Late in Peter Novick’s standard work on the history of the American history profession, he drops in a quotation from Conor Cruise O’Brien: “Of history and its consequences it may be said: ‘Those who can, gloat; those who can’t, brood.'” Novick applies the quote to a startling pattern in the historiography of slavery that emerged from the 1960s and 1970s:
While there are some exceptions to the rule, those who have written the most influential studies of white attitudes and behavior toward blacks were almost all gentiles—David Brion Davis, George Frederickson, Winthrop Jordan, Morgan Kousser, James McPherson; those who wrote of blacks as subjects, were overwhelmingly Jewish—Ira Berlin, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, Leon Litwack, George Rawick. (479)
Novick (who was himself Jewish) suggested that Jewish-Americans at that point must have had a greater affinity for the Black experience because they were brooders rather than gloaters. This is a provocative observation in part because of the way that it transgresses certain norms of today regarding cultural appropriation. There are several vibrant (if tense) ongoing conversations among Jews in the US regarding the extremely complex relationship between antisemitism and anti-Black racism and the need to find ways to fight both simultaneously while still acknowledging their different histories as well as the reality that most Jewish-Americans are generally perceived as white (albeit, as some have argued, only “conditionally white“).
I thought about this passage and the O’Brien quotation as I recently re-read Ira Katznelson’s influential Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. This revisit happened to occur during Katznelson’s prominent role in the recent strike by graduate workers at Columbia University (Katznelson serves as the Interim Provost there). Katznelson’s support for the university’s multifaceted campaign to prevent the grad workers from unionizing drew sharp criticism, but it also produced a widespread sense of confusion and disappointment. Katznelson’s scholarly record places him as a stalwart supporter of unions, or at least implies as much. What, then, was he doing effectively holding the bag for a union-buster?
The reason I connected this situation with O’Brien was the sense that I got from Fear Itself that Katznelson badly wanted the reader to understand the moral lesson that leaders often have to betray some of their principles in order to protect their bedrock commitments. I’ll get to some specific passages from the book in a minute, but I’m sure you can see where this is going: although Fear Itself was written years before the events of the Columbia grad strike, the way Katznelson approached the choices made by New Dealers in the 1930s can be read as a proleptic justification or rationalization of the way things turned out at Columbia.
Rationalization or self-justification might seem rather far from “gloating”—in fact, tonally it might appear to be closer to the moroseness of a brooder—but the deeper meaning behind O’Brien’s division of brooders and gloaters is, I think, that some historians instinctively orient their accounts in a way that steers the reader time and again toward questions of intention, which is another way of saying credit (and blame). Issues of structure and agency are not important merely to establish causation for these historians, but because they allow us to calibrate how much honor or guilt is to be charged to a historical actor’s account. These historians, in other words, naturally drift toward the perspective of people in charge, people for whom responsibility is both an opportunity for distinction as well as a source of conflicting demands or contradictory values. Their histories are written not so much as records of things that happened but as chronicles of things that people tried to make happen. When the story is one of success it is necessarily a story of gloating, but when it is a story of failure it is not generally given over to brooding but to tragedy and irony.
Before I return to Katznelson, let me give an example of what I think of as a brooding history: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. Except in the vernacular sense of a tale of woe, Black Reconstruction is not written as a tragedy. There’s no buried flaw among its principal actors that works itself out to the surface, cruelly punishing the protagonist for their inability to surmount or transform their own nature, no didactic admonition that life presents us with incompatible virtues or obligations. Du Bois does not seek to inspire pity or even terror so much as outrage and defiance (as well as pride and respect for the real achievements of the period). Black Reconstruction is a brooding book because it refuses to equate defeat with loss: Du Bois takes us into the past not as a source of solace or escape but as an incitement to action. It is not an elegy but an arraignment.
Fear Itself is, I think, written as a tragedy, and quite a bit of the general assessment of the New Deal Order that has coalesced around it shares that tragic sense of politics: internal contradictions, ironies of irreconcilable commitments pulling in different directions carry a load of causation in this narrative that vastly outweighs considerations of external opposition or even a more modest evaluation of the New Deal’s achievements. In its ruins it nevertheless possesses a grandeur that permits, if not gloating, then at least a kind of boastful lamentation. “I ascribe to the New Deal an import almost on a par with that of the French Revolution,” Katznelson writes. What has changed, therefore, from an actually gloating history of the New Deal (like, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s trilogy) is simply that it must have a different ending, not enduring glory but cruel loss: an age of heroes is no more.
Let me show you what I mean by the tragic sense in Fear Itself. Here is a passage early in the book that places the New Deal at the nexus of competing imperatives—keeping faith with democratic principles on the one hand and providing security for its citizens and for the world from illiberalism on the other:
This is a book about democracy and fear. Faced with emergency, the New Deal urgently had to navigate dangerous borderlands where freedom and the lack of freedom overlapped. By exploring how the New Deal dealt with these challenges, Fear Itself probes not just the achievements but the cost of doing what was necessary to preserve liberal democracy and protect its values.
Or how about this operatic passage?
Before, even the most flagrant examples of human suffering could be overcome. Slavery could be abolished. Decolonization could triumph over imperialism. But with radically enlarged prospects of vast and irrational killing fields, domestic and international politics came to be informed by a new and permanent amplification of danger and fear at a moment, ironically, when history’s course held out possibilities of profound human improvement. Everyday politics became the stuff of unprecedented and awful apprehension. “Quite ordinary civilian rulers,” Denis Brogan, a leading British historian of the United States, remarked in a 1956 lecture devoted to the implications for democracy in an atomic world, “are in the position of Milton’s God.”
Certainly—to extend the comparison with Du Bois— Black Reconstruction has its share of grandiloquence and makes an equally insistent case for the world historical meaning of emancipation and Black self-government. But my point is not that gloaters make claims to epochal significance and brooders do not—I think both do—but that gloaters tend to turn that significance in a direction that insulates the protagonists of its epics from straightforward analysis of cause and effect. It twists everything into an exhumation of the protagonists’ motives, their intentions, their moral struggle against the weight of the world, their attempt to stretch themselves on the rack of incompatible ideals. Here is a simpler sentence that tries to strike the same lofty tone as the passage above, but misses, and becomes a kind of whiny rationalization: “As a liberal democracy without the luxury of sticking to a policy of high moral probity, the United States engaged dubious allies, abroad and at home.” What would you do, in other words, if you were forced to choose between working with Theodore Bilbo or letting Hitler destroy global democracy?
The point is not that this dilemma did not face Franklin Roosevelt (although obviously this is a very reductive way of putting things) but rather that this is not a question the historian has to ask. It is a choice, it is a decision to look at the New Deal from the point of view of someone with the power to make this kind of decision. History inevitably looks either like a set of tragically difficult choices from this position, or it looks like a record of reasons to gloat, but the point of view is essentially the same. The difference between tragedy and gloating is not one between sorrow and jubilation but between a full Hegelianism and what I’d call a half-Hegelianism: whether one ascribes to History a complete consciousness, purpose, and direction, or whether one only sees it as cunning and ironic, but unconscious (or lacking a consciousness).
That obviously opens up a rather broader vista than I want to survey right now (1500 words into this post), so I’ll leave you with that provocation and say ’til next week.
4 Thoughts on this Post
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Andrew,
W/r/t the end of the post: while Katznelson did not have to ask that specific question, wouldn’t any book about the New Deal have to address in some way the choices and dilemmas FDR faced? That would not *necessarily*, I suppose, lead to the kind of tragic perspective you say Katznelson has, but some effort to confront FDR’s choices (and perhaps motives) would seem unavoidable. (Otherwise it’s sort of like, to put it glibly, Hamlet without the prince.) I realize I may have missed the point here, but that’s my initial reaction to a once-through reading. On the broader point, about ‘gloaters’ being concerned or obsessed with credit and blame, doesn’t this sometimes actually pull against the emphasis on “tragic” choices? Tragic choices don’t have optimal solutions, and it’s hard to be really lavish with praise in those situations, or so one might think. I haven’t read _Fear Itself_ , but if the book argues that FDR allied w Southern Democrats to pass New Deal legislation and consciously overlooked Jim Crow and its manifold evils, this *could* be framed less as a matter of praising and blaming and more as a quasi-neutral description, to the extent such a thing is possible, of what FDR did. (Whether Katznelson frames it that way I don’t know for sure; I’m thinking he does not based on what you’ve said, but that doesn’t mean such a framing is impossible.)
Andrew, a thoughtful post for which I am grateful. It recalled to me my own review of Fear Itself, which focused on the merits of Katznelson’s tragic narrative frame. As I wrote there, “[Katznelson] encloses his meticulously balanced story of great achievement and grave disappointment within what might be termed a frame of consolation, which renders the relationship between them as a tragic one. He intends this tragic frame to serve in some considerable measure as a salve for those inclined toward disappointment. The result, in the end, is one of the more nuanced liberal narratives of the New Deal we now have – one that accepts, even extends, the account of its shortcomings offered by its critics, but construes those shortcomings as the unhappy yet unavoidable price of a greater good. Unfortunately, for those who would see this tragic drama as a satisfying way to end historiographical controversy over the New Deal (at least in the middle and on the left), Katznelson’s great achievement story is unconvincing; his grave disappointment story is more, if not altogether, compelling; and his frame of consolation provides little solace” (3).
I will not go into the details of why I think Katznelson comes up short as a tragedian. That would mean more or less reprinting the review here. If you are interested, the cite is: “Tragic Deal,” Reviews in American History 43 (March 2015); 1-13. Rather I would point to what is perhaps the most significant disagreement between us. You seem out to disparage the tragic narrative frame as such, while I value it highly when it seems to fit the evidence and object only to the particulars of the tragedy that Katznelson crafts. If historians are going to write the stories of moments of great moral import, they can hardly avoid tragic narratives since as William James most such moments require that human beings “butcher the ideal” of a full reconciliation of competing commitments. Intentions are essential to such stories (you cannot butcher this ideal if you do not strongly feel the pull of the competing commitments that comprise it) if we historians are going to credit our subjects and not only ourselves with a tragic consciousness of their actions. One of my complaints about Katznelson’s story is that, while the course of the New Deal may well be tragic to him since, as he sees it from our time, it failed to reconcile the preservation of democracy with racial justice, he fails to demonstrate that New Dealers felt much torn at all between these two ideal ends. Katznelson renders FDR and other Northern liberals as actors fully alert to their various tragic dilemmas. I question not only his account of the dilemmas but also his portrait of the New Dealers’ moral sensibility. The “dirty hands” defense of one’s subjects (what I call the “frame of consolation”) such as that Katznelson offers is far less compelling if these subjects fail to see in some anguish that their hands are dirty, however obvious it may appear to a later historian to be the case.
The “problem paradigm” you’ve laid it out so provocatively in recent posts appears to have more to do with the choices some historians make than with the reality of social and historical life.
You juxtapose a strictly causal account with the idea that the paradigm opens spaces where intention is possible, where historical actors are insulated from “straightforward analysis of cause and effect,” where histories are less the “records of things that happened [than] chronicles of things that people tried to make happen.”
This gives such historians the ability to engage in moral assessments, judging how well or poorly actors do in their “moral struggle against the weight of the world.”
Given the insulation from cause and effect [setting aside the apparent claim that agency is mostly limited to the powerful – but maybe that’s the key here!], it’s difficult to see how the tangled weightiness of things gets conceptualized or worked in.
This might be the point of your distinction between “conjunctural or circumstantial complexity and moral complexity,” though I’m sorry you didn’t elaborate on how readers are led to “associate” the former with the latter …
I’m probably pushing the point too hard, but it’s almost as if circumstance functions as a lead-in and disguise, a sort of stage for the performance of “structured and orderly” moral concepts.
There’s sort of a double reduction, or translation, nearly an allegorical turn, as a concept such as
“internal contradictions” is actually not a way of working with…empirical complexity but of sidestepping it and pivoting to an orderly moral analysis from which we learn a relatively simple object lesson.
The historian is partisan of a carefully concocted, even caricatured, complexity.
Westbrook’s observation that the full consolation of tragedy requires historical actors themselves to recognize tragic ironies may get at a parallel discrepancy between the historian’s displays and what the historic reality itself could support.
Sorry – I intended to indent “‘internal contradictions’ … object lesson”