Feature Articles
For Whom Do We Write?
Victorians and the Virgin
Mary: Religion, Gender, and National Identity in England, 1830-1885
The Turn Inward: The Inauguration of Luiz
Inacio Lula da Silva
For Whom Do We Write?
Alonzo L. Hamby, Ph.D.
“Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research. Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.” Carl L. Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian” (1932)
Afew years back, as a college freshman in search of diversion, I found myself flipping through a copy of Esquire magazine and chancing on an article about young Franklin Roosevelt. The characterizations were sharp, the story line strong. The author was someone named Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the piece excerpted from his forthcoming The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of the Age of Roosevelt. I began to get a sense that the writing and teaching of history could be a vocation worth pursuing.
I eventually learned Schlesinger had a large audience outside the academy, taught at Harvard without benefit of a Ph.D., and was as much political activist as tweedy scholar. I also discovered that within the university world he attracted a lot of resentment for his relative youth and perceived arrogance, or his presence in the Kennedy White House, or his anti-Communism, or just maybe his success in writing for what the publishers call a trade readership. His Roosevelt volumes remain significant works of history, good literature based on impressive research in primary sources.
I soon discovered that he was just one prominent figure in a long line of historians who directed their work to readers away from college campuses and who thought of themselves as public intellectuals. Indeed, that line stretched back as far as Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Charles A. Beard. At the time Schlesinger was working on Roosevelt, he was one of a number of historians as esteemed outside academia as within it. I was especially impressed by a Magnificent Seven: Schlesinger, Henry Steel Commager, Allan Nevins, C. Vann Woodward, Eric F. Goldman, Richard Hofstadter, and James MacGregor Burns. I accumulated their books, read them with pleasure, and enjoyed the exhilaration of discovering new knowledge. Of course, the passage of time, the weight of new research, and the emergence of new perspectives all uncovered deficiencies in what once seemed near-perfect products. However, the main body of work produced by these historians bears the weight of a half-century well.
Who are their counterparts today? Are there some academic historians out there who write sophisticated history for a mass audience? Joseph Ellis (whatever his personal peccadilloes) and Ian Kershaw come to mind. And it is wonderful to see Edmund S. Morgan’s name on the New York Times best-seller list. Some other academics write prolifically for a large audience, tell stories wonderfully, but in the end contribute little that is new or exciting. Increas€ngly, they seem indistinguishable from talented journalists and free-lancers who skip from one chronological period to another. It is in truth hard to nominate many candidates who might be placed with the seven who so affected my own sense of history.
That just may have something to do with the state of our profession today - its fragmentation and overspecialization, its huge size that makes it possible for historians to talk to each other with little sense of a larger public, and its increasing resort to theoretical discourse. We live with an ethic that makes professional advancement dependent on explorations of the marginal, executed with rhetorical strategies that seem designed to exclude non-specialists.
“Aha!” you may be saying to yourself at this point. “Next comes the pitch for getting back to old-fashioned narrative political history.” Well, not exactly, although that is my kind of history, if it has a broad sense of what is “political” and accompanies a good story with sharp interpretation and original thinking.
The not-so-new social/cultural history that dominates our profession today provides topics of vast popular interest—race, ethnicity, sex (or gender, if you prefer), social mobility, class identity, slavery, family—to name a few of the obvious. No one can say that “politics” (as most people understand the term) is more important. Yet when Carl Becker’s Mr. Everyman hears the word “history,” he usually thinks politics, diplomacy, or war and expects a biographical approach. Instead he finds works that fail to put people up front, do not develop a narrative line, reject vernacular English for specialized terminology that ordinary readers will consider jargon, and often hew to prepackaged interpretations (“theory” to be obeyed without question). The interested adult who does not have to read such writing as a required assignment moves on to something else.
A little over a year ago the president of the American Historical Association, William Roger Louis, wondered aloud if the American Historical Review would review Geoffrey Best’s new biography of Winston Churchill, a volume Professor Louis described as “a balanced and perceptive interpretation of Churchill’s life without losing critical judgment or scholarly standards . . . [that] adds to the scholarly debate on how to assess Churchill’s life.” Yet the AHR, he concluded, probably would not review it because it was a work of synthesis rather than a monograph based on original sources. Professor Louis’s purpose was not to criticize the AHR, upon which he heaped extravagant praise. Nor is it mine, because its management is an expression of deeply ingrained professional norms. But surely the Best biography and the much larger work on Churchill by Roy Jenkins both rate reviews, simply because we can learn from them. Their authors and publishers do not need us; both volumes were widely reviewed in general interest venues at the time of publication and likely have sold pretty well. We need them. That this is not widely understood in the profession may tell us something not just about the American Historical Review, but also about the rather cramped mission we assign to ourselves.
We do not engage well with a non-academic audience, nor do we seem to think it is important to do so. In fact (does one dare use that word?), we are so specialized we do not speak to each other very well. How many of us read all or most of the articles that appear in the AHR or Journal of American History or any other journal with a wide scope? How many of us usually just skim through the book reviews, peruse the publisher advertising, and turn to the letters section for the latest example of review-rage from some angry author? The profession is just too diverse, shooting off in too many directions, to allow many scholarly articles to have a genuine interest for most of us.
Well, then, for whom do we write? A few of us make an effort to reach a larger public. A few are good textbook writers who effectively communicate with a student audience. Most of the rest who publish at all place their articles with scholarly journals and their books with university presses that specialize in very limited press runs. In brief, most of us write for our subgroup within a profession so polyglot that it makes the Austro-Hungarian Empire seem homogenous. We address perhaps a few hundred other historians, and we use current buzzwords and concepts that get attention from that group. That is what gets us tenure, promotion, salary increases, and better job opportunities.
Do we all need to make contact with a larger public? Yes, although few of us will ever draw the royalties to which the Magnificent Seven became accustomed. Apprentice historians doing dissertations, of course, will mostly do tightly defined monographic topics, but even they need to connect what they are doing to larger and easily understood themes. (Hint: One can write a compelling and meaningful story about men and women attempting to gain control over their own destiny without ever using the word “agency.”) A good story well told, a rejection of jargon and prepackaged interpretation, a superior effort at original thinking about a significant subject is its own reward and a duty of scholars who are trying to teach. As Becker told us some seventy years ago, it will do work in the world.
Carol Marie Engelhardt, Ph.D.
The Virgin Mary is the most recognizable woman in the Catholic tradition. Her role and representation in that tradition have been analyzed by a variety of scholars, including Robert A. Orsi (The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem), David Blackbourn (Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany), and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz (Encountering Mary: From LaSalette to Medjugorge). Perhaps the Virgin Mary’s prominence in Catholicism has deterred scholars from examining her representations in predominantly Protestant cultures. However, such an examination is overdue, for how a culture understands the Virgin Mary can tell us much about that culture, whether it be Catholic or Protestant.
In 1841 the Anglican clergyman Thomas Hartwell Horne warned his compatriots that “the worship of the Virgin Mary is taught and enforced by the modern Church of Rome” and furthermore that such idolatry posed a threat to English Christianity. Such sentiments were not uncommon in Victorian England. Publicly and privately—in sermons, lectures, diaries, letters, novels, and scholarly works—clergy and laity alike denounced the Virgin Mary as a pagan goddess, the usurper of Jesus’ role, and a menace to true Christianity. On one level, their outrage is not surprising, for events that reminded English Protestants that Roman Catholics were increasing in number and status—such as Catholic Emancipation (1829), John Henry Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism (1845), and the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England (1850)—reinvigorated England’s long tradition of anti-Roman Catholicism. However, neither historical precedents nor theological disputes entirely explain the Virgin Mary’s prominence in Victorian England. When we explore the substance of these attacks, we find that she became a focus for Victorians’ anxieties about how to define their religious and gender identities, both of which were crucial components of their national identity. Analyzing the reactions to the Virgin Mary suggests that even the apparent truisms on which Victorian culture was based were essentially insecure and open to challenge. Far from being merely a stock figure in Victorian religious disputes, the Virgin Mary reveals the anxieties that underlay and threatened the Victorians’ aggressive but ultimately superficial self-confidence.
One of the hallmarks of Victorian culture was the feminine ideal, known to scholars as the Angel in the House: the woman who was naturally maternal, untouched by carnal desire, and morally superior to men. The Virgin Mary was the logical extension of this ideal: Christians believed that she was both virgin and mother, and Ineffabilis Deus (1854) confirmed the popular Roman Catholic belief that she was free of original as well as actual sin. Therefore, both Mariologists and scholars of Britain have assumed that the Virgin Mary was interchangeable with the feminine ideal. Close analysis of Marian representations, however, shows that this conclusion is invalid. Victorians as diverse as the Broad Churchman Charles Kingsley, the High Churchman Samuel Wilberforce, and the Presbyterian controversialist John Cumming attacked the Virgin Mary for exhibiting the very virtues a woman was supposed to exemplify: they limited her maternal role to the bearing of Jesus, denied that she remained a virgin, and declared that the public rebukes she received from Jesus confirmed her sinfulness. These attacks were fiercest and most numerous from c. 1830 to c. 1885, when the feminine ideal was ascendant. They began to decline in the 1880s, partly in response to the appearance of alternate models of womanhood that somewhat alleviated the tensions the feminine ideal engendered: the Angel out of the House, which urged women to use their particular virtues to improve the public sphere, and the New Woman, which radically rejected not only the confines of the domestic sphere, but also the constraints of traditional behavior, clothing, and occupation. The energetic and sustained attacks on the Virgin Mary in the nineteenth century do not merely show that the feminine ideal aroused great anxiety, but suggest why it did: the Virgin Mary demonstrated that the very virtues that were intended to restrict women to the domestic sphere were in fact their means to access the public sphere.
Leading the attacks on the Virgin Mary were Protestant clergymen, who were instrumental in popularizing the ideal but whose masculine identity was precarious as a result of the feminization of religion in the nineteenth century. Recent works by Peter Gay, James Eli Adams, Claudia Nelson, and John Tosh have described how the ungendered virtues Christianity promoted—including charity, chastity, and humility—made it especially difficult for Christian men to defend the ideology of separate spheres on which the masculine ideal was premised. Clerical condemnations of the logical extension of the feminine ideal—the Virgin Mary—allowed clergymen to reclaim religion as a masculine enterprise and justified their monopoly on the pulpit, and by extension the male monopoly on the public sphere. These condemnations, however, force us to reconsider the extent to which Protestant clergymen genuinely believed in the feminine ideal that they ostensibly promoted.
In addition to allowing Victorians an opportunity to express their otherwise socially unacceptable hesitations about the feminine ideal, attacking the Virgin Mary enabled the English to imagine themselves as a modern, masculine, and Protestant nation, in contrast to Roman Catholics, whose historic association with the Virgin Mary allowed them to be dismissed as superstitious and effeminate foreigners. This attempt to posit a common English identity was, however, the work of English Protestants, a term that covers Dissenters as well as the majority of Anglicans who believed their church to be Protestant. Anglo-Catholics—who coalesced as a distinctive group in the 1830s as they sought to reclaim the Catholic identity of the Church of England—and Roman Catholics allied to praise the Virgin Mary as a woman without sin who was chosen by God to be the virgin mother of the Savior.
In defending the Virgin Mary, marginalized Catholics, whose spokesmen included John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble, and Frederick W. Faber, emerged as the only Victorians to embrace fully the feminine ideal that was one of the hallmarks of Victorian culture. This division of English culture into two competing groups—Catholic and Protestant—helps to explain why the English struggled to define a coherent national identity throughout most of the nineteenth century: the significant cultural and theological divisions between Catholics and Protestants prevented the formation of a religiously-based national identity. The rise of the “New Imperialism” in the 1880s provided an alternate means of defining a national identity, for religious differences could be subsumed under a shared Christianity as imperialism posited a more obviously different Other. This development made the English reluctant to be reminded of the theological differences that divided them and thus further explains why Marian attacks declined significantly at the end of the century.
The
Turn Inward:
The Inauguration of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Donald Ramos, Ph.D.
As Americans watched the Rose Bowl parade, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office as President of Brazil. For the first time in forty years an elected president took the sash of office from an elected president.
It was a remarkable event that rapidly became a celebration. The monumental spaces of Brasilia were filled with the red flags of the Workers Party. Here and there the flags carried images of Che Guevarra. The public spaces were a sea of red.
Brazil has moved into uncharted territory. A society has cautiously and nervously embraced change. It’s new leader seeks to build that change on its own history -- to look inward for answers.
For the first time in the history of Brazil, the president had risen from the ranks of the working class. More remarkably he was born into the grinding poverty of the Brazilian Northeast and like millions he had migrated with his family to the state of São Paulo. Lula, a nickname, now a legal part of his name, moved through a series of jobs such as selling peanuts on the street to successfully become a metallurgical worker. Then the actions of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985 propelled Lula into active union organizing, eventually founding an independent labor union and confederation (CUT: The Unified Workers Confederation) out of which came the Workers Party (the PT: Partido dos Trabalhadores). Lula was elected this October as the standard-bearer for a coalition built around the PT.
Over the last year, Lula moderated many of his ideas. Making political alliances, the PT moved from the far left toward the center, enough to attract enough voters to win, too much for the far left within the party. He moved from a rhetoric emphasizing a sharp break with the past to one that called for gradual change -- reform over revolution. He promised to uphold all contracts, which mollified business and financial interests, domestically and internationally. He even took to wearing suits.
Equally important, millions of Brazilians at many social levels decided that there had to be a change in the Brazilian system. One of the key themes of his inauguration speech and an idea emblazoned on many of the red flags in Brasilia was “Hope Won over Fear.” People identified with Lula—it is commonplace to hear the phrase that the president is “someone like us.” The sense is that he does not speak “for the people,” he is “one of the people.” He speaks eloquently of his past and the history of struggle, of the battles fought and the people lost. But the reality is that behind the euphoria of taking office, the PT has changed and not everyone is pleased. But Lula and his key advisors in the PT decided to moderate their methods and language if not their goals. Another aspect of this reality is that the PT won the election in coalition with various left parties and has made deals with various centrist ones in an effort to create a majority in Congress, something it still does not have.
Lula believes he has a mandate to produce significant change. Even before taking office he had begun to govern. His cabinet is a fusion representing the alliances that have been made, and it will probably continue to change as new alliances will have to be made to produce a working majority in Congress. The cabinet is diverse containing four women and two Afro-Brazilians. It also includes old-line Trotskyites as well as members of the opposition. It even includes one of his opponents in the primary.
The inauguration speech itself is a history lesson. Lula emphasized that he was part of a process that spanned generations of suffering and resistance. He noted that each stage of Brazilian history, from sugar to gold, to coffee, to industry, had done nothing to combat hunger. He then promised to address the issue and set the measuring stick for his administration high: a goal of three meals a day for every Brazilian. This is change the poor can understand.
So is land reform. It is a word that masks histories of oppression, repression and violence. The Landless Movement in Brazil has had the support of the PT and elements of the Catholic Church. Land reform is always a hot button issue in Latin America and Lula promised gradual transformation of land holdings using unused land while maintaining production.
This is but one of the reforms promised -- others include social security/retirement, taxes, politics and labor legislation. To accomplish this ambitious agenda he is calling for a social pact between all sectors of society, transparency in government and an end to the impunity of the rich and powerful. It is a remarkable agenda.
His foreign policy statement was cautious but insistent
on the primacy of Brazilian interests. Regarding the U.S. he said: “We
look for a mature partnership with the United States based on reciprocal
interests and mutual respect.” But elsewhere the message was stronger:
“Brasil will fight protectionism
. . . . We will work to eliminate the scandalous agricultural subsidies
of the developed nations which endanger our producers, robbing them of
their comparative advantages.” From the Brazilian perspective, the United
States insists on free trade for others while subsidizing the steel industry
and agriculture against more competitive economies.
The Lula inauguration speeches emphasized looking inward. If Cardoso looked outward, Lula wants Brazil to build from within: “Today is the day that Brazil gets in touch with itself” could be seen as a critique of Cardoso’s cosmopolitanism. Lula concluded his address with “Long live the Brazilian people” rather than the traditional “Long live Brazil.” The difference speaks volumes.In the emotions of the day, crowds throwing themselves into the streets, jumping on Lula’s car, the ocean of red, the symbolism of the man, the reality is that Brazil is a big country with big problems but also big possibilities. To begin addressing them, Lula needs to construct a congressional majority from within the fragmented party system or by using the social movement of the streets to push for support on specific issues. Much is expected of him and he has been lowering expectations, emphasizing gradual change, gradual land reform, maintenance of all contract and treaties, but still much is expected from him. It will be hard to deliver everything.
But his election marks an important point in Brazil’s history. It is an affirmation that Brazil has managed to construct a legitimate democratic government. For that Fernando Henrique Cardoso deserves more credit than he has received. The transition was handled with dignity and seriousness. The end was cordial and respectful. The symbolism of the election of a worker, a migrant from the interior of the Northeast, should not be overlooked either. It is a powerful symbol in a society where so many have been marginalized. The symbolism of a victory of the left is also important. Cardoso was also from the left, but it was the university, intellectual left, and to find his majority he had to move far to the right. Lula comes from the left of the streets, his role in the strikes of the 70s and 80s are legend. His election is a call for social reform.
Whether it can be accomplished is a very real question. For a hint we have only to look at the visiting heads of state. Among them were Fidel Castro, whose revolution has met with the staunch opposition of the U.S. and Hugo Chavez, the elected president of Venezuela whose plans to constitutionally transform Venezuela has created a middle- and upper-class backlash. Lula seems to have a good grasp on these realities and is an experienced politician. His gradual approach may be, in the end, the fastest, perhaps the only way, a Latin American society can begin the necessary process of transformation.