David Farber responds to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
For a Nastier US Intellectual History
Before commenting on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s pithy and engaging account of The Ideas That Made America, allow me to make a brief autobiographical detour. I promise the excursion has a point and will eventually lead back to the promised commentary on the book at hand: I am not now nor have I ever been an intellectual historian. At the same time, I doubt I would have become a historian without the intellectual history undergraduate coursework I did with Stephen Tonsor and David Hollinger and the conversations I had with these two men at the University of Michigan almost half a century ago.
Of the two, Hollinger, while not a chatty fellow, was more approachable; he lectured on issues and concerns much more in line with my academic interests; and he was brilliant in a way I could recognize and respect. It was Professor Hollinger who took a personal interest in me and told me—in the midst of the first crisis in the academic job market—that graduate work would suit me and that I had a better than decent chance of making my way into academia.
But Professor Tonsor was, for me back then, a more provocative figure.[1] Most of us enrolled in his courses, circa 1978, knew that he was a reactionary. In the two courses I took with him—The History of History and Nineteenth Century European Intellectual History—I learned in great detail about the thoughts of many German men, including Karl Marx; nothing at all about what women or—to be anachronistic—people of color thought or said about anything at all; but we did hear about how to understand European formal gardens as intellectual forms! In what was then the glory days of the social history boom and the early years of the humanities’ openly leftward turn, I always wondered what Tonsor’s colleagues made of him.
Professor Tonsor was swimming against the intellectual tide when I took his courses. But that’s what made his courses so absorbing. He modeled analytic rigor as he made an implicit defense of a narrow, traditional approach to intellectual history, and to historical studies more generally. That made him a difficult man and, according to an account by one of his students in the 1980s, an ugly man when challenged on his fundamental beliefs. Gleaves Whitney, a Tonsor graduate student, quotes a fellow student: “He may look like the Paddington Bear but he’s got a reputation…. [W]hen a feminist challenged him in one of his classes, he said to her face that her soul was as filthy as the floor she walked on.”[2]
Tonsor was never overtly political or bullying in the classes I took with him (at least as I remember). I found his courses a useful intellectual provocation—in the texts he assigned, in the lectures he gave, in who he included and excluded in the traditions he analyzed. Bluntly stated, he challenged me to think harder not just about the course material but about the making of an intellectual canon and historical pedagogy. Admittedly, I was not your average undergraduate student.
Intellectual engagement, not dutiful agreement, was Professor Tonsor’s stated pedagogical goal. While his horrific treatment of the feminist student in his class reveals the limits of his own ability to engage with ideas—and people—that did not meet with his approval, what I took away from my time with a right-wing, Catholic traditionalist intellectual historian was that, at its best, the core of university life was challenging the texts and the professor who teaches them.
I proffer this bit of self-indulgent autobiography in service to the point of this short essay: wrestling with ideas, situated in the historical context from which they sprung, demands an analytic approach that precludes easy dismissal of those ideas that do not favor academia’s current conventions or one’s political or scholarly proclivities. More than the other subfields of our discipline, intellectual history engages most directly with ideas and the proponents of ideas that can and often should infuriate us. It’s one thing to teach students about the horrors of the slave trade. It is often more vexing to teach students how intellectually robust thinkers justified such a business. That, of course, is the rub. Exposure to such ideas—ideas now rightfully and almost universally considered repugnant and hateful—can be dangerous, daunting, discomforting, and even harmful. As a result, today’s students and many of their professors fear and condemn such exposure. The life of the mind, which is the territory of intellectual history, is a confounding place.
Glaringly Bloodless
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (at last, as promised!) offers in The Ideas That Made America a more gentle, careful and, at times, becalming version of intellectual history. She does not tell her undergraduate readers (my sense of the book’s intended audience) about the discomforting experience of encountering historically emergent ideas that might challenge our contemporary notions and feelings. In the book’s introduction, she offers, instead, encouragement: “ideas,” she writes, “have achieved their power not because their meanings are absolute but precisely because they are so fluid, so multivalent, and so prone to redefinition when they come into new conditions of possibility.” For Ratner-Rosenhagen, “The vibrancy of American thought lies in the movement of ideas as they have been enlisted to mean different things to different people throughout the American past.” For sure.
At the same time—and this is where the book raises questions about intellectual history so different from Tonsor’s nasty but fierce intellectual engagement—proffering key American ideas as “fluid” and “prone to redefinition” is a glaringly bloodless accounting of Americans’ painful and sometimes destructive wars of ideas. I wonder if such language allows ideas to remain in their own safe sphere, separate from the vicious struggles that have riven the United States.
Ratner-Rosenhagen treats specific aspects of the history of American ideas with enviable precision. She does what many of us try to do when explaining historical figures’ clay feet. She allows her intellectuals to live in their own contemporary world of ideas. To wit, she discusses Thomas Jefferson’s willingness to own slaves while at the same time channeling Enlightenment beliefs about the equality of man. And she explores his contradictory beliefs, as well as his willingness to justify what he fears is unjustifiable. “Jefferson,” she writes, “provided an authoritative framework and conceptual language for marking racial difference, which would justify the evils he thought unfortunate and hoped were remediable.” A sound analysis but, to repeat myself, bloodless, especially for undergraduates who are likely to wander around this ungainly sentence with little sense of its meaning. Where in this account is Sally Hemings? How does US intellectual history account for her thinking?
Ratner-Rosenhagen, to her credit, does not shy away from a more direct analysis of Southerners’ defense of slavery. In a section titled “The Split Screen of the Southern Mind,” she notes: “Chattel slavery animated Southerners’ habits of mind to make sense of those experiences” (68). She describes George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery and his attack on free labor, in which he states that white southerners are a “band of brothers working for the common good,” while white northerners are “a bag of cats biting and worrying each other.” Great quotes! Say what you will about Fitzhugh—a first-class asshole—he can write. She then compares Fitzhugh’s critique of free labor to that made by Karl Marx. A critically important point and one that might open up a classroom conversation about the rights of labor, but why not jumpstart a more pointed conversation about slavery by making note of Fitzhugh’s other famous work, Cannibals All! In it, he writes, “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.” What do ideas mean when they are so brutally used against the people that they purport to explain? That might be an even better classroom exercise.
More broadly, I think it would be useful—even imperative—to entangle slavery’s defenders with enslavers’ practices. What do ideas mean in the context of their social enactment? I’ve been deploying the term “bloodless” to connote that lack of engagement. And I don’t just mean engagement with the cruelties perpetrated by enslavers. Why not write a paragraph or two that places Fitzhugh’s publications in their institutional and cultural context—as studied and discussed documents in the white South’s quest for moral and intellectual legitimacy?
Throughout much of the text, I wanted to see more people responding to the ideas presented herein and not just in a point-counterpoint manner (one intellectual responding to another intellectual). To whom were these various intellectuals writing? Which audiences mattered in the making of America’s ideas? Did those audiences change over time? Did the way ideas were disseminated change over time, as well?
Ratner-Rosenhagen does sometimes provide this kind of response. For example, she ably and cleverly explains how Black southerners, though largely deprived of the tools and the power they would have needed to respond forcefully—or almost at all—to their enslavers’ justifications, did have their own “mindscapes” that offered them a means of intellectual struggle.
Focusing in particular on how any individual author treats slavery in a short synthetic work is a kind of cheap shot. But I did so to make a straightforward point: to claim to write about “The ideas that made America” without giving a stronger sense of the America that was made seems like a bum steer. Maybe this perspective explains why I did not become an intellectual historian.
Let It Sink In
Intellectual history, like any other historical subfield, has the right to its own internal questions. Ratner-Rosenhagen provides a quick overview of many of the most influential figures in American intellectual history. She does so with aplomb and enviable erudition. And she follows current historiographical practice by rightfully explaining how those who have not been welcomed in America’s intellectual salons also have a place America’s life of the mind. I just prefer a more dynamic accounting in which ideas are situated more fully into the life of the nation and its people. Ideas do not just float above society; sometimes, like Tonsor’s cruel insult to the female student in his course, they sink, hitting the very groundings of power, social organization, and institutional life.
About the Author
David Farber is the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. His books include The War on Drugs (2021), Crack (2019), Everybody Ought to be Rich (2013), and The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism (2010).
Notes
[1] For a marvelous account of the first day of Professor Tonsor’s History 416 Nineteenth Century European Intellectual History see Gleaves Whitney, “Tonsor: Intellectual History—First Class: The Joy of the Intellectual Historian,” History Gadfly, 10 September 2017, http://gleaveswhitney.blogspot.com/2016/09/tonsor-4-part-1-first-class.html.
[2] Whitney, “Tonsor: Intellectual History—First Class: The Joy of the Intellectual Historian.” I did not witness such behavior but I don’t remember a single person of color in the classes I took with Professor Tonsor and only one woman (both classes had low enrollments). The single regular class I took with Professor Hollinger had a much higher enrollment and a number of women—but I don’t think any students of color were enrolled (then, too, only a tiny number of students of color were in any of the upper-level courses I took at Michigan).