Cross-posted from H-SHEAR

***************************
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 10:47:34 -0400
From: Marc Trachtenberg <cram@sas.upenn.edu>
To: James Banner <jbanner@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
Subject: Re: your letter

Dear Jim,

        I hope it's okay to use your first name. I feel a certain bond of
intimacy with serious and honest people, regardless of the position
they take on these issues.  And since you took the time and trouble to
respond to what I wrote in the Wall Street Journal piece so
thoughtfully, I'd certainly put you in that category. These are
important matters, and they need to be argued out.  I don't think our
areas of disagreement are as great as they might seem at first glance,
and I think where we do disagree, productive discussion is actually
possible.

        I suppose the most basic question we're dealing with here is whether
there is a real problem in the profession.  I obviously think there is.
You're quite right to suggest that my own views are not based on
detailed, systematic analysis.  They of course derive in large part on
my own personal experience--the sorts of things I've seen in recent
years, and not just with the AHA.  Maybe that experience is skewed; you
feel that the what you saw at the SHEAR meeting is more typical.
All I can say here is that the conclusions I've reached are not based
on my own experience alone.  I have talked with quite a few people and
many have come to similar conclusions.

        And this, I'd argue, is the strongest evidence we have that something
fundamental is amiss.  Wouldn't you agree that we're entitled to draw
some inferences from the fact that so many historians, including a
number of quite prominent ones--people coming from all over the
political spectrum--have become so upset with the status quo that they
have agreed to join the new organization?  This is indirect evidence,
but it strikes me as rather powerful.  Or to make the point (about the
legitimacy of views not based on a direct and more or less scientific
analysis of the evidence) in a somewhat different way:  I imagine your
own views are also based on your own subjective sense of the state of
the profession, not on the kind of "strong studies" that you and I both
agree are lacking, but this certainly does not mean that you do not
have the right to hold whatever views you have.

        What exactly is the problem as I see it?  It's not the simple fact
that historians are no longer just working in the old traditional
fields in the old traditional ways.  Most of us involved with the new
organization certainly do not object to the fact that "workers,
colonial peoples, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and misfits" are
now being studied.  Think of the Genoveses, for example--not just the
role they're playing in the Historical Society, but the fact that
they've both done pioneering work in precisely the fields you
mentioned. You may not believe me, and you may think this claim is
self-serving, but my sense is that what most (although not all) of the
people involved in this effort object to has to do with the WAY these
subjects are being studied.

        Maybe I'm wrong, but I sense that the two of us are not all that far
apart on this issue.  You write: "You and I may not always like the
tone, the approach, and the ideology that undergirds and advances this
understanding" (of hitherto ignored subjects); this implies to me that
there is something about these new trendy approaches that makes you
uneasy.  Where we disagree, perhaps, is on the issue of whether the
fact that much of this new work is undergirded by an ideology really
does ADVANCE our understanding of these subjects. Maybe I shouldn't
read too much into the way you phrased the issue. The basic point I'd
make here is simply that I sense a certain ambivalence on your part
about this whole cluster of issues. Indeed, I got the impression from
that sentence of yours that you would agree that much of the work that
people like me object to IS heavily ideological. And I think you might
even agree that if this brand of historical work was as much in the
saddle as I seem to think, that this would be a problem calling for
corrective action.  I didn't get the sense that you're one of those
people who feel that all history is necessarily ideological;  you refer
at the end of your letter to the value of "evidence-based,
non-ideological studies of the recent history of the discipline of
history," and if you think historiography can and should be studied in
this way, I assume you would agree that history as a whole can also be
studied in this way.  If so, you and I are on the same side of the
divide, and the real issue separating us is the empirical one of how
far things have gone, and how much of a problem we have on our hands.

        In particular, there is the fundamental question of whether people,
especially younger scholars, who do not do trendy work are being
screwed--at least to the extent that I implied in the article.
Frankly, as much as I dislike ideologically-driven historical work, I
wouldn't have bothered to get involved in this new organization if it
were not for this "squeezing out" factor.  If everyone had a "live and
let live" attitude, I wouldn't have gotten too upset by the fact that
other people in the profession were doing work that I didn't think was
of much value. But my own experience has been quite different. I see
the best younger scholars having a very hard time getting jobs;  I see
positions in traditional fields drying up and appointments being made
in trendier areas.  You deny that this is the case, but you also say
that "by unspoken consensus, the majority of historians has decided
that, at least for now, we know enough of traditional subjects and must
learn more . . . about subjects previously ignored."  If that is the
prevailing view, how can that NOT translate into what goes on with
hiring?  And if someone (like me) disagrees with what you call the
consensus, why should that person be expected to just keep his or her
mouth shut and go along with it?

        I think that you can understand why we felt we had to do something.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for someone like me,
with a tenured position, to just sit back and do my own work and say
that the future would take care of itself.  But when I saw over and
over again how people were being screwed--when I saw the kinds of
forces that were out there and were ruining people's careers--I thought
it would be the height of irresponsibility to take that attitude.
Again, maybe you would disagree, but I hope you would recognize that
we're acting in good faith and out of an honest concern for the future
of the profession.

        You made one very good point toward the middle of your letter.  You
pointed out that although we say everyone is welcome to join, in
reality only people who essentially agree with us will sign on, and we
might thus end up being another parochial group--just as sectarian (I
might add, but maybe you'd agree) as the AHA has become.  I admit this
is a very real danger.  If this ends up as just another group of
whiners, the whole effort, in my view at least, will have failed.  I
think it will take a real effort to make sure that we grapple with the
serious issues all historians have to face.  I can't give you any
guarantees about this, since I'm just an organizer and this new group
will be what its members make it, but the breadth of our membership
might provide a certain glimmer of hope that this will not happen.  If
people like you come aboard, it will be less likely to happen.
Incidentally, would you agree that this same sort of argument can be
applied to the AHA--do you hold it against the AHA leadership that they
have allowed their organization to become so sectarian?  If so, would
you agree that this issue would not even have been raised if we had not
taken the action we have?  And wouldn't that it itself justify what we
have done?

        Anyway, let me say again that the points you raised are all important,
and I think this kind of discussion is just what we need as a
profession.  I think that the point you made about the danger of a
splintering of the profession is quite valid, but I hope you would
understand why those of us who are not happy with the status quo felt
that something had to be done--and maybe you can even sympathize a bit
with some of our motivations.

                                With best regards,
                                Marc (Trachtenberg)


*********************
                                4 September 1998

Dear Marc:

One sends a letter such as I sent to you in July with some fear that it
will be taken amiss and its intent misrepresented.  It's therefore with
much relief that I received your thoughtful and attentive response to
my observations about your original article.  And at the risk of
prolonging unduly this exchange, I beg your indulgence for these
additional comments, most of them addressed to your response.

Quite clearly, as you perceive, we share some of the same concerns
about the current condition of Clio's house and appear to have often
roughly similar reactions to some of what is done in her name (although
I tend to laugh and gnash my teeth about them, while you seem to think
that, because human nature may be reparable, one should lose some sleep
and take up arms against opposing forces).  Nevertheless, we disagree
rather more sharply than your response wishes to make it appear-about
the causes of what has happened, the depth of its permeation into
intellectual work in general, the strategy that might be used to combat
developments (if it's combat that one wishes to enter), and the manner
in which the actions of the self-styled Historical Society will be taken.

Without repeating what I earlier wrote about the society's name and the
vocabulary it employs, let me nevertheless take up that last point
first.  When one sees a roster of names composed principally (albeit
not exclusively) of people like me-male, white, and over a certain
age-one is justified, I think, in taking this demographic deformation
to have some significance.  Why is the society attractive to such a
comparatively homogeneous group of people? one is forced to ask.  I
don't think the answer is far to seek.  We are those who have in effect
been on the defensive-been put on the defensive-since the 1960s to
justify the entire structure of intellectual endeavor and discourse
since the Enlightenment.  It is we who have seen our previously secure
position (of every kind) threatened by deep change in our public,
private, and professional worlds.  Should it therefore come as any
surprise that, aggrieved, some would wish to protest and fight back?

Fine with me.  I am no stranger to the costs of being what I am, and
occasionally I have had to riposte with more than a laugh.  Often, to
bear that to which I've been witness has required a rather hefty dose
of will and applied rationality to trounce my aroused emotions-but only
because I believe that much of what I detest is the necessary cost of
progress.  Therefore, I am surely warranted in suspecting that there
lurks behind the claims of cool reasonableness offered by the founders
of the society something else at work.  No hard evidence here of
over-determination , just a sort of suspicion borne of a few decades of
existence.  This is relevant to our shared concerns, I believe, because
it reaches to my conviction that the response to thirty years of change
represented by the society is both excessive, misguided , and too
late-and thus not likely to do much good.

I also believe that while your concern for young historians, especially
aspiring graduate students, is entirely warranted, I believe that it
must be put, as we say, in historical perspective.  Soon after I began
teaching in the late 1960s, it began to become increasingly difficult
for doctoral recipients to find posts of their choice, eventually to
find posts at all.  Great was my despair then to see some of my
graduate students by the late 1970s wandering the countryside like
Romanys in their wagons.  At that point, the cause of their trials was
inflation and the parlous conditions of colleges and universities.  By
the 1980s, job-searching began to be affected by the ideological forces
you identify as being at the root of young historians' desperation to
day.  But the problems did not end with those forces.  The federal
prohibition against forced retirements kept senior positions filled
much longer than they otherwise would have been, with a resulting
pernicious effect on hiring.  With equal ill effect, just now being
recognized, institutions began to rely ever more regularly on part-time
faculty members, many of them fresh out of graduate school.  Therefore
it will not do to attribute the difficulties facing your graduate
students just to ideological  conformity in the academy and to the
appeal of what you refer to as "trendier areas."  Ye gods, would that
the former monopoly position of studies of politics and institutions,
of men and warfare, had been just trends and not a palling restraint of
trade!  To o break that kind of monopoly, I say, let's have trends for
a while.  Or do I detect in the society's origins a certain distaste
for any uncontrolled marketplace, even that of ideas?

Of course, such trends get translated into hiring.  How could they not?
When such hiring itself becomes monopolistic, as it has become in some
cases, then it should be attacked and defeated.  A group of young girls
is no better than one of old boys.  But here again we disagree: While
too many younger (as well as a few older) historians have had to pay a
heavy price for a new kind of discrimination in hiring, this is the sad
and inevitable cost of the advances in historiography we have
witnessed.  And surely nothing the society does, such as raising its
voice, is likely to avail in the foreseeable future against the
excesses of stupidity and imprudence in some corners of the discipline.

Advances in historiography?  Here, too, I'll stand my ground.  I don't
quite see the relevance of your complaint about ideology.  Haven't we
learned that every set of ideas embodies, often hidden, a structure of
assumptions?-a lesson nicely taught us by, among others, Messrs. Marx
and Engels.  If we are all, in our various ways, ideologues, then we
can't complain that others are ideological and we are not.  Better and
more honest to argue that you don't like the ideologies you're
combating than dismissing them as infra dignitatem because they're
ideologies.  But it strikes me as exceedingly naive, if not
disingenuous, to argue that even a balanced, centrist position which
the society claims to occupy makes no ideological-that is, also,
historiographical-claims of its own.

Also, you and I simply differ as to the value of ideology.  I believe
them to be, up to a point, useful, clarifying, organizing, and
motivating-all good qualities.  To be sure, they can be, often are,
taken to excess-as you and I probably would agree such ideologies as
feminism, capitalism, Marxism, and the rest-have been.  But I cannot
agree that the ideologies that now give the society such offense have
not brought about great and enduring advances of our understanding of
the past.  How, may I ask, could Gene Genovese have produced such
extraordinary advances in our thinking about Southern society and
slavery without the spur of Marxist ideology?

Many differences among people may arise from temperament (a factor
usually overlooked by historians).  And it may be differences in
temperament that lead me to see Clio's mansion as three-quarters full,
you to see it as (perhaps) half empty.  But I don't believe our
disagreement about ideologies arises in temperament.  It arises in
different interpretations of fact and reality.  And I'll stand by my own.

As for the AHA and OAH: Again, we differ.  You charge their
"leadership" with dereliction.  But of what is composed that
leadership?  Of people elected by a majority of those voting to hold
constituted offices.  It rather reminds me of our democratic republican
system: If voters remain home, those candidates they don't like may get
elected-and by pluralities at that.  It therefore seems to me that the
two organization's leadership rather well represents the views of those
who bothered to cast ballots to elect them in the first place.  Many of
your members will no doubt remain members of those organizations, and
both of them will surely survive the defection of some hundreds of
members (if it comes to that).  But I repeat my insistence that going
to Canada didn't affect the United States during the Vietnam War nor
gain honor to those who went, and it won't affect the AHA and OAH
now-except to remove from its precincts those who might wage a lively
battle to regain some influence within them.  That will be of little
help to your confreres who remain within those organizations, lonelier
than ever.

In the end, then, I believe that we do rather substantially differ in
our convictions about the state of historical studies in the United
States today.  But, like you, I hope that such differences among all of
us can be aired civilly, not dismissed, and that hat, whatever their
differing views, all historians will consider themselves engaged in the
same great enterprise of understanding the past.

With best wishes,

                        Cordially,

                        /s/ Jim Banner

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