On Leo Ribuffo

Leo Ribuffo did not make it easy for us by dying suddenly and telling us in his will that he wanted no memorials. So I don’t call this a memorial, but I do want to make a stab at saying who he was to me.

Leo was often – and quietly — gracious to students starting out in university life, and to various persons who were in trouble or who had been set upon by the world. This generosity of spirit was often in evidence. But it is a serious error to over-emphasize that part of his extraordinary character. He was never, in the 50 years I knew him, just a Mr. Rogers for adults, or an intellectual Santa Claus.

Leo was raised in a dysfunctional, broken household that was not out of poverty. Misguided medical treatment when he was born – common in the 1940s – permanently impaired his eyesight. He wore goggle-like glasses, and never had any interest in athletics, sports, or exercise.  In the early 1950s, in Paterson, New Jersey, Leo went to School 4, where his father was the janitor. Some guidance counselors advised that Leo be considered for “special” lessons, those reserved for the “retarded.” He had, however, a keen and penetrating mind, and a love of reading. He was also lucky enough to have had some mentors who appreciated his ability and his seriousness of purpose in trying to understand where he came from. They included not just teachers in grade-school, but three men who taught him as an undergraduate in that great Rutgers History Department of years back – Lloyd Gardner, Gene Genovese, and Warren Susman. At Yale, where Leo received his PhD in American Studies, that teacher was his advisor, the much-loved and open-minded Sydney Ahlstrom, who was known in New Haven for embracing the post-graduate waifs.

As Leo, by force of intellect, made his way in the academy, he came more and more in contact with affluent professionals. Yale topped this off. Here was a crowd with privileges that Leo had never dreamed of. Many of these people, to Leo, were not very smart; they were if not conservative, at least conventional; they had gotten to where they were through family connection, money, or private education; most of all they looked down their high-class Protestant noses at lesser creatures with names ending in vowels. Leo hated them – I use the verb deliberately. There is enough of the same emotion in me to grasp its extreme expression in Leo.

When I first met him in New Haven, we double-dated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But he had little luck with girls, and told me they always thought they “could do better” with guys in their own set. It was only years later that he believed “the demographics” had altered. By then he had a series of “lady friends,” as he called them, including along the way a failed marriage, which in its own way made him feel normal, like the rest of us who related, however problematically, with the opposite sex.

As I grew close to Leo over the years, I saw more and more how much of him was shaped by hostility to social and economic status.  He saidabout his own essays: Never underestimate spite as an engine of intellectual achievement. He was infuriated by “the cronyism” of leading figures in the history profession, their self-aggrandizement and careerism dressed up in the fake language of meritocracy. One of Leo’s mantras went: “My Uncle Tony” had a more “nuanced” view of race relations in the United States than all the liberal historians writing on the topic.He wrote a scathing attack on me at one point, claiming that my views about the profession reflected “an educational background and academic career spent entirely at elite universities.” In his last days he talked about organizing a session at the 2019 USIH conference that would get old-fart intellectual historians to talk about the field in the 1970s. He absolutely refused to consider several prominent historians whom he judged as well-to-do and orthodox net-workers. About Washington, D.C., he said many times words to this effect: “I associate with lawyers, assistant secretaries of some agency or other, national security talking-heads, Clinton partisans waiting for work. Many are my friends. But I don’t like the class.” While his kindness and self-knowledge allowed him to value the individual, he forever felt alien from an upper crust.

Leo was fearless in debate with the establishment. At a round-table on the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a cardinal of the church of the advantaged, told Leo that he could not get the feel of the era because he had not lived through it. Leo, then at Bucknell, young and untenured, growled back at Schlesinger: Is that true about you and The Age of Jackson? Case closed. I saw Schlesinger in action many times; this was the only time he had no retort.

Then there is Leo’s famous run-in with Alan Brinkley at the AHA in 1994. Brinkley, an esteemed Ivy Leaguer and the son of the famous journalist David Brinkley, had written a good book on the 1930s. At the AHA he updated his predictable Democratic ideas. In a masterful attack, Leo called Brinkley’s work “a certification narrative” — a phrase I have stolen, so brilliant is its capture of a certain kind of scholarship. OK, so what? Well, the last set of email exchanges I had with Leo was a couple of weeks before he died, twenty-five years after the 1994 AHA. He told me that he would have nothing to do with a 2019 AHA session that would honor Brinkley. Leo still resented the “few crumbs Brinkley first tossed me.”

We should not forget this part of Leo’s character, which was not always pretty or justified or consistent, and was certainly not the whole of Leo. But this part fundamentally contributed to making him the singular human being he was. At least it endeared him to me. More important, it accounts for the acuityof his writing and his commentaries. One thing unites a certain company of lower-class folks who become professors. It is constantly amazing for us to see the loftier world face-to-face after we were reared to think GROWN-UPS out there ran things, “them there evaluators,” as my father used to say. There were no grown-ups, Leo held, only a bunch of “snots” who were trying to impose their notions “on the great unwashed,” another favorite phrase of his. His scholarly insight was bound up with his anger. He got at the heart of matters because he wrote from his own experience – his pain and personal suffering — and was unafraid to tell us what he saw. In him the inscrutable and contradictory issues surrounding the accident of birth were always front and center.

What an original, what a powerful talent, what a wonderful friend to have had.

Bruce Kuklick
University of Pennsylvania
December 17, 2018