Fifty-three: The Walrus was Paul

In the section of my paper, “Empire, Class and Culture,” called “My Dinner with Andre,” I described a visit that I made to another historian’s house, during which I discussed a paper I had recently published. The paper was “The Empire and Mr. Thompson: The Making of Indian Princes and the English Working Class.” It had been published in the Economic and Political Weekly in Mumbai, and it described how empire had been erased from The Making of the English Working Class (now reaching its fifty-year anniversary). It further described the work of E.P. Thompson’s father, Edward, who had lived in India and wrote several histories of the subcontinent, thereby making the erasure that much more ironic (particularly given the titles of the two men’s seminal texts).

My host had been somewhat upset with me during my visit, and he had also been extremely condescending – who was I to say? etc. He, after all, knew E.P.; he had even housesat with him, on the occasion that E.P. had visited India – the occasion that was described by E.P. in Writing by Candlelight. So he knew E.P., and it was completely out of the question that he could have done any of the things that I suggested in my article.

“Empire, Class, and Culture” had become a paper written following this interaction, and it had been presented at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. It had caused considerable consternation there. David Montgomery and his ilk were apoplectic, as was one of the organizers of the conference – who ensured that the paper did not get included in the volume that would be published from the conference (Racializing Class, Classifying Race).

The one question I was asked again and again, by the younger members of the conference who liked my paper, and who had each had their own experience of being talked down to by more senior members of the profession, was the about the identity of my host. “Who was Andre?” they all wanted to know.

Well, I didn’t want to say, because I was a junior faculty member and didn’t feel secure in my position at the time. The person, Alan Dawley, was an exceedingly nice man, and in retrospect he probably enjoyed the interaction with me – but he was also one of many labor historians who felt what I had to say was not permissible. Pleasant or not, serving cherry pie or not, I didn’t feel comfortable going public with my piece in that kind of way.

I regretted it when I heard he had died later. He was obviously a great historian in his own right. And I was a mere peon who probably didn’t deserve to wipe his boots. But, then we were talking about the making of the English working class, and not the making of Indian princes, so such refinements probably shouldn’t have detained me.

Oh well.

Fifty-two: The Passing of Robert F. Engs

I learned today that Robert F. Engs died on Monday.  This is very sad news indeed.  Bob was a one-of-a-kind. He was one of the brightest people I ever met, a great historian, and he was a fantastic human being. Here is a very nice blog-obituary from Al Brophy, (I believe).

A few years back Jeff Kerr-Ritchie organized a series of workshops on Bob's influence. At one of the sessions, I presented the following on my work with him on the University of Pennsylvania's President's Forum on Race. I had posted it before in Histrionics, but I think it is worth posting again.

I want to briefly focus on the University of Pennsylvania’s President’s Forum, which lasted for eighteen months from 1986 through the end of 1987. I think there are a number of intriguing aspects to the story of this forum that may tell us a little about Robert Engs, whom we are honoring on his retirement, and a little also about the university to which he contributed so much.

I should back up a little to the fall of 1979. That was when I first arrived at Penn as an exchange student from Edinburgh University. I decided to take a course in African American history at Penn, I think, in part because I wanted to get the “real” story of the place – the United States – that I would be spending a year studying. As a foreign student I was not particularly unique in looking for the real America in this way. Many British students came to America and wanted to find out about race and the black experience. This may be because they came from a place that seemed to be so class divided that they expected to find some kind of equivalent in the United States – which at the time seemed to revolve around the issue of race. This was also a period when a lot of great African American history was being written, and exciting new work was being undertaken in Black Studies, so it wasn’t surprising that this field would be appealing to the foreign student.

Anyway, I remember the first class that I turned up to in the seminar room on the second floor of College Hall. This was History 176 (a) and it was a relatively small class focusing on the first part of African American history up to the Civil War. I remember it well because I was the only white student in the class, and there were about 15 students altogether, sitting around the square table. I remember Bob entering the class and starting to lay out the course requirements and taking us through the syllabus, and I remember very clearly that, right from the beginning, he didn’t pull any punches whatsoever. What he was going to be teaching about was something that we wouldn’t be getting from other American history courses; it was a narrative or a set of narratives that placed race and racism at the center of the American experience. Bob’s presentation was electrifying, and while it was fairly uncomfortable being the only white person in the class talking about the issue of race, I knew that I was definitely going to want to take the course, and was also going to get a lot out of it – which I certainly did. I also felt that while Bob was talking about the issue of race at a theoretical level, he himself was very pleasant and welcoming to me personally and clearly evidenced that he himself harbored no animosities – so long as I seemed willing to take seriously the issues that he was raising.

Bob had just gone through a difficult tenure battle, but he was not someone who brought the scars of that conflict into the classroom. I remember that Freedom’s First Generation was published during that semester, and this was a point of considerable pride for him – he brought a copy of the book to the class to show the students. I had an extremely good year in part because of what I learned from Bob – in part also because of the different approaches to teaching Bob took; he asked us, for example, to keep a journal as a slave, and I recollect very much enjoying writing fiction based upon our studies of the readings he had provided. When I went back to Edinburgh for my final year, I combined the intellectual history from the other courses I had taken at Penn, with the African American history and wrote a thesis on W.E.B. Du Bois, having been assigned and read Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America in History 176 (b).

I then came back to Penn as a graduate student and was very fortunate to have Bob as my advisor. He may have thought I was a little strange, as I would do some odd things, like taking on Lee Benson, or writing weird assignments for Mike Zuckerman, but Bob was always supportive. This was a pretty rough period for him, I believe, in retrospect. He had tenure, but didn’t get the respect he deserved from other members of the department, and this made life pretty difficult for him. They didn’t care that he had been a Princeton student, one of the first to break the color line there, and one who had excelled in that rigorous academic environment; nor did they much care that he was one of the very best C. Vann Woodward students at Yale. By any measure, with his success in the classroom and a solid first book manuscript in his pocket he should have been considered a prize for the university, but the department only could see race, seemingly, and didn’t take African American History particularly seriously. One professor who received a Guggenheim at the same time as he did, said to him, “Ah, but yours is a Black Guggenheim.” These were the kinds of slights that were fairly frequent at that time, and I think they took a toll on him.

Nonetheless, Bob was an excellent citizen at Penn, and when the university found itself in some deep water trying to deal with some of the racial issues on campus it was to Bob that it turned to help get them out of the mess. This was how he came to be running the University of Pennsylvania’s President’s Forum, titled “The Enduring Significance of Race.”

This needs a little bit of background and perhaps a little bit of Penn history to give a sense of what was going on at the time. The University of Pennsylvania has always had a difficult time trying to relate to the surrounding urban community. When the college moved out to West Philadelphia from center city in the late 19th century, it was given land by the city in exchange for it providing certain services to the community. For example, when it received the land for the library, the university was supposed, as part of the exchange, to provide a free library for the community – in perpetuity. This it did for many years but as it the community changed the willingness of the university to provide the service diminished significantly. Likewise, the university’s Mayors scholarship program was also established to pay back the city for the land it gave Penn, and this benefited large numbers of the children of immigrants who were able to get free educations at Penn; but when the city community changed these scholarships began to fall by the wayside also, and the university attempted to reduce the number of these it gave, even fighting a court battle over this issue.

By the 1970s Penn was facing a number of difficulties. It had displaced large numbers of African Americans in creating the residential area between 38th and 40th, and Spruce and Walnut Streets in West Philadelphia and in closing off Locust to the outside community, and as a result it had very bad relations with the communities of West Philadelphia. By the time I arrived at Penn, there was a clear injunction that you shouldn’t (as an undergraduate) go past 40th street after dark, except perhaps to walk down to Walsh’s Tavern on Spruce Street in a group. The notion of Fortress Penn had come into being; all the buildings were constructed in such a way as to ensure that they were only open towards the inside of the campus – so that outsiders would be discouraged from wandering in, and when they did they could be detected easily as they came onto the campus. This growing sense of threat developed at a time when the university President, Martin Meyerson, decided that Penn needed to become less local in drawing its student population, and more regionally diverse. In other words, it needed to start appealing to more white suburban kids from around the country – so that it would begin to look more like Princeton (only a Princeton located smack in the middle of a blighted city). This was going to be difficult to accomplish, however, if tensions existed with the outside community, and if African American students themselves were unhappy with the way they were being treated on campus.

One example of the kind of stress that existed seemed to be symbolized in a stabbing of a Penn student that occurred at the MacDonalds on 40th and Walnut. The Penn student was loudly proclaiming his allegiance to the Boston Celtics, his home team, and also the whitest of all the NBA rosters at this time, while the local man was clearly a Sixers’ fan, a team that had only one white player in the starting line-up and he was the journeyman Bobby Jones. Somehow, things got out of hand, and the Celtics fan ended up stabbed – though I think I recall he survived the encounter.

At this time there was very much a sense of segregation on the campus, with African Americans in the Du Bois residential house, and white students often claiming that blacks were self-segregating. Whether or not the latter was the case was open to question, but the atmosphere was sufficiently unwelcoming at the time that most African American students who lived on campus did opt to live in the black dormitory.

By 1985 there was a lot of animosity on campus, and a lot of hostility, as many black students felt bitter and embattled. White students felt comfortable using racial epithets and one occasion when this occurred, the infamous “Water Buffalo” incident, resulted in considerable embarrassment for the university, and a great deal of protestation among African American students. President Hackney believed that he needed to act to try to move towards more racial tolerance and increased harmony, and who was there better to take on this role, he felt, than Bob Engs?

Put this way it might seem as though I am saying that Bob was not especially radical and was not in line with other African American faculty and students on the campus; but it was much more complex than this. It is true that I think he felt that he was at some distance from other leading black professors, people like Ralph Smith in the Law School, and Houston Baker in the English Department. But I think it is worth remembering what I said about my first class with Bob. He was entirely uncompromising in challenging mainstream thinking and was in his own way extremely radical. But I think what was different about him was that he believed in the power of persuasion and engagement. He felt that people were inherently good and could be swayed to a different way of thinking about race and about those who were unlike themselves; they wouldn’t necessarily be moved by direct confrontation, and might only harden their positions of ignorance and bigotry.

Bob was also different in some ways because he was keenly aware not just of interracial conflict, but also intra-racial divisions. His sense about African American history, was that until the variegated nature of the black experience was appreciated, in all its dimensions and with all its conflicts, such history would not be doing justice to the people it was being written about. Freedom’s First Generation was deeply rooted in an understanding of the complexities of the black community in Hampton, and it was fair to assume that Bob would bring some of his analytical frame from his historical work to dealing with contemporary political and social issues. So I think President Hackney’s assessment, one based on the qualities of a fellow Southern Historian and Woodward student, were largely correct.

Consequently, Hackney did call upon Bob to lead the Forum, and the result I think was one of the most interesting and far-reaching forums undertaken by a university campus. I don’t think it was recognized for this at the time but it really was a very innovative series of colloquia and presentations, one that helped to radically transform the atmosphere on campus, and help to make Penn the university that it is today.

Bob’s first act was quite symbolic, and he certainly said that he intended it to be so. On learning that the position of Chair of the President’s Forum would come with a graduate assistant, Bob hired me for the position. Essentially, this meant that I would receive the stipends I was receiving while I continued to work (a little) on my dissertation, but I would be working pretty much full-time on the President’s Forum, taking minutes at meetings, contacting speakers, organizing PR for the events, working with graphics, and so forth. Bob knew that he would get some criticism for hiring me for this position. It made logical sense at one simple level, as I was his only graduate student at the time who was at my stage in his graduate career (beginning work on a dissertation), at least who was in the area. I think he also thought I could do the job reasonably well. But Bob also liked the symbolic part of this inversion; that a forum on race and racism would be run by an African American who was assisted by a white graduate student. Other members of the committee also seemed to think this was interesting, because I never felt any of the negative response regarding my appointment, and, beyond the odd double take when I was first introduced as the Bob’s assistant, I had an extremely good working relationship with everyone involved in the forum.

But Bob’s creative thinking went beyond the hiring of an assistant. In order for a Forum to address the issues of race fully, Bob felt, it had to think beyond the United States, and beyond one or two colloquia on what were the usual topics considered at the time. Bob felt that every school in the university and every field should take on the issue and develop programming on the topic – and it is certainly the case that every School was touched upon. Health Sciences, Athletics, the Wharton School of Business, Education, the College of Arts and Sciences, Social Work, Annenberg, and a number of organizations (the Christian Association) – everyone sponsored an event relevant to their field. Given this, the events were very far ranging, diverse, from discussions of Black business, to health issues and race, blacks in communication, race and Athletics – and many extremely prominent intellectuals came to campus to present their work.

The title for the series came from the inversion of William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race. This was a work, published in 1978, which received a lot of attention at that time. It argued (though Wilson was less emphatic about the points than some of those who deployed his arguments) that class was replacing race as a determinant in the lives of African Americans and Americans generally. Many argued against these points around the United States, and this was clearly also the case at the University of Pennsylvania. It was Ralph Smith, I seem to recall, who first proposed that the President’s Forum be titled “the enduring significance of race,” to make a counterpoint to Wilson’s work, and this was quickly adopted, and the graphic that was established became a very prominent feature of campus life for the next 24 months. Whether or not the argument was sound that race was enduring, the logo took on a sturdy life over the eighteen months of the forum.

The title bears a little more evaluation of course than this. Wilson was correct in some ways that class was becoming more and more of an issue in the post-Civil Rights era, that some of the racial barriers were no longer so important as they once had been, and that many African Americans would face greater barriers of class and problems associated with income deficiencies compared to whites. There was a radical element to what Wilson was saying, that even if Civil Rights had had an impact, the situation for many was still dismal and needed to be changed; but some of the response to his work was to pigeon hole him as someone who was an apologist for the United States’ racial system, which he did not intend to be. There were two reasons for this reaction, perhaps more, but two that come to mind immediately. The first was that this was a period of racial backlash, and it was not good to be seeming to suggest in the face of greater hostility to social change among whites, that race wasn’t important. With the Bakke decision of 1978 and the retrenchment that followed in its wake, undermining affirmative action, there was a real sense that some of the advances would be fleeting and could easily be lost. And of course, the discrimination issue was an important one since the debate often has come down to the issue of supporting particular minorities, while not necessarily advantaging the poor more generally. Clearly there were many ways to respond to this, both in defense of …., but also , but Wilson seemed to be threatening at many levels at this time.

The second reason, I think, was that Wilson seemed to miss some of the institutional racism that existed and which seemed to be embedded in the American system. I think this was more apparent in the 1980s than it is perhaps today (though this is a point that might be argued over), and Wilson was after all suggesting a direction in which the United States was moving, one that we might easily suggest has been confirmed in the last few years of social and political change in the United States; but in the 1980s, during the years of Ronald Reagan and the decline of the New Deal and an on-going assault on political rights, such a movement did not seem particularly clear.

There was also a degree to which I think that Bob, himself, spoke to some of the problems of Wilson’s work, and this was something that I learned most from conversations and listening to him lecture and teach. It was also something that very much made its way into my thinking relating to my first book on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the Great Migration. This was the close relationship that existed between race and class, and an understanding of how they played off each other. For Bob, it seemed to me, the fact that class was growing in importance, did not diminish the significance of race; in fact, the very limited nature of resources that a community had at its disposal resulted in a considerable rift between the haves and have-nots and a conflict over those resources. As people made their way out of the ghetto, as the phrase used to be, the very nature of the racism in society meant that they didn’t want to maintain strong ties with they places from which they had come. Thus, a clear difference existed between the migrations of African Americans and other so-called European ethnics – while those groups frequently kept ties with the places they left both in their original rural European communities and then the urban American communities that they established – using these as the basis for their social networks, African Americans faced a different climate that often saw them breaking away from their roots in the South, giving up property and connections that they may have had there, and then also giving up their place in the inner cities when they moved to suburban areas. The severing of such ties was all the more understandable in light of the fact that these inner-cities were going through a decline, one that was deeply inflected by race (as the cities’ populations became blacker the support that they received from the States and the nation diminished).

So class and race were inextricably linked and it was often the case that dealing with the one, through affirmative action, for example, while not actually reaching down to help the urban poor, might nonetheless still affect the situation and improve the position of the community as a whole – this is particularly evident in the cultural transformation that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in music and other fields, with African Americans rising to the fore in quite symbolic, but significant, ways.

Getting back to the President’s Forum, one would like to suggest that the whole university was transformed, and that this led to a transformation to the larger community, and spread like George Bush’s thousand points of light, until the whole of the United States succumbed to the change, resulting in the election of the first black President. But the President’s Forum wasn’t so significant, and Penn is not so significant either. The forum did make for a better community. Large sums of money were spent bringing prominent theorists and public intellectuals to raise consciousness regarding important issues, and the plethora of events did contribute to making people more sensitive to a number of the concerns held by many about racial attitudes on the campus. It also was the case that some of the things done in the forum fit within developments in academe across the country as cultural studies was beginning to take off and as concerns with power, particularly with regard to issues of imperialism – were increasingly focused upon – with colleges forced to consider how they themselves were to systems and histories of oppression.

I am not sure whether Bob felt that he was better off after the Forum than he had been before. He did receive the gratitude and respect for what he had achieved, but he also felt significant pressure, I think, to bring off a series of events that were successful and meaningful. He attended them all, and spoke at most of them. The toll it had on him was great, I believe, and played a considerable part in delaying his second book and in the decline of his health. But he transformed himself after his heart attack and he came back to produce his second volume (Educating the Disenfranchised and the Disinherited) and other important works. His own view became different, though this may not have been related to the forum at all, but was growing wisdom and acceptance of others’ limitations. Certainly he seemed to look on the History department with greater amusement, where he had previously felt considerable anger at the way it had treated him. Whether or not leading the President’s Forum helped in this process, I don’t know, but I believe it was an important event for him, and he certainly helped shape the way many thought and felt about race through it.

In the end, the Forum was important in many ways for helping direct us to where we are today, even if it wasn’t instrumental in bringing about that change. The forum demanded that American college students and faculty consider the issues of race and equality when they might otherwise have been happy to go on believing that they had moved beyond all that, that the Civil Rights era was over and all the change that was necessary had already occurred. But at the same time, Bob demanded that we be open and expansive about our understanding of race – that it wasn’t just limited to one group of people who had experienced one history of oppression in one country. He wanted to know more; to link it to more things, and see it as something that could be interpreted in multiple ways. The fact that the United States would elect a man who was born in Hawaii, of a white mother and a Kenyan father, who had grown up in different parts of the world, and had gone on to be a community organizer and a politician in Chicago, would not have been beyond Bob’s understanding of the world.

Interestingly the world seems to have caught up with him, and that is a very good thing.

Fifty-One: Interrogare redux

[Office of Literary Agent.]

AGENT    I’m sorry, but the play just doesn’t work.

AUTHOR    Why not? This is my most important work, Andrea; you liked the other pieces. What’s wrong with this one?

AGENT    Well, it just doesn’t work as a play. It’s like watching paint dry, or having to sit through “My Dinner with Andre” for the fifth time.

AUTHOR    Well, I liked that movie. I am not sure I could sit through it five times, but I have done it three, at least.

AGENT    But this is like a political dialogue, a lot of talking, about Empire and things people don’t care about anymore. And there’s no dramatic action.

AUTHOR    What do you mean? The protagonist gets hanged, and the antagonist is arrested for exposing himself. What more do you need?

AGENT    Well, that would be fine, but they happen at the end, and the build up has nothing dramatic.

AUTHOR    There’s an interrogation of a major historical figure. Isn’t that dramatic?

AGENT    It’s like you and me sitting here chatting; it doesn’t feel like an interrogation.

AUTHOR    Well, I admit the stakes have been raised by Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, and so what we used to think of as dramatic, no longer seems so any more. But, that’s history, these were all gentlemen; they addressed each other in a civil manner, even if the stakes were still great.

AGENT    But, that’s another thing about it. Nobody knows or cares about some obscure Irishman executed during the First World War. It isn’t important history.

AUTHOR    You are so wrong about that. Just because no one knows about it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t important.

AGENT    Well, even if I am wrong, the fact that no one in your audience will have a clue about the significance of what is going on will just mean that they won’t fill the seats.

AUTHOR    This is a play about Ireland. I could just go onto any street in Dublin or Belfast and read the text aloud and I would get an audience.

AGENT    But we aren’t in Dublin. And American audiences don’t know this stuff; they need a kick in the pants to help them digest their history – particularly when it isn’t something that they had spoon fed to them in their high schools.

AUTHOR    But there are a lot of Irish Americans, and even more German Americans. Don’t you think they would be interested in knowing how the British manipulated American society and how they shaped American history? The outcome of this story largely determines the cesspool that the twentieth century would become.

AGENT    Really? I certainly didn’t see that.

AUTHOR    Well it is true nonetheless. If the British hadn’t been able to neutralize Casement, it would have been very difficult for the Americans to support the British in the way that they did. What Thomson does in my play – along with everything else he was doing at the time – essentially wins the war for Britain. This was the most unpopular war ever fought by the Americans, so if Casement had been able to promote an Irish position in opposition to it, Woodrow Wilson would have been in a jam. You know he was the president, right?

AGENT    Don’t get snarky. I still don’t think it works as a play.

AUTHOR    Look, I have some people workshopping it nearby. Could you at least come to see them work over the next couple of days? It may help you to see that the play is more interesting and dramatic, than you think.

AGENT    If I must. I am not confident about its prospects at all.

Fifty: Pudding and Bow Tie

George Will’s op-ed piece from The Washington Post (11/1/12) was quoted at length today on Morning Joe. It is a nasty piece.  Will describes President Obama as “indolent in mind,” and suggests that his campaign has a “bilious tone,” with its “scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference.” He continues, “Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.”

Will then goes on to insult Joe Biden in what couldn't possibly be a bilious tone, and then everything else about the Democratic candidates’ reelection campaign. It is like the George Will of old, when he was on the right of his party and he could be truly nasty in ways that made one sit up and take note, simply because he was way beyond the realm of Republican and Democratic consensus. Indeed, it wasn’t that one used to believe in the 80s and 90s that he was the only one who would use a word like “bilious”; one actually believed in those good old days that he had invented the word himself to describe his own behavior (with approval, of course – as he has no self-esteem deficit either). But for many years now he has seemed a shade of his former self. The Republicans have moved so far to the right, so that no compromise with any Democrat is acceptable. They began this move (led by Gingrich) against the other great democratic moderate – Clinton – whom, like Obama, they painted as a borderline socialist. And, in the process, they left George Will trying to tie his bow tie a little tighter so that he would be welcomed to their tea party. Since then Will has just seemed confused as to whether he should be going along with the radical right, or trying to claim (as he did today) that his brand of nastiness is actually the middle.

And should a President seeking reelection with Obama's record not “smolder with resentment”? If any other President had achieved what Obama has done – saving the auto industry, establishing health care, completing the withdrawal from Iraq, killing Osama bin Laden, and a host of other things – he or she would not be having the kind of difficulty getting reelected Obama has had, against someone who clearly has the same kind of oceanic self-esteem that any candidate for President must have, and who clearly has made considerable gaffs and blunders (not to mention all his outright falsehoods and flip-flopping) that would have killed off any other candidacy. And certainly no one would be charging that President, as Will is doing, with being “indolent in mind.” The fact that Barack Obama is black goes a long way to explaining why he is having such difficulty, why he is not considered fundamentally moderate in his policies, and why this has-been journalist is describing him as indolent.

Forty-nine: Pygmalion

THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with his Queen's English: the English that will keep him on the dole queue to the end of his days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass him off as an American graduate student at a faculty-student tea party. I could even get him a place as an American historian which requires altogether different English.

When I came to do graduate work in the United States, I was immediately confronted by the need to alter my writing style. Such style as I had acquired would have been representative of the British public (private) school and the British university system – not Oxbridge perhaps, but a very respectable Scottish version. This style was marked by long sentences and a liberal use of the passive voice. Such style, I soon learned, was verboten in an American graduate school. Indeed, any manual of style that one might consult would almost always tell you to eschew the passive voice, and make all sentences, where possible, active. I did not perceive the need for this change myself, but was soon informed that it would need to be done. Rather, I would need to do this. The first seminar paper draft that I handed in was so marked up when it was returned to me that almost every sentence needed alteration. Indeed, my professor had marked up so many of my sentences that I would have to alter almost every one. 

No harm done, I suppose. My sentences were shortened and simplified; I even did this myself: I shortened and simplified my sentences. Now, I would no longer sound like Gibbon, or to the American ear a longwinded gibbon, but would be to the point and direct. My actors would do their acting, and my thick description would have the benefit of all being about people actively doing things. Agency would be clear for one and all.

The significance of this for me is more than mere nostalgia. I am no Eliza Doolittle. I do not feel that I have been changed irreparably by several American Henry Higginses, and that this is not entirely a good thing. The point is rather to note that American academics’ preference for the active voice over the passive says something about them. This is a political preference, and links tidily to the kind of social history that has predominated in the United States. There is something that we might consider very American about the notion of agency (even if it descends from E.P. Thompson, we can blame it on his American Mom!), because having people make their own history and performing these things in the active voice can, I think, be tied to the gendered discourse of republicanism (i.e., the idea of independence as the mark of respectability). [Now, before I am accused of being an exceptionalist, let me say that this was also one of the characteristics of the British colonial official charged with the duty of uplifting the "benighted" masses – acting. It was also part of the anti-intellectual ethos of the British public school (a connection that may be suggestive about the atheoretical proclivities of Social Historians).] 

But the active voice only ever takes us so far. However hard we try we always seem to stumble on the person trapped in his/her passive passivity – the subaltern who is certainly not able to speak in the active tongue of the bona fide citizen of History.

Forty-eight: Convict Histories

It always seemed to me that “Subaltern” was an odd term for a school of history endeavoring to capture the narratives of the lowest classes in India. “Dalit History” seemed like a better bet to me, comprising the study of the poorest elements of the work force, the slum dwellers, and the so-called “untouchables.” This was before I understood that subaltern was not necessarily intended to replicate the Thompsonian search for a working class to whom agency could be given. Indeed, the subaltern was perhaps a worthy choice because it was so difficult to define and locate. It was, or came to be in its more recent guises, a category of people to whom agency could not be given. They were in a sense beyond the reach of agency – once they had it, they were no longer subalterns.

There is actually a rather odd aspect to the notion of the professional historian being the bearer of agency to his or her subjects. After all, the historian is by his or her location – wandering the book fair at the AHA Conference, teaching in some fairly lavishly endowed colleges and universities – aspiring to remove himself or herself from the slum of graduate school and reach secure bourgeois existence in the heights of the tenured profession – very far from the dalits of the world. They are far enough from the dwellers of American inner-cities; their difficulties speaking for and representing such people are legion. 

Is there history to be written from the perspective of the convict? “Convicts of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” That has a pretty good ring to it. But, we would be able to see the world through the eyes of the transported convict, carried to the Americas or to Australia. What made him/her do what she did? Was she the true Durkheimian deviant – created by the society as its ultimate emblem? Is this, other than the suicide, the ultimate subaltern. Can he/she/it be celebrated?

This problem of endeavoring to reach the masses occurs to one as one reads, Roberts's, Shantaram. The book is really quite a fascinating study of Mumbai, all its many layers from top to bottom, from criminal world to business world (which may not be any distance traveled), and all its many connections to the Indian hinterland and the different parts of the world. Mumbai is out of reach to the tourist and even to the anthropologist. Who among either of these groups will live in the slum, work alongside slumdwellers as they deal with fire and cholera, talk to crime lords, see the leper colonies where black market medicines are secured, visit and sojourn in the labor catchment areas of Maharashtra, and any number of other things that the narrator does in this tale? The tale itself is a cross between Conrad’s Lord Jim and Papillon. And, it provides a glimpse of a world that exists beyond the respectable world of convention and scholarship. 

And what makes it possible for such a work to exist is the fact that Roberts is an escaped convict. He does things that many other people would not do. He is forced to go to places that many other people would not go to. It isn’t a history of convicts, of course, though it certainly feels like a history of prisoners of ill-fortune; but it most certainly is a history that only a convict could have written.

If one wanted to understand the world of the turn of the 18th century, there was really only one person who had the breadth of experience to really explain it to you. That person was not a historian like Edward Gibbon or a poet like William Blake, though the latter might have told you a thing or two you needed to know. That person was Olaudah Equiano, who witnessed the world in all its aspects from enslavement in Africa, through the Middle Passage, to a number of experiences in many different slave colonies in the Americas, and finally to freedom. At the beginning of the twenty-first century one of the few people who could really give you an inside view of the world – at least outside Baltimore and “The Wire” – is a former Australian convict who now resides in Mumbai.

This is a must read, in my humble opinion, though I hasten to add that listening to the 35 CDs performed by Humphrey Brower may be even better. Brower's rendering of all the accents, and his ability to draw all the life out of the narrative is truly astounding. Whether or not Hollywood and Johnny Depp can capture the depths of this book and make it more than a mere adventure story remains to be seen. [what happened to that movie?] Of course, there are many who will feel that by purchasing this book they are allowing a man to benefit from his crimes, a man who committed murder (though I don't recall him declaring this in the novel). Oh well, it is a great story, and I think one that we all may learn from; does a man repay his debt to society, by letting that society know some of its shortcomings, some of the ways in which it functions? I don't know.

And a brief addendum: Since writing this, “Slumdog Millionaire” has appeared in the movie theaters and has carted off all the Oscars for best movie, best director, and the like. This is a good movie; it perhaps does not deserve all the awards it has garnered – since there are plenty of Bollywood movies that are better, and there is an Orientalism involved in the judgment of its quality – but it is definitely good. The director, Danny Boyle, really has done an extremely good job of being not an overbearing Brit in India, but someone who first of all declares that he knows nothing and needs to be shown what is going on. His best scenes – those early in the movie, in the slums – really provide a sense of what it must be like living in those mazes – well, perhaps not living, you get a better sense in Shantaram – but endeavoring to get by and survive, particularly as a child. In the end, though, it may fall back on established narratives, and ends in a romance that lets the viewer off the hook.We come away, realizing we have seen horrors, but they are distant – and anyway, everyone is dancing bangra at the end – so all's cool.

Shantaram, by contrast, says the world is [expletive], but don't just blame the perpetrators of these crimes – good guys and bad guys are pretty hard to distinguish – and in the end we are all complicit. In convict history, you heard it here first, we all have to realize that the voices we hear, are voices we ourselves created.

Forty-seven: Revolting Revelations

We need our revolutions to be pretty. Well, not exactly pretty, like rosy, but pretty, like neat. They need to be comprehensible and easy to interpret; otherwise how usable will they be for those who come after. They need to be undertaken by the ‘good’ people, or – if we are trying to resist change – by the ‘bad’ people. They shouldn’t be undertaken by a diverse group of people for conflicting purposes grounded simply in material self-interest. So, this brings us to a second rule: revolutions should be undertaken by idealists, whether or not we like them. That way we can find our own ‘better’ selves reflected through or in the revolution. If it is our fight, we will need to see the changes (often violent as they are) as being worth it because they are backed up by our high ideals. If it is someone else’s fight, we will want our side to be justified by a cause or two of our own, even if it is just the assumption that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Either way, we help define ourselves neatly in the process. 

But revolutions are never this way. While they may have half lives of idealism that can get the nations that emerge from them through a decade or two, or maybe even a century or two, they are always open to interpretation and questioning. Simply put, the new orthodoxy that gets established in the place of the old orthodoxy is still going to be inadequate as an explanation for the messiness of history. 

These two “truths” – that revolutions need to be pretty and idealistic – seem perfectly clear when we are looking at other people’s revolutions. Take the Russian: There were a bunch of Bolsheviks – a majority in nobody’s minds but their own – who imposed communist doctrine on an empire. Ditto China. But the idealism Petered out and the St. Paul of corruption turned Leninist idealism into Stalinist pogroms. Ditto the Cultural Revolution. The French: from Girondins, through Robespyre and guillotine, to bones apart – say no more. It is only when we come to the American Revolution that everything – history – comes unglued. Here a revolution that never made much sense to anyone who was involved in it – and certainly not much to the British who had other concerns to deal with – developed idealism half-lives that push well beyond strontium on the road to plutonium for some of the seediest of self-interested characters – 230 years and counting.

How does a society, your society, pull off this feat of repeatedly injecting idealism back into its revolution and continuing to find this comprehensible and historical? There are many answers. 

The first, of course, is that you need your revolution to have been considered a relatively insignificant affair – and indeed, the stakes were considered to be very low with regard to the American revolution. The fact that nobody cares about your revolution, because it simply isn’t seen to matter very much, really helps you to stake a claim for idealism and plant your seed firmly in this idealistic soil. Compare any other revolution and the responses they stirred. Haiti – slaves revolting, wow, stomp on that. Russia – proletariat acting out, let’s all invade. China – Mao or less insane, how about a war in Korea? America – well we don’t need its food anymore, because we’ve got Canada; we don’t want to do what it takes to win this thing, because we may lose our prosperous slave colonies in the Caribbean. Besides, who the hell wants New Jersey?

The second is that you should, in spite of yourself and your best efforts to do otherwise, become a great nation. In this way, the seed firmly planted will grow into a strong plant, and the fact that the seed is being given miracle grow that allows it to shoot up in spite of, not because of, the idealistic soil will go largely unnoticed. A Louisiana Purchase is really all you need. This will take you from being a small nation hemmed in by empires that will be able to pick you off at a time of their choosing, to being an empire in your own right. You will have won the yellow bits on the Risk board – well the best spaces, anyway – and you can begin an expansion of your own. Your best efforts to do otherwise would be to say to Napoleon, as Jefferson did, hey, we don’t mind if you invade Haiti. We worry more about the success of a slave rebellion on our own plantations in Virginia than we do about the fact that you’ll bring your army to New Orleans, and establish the whole Louisiana territory as your breadbasket for your sugar colonies.

The third answer is that every time you go back to develop the teleology that you call history you must simplify the story so that the messy parts get left out. Essentially, this means you must forget New Jersey – home of the Sopranos and their ancestors. 

So what of New Jersey? If you are to understand the revolution, or at least comprehend all the dimensions of its incomprehensibility as a pretty revolution, you must learn about New Jersey. Who were the 18th-century Sopranos? They were basically the Proprietors and their agents who wanted to ensure that they established a Scottish style landowning system at the expense of the yeomanry, who had settled on the land. While the landowners were clearing the land in the Highlands of Scotland, the would be owners of New Jersey, the Proprietors, were getting their agents to begin the process of clearing all the lowlifes (read regular people) from their lands throughout the colonies.

Arch villain in this is a man named James Alexander. 

The rise of the professional bar further alienated common farmers from the judiciary. In 17th-century America, educated lawyers were rare. Many lawyers had no formal legal training, and some were only semiliterate. In the 18th century this changed as London-trained attorneys (James Alexander being a prominent example) arrived in the colonies and established informal law schools in their offices. Soon, a trained legal cadre emerged and reignited a deep, latent hostility to the bar, variants of which were evident throughout Anglo-American society. The hostility of provincial yeomen toward lawyers was strong because they were understood as dispute-encouraging parasites. “There is,” wrote a young law clerk in 1745, “perhaps no Set of Men that bear so ill a Character in the Estimation of the Vulgar, as the gentlemen of the Long Robe.” The fact that James Alexander trained many of New Jersey’s lawyers in his office only reinforced popular hostility to the bar.

The Revolution in New Jersey was essentially a story of these lawyers endeavoring not to lose control of the position they had established under William Franklin, in the face of growing dissent against the Crown throughout the colonies. This meant that they needed to know which way the political winds were blowing and act accordingly. The result was that their loyalties were not firmly established, and they were quick to respond to whether or not General Howe or General Washington was on the ascendancy.

All of this is embodied in the person of Richard Stockton. He was a product of the East Jersey and New York law firms, a judge who was very much aligned with Lord Dartmouth and Franklin. He was the kind of person who would turn up at a convention of radicals and instead of immediately signing an idealistic declaration of independence, would ask for a recapitulation of the pros and cons; he was the kind of person who would later sign an oath of loyalty to the King, and then once Washington had reestablished control, change sides once again.

Revolutions are never neat, of course, but it is neat, as a historian, to see how the least idealistic of all the revolutions has gained ascendancy as the most determined by ideas. That is partly the result of so much history, all those messy bits, being suppressed so comprehensively.