Historians Should Embrace Politics

Some historians tend to follow politics closely. Robert Dallek, Leo Ribuffo, and Joyce Appleby, for example, have recently signed on to support Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency, along with some of their fellow colleagues. The organization “Historians Against the War,” for another example, has called for an end to the American “occupation of Iraq” and earlier this year successfully lobbied the American Historical Association to condemn the war. Most historians, unfortunately, do not ascend to this level of political involvement. Even fewer write about such political experiences. I wish they would.

Politically-inclined historians might be interested in my new book Daschle v. Thune: Anatomy of a High Plains Senate Race (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), which chronicles a Senate race in which, for the first time in more than half a century, a party leader in the United States Senate lost a re-election bid. Since this Senate race between Tom Daschle and John Thune coincided with the famously contentious Bush-Kerry Presidential race, The New York Times deemed it “the other big race of 2004.” Roll Call placed the contest in the top-ten Senate races of the last fifty years.

The setting for the race is South Dakota which, for those interested in close-run political races, is an ideal state to examine. The professional historian-turned-Senator George McGovern (with a history Ph.D. from Northwestern University) won his first race in South Dakota in 1962 by 597 votes. Now former Senator Tom Daschle won his first race for the House of Representatives in 1978 by 139 votes. Current Senator John Thune lost the 2002 Senate election to Senator Tim Johnson by 524 votes. South Dakota is no stranger to barn-burner elections.

South Dakota politics also provides a window on American political history in recent decades. The Daschle-Thune race of 2004 was largely shaped by the contours carved by 1960s liberalism and 1980s conservatism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, in keeping with the strength of political liberalism during those decades, South Dakota elected two of the most liberal members of the Senate, George McGovern and James Abourezk. As conservatives began to organize against the movements of the 1960s, however, both in South Dakota and nationally, the political appeal of liberalism withered. Senator Abourezk declined to run for re-election in 1978 and Senator McGovern met defeat in his 1980 re-election attempt as Reaganism surged nationally.

Tom Daschle worked for both Senators McGovern and Abourezk and carried on their liberal causes. John Thune, on the other hand, was in college when Reagan was elected President and became a product of the Reagan revolution. When Daschle and Thune ran against one another in 2004 it was a clash, writ small, of the larger forces of McGovernism and Reaganism which still animate American politics. In short, much can be learned about American politics in recent decades by studying the Daschle-Thune race of 2004.

During this important Senate race, I was consultant to now-Senator Thune and an assistant professor of history at South Dakota State University and so I had a good view of the action. Getting involved in the Senate race provided many lessons in practical politics that cannot be learned in library stacks and I commend the experience to other historians. Charles Beard was right when he lamented that the historical profession was impaired by “too much calm, not enough passion … too many books, not enough strife of experience.” [1] Jesse Lemisch, with a bit more flare, once said that a “good dose of tear gas makes us think more clearly as historians.” [2]

The socialist Michael Walzer made the best case for participatory history in his book, The Company of Critics. “Closeness is the crucial quality of the good social critic,” Walzer says when promoting the model of the “connected critic” over what Jacques Bouversee deems the “official marginality” of many university professors. Walzer also notes that “it is one of the discoveries of modern democracy—an advance that we have made over the Greeks—that by not killing the critic, we acquire the right not to admire him.” [3]

I realized, of course, that there would be inevitable criticism of combining scholarship and political involvement, but I thought it was important to use my unique vantage point and write an account of the Daschle-Thune race because it can tell us much about the practice of American politics. Too often, Thomas Carlyle once wrote, “Battles and war-tumults which for the time din every ear, and with joy or terror intoxicate every heart, pass away like tavern-brawls.” [4] I wanted to ensure that the details of the Daschle-Thune race did not fade into the recesses of our memory too quickly, losing “some significance that once was noted in them, some quality of enchantment that once was theirs,” as Carl Becker famously worried. [5]

As another political season quickly approaches, historians should get involved. This plunge into the public sphere will provide more perspectives which can only enhance teaching, historical scholarship, and the stacks-centered life of the scholar. American democracy needs more scholar-citizens. Do not forget your laptop, because what you see might inspire your next book.

Notes:

[1] Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 4.

[2] Jesse Lemisch, “2.5 Cheers for Bridging the Gap Between Activism and the Academy,” Radical History Review 85, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 241.

[3] Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xiii, 8, 16.

[4] Thomas Carlyle, “On History” (1830), reprinted in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: Meridian Books, 1968), 93.

[5] Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review vol. 37, no. 2 (January 1932), 236.

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