cold War liberal thinker in the 1950s, Bell later became a founding co-editor of The Public Interest which eventually made him a charter neoconservative, though Bell's version of neoconservatism was always idiosyncratic. Irving Kristol declared that his college friend and co-editor represented the "social democratic wing" of neoconservatism. Bell, for his part, referred to himself as a right-wing social democrat, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Tony Judt has apparently passed away following a two-year battle with ALS. No obituaries seem to be online yet. I'll update this post with links to them and some thoughts of my own later in the day.

UPDATE I: While the official New York Times obituary has yet to be posted, this short appreciation by William Grimes has appeared on the NYT's website. See also this piece on Judt's working with ALS that appeared in this morning's Irish Independent before news of Judt's death had been announced.

UPDATE II: The NYT has now posted a complete obituary, also by Grimes. The Guardian (UK) also has an obit up.

A few thoughts of my own: I never had the opportunity to meet Tony Judt, so I can't offer any personal reminiscences; my knowledge of him is entirely through his historical scholarship and his career as a public intellectual. When I read a piece by Judt, I could always count on its intelligence, its wit, and its independence from the orthodoxies that plague those of us who think about the past or try to comment on the present. To say that he was brilliant and independent is not at all to say that he was always right or that I always agreed with him. But he was always worth reading. In my opinion he was the model of a public intellectual. The historical profession has lost one of its most distinguished members and our public discourse has lost one of its most valuable and distinctive voices.

Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Tony Judt has apparently passed away following a two-year battle with ALS. No obituaries seem to be online yet. I'll update this post with links to them and some thoughts of my own later in the day.

UPDATE I: While the official New York Times obituary has yet to be posted, this short appreciation by William Grimes has appeared on the NYT's website. See also this piece on Judt's working with ALS that appeared in this morning's Irish Independent before news of Judt's death had been announced.

UPDATE II: The NYT has now posted a complete obituary, also by Grimes. The Guardian (UK) also has an obit up.

A few thoughts of my own: I never had the opportunity to meet Tony Judt, so I can't offer any personal reminiscences; my knowledge of him is entirely through his historical scholarship and his career as a public intellectual. When I read a piece by Judt, I could always count on its intelligence, its wit, and its independence from the orthodoxies that plague those of us who think about the past or try to comment on the present. To say that he was brilliant and independent is not at all to say that he was always right or that I always agreed with him. But he was always worth reading. In my opinion he was the model of a public intellectual. The historical profession has lost one of its most distinguished members and our public discourse has lost one of its most valuable and distinctive voices.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

I've just read the sad news that Howard Zinn has passed away.

Zinn's career stands as a monument to the proposition that scholarship, teaching, and activism can be successfully melded. As someone who values all three, but manages the relationship between them rather differently, I cannot honestly say that Zinn and his scholarly work have been a model for me. But I greatly admire his career nonetheless.

I never studied with Zinn. But I had the opportunity to meet him briefly, when he was the keynote speaker at the conference on Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq that was sponsored by Historians Against the War (on whose steering committee I then sat) in Austin, Texas in February 2006. Zinn gave a rousing and deeply historically informed talk. And he had all the warmth and genuine concern for history, his country, and his fellow citizens that I'd always associated with him.

Truly a life well lived.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

I've just read the sad news that Howard Zinn has passed away.

Zinn's career stands as a monument to the proposition that scholarship, teaching, and activism can be successfully melded. As someone who values all three, but manages the relationship between them rather differently, I cannot honestly say that Zinn and his scholarly work have been a model for me. But I greatly admire his career nonetheless.

I never studied with Zinn. But I had the opportunity to meet him briefly, when he was the keynote speaker at the conference on Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq that was sponsored by Historians Against the War (on whose steering committee I then sat) in Austin, Texas in February 2006. Zinn gave a rousing and deeply historically informed talk. And he had all the warmth and genuine concern for history, his country, and his fellow citizens that I'd always associated with him.

Truly a life well lived.