Timothy Burke posted last Friday about Ross Douthat's critique of Harvard's curriculum in the Atlantic Monthly, which might have been appropriately and sardonically titled,"The Education of Ross Douthat."

Douthat doesn't go as far as Henry Adams; he doesn't refer to himself in the third person. But he might well have quoted Adams, his fellow Harvard alumnus, who made most of Douthat's points in 1918:

For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. (p. 50)

Now, no one really takes Adams' lack of seriousness about Harvard seriously either. Indeed, Adams spends his entire autobiography complaining about the ill fit between his nineteenth-century education and his twentieth-century experience, but in the process of doing so he does a pretty good job convincing his readers that he's a pretty educated guy, in all senses of the word. Harvard must not have been that bad for Adams. After all, he went back to work there.

But back to Douthat. There has been more discussion of the article at Left2Right, Brad DeLong, and Matthew Yglesias. Douthat speaks back here and here.

Most of these discussions concern the covering laws that Douthat suggests about contemporary philosophy -- that the dearth of metaphysics and morality in philosophy departments has doomed the discipline to popular irrelevance. Several philosophers in the above discussions have bristled. Since this is a history blog, though, I might as well point out that historians make out even more poorly in Douthat's article, what with all their pointless essay questions, microhistory, and, of course, their postmodern sensibilities. (I might respond by invoking Henry Adams too:"In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such -- or falsified. Adams wanted to do neither." Ah, the eternal dilemma of the conscientious history teacher.)

In both the article and one of his blog responses to critics, Douthat takes history and their disciplinary cousins to task for what he calls"the tendency of the humanities to become more scientistic in various ways over the last half-century -- via the dominance of Theory in the English and Literature departments; via the emphasis on primary research, material history, etc. in the History Departments; or more recently, via the rise of rational-choice theory in the realm of political science." This seems to me an odd way of thinking about what it means for the humanities to be"scientistic," and it is especially disorienting that the article dubs this baneful tendency as"postmodern." Emphasizing primary research and adopting rational-choice theory also seem to me horses of very different colors; I'm not sure I see what the tendency that Douthat is identifying is, unless it's the standard complaint that humanistic writing has become more science-like -- jargony and what not.

What I really wanted to point out, however, was Douthat's response to those (like me) who believe he underestimates the crucial role of the student in higher education. His response is that we overestimate that role. I'm inclined to agree (as Burke also seemed to suggest) that a balance has to be struck between administrative facilitation and student self-motivation in order for that mysterious cocktail called"education" to be shaken up. Douthat's complaint about those who place the onus on students reads like this:

I tend to think if you take a bunch of teenagers, however smart they may be, and drop them into a stress-ridden, hypercompetitive school in which the only academic guidance takes the form of a terrible, terrible Core Curriculum, most of them will take the path of least resistance, seek out easy classes and popular, potentially lucrative concentrations (hello, economics!), and generally fail to get the most of their four years. Is this a moral failure on the students' part, and therefore something that the administration and faculty shouldn't be concerned with? DeLong et. al. seem to think so. Their attitude is apparently that if you didn't do a good job picking, without any kind of guidance (I don't know what the advising system was like in DeLong's era, but it's nearly nonexistent now), thirty-two classes out of the hundreds and hundreds of potential offerings that Harvard flings at you -- well, then tough luck, buddy. And good luck at the consulting firm.

It struck me while reading this how uncannily it sounds like a liberal view of government. We know from others of his writings that Douthat doesn't like what he calls"left-liberalism." But his impassioned critique of the university as a passive institution, and his defense of the betrayed student from the charge of"moral failure," sound an awful lot like he's a closet liberal. Try this experiment: go back through the paragraph above, and read it this way:

I tend to think if you take a bunch of [people], however smart they may be, and drop them into a stress-ridden, hypercompetitive [market] ... most of them will take the path of least resistance ... and generally fail to get the most of their [potential]. Is this a moral failure on the [people's] part, and therefore something that the administration and [government] shouldn't be concerned with? DeLong et. al. seem to think so. Their attitude is apparently that if you didn't do a good job picking, without any kind of guidance ... [life options] out of the hundreds and hundreds of potential offerings that [the world] flings at you -- well, then tough luck, buddy. And good luck [on the unemployment line].

Okay, it's a highly selective edit, but it raises this question: Why are so many conservative critics willing to make structural arguments about the failures of"the system" when it comes to higher education, while they sneer at the insistence of liberal critics that"failure" in the school of hard knocks is not knock-down evidence of"moral failure" on the part of people who need help now? Are the rules that apply to universities different from those that apply to all other social institutions?

(Cross-posted at Mode for Caleb.)

Earlier this week, I posted at Mode for Caleb on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, the late nineteenth-century novelist long presumed to be an African American but now believed to have been white. The post followed up on Scott McLemee's column at Inside Higher Ed and Ralph Luker's post here at Cliopatria.

One of the things I suggested was this:"There seems to have been an enormous rush to judgment that the evidence provided by Holly Jackson, the Brandeis graduate student aforementioned, is straightforward proof about Kelley-Hawkins' race." That was a sloppy sentence, because it implied that I think Jackson might be wrong about Kelly-Hawkins' whiteness. McLemee, who generously linked to my post from his main page, responded thus:

As for CM's idea that there is a"rush to judgment," that certainly crossed my mind. But Holly Jackson actually makes a strong case for EDKH as white, while nobody has any solid evidence that she was black -- and when you read the scholarship, you notice people bending themselves out of shape to find some reason to think that she was. (I could have said more about that in the piece, including one case that verged on outright dishonesty, but that seemed like overdoing it.)

I agree completely that Jackson's evidence on the matter demolishes the traditional story about Kelly-Hawkins, since the traditional story is now apparently supported by no evidence at all. But if you look closer at my original statement on the"rush to judgment," what I wanted to question was not Jackson's particular evidence about Kelley-Hawkins, but rather the general presumption that certain kinds of historical evidence about race are inherently more decisive than others.

The idea that Kelley-Hawkins was black seems to have rested largely on the ambiguity of a photograph that appeared in one of her novels. Jackson's case for her whiteness rests, on the other hand, on family memories and documentary sources like the census. What I wanted to offer, however, was a cautionary warning that documentary sources about race are not necessarily less ambiguous than pictures. For instance, I wondered in the post about how nineteenth-century enumerators recorded" color" or"race." If, in some cases, determining a person's"race" was left to the enumerator's discretion, then a"W" in the census is not necessarily less ambiguous than a picture. It could simply record what a contemporary saw when he looked at Kelley-Hawkins. Does the census always offer us more information about race than meets the eye, or simply the same"information" provided from a contemporary perspective and packaged in documentary form? Such, at least, is a question I thought worth asking about Jackson's evidence. (An article by Martha Hodes in the February 2003 American Historical Review raised these questions about another Massachussetts family in the nineteenth century.)

At Coffee Grounds, Evan Roberts replied with an extremely helpful post about census procedures, which includes links to instructions that were given to enumerators. This information supplemented comments that Julie Meloni made on my original post, drawing on her own experiences using the census for genealogical research.

I highly recommend Evan's post, and I entirely agree with this sentence:"What I think is significant is that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and her ancestors are always described as white. That is firmer evidence of being white, whatever 'being' and 'white' mean." What I wanted to say in my post was that we should continue to add that final clause to whatever we say about race in the nineteenth century. This does not mean that we cannot make judgments, on the basis of contemporary descriptions, about the"race" of historical actors. But it means we must always keep in mind how ambiguous and arbitrary such descriptions about race could be and still are. And we must careful not to assume uncritically that certain kinds of evidence -- like the census -- somehow offer glosses of what"being" and"white" meant that are more determinate than other kinds of evidence -- like photographs. (Incidentally, Coffee Grounds also has two recent posts on the distinction between"quantitative" and"qualitative" sources that might be relevant here. I'm suggesting that even"quantitative" sources like the census were"qualitative.")

That's why I also suggested that the scholarship that has been done under the assumption that Kelley-Hawkins was not white should not simply be thrown out with the bathwater as a bunch of political misdirection. By presuming that Kelly-Hawkins was a black author creating aggresively white characters, that scholarship had to wrestle with what"being" and"white" meant. Without having read any of the scholarship that McLemee profiles, I think its insight that race can be malleable and strategically deployed is a valuable one. Although in this case scholars turn out to have been barking up the wrong tree, the bending themselves out of shape that they had to do is the kind of exercise that now makes us more limber as historians of race. In that limited sense, the underlying assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of that scholarship were not worthless. And it would be a shame if the conclusion that people drew from Kelley-Hawkins' case was that any scholarship on the cultural construction of"whiteness" and"blackness" is simply the product of postmodern mumbling and political correctness.

In a thought-provoking recent post, the Little Professor writes that"literary scholars ... study how texts work." Historians, on the other hand,"study how texts exist." These two scholarly endeavors, of course, overlap and complement each other. But as the post goes on to say,"it's very difficult to make the historian cohabit peacefully with the literary critic."

It is especially difficult to make them cohabit in the classroom.

Discussion-based history classes are usually organized around historical texts -- novels, autobiographies, slave narratives, and so on. We assign such texts to students partly as primary sources. Their existence tells historians something about the times in which they were produced. Yet we also want students to approach these texts like literary scholars, to think about how texts work. The difficulty, for teachers and students alike, is to approach texts in both ways at the same time.

Consider a syllabus favorite like Frederick Douglass' Narrative. On the one hand, the text serves well as a window onto the experience of enslavement in antebellum Maryland. On the other hand, the Narrative is clearly not mere reportage. Douglass is reporting events that actually happened, but he is also engaged in particular rhetorical projects, which are shaped by still other events in his life and other texts he has read. For instance, Douglass foregrounds gruesome examples of slave women being whipped partly because he knows that antislavery readers expect such examples as part of the genre. Douglass also addresses the Narrative to particular defenses of slavery being offered in the North, interjecting at several points that if slaves sometimes seem contented, they are only pretending to be so for their own safety. His examples are selected and presented not just as episodes in a memoir, but as evidence for an argument.

Yet many students are more comfortable thinking of a text like the Narrative as a report rather than as a rhetorical project. How, then, does a teacher help students analyze the rhetorical and argumentative structure of the text without undermining its value as a piece of reportage?

Often the surest way of helping students to read a text as rhetoric is to present it to them as fictional or false. If you posit some disconnection between actual events and a text, it is easier for students to address the question of how the text"works."

Suppose, for example, you are teaching another syllabus favorite: Olaudah Equiano's narrative. In an earlier comment thread, Timothy Burke and Jonathan Dresner had a brief exchange about Vincent Carretta's hypothesis that Equiano was not born in Africa, as his autobiography suggests, but in North America. This hypothesis is still hotly debated by scholars (I've been reading Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, which includes a thoughtful appendix on the debate). But from a pedagogical standpoint, Carretta's hypothesis is useful because it unsettles students' expectations about how the text came to be and where Equiano came from. Once we are open to the possibility that Equiano was not born in Africa, it becomes easier to think about how his representations of Africa work. What conventions of abolitionist literature do they follow? How do they reflect Equiano's views as a Christian? How do they address particular arguments being circulated in the Atlantic World about the"savagery" of native Africans? Raise a question about how the text came to exist, and students eagerly discuss how the text works.

For similar reasons, it is easier to ask students about how proslavery texts work than it is to ask how antislavery texts work, because students are (hopefully!) constitutionally skeptical about the former but inclined to trust the latter.

For example, Catherine Clinton's new biography of Harriet Tubman quotes from a Philadelphian, John Bell Robinson, who published a fierce attack on Tubman after she brought her parents to the North in 1857. His"invective became even more lethal when he launched into a diatribe about [Tubman's] removal of her aging parents from a slave state. Robinson's reasoning was that of a quintessential proslavery apologist: 'Now there are no old people of any color more caressed and better taken care of than the old worn-out slaves of the South ...'" (p. 143).

Here students are likely to have no problem seeing that Robinson's text is doing certain kinds of rhetorical"work." At the very least, Robinson's claims are unlikely to be taken as simple reportage about the treatment of elderly slaves, especially once students learn that Tubman's parents were already free when Tubman brought them North. So Robinson has his facts wrong in more than one way. But then Clinton goes on to point out that"it suited both proslavery and abolitionist camps to portray Harriet's parents as an elderly enslaved couple. One side claimed their dependence upon some fictive master's goodwill, while the other painted the harsh cruelties of whips and chains if they did not escape" (p. 144). Even though Tubman's father had been manumitted in 1840 and her mother had been free since 1855, abolitionists sometimes folded their story into Tubman's other heroic rescues of enslaved family members.

Clinton's point would probably help students see how abolitionist texts"worked." But the lesson learned may come at a high cost. For it would now be easy for students to wonder:"If Robinson was lying and had his facts wrong ... did abolitionists also have their facts wrong?" The realization that Robinson had a rhetorical argument to make helps students call into question his facts. But once you point out that abolitionists also had a rhetorical argument to make, students might wonder whether their facts were wrong too. That's certainly not necessarily bad, but it can be if students conclude from this discussion that abolitionists were"as wrong" as Robinson was -- and wrong in the same ways.

What I'm getting at here are old and familiar problems -- about the relationship between authors and audiences, rhetoric and reality, texts and facts. But I'm encountering these problems for the first time from the perspective of a teacher. And I'm worried about the potential pitfalls in the pedagogical methods I've been describing -- using the Caretta hypothesis, for instance, to discuss the rhetorical structure of Equiano's narrative, or pointing out that abolitionists and proslavery apologists alike overlooked the freedom of Tubman's parents because that fact did not serve their arguments.

My worry is that students will learn to associate the idea of"rhetoric" with dissemblance. The strategies I've outlined might reinforce a preexisting sense that rhetoric can be equated with bias, which has an almost universally negative connotation as antithetical to truthfulness.

I remember facing a similar pedagogical challenge when I worked as a tutor in symbolic logic. Any Introduction to Logic course begins by drawing a basic distinction between the validity of an argument and its soundness. An argument is formally valid if the premises entail the conclusion. But a sound argument is a valid argument whose premises are also true. I often found that students had a difficult time understanding the distinction between validity and soundness. The easiest way to help was to present an argument that was valid but clearly unsound. For example ...

If the moon is made of green cheese, then two plus two equals four.
The moon is made of green cheese.
Therefore, two plus two equals four.

Clearly, if the premises to this argument are true, then the conclusion is also true. But in this case, also clearly, the second premise is false. (It throws students for another loop to inform them that the first premise is true, but that's another issue ...) The argument is valid but unsound. Usually such examples help students distinguish between validity and soundness, but inevitably some students will start to think of valid arguments as always unsound. That is, they will associate validity with moons of green cheese.

The analogy isn't exact, but the pedagogical problems with teaching texts are similar. You can show students how Equiano's arguments worked by calling into question whether he was born in Africa. But then you risk encouraging them to associate rhetoric with falsehood. And that would be to fail in your original objective, which was to show how even a report that gets its facts right is structured according to certain rhetorical and narrative conventions.

I talk about this as if it is merely a pedagogical problem, but of course it isn't. There are thorny issues of textual representation and rhetoric here that befuddle all historians and literary scholars. But as a beginning teacher, I'm discovering for the first time how especially thorny these problems can be in the classroom. And although I think one goal of education is to model informed and thoughtful befuddlement, confusion does not always signify an appreciation of complexity. Advice from non-beginning teachers (or swifter beginners) would be very much appreciated.

(Cross-posted at Mode for Caleb.)

A copy of David Reynolds' new biography of John Brown is on its way from Amazon. I'm anxious to read the book because I have already read several troubling reviews, including those by Barbara Ehrenreich in the New York Times, Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, and Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. What bothers me about these reviews is their barely veiled implication that Brown, because of his willingness to kill for his convictions, had more radical and more authentic convictions than run-of-the-mill abolitionists who were not willing to kill.

All of the reviewers make clear that Reynolds wants to resuscitate Brown's reputation and to show that his violence was not maniacal or insane, but intelligible, radically egalitarian, and perhaps even necessary. Following the Transcendentalists' own celebration of Brown, Reynolds apparently portrays Brown as a hero. (In the best review I've read, David Blight reports that Reynolds casts Brown anachronistically as a"good terrorist.") But every hero needs a foil. And for the reviewers, as perhaps for Reynolds too, that part is furnished by Northern white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who are portrayed as though they were lily-livered sissies and passive pacifists until Brown came along to steel their nerves.

Gopnik, for instance, calls William Lloyd Garrison"the white Martin Luther King, Jr.," but he adds a"but.""But Garrison, like Dr. King, was a pacifist, and, right up to the moment when the war broke out, he had no really practical plan for ending slavery, aside from 'separation' (i.e., the decoupling of the North from the South) and moral suasion." While Gopnik tars"moral suasion" with the usual brush--it was not"really practical"--Hitchens goes farther. After noting that Reynolds goes to great lengths to rationalize Brown's violent methods, Hitchens glibly says that the"superfluity" of such apologies is"easily demonstrated. Not only had the slaveholders perpetrated the preponderance of atrocities, and with impunity at that, but they had begun to boast that northerners and New Englanders were congenitally soft."

Hitchens seems to agree that non-Brown abolitionists were"soft"; he relishes Reynolds' comparison between Oliver Cromwell and Brown, and he refers to moderate antislavery Northerners as"invertebrate Lincolnians." Ehrenreich echoes the spineless pacifists theme, writing that"antislavery activists ... were often pacifists and usually the victims of their political opponents -- a relationship symbolized by a South Carolina congressman's crippling beating of the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate. With his guns and pikes, Brown reversed the equation -- stiffening the backbones of Northern abolitionists, terrifying the white South." Even Gopnik, who goes relatively easy on the Garrisonians, cannot resist saying,"Where Garrison, though utterly passionate and courageous in his denunciations, was a thorough man of the North, with lawyerly-journalistic gifts of argument and irony, Brown was a man of romantic feeling." And, referring to an 1835 incident in which a violent crowd of rioters attempted to lynch the radical editor, Gopnik avers that"even Garrison, a man of unexampled courage, could not face down a mob in Boston but had to be saved by the police."

Umm ... he was facing a lynch mob that had managed to tie a noose around him. Is Gopnik really prepared to say that Garrison was less courageous than Brown because the police rescued him from his attackers? (Actually, that's not even entirely accurate: Garrison was lifted to safety by a couple of burly rioters who took pity on him. And he was driven away to safety by an unidentified black hackney-driver, who used his whip to keep the crowd at bay. The police assisted in Garrison's rescue only grudgingly, if at all, and when Garrison was brought for protection to City Hall, he was told that he could not stay there because his presence made the building unsafe.)

There was probably never a day in Garrison's adult life when there was not a bounty on his head somewhere in the South. But was he somehow less courageous than Brown because, unlike the Old Man, he was unwilling to lop off the heads of Southerners?

When historians compare radical reformers, it is certainly appropriate to ask about the practicability of their different methods and even to judge the consistency of their convictions, not because historians are the best judges of character, but because making those judgments can help reveal what their bedrock convictions were. But there seems to be something more going on in these comparisons between Brown and Garrison. What seems to be driving the resuscitation of Brown's reputation is not just an historical judgment but an ethical judgment about his superior courage and radicalism. Read between the lines and you'll find the essentially ahistorical insinuation that principled pacifists are really cowards; that those who choose liberty or death to its enemies are more radical than those who would rather die than kill; that meekness is weakness; that the vision of lions lying down with lambs is a pleasing fantasy invented by lambs; that, by a process of elimination, people turn to pacifism when they don't have"practical" plans for making society more just. Pacifists, to paraphrase Ehrenreich, are seen as"victims." Only the violent are thought of as valient.

Clearly these statements are moving outside the realm of purely historical analysis and into the realm of ethics. I'm not necessarily uncomfortable with that movement; I don't believe people who tell me they can study history without allowing their thoughts to at least drift in the direction of ethical reflection. But so long as we are headed in that direction, allow me to point out the irony of book reviewers consigning"moral suasion" to the dustbin of history and dead pacifists to the ship of fools. What are historians and writers, after all, if they are not persons who believe that the word is more powerful than the sword? And if they do not believe this, then why are they in a byline instead of on a frontline?

I realize that question might not be entirely fair. Not everyone who believes that violence is more radical than moral suasion is thereby obligated to take up arms and rid the world of its wrongs. But such reviewers are essentially castigating people like Garrison for failing to live up to their convictions, to stiffen their spines, to get their hands dirty or bloody. So forgive me if I can't avoid poking a bit at the inconsistency of"inverterbrate Hitchensians." (One could point out the same thing about the Transcendentalist scriveners who were most responsible for Brown's apotheosis. Was Emerson really more courageous than Garrison simply because his words celebrated antislavery violence?)

But that's not the main point I want to make here. Skeptical as I am of the ethical claim that violence is always more radical than nonviolence, I am even more concerned that this view is historically suspect, for at least two reasons.

First, nonviolence was not merely an instrumental strategy for many radical abolitionists; for many of them, it was integral to their most radical ideologies. If we view their pacifism as nothing more than a strategy or personal trait, then it is easier to portray that pacifism as a sign of whimsy or weakness. But in fact, for many Garrisonians, a commitment to"nonresistance" was much more than a mere strategy, and certainly more than a simple sign of courage or its lack. It was at the core of their critique of slavery, government, and much else. According to nonresistants, any exercise of violence was an unjust usurpation of God's authority, an immoral abuse of power. From their perspective, that was a large reason why slavery was wrong--it assigned to the master violent power that did not belong to him or her. For many Garrisonians, then, their renunciation of violence was of a piece with their renunciation of slavery. To call their pacifism a mere lack of spine ignores how it shaped their posture towards slavery and other violent abuses of power--like the treatment of Native Americans, the hawkish expansionism that sparked the Mexican War, and unequal marriages.

I could generalize this point to other theorists of nonviolence like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. For both men, nonviolence was not simply a strategy or a practical plan. Both argued that direct nonviolent action was more expedient than violence, but this was not their only defense of pacifism. Rather, the commitments that informed their pacifism also informed their views of the state, of the human person, of justice; to remove the pacifism would not just be to make a change of"plan," it would force thinkers like Gandhi and King to rethink their entire philosophies. It's also simply false in their cases, as in the case of the Garrisonians, to suggest that nonviolence put a brake on their radicalism. Some of their contemporaries certainly did suggest that--think John Brown or Malcolm X--but they were not necessarily right. Progressives today usually praise King in his later years for moving in more radical directions in his thinking about poverty and the war in Vietnam, but they often forget that this trajectory was an outgrowth of his philosophy of nonviolence. His radicalism, like Garrison's, did not view pacifism as a mere tool in the reformer's hand, but as part of the hand itself.

Second: not only is nonviolence often integral to radical programs; violence is often integral to conservative or reactionary worldviews. It may seem as though John Brown's belief that slaves and abolitionists needed to rise up in holy war against the South could only have radical and egalitarian overtones. But that very belief was also integral to the arguments of those who opposed racial equality and emancipation. In an article in the Journal of American History that recently won the ABC-CLIO Award from the OAH, my friend Francois Furstenberg has argued persuasively that the definition of"freedom" as"resistance" to oppression might actually have served to legitimate personal slavery, since it allowed defenders of the system to claim that slaves who did not resist their enslavement were somehow" choosing" their plight autonomously. Implicitly, I think, calling Garrisonians or Lincolnians"spineless" can potentially point in a similar direction, since it suggests that those who do not, like Brown, put their swords where their words are must not"want" freedom as much.

There are also gendered overtones to the idea that Brown was more genuinely radical than Garrison, since violent resistance was defined throughout the antebellum period (as it probably still is for many people today) as a"masculine" virtue, an act in which men prove that they are manly men. The word"sissy" itself carries that overtone, and to imply, even indirectly, that Garrison was a sissy also comes across as a derogative accusation of effeminacy. The connected implication is that women are incapable of proving their mettle the way that John Brown could. Hitchens' review opens with a paragraph that suggests I'm not making this up. He relates the story of Lincoln's telling Harriet Beecher Stowe that she was the woman who started the Civil War. Says Hitchens,"That fondly related anecdote [about Stowe] illustrates the persistent tendency to Parson Weemsishness in our culture. It was not all the tear-jerking sentiment of Uncle Tom's Cabin that catalyzed the War Between the States. It was, rather, the blood-spilling intransigence of John Brown, field-tested on the pitiless Kansas prairies and later deployed at Harpers Ferry." Women novelists become"tear-jerkers" and sentimentalists, on this view, and thus incapable of catalyzing social change. Rather, it's the"field-tested" violence of John Brown and his manly men that get the credit for emancipation.

In sum, while it certainly is appropriate for historians to compare and contrast Brown and Garrison, and to weigh the relative radicalism of their approaches to emancipation, it is historically misleading to suggest that their positions on violence are failproof indicators of their radical commitments. I'm looking forward to reading Reynolds because I think that Brown's reputation is in need of some resuscitating and subtle revising. But why is it that reputation-revivals in history must so often be zero-sum games, so that someone else's stock has to fall for someone else's stock to rise? In this case, I've suggested, it's unfair to praise Brown's radicalism at the expense of Garrison--at least if one is doing so by suggesting that Garrison's pacifism was nothing more than a lack of courage or clear thinking. It certainly is true that nonviolence sometimes is a sign of cowardice, but so is violence. It's always startling to me that despite the fact that most people accept detailed taxonomies of different kinds of violence, which range along a spectrum from justified and heroic violence to illicit abuse, very few of us have similarly well developed taxonomies of different kinds of pacifism, which can also range from the heroic to the thoughtless. I have suggested that a simple dichotomization of radicalism that places"fight" on the one hand and"flight" on the other does violence to history. I also think it does violence to our moral intuitions, but I don't need to make that argument to prove that, historically, (a) nonviolence is often integral to radicalism and that (b) violence is often integral to conservatism.

(Cross-posted at Mode for Caleb.)