125

July 15, 2009

The Enduring Significance of Race– Revisited 

I want to briefly focus on the University of Pennsylvania’s President’s Forum, which lasted for eighteen months from 1986 through the end of 1987. I think there are a number of intriguing aspects to the story of this forum that may tell us a little about Robert Engs, whom we are honoring on his retirement, and a little also about the university to which he contributed so much.

I should back up a little to the fall of 1979. That was when I first arrived at Penn as an exchange student from Edinburgh University. I decided to take a course in African American history at Penn, I think, in part because I wanted to get the “real” story of the place – the United States – that I would be spending a year studying. As a foreign student I was not particularly unique in looking for the real America in this way. Many British students came to America and wanted to find out about race and the black experience. This may be because they came from a place that seemed to be so class divided that they expected to find some kind of equivalent in the United States – which at the time seemed to revolve around the issue of race. This was also a period when a lot of great African American history was being written, and exciting new work was being undertaken in Black Studies, so it wasn’t surprising that this field would be appealing to the foreign student.

Anyway, I remember the first class that I turned up to in the seminar room on the second floor of College Hall. This was History 176 (a) and it was a relatively small class focusing on the first part of African American history up to the Civil War. I remember it well because I was the only white student in the class, and there were about 15 students altogether, sitting around the square table. I remember Bob entering the class and starting to lay out the course requirements and taking us through the syllabus, and I remember very clearly that, right from the beginning, he didn’t pull any punches whatsoever. What he was going to be teaching about was something that we wouldn’t be getting from other American history courses; it was a narrative or a set of narratives that placed race and racism at the center of the American experience. Bob’s presentation was electrifying, and while it was fairly uncomfortable being the only white person in the class talking about the issue of race, I knew that I was definitely going to want to take the course, and was also going to get a lot out of it – which I certainly did. I also felt that while Bob was talking about the issue of race at a theoretical level, he himself was very pleasant and welcoming to me personally and clearly evidenced that he himself harbored no animosities – so long as I seemed willing to take seriously the issues that he was raising.

Bob had just gone through a difficult tenure battle, but he was not someone who brought the scars of that conflict into the classroom. I remember that Freedom’s First Generation was published during that semester, and this was a point of considerable pride for him – he brought a copy of the book to the class to show the students. I had an extremely good year in part because of what I learned from Bob – in part also because of the different approaches to teaching Bob took; he asked us, for example, to keep a journal as a slave, and I recollect very much enjoying writing fiction based upon our studies of the readings he had provided. When I went back to Edinburgh for my final year, I combined the intellectual history from the other courses I had taken at Penn, with the African American history and wrote a thesis on W.E.B. Du Bois, having been assigned and read Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America in History 176 (b).

I then came back to Penn as a graduate student and was very fortunate to have Bob as my advisor. He may have thought I was a little strange, as I would do some odd things, like taking on Lee Benson, or writing weird assignments for Mike Zuckerman, but Bob was always supportive. This was a pretty rough period for him, I believe, in retrospect. He had tenure, but didn’t get the respect he deserved from other members of the department, and this made life pretty difficult for him. They didn’t care that he had been a Princeton student, one of the first to break the color line there, and one who had excelled in that rigorous academic environment; nor did they much care that he was one of the very best C. Vann Woodward students at Yale. By any measure, with his success in the classroom and a solid first book manuscript in his pocket he should have been considered a prize for the university, but the department only could see race, seemingly, and didn’t take African American History particularly seriously. One professor who received a Guggenheim at the same time as he did, said to him, “Ah, but yours is a Black Guggenheim.” These were the kinds of slights that were fairly frequent at that time, and I think they took a toll on him.

Nonetheless, Bob was an excellent citizen at Penn, and when the university found itself in some deep water trying to deal with some of the racial issues on campus it was to Bob that it turned to help get them out of the mess. This was how he came to be running the University of Pennsylvania’s President’s Forum, titled “The Enduring Significance of Race.”

This needs a little bit of background and perhaps a little bit of Penn history to give a sense of what was going on at the time. The University of Pennsylvania has always had a difficult time trying to relate to the surrounding urban community. When the college moved out to West Philadelphia from center city in the late 19th century, it was given land by the city in exchange for it providing certain services to the community. For example, when it received the land for the library, the university was supposed, as part of the exchange, to provide a free library for the community – in perpetuity. This it did for many years but as it the community changed the willingness of the university to provide the service diminished significantly. Likewise, the university’s Mayors scholarship program was also established to pay back the city for the land it gave Penn, and this benefited large numbers of the children of immigrants who were able to get free educations at Penn; but when the city community changed these scholarships began to fall by the wayside also, and the university attempted to reduce the number of these it gave, even fighting a court battle over this issue.

By the 1970s Penn was facing a number of difficulties. It had displaced large numbers of African Americans in creating the residential area between 38th and 40th, and Spruce and Walnut Streets in West Philadelphia and in closing off Locust to the outside community, and as a result it had very bad relations with the communities of West Philadelphia. By the time I arrived at Penn, there was a clear injunction that you shouldn’t (as an undergraduate) go past 40th street after dark, except perhaps to walk down to Walsh’s Tavern on Spruce Street in a group. The notion of Fortress Penn had come into being; all the buildings were constructed in such a way as to ensure that they were only open towards the inside of the campus – so that outsiders would be discouraged from wandering in, and when they did they could be detected easily as they came onto the campus. This growing sense of threat developed at a time when the university President, Martin Meyerson, decided that Penn needed to become less local in drawing its student population, and more regionally diverse. In other words, it needed to start appealing to more white suburban kids from around the country – so that it would begin to look more like Princeton (only a Princeton located smack in the middle of a blighted city). This was going to be difficult to accomplish, however, if tensions existed with the outside community, and if African American students themselves were unhappy with the way they were being treated on campus.

One example of the kind of stress that existed seemed to be symbolized in a stabbing of a Penn student that occurred at the MacDonalds on 40th and Walnut. The Penn student was loudly proclaiming his allegiance to the Boston Celtics, his home team, and also the whitest of all the NBA rosters at this time, while the local man was clearly a Sixers’ fan, a team that had only one white player in the starting line-up and he was the journeyman Bobby Jones. Somehow, things got out of hand, and the Celtics fan ended up stabbed – though I think I recall he survived the encounter.

At this time there was very much a sense of segregation on the campus, with African Americans in the Du Bois residential house, and white students often claiming that blacks were self-segregating. Whether or not the latter was the case was open to question, but the atmosphere was sufficiently unwelcoming at the time that most African American students who lived on campus did opt to live in the black dormitory.

By 1985 there was a lot of animosity on campus, and a lot of hostility, as many black students felt bitter and embattled. White students felt comfortable using racial epithets and one occasion when this occurred, the infamous “Water Buffalo” incident, resulted in considerable embarrassment for the university, and a great deal of protestation among African American students. President Hackney believed that he needed to act to try to move towards more racial tolerance and increased harmony, and who was there better to take on this role, he felt, than Bob Engs?

Put this way it might seem as though I am saying that Bob was not especially radical and was not in line with other African American faculty and students on the campus; but it was much more complex than this. It is true that I think he felt that he was at some distance from other leading black professors, people like Ralph Smith in the Law School, and Houston Baker in the English Department. But I think it is worth remembering what I said about my first class with Bob. He was entirely uncompromising in challenging mainstream thinking and was in his own way extremely radical. But I think what was different about him was that he believed in the power of persuasion and engagement. He felt that people were inherently good and could be swayed to a different way of thinking about race and about those who were unlike themselves; they wouldn’t necessarily be moved by direct confrontation, and might only harden their positions of ignorance and bigotry.

Bob was also different in some ways because he was keenly aware not just of interracial conflict, but also intra-racial divisions. His sense about African American history, was that until the variegated nature of the black experience was appreciated, in all its dimensions and with all its conflicts, such history would not be doing justice to the people it was being written about. Freedom’s First Generation was deeply rooted in an understanding of the complexities of the black community in Hampton, and it was fair to assume that Bob would bring some of his analytical frame from his historical work to dealing with contemporary political and social issues. So I think President Hackney’s assessment, one based on the qualities of a fellow Southern Historian and Woodward student, were largely correct.

Consequently, Hackney did call upon Bob to lead the Forum, and the result I think was one of the most interesting and far-reaching forums undertaken by a university campus. I don’t think it was recognized for this at the time but it really was a very innovative series of colloquia and presentations, one that helped to radically transform the atmosphere on campus, and help to make Penn the university that it is today.

Bob’s first act was quite symbolic, and he certainly said that he intended it to be so. On learning that the position of Chair of the President’s Forum would come with a graduate assistant, Bob hired me for the position. Essentially, this meant that I would receive the stipends I was receiving while I continued to work (a little) on my dissertation, but I would be working pretty much full-time on the President’s Forum, taking minutes at meetings, contacting speakers, organizing PR for the events, working with graphics, and so forth. Bob knew that he would get some criticism for hiring me for this position. It made logical sense at one simple level, as I was his only graduate student at the time who was at my stage in his graduate career (beginning work on a dissertation), at least who was in the area. I think he also thought I could do the job reasonably well. But Bob also liked the symbolic part of this inversion; that a forum on race and racism would be run by an African American who was assisted by a white graduate student. Other members of the committee also seemed to think this was interesting, because I never felt any of the negative response regarding my appointment, and, beyond the odd double take when I was first introduced as the Bob’s assistant, I had an extremely good working relationship with everyone involved in the forum.

But Bob’s creative thinking went beyond the hiring of an assistant. In order for a Forum to address the issues of race fully, Bob felt, it had to think beyond the United States, and beyond one or two colloquia on what were the usual topics considered at the time. Bob felt that every school in the university and every field should take on the issue and develop programming on the topic – and it is certainly the case that every School was touched upon. Health Sciences, Athletics, the Wharton School of Business, Education, the College of Arts and Sciences, Social Work, Annenberg, and a number of organizations (the Christian Association) – everyone sponsored an event relevant to their field. Given this, the events were very far ranging, diverse, from discussions of Black business, to health issues and race, blacks in communication, race and Athletics – and many extremely prominent intellectuals came to campus to present their work.

The title for the series came from the inversion of William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race. This was a work, published in 1978, which received a lot of attention at that time. It argued (though Wilson was less emphatic about the points than some of those who deployed his arguments) that class was replacing race as a determinant in the lives of African Americans and Americans generally. Many argued against these points around the United States, and this was clearly also the case at the University of Pennsylvania. It was Ralph Smith, I seem to recall, who first proposed that the President’s Forum be titled “the enduring significance of race,” to make a counterpoint to Wilson’s work, and this was quickly adopted, and the graphic that was established became a very prominent feature of campus life for the next 24 months. Whether or not the argument was sound that race was enduring, the logo took on a sturdy life over the eighteen months of the forum.

The title bears a little more evaluation of course than this. Wilson was correct in some ways that class was becoming more and more of an issue in the post-Civil Rights era, that some of the racial barriers were no longer so important as they once had been, and that many African Americans would face greater barriers of class and problems associated with income deficiencies compared to whites. There was a radical element to what Wilson was saying, that even if Civil Rights had had an impact, the situation for many was still dismal and needed to be changed; but some of the response to his work was to pigeon hole him as someone who was an apologist for the United States’ racial system, which he did not intend to be. There were two reasons for this reaction, perhaps more, but two that come to mind immediately. The first was that this was a period of racial backlash, and it was not good to be seeming to suggest in the face of greater hostility to social change among whites, that race wasn’t important. With the Bakke decision of 1978 and the retrenchment that followed in its wake, undermining affirmative action, there was a real sense that some of the advances would be fleeting and could easily be lost. And of course, the discrimination issue was an important one since the debate often has come down to the issue of supporting particular minorities, while not necessarily advantaging the poor more generally. Clearly there were many ways to respond to this, both in defense of …., but also , but Wilson seemed to be threatening at many levels at this time.

The second reason, I think, was that Wilson seemed to miss some of the institutional racism that existed and which seemed to be embedded in the American system. I think this was more apparent in the 1980s than it is perhaps today (though this is a point that might be argued over), and Wilson was after all suggesting a direction in which the United States was moving, one that we might easily suggest has been confirmed in the last few years of social and political change in the United States; but in the 1980s, during the years of Ronald Reagan and the decline of the New Deal and an on-going assault on political rights, such a movement did not seem particularly clear.

There was also a degree to which I think that Bob, himself, spoke to some of the problems of Wilson’s work, and this was something that I learned most from conversations and listening to him lecture and teach. It was also something that very much made its way into my thinking relating to my first book on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the Great Migration. This was the close relationship that existed between race and class, and an understanding of how they played off each other. For Bob, it seemed to me, the fact that class was growing in importance, did not diminish the significance of race; in fact, the very limited nature of resources that a community had at its disposal resulted in a considerable rift between the haves and have-nots and a conflict over those resources. As people made their way out of the ghetto, as the phrase used to be, the very nature of the racism in society meant that they didn’t want to maintain strong ties with they places from which they had come. Thus, a clear difference existed between the migrations of African Americans and other so-called European ethnics – while those groups frequently kept ties with the places they left both in their original rural European communities and then the urban American communities that they established – using these as the basis for their social networks, African Americans faced a different climate that often saw them breaking away from their roots in the South, giving up property and connections that they may have had there, and then also giving up their place in the inner cities when they moved to suburban areas. The severing of such ties was all the more understandable in light of the fact that these inner-cities were going through a decline, one that was deeply inflected by race (as the cities’ populations became blacker the support that they received from the States and the nation diminished).

So class and race were inextricably linked and it was often the case that dealing with the one, through affirmative action, for example, while not actually reaching down to help the urban poor, might nonetheless still affect the situation and improve the position of the community as a whole – this is particularly evident in the cultural transformation that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in music and other fields, with African Americans rising to the fore in quite symbolic, but significant, ways.

Getting back to the President’s Forum, one would like to suggest that the whole university was transformed, and that this led to a transformation to the larger community, and spread like George Bush’s thousand points of light, until the whole of the United States succumbed to the change, resulting in the election of the first black President. But the President’s Forum wasn’t so significant, and Penn is not so significant either. The forum did make for a better community. Large sums of money were spent bringing prominent theorists and public intellectuals to raise consciousness regarding important issues, and the plethora of events did contribute to making people more sensitive to a number of the concerns held by many about racial attitudes on the campus. It also was the case that some of the things done in the forum fit within developments in academe across the country as cultural studies was beginning to take off and as concerns with power, particularly with regard to issues of imperialism – were increasingly focused upon – with colleges forced to consider how they themselves were to systems and histories of oppression.

I am not sure whether Bob felt that he was better off after the Forum than he had been before. He did receive the gratitude and respect for what he had achieved, but he also felt significant pressure, I think, to bring off a series of events that were successful and meaningful. He attended them all, and spoke at most of them. The toll it had on him was great, I believe, and played a considerable part in delaying his second book and in the decline of his health. But he transformed himself after his heart attack and he came back to produce his second volume (Educating the Disenfranchised and the Disinherited) and other important works. His own view became different, though this may not have been related to the forum at all, but was growing wisdom and acceptance of others’ limitations. Certainly he seemed to look on the History department with greater amusement, where he had previously felt considerable anger at the way it had treated him. Whether or not leading the President’s Forum helped in this process, I don’t know, but I believe it was an important event for him, and he certainly helped shape the way many thought and felt about race through it.

In the end, the Forum was important in many ways for helping direct us to where we are today, even if it wasn’t instrumental in bringing about that change. The forum demanded that American college students and faculty consider the issues of race and equality when they might otherwise have been happy to go on believing that they had moved beyond all that, that the Civil Rights era was over and all the change that was necessary had already occurred. But at the same time, Bob demanded that we be open and expansive about our understanding of race – that it wasn’t just limited to one group of people who had experienced one history of oppression in one country. He wanted to know more; to link it to more things, and see it as something that could be interpreted in multiple ways. The fact that the United States would elect a man who was born in Hawaii, of a white mother and a Kenyan father, who had grown up in different parts of the world, and had gone on to be a community organizer and a politician in Chicago, would not have been beyond Bob’s understanding of the world.

Interestingly the world seems to have caught up with him, and that is a very good thing.

126

June 10, 2009  

Of Turds, Termites, and Terminal Degrees of Freedom, or ‘Fabricating Turds’, for short

True religion and undefiled, is to give everyone land freely to manure co-operatively.

– Gerard Winstanley

I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference (“Reflections on Fifty Years of the American Experience”) celebrating the work and teaching of Michael Zuckerman. It was a fabulous affair and very much a tribute to a historian who has influenced a great many people, among whom I number myself.

What follows: first, for what it’s worth, a brief (no doubt lengthy) description of the ways in which Mike has influenced me and a few words on our interactions over the past 27-odd years since I walked into History 700 at Penn. And, then, a few more words about one of the questions raised during the presentations in Mike’s honor.

It was a surprise to me when I thought back over the years and came to the conclusion that Mike had been so influential in my own intellectual development. I cannot attribute all my cantankerousness and desire for disputation, and quirkiness (inasmuch as these exist) to Mike, as I am sure I learned a great deal from others – most notably Owen Dudley Edwards at Edinburgh University – but to have taken the introductory graduate course in history at Penn with Mike was a very significant experience indeed.

Fabricating Turds
What was this course? This was the so-called “Proseminar in History,” designed to provide an introduction to the discipline for in-coming graduate students. Frequently, these seminars started from Thucydides and worked up through Macaulay to Braudel and Foucault. For our seminar, Mike had decided we would take on the literature of Modernization, since this was interesting him at this time. One of the curious aspects of this was that modernization was beginning to fall out of favor, and the easiest thing for us graduate students to do as we were taking our first steps in grad school was begin an all-out assault on the notion. But, not so fast; insofar as we wanted to jettison the concept, Mike felt we might want to hang onto it; but, by the same token, to the extent that we agreed with some of its assumptions, Mike felt they were questionable (the key was not “to throw the baby out with the bath water”). This is somewhat of an overstatement, but it was very much the case that each class was entirely unpredictable in terms of how Mike would react to the readings. This made each meeting, even with the reticence of new graduate students, more engaging than it might otherwise have been.

A list of the readings Mike offered provides a good sense of what we covered that semester:

Week 1:
Introduction
Week 2:
Ruth Benedict, “Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning,” Psychiatry 1 (1938), 161-7
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time,” in J.A. Pitt-Rivers, ed., Mediterranean Countrymen, pp. 55-72
George Foster, “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 293-315
Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 360-411
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 412-53
A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World-View,” in Stanley Diamond, ed., Primitive Views of the World, pp. 49-82
June Nash, “The Logic of Behavior: Curing in a Maya Indian Town,” Human Organization 26 (1967), 132-9
Robert Redfield, “The Social Organization of Tradition,” in Peasant Society and Culture, pp. 40-59
Victor Turner, “A Ndembu Doctor in Practice,” in The Forest of Symbols, pp. 359-93
Eric Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in MesoAmerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957), 1-18

Week 3:
Talcott Parsons, et al., eds., Theories of Society, pp. 191-201 (Toennies), pp. 208-13 and 436-43 (Durkeim), pp. 315-8 (Cooley), and pp. 331-47 (Schmalenbach)
Robert Merton, “Patterns of Influence: Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials,” in Social Theory and Social Structure
C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernizationi, pp. 1-34
Samuel Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3 (1971), 283-98
W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, pp. 1-35

Week 4:
Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Montaillou
Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, “Motionless History,” Social Science History 1 (1977), 115-36

Week 5:

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, pp. 13-102, 138-67, 231-67, 276-95, 312-461, 657-756, 892-903, 1238-44

Week 6:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, ch. 1, 21, 22

Week 7:
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967), 56-97
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, “ Past and Present (50 (1971), 76-136
Edmund Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-1618,” American Historical Review 76 (1971), 596-611
Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America,” American Historical Review 78 (1973), 531-88
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, ch. 1-2, 16-18
Marcus Rediker, “‘Under the Banner of King Death’: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716-1726,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981), 203-27

Week 8:
Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood

Week 9:
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheusu, pp. 1-358

Week 10:
Karl Marx, “Preface” to Critique of Political Economy
Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India”
Andre Gundar Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution? ch. 1

Week 11:
Reinhard Bendix, “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1967), 292-346
Daniel Calhoun, “Participation versus Coping,”
Raymond Grew, “Modernization and its Discontents,” American Behavioral Scientist 12 (1977), 289-312
Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism
Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, pp. 3-14
Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History15 (1973)
E. A. Wrigley, “The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972), 225-59
Michael Zuckerman, “Dreams that Men Dare to Dream: The Role of Ideas in Western Modernization,” Social Science History 2 (1978), 332-45

Week 12:
David McClelland, The Achieving Society, ch. 1-4, 10
Alex Inkeles and David Smith, Becoming Modern, ch. 1-3, 6-8, 9-12, 18-21
Stanley Bailis, “Individuals Coping: Modernization and Habitual Change,” in Harold Sharlin, ed., The Freedoms of Enterprise

Week 13:
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History

Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, ch. 1
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society, pp. 3-49
James Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815
James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978), 3-32

Michael Zuckerman, “The Fabrication of Identity in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977), 183-214


As far as these readings were concerned, there was not much on race, not much on gender, and no Orientalism. But the point was, I think, not that we became familiar with all the different trends and issues emerging in the discipline, but that we become equipped to respond to them when we were confronted with them (whatever they might be in the future); and perhaps we might even be equipped to introduce a few ourselves. I am sure many other students would have disagreed with this approach, and would have (and probably did) complain about the absence of material on women and African Americans (in particular), but I never felt this absence. My interest before coming to Penn had been in intellectual history and in W.E.B. Du Bois, and so reading the kinds of things that we were looking at fit with my sense of what I needed to do at this juncture.

And it was also significant that a majority of the authors were not even historians. From psychologists to economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, we read across the range of the disciplines, and frequently the actual historians found themselves crowded out of the week’s readings. This was quite suggestive about the nature of the profession. We were not being provided with a basic grounding in different historiographies; this was rather an interdisciplinary approach to grappling with a single concept. Understanding any historical concept, Mike seemed to be suggesting, would require that we read as widely as we were doing with regard to theories of Modernization. In many ways, this was very different from other introductory courses that would tend to focus on different examples of historical writing from different fields. It certainly provided a solid grounding intellectually; but it wasn’t an approach to graduate education based in emulation of the leading lights of the discipline. I liked Mike’s particular method, but many students may have preferred another.

Each week we wrote two pages of comments on the texts we read or something about them that we found interesting, and Mike would respond with almost as many comments about what we had written all scribbled in pencil in somewhat indecipherable capitals incorporating symbols for groups of letters (e.g., a single squiggle for the letters ‘the’ whenever these letters appeared, per4mance, 2 for to, etc., a whole abbreviated language pre-texting). This took a couple of weeks to get used to. The comments were largely in the margins, but would be followed with an overall reaction. These had a flavor that generally encouraged and challenged in a single flourish (e.g., This is fantastic, but…; Despite my carping at how badly you have misread these texts, this is a neat argument).

Here are some of his reactions to my comments:
On Bourdieu: I think you’re wrong, radically wrong, about Bourdieu’s ethnocentrism, and I think you substitute repetitious charge for substantiation of it, but this is a splendidly thoughtful and penetrating essay, full of delicious things. You control and focus a complex argument, and you develop it in real seriousness.

On Toennies and Durkeim: This is a brilliantly organized and beautifully conceived essay. Everything connects, and is sustained, and is important. Unfortunately, I think it is quite wrong about Durkheim and misses (a crucial part of) the point about Toennies, mistaking his ideal types for actual historical analysis. But all that is relatively trivial. The level of intelligence and critical power and verve at work (play) here is sensational.

On Braudel: I don’t think you quite bring it off, but this is a wonderfully wide-ranging yet deep-cutting paper. You don’t understand Turner (or at any rate you don’t understand him as I do), but you get gorgeous mileage out of invoking him as a means of raising pivotal questions and throughout you confront the big issues and confront them bravely and suggestively even if not as compellingly as I could wish.


On Weber: Even more in the exposition than in the critique, this is a marvelously assured and intelligent performance. For all my carping, I am impressed.

On Gutman: An intelligent argument on an intelligently established and assuredly important question. I didn’t always find it compelling – I think sometimes you go as far in the opposite direction as your antagonists go in their direction, and so you miss some things – but I found it steadily informed, engaged, and ambitious. I could hardly ask for more.

On Aries: This is a fine paper, not least for its mating of impatience with Aries’ failure to offer causal accounts and its sure and, if not sympathetic, at least comprehending grasp of what is and isn’t doing. I offered my own view of causality at the end of class; you’ll get it again in my “Dreams” essay in a few weeks. But I would add that, even if nothing could be advance on Aries’ behalf, with regard to explanation, I would still say you make too much of a fetish of explanation. Historians do very badly along that line – in a perverse mood I’d challenge you to show me a single satisfactory historical explanation of a significant phenomenon – and I think it would be a mistake and an unfortunate one at that, to make explanation the principal measure of historical adequacy. There are so many other things historians do.

On Landes: I think you began from a (largely, not entirely) misplaced irritation with the use of a single word – rationality – and just dug deeper and deeper thereafter. It’s a decent polemic for some other target, but it doesn’t quite connect with this one. Also, though I am cosmically sympathetic to your epistemological points, I am rather less concretely sympathetic. As I tried to suggest in the margins there is room in such an epistemology for issues of degree, and a difference in degree is all that Landes really requires. He knows – and says – that Europeans weren’t wholly rational (on his delimited definition of rational) any more than they were utterly into private enterprise, Faustianism, etc. He’s trying only to identify the differences in “scope and effectiveness” (to use your own quotation from him) in such elements that could account for the distinctively different (in degree) outcomes in different cultures.

On Grew: This is, despite my comments in the margins, a thoughtful and intelligent paper. I can’t for the life of me, though, fathom why you’d want to waste your thought and intelligence on a straw man, or where you even got the travesty of modernization theory you assail. Almost nothing – sometimes literally nothing in our readings sustains the characterization you impute to it; and as Grew suggests re the likes of Tipps, one only demeans oneself debunking straw men, especially when there are targets of stature you’re shying off. As in that last paragraph, this paper simply never gets the real targets in its sights. Modernization theories may not be the right or best theories of cultural interaction and conflict, but they are exactly theories of cultural interaction and conflict. If you don’t see that you are not even in the game. [reflection: since “the game” was very much moving on from modernization at this time, I am not sure I was too much out of line with what many others would have said; perhaps modernization was killed once it was turned into a straw man, and Mike was opposing this as much as he was reacting to me.]

On McClelland: How do I say this without seeming to contradict myself? I think you mistake McClelland and mistake Toynbee – rather badly in both cases – and yet I think this is an impressive piece of analysis. I’ve tried to indicate some of the misconstructions in the margins. What I’ve not been able to say there is how splendidly the focus and the thread of argument are, how close the reading and reasoning are, how sensible and judicious the comparisons are in their insistence – at high levels of abstraction – on common ground between two men, how ingenious the argument often is. If the writings the two were as you say they are to begin with this would be an utterly brilliant essay. [reflection: being “brilliantly wrong”, we learned at the conference was, in Mike’s eyes, better than being “boringly right,” so perhaps I passed a test on this one!]

On Hartz: I don’t entirely agree with your premises, analysis, or conclusion, but this is an ambitious essay and a thoughtful one besides. It scatters intriguing questions and insights, and my differences with it are more often matters of our divergent judgments than of your deficient readings and reflections.

II. Termites
My favorite comment is definitely the one from Aries’s Centuries of Childhood, which is suggestive about the impact of this course. If one remembers that the course was (in part) intended to introduce graduates to the profession into which they were moving, such comments about me making a fetish of explanation are certainly different from what one might expect. Many historians would like to claim that one of the things they did was explain why things happened, but Mike was essentially saying that this was a lost cause: “in a perverse mood I’d challenge you to show me a single satisfactory historical explanation of a significant phenomenon – and I think it would be a mistake and an unfortunate one at that, to make explanation the principal measure of historical adequacy” – and this was before post-modern and post-colonial theorists who might have agreed. I, too, would tend now to agree with this comment, but I am not sure many historians take the idea that explanation is beyond them into the college classroom and try to sell it to their students. Of course, they should probably do so; they would then less frequently be tools of “standards” and/or political ideologies, but the students would no doubt balk at their professor continually shying away from explanation for particular historical occurrences. Such comments were like anarchic termites eating away at the pillars of the profession, suggesting that the halls of wisdom constructed since the professionalizing of the discipline in the last quarter of the 19th century, needed to be brought tumbling to the ground, since they were potentially built upon mistaken assumptions.

The class itself started with a fairly strained discussion of ideas, but probably less strained than other courses of this nature might have been considering the students’ lack of familiarity with the material they were contemplating. Mike would then end with half-an-hour of comments to wrap things up. Curiously, while he encouraged interventions from everyone, the end of the class was his time to “go off” and develop the ideas that were gelling in his mind as the discussion had been continuing. It was almost impossible to interject at this stage, and if something he said raised a question in your mind, you had to wait till after the class to finish it. This is not a criticism, really, as these were often the most provoking and stimulating parts of the class; it was almost as if he was in a trancelike state communing with his ideas aloud, and he really didn’t notice the hands as they went up in the air – which they did at the beginning of the semester, until this ritual was imbibed.

What I liked about this Proseminar was that it confirmed everything for me about what graduate school was meant to be. We were supposed to be training, in my opinion, to take on all who came before. I had learned enough about historiography at Edinburgh, to know that history was about interpretations, and competing ones at that, so it made sense that we were going to need to make our own and need to be able to take on all-comers. Every author was up for grabs – they all needed to be understood, but they also needed to be interrogated and critiqued.

While we certainly read some great historians, there was no sense that we were doing this reverentially; there was absolutely nothing pre-professional about this class, and this made our cohort very distinctive from some of those that preceded it and all of those that followed. Again, it may not be appropriate to attribute all of this to Mike, since what he was doing certainly fit with my predisposition (and maybe that of others), but I certainly differed from many of the other Penn graduate students in terms of thinking about the job market. It never occurred to me to think about working on projects that would be helpful to secure a job down the road. What ended up later as my book – Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression – had its first iteration in the second semester of this course, the research paper – and it was a distinctly messy thing – trying to cover African American migration in light of interpretations of modernization (Schmalenbach being the person whose theories I found most useful). The paper had some good points, but it had many bad ones also – it was written by someone who had brought over his passive voice from England, it was trying to cover too much, and it really wasn’t able to get at the people whose identities were supposedly being shaped/fabricated in the process of migration (so in fact it could not really tell you what they thought about community and individualism, or much else). You could perhaps attach any particular theory you wanted to the migrants in this paper, and the facts would help you in doing so equally well – whichever one you selected.

There was definitely a book somewhere in there, but I was advised, by almost everyone except Mike, not to go anywhere near it with a barge pole, and instead to think of some other topic that I could work on, and preferably not in African American history – as that would never enable me to get a job. Mike, himself, probably never gave what I worked on another thought; as far as he was concerned what I had been doing in this paper was an exercise for his class, some way of trying out some of the ideas he had floated in the previous semester. It wasn’t to be thought of as the beginning of work towards our dissertation, though it turned out to be the case for at least two of the people in the class whose books began in that second semester.

Of course, I ignored those who said I shouldn’t work on this anymore, but not so much deliberately. While I was wandering the intellectual halls both within and beyond the discipline, I really was not approaching a topic of any kind, and when I finished my oral exams, I was still undecided about what I would work on for my dissertation. I had written a long paper on South Africa and the United States, and so the best bet might have been that I would do something comparative. But South Africa was an Apartheid regime so I had no desire to travel there to undertake research, and while the African Methodist churches I had studied presented me with the idea of writing a chapter or article on their involvement in Southern Africa (something I dropped when I learned that James Campbell was working on this topic at Berkeley), nothing really had emerged as a viable topic. Two or three things decided my course, and sent me back to working on African American migrants. First a lot of interlibrary loan requests were filled in the year or two following the completion of my paper for Mike – and these were really very interesting and made it seem as if there was something very much worth doing. Some of this material had great potential for using quantitative methods (which I had learned after my first year) and that approach seemed like it might offer some interesting avenues for new inquiry. But, also, two titles came to me, one for the dissertation itself (“Sparks”), and the other for an article. There had been a nifty section of the paper about the pastor at Mother Bethel confronting his congregation and the split that ensued, that I began to realize really might work on its own. I tried it out on Mike (though I am not sure why I showed it to him first, as I hadn’t had much communication with him in the intervening three years since the course) with the title of “The Earnest Pastor’s Heated Term,” beginning with a chase down the streets of South Philadelphia, and he loved it. He said it could stand by itself and didn’t need all the rest of the baggage that I had attached to it in my original paper, and so I submitted it to The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and it was accepted (and, I was led to believe, became one of their more successful articles – attracting a wide readership).

Titles became incredibly important to me, and this may be something I got from Mike, as I don’t recall ever having had a penchant for them before – and most titles seem rather deadening in the historical profession. In fact, when a Temple University Press editor suggested that I change my title (as it was too long and she didn’t think it would be good for marketing as the readership wouldn’t really know what it meant), I said I wouldn’t (even though she was probably right). As far as I was concerned the book wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t had the title on which to hang it. Once I had come upon the title, found in a sentence from the writings of another African American pastor, I had my book – it almost wrote itself. I couldn’t imagine changing that, and since, generally speaking, the titles come to me before the work on which they are based, I remain pretty loyal to them.

But, I may be digressing, or at least, I may have come to the end of what I need to say about the beginnings of my intellectual debt to Mike, so I have started to ramble on, off point. A couple of things need to be said, however, before moving to a discussion of one of the points raised at Mike’s conference. What there is that is left to say is that after his effusive response to “The Earnest Pastor”, I continued to go back to him to receive feedback. I didn’t show him my dissertation, nor the book manuscript as it developed, but as I began to realize that all those folks who said I would never get a tenure-track job writing on African Methodists in Philadelphia began to seem prescient, I started to send Mike all the other things that I was working on – various think pieces. There was one on Imperialism in America (“The Imperial Nexus”), which I had shown to Daniel Rodgers at Princeton and which he really didn’t like (I think mainly because he felt that I was dredging up the usual Progressive suspects, though the point I was making was that American Progressivism could be reconfigured – he had dismantled it – if one thought of it in terms of a larger imperial framework – and to some extent he did something similar himself in relocating it in comparative terrain), and which Walter Licht at Penn liked somewhat (describing it as “wild and woolly”, which I appreciated). But Mike was effusive. He called me up about it and just was incredibly positive. He didn’t say anything like, drop everything and turn this into a book; he just indicated that what I was doing was insightful and interesting, and that was enough for him (and, to hear it from him, for me). As a result of my sending him this paper, he began to invite me to join his salons, something I only managed to do on a couple of occasions as I was by now living and teaching at Princeton.

This was also about the same time that Mike came to Princeton to present “The Power of Blackness,” an article that I have to say had the most profound influence on me. I have written about this piece elsewhere, both in my second book, in a small essay on Saint Domingue, and in my blog (“The Now Nation”). I didn’t go to the presentation. I am not sure why, except that while I was at Princeton I seem to have stuck pretty closely to just catering to my students and didn’t really stick my head above water. But the reverberations from Mike’s visit could be heard up and down the corridors of Dickinson Hall for several weeks afterwards. The confrontation with Sean Wilentz (which may not actually have been a direct one in the seminar) had caused quite a stir. Sean loved Jefferson; Mike had portrayed him as the first true racist. Ouch! I was with Mike on this one, having sat through Sean’s lectures and thinking somewhat the same thing about Jefferson, and I just loved the paper.

Other papers of mine have received the Zuckerman treatment. He loved “Apropos Exceptionalism”, though I didn’t share this with him before I submitted it for the conference at University College, London, when we were both to present there. After my presentation had gone horrendously and I left before the last presentation during which the commentator discussed my essay and pronounced it among the best of those written for the conference, Mike very nicely let me know that I had really missed something – of course, I didn’t tell him that I had just left as a result of being unable to speak to anybody after my presentation, but perhaps he sensed that.

“Unreal Cities: London, Bombay, New York” he found exciting, and suggested that I incorporate the students’ reactions to the course more prominently into the paper. That seemed quintessentially Mike – the need not to just have the professor’s view of the course in the paper, but to include the words of the people he was inflicting these ideas on. This improved the paper greatly. He encouraged me to submit the article for publication, which I did, and the result was a Teaching Radical History essay in Radical History Review.

And, on and on. I don’t think I showed him my critiques of E.P. Thompson, and I am not sure why I didn’t share them with him; but I believe I gave him a copy of my second book (Inside Out, Outside In), as I thought he might like it. I don’t believe, though, that I actually gave him the credit he deserved in the acknowledgments, which is curious. I dedicated the book to Owen Dudley Edwards, in part because I felt that the quixotic aspect of the book had derived from his classes at Edinburgh; but in much of what I was writing about, the manner in which I was writing it, and the support that Mike had a times given me meant that it actually owed as much, if not more to Zuckerman than to Dudley Edwards. Be that as it may, mention of this book provides a segue into a discussion of a couple of the points raised at the conference, partly because this was a book of essays (which Mike indicated was his preferred currency), and partly because it in many ways fit within the realm of what (we learned at the conference) was referred to as “doing a Zuckerman” – assaulting the establishment.

III. Terminal Degrees of Freedom
The first panel had touched largely on two essays: “Fabrication of Identity in Early America” (1977), and “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America” (1998). The summary of “Fabrication” was thorough, and took me back to the History 700 in which we had read it. It occurred to me that a lot of the things that I had been writing about migration – especially that to be found in Histrionyx (my on line book) were founded in ideas that came from the Proseminar and which were embedded in “Fabrication.” The presentation of Mike’s argument seemed to contradict that to be found in his “Turds” article, but I wasn’t sure if this was just the way they had been presented, or whether Mike’s own view had developed over the 21 years between the two articles. If there was a contradiction, did that matter? I am not sure, and I am not sure Mike would necessarily have felt troubled by it. To be extremely brief both essays had challenged fundamental assumptions historians had about Americans in the 18th century. The “Turds” article seemed from the description to have been the equivalent of defecating in the middle of a seminar where all the major colonial Americanists were pontificating away. This, after all, was being published in the hallowed Journal of American History!

What became clear in the discussion of the “Turds” piece was that Mike had undertaken an assault on the 18th-century history-wallahs and had angered, not to say traumatized, many of his targets in the establishment. The question arose, not surprisingly perhaps, whether or not a scholar would have been able to write such a piece today, especially if the person wasn’t a full professor at an Ivy League institution. This question intrigued me, as did Mike’s response to it. It was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand he believed that we should all be doing these things, questioning and being contrary, and that as often as not those who do so end up being celebrated for their work. At another level, he had a fatalistic feeling that there was a kind of zeitgeist, not static and unchanging, such that one could have little or no control over whether one’s work was acknowledged and supported.

Those who take risks may be rewarded, and here Mike mentioned pre-tenured, probationary faculty who get involved in community work, rather than simply tying themselves to working on their manuscripts. Such folk seem to fare better in the tenure process than those who pinned all their hopes on the success of their monographs. This, however, speaks less to the radical nature of the manuscripts that they were slaving away at and the degree to which these authors were endeavoring to turn the world upside down. And the likelihood that someone would be making waves (unsupported at some level by a mentor) is diminished by the fact that the tenure-track candidate had needed such support in the form of letters of recommendation in order to get the job in the first place – and from that point they are merely endeavoring to fulfill expectations. Serious assaults on the establishment seldom occur prior to tenure, and as one person at the conference noted, if they don’t occur prior to tenure, they are unlikely to happen when the faculty member has become more firmly established.

So the power of the zeitgeist is bolstered by-and-large by the faculty member’s sense that he or she needs to tread carefully. It is true that if the person can get published and can make waves, it may work to his advantage – the fact that David Washbrook, Rosalind O’Hanlan, and Burton Stein responded so viscerally to Gyan Prakash’s work, for example, can’t have been pleasant for him, but it didn’t necessarily hurt his career (though it should be noted that Gyan’s more radical pieces followed, rather than preceded, the publication of Bonded Histories, which by contrast was less threatening to the establishment – and it should also be mentioned that being ensconced at Princeton was better than sniping from the periphery of a lower-tier institution). My sense is that wherever Mike had been he would have undertaken his work, and his abilities would have produced similar effects, but many others would not have been so successful, and, these days, with publication limitations and job markets changing, he might have had to resort to doing so in non-traditional ways – e.g., writing on the web instead of in the Journal of American History.

The two impulses, the individual’s need to seek out whatever was most compelling to him or her, come what may, and the overall impulse against doing this if the Profession (capital P) found it to be less than worthy, could sit cheek by jowl (a phrase commonly used by Mike, I recall) without much problem. But here I think the issue of power is elided, along with the privilege of the Ivy League (or an element of it). The zeitgeist signifies power, at one level, and unless you have power of your own to draw on you can be squashed like a bug. The author of “Fabrication of Identity” and “Turds” had significant resources at his disposal allowing him to say what he wanted, so that it would end up being heard, and so that it would be taken seriously. Others who submitted articles along the same lines would probably not be so fortunate. This is not to discount the fact that the two articles were written by a craftsman, whose skills could not be altogether ignored; and they are written by someone operating at the height of his skills, a dizzying height indeed. But would he have been able to publish such pieces on the way up to the top?

Two answers can be suggested to this. One can be drawn from the account given about the publishing of “Turds”; another can be drawn from the fate of a paper written by another author in another time and place. We heard at the conference from one of the readers for the JAS that Zuckerman’s fingerprints were all over the article; clearly one doesn’t want to go too far down the road of suggesting that this was a key to its publication, but since this reader was a former student of Mike’s it seems fair to suggest that this had an impact on the reading of the article and his recommendation. Similarly, the JAH editor thought the article was really “a joke,” Mike mentioned. Would this editor have been as sanguine about publishing this piece, one that clearly would upset some major historians, had he known it had come from the pen of the ultra-serious Jane Stubbings of Podonk State in Montana? My guess is probably not!

The second piece of evidence we have is the story of the paper of mine entitled “Class, Culture, and Empire,” [CCE] (a play on Herbert Gutman, which, in turn, was a play on Raymond Williams). Produced for a conference in Oxford, it was an account of the reaction from an established labor historian to the essay Madhavi Kale and I published on E. P. Thompson and empire (“The Empire and Mr. Thompson”) – published in the Economic and Political Weekly in India (since we believed it a little too incendiary, long, and unorthodox a piece to fit in any of the professions journals in the U.S. – and given the story of “Turds” at the JAH, this wasn’t too unrealistic an assessment). CCE was the talk of the conference, particularly on the floor among participants (who were especially interested in the “My Dinner with Andre” section), and it certainly raised the ire of the two major historians attending the conference, one the keynote speaker, and the other the commentator, both of whom considered themselves Thompsonians. At the beginning of the conference there was no question that my essay would be in the book (the organizer had eulogized it effusively by email prior to my arrival); immediately after the conference I was informed that the piece was being dropped from the book, because both the Thompsonian twins would not include their pieces in the book if mine was in there (my piece was almost worth the same as their two pieces, but not quite, apparently!). Of course, the paper saw the light of day later in the Journal of Historical Sociology, but not until after one of the readers wrote to the editors saying, “this is a gossipy piece…[that] quickly loses its charm…some of it I found offensive, most is disagreeable.” Fortunately the editor didn’t take these remarks seriously, “because they were not backed by any substantive discussion of the arguments in [the] paper,” and rushed the article into print.

There are many ways that the zeitgeist so-called can get established. It is through such readers’ reviews of articles as the one just mentioned; through tenure reviews; through senior scholars’ and their acolytes’ commentaries on panels; through the senior scholar’s withholding of a review of a book she doesn’t like (and then not returning the book to the journal so it can be reviewed by someone else); through the appointment of particular worthies to Association committees studying new approaches to history; and so forth. These actions are on-going and occur at the level of material reality, rather than in the realm of ideas. They do a great deal to shape discourses and actual people end up being the profession’s gatekeepers. This doesn’t mean that change doesn’t occur, but generally it does so in a managed way at the center among the powerbrokers themselves, who decide to jump on a bandwagon, and who, by and large get the credit for the transformation (internationalizing American history, anyone?).

The Ph.D. then opens the doors to many possibilities for the individual but as a terminal degree it is frequently something that comes with the shutting down of freedom to develop and express certain ideas. Thorstein Veblen largely had it correct when he suggested that as people acquire the skills for certain professions they also develop certain “trained incapacities.” Much of the training that goes on in graduate schools seems to fit this. But this was not the case in Mike Zuckerman’s class. One may not have developed all the professional skills, and one may not have become primed to succeed in the profession, but one was definitely taught to engage any idea, backed by a zeitgeist or not, and hold one’s own. For that I will certainly always be extremely grateful to him for his willingness to buck the system and aspire to be unique.