I am at the OAH 2022 conference in Boston this weekend. Yesterday I was so pleased to attend the USIH-solicited roundtable on the life and work of Charles Capper—“Charlie” to all there. The panel was chaired by David Hollinger, and included remarks from Megan Marshall, the award-winning biographer of Margaret Fuller; Nelson Lichtenstein, historian of labor movements and the 20th century Left and a friend of Capper’s since graduate school; and Andrew Delbanco, historian of the Transcendentalists and American romanticism.
There were about eighteen conference-goers in attendance for the session; Jim Kloppenberg, Joan Rubin, and Mary Kelly were there.
The discussion began with comments from Megan Marshall, who talked about Capper’s scholarly influence outside his own field, an uncommon achievement for an academic. It was no accident, she said, that the Margaret Fuller society, organized to provide a more focused forum for the discussion of all things Fuller than that available at the Modern Language Association conference, was founded in the wake of the publication of Capper’s first volume of the biography. Capper was an enthusiastic supporter of the society; Marshall conveyed the warm remarks and fond memories of many early members of the society about Capper’s scholarship and support.
Marshall confessed to some friendly laughter that she had not always been fond of Margaret Fuller mostly because of her coolness toward the Peabody sisters. However, she said, when she read Capper’s biography of Fuller, particularly the second volume, she gained a deeper appreciation for Fuller—as well as for the work of her biographer. For, she said, Capper had written a biography that one could rely upon and also build upon. He laid the groundwork for all who follow, and his name and work will be remembered alongside Fuller’s for as long as scholars and readers are discussing her name and work.
Nelson Lichtenstein’s comments provided attendees with a fascinating glimpse into Capper’s life as a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1960s (and 1970s and 1980s). Lichtenstein situated Capper within the various splintered factions of the New Left on campus; Capper was the ideological and organizational leader of a Trotskyist group. Lichtenstein talked about Capper’s awakening to Left causes as a high school student in Arcadia, California. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, Capper helped organize the 1965 SDS protest march in Washington against the Vietnam War. At Berkeley, Capper was an admirer of the Black Panther movement.
Lichtenstein noted that Capper not only took eighteen years to finish his dissertation at Berkeley, but he failed his oral exams the first time around. Capper, Lichtenstein said, began his graduate career with the strong conviction that the whole world could be legible to interpreters who were guided by a Marxist/Modernist framework of interpretation. That explanatory scheme may have afforded Capper Capper the illusion that a solid grasp of theory was more important than a solid grasp of particularities. Capper’s first run at oral exams did not go well in part because he answered questions about, say, socialism in Oklahoma that were theoretically sound but unmoored from historical details that he was expected to master from his readings. Capper’s mastery of a Marxian interpretive framework was not enough to get him past the examining committee of the Berkeley History Department. Lichtenstein suggested that from this misstep Capper emerged with a passion for details, facticity, accuracy and thoroughness—a passion that slowed down his writing considerably. But the slow pace was vindicated by the caliber of the work.
Andrew Delbanco talked about Capper’s scholarship on Fuller and also on the Transcendentalist movement more broadly, reflecting on Capper’s crucial review essay on the historiography of Transcendentalism as well as his work on Fuller. Delbanco saw the review essay as a shining exemplar of one type of the genre: the review as an effort to show the way to new work. Delbanco regretted that Capper did not live long enough to write the big synoptic book about Transcendentalism that this crucial essay gestured toward. Still, Capper showed a way forward.
“Any living work of scholarship,” Delbanco said, “is driven by some not-waking passion that that may not be explicit to the reader and may not even be fully known to the writer.” He said that Capper’s work and his conversation and his dedication to exploring and living the connection between the theoretical and the biographical, in his subject and in himself, were a counterpoint to T.S. Eliot’s idea of the “dissociation of sensibility” in the writer. “There was no such dissociation in Charlie,” Delbanco said. “Ideas were emotions for him,” and the distinction between the private (emotion) and the public (thought) didn’t prevail with him. In this, Delbanco offered, Capper was much like Fuller.
David Hollinger capped off the roundtable with some reminiscences about Capper’s extraordinary confidence as a Left activist. Left politics at Cal in 1966 was a hotbed of “ferocious sectarianism,” and right away Charlie stepped into that swirling moil with serene confidence. Capper’s long sojourn as a graduate student—an eighteen year journey to finish his dissertation—took him through the disillusionment of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. He retained the quiet confidence of someone who knew what he was talking about and could ask a question that cut immediately to the heart of the matter, but he also manifested an epistemic humility. He was relaxed and calm, unpretentious yet commanding in his interventions and observations—a throughline from his days at Sproul plaza.
After the formal portion of the roundtable concluded, audience members added their own thoughts and recollections regarding Charles Capper. Opening up the remarks, Jim Kloppenberg echoed David Hollinger’s observation on Capper’s acuity as an interlocutor who could immediately identify the key issues at stake in any discussion or assertion. Kloppenberg said that Capper’s questions were always incisive but never arrogant.
Some of Capper’s former students at Boston University were also in the audience. They spoke of his warmth and generosity as a scholar, his appreciative encouragement of their work. But he was also understanding when life got in the way of work and did not wish his students to hold such things against themselves. “Life happens,” he said in response to one student’s agony over a less-than-sterling seminar paper.
Joan Rubin echoed many of the roundtable participants’ amused reminiscences of how Capper could get so lost in thought that he could literally get lost or forget to eat dinner at dinner. Then she offered a fascinating observation that was at the same time a question, every bit as incisive as something Capper himself might have said. She found it interesting that Capper had moved from a revolutionary mode of political engagement to the adoption of institutional forms and approaches to disseminate his ideas—the academy and the work of scholarly research, the founding of a journal, and so forth. Rubin found it interesting that Capper saw radical possibilities in institutional forms.
Hollinger and Lichtenstein offered some crucial insights here. Hollinger said that Capper had a deep appreciation for Niebhur’s introduction to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, where Niebhur took James to task for not understanding or adequately valuing the crucial work of institutions in anchoring the religious life in the world. Lichtenstein suggested that Capper’s radicalism in the 1960s was driven by a sense of urgency about the possibilities for immediate social transformation. But as that sense of immediacy gives way to the sense of a longer struggle, then there is both time and need to build institutions. Hollinger suggested that among the many things Capper learned about as a student of Henry May was the history of Christianity, and the shift from radical revolutionary activism to institution building matched the historic shift in Christianity from the earliest days of urgent proselytism before the supposed imminent return of the Lord to the gradual realization that the world may not end within a generation or two of the apostles’ lifetimes, so the Christian movement began to focus in earnest on institution building.
Hollinger then asked us all to consider our current moment and the current state of higher education as an institution. There was some discussion about this. None of us are looking for the Parousia, but some of us certainly see the Apocalypse in view.
In the meantime, however long or short that may be, may we see as clearly and think as passionately as Charles Capper.
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I’m obviously late reading this, but thank you LD! I especially appreciated this passage on one of Nelson Lichtenstein’s reflections:
“That explanatory scheme may have afforded Capper Capper the illusion that a solid grasp of theory was more important than a solid grasp of particularities. Capper’s first run at oral exams did not go well in part because he answered questions about, say, socialism in Oklahoma that were theoretically sound but unmoored from historical details that he was expected to master from his readings. Capper’s mastery of a Marxian interpretive framework was not enough to get him past the examining committee of the Berkeley History Department. Lichtenstein suggested that from this misstep Capper emerged with a passion for details, facticity, accuracy and thoroughness—a passion that slowed down his writing considerably. But the slow pace was vindicated by the caliber of the work.”
I too entered grad school, and existed in it, as a person with a passion for theory and philosophy that felt more urgent than facts and details. To me, understanding the deepest explanatory scheme mattered as much or more than how it was populated. Then, as a writer, I swung over to factual complexity and details–to a borderline historicism. But now I see these things in dialogue, with equally important knowledge to convey. I suspect all professional historians struggle in their attention to both, hence our need for editors to help bring balance in our writing.
I also appreciated the relay about Capper’s career struggles, particularly the reveal about his oral exam failure and long period in the purgatory of graduate school. I nearly failed a minor field exam, and was ashamed of that for a period. I told very few people about it. I appreciate knowing about the failures and close-calls of others. – TL