Fifty-eight: Of Epigrammatology -- Wilde Stuff

During the course of his cross-examination, Wilde was repeatedly asked to explain his various epigrams. Having to explain negates the entire epigrammatic position: the discourses are suddenly claimed unfamiliar, the intervention unrecognizable, the mastery invalid, and the epigram unrepeatable. The epigrammist is silenced. But each time we see one of Wilde’s plays, we get to see successful epigrammatology at work. Through that process, the characters achieve the new, the original, the epigrammatic. Night after night, the theatre’s Jack is claimed and becomes Wilde’s Ernest.

Francesca Coppa, in Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces  p.19

Fifty-six: Delta Darkness

I want to explore the career of the Congo metaphor, and contemplate how it might be used in the American context, and how it is used in Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Harvard University Press, 2003). In Woodruff’s work, it seems to me that the idea of the American Congo is grafted onto an excellent monograph and intricate study of the Mississippi Delta and African American resistance. My feeling, though, is that had the notion of the Congo not been deployed, but a more thorough comparison with colonialism been undertaken instead, along with an analysis of the location of subalterns in such systems of oppression, then her attempt to internationalize American history might have worked better still. Though, this is not intended to diminish the accomplishment, already noted by many other reviewers of this book.

Clearly, the Congo metaphor refers to an area of the world and a time that was considered the worst of empire – on a continuum of empires it would be located down one end as the one that manifested the harshest, cruelest conditions, where laborers and the indigenous peoples were treated most deplorably. It was “the nadir of Europe in Africa”, the ultimate product of the scramble for Africa, the place where the desire to make money quickly came together with the desire to create an instant empire for Belgium and King Leopold to allow people to be treated in the most barbaric fashion. This was, as Joseph Conrad put it in the Heart of Darkness, “the horror of it all,” “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience;” for W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Negro in 1915, “the valley of the Congo [would] long stand as a monument of shame to Christianity and European Civilization.”

The history of the Congo is described admirably in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate all the Brutes, the two sources used by Woodruff to describe the Congo on the opening page of this book. Woodruff argues that the descriptions of the Congo apply to the Mississippi Delta also, so that, if we accept the description of an imperial continuum, the Delta would be located down towards the same end as the Congo. She writes:

Planters in the [Mississippi Delta] had forged an ‘alluvial empire’ in the early twentieth century that, like Belgian King Leopold II’s African Congo in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, wore the face of science and progressivism, yet was underwritten by labor conditions that were anything but progressive.  King Leopold used the rhetoric of uplift and benevolence to mask his relentless search for ivory and rubber in the Congo. Leopold’s men burned villages and their inhabitants, raped the women, cut off the hands and heads of thousands of Congolese, and worked them in chain gangs until they dropped from hunger and exhaustion.

Woodruff then proceeds to make the link between Delta planters and the Congo, writing:

[Delta planters] may not have cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers, but they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and other forms of terror to retain their labor.  Some of the meanest corners of the “heart of darkness” were found in the Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. 

Woodruff seems to want us to read this connection literally and accept the comparison.  When she describes the capitalists creating their alluvial empire, she outlines their progressive intentions tempered by their racism and desire for profit at the expense of African Americans.  Lynch spirit and convict labor, through which they maintained their power, stand in for the barbarity of King Leopold’s vassals.

There may be a couple of problems with this.  First, when people referred to the Congo they did not bring to mind the progressive aspect of the project as outlined first by Stanley and then promulgated by King Leopold.  Whatever the merits and intentions of the original project, what people referred to was just the horror of a state run imperial project that deprived people of lives and limbs in the name of simple profit.  It was the image described by William Sheppard in 1899 of 81 hands smoking on a slow fire in order that they would be preserved as evidence that cartridges supplied by Europeans had not been wasted. So the progressive intentions of Delta planters do not really help to make the Congo metaphor stick for their region. 

Second, once Woodruff describes the development of the alluvial empire it is clear that the way that the empire became established was not simply on the basis of exploitation and brutality as the Congo metaphor suggests.  Indeed, it was founded in negotiation, to which African Americans were a party – particularly in their demands, which were met, that they be given land as sharecroppers.  As the planters began to push for greater profits and consolidation of their position at the expense of their laborers, when they faced resistance from those workers, and when they found themselves blocked by the federal government from imposing outright peonage on their labor, they then turned towards violence.  By contrast, violence was the basis for the system of capitalist accumulation in the Congo.  Leopold’s goons used terror against whole villages to ensure that they produced the labor and goods that were desired. 

If there is a problem here it may lie in the fact that Woodruff wants to use “American Congo” as a synonym for “Mississippi Delta,” and does so on about twenty occasions throughout the book.  Doing so suggests that there really is some equivalence between the two places.  However, it seems to me that she is closer throughout the book to establishing a more general comparison with empire and colonialism.  A passage at the end of the chapter, “Forging of the Alluvial Empire,” makes this case perfectly.  She writes:

As the alluvial empire materialized on the eve of WWI, its contours were not so much different from those of other western empires: a wealthy and powerful few lived off the sweat of a predominantly “coloured” labor force.  The accumulation of capital in the Delta had led, as it had in other regions of the world, to oppressive labor conditions that drew on peonage, convict labor, and eventually murder and torture.  As in other colonies, workers were stripped of any access to citizenship.  They had no legal rights, and not only did they lose the fruits of their own labor, but they also lacked the basic protection of civil rights.  People worked without pay, people disappeared, and no one was held accountable.  The enlightened face of progressivism and science that characterized the early-twentieth-century culture of the region masked an oppressive racism.

What this really describes is colonialism, or at least one interpretation of it.  This is not the Congo metaphor; this is empire.  Now, where Woodruff enters into debates about empire and colonialism she does so using Cooper and Stoler, as the title of her chapter “Tensions of Empire,” would suggest.  But doing this, I think, further weakens the Congo metaphor as this approach is very much tied to notions of agency, a point I will return to in a minute. 

The origin of the Congo metaphor lies in the campaign undertaken by E.D. Morel, a former British shipping clerk who had worked in Brussels, in the report published by Roger Casement in 1902 of widespread mutilation, forced labor, and murder occurring in the Congo Free State, and in the publication of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, also in 1902.  It is important to note, I believe, that Casement was a consular official sent to investigate conditions in the Congo by the British Government.  As such, the origin of the metaphor was tied more to the continuance of empire, than to any conception of its eradication.  The report was generated to promote reform of outright abuses, and reflected the self-satisfaction of the British with regard to what they did in their own empire.  The Congo report, and the metaphor derived from it, validated empire more than it threatened it.  Those nations who were quick to admonish the Belgians, especially the British, could describe their own empires as much different from, and more progressive than, that of King Leopold.  Indeed, the idea of an imperial continuum, and its appeal to us even today, is in part a product of an archive that was put in place to situate the British and their empire at one end, and everyone else and their empires along down the line towards the Belgian Congo.

This comparative frame is a key aspect of empire and colonialism that needs to be remembered.  The horrors of one fragment could be used to validate other not quite so horrific instances of abuse.  Past excesses, like slavery, could be used to make anything not quite so blatantly inhumane, not quite so systemic, seem more palatable.  As such, there is a very real way in which empire and colonialism depend upon the metaphorical Congo for their continued existence – so that the metaphor of an American Congo, were it to have been used liberally at the time, would be very powerful indeed, just as the notion of Mississippi itself as the worst area of the South was very powerful both for those who opposed the Jim Crow South and those who, while wanting it to continue, wished to validate their progressive version of it.  Indeed, even the proponents of the alluvial empire clearly wished to promote their South as different, and not as bad as other sections of the South.

This use of the Congo, I think, helps explain Roger Casement’s own trajectory into a position of being at war with the British Empire.  It seems clear that he came to see his work as not bringing about change, especially after the failure to convince the British and American officials to reform their capitalists who were establishing their own shop of horrors in the Putamayo, and that he began to realize that reform within empire would not work – certainly not for the Irish anyway.  As such, the idea of a Congo, or at least the continuum that is implied within it, needs to be questioned, and I think the evidence in Woodruff’s book speaks admirably to this problematic.

The way in which metaphors are used is very important indeed, and, as I said, if this metaphor of the Congo had traction at this time it would be very revealing about who was using it and for what purpose.  And, clearly, one would think that since Mississippi was often considered the worst area of the Jim Crow South, such a metaphor would have had some purchase; and yet this does not appear to be the case.  The basis for the use of this metaphor in this book is an article by a member of the NAACP in “The Nation.”  William Pickens called the Mississippi River Valley the American Congo in his article describing the lynchings that had occurred in 1921.  The article itself appears to have been focused on the lynchings and did not elaborate the ways in which the region actually resembled the Congo.  All the other newspapers that make appearances in this work, the Chicago Defender and the NAACP’s and Du Bois’s The Crisis in particular, apparently failed to make this comparison, even though to have done so might have been effective politically.  As such the metaphor does not seem to have had much traction, and the reason why it may not have done is that it wasn’t evident to people that the comparison actually worked in the case of the Mississippi Delta. 

But were people at the time overlooking the potential of a metaphor that seemed to characterize this region?  It is interesting that Woodruff’s work tries to do two things: one is highlight the plight of people in the Mississippi Delta, comparing them to the Congo, and the other is describe the ways in which these people resisted their conditions and brought about change – bringing the tension to empire.  Is there perhaps a contradiction in these two impulses?  For the ability to bring about change, that Thompsonian agency effect, is in many ways one of the things that distinguishes the resident of the Mississippi Delta from that of the Belgian Congo, at least in terms of situating them on our imperial continuum. Woodruff writes of the brand of imperialism she is describing:

And yet the imperialism and the human carnage it wrought did not go unchallenged by those whose lives were being transformed or destroyed.  Slaves, peasants, plantation workers, and those who labored in other extractive industries, such as mining, timber, and rubber, fought their oppression in numerous ways, seeking to protect their land and families against the intrusion of capitalism and white racism.

But does this Social History model, which we seem comfortable applying to colonialism and imperialism and through which we feel obliged to empower our workers, work for the real Congo?  It may or may not have done, but empowerment was certainly not on the minds of those who created and deployed the Congo metaphor: the heart of darkness was supposed to be a black hole for human agency, it was a severed head on the end of the pike, agency was entirely absent.  Here again, the use of the metaphor might be very instructive in telling us, not so much about real representations of human agency, whatever that abstraction might translate into, but rather about who could gain empowerment and under what circumstances.  Indeed, there are hints of this in the quote that I just used.  People, according to Woodruff, “fought their oppression in numerous ways, seeking to protect their land and families against the intrusion of capitalism and white racism.”  The historian’s denial of agency, the denial of historiographical rights, of particular kinds would register as being unwarranted, if they were directed against the capitalist or white supremacist system.  But the oppression of someone within the family who is being protected from capitalism might not register; nor perhaps would the effort of someone who, instead of fighting against the oppression, worked within the system to protect him or herself and his or her family, by exploiting and humiliating others who were oppressed.

A related point to this is the fact that lynching is a specific phenomenon tied to time and space.  I am reminded of the similarities drawn between the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa, once in vogue.  John Cell, if I recall correctly, questioned the comparison, pointing to the fact that the South African system was constitutionally guaranteed and protected by the state with the backing of the police, whereas the Jim Crow South was tempered by the Constitution, by laws against peonage and notions (even if not adhered to) of separate but equal.  In such a situation, where the oppressed had certain rights – the right to move and ownership of property, for example – lynching, mob rule, and other forms of terrorism stepped in to ensure that such rights remained circumscribed.  In South Africa, pass laws and residential apartheid, backed up by the police made such informal terror largely unnecessary.  The police could kill a Steve Biko if necessary, they didn’t need a mob to do the work for them; they also didn’t need to stage the humiliation of black labor – it was written into everyday existence.  Similar comments might be made about the Congo and the Mississippi Delta.  State functionaries were doing the killing and maiming in order to establish certain labor conditions.  The violence was not done in response to perceived advancement of Africans protesting particular conditions and bringing political pressure to bear in their favor.  The irony here, then, is that what makes the Mississippi Delta seem most akin to the Congo is the very thing that distinguished the two regions and brings into question the notion of a Congo continuum altogether.  For it is the growing power of the African American labor that provokes the anxiety for the planter, which in turn leads to the massacre at Elaine and the various horrific lynchings described throughout the book. 

Where does this all lead?  It may lead us to wonder whether the Congo metaphor itself, with its implicit assumptions about degrees of harshness of different systems of exploitation, is something that we may need to move beyond – for the anxious planter can produce conditions of terror in many different environments and conditions of exploitation – from the seemingly liberal and progressive to the draconian and reactionary. It may also lead us to wonder about the historically contingent nature of labels and metaphors.  They are used for specific purposes and with different effects in different times and places.  These have to be understood and analyzed closely.  We have to be careful how we might use a particular metaphor to characterize a region, as for all its descriptive strengths it may blur as much as it is reveals.

Fifty-five: A Year in the Short Life of Henry Thomson

If you are interested, and surely you must be after my astoundingly intriguing prospectus -- "An Imperial Family", then take a look at the first few pages of Henry Maxwell Thomson's illustrated journal of the year 1886. You can find it here. Click on the frontispiece and you can take a look at a few pages inside.

Fifty-four: An Imperial Family: The Thomsons, 1750-1960

Just found this prospectus for a book as I was rummaging through a box of old materials. It was written in late 1995, when Empire and things imperial were fairly new -- cutting edge even. I wrote it in a vain attempt to seem like a British historian, since I certainly didn't seem to be an African-American one. I am still working on parts of this. I intend to finish this history, but in the short term I have penned a screenplay of a movie set in Tasmania, a short screenplay featuring doctors in London and Philadelphia, and half a novel on... well, it is a fictionalized version of parts of this. 

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This work covers six generations of the Thomson family from roughly the 1750s to post-World War II Britain. The story is unique for a number of reasons: for its perspective, which enlarges the boundaries of British history to make the Empire a central part of the story; for its focus on Scots in that empire – about whom much has been said concerning their role in forging empire, but little shown; for its scope, which ranges from 18th-century Savannah, Georgia, to mid-19th-century Ceylon, to Egypt and Fiji at the turn of the 20th century, and back to England in the late twentieth; for its wide range of themes, from the consolidation of medical practices, to education, legal practice, art, literature, history, Orientalism, and the roles of women in British families and society; and last but not least, for its endeavor to bring ordinary individuals to life through their own private papers, journals and photographs.

At first glance, the family may seem unremarkable and only a few of its members have made it into The Dictionary of National Biography or The Encyclopaedia Britannica. The outline, the approach, and the scope all resemble the narrative of The Sassoons (Stanley Jackson, Dutton, 1968), but there is no Siegfried; or those of Dreyfus: A Family Affair (Michael Burns, HarperCollins, 1991), without “the affair.” But to the extent that this is so (and there are many noteworthy people in this study) this is one of the points of the story. There were many families like the Thomsons in the British Empire’s heyday, formed and allowed to thrive within, even soar over expanding imperial horizons, and then brought down to the ground with a firm thud as those horizons drew inward. Moreover, while the members of this particular family did not change the course of British History, events that did just this seemed to occur around them.

And by “British” here, I mean the Empire. For what this work demonstrates is the centrality of empire to the lives of average middle-class family in Britain throughout the 19th and early 20th century. This family history confirms recent [now not so recent] scholarship [see, for example, C.A. Bayly’s Imperial Meridian (Longman, 1989), Linda Colley’s Britons (Yale, 1992), Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (Verso, 1993), Catherine Hall’s White, Male and Middle Class (Routledge, 1992), or Antoinette Burton’s, Burdens of History (Duke, 1995) [Not to mention my own Inside Out, Outside In (Macmillan, 2000) which has come out since I wrote this in 1995], which places British history in an imperial framework. It intends, therefore, to complement the view of the English middle-class family found in Leonore Davidoff’s and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes (U. Chicago, 1987). The existence of empire is seen shaping the experiences of the Thomsons, and also molding the very nature and definition of the family itself.

Having noted that many of the individuals may appear unremarkable, the list of their achievements is considerable. The first person of note is Anthony Todd Thomson, who as one of the founders of University College Hospital in London made a significant impact on developments in the study and practice of medicine during the first part of the nineteenth century. Anthony Todd’s second wife, Katherine Byerley Thomson, one of the Byerley sisters of Warwick, who established the Avonbank school and who were cousins of the Wedgwood family, became a widely-known author of historical romances. While her name has now been dropped from the canon and she is largely forgotten, between 1820 and her death in 1862 she was one of the leading popular historians, publishing over thirty volumes in innumerable editions on both sides of the Atlantic. One of her sons, John Cockburn, was the first person to translate the Bhagavadgita from the Mahabharata into English, and he studied with the leading Orientalists at Oxford before drowning at the early age of twenty-seven (he also was a close childhood friend of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s son, Robert, who went on to be the Viceroy of India, and he had a very strange connection to the death Robert’s sister, Emily, who died in 1848, aged 19). Another son, Henry William Byerley, became a judge in Ceylon and helped to shape legal practices on the Indian sub-continent and around the empire.

The scope of the project is large therefore. It begins, as I noted, in Savannah, just prior to the American Revolution where Alexander Thomson served as Postmaster General. It follows Alexander’s marriage and experiences as a loyalist during the war, and his return to Edinburgh after it. In Edinburgh, it turns to the story of his sons’ early years, growing up and getting an education at Edinburgh University: the elder brother, William John, would become a noted portrait painter in Edinburgh (a famous portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell – his sister would become her step-mother – was one of his), the younger son was a doctor. The book then describes Anthony Todd’s connections with the Edinburgh intellectuals, such as Lords Brougham and Cockburn, at a time when The Edinburgh Review was just being established as a leading shaper of political opinion throughout the British Empire. The story moves on to London where Anthony Todd established his Sloane Street practice (becoming the physician for, among other people, Elizabeth Stevenson, later Gaskell), and we observe the prodigious growth of University College Hospital, which would make a considerable contribution to the spread of medical practices around the British Empire.

With Anthony’s second marriage to Katherine Byerley in 1820 we are introduced to London’s literary society. The circle around the Thomsons included many notable figures, among them Campbell, Wilkie, Jeffrey, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Mackintosh, Thackeray, Browning, and especially the most revered poetess of her day, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 1802-1838), with whom Katherine became a close confidant. L.E.L. married a young soldier and went off to live with him at a British station in West Africa (overseeing the eradication of the slave trade) and within a few days was found poisoned. The account of this event and the subsequent inquest in London reveals a great deal about race, class and gender practices in England when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. The fact that the medicine chest from which the poison came was provided to L.E.L. by Anthony Todd Thomson is also intriguing.

The story then moves to France, where Anthony Francis became a clergyman for the English community in Normandy, and to Ceylon, where Henry William Byerley was a practicing judge. Meanwhile, we find John Cockburn at Oxford undertaking Oriental studies before moving to Paris with his mother (following his father’s death), where he co-authored historical studies with her until his accident. This generation also included Marion Jane, wife of Captain Ivan Andrea Herford, a participant in both the Crimean War and in the putting down of the “Indian Mutiny” (one of the most pivotal events in nineteenth-century British history).

Anthony Francis Thomson’s many children (10 in all) widened the horizons of the family still further. Captain Anthony Standidge served in the merchant navy, and traveled the world over laying telegraph cable (something that would leater be crucial to the outcome of the First World War). Among his records are a ship’s log from 1870 and two photograph albums, including many pictures of the members of his and his parents’ generations and places from Georgetown, British Guiana, through Europe and Africa, to Fiji, where Francis Byerley served on a sugar plantation overseeing Indian indentured laborers. Ernest Malcolm was a Lieutenant in the Navy, Arthur Victor was an insurance broker in Cairo, and Henry Maxwell was an art student in London until his death from consumption at the age of nineteen.

Besides Katherine Byerley there were many other women in the family who achieved prominence in their own right, or who through marriage extended the imperial connections further – notably those with the Herfords, Maxwells, and Rennell Rodds. A chapter, therefore, deals specifically with the roles of women in this imperial family and more generally with the nature of gender roles in the Victorian empire.

Among the wide range of sources tapped for this study are the many published works by members of the family: Anthony Todd wrote numerous volumes on medicine and botany (an edited an edition of the poet James Thomson’s The Seasons); Katherine Byerley authored histories, novels, and a memoir; Anthony Francis wrote a study of the English schoolroom; Byerley worked in law and wrote guides to help people choosing a profession, as well as studies of military defense; Cockburn was the Orientalist, but he also published a studies of Reformatory Schools and of life at Oxford University; Henrietta followed her mother in writing historical romances; and lastly, Anthony Standidge wrote on shipping. There are other unpublished works which include Anthony Todd’s journal of a tour through England and the Scottish Highlands in 1823, Anthony Standidge’s ship’s log and photograph albums, and Henry Maxwell’s illustrated journal of 1886 (a year noted for riots and other important events in London), and other illustrated story books. There are many other contemporaneous works of relevance, particularly relating to the Byerleys (Mrs. Parkes, the world-renowned author on domesticity was Katherine’s sister), and the many members of the Sloane literary circle.

So that’s an introduction of sorts to a book that is still in progress. Check back and you should see more of it taking shape in different guises.

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.