People Making History

Announcer:
Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers:
I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne F.:
And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers:
If you’re new to the podcast each week, along with our colleague Nathan Connolly, we explore a different part of American history.

Joanne F.:
As historians, a big part of our job is to dig into the past to try and make sense of what’s happening in the present. But how do you make sense of history? For many of us, it’s through stories, individual tales of individual people. There are the big names, ones many of us grew up hearing about like George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. The list goes on and on.

Ed Ayers:
These people’s influence on the U.S. is undeniable. But what about some of the folks who don’t get much space in the history books, people whose stories can still offer us some important lessons for how to make sense of the world?

Brian Balogh:
So this week on BackStory, we wanted to bring you a round table discussion about the power and potential perils of seeing history through the lens of individual stories. We’ve each chosen somebody from the time period we study to talk about. They’re people you might not know that much about, but it’s someone we think can help us make sense of our current moment.

Ed Ayers:
Joanne, you go first if you would.

Joanne F.:
I will. Okay, so the person I’m going to talk about is probably someone that almost no one has heard of, but you’re going to hear why as a historian, he’s sort of a historian friendly character. His name is William Plumer and he was a Federalist in the U.S. Congress in the very beginning of the 19th century when Thomas Jefferson was president and the Jeffersonian Republicans were pretty much coming to power. And I’ve picked him to talk about because he’s a guy who was doing something that in a sense I think all three of us and anyone else who’s historically minded, maybe isn’t historically minded, are doing now or ought to be doing, and that is trying to figure out what the heck was going on around him.

Joanne F.:
He was part of the out group and he was looking at what was going on in the government, wasn’t quite sure he liked it, really wanted to understand what was going on, and did a logical thing: Began to collect documents that were around him that were piling up, that were old documents, even some contemporary documents. He was looking for clues and evidence about what the heck was going on around him.

Joanne F.:
He did that by carefully looking at what was going on around him, by interviewing people, by asking lots of questions, by collecting evidence. He interviewed people. He interviewed President Jefferson, kind of asking him what he thought of the government, it was only 10 years old. He talked to John Quincy Adams. He asked all these people what they thought of the government, and what it had done in its first 10 years of existence, and where they thought it might be going. So in that way, Plumer was doing something that I think is, I don’t know, responsible and logical. Okay, maybe we’re not all collecting papers. I am collecting papers, but he was trying to figure out things around him by collecting evidence. So in that way, I’m thumbs up for William Plumer, but one of the reasons I picked him to talk about is because there’s a downside to what he was doing.

Joanne F.:
He really wanted to understand where the government had come from, the new U.S. government and where it was going. So he began to back up, “Oh, well to understand 1802, I need to understand 1795 right? To understand 1795, I need to go back to the Revolution.” He backed up all the way to hieroglyphics, and I’m really not kidding you. He really did all the way to hieroglyphics trying to figure out how things made sense.

Joanne F.:
So on the one hand in this moment that we’re in, when there’s so much happening every day and we’re all historians or not historians struggling to figure out what everything means, on the one hand, Plumer was doing what we should all be doing, which is looking closely, watching what was going on, collecting and evaluating evidence. On the other hand, there’s a risk that by really focusing so much on the past and looking to see history repeating itself in some way, that you blind yourself to the fact that history doesn’t repeat, and that what’s going on in the present needs to be seen as happening right now and not necessarily duplicating what happened in the past.

Ed Ayers:
So why would you bring this up, Joanne? If we’re all so confused right now to suggest that collecting documents and thinking about the past, maybe it’s not the most important priority right now. Why do you hold him up as somebody just to admire, perhaps?

Joanne F.:
Well, I hold him up because he’s doing what I think we should all be doing, which is evaluating what’s around us. Looking at the roots of where we are, trying to figure out what’s going on around us and using every kind of evidence and knowledge that we can corral to do that. I mean we’re really in some ways on unknown terrain as far as politics goes right now. And so I am holding up Plumer because in one way he was doing a really useful admirable thing, which is trying to figure things out as best he could by really in a sense being a historian, thinking about past and present. The downside to that, the other side of that, is that you can get lost in the past. You can get so focused on when in the past this has happened before that you blind yourself to the things that are happening in the present that haven’t happened before.

Brian Balogh:
Well, was there any takeaway from his Trek back to hieroglyphics?

Joanne F.:
I hate to say this because it makes me feel so bad. Not really.

Brian Balogh:
I was getting that sinking feeling.

Joanne F.:
On his behalf, I will say that he collected so much evidence about so many things, people from his own time, that he ultimately… You know, his papers are kind of an amazing source for anybody really looking at early America.

Brian Balogh:
So there’s a kind of personal insight or interest here.

Joanne F.:
Yeah, yeah. Well, certainly for me, when I discovered his papers, it made me very happy because there was a guy who did what I do.

Ed Ayers:
And what did he have to say about hieroglyphics? Are they making a come back?

Brian Balogh:
I’m sorry, but that not make for good radio.

Joanne F.:
No. And I will confess that by the time I got to hieroglyphics, I was no longer reading William Plumer very closely. I was just marveling that he went back that far.

Ed Ayers:
Well, I have a quite different sort of person. I have somebody who actually is in our textbooks, but for just a moment, and that person is W.E.B. Dubois. Now I’ve worked with a lot of freshmen and I’d ask them, “What do you know about African American life between the end of Reconstruction and, say, Rosa Parks?” And they say, “W.B. Dubois argued with Booker T. Washington.” But that’s kind of what’s in the textbook. And so how many times we’ve had these debates in class and you can watch it change from one decade to the next. One time Washington seems all savvy and businesslike. Other times Dubois seems like, you know, the voice. But what is surprising is that people don’t know anything about Dubois after that moment and exactly what it was that he did. You see him briefly to form the Niagara Movement, which becomes the NAACP But other than that he just disappears.

Ed Ayers:
And so as I’ve been thinking about our current moment, and I thought about who actually addressed this the most thoughtful way, it’s Dubois in 1903. And that’s when, and I was amazed to learn this, he was only in his late twenties and early thirties when he published this book, The Souls of Black Folk. And it was a collection of essays. And one essay was about Booker T. Washington, and it was a younger generation kind of being skeptical of him, and that was the one that reviewers focused on and so forth. And the book was popular at the time, and we need to remember this book came out at the time when segregation and disfranchisement and lynching were at their very worst moment. This is when the white part of the United States seemed to be turning its back on black people, and Dubois was in Atlanta in the South writing this from 1897 to 1910. He was a New Englander. He’s been in Europe. The first PhD with a African American background from Harvard. And he saw the striving of black southerners with a particular clarity. He was one of them and he was not.

Ed Ayers:
And he’s given us two phrases that we still hear, that we’re not exactly sure where they came from and what he meant by them. One of them was a prophecy. The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the “color line,” he said at the very beginning of the 20th century. Now understood in the context of U.S. history, that was directly true with the black freedom struggle. But understood globally in the context of decolonization globalization, it was also true. And understood in the context of today when the color line crosses many different kinds of boundaries and overlaps, intersects, it’s still true. And so you see that Dubois was able to understand that this artificial boundary among people of supposedly different colors was going to be a recurring challenge for the 20th century, and now it still is for 21st century.

Ed Ayers:
The other thing that he said is that speaking of African-Americans, one ever feels his “two-ness”: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. And that two-ness of what it means to be both black and American, you hear all over American popular culture today and everything from Beyoncé’s videos to the movie Get Out to hip hop. And people know themselves and see themselves in the larger culture in ways that Dubois imagined back in 1903. I mean, he defined the very spirit of Black Lives Matter. He says this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. So Dubois’ very lonely book says these things that echo a hundred years later, and it strikes me that he needs a lot more than those two paragraphs, that one bit of excised text to put up against Washington in our textbook to see how his story unfolded over the rest of his life.

Brian Balogh:
What was it about Dubois that allowed him to put his finger on what clearly is the essence of the American 20th century and more?

Ed Ayers:
I think he was an outsider all his life, partly by choice. He preferred that no one call him by his first name, but always Dr. Dubois. But he grew up in New England, the only student of color among the 13 in his graduating class. Then he goes to Fisk down in Nashville and visits country schools in East Tennessee where he’s teaching. He doesn’t fit there. Then he goes to Harvard, and he doesn’t feel that he belongs there or wants to belong. Then he goes to Germany and England, where he feels more at home than he feels anywhere else. But then he comes back to Atlanta, and really one of the most heartbreaking sections of all American literature in my opinion, is when he describes the death of his two year old son in Atlanta, who then has to be taken out and buried in the blood red Georgia soil. It’s really one of the most heartbreaking things that you see.

Brian Balogh:
Oh, my goodness.

Ed Ayers:
And what you realize is that today the people like Ta-Nehisi Coates who are writing about African American life use the same method of personal narrative and broad perspective and historical understanding. So I think that Dubois felt outside wherever he was, Brian, and that gave him this vision of this two-ness that he was able to see in some ways is shared by a lot of other people.

Joanne F.:
Did that change at all over the course of his life? Like in his later years when he looked back, was there, did he alter his thinking in any way or was he absolutely consistent?

Ed Ayers:
No, he found new ways to kind of keep pushing. He was the only African American person who addressed the American Historical Association. He gave a paper in 1909 which disagreed with everything that the Academy and popular film, everything was saying about it, and no other African American person was invited afterwards. And this breaks my heart to think about. His book fell out of print in the 1940s, and he bought the plates for it for $100 in 1949 so that it could be put out in time for its 50th anniversary.

Ed Ayers:
Then in the early 1950s he was targeted as being a communist by McCarthy because he opposed nuclear weapons. If you can imagine: here’s a man who’s writing at the beginning of the 20th century and then ends up later in his life opposing nuclear weapons. And then he joins the communist party in October, of 1961, and moves to Ghana, and he declares himself in favor of “a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit a part,” language we are hearing in American politics all over the place today.

Ed Ayers:
So if you think about this remarkable life that stretches all the way from Reconstruction, he’s born in Reconstruction, all the way through the Cold War and at every step along the way, he is seeing things with a clarity and a distance that almost no one else is. So that’s why I choose… Here’s a guy whose story is fascinating, but we just take a snapshot of him rather than a film. We see him at just one moment when he’s 29 years old and freeze him as forever being that, rather than seeing how he struggled with the evolution of American life throughout the first two thirds of the 20th century.

Brian Balogh:
Oh, you’ve certainly convinced me he deserves a whole film festival. And you know those of us in the biz understand how important Dubois is. But I absolutely agree that he ends up with that “snapshot” that you referred to rather than really being appreciated for how much he put his finger on. It’s kind of the central themes of what would follow.

Joanne F.:
And the irony of that being that of course all of the things, Ed, that you just outlined, he’s talking about an experience, he’s talking about a long exposure of things, which is the opposite of the little spotlight that he’s gotten in the eye of history.

Ed Ayers:
Exactly. And you know, but he doesn’t fit a clear narrative line, which is kind of our point today, right? How do we talk about people when they refuse to stay in the role that we’ve assigned them?

Ed Ayers:
So maybe, Brian, you have somebody who’s going to help us figure this out more clearly.

Brian Balogh:
Well, I do have somebody who disrupts the narrative line at the very moment that people feel, This isn’t the country that I thought I had lived in. What is going to stop the juggernaut of really the most powerful demagogue in the 20th century up to that point? And this point is exactly June 9th, 1954. The man disrupts it with really just a few words.

Joseph Welch:
Let us not assassinate this lad, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Brian Balogh:
So, that was Joseph Welch. And I know that both of you have heard of him, and he gets maybe a sentence in textbooks.

Ed Ayers:
And a picture.

Brian Balogh:
And sometimes a picture.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Brian Balogh:
And if you look at that picture, you see a kind of an unremarkable man in his sixties. Joseph Welch was actually born in Iowa and enjoyed shooting gophers with his rifle growing up. But he was, let’s just say, laundered through the finest legal education America had to offer, Harvard law school and then went to work for Hale and Dorr. And the exchange you just heard was Welch finally standing up to Joseph McCarthy. And by June of 1954, Joseph McCarthy was riding roughshod through the norms and practices of American institutions. Does that sound familiar to anybody? And even men as popular as Dwight D. Eisenhower and his powerful as Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t quite know how to stand up to Joseph McCarthy.

Brian Balogh:
So the setting that this exchange happened in was a congressional hearing. McCarthy was dominating it and he was getting bolder and bolder. Does that sound familiar? He was taking on now the U.S. Army, which certainly until Vietnam was a greatly admired institution. And McCarthy had the audacity to say, well, security wasn’t really good in the army, there were communists at this base in the army. McCarthy was taking on the army, and Welch had been called in to represent the U.S. Army. And he took down McCarthy by being straightforward, plain spoken, and some say, and this was even reflected in the headlines the day after the hearings where he said these words, “Have you no sense of decency?” Some say that he even had a tear in his eye. And there was something about that quiet country boy’s response to Joseph McCarthy’s bullying, that many believed changed the momentum of McCarthy-ism.

Brian Balogh:
Now, I know we’re going to go on to talk about the perils of focusing on individuals, so I’ve left out a lot of this story. I’ve left out the fact that a change in administration meant that McCarthy attacking Republicans as a fellow Republican was not as useful to the Republican party. I’ve left out perhaps the American public getting a little bit tired of McCarthy. I’ve left out even Eisenhower’s activities behind the scenes to begin to deflate McCarthy. Nonetheless, it’s very hard to tell the story of McCarthyism, the witch hunt against so-called communists in the government, in the arts, in Hollywood. It’s very hard to tell that story and why it turned, why McCarthy was a nonentity within really a matter of months from this without citing those few words by Joseph Welch.

Joanne F.:
But you know, it’s interesting, Brian, because you mentioned those words as being plain-spoken, which they are, but what strikes me is the real power there is the emotion.

Brian Balogh:
Yes.

Joanne F.:
The absolute ground level, gut emotion that, I mean, we remember those words partly because as you say, they’re simple and partly because there’s such a sincerity and a depth of understanding in that statement that, beneath all of the machinations and the churning and the power plays and the bullying, when one voice basically says essentially nothing about this is decent, that reverberates. Right? I mean that’s… The power of emotion in politics think, gets short shrift. And I think that’s a really powerful example of that.

Brian Balogh:
That’s such a good point, Joanne. We need to point out that… I don’t know of any historian who has written about the power of emotion and politics better than you have, and so it’s terrific of you to point it out in this instance, and I couldn’t agree with you more.

Ed Ayers:
So it’s my memory that he was defending someone with those comments, someone that McCarthy had attacked. Is that right, Brian?

Brian Balogh:
That is correct. He was defending a young man who worked in his own law firm, a man by the name of Fred Fisher, and it was discovered that Fred Fisher had been a member of a communist front organization when Fred Fisher was at Harvard Law School. And Welch and the aide to Joseph McCarthy, the infamous aide to Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, had agreed that they would leave Fred Fisher out of this, and Welsh had plenty of ammunition on his side. It was a quid pro quo, so to speak. McCarthy, when he mentioned Fisher’s name right before this exchange, he broke that agreement. And Joanne, I was very moved by your comments about sincerity, but many scholars believe that Welch was not entirely sincere, that his performance was intentionally theatrical, although low key theatrical, and that he had planned for months to expose McCarthy by not arguing tit for tat with him, by showing him to be a bully, for exposing him for not being a decent person, basically.

Ed Ayers:
But you know, what this reminds me of more than anything is Rosa Parks.

Brian Balogh:
Absolute, Ed. I keep thinking about Rosa Parks.

Ed Ayers:
Right. And I’ve been involved in quite a few conversations as of late about the standards of learning about African American history in Virginia. And the teachers always kind of laugh about how kids are taught about Rosa and Martin, and that’s kind of what does African American history for most of the year. And of course she was nothing like the way that the story’s usually told, not a tired…. Well, she was tired, but she was not a seamstress who just couldn’t stand to get up. She’s a member of the NAACP and so forth. But we like the story that has a face and that has emotion in it.

Brian Balogh:
That’s right.

Ed Ayers:
And who would deny that Rosa Parks is useful as a way for young people in particular to understand that social events have to take place in individual lives to really take on their full meaning.

Brian Balogh:
And so I think what we’re all saying in a certain way is that focusing on individuals allows us an accessible way into history. Perhaps getting a little overboard in your case, Joanne, going all the way back to hieroglyphics. Maybe we didn’t mean to get that into history, but it does, even for seasoned professionals like the three of us, it offers a path into stories that as we start pursuing them turn out to be far more complex than just this individual. Nonetheless, it gets us started or that’s how I think about it anyway.

Ed Ayers:
So that was fun. Thank you. About individuals who move history, but what’s the downside of that approach?

Brian Balogh:
Well Ed, you study statues, right? And statues are usually about individuals. And so you know, to be pretty blunt about it, for every statue there’s often an entire group, a social movement, or an army behind that person, and they don’t really get all that represented by the statue, that statue standing in for the individual in this case.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, I think I’ve been on the commission to think about commemorating emancipation. I’ve been thinking that we needed a non figurative strategy. I went to the first meeting and it became clear immediately I was wrong, that people want someone, even an imagined someone to literally embody the past. And the people in the public meetings declared that they wanted someone who looked enslaved. They wanted to see the ragged clothes, maybe barefoot or the shoes that are torn, and on the man’s back the evidence of whipping. And they said that it’s much more powerful if you can identify an individual was suffering, or a process, or an accomplishment rather than some abstract process. So it was kind of an instruction to me that even if we don’t have an actual individual, we need to imagine history as individualized.

Brian Balogh:
Ed, I hear you. But having visited the memorial to the Vietnam War, which is a low gray slash in the ground, if you will, very non figurative, I found that unbelievably moving. Now maybe that’s because I came of age during the Vietnam War. I didn’t fight in it, but in many ways it define large portions of my life. So is this just the difference between the recent past and the distant past?

Joanne F.:
But you know what I would say about the Vietnam Memorial? On the one hand, you’re right, it’s just a sort of slash in the earth with lists of names, but somehow, maybe because of the abstraction of it, it captures the group ness. It captures the immensity of what went on. And the best evidence of that is that when you go to that Memorial, what you see is people touching it. Right? They don’t, people don’t touch statues when they go to visit statues, but what you see there are people touching names, touching the wall. So that in some sense there is something human that people are pulling away from that, even if it isn’t embodied.

Brian Balogh:
So I think you guys know, I study bureaucracy. And you’ve actually been kind enough to read some of my scholarship, which avoids people at all costs. And what I’m thinking about, it’s kind of odd, but I’m thinking about the Space Race. I’m thinking about this gigantic bureaucracy, NASA and this huge amount of funding and congressional oversight and stuff that just, Oh, just bores you to tears. But NASA itself understood the importance of the astronauts. And Wernher von Braun, who pretty much invented the ballistic missile or certainly developed it first for the Nazis and then for NASA, he didn’t want astronauts. He thought it was much more efficient to control the spacecraft from Houston, quite literally.

Brian Balogh:
But NASA, that gigantic bureaucracy, which you can’t tell the story of the Space Race without talking about NASA, but that gigantic bureaucracy really understood the power of the John Glenns, who could be on the front page of life Magazine, who could have ticker tape parades. You know, when we talk about the balance between individuals and what historians call “larger structural forces,” I like to think of NASA because you really need to get them all into the picture as a historian. I know we’ve focused on individuals today, but it really does strike me that when a gigantic bureaucracy like NASA confesses that it needs humans for people to identify with, you know they’re going to be part of our history for a long time.

Joanne F.:
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us @BackStoryradio.org or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryradio.

Brian Balogh:
BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins university, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.