Arrogance and Empire: What Can US Intellectual History Learn from US and the World?

This week I’m going to switch subfields: instead of writing about the development of the new history of capitalism as a particular line of scholarly inquiry, I’m going to catch up with an academic controversy from about—sheesh—half a year ago.

In November of last year, the journal Diplomatic History published a historiographical essay by Paul Kramer titled “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” a piece that identified widespread conceptual and terminological errors in the field but focused its critique on the work of one historian, Daniel Immerwahr. Immerwahr had given the 2016 Stuart Bernath Lecture entitled “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History” and was about to publish How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, which as you can see from the subtitle, is the book-length, fully fleshed out version of the lecture.

Immerwahr quickly replied to Kramer’s critique, but as he quietly observed, his best answer to many of Kramer’s objections could be found in the much more substantial research and precise argumentation of his book.[1] But in some senses, the book also stood alone or off to the side: the exchange illuminated basic divisions among historians of the US regarding one of the most essential but frequently neglected questions of historiography: the author’s point of view.

In what follows, I definitely won’t do justice to all the different points raised by Kramer nor will I do anything like justice to Immerwahr’s incredibly rich and generative, immensely compelling book, which I very much urge people to read. (For a great review of the book which also covers some of the basic field-specific issues raised by the debate, see Patrick Iber’s piece in The New Republic.) Instead, I want to focus narrowly on the disagreement between Immerwahr and Kramer that I think is most portable and provocative for US intellectual historians. Immerwahr and Kramer research and write about many of the same things, and in reality they probably have similar judgments about many historical events. But they see themselves as writing to very different audiences and they locate themselves at very, very different positions within the complicated matrix of possible relations between the academy, the US state, general readers, and scholarly communities from other nations. Although US intellectual historians don’t face quite the same menu of choices regarding how to position themselves, this disagreement between Kramer and Immerwahr may help us think through some of the choices we have made as scholars and the choices we may want to make in the future.

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Perhaps the best way to begin unpacking this disagreement is by zeroing in on a specific word: mainstream. Immerwahr began his lecture by talking about Pedro Albizu Campos, whom he calls “arguably the most important domestic opponent of the U.S. empire in the twentieth century.” Albizu was a Puerto Rican nationalist and an extremely complicated figure, but one who—despite incredible prominence within the scholarly and lay communities of Puerto Ricans—is wholly absent from “mainstream U.S. historiography,” from basic reference works about U.S. history or from “any of the major textbooks—including those, like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, explicitly designed to give voice to suppressed histories. The Journal of American History has never printed his name” (Immerwahr 2016, 374).

Kramer bristles at this use of the word “mainstream.” Immerwahr’s observation about Albizu’s invisibility within “mainstream” historiography

does injustice to the intellectual labor of scholars studying U.S. colonies within former and present-day U.S. colonies and the U.S. metropole… Who is on the outside of “mainstream” history and why doesn’t their scholarship really count?” (Kramer 2018, 919).

Kramer’s anger at Immerwahr for failing to acknowledge the extensive scholarship that has been done on figures like Albizu is questionably grounded. Even without access to the much more extensive scholarly apparatus of How to Hide an Empire, Kramer ignored a number of caveats in Immerwahr’s lecture that demonstrated his awareness of this literature. (See, for instance, Immerwahr 2016, 374-5 and 382.) High-handedly, Kramer instead concluded his critique with eight pages of bibliography gathering scholarship published since 2007 on U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and in Puerto Rico.

Kramer’s point in listing these works, to be fair, is not just to shame Immerwahr for what he thinks is Immerwahr’s ignorance. It is also to elevate and publicize work that scholars like Immerwahr are too often ignorant of—a move that in fact proves Immerwahr’s point. Immerwahr is a “mainstream” historian: he has a job at a prestigious university (Northwestern), publishes in the discipline’s top journals, and his books have been published both by a top university press (Harvard) and one of the most illustrious trade publishers, Farrar Straus & Giroux.

The reason why Kramer refuses the term “mainstream” isn’t that he doesn’t see these forms of prestige or is in denial about their power to determine whose voice is amplified by their institutional resources. In his own career he has clearly recognized the desirability of publishing his scholarship in many of the same venues as Immerwahr—his critique is, after all, published in Diplomatic History, the official journal of the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, not in a Puerto Rican- or Philippines-based journal. Instead, Kramer so vehemently objects to the way Immerwahr employs “mainstream” because it is—he thinks—consistent with a willingness to follow in the grooves of official U.S. thinking about whose story should be foregrounded, or as Immerwahr puts it in his rejoinder, who gets to be the “protagonist of the historiographical drama” (Immerwahr 2019, 402).

Immerwahr, he argues, believes that the U.S. belongs in the protagonist role—even when the story is about places like Puerto Rico or Hawai?i or the Philippines. Immerwahr, he thinks, sees events or figures as prominent and important only if they can be shown to have some proximity to figures or stories familiar to an implicitly Anglo audience.

That charge is both unfair and correct. It is unfair in its accusation that Immerwahr thinks that the history of a person or an event is only truly significant if it registers as making an impact on traditional U.S. narratives about the nation’s own history. Immerwahr clearly believes that histories have intrinsic importance whether or not they can be connected to the United States. But it is correct in the sense that Immerwahr is trying to reach an audience whose instruction in history has been nationalist in character and has featured a quite narrow—very white, very male—roster of protagonists.

Immerwahr clearly has spent a lot of time thinking about how to get that kind of reader interested in learning more about the history of Puerto Rico, and he frames his book as an invitation and a revelation. Many of the cases in How to Hide an Empire have a structure that is similar to the old Paul Harvey radio feature “Now You Know the Rest of the Story.” Immerwahr begins by telling us all the facts about a particular person (or, in one case, a corporation) without revealing its name. As he lays detail upon detail, all kinds of fascinating connections to familiar names emerge, yet Immerwahr tries to keep the reader guessing—sometimes for pages—as to the identity of this mystery figure. Once he finally does, it usually is someone or something an Anglo reader would be familiar with (one example is the Beatles), but now this someone has been made to stand in a wholly new light because of their deep connections to U.S. empire and imperialism. It is wonderful fodder for lectures—already I have incorporated some of Immerwahr’s anecdotes into mine, and although I’m not as skillful a storyteller as he is, they have gone over pretty well.

But I also teach at a school that is overwhelmingly white, and my students are precisely the kind of people Immerwahr’s book is designed to reach. Kramer, I believe, thinks that there is something fundamentally wrong with writing history from this scholarly position, and he is doubly dubious of Immerwahr’s obvious identification with the white US student who grew up not knowing about Pedro Albizu Campos.

The problem that Kramer sees with this approach and this identification—the problem with researching and writing from the point of view of most white U.S. citizens—is that it reinscribes their ignorance as normative. It flatters white U.S. readers and scholars into thinking that their ignorance is just a product of a U.S.-centered world: we don’t know about the history of the Philippines because U.S. history is just globally more important than the history of the Philippines.

It is hard to deny that this kind of assumption doesn’t lurk somewhere in most U.S. historians’ thoughts about their work. I’ll be candid and say that I chose to study U.S. history because I think that anything I can do to help get this story—the story of the United States—“right” will do more good than studying something else: Latin poetry, say, or the history of France. Part of that reasoning is that I live in the United States, and studying France here gives me much less leverage—fewer opportunities to make a difference—than studying the United States.

There’s an undeniable arrogance about this: it is arrogant to tell a scholar who does study, say, the history of Argentina or Nigeria that my work has greater potential impact than theirs does because the U.S. has a bigger “role” in the world than “their” country does. Politeness generally forbids putting this into words.

It is important and salutary that someone like Kramer is calling us on our arrogance. But it is also hard to know what we are supposed to do. Kramer slams what he calls “nationalist transnationalism”—a re-mapping of U.S. history that simply makes it bigger, aggrandizing rather than critiquing standard narratives about the global centrality of the “American story.” “If going ‘global’ simply meant enlarging U.S. national histories,” he writes, “then U.S. historians could venture ‘abroad’ without ever really leaving ‘home’” (Kramer 2018, 921-922). Any desire to write “a more cosmopolitan history of the United States,” he contends, is at heart annexationist, driven not by a desire to question U.S. centrality but by an unease with looking too provincially ignorant of other people’s stories.

When I first read this passage in Kramer’s critique, the question that occurred to me was simply, “is there something wrong with wanting to write a more cosmopolitan history of the United States?” And that, in fact, may be the heart of the matter. I can certainly see why the desire to write a more cosmopolitan (intellectual) history of the United States is problematic, but I also can’t entirely see why it should be undesirable. And I am also lost when it comes to imagining alternatives that don’t essentially require me to stop being a historian of the United States. Kramer explicitly asks historians of the U.S. to be not just anti-exceptionalist—to strive to maintain an awareness of built-in blind spots, to be more cosmopolitan—but to employ “a post-nationalist sense of which questions to ask, which concepts to employ and, ultimately, who constitutes the community of inquiry itself. From this point of view, the best histories of the United States in the world were likely to be generated by scholars positioned either ‘outside’ of U.S. history or in the rich interstices between the United States and the rest of the world” (Kramer 2018, 922).

But if that’s not where you start from, how do you get there? And if that’s not where your audience starts from, how do you get your audience to follow you there?