On what public scholars can and should do, these days and all days.
Over the last couple of years I’ve found myself, in thinking
about my goals for a wide variety of my pursuits—from this blog to my future book
projects, from certain aspects of my classroom work to other public commitments
like those with the New England
ASA—somewhat torn between a couple of distinct emphases, both answers to
King Theoden’s question, “What
can men do against such reckless hate?” Which is to say, in a moment when upward
of 60% of Republicans consistently buy into Birtherism, when a significant number
of our national conversations and narratives seem to have entirely unhinged
from any discernible or even debatable reality, what is the role of a public
scholar?
At times I find myself agreeing with the constant refrain of
one of my favorite bloggers, Digby,
who believes that far too often writers and thinkers on the left attempt to
take such a high road that they cede the most traveled paths to those voices on
the right who are willing to shout their arguments as loudly and as
passionately (and often, yes, as falsely) as possible. In a recent post she
linked to an 1820 essay by William
Hazlitt, entitled “On
the Spirit of Partisanship,” which illustrates just how much the two sides
have long (and perhaps always) been unfairly matched in this sense: “Their
object is to destroy you,” Hazlitt writes to his fellow liberals about their
conservative opponents, “your object is to spare them.” Yet as tempting, and at
times certainly as necessary, as it can be to fight fire with fire, at the end
of the day I still believe that the most central goal of any liberal writer—and
doubly so of any public scholar—should be to push back against oversimplifying
narratives, to argue for more complex and dense and genuine understandings of
American culture and history and identity and even politics. It’s a long arc
for sure, but if enough such voices make themselves part of the conversation,
it can still bend to justice.
It’s important to add, though, that providing such a
measured and complex perspective is not mutually exclusive to fighting for an
era’s most significant causes, a fact that is exemplified by today’s nominee
for the American Hall of Inspiration, Albion W. Tourgée
(1838-1905). Tourgée managed to be, for many decades, both one of America’s
most thoughtful public scholars and commentators and a passionate advocate for
the issue (racial equality) about which he felt most strongly: a Civil War
veteran who was struggling with his wounds in the climate of his native Ohio,
he moved with his wife to North Carolina and became a Radical Republican
supporter of Reconstruction and freedmen’s rights there; he wrote a pair of
profoundly complex and self-reflective and at times ironic and cynical novels
about that experience, A Fool’s Errand, by One
of the Fools (1879) and Bricks Without Straw
(1880), and continued to publish works of fiction for the rest of his career;
but even after moving back north in 1881 he published a syndicated newspaper
column (“A Bystander’s Notes) in which he argued passionately for racial
equality on a variety of fronts (and against racial violence and discrimination
on at least as many). His opposition in that space to Louisiana’s segregated railways
led to his selection to argue
Homer Plessy’s 1896 case before the Supreme Court; in those arguments
Tourgée advanced his belief that justice should be “color-blind,” a phrase
which Justice John Harlan borrowed for his passionate dissenting opinion from
the Court’s pro-segregation (“separate but equal”) decision.
Tourgée was always, I believe, able to view himself and his
writing with the kind of distance that keeps one from becoming a caricature, a
windbag so fond of one’s own voice and arguments that no one not already
convinced will even listen. Yet he most certainly did not fear to tread into
some of his era’s most divisive and difficult questions, and in fact advanced
the same kind of measured and reasoned and profoundly impressive ideas there
that his Reconstruction novels force an audience to confront. Inspiring on
every level for sure. Final post in the series tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? What are the roles of public
scholars, and what aren’t? Why?
11/15 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two pioneering,
talented, and inspiring modernist
artists, Marianne
Moore and Georgia
O’Keeffe.
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