Pauline Maier Introduction

For those unfortunate souls who missed the fourth annual USIH conference--the best yet--I'll kick off the blog discussion of the conference, which figures to be intense, by posting my prepared introduction of Pauline Maier's keynote address. Maier's talk was simply wonderful.
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November 18, 2011

Welcome everyone! It is my great honor to introduce this year’s keynote speaker. This is the first conference hosted by the brand new Society for U.S. Intellectual History, about which I am extremely proud. However, this is the Fourth Annual U.S. History Conference.

I’d like to give a very brief history of our keynotes. At the first, held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we did not have a keynote speaker. That would have been presumptuous, even for us.

At the second, held here at the Graduate Center, James Livingston gave our first keynote address. It was a fascinating talk on how recent directions in intellectual history were foreshadowed by developments in popular culture, including cartoons. One of the more memorable moments came during the Q&A, when Eric Alterman shouted at Livingston from the back of the room, accusing him of badly misinterpreting the film Hurt Locker. Alterman then used his regular column in The Nation to further hammer home his point about Livingston’s supposed fanciful interpretations. (Note: As those in attendance know, this moment during the introduction was memorable--and embarrassing for me--since Alterman walked into the room just as I mentioned his name. Thanks to Ben Alpers for pointing out his presence!)

At last year’s conference, also hosted here at the Graduate Center, James Kloppenberg gave our keynote. It was a rousing overview of his book Reading Obama. The talk was featured in a New York Times article by Patricia Cohen, in which I was quoted as saying that the audience found the talk so fascinating because Obama’s education—his introduction to traditions of American thought, such as pragmatism and republicanism—seemed very similar to our own. The right-wing blogosphere used that article as evidence that Obama is an elitist and that academics are a bunch of sycophants. We couldn’t have scripted it any better.

It thus seems that giving our keynote is a great occasion to become the subject of a minor controversy. Since any publicity is good publicity, and since we don’t yet have any money, we found our selling point!

On that note, it is my great pleasure to introduce this year’s keynote, Dr. Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maier received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968 and has since published several important books about America’s revolutionary era. These include: From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776; The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams; and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. Her latest book, published last year by Simon and Shuster, is Ratification. The People Debate the Constitution. 1787-1788.

In a recent review of Ratification in the American Historical Review, Frank Cogliano writes that: “Maier deploys narrative as a methodology in order to recreate the major debates over the Constitution and to chart the ebb and flow of the ratification struggle.” It would thus seem that this year’s conference committee, Ray Haberski, Ben Alpers, and our chair, Mike O’Connor, did a brilliant job of matching the keynote to the conference theme of “Narratives.” Well done! Please help me welcome Pauline Maier.

The Page 99 Test

I just came across this website after being asked to contribute. The premise is clever, and there are a lot prominent contributors who make it interesting. The English litterateur Ford Madox Ford once said,"Open the book to page ninety-nine, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Taking off from that quote, the Page 99 Test asks writers to apply the maxim to their own work. What does page 99 say about the work as a whole? The site rewards some exploration, but here are a few memorable contributions that I've found: Daniel Rodgers on the Age of Fracture, Pauline Maier on Ratification, Daniel K. Williams on God's Own Party, Darren Dochuk on From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, and Samuel Moyn on The Last Utopia. My contribution on The Myth of American Religious Freedom is here.

The Page 99 Test

I just came across this website after being asked to contribute. The premise is clever, and there are a lot prominent contributors who make it interesting. The English litterateur Ford Madox Ford once said,"Open the book to page ninety-nine, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Taking off from that quote, the Page 99 Test asks writers to apply the maxim to their own work. What does page 99 say about the work as a whole? The site rewards some exploration, but here are a few memorable contributions that I've found: Daniel Rodgers on the Age of Fracture, Pauline Maier on Ratification, Daniel K. Williams on God's Own Party, Darren Dochuk on From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, and Samuel Moyn on The Last Utopia. My contribution on The Myth of American Religious Freedom is here.

2010 in US Intellectual History

Historically, we don't amount to much apparently!

This being the last week of the year, I figured it would be a good time to have a conversation about 2010 in U.S. intellectual history....which of course means at least two things*:

1. The most significant works in U.S. intellectual history.

2. The most significant developments in U.S. thought.




That second meaning, I think, will likely be somewhat elusive at this point. After all, one of the reasons we do intellectual history is that ideas take a while to work their significance out (if that's not dreadfully old-fashioned to say).  Though some very important things have been thought in 2010, we're likely not to know what they are at this point. I took a glance at both Scientific American's list of World Changing Ideas 2010 (behind a paywall, unfortunately) and the New York Times' Year in Ideas and they are both heavily dominated by technological innovations rather than ideas per se.

(There are, however, some technological innovations of direct interest to intellectual historians, like crowd-sourced manuscript transcription and Google's Ngram, which generated the little chart at the top of this post. The latter, in particular, is worthy of further discussion, I think)

As for the first meaning, a lot of interesting and significant works of intellectual history have been published this year, including one by USIH's own David Sehat: The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2010 includes at least six works that might qualify as U.S. intellectual history (you might count even more among them): Lewis Hyde's Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership; Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery; Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness; Alan Brinkley's The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century; Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (which David Sehat reviewed for this blog); and Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade.

Though a number of these books are on my to-read list, I haven't read any of them yet.  Among the works of US intellectual history published this year that I have read, George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters stands out as one of the year's best.

What do you think has defined--and will define--2010 in US intellectual history?
___________________________
* A third possible meaning would involve the year for USIH (i.e. this blog/organization).  It's been a good year, but I don't think that's necessarily worth a post.

2010 in US Intellectual History

Historically, we don't amount to much apparently!

This being the last week of the year, I figured it would be a good time to have a conversation about 2010 in U.S. intellectual history....which of course means at least two things*:

1. The most significant works in U.S. intellectual history.

2. The most significant developments in U.S. thought.




That second meaning, I think, will likely be somewhat elusive at this point. After all, one of the reasons we do intellectual history is that ideas take a while to work their significance out (if that's not dreadfully old-fashioned to say).  Though some very important things have been thought in 2010, we're likely not to know what they are at this point. I took a glance at both Scientific American's list of World Changing Ideas 2010 (behind a paywall, unfortunately) and the New York Times' Year in Ideas and they are both heavily dominated by technological innovations rather than ideas per se.

(There are, however, some technological innovations of direct interest to intellectual historians, like crowd-sourced manuscript transcription and Google's Ngram, which generated the little chart at the top of this post. The latter, in particular, is worthy of further discussion, I think)

As for the first meaning, a lot of interesting and significant works of intellectual history have been published this year, including one by USIH's own David Sehat: The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2010 includes at least six works that might qualify as U.S. intellectual history (you might count even more among them): Lewis Hyde's Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership; Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery; Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness; Alan Brinkley's The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century; Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (which David Sehat reviewed for this blog); and Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade.

Though a number of these books are on my to-read list, I haven't read any of them yet.  Among the works of US intellectual history published this year that I have read, George Cotkin's Morality's Muddy Waters stands out as one of the year's best.

What do you think has defined--and will define--2010 in US intellectual history?
___________________________
* A third possible meaning would involve the year for USIH (i.e. this blog/organization).  It's been a good year, but I don't think that's necessarily worth a post.

Sehat on Pauline Maier, Ratification (2010)

Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). ISBN-13: 9780684868547. 608 pages.

Review by David Sehat

Georgia State University

December 2010

When I heard that Pauline Maier had just published a history of the Constitution’s ratification, I knew that it would be a definitive work. This is not only because it is by Pauline Maier, who is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at MIT and widely regarded as a careful and sensitive interpreter of the Founding period. It is also the only comprehensive history of the event that exists. The task was so large that it took Maier a decade to write this book, and the result is well worth the wait.

Part of the problem in writing about ratification is that it was not just one event. It involved multiple state-level conventions, some of which occurred simultaneously. Each convention then influenced the debate in the conventions that followed. Sorting through the documentary evidence and simply keeping track of the players is a difficult task. Maier candidly acknowledges that her research was made possible, or at least easier, through an editorial project that gathers much of the material that is available on ratification into what is currently a twenty-one volume documentary series, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. I have used the Virginia portion of this series and can attest that it is indeed a remarkable resource. But Maier’s interpretive and writerly abilities in making sense of the raw material are what shine throughout the book.

In order to outline the relationships and issues at stake in ratification, Maier opts for a narrative approach in which she asks readers to bracket their knowledge of the outcome. By appreciating ratification as a series of moments in which the fate of the Constitution could have gone in multiple directions, Maier also changes the way that historians have typically viewed ratification, which is from the perspective of the Federalists. To counteract this bias, she must at least partially rehabilitate the so-called Antifederalists, a moniker that she refuses to use. She avoids the term because the Federalists invented the idea of an “Antifederalist” as an expression of opprobrium during the ratification debate. “To use the Federalists’ language—to tell the story in their terms—tends to give them the game, or at least to tip the story further in their direction,” she explains. And though she does employ the term “Federalist,” as the Constitution’s proponents called themselves, she is ambivalent about that term as well. “It tends,” she again explains, “to suggest that there was something called a Federalist party in 1787 and 1788, which there was not, at least in anything like the form that emerged later, and that the fight over the Constitution was a two-sided contest between them and the opponents they called ‘Antifederalists,’ which, again, it was not.”

This reframing changes our perception of the process by suggesting not just contingency but a certain amount of disorder. Boiled down to its most basic operations, ratification involved a fluid but still regular process in which each state convened, made up the rules that governed its convention, and then conducted a debate on the constitution that eventually culminated in a vote. The one exception was Rhode Island, which instead submitted the Constitution to a statewide referendum, where it was at first voted down. But rather than focusing on the final outcome of the process and reading backward through that lens, Maier undermines the tidy perception of ratification by depicting it as a contingent series of engagements that involved multiple parties with different ideas. Although a person eventually had to vote yes or no on the Constitution—a fundamental reality that the terms “Federalist” and “Antifederalist” do reflect—those were not the only choices for most of the debates. Even the strongest of the Constitution’s supporters, such as Madison, had reservations about the Constitution and would, in private, countenance the idea of amendments after it was ratified. Some opponents sought to conditionally ratify the Constitution because they were in favor of the union and disliked the Articles but did not believe that the Congress could be trusted to enact amendments after the fact. Some disliked the Constitution so much that they thought the process should be started over, though they did not want to go back to the Articles. Still others sought to remain under the Articles with perhaps a few tweaks.

To make sense of ratification as a contingent moment with sincere and diverse arguments on multiple sides, Maier proceeds carefully through each ratification convention, summarizing arguments, explaining alliances, and showing the effect of the debates on other conventions. There were times as she told the story that I might have wished for a shorter, less exhaustive book. But Maier’s careful attention to the many arguments is her greatest contribution. By recounting the debate in tight but elaborate detail, Maier offers possibly the most important reference manual in the ongoing controversy about the Constitution’s original meaning. As Jack Rakove has suggested, when we seek to determine original meaning we should not look just to the text of the Constitution, which is often ambiguous, nor should we seek to get into the heads of the constitutional framers, which is largely impossible and often not useful since they disagreed with other framers and also changed their own minds.* Instead, we should consult the ratification debates where the people’s representatives often went line-by-line arguing over the various constitutional provisions. When we do that, we see a range of meanings attributed to the Constitution, not a single and fixed meaning. Maier’s account, with its brilliant detail, validates Rakove’s argument by enabling scholars and jurists to determine this range of meanings at the founding moment in the larger development of popular constitutionalism. The result is a rare combination: a work of dispassionate scholarship with contemporary political and legal relevance that advances constitutional debate while preserving scholarly integrity. A magnificent achievement, indeed!

*See Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996).

Sehat on Pauline Maier, Ratification (2010)

Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). ISBN-13: 9780684868547. 608 pages.

Review by David Sehat

Georgia State University

December 2010

When I heard that Pauline Maier had just published a history of the Constitution’s ratification, I knew that it would be a definitive work. This is not only because it is by Pauline Maier, who is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at MIT and widely regarded as a careful and sensitive interpreter of the Founding period. It is also the only comprehensive history of the event that exists. The task was so large that it took Maier a decade to write this book, and the result is well worth the wait.

Part of the problem in writing about ratification is that it was not just one event. It involved multiple state-level conventions, some of which occurred simultaneously. Each convention then influenced the debate in the conventions that followed. Sorting through the documentary evidence and simply keeping track of the players is a difficult task. Maier candidly acknowledges that her research was made possible, or at least easier, through an editorial project that gathers much of the material that is available on ratification into what is currently a twenty-one volume documentary series, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. I have used the Virginia portion of this series and can attest that it is indeed a remarkable resource. But Maier’s interpretive and writerly abilities in making sense of the raw material are what shine throughout the book.

In order to outline the relationships and issues at stake in ratification, Maier opts for a narrative approach in which she asks readers to bracket their knowledge of the outcome. By appreciating ratification as a series of moments in which the fate of the Constitution could have gone in multiple directions, Maier also changes the way that historians have typically viewed ratification, which is from the perspective of the Federalists. To counteract this bias, she must at least partially rehabilitate the so-called Antifederalists, a moniker that she refuses to use. She avoids the term because the Federalists invented the idea of an “Antifederalist” as an expression of opprobrium during the ratification debate. “To use the Federalists’ language—to tell the story in their terms—tends to give them the game, or at least to tip the story further in their direction,” she explains. And though she does employ the term “Federalist,” as the Constitution’s proponents called themselves, she is ambivalent about that term as well. “It tends,” she again explains, “to suggest that there was something called a Federalist party in 1787 and 1788, which there was not, at least in anything like the form that emerged later, and that the fight over the Constitution was a two-sided contest between them and the opponents they called ‘Antifederalists,’ which, again, it was not.”

This reframing changes our perception of the process by suggesting not just contingency but a certain amount of disorder. Boiled down to its most basic operations, ratification involved a fluid but still regular process in which each state convened, made up the rules that governed its convention, and then conducted a debate on the constitution that eventually culminated in a vote. The one exception was Rhode Island, which instead submitted the Constitution to a statewide referendum, where it was at first voted down. But rather than focusing on the final outcome of the process and reading backward through that lens, Maier undermines the tidy perception of ratification by depicting it as a contingent series of engagements that involved multiple parties with different ideas. Although a person eventually had to vote yes or no on the Constitution—a fundamental reality that the terms “Federalist” and “Antifederalist” do reflect—those were not the only choices for most of the debates. Even the strongest of the Constitution’s supporters, such as Madison, had reservations about the Constitution and would, in private, countenance the idea of amendments after it was ratified. Some opponents sought to conditionally ratify the Constitution because they were in favor of the union and disliked the Articles but did not believe that the Congress could be trusted to enact amendments after the fact. Some disliked the Constitution so much that they thought the process should be started over, though they did not want to go back to the Articles. Still others sought to remain under the Articles with perhaps a few tweaks.

To make sense of ratification as a contingent moment with sincere and diverse arguments on multiple sides, Maier proceeds carefully through each ratification convention, summarizing arguments, explaining alliances, and showing the effect of the debates on other conventions. There were times as she told the story that I might have wished for a shorter, less exhaustive book. But Maier’s careful attention to the many arguments is her greatest contribution. By recounting the debate in tight but elaborate detail, Maier offers possibly the most important reference manual in the ongoing controversy about the Constitution’s original meaning. As Jack Rakove has suggested, when we seek to determine original meaning we should not look just to the text of the Constitution, which is often ambiguous, nor should we seek to get into the heads of the constitutional framers, which is largely impossible and often not useful since they disagreed with other framers and also changed their own minds.* Instead, we should consult the ratification debates where the people’s representatives often went line-by-line arguing over the various constitutional provisions. When we do that, we see a range of meanings attributed to the Constitution, not a single and fixed meaning. Maier’s account, with its brilliant detail, validates Rakove’s argument by enabling scholars and jurists to determine this range of meanings at the founding moment in the larger development of popular constitutionalism. The result is a rare combination: a work of dispassionate scholarship with contemporary political and legal relevance that advances constitutional debate while preserving scholarly integrity. A magnificent achievement, indeed!

*See Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996).