The conversation continues. Over at the Cliopatria award-winning U.S. Intellectual History, David Sehat weighs in on the Gordon Wood review of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes.
After reading Sehat’s analysis, I am now closer than I have ever been (but not quite there yet) to embracing William Hogeland description of the review as “almost fantastically, even goofily, unfair.”
Here is a taste of Sehat’s post:
He never quite admits that the Tea Party’s history is bad, or that their stance toward it is wrong-headed. Instead, Wood shifts into a discussion of memory, as opposed to history, and the emotional requirement of memory for, again, “ordinary Americans.” As opposed to critical history, Wood asserts that ordinary Americans need a variety of mythical interpretations by which “humans have sought to sanctify their societies, buttress their institutions, and invest their lives and their nations with a sense of destiny.” At one point Wood suggests that “Lepore is correct in believing that historians have a professional obligation to dispel myths and legends,” but then he spends the next eight paragraphs trying to show the emotional thinness of critical history, which seems to suggest that professional obligations run contrary to human need–a somewhat bizarre stance for an intellectual and an educator. Since I’ve just published a book that seeks to dispel a myth (The Myth of Religious Freedom) I read this section of the review with great interest, but the more I think about it, the less it makes sense. It seems to be nothing so much as an intellectual defense of anti-intellectualism. He seems, against all protestations to the contrary, to be faulting the historian Jill Lepore for being (wait for it) . . . a historian!
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an intellectual defense of anti-intellectualism.
Yeah. And somehow, to me, lacking in heartfelt defense. And it's funny, because I've dabbled in what might be branded some of that myself — but what's up with *Wood*, of all people, going there (and going there *now*)? I really think Lepore has a more gut-sympathetic feeling for the dismaying anti-intellectualism she reports on than Wood ever could. So what's he on about? I have some answers to that rhetorical question, reflecting on the body of his influential work, but that's a story for another time. He's right, of course, that some of the Revolution itself engaged in similarly semi-informed, popularly imaginative, and rowdy protest, possibly conectable to today's Tea Party movement, but he states that fact as if Lepore is suggesting otherwise and he's correcting her. Agree or not, but isn't Lepore saying that professional history has largely failed to provide a broad, coherent narrative, accessible by nonspecialists yet credible to historians? And trying to trace that failure in both pop and pro history? Re the “popular memory” thing: I again wonder if Wood asnd others have read Neitzsche on monumental/critical/antiquarian history. This is not a new issue. …
BILL HOGELAND
I mean “Nietzsche.”
Ms. Lepore did not accept the necessary rigor of establishing that the Tea Party's normative understanding of itself as any more than figurative, metaphorical and analogous to the original.
And so, there has been little effort made on the part of her supporters to defend the book on its own merits, because it cannot be defended on a scholarly basis as it lacks the necessary rigor.
It's opinion journalism, based on anecdote. The Tea Partiers are ignorant and don't know their history. Which is fine. For opinion journalism.
But I would argue they were well aware that what are perhaps their biggest beefs, the ballooning deficit and encroaching “socialism” [read: Obamacare] were not issues at the first Tea Party. Further, the original was an act of destruction and civil disobedience; the modern version certainly was not.
The issue here to me seems to be Wood, and the battle for history and how to do it. If Lepore's book is how to do it, by anecdote rather than attempting an empirical search for the normative, then all history will become opinion journalism.
Further, I have substantive beefs with the Lepore book like
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“Austin Hess was offended at being called a racist; he said we lived in a post-racial world. I took him at his word and wanted to be sympathetic with him.”
Well, that's nice, since her book says that Hess' girlfriend is black.
“But that’s why they love the American Revolution, because they see it as a white, pre-racial movement, which of course it wasn’t. But that’s sort of the point of the book, and why I gave it the title it has [The Whites of Their Eyes].”
Well, that's a relief, sort of. But I wonder how many people will take the title to imply racism.
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I might have made Wood's argument about myth and memory a bit differently, that it's entirely appropriate to appeal to our better angels and principles as Frederick Douglass did, and perhaps such exhortations are more responsible for our “progress” than rubbing our noses in our historical failures to live up to them.
Or to give disproportionate credit to the more prophetic Roger Williamses and Levellers and the like. This is not to say they weren't prophetic, they were. However, it's far from certain that their sentiments weren't shared by others who simply thought it would be disastrous to force such radical change at the time.
Indeed, Douglass—at least publicly—came to exactly that view, that he had seen Lincoln as a man who moved too slowly, but came to appreciate that Lincoln was moving us as fast he could.
This is not to say we whitewash slavery and the Trail of Tears, etc. and sexism and homophobia and the rest of the laundry list. But the academy being what it is, I see no danger of such a whitewash.