The Sins of the Founding Fathers

A great question came up in HST 346 (American Revolution) this week: Why weren't the Founding Fathers more laudable?  Many of them owned slaves, none of them thought women should have the vote, and most of them opposed much enlarging the franchise to include more white males.  A good number of them made a lot of money from the Revolution by speculating in land or currencies.

Students made two excellent point in response to this concern.  First, the Founding Fathers simply didn't share our assumptions about human equality--Jefferson's stirring words in the Declaration of Independence's preamble notwithstanding.  So we can't much fault them for not believing what we do.  Second, their movement toward equality, the establishment of a republic, provided the framework for progress in all of the above areas--well, except that people still make a lot of money from speculating in land and other commodities.

I'd add a third point.  I think that we have become so idealistic that we have unrealistic expectations for all of our public figures, past and present.  We greatly underestimate how powerful self-interest and evil are in the world, not to mention sheer inertia, our reflexive conservatism with it comes to change.  It is much easier to accomplish technological or scientific advances than moral or social or political ones.  Even the best of us are flawed, both in our characters and in our knowledge.  The Founders knew that.  We have forgotten it and are therefore often surprised by human frailties.

The History Channel and a Lost Opportunity

I've recently been contacted by a television show requesting some help on an historical subject.  If anything comes of it, I'll be sure to write about it here.  In any event, it reminded me of an earlier opportunity I did not handle well.

It was about ten years ago when the History Channel contacted me about appearing as one of the academic experts on a show of several minutes duration they were planning on Oregon.  Their goal was to cover all fifty states in a relatively short amount of time.

I had some broad themes in mind: the libertarian tradition in Oregon (low taxes, weak public institutions) and a long history of racial exclusion, for example.  But their principal interest was this: why couldn't you pump your own gas in Oregon?

I didn't think that was a very important question, so I didn't research it and had little to say about it.  And when I checked on the content of the show, years later, I found that they had used none of the material from the academic historians they had interviewed and instead found someone willing to talk about why you couldn't pump your own gas in Oregon.

At the time, I felt a sort of pride in taking the high ground.  In retrospect, though, I wish that I had researched the history of why one couldn't pump one's own gas in Oregon, then linked that history to some broader themes.

My unwillingness to adjust more fully to the History Channel's expectations is illustrative, I think, of a tendency among academic historians to discount popular history, to look down our noses at widespread interest in subjects such as local history and family history.  If we instead embraced these subjects and then related them to the broader, more interpretive subjects that we most care about, would we not be more widely read and listened to and influential--even more informed?

Thoughts on "Nebraska" and the Decline of American Freedom

Wendy and I watched "Nebraska" last night, and it prompted a couple of reflections.

First, though it's nice of Hollywood to every once in awhile to notice the vast stretch of unexplored territory between the two coasts--especially small towns--it would be even more impressive if films on these hinterlands could treat their residents with more respect.  There are men who live outside of LA and NYC who are interested in more than how long it takes to drive from one place to another.

Second--my first point notwithstanding--I thought the film did a fine job of depicting the sort of perpetual childhood that so many aging adults (present company certainly included) become mired in.  Woody, the declining father, has certainly suffered.  We learn that his parents were strict, that the Korean War wounded him, and his life partner has been, well, challenging.  And Woody's peculiar quest is driven in part by a desire to somehow make good his many failings as a father.  But it also strikes me that his often-expressed desire "to be left the hell alone" well articulates what the American Dream and the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence have boiled down to for so many of us.

An Exemplary Professor Retires

I met Ken DeBevoise more than thirty years ago, and right away, like everyone else, I knew he would do great things--but not in the conventional way.

Ken came to the University of Oregon as a refugee from practicing law.  He was, I believe, the first student at the University of Oregon to win a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, which he used to research and write a dissertation that eventually became a book: Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton University Press, 1995).  His splendid scholarship got him a job at Northwestern University, where he turned to teaching with a vengeance.  Both his topics (such as Texas high school football) and his method (taking the class to Texas) were unorthodox, as was his commitment to teaching, which peers less dedicated to undergraduates (which included just about everyone) commonly passed off as a lack of commitment to scholarship.

So Ken landed back at the U of O, where he taught courses for years in History and Political Science, drawing people willing to work hard outside (the reading list commonly required the equivalent of two books a week per class) and inside (intensive class discussions) of class.  Some administrators tried to ease him out a few years ago, before he was ready, an effort that prompted a spirited defense from students present and past, and Ken kept teaching into his early seventies.  His graduates include people prominent in law, development, and other fields, people whom, once challenged to think, have kept right on thinking--and acting.

I remember a professor years ago who referred to undergraduate teaching as "making mud pies" who wished that someone would just pay him a very large salary to research and write.  We need many more professors like Ken, scholars capable of writing great books who instead focus on challenging themselves and their students to learn broadly and deeply about the complexities of the human prospect.