Editor's Note
This is the second in a series of guest posts by Rebecca Brenner, a doctoral candidate (ABD) in early American history at American University in Washington, DC. She has served as Secretary of the Society for US Intellectual History since June 2017.
Philosopher and social theorist Walter Benjamin wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in 1940. He wrote it in Paris, as a Jewish German anticipating the Nazi invasion that May. Benjamin committed suicide that September.[1] But in the early months of his final year – his suicide motivated by victories of the political and historical Nazi nightmare – Benjamin beseeched historians to read and write “against the grain” of the past.[2]
Last month, in April 2018, emeriti historians Joseph J. Ellis and Gordon S. Wood appeared on stage with a moderator at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida, to consider the “legacies of the founders.” Their conversation turned into an analysis of changes in the ways that professional historians – predominantly professors – study and present the early American republic. When a video of this conversation became public on C-SPAN earlier this month, May 2018, it was not well received.[3] The current battle between the “vast early America” historians and Ellis and Wood boils down to competing objectives of historical scholarship.
I have divided the competing objectives into two umbrella topics. First, Ellis and Wood emphasize the positives. Ellis rebuffs what he calls “anti-America history,” referring to scholarship that reflects poorly on the traditional American origin story. He asserts that nontraditional “story lines,” should not replace the founders’ story. Wood seconds this by distinguishing between science – which must be precise and specific – and our “understanding of the past.” He corroborates Ellis’s criticism of “anti-American history,” explaining, “history is different” because historians have a “public obligation,” and the “public is hungry for knowing the story of the founding.”[4] Essentially, the general public wants to be proud of American history, and therefore Ellis and Wood cater to them.
Thus Ellis and Wood’s second objective, according to my grouping, is that history should be accessible to the public. Ellis decries a “deplorable situation,” where “most Americans do not know what the Bill of Rights is. A lot of them do not know what came first: The American Revolution or the Civil War.” Regardless of whether this is correct, Ellis blames the current historiography of early America for this widespread ignorance. He charges that a supposed historiographical shift away from the founding makes Americans “vulnerable to fake news.”[5] Wood likewise notes a gap between academia and non-academic historians. He evokes nostalgia for the 1950s, when Richard Hofstadter wrote for academic and public readership simultaneously. Wood claims that early American historiography has become too narrow and specified.[6]
Combining the strands of positivity and palatability, a central objective of Ellis and Wood’s scholarship is to focus on the positives in order to engage the public. Wood points out abruptly that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was “not genocide in any Nazi kind of sense” and that it was a “tragic, ironic story,” an outlier to the legacy of the founders. Wood claims that instead of civic education, early American historiography is now about “war and oppression.”[7] But, is not there a connection between civic education and the history of war and oppression? For Walter Benjamin, there was.
In context, Benjamin wrote that the “historical materialists” were the ones brushing “against the grain.”[8] He introduced historical materialists in the previous thesis: “Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.”[9] So, historical materialists apply history to improve desperate situations. In practice, this is civic education. Then, his line that applies most directly is: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment.”[10] The vast early Americanists resemble Benjamin’s historical materialists, striving to understand a world in which most of the participants could not leave records.
The historians that Ellis and Wood deplore focus less on whether Americans should be proud. They interrogate exactly what happened and why, and these insights inform the present in a “moment of danger.” They delegate the objective of connecting with the public to the rigorous field of public history. Despite their masters’ degrees and in some cases doctorates, public historians prioritize “sharing authority” with diverse audiences and many publics.[11] Beyond crafting a narrative of the founding, public historians work as a bridge between museums and academics. Public history is the expertise of many professors and scholars. Meanwhile for early Americanist academic authors and professors, their objective of historical scholarship is closer to Benjamin’s than to Ellis and Wood’s. The founders and their kin “emerged victorious,” and their “triumphal procession” continues through holidays, parades, canonical documents, media, some scholarship, and even theatre.[12] Today, historians combat the traditional narrative because it steps “over those who are lying prostrate.” The United States boasts innumerable “cultural treasures,” and the vast early Americanists view them with “cautious detachment.”[13]
In this post, I have framed Ellis and Wood’s recent C-SPAN appearance as one approach to the philosophy of history. At best they want to engage what they call the public, but at worst they appease a privileged demographic of readers by sugarcoating early American history. I hope that my post will provoke discussion regarding not only the state of early American historiography, but also what this means for how and why we study the past.
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[1]“Walter Benjamin,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/.
[2]Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Thesis VII, http://pages.ucsd.edu/~rfrank/class_web/ES-200A/Week%202/benjamin_ps.pdf.
[3]Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood, “Legacies of the Founding Fathers,” C-Span 3: American History TV(5 April 2018) https://www.c-span.org/video/?443323-2/legacies-founders; My biases here are threefold. Professor Ellis was a kind mentor to me as an undergraduate student at Mount Holyoke. Yet, the people who shaped the current state of early American historiography through outstanding bottom-up and middle-out scholarship inspire me. Finally, my masters degree, as well as career plans, are in public history precisely because I want sophisticated, “against the grain” scholarship to connect with broader, diverse audiences.
[4]Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood, “Legacies of the Founding Fathers,” C-SPAN 3: American History TV(5 April 2018) https://www.c-span.org/video/?443323-2/legacies-founders.
[5]Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood, “Legacies of the Founding Fathers,” C-SPAN 3: American History TV(5 April 2018) https://www.c-span.org/video/?443323-2/legacies-founders.
[6]To cite a personal example, my dissertation traces Sunday mail delivery from 1810 through 1912, focusing on religious minorities and disenfranchised persons, in order to analyze American governance.
[7]Joseph Ellis and Gordon Wood, “Legacies of the Founding Fathers,” CSPAN3 American History TV(5 April 2018) https://www.c-span.org/video/?443323-2/legacies-founders.
[8]Benjamin, Thesis VII.
[9]Benjamin, Thesis VI.
[10]Benjamin, Thesis VII.
[11]Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds., Letting Go: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, (Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011).
[12]David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820(The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
[13]Benjamin, Thesis VII; Key scholarship on vast early America includes Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2003); Kathleen Duval, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution(New York: Random House, 2015); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016).
3 Thoughts on this Post
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It seems to me historians have an obligation to inform the public that history is usually complicated, that it is rarely a matter of comic-book-style pure good versus pure evil, and that simplistic, uncritically celebratory versions of a national past are just as harmful as narratives that emphasize only the worst, most deplorable aspects — if not more harmful. Based on the quotes in the post (I haven’t watched the video), I would say Wood/Ellis have not fulfilled that obligation here.
Wood and Ellis don’t have to become fans of Walter Benjamin. (Though, e.g., his rumination on the angel of history, after the Klee painting, is so striking that everyone should read that passage.) All Wood and Ellis have to do is act like responsible professional historians. That shouldn’t be too hard for them, but they don’t seem to have done that here.
The post is undoubtedly correct about Ellis and Wood, although both have produced important work, and historians should think more about their connection to politics. I don’t think Wood and Ellis are wrong about that, but they have misidentified the public and its needs today.
Just for argument’s sake, respectfully, it might be the case that the post is giving a little too much credit to early American studies for being reflective on the conditions of intellectual practice, etc. A good deal of contemporary professional historical writing, particularly of the vast early america sort, seems much closer to the kind of historicism that Benjamin was targeting in that essay… I think a lot of that scholarship is very good and important, humbling, and as someone working on Pacific exploration stuff now I continue to learn a lot from it, but Benjaminian it ain’t.
Chris Tomlins is someone who has explored Benjamin’s relevance to legal history, and on early American studies more broadly, a must read is (my advisor) Michael Meranze’s “Even the Dead will Not be Safe: An Ethics of Early American History” WMQ 50:2 (April 1993)
Thank you both for such thoughtful comments! I especially like the point that history is complicated and that painting everything as negative can be as misguided as the opposite. Also, thanks for the Meranze article rec!