23 July 1998

Professor Marc Trachtenberg
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228

Dear Professor Trachtenberg:

I write in response to your article, "The Past Under Siege," in the
Wall Street Journal of July 17th.

While the new historical association, on whose creation you and Gene
Genovese are embarked, is likely to gain a toehold among other
associations, it seems to me that the project fails on grounds of
ideology, strategy, evidence, consistency, and, not least of all,
nomenclature. Other than that, as one might say, it has a strong future.

Let's start with its claimed name: The Historical Society. To those of
us who continue to support, despite their evident weaknesses and
frequent foolishness, the senior organizations of Clio's discipline,
especially the American Historical Association and the Organization of
American Historians-just as we retain a certain loyalty to the United
States, despite the nation's many defects, and don't flee to Canada-the
arrogant presumptuousness of the new organization's name, "The
Historical Society," strikes a sour chord. The historical society of
what? one is forced to ask. Of aggrieved victims? Of Atlanta or
Philadelphia? Of Massachusetts (surely never that!)? Or of the world?
Are the AHA and OAH not historical societies? The one reaction the
organization is unlikely to survive is ridicule. It may be too late.

In addition, those who have read what for another organization would be
termed its "prospectus" are forced, in this day of exquisite
sensitivity to words, to take note of the name of the society's own
prospectus: its "Manifesto." Those who claim to seek the resurrection
of political, institutional, and diplomatic history ought to exhibit
less of a political tin ear than that. There have been manifestos
elsewhere, but something tells me that the term is rather foreign to
the American experience.

But let us turn to evidence. In a wry commentary some years ago on
certain kinds of increasingly popular argumentation, Francis Oakley
coined the term "disheveled anecdotalism." One would like to think
that you and your colleagues would avoid that method. So far you
haven't. To be sure, the space you're allotted on an op-ed page
prevents you from making your case fully. And surely you're right to
cite some of the more egregious examples of academic folly, such as
history courses in "bodyworks," meeting sessions on "constructing
menstruation," and the use of neologisms like "privileging" (but
shouldn't we also add "hegemonic"?), against which all of us can justly
rage (and many of us laugh). (Although I must say that the sheer
foolishness of some historians reminds me frequently, and gives me
heart, that historians are normal human beings and not, as some would
think, people out of the ordinary.) But to suggest that such courses
and such terms are universal, that they've taken over all departments,
and that young scholars who don't pursue fashionable studies are kept
from professorships seems to me simply wrong on its face. Until you
provide us with strong studies (not anecdotal ones) in your favor, your
enterprise doesn't deserve the support or respect of historians who,
even from undergraduates, normally require better evidence than you offer.

Let me, however, provide my own slice of evidence (disheveled
anecdotes, too!)-and evidence to the contrary. Just this past weekend,
I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the
Early American Republic. A firm opponent of "fragment " institutions,
I have never been a SHEAR member, although I have long been a student
of the early nation. Yet no one can overlook the strength and success
of this little institution in its 22 years-its journal, its meetings,
the seriousness of its member , the scholarship that it encourages.
Had you been at its recent meeting, you could not have subsequently
written as you did, at least ingenuously, in the Journal. Virtually
the entire meeting program was devoted to traditional issues or new
ones defined in ways that would have made your heart sing. No
neologisms here, no caucuses, no divisions of men and women (men
attended sessions on women, and vice versa), no ideological battles, no
"manifestos." Instead, graduate students mixed easily with senior or
scholars and newly minted academics-most of the latter of whom,
although political and institutional historians or, like you, students
of foreign affairs, had recently found line positions at colleges and
research universities throughout the country.

What was so encouraging to someone like myself, who has, like you, a
short fuse for inanity, was that no foolishness was to be heard or
seen. I have rarely attended a meeting from which I gained as much.
Everyone had put political beliefs aside and framed ed questions, in
your words, "in such a way that the answers turned on what the evidence
showed." If you are to claim that politics, "exclusionary attitudes,"
"feminist studies," and such have taken over the discipline, you will
have to explain away such evidence to the contrary. The status quo
"boring" so that people were rushing off to found a new society? On
the contrary. Venerable disciplinary questions were being treated in a
manner of engagement, liveliness, and wit that was anything but boring.
And women were not being pushed aside for not doing "feminist
history," nor, inasmuch as a majority of the papers were given by
graduate students or young assistant professors, was there evidence of
aspiring professionals "not getting a fair shake from the system."

Next, let's take the strategy of the soi-disant Historical Society.
You and I can fairly differ about whether a "come outer" approach works
or can work in a situation such as the one you claim the discipline
faces. But, again, the facts, I fear, are not on your side-or at least
I interpret them differently than you do. You imply-and I wager that,
like I, in the solitude of your office you more loudly complain-that we
risk becoming a discipline of self-professed victims and that we pursue
victim studies . Much of what has been produced in the name of Clio in
the last quarter century can surely be called that. But here again, to
make a robust case for your course of action, you have to convince me
of two things. The first is that, whether in the name o of victims or
not, the last quarter century has not given us (with serious costs to
be sure) the greatest advances in understanding of other people at
other times in other places that the discipline has ever before
experienced. You and I may not always like the tone, the approach, and
the ideology that undergirds and advances this understanding. But if
you can find another era in which we've learned so much about workers,
colonial peoples, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and misfits-to
say nothing o of elites, white men, majorities, "normal" people, and
politics and institutions (my particular interest) and foreign
relations (yours)-I should like you to cite it to me and make your case
to all the world. You are free not to like what we've learned; you are
free to pursue other kinds of scholarship than those which are
fashionable. (In fact, yours is the kind of scholarship I pursue,
sometimes, I fear, at the risk of seeming an anachronism; but I do so
out of love for the subject, and nothing will deter me from that.) But
you must do better than to dismiss the results of this scholarship as
mere victim, ideological, or self-referential history.

The second thing of which you have to convince me is that you and your
colleagues are not themselves engaging in what you and I apparently
both detest: whining. Yes, you've been momentarily pushed aside by new
currents of thought. By unspoken consensus, the majority of historians
have decided that, at least for now, we know enough of traditional
subjects and must learn more-and learn to think about that "more"
better-about subjects previously ignored. But rather than staying
within the AHA and the OAH and fighting for your subjects, for space on
their annual meeting programs, for posts on their governing boards,
and, most important, for the epicentral significance of issues of
politics, ideas, power, and wars, you've decided to take the easy way
out.

Perhaps you've admitted defeat (although I hope not). But surely you
can be accused, as you accuse others, of complaining rather than
battling, of yourselves trying to change the rules of the game rather
than using the ones that exist, and, worst, of moving off onto your own
isolated terrain with the possible result that others can more easily
ignore your just claims to seriousness and attention. In that soil lie
the seeds of your own irrelevance. You will welcome everyone to
membership, you say in your article. But why would those whom you
attack join? Why would Bill Buckley join the Democratic Party or Tom
Hayden attend a Republican convention? You risk hiving yourself off
into another discrete segment of historians, publishing yet another
journal in which scholars talk to one another but not to anyone else,
meeting warmly each year with comrades in negative reference to the
others with whom you disagree, hyperventilating about the delicts of
most historians, and gaining the exquisite satisfaction of being in the
right. That is not enough.

Finally, I have to remind you of the thin theoretical base of the
claims that are implicit in your approach. Out of the
turmoils-evidentiary, ideological, social, cultural, and theoretical-of
the past decades has arisen a body of thought about objectivity,
language, evidence, argument, presentation, and even the very existence
of independent historical knowledge. I refer of course to the work of
such historians as Haydn White, James Kloppenberg, Tom Haskell, David
Hollinger, Bob Berkhofer, and most recently David Harlan-to name only a
few and only those in the Anglo-American tradition. Underlying much of
the disintegration of purpose, comity, and institution in academic life
is a vital debate, not yet resolved (and possibly never to be) about
the nature of reality, perception, and fact. The notion of "historical
truth" is not universally considered, as you write, to be "hopelessly
naive" or "dismissed out of hand." Far from it. Some of the best
minds in the discipline wrestle with the very nature of historical
truth in every word they write. One who thinks deeply and seriously
about historical truth must accept the possibility that, whether you or
I like it or not, it will never be possible on philosophic grounds to
accept older notions of truth, historical or otherwise. This may
indeed mark a revolution in human affairs, and so it is not likely that
the actions and words of a few historians can avail against the
powerful thrusts of epistemology, French theory, deconstruction,
postmodernism, and the he like. They have permanently altered our
world-they are indeed, as you say, "more basic"-and no historical
society will hold back their forces.

I should also point out in closing, if somewhat parenthetically, that
your analysis of the state of what you call "the profession" pertains
principally to the academic profession. An entire body of new
practices, little noticed by too many academic historians though of
great consequence to their students, has come into being, and it goes
under the name of public history. An increasing number (now close to
40%) of aspiring historians-whether by necessity or choice is still
unclear-are entering this other profession within history's discipline.
Your fears about the fate of graduate students, which, as I argue
above, I believe are misplaced on other grounds, may also be misplaced
on this one. To be sure, many are being disappointed in their search
for academic posts. But many are carrying Clio's light beyond the
classroom, and a historical society that ignores these historians, as
well as the methodological and historiographical issues they raise,
ignores them at its peril.

In this letter, I have tried to be as fair and serious as your efforts
deserve. So I close with the hope that you will try to provide the
evidence I seek and engage some of the issues that I raise here. They
are, I'm confident you will agree, important issues, and issues on
which more heat has been vented than light shone in recent years. They
cry out for evidence, for analytical rigor, and for theoretical
sophistication. If the new organization, despite my objections, could
achieve what has been so lacking in recent decades of charges and
countercharges-namely, evidence-based, non-ideological studies of the
recent history of the discipline of history-that would be a genuine
contribution to us all. To do so, however, will require quite
different approaches than the ones that you and your colleagues (my
colleagues, too) have so far adopted.

That such a wide range of people, many of whom I know and admire, have
seen fit to join your new organization gives me pause about not joining
myself. But I cannot wish well to yet another fragment society, one
built so far upon such a shallow foundation of evidence, upon such a
tone of grievance, upon the name that it claims, and upon the strategy
it pursues. The society may flourish, and I wish well for the work of
its members. But it will not have my support. For how can we all pull
together if we all pull apart?

With best regards,

Sincerely, /s/

James M. Banner, Jr.

[END]

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

Dear Jim,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With best regards,
Marc (Trachtenberg)

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

Dear Marc:

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

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

Without repeating what I earlier wrote about the society's name and the
vocabulary it employs, let me nevertheless take up that last point
first. When one sees a roster of names composed principally (albeit
not exclusively) of people like me-male, white, and over a certain
age-one is justified, I think, in taking this demographic deformation
to have some significance. Why is the society attractive to such a
comparatively homogeneous group of people? one is forced to ask. I
don't think the answer is far to seek. We are those who have in effect
been on the defensive-been put on the defensive-since the 1960s to
justify the entire structure of intellectual endeavor and discourse
since the Enlightenment. It is we who have seen our previously secure
positi ons (of every kind) threatened by deep change in our public,
private, and professional worlds. Should it therefore come as any
surprise that, aggrieved, some would wish to protest and fight back?
Fine with me. I am no stranger to the costs of being wha t I am, and
occasionally I have had to riposte with more than a laugh. Often, to
bear that to which I've been witness has required a rather hefty dose
of will and applied rationality to trounce my aroused emotions-but only
because I believe that much of what I detest is the necessary cost of
progress. Therefore, I am surely warranted in suspecting that there
lurks behind the claims of cool reasonableness offered by the founders
of the society something else at work. No hard evidence here of
over-determ ination, just a sort of suspicion borne of a few decades of
existence. This is relevant to our shared concerns, I believe, because
it reaches to my conviction that the response to thirty years of change
represented by the society is both excessive, misgu ided, and too
late-and thus not likely to do much good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With best wishes,

Cordially,

/s/ Jim Banner