Whig Hill

Accountability, week 8

Two things occurred to me this weekend regarding Strong Thomasson and the dissertation. First… I’ve read him about five times now and I’ve only just noticed his class…uhhh…consciousness. And by that I mean his dainty opinion of how people should behave in public: with sobriety, cleanliness, and rectitude. Not very surprising, any of those, but he is a real fine illustration of how religious expectations shaped public morals. As we already know, he advocated temperance. Drunkenness disgusted him and he did his best to avoid places he knew liquor would be present. Even better, he considered (public) education to be a moral obligation of parents and he continually expressed bewilderment that many people would leave their children’s souls—and society—in danger by not sending them to class. And he had a couple of outbursts about the filthyness of poor people. Filth, to him, represented disorder, ignorance, and sin. This coming from someone who regularly de-hided premature calves, chased pigs through creeks, and grubbed stumps in swamps. Taken together, that middle class sensibility is becoming an unexpected part of this section.

The second thing is that while reading Strong, I suddenly recalled that the letters and diaries of three siblings from Yadkin County were published about fifteen years ago by a small local history press. The two sisters of this clan interest me, so I quickly ordered them up on Amazon, and being unable to await their arrival, I ran down to the library and checked them out. I need to spend some time with them before I commit them to the dissertation. On the surface, this family is an odd lot: relatively wealthy (in 1860) non-slaveholders (tanners, in 1850), heavily involved in educational institutions, and deeply divided by the Civil War. One sister went north to college and the both of them were enamored with transcendentalism and apparently sat around being melancholy about death and God. (I get this all from the introduction.) One taught in Greensboro and had Charles F. Deems as a mentor. Deems has a supporting role in Chapter 3. Anyhow, I’m being vague because I don’t yet know these people and don’t know how they will be used, if at all. (Speer family. If you know, you know.) They would help my present gender imbalance, but would not help my Methodist imbalance at all.

So, this week I’ll be consolidating my thoughts and writing on Thomasson, and reading these two sisters.

That, and grading. First round of papers due Tuesday night. I expect I’ll be sending them all back for revision.

No goals this week

No goals this week because I have too much to do.

No dissertation goals, that is. At least, not in getting anything written or researched. Most of this week has been devoted to wrangling a seventy one page chapter into a fourteen page conference paper. Not as easy as it sou… oh, it doesn’t sound easy, either. I haven’t had this experience yet, mainly because I haven’t ever had seventy one pages before, but you go on that long and an argument begins to be large and have many parts. Putting it in a short paper means you have to take it all apart, extract something pungent, and put some of it back together. Makes the surviving pages seem kind of naked. Whatever…the nice thing is that this is the first time I have gone back to read the chapter, and I think it’s still pretty good. Interesting to look back, see some good writing and sophisticated analysis and think… I did that?

Should I have any spare time this week, I’ll pitch back into Thomasson’s diary, looking for his social graces.

Still having fun with Glenn Beck Guy. What I mean to say is that our classroom discussion of history is civil. Now, I don’t think he’s rethinking what he knows, but that’s not my goal as a teacher. (Well, content-wise, it is. My goal is that ultimately, he—and everyone else in the class—will begin to think historically about things. It is a habit; not something that is going to happen after six classes.) I left class Tuesday night feeling good and expansive about history in the public. Hell, I saw Sam Wineburg speak last week about Howard Zinn’s history and I’m thinking to myself, why the hell not give Glenn Beck’s history books a similarly respectful review?

But I came home and saw this and now I’m thinking F*$^ that S*#@.

Progressive Fred W. Taylor would be impressed

Last night in class we discussed the “Gospel of Efficiency” rampant during the Progressive Era. Kind of ironic to see the same sentiments at work in our own state legislature this year. For the sake of efficiency, the legislature is proposing the closure of museums and gutting of historic sites.

"It's not just about money. We need to do things as efficiently as we can," said Representative Julia Howard, Republican member of the oversight committee that produced budgetary and structural recommendations for North Carolina’s “attractions,” including historic sites, museums, the N.C. Zoo, and whatnot.

Recommended for closure is the Museum of the Albemarle. Historic sites are slated for reduced hours or closure. But you know me—D-town all the way down baby—my favorite recommendation is this:

Implement a coordinated management structure for Bennett Place, Duke Homestead, and Historic Stagville located in Durham County and analyze site proximity and span of control to identify other historic sites that could adopt a coordinated management structure. One manager would oversee a group of closely located sites, non-managers would not be affected by this change, and sites would not be merged. In Finding 1 of this report, the Program Evaluation Division found coordinating management of historic sites in Durham County could result in cost savings by reducing the number of management positions. The three historic sites, each with a site manager, are within a 30-minute drive of each other in Durham County. Coordinated management of these three sites would eliminate the need for two management positions and produce recurring savings of $92,100 (based on the statewide average historic site manager salary and benefits of $46,053). With this combined management structure, the span of control for one manager for all three sites would be 8, which is no larger than the number of staff currently at the two largest historic sites. Costs associated with this change, such as travel, should be minimal. 

I thought the Durham sites already shared resources, especially in the site maintainence area (lawn mowing). But I’ve always thought they should be more interpretively intertwined. I mean, how often do you get three great sites so close to one another that have as their topics people from the same time period but separated by race, class, and economic and political circumstances.

But that’s not what the recommendations argue for. Their entire justification for combining three sites into one is the opportunity to fire two people. (And bear in mind that the stated manager salary--$46,053—includes benefits. No manager is bringing home that kind of money in a paycheck.)

Any teacher or historian (public or otherwise) can tell you that the value of museums lies not in their cost to visitor ratio, the annual receipts, or attendance numbers. The value is in the immeasurable qualities of cultural literacy, civic sensibilities, and social benefits of sharing a past.

Firing two people in the name of efficiency hinders that goal, but that’s the bold legislative vision we can expect from our legislature.

Which relates to another thing we talked about in class last night. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, Americans recognized the social chaos gripping the nation as traditional modes of social responsibility (families, rural communities) lost power in the face of new technology and sociological circumstances (industrialization, immigration, urbanization). Americans had a gut check on the question of what responsibility society had toward fostering cultural life, education, and the welfare of its less fortunate. Though disputed, and not fully realized until the 1950s, Americans leaned toward the idea that we do have social and cultural responsibilities toward one another, and the state (whether local, state, or federal) has a key role to play in maintaining those relationships.

This business with strangling cultural resources to near-death before completely dispatching them is part of a larger effort to reject the governmental imperative of social responsibility that this country has been so successful with for the last one hundred years.

If nothing else, it’s a good lesson putting our present circumstances into historical perspective. We’ll have a lovely discussion in class next week. Thanks, assholes.

Accountability, week 7: social grace

I’m going ahead with Strong Thomasson. And I’m going ahead with a term I’m taking out of context from the Howe book: social grace. Howe was not talking about what I’m talking about (even if we’re in the same realm), but the term fits perfect. I’m working up a definition that goes something like this: social grace is the state of social relations evangelicals aspired to by the practice of discipline. Social grace is characterized by absence of strife and a communal purpose toward faithful adherence to Christian precepts (including the nineteenth century imperative toward self-improvement—secular and spiritual.) Howe used social grace in an eighteenth century context (I think), and I’m not comfortable stealing the term, especially when my subjects in the nineteenth century did not use it themselves to define what I’m talking about. But they did strive toward the thing it defines.* (As Strong would say, “that is some definition.”)

*I just received some Emile Durkheim books from Amazon, so I will soon be learning, I’m sure, that he provided a thorough and useful definition to what I’m talking about, one hundred years ago.

See, I knew going ahead with Strong would ultimately help me tie together the first section and Flintoff.

Thomasson has turned out to be a bit subtler than Flintoff here. I mean, Flintoff’s diary entries largely focused on what made him unhappy (life with his uncle) and what made him happy (life among evangelicals). Even though he didn’t write all that much, discovering what he considered to be “social grace” is comparatively easy.

Strong, on the other hand, talks a lot, and I mean a lot, about everything. (I can read Flintoff’s eighteen years more quickly than one single year in Thomasson). He’s always happy. Reading into his conception of “social grace”—and he has one—requires greater attention to how he organizes his daily life, or what he does with himself. For instance, whom does he hang out with, and how does he describe his time with other people? He works, whether on his own farm or when he’s helping on someone else’s farm. But he spends the most of his time in labor. He goes to church. Sundays for services and Wednesdays for class meetings. He sings in the choir and occasionally gives lectures (he eventually becomes a licensed exhorter). He goes to yearly camp meetings, sometimes more than one a year. He loves it all. He goes to school committee meetings (since teaching is his profession, this is not a surprise.) He goes to debating clubs. These are all things, church related or not, that have a significant element of self-improvement, the fostering of civic maturity, etc. Oh, and of course, he spends a great deal of his time courting the gals, particularly Cranberry Bell’s daughter.

But he approached other social gatherings with suspicion. He hung out with friends one time and they sat around gossiping, and he hated it. “I shant do so again, soon, that’s certain.” On another occasion he stayed behind when his other friends attended a magic lantern and “moving table” show. “That’s another humbug, and no mistake.” I haven’t got this far ahead yet, but I know that he demurred from attending some corn huskings and other communal gatherings because he new people would be drinking.

I think that’s where I’m going with this social grace thing. For Thomasson, the line between sacred life and the world is not clearly delineated. He, like every other believer, crossed it without even noticing the difference. The point is that he took the lessons and prescriptions from his religious life and applied them to his social life even if he didn’t articulate it as such. (Implicit here is that he did not adhere to other forms—ahem, honor, patriarchy—that some other southerners took to.) He did recognize the social risks of doing this. He made an exhortation at Aylesbury once that he felt made the congregation uncomfortable. “Human nature likes to be flattered, but at the truth it takes offense. How strange!” This bordered on strife and dissention, but he apparently knew the difference between discomfort and conflict, and avoided the later.

So this week I’ll be reading Strong Thomasson and working these details out.

Otherwise, the teaching is going well. Tonight at the CC is the Progressive Movement, which Glenn Beck Guy is convinced is the thing that invented Nazism and Communism and imposed them onto America by way of college professors and Woodrow Wilson. GBG is pretty good humored about it, but he’s not shy in connecting everything that might be wrong in this nation’s past to the evil designs of academics. We have a lot of fun with that.

I’m obviously not going to change how this guy thinks, but that’s ok. I don’t fall into the unhelpful trap of confronting his weird historical assertions. Instead, I try to integrate what he holds into the larger narrative the class works through in the directed discussions. This may be a healthier course because 1. I believe anyone is allowed to do history and there is no one way to think about it, so I’m not out to invalidate his history, even if it is pretty wrong, and I recognize the limits of our own disciplinary practice.  2. I think there is a future “will-have-learned” payoff that both GBG and the other students will be rewarded with. I think he’s learning perspectives and ways of thinking without realizing it, and will only recognize it later. 3. History is a dialogue, not a confrontation, and I’m trying to demonstrate that by example. 4. I like upending expectations, and if I do not teach, think, and behave in ways your standard Glenn Beck person thinks an academic historian teaches, thinks, and behaves, that will be a learning moment. (He did see the Obama bumper sticker on my car, so I’m sure he thinks I’m just being deceptive! But like I said, he’s extremely humored about it all.)

So, I’ve talked about teaching for a good part of my weekly goal summary for dissertation writing. That right there should tell you why things have slowed down a bit.

Ok, this has gone on longer than I expected… have to go read some Woodrow Wilson hagiography now.

Summary, week 6: positions

Flintoff is kind of finished. I drafted out twelve pages. Kind of measly, but it will grow. I’m still not to happy with the entire thing because I spent the first part of this chapter describing an apple, but with Flintoff I’m showing you an orange to prove it. No…that’s probably unfair because I am trying to describe a larger thing (“discipline”) that contains many parts. All of it is tied together by the implications for social behavior in the world.

Ugh. It’s time to move on. Where to next? I have plenty of holes to fill in the first half of this chapter. Also, Flintoff will benefit from reading Christopher Morris’ book, Martha Jane Brazy’s book, and William Scarborough’s book by contextualizing Flintoff’s unhappiness in Mississippi. Do I need to go back and do that? Or should I return to Thomasson and sketch out what he has to say (or not) about discipline? I’m leaning toward the Thomasson option because he is like Flintoff in that his practice of discipline is not expressed in church courts or doctrine, but in his choices for social behavior. In other words, he’s another orange. Incorporating Thomasson will help me find peace between Flintoff and the first section of this chapter. Thomasson does, also, have a more direct connection to temperance activity, which is a large part of the first section. Plus, I do like to move forward.

I wanted to have this chapter done by the beginning of the four-year college semester, but oh well.

My conversation with the out-of-state denominational archives has proven frustrating. A dozen emails and a phone call and I’m still not sure if what they have is worth driving 600 miles for. This is in part because their online catalog says they have materials that their archivists say they do not. But their archivists still think I’m looking for genealogical papers. I don’t know.

Two books I should have paid attention to before now have absorbed a lot of time this week.

 

First, the edition The Cultural Turn in U.S. History. I think of my work as cultural history, but I don’t know cultural history all that well. In the context of this book’s opening “propositions,” I’d place myself in the “culture defined as a common set of beliefs, customs, values, and rituals—a.k.a. the ‘anthropological’ concept of culture” school, as opposed to the “matrix of commercial institutions and structures in which artistic forms are produced and consumed, “ or the “semiotic or discursive system” approaches. That, of course, includes the usual suspects (Geertz, Isaac, etc.). I’m interested in ways that the historiography seems to be loosed from New Left imperatives, but that’s ok. You already suspected that about me.*

Speaking of Whigs, the second book is Daniel Walker Howe’s Making the American Self. I really wish I had read this earlier because he’s talking about things that I’ve been having a hard time articulating for a while about changes in the larger secular world. To wit, the democritization of self-construction; that ever more people—not just elite white men—claimed the right to self-fulfilment (or actualization, as we feminists described it in late 1990s graduate school). Now I’m dealing with forces religious that continued, throughout this period, to exert powerful claims on individuals. Historiography states that religions lost power to personal autonomy, and thus represented a threat to traditional authority. I’m not seeing that. I’m seeing adaptation. Or, as Howe said,

It also seems important to explain at the outset that I have not found the kind of individualism that concerns me here to be at polar opposition to a strong sense of community, so that to emphasize one necessarily involves moving away from the other. On the contrary, the quest for personal identity can entail joining a new community, and projects of self-discipline or self-improvement can be undertaken collectively as well as individually.

This is one of those moments a young** scholar has—affirmation of an idea simply because an established scholar has already put it into print. Don’t know if I’ll remain faithful to Howe’s formulation, but that’s where I’ll start.

But that’s getting way far ahead. I think this will be the much-needed framework for the first chapter that deals with what evangelicalism does to individuals.

*This has everything to do with historiographical positioning and nothing to do with contemporary political sentiment, of which I am predictably liberal.  

**Seems ridiculous to say this as I’m beginning to experience the generalized back pain associated with sleeping that only mature people talk about.

Accountability, week 6

When we last left our hero, John Flintoff, the young man had fled Mississippi a failure. He clashed with his uncle, disapproved of his cousins’ aristocratic lifestyle, and worst of all, had long moments of spiritual isolation. Only when he attended college—a Methodist school in Jackson—did his happiness flourish. Flintoff learned one thing in Mississippi: his contentedness depended on the nurturing associations of an evangelical community.

I am going to suggest that in the end, Flintoff’s prioritized* his religious needs over his economic and social aspirations. But as always, it’s not that easy. Upon his return to North Carolina and his mother—and a vastly different cultural environment—Flintoff remained unhappy. He resented his chronic indebtedness and continued to harbor aspirations for success as a cotton planter. Thus, after his retreat to Orange County, he reorganized, and this time armed with a wife and enslaved people, resumed his adventure in Mississippi.

This second attempt ended worse than the first. Broke, sick, and constantly at war with his uncle, Flintoff fled again. He spent a couple more years unhappy at home—now in Caswell County among his wife’s family—before he found some measure of economic stability and happiness.** Here’s my problem: I think you can make a convincing argument that Flintoff’s happiness was—perhaps unbeknownst to him—grounded in that economic stability.*** The story doesn’t make an equal analog between Mississippi and unhappiness and North Carolina and happiness. What came first, economic and social failure, or religious despair? Not too easy to prise that apart, but I think that in Flintoff’s own mind, the religious concern prevailed and his revised economic aspirations followed.

That’s what I’ve got to prove this week.

*I read recently where Darrett Rutman dismissed and mocked the idea of prioritization, so I’m alert to its vulnerability as a tool.

**This is a different story, but I’m certain that Flintoff’s newfound prosperity is attritutable to rising prices for tobacco and that industry’s expansion on the eve of the Civil War.

***Glenn Beck just condemned me to Hell, yet again, for this observation.

Summary, week 5

So I figured half way through this week that I would not be spending much time with Flintoff. And I didn't. I ended up with about four pages of new writing on him. Flintoff doesn’t lead himself to easy analytical interjections by the author (apparently that’s easier with chatty people like Thomasson), so I need to make my point by narrative. That’s harder than it looks (especially if you are trying to read good narrative writing at the same time). I haven’t developed much thinking on Flintoff since last week, but he makes some subtle, and vital, sighs of despair in which the necessity of social religious interaction to individual spiritual fulfillment are apparent. Plus, he stated very directly that he believed he could achieve happiness on earth and prepare for eternity all at the same time. The former and the later are slight observations, but taken together, I think, interpretively important, especially if you’ve just been reading some John Boles.

Started the semester at the Four Year College this week (that’s where my time has gone.) I hope some day I can devote all my (work) time to prepping classes and teaching without feeling I’m stealing from the more important project. Anyhow, the folks at FYC have been fantastically friendly and I couldn’t ask for more as a simple one-class adjunct.

Some interesting observations, at least to me: The students in my CC class have quite a bit more “life experience” and it really shows in basic classroom behavior. And I mean that in a good way. They fully engage in the conversation (well, most do). I have everyone from adults to first year college people; from people who haven’t been to school in twenty years and people who are still in high school. At the FYCs (not just this one, but all I’ve been at), the classes are very, very, uniform in age, race, and life experiences. Obviously, this is not a groundbreaking observation, but it crackles when you see the differences up close. The FYC students don’t seem to know what to do in class until I start a lecture* and all of a sudden, the pens and notebooks (or laptops) come out and the note-taking begins. They have a purpose, and they know how to do this. The educational conditioning of this generation is weird, and unfamiliar to me.

Also, I’m using a textbook at the CC, and a different kind of book at the FYC. Same topic (American History 1865 to present), but the way the readings are set up, completely different approaches. The FYC book doesn’t do “coverage,” meaning, it doesn’t tell as broad a narrative emcompassing everything in Am Hist that can possibly be covered in a chapter. It hones in on, well, “major problems” from each chronological period. I actually have nothing meaningful to say about this observation, yet, but I think my determination not to lecture may be severely tested very soon as some facts are going to need to be layed out.

As if starting a new semester at a new school wasn’t exciting enough, I had the thrill today of stumbling upon Glenn Beck on the radio just as he was explaining how historians are going to Hell because we’re such hacks, so sketchy with facts, and all crave affirmation from vicious Marxists. This is not hyperbole. This is what he said. So at least I don’t have to worry about my soul, since I now know where it’s headed.

*or lecture-type discussion, because I don’t really lecture the classical way.