A Response to Bruce Kuklick

As Alan Brinkley’s former graduate students, we would like to respond to the unkind portrait of him in Bruce Kuklick’s tribute to Leo Ribuffo, which S-USIH published on its website. We have no way of knowing Leo’s personal feelings toward Alan, except insofar as he was always full of praise toward his colleague whenever he spoke about him to one of us. If Ribuffo bore any resentment toward Brinkley, he was tactful enough to keep it private. Out of respect for both Ribuffo and Brinkley, we were dismayed to see a piece that divulges what Ribuffo must have considered a discreet conversation and does so with a startling lack of collegiality.

Kuklick grudgingly calls Brinkley’s first book, Voices of Protest—which won the National Book Award—“a good book on the 1930s,” as if it were not still one of the most important accounts we have of the populist currents of the Depression era. The reference to Alan’s ostensibly “predictable Democratic ideas” strikes us as an oddly dismissive description of his influential work. Most strangely, and in supposed juxtaposition with Ribuffo, Kuklick presents Alan as “an Ivy Leaguer” and an upper crust representative of “the establishment,” pointing out that his father was the famous newsman David Brinkley. Alan did grow up in comfort and privilege, but his father (for what it is worth) grew up in poverty and rose to the top his profession through his own reading and education—a story not unlike Leo’s own. (Kuklick himself, it bears mentioning, has degrees from several elite universities and has taught in the Ivy League his whole career.) At any rate, Alan is widely known as one of the most modest, least pretentious members of our profession, without a hint of class prejudice, and many of his students have come from unlikely, non-elite backgrounds.

We should also note that Kuklick’s account completely mischaracterizes Ribuffo’s well-known 1994 interaction with Brinkley: Rather than a “famous run-in” at the AHA meeting, they engaged in a heated but respectful and enlightening exchange of views that year in the American Historical Review, on the topic of American conservatism and its historiography. In that exchange, which has benefited students and scholars ever since, Ribuffo used the term “certification narrative” to make a trenchant point about the sociology of historical research – and certainly not to “attack,” as Kuklick puts it, Alan’s scholarship.

We think it’s unfortunate (if it is indeed the case) that Leo was planning to skip the upcoming AHA session devoted to Alan’s scholarship, which we are proud to be a part of and which comes at a time when Brinkley is in the twilight of his career. We encourage others to attend that session to pay tribute to Alan and discuss his contributions to American political history. We wish Leo could have come, too—for those of us who knew him as a witty and pioneering historian believe that while he might have had some grumbling dissents, he would have been a lively contributor to the conversation.