Framing the collapse

In The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, Scottish intellectual extraordinaire Niall Ferguson offers a provocative, if flawed, overview as to why the Western world is fading

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

I'm a sucker for lecture series books. For many years, Harvard University Press has published the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which have included wonderful titles like Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country (1998), and Andrew Delbanco's The Real American Dream (1999). Louisiana State University Press's Walter Lynwood Fleming Lecture series is also very good, notable for Drew Gilpin Faust's The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1989), among other titles. What's nice about these books is that they often distill a cast of mind into highly readable, short volumes that can be digested in chunks. They're typically small in terms of trim size and their number of pages.

What's not typical is for a major commercial press like Penguin to publish a series of lectures. But then Niall Ferguson is not exactly a typical author -- he's an academic superstar with appointments Harvard, Oxford and Stanford and a veritable journalism and television brand. In The Great Degeneration, he offers a précis of his libertarian brand of thinking with an expansive view of Anglo-American society -- and why it's falling apart. It rests on a key insight, and a questionable prescription.

The insight -- a usefully provocative one -- is to view the United States and Britain (with occasional references to the rest of the West) through the lens of institutions. Actually, it's a little surprising this isn't done more often. In recent years we've tended to focus on things like climate/geography, brilliantly argued in works like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) or culture (the orientation of neoconservative intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell). Ferguson instead focuses his four chapters, bounded by an introduction and conclusion, by four institutional forces in everyday life: government, the marketplace, the legal system, and civil society (he's a big Tocqueville fan). In each case, he locates the triumph of Anglo-American life in the last three centuries to the way England and the United States have organized these institutions relative to their rivals. And in each case, he also cites the degeneration of the title, which he captures with brief, vivid strokes (and a few graphs). In diagnosing a problem, he's fairly persuasive.

It's when he starts prescribing a solution that Ferguson runs into trouble. The underlying cause of these maladies, as he sees it, is excessive regulation. It leads to government tyranny, market decay, legal shenanigans (he describes the replacement of the rule of law with "the rule of lawyers"), and the evisceration of the voluntarism that provided the sinews of greatness. The problem is not exactly that he's wrong -- though he certainly has his critics -- so much is that he can't resist potshots that undercut his credibility. So, for example, he complains that the creeping socialistic mentality in the West has led to demands for rights to things like education and healthcare, which he regards as unsustainable. But when he asks as an aside, "Why not a right to a drinkable wine, too?" he trivializes understandable longings with a bon mot that suggests glibness, if not heartlessness.

Other times Ferguson is simply too selective to be taken seriously. When describing his legitimate concern about cost of entitlements for future generations, Ferguson asserts that "if young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be fans of Paul Ryan." Ryan does indeed want to cut social programs. But since his ardor for cutting taxes and offering benefits to large corporations ultimately outstrips his desire to balance the U.S. budget, it's hard to accept that he's thinking in the long-term way Ferguson advocates. Ferguson fairly notes that deregulation of financial markets has led to substantial growth relative to countries -- notably Canada -- that have been less aggressive in this regard. But he fails to mention that whatever its defects, Canada has not suffered the spectacular failures seen by U.S. and British financial institutions in the last decade. He has some legitimate, even amusing, anecdotes to offer about silly attempts by the government to micromanage the economy. But he never acknowledges that such efforts, however misguided, do not emerge in a vacuum -- they're often a response to the often unrelenting efforts of large corporations to accept any form of accountability, especially in the realm of paying taxes.

 Still, Ferguson can't be dismissed out of hand. The vigor and economy of his prose has always been a strength, and they're in sharp focus in a book that began its life as part of a radio series for the British Broadcasting Company in 2012. Ferguson notes in his acknowledgments that he produced the book in the seven months after a newborn son (one wonders how much a distraction the child proved to be). A reference to President Obama's notorious "you didn't build that" speech of last summer suggests the book's perishability. Still, as an introduction to Ferguson's work and a lively, if boilerplate, presentation of libertarian ideology, The Great Degeneration is not a bad place to start. If nothing else, Ferguson frames the problems of our time with the simplicity that is the hallmark of a powerful mind that even his complacency can't completely undercut.

An eerily modern old-fashioned war

In The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark refashions an old story and makes is startlingly new

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

At one point early on in The Sleepwalkers, University of Cambridge Professor Christopher Clark cites a perception -- certainly one I had growing up -- of the First World War taking place on the far side of a historical divide. "It was easy to imagine the disaster of Europe's 'last summer' as an Edwardian costume drama," he writes, attributing this view to Barbara Tuchman books. "The effete rituals and gaudy uniforms, the 'ornamentalism' of a world still largely organized around hereditary monarchy had a distancing effect on present-day recollection. They seemed to signal that the protagonists were people from another, vanished world."

The Sleepwalkers -- particularly the first of the book's three parts -- bracingly, even joltingly, revises this view. We are introduced to a shadowy world of fanatical terrorist cells engaged in plots that range across state borders, funded and armed by secret organizations that are connected, with carefully constructed plausible deniability, to official government ministries. The fanatics in this case are Serbian nationalists rather than Islamic fundamentalists (though it should be said that Serbian nationalism has long had strong religious overtones), but their outlook and methodology seem startlingly modern. So too are the polarizing pressures and media attention their activities generate, especially in terms of a positive feedback loop in which even presumably moderate figures feel compelled to emphasize their militancy for fear of appearing weak. When, after a series of botched attempts, one youthful member of an organization known as the Black Hand finally succeeds in murdering the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it triggers a war in which many of the participants have only a peripheral relationship to its proximate cause. Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly don't seem so far away from the Balkans.

The second part of The Sleepwalkers is a traditional diplomatic history reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor's classic 1954 study The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1914. Clark reconstructs the realignment of European great-power politics in the four decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The hallmark of his approach is pluralism: he demonstrates that for every national player in this drama, decision-making power was decentralized. In parliamentary societies, there were considerations of party politics, as well as the relationships between the military, the diplomatic corps, and a nation's political leadership. But even in presumably autocratic societies like Russia, policymaking was hardly straightforward; figures like Tsar Nicholas II or Kaiser Wilhelm were often managed by their ministers rather than leading their countries, and public opinion could influence strategic considerations no less than it did in France or England.

The final segment of The Sleepwalkers returns to Sarajevo in 1914, opening with a depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that spools with cinematic clarity. Clark then proceeds to chart the sequence of decisions -- more like miscalculations -- that culminated in catastrophe. In light of his preceding analysis, it's clear that he rejects the notion of an overriding cause or a principal villain. As he explains in his conclusion, "The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol."

And yet the weight of his own analysis makes clear that Clark blames some figures more than others. Serbian nationalists were not only irresponsible in the intensity of their fervor, but in their insistence on the legitimacy of territorial claims flatly denied the realities of history and the presence of non-Serbs in places like Albania and Bosnia. (Serbian conquests in the Balkans in 1912-13 were followed by atrocities strongly reminiscent of ethnic cleansing.)  Russia's support of the Serbs was part of a larger pan-Slavic strategy that had less to do with mystic chords of memory than trying to realize a long-term goal of succeeding Ottoman Turkey as the master of the Straits of Bosphorus, one that led the Russians to take dangerous risks. And French desperation for a strong partner to counter Germany virtually goaded the Russians to take those risks.

Conversely, Clark rejects the view that Austria-Hungary was an empty husk of an empire lurching toward collapse -- indeed, Franz Ferdinand had a plausible scenario for a reformed and federalized polity that reduced the disproportionate influence of of Hungary and gave more representation for Slavs, including Serbians (one reason why radicals wishing to see the empire break up were so intent on killing him). Vienna's demands in the aftermath of the assassination were not unrealistic, though its delay in issuing them -- here again the baleful influence of internal divisions, one of which were foot-dragging Hungarians -- led rivals to mobilize their opposition. Germany is often portrayed as ratcheting up the pressure by giving the Austrians the notorious "blank check," but Clark depicts Berlin as believing the crisis could be resolved locally long after everyone else had concluded otherwise. British Conservatives welcomed war as a means of preventing Irish Home Rule, since fighting Germany would deprive Liberals of the military tools to implement a policy that had vocal, and possibly violent, opponents. More generally, there's a motif about anxieties surrounding masculinity being a factor for some of the characters he portrays, a nod toward cultural history that isn't really developed.

None of which is to say that The Sleepwalkers is a polemic in the vein of Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (1999), which considers Britain the culprit for the war. Clark's mode is tragic; his title refers to politicians who, "watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams," blindly led their peoples toward an outcome that no one wanted. Which makes for one more piece of revisionism worth noting here: Clark rejects the idea that jingoistic Europeans blithely leapt into the void in 1914. Instead he offers evidence that a great many people, both inside and outside government, were deeply worried about what was to come (he also gives us examples of diplomats who were literally sickened by the prospect). This may well be the most troubling aspect of this riveting, sobering book: in the end, good will and intelligence may simply not be enough to prevent disasters. Even those who remember the past may be condemned to repeat it.

Winning the battle -- and the war

In The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, Marc Morris tells a story whose real drama began after the big big battle was over

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

I didn't realize until after I had finished Marc Morris's The Norman Conquest that I had done so shortly after reading another book about a pivotal battle in the history of a nation, Allen Guelzo's new book on Gettysburg, The Last Invasion (see my review here). In that book, as in every account of Gettysburg, there are countless subjects for speculation -- what Robert E. Lee was really thinking; how many effective troops the two armies actually had at their disposal; who really should get the credit for the Union army's retention of Little Round Top (and if that really mattered). But whatever questions may arise about that or any other battle in the American Civil War, the documentary record is immense. We know, for example, what Abraham Lincoln was doing on any given day, often on an hourly basis.

In the case of the Battle of Hastings, an epochal event in the making of England, the amount we don't know is vastly greater than what we do. History in such cases rests on the slimmest of written accounts, which often contradict each other. At one point in his narrative, Morris compares such accounts with the famed Bayeux Tapestry, and then quotes himself on some of the terms he used in preceding sentences: "seems"; "looks very much like"; "appears"; "as if." Though the battle took place was a "mere" 947 years ago, he has less to work with than even some ancient historians.

And yet Morris's professed uncertainty gives us confidence in him. He is as attuned to the historiography of his subject as he is the primary source record, which he deconstructs in some cases and affirms in others, often through a process of triangulation. Though clearly intended for a trade audience, and written by a non-academic (Morris is a magazine writer and broadcaster), The Norman Conquest is a tour de force piece of scholarship.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got a little impatient in the early going, which reviews a good deal of English history before and during the reign of King Edward the Confessor, a period marked by political instability and foreign occupation in a country where power was relatively decentralized.  It was not until about a third of the way through Morris's account that we finally get to hear about one of the more intriguing events that culminated in the Battle of Hastings: Earl Harold Godwineson's unexpected sojourn with William of Normandy -- which apparently happened when the earl's ship blew off course and he found himself a lavishly feted hostage -- that culminated in the Harold's pledge to support William's claim to the throne of England. But upon the death of Edward in January of 1066, Harold later took the crown for himself (he clearly regarded his promise,  made under duress, not binding). Harold fought off another claimant, that of the invading Scandinavian Harold Sigurdson -- the dreaded Harold Hardrada -- at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September, and then managed to make it to the other end of England in less than a month to meet William at Hastings, a battle he came within a whisker of winning. Morris's account of these dramatic events is authoritative and fast-paced. It's also complete before the book is half over.

One of the things that Morris explains in the remainder of the book -- which you can sort of infer but which he makes vividly clear -- is that however decisive it may have been, the Battle of Hastings was only the beginning of the Norman conquest. It was far from clear that William could actually subjugate the rest of the country, pockets of which resisted him for years. Once he did, he had to contend with outside incursions from Scotland, Wales, and Denmark, all of which he managed to fend off. Once he did that, he had to deal with challenges from within his own family. The sheer unlikelihood that he prevailed becomes increasingly remarkable. Before 1066, successfully invading England wasn't all that difficult. After 1066, it never happened again.

The first half of Morris's subtitle is "the Battle of Hastings," which is the main reason why I (and, I suspect most other casual readers) picked it up. But it's the second half -- "the fall of Anglo-Saxon England" -- that's his real subject here. This is a book about a social revolution: a society whose law, language, religion, architecture and much else were transformed over the course of a generation. It wasn't a pretty process; indeed, William could be downright brutal, as in his notorious "Harrying of the North" in which he suppressed an uprising in Yorkshire by inducing a famine. Aristocrats and middling folk were stripped of their possessions, an expropriation codified in his legendary "Domesday Book," one of the most remarkable inventories ever created. But The Norman Conquest is not an account of unmitigated disaster; as Morris points out, the Normans ended slavery, reformed the churches, and took a less murderous stance toward defeated opponents than their predecessors did. In the long run, as he explains in a graceful final chapter, they laid the foundations for a hybrid state that proved remarkably durable and tensile.

The Norman Conquest is a highly readable and substantial account of one of the most pivotal events in British history. It is a distinguished contribution to the annals of 1066 and deserves to have a long history of its own.

My latest essay

I'm happy to report publication of a piece that reflects my intellectual preoccupations of the last year. It's called "Problems and Possibilities of the Self-Made Man," and it appears in the Summer 2013 edition of The Hedgehog Review, a quarterly journal published by the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies at the University of Virginia. The piece looks at the fading presence of the self-made man ideology in contemporary academic discourse, even as it persists in many -- and many unexpected -- corners of everyday American life. It was part of a larger project, since abandoned, on the self-made man in U.S. history, which I was having trouble managing effectively. I'm glad I was able to salvage something that I hope will prove useful.

You can link to the essay here. I'd be obliged if you had a look. Thanks.  --JC

Anne's House, Our House

Why I love the Puritans Dept: Remembering Goodwife Bradstreet, homes lost and homes found, on the 347th anniversary of a personal calamity.

Even now I can see that house burning. The fire, a huge orange sheet, sweeps up toward the New England night, overrunning the wood, glass and thatching, gray smoke against a black sky. Clothing writhes, curls and blackens amid the overpowering heat. I'm stunned by the quietness of the destruction, which is punctuated by occasional crackling and the songs of crickets.

I wasn't there, of course. But Anne Bradstreet was. She would have been about 54 years old. She labeled the poem she later wrote with this heading: “Here followes some verses upon the burning of our house, July 10, 1666. Copeyed out of loose paper." The "loose paper" is evocative; it's as if she literally or figuratively grabbed a fragment of the ruins and tried to inscribe her memory on them, to somehow preserve what was irretrievably lost.

She knew she couldn't bring that house back. And deep down, she knew that she shouldn't be trying. In essence, that’s exactly what her poem was about.

And when I could no longer look,
I blest his grace that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was his own; it was not mine.
Far be it that I should repine . . . .

The problem is that she does repine. She saying all the right things: that the house was never really hers to begin with, that all glory should go to God, that while his ways may be difficult to understand, they are always right – period. And yet as the poem proceeds, it's clear that she can't quite let the matter rest.

Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best,
My pleasant things in ashes lie
And them behold no more shall I.
Under the roof no guest shall sit,
Nor at thy Table eat a bit.

It's a heartbreaking scene – and one that bristles with tension. I picture her as she pictures herself, walking among the ashes. No no, she saying, it doesn't bother me a bit that this place I loved has gone up in smoke. I won’t miss the furniture, or my trinkets, or the company of friends and family that gave it life. More importantly, my faith is so secure that I need not grieve for it. Really.

No pleasant talk shall 'ere be told
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle 'ere shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee.
In silence ever shalt thou lie.
Adieu, Adieu, All's Vanity.

Bradstreet didn’t want to come to America. Born in Northampton, England in 1612, she had been a child of relative privilege. Her father, Thomas Dudley, was a skilled manager who had transformed the balance sheet for Earl of Lincoln. Shortly after her marriage age 16 to Simon Bradstreet, she joined her new husband and father in founding the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630 (both men later became governor). But while she thus had some real stature in his fledgling community, she nevertheless found it difficult to adjust. As she later explained to her children, "I changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, at which my heart rose [in rebellion]. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the Church of Boston." You get the sense that there’s a lot of personal history compressed between those two sentences, a story she didn’t particularly want to tell at that point, the way parents sometimes don’t.

         To the difficulties involved in moving and the rigors of her faith was added another, which he described in language typical of the Puritans: "it pleased God to keep me a long time without children." She eventually raised eight in the frontier settlements of Ipswich and Andover (which is were the house that burned down was located), making the fact that she wrote any poetry all the more remarkable. Upon learning that she had accumulated a body of work, her brother-in-law brought some of it back to England, which was published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America. These poems, which demonstrate the degree to which Bradstreet absorbed Renaissance history and literature, had a largely public voice; one poem, for example, is a tribute to Queen Elizabeth I.

      But much of her work, especially her later work, has a more personal focus, and at times a startlingly modern edge. “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits,” she complained of those real or imagined figures who complained about her. She could also be a true romantic. "If ever two were one then surely we," she begins a poem "To My Dear and Loving Husband.”

        But the central struggle of Bradstreet's life as expressed in her writing can be described in terms of the Puritan injunction to live in the world but not be of it. “Farewell dear babe, my hearts too much content," she wrote of a grandchild who died in 1665 (she lost four and a daughter-in-law in rapid succession, which broke her heart). This passionate, if somewhat belated, love of the life she had made in America was checked by a higher sense of duty, the very sense of duty that led her and her compatriots to come to a foreign land in the first place.

Indeed, while the house and Bradstreet lived in was an actual structure of stone and wood – its very materiality was a source of its comfort – a "house" is not necessarily synonymous with a "home." If for her, and many of us, the concept of home can notes a series of concentric circles that includes one's family, birthplace, region, and nation, Bradstreet in some respects left home for good at an early age. The Puritans, after all, founded Massachusetts because they believed that King Charles I – a sovereign from the “house” of Stuart – was betraying the legacy of a Protestant Reformation that had transformed the houses, villages and cities of England. While Bradstreet's Massachusetts Puritans called their variety of the Church of England Protestantism “non-separating” (in contrast to the even more disenchanted Pilgrims who founded the colony of Plymouth when they arrived on the Mayflower in 1620) it's clear that they were trying to put as much distance between themselves and the mother country as possible.

Even so, the ties between house, home and nation remained deeply entwined. In the context of the 17th-century world, when English and Dutch renegades challenged the supremacy of Catholic Spain, virtually all sacred and secular striving to place in a world of emerging religion-based nation-states. When future Governor John Winthrop, who arrived in the same boat as Bradstreet did, implored his fellow emigrants to found a fabled "city on a hill" even before they arrived in Boston, he took it for granted that a new Jerusalem could not be born in Spanish Mexico or French Québec. These people went on an errand into the wilderness to found a New England. And they did so – and distinguished themselves from the "savages" they conquered – not by building forts or trading posts, though they certainly did build those, but rather by building houses, far more of them in New England than anywhere else in the “new” world.

So it was by this twisted path that Bradstreet’s house really had become a home as fact and symbol, an emblem of family and nation. And yet a spiritual restlessness would not quite allow her to live there at ease. In her poetry otherworldly commitments always have the last word. "The world no longer let me love," she concludes or elegy to her burned house. "My hope and Treasure lies above."

If, by some magical process, I could be transported into the wilderness of colonial Massachusetts, circa 1666, I would guess that Anne Bradstreet would not be so familiar. The differences between us – of sex, religion, and the sheer weight of history coursing like the Merrimack River near her house – are so great that I wonder if we could really communicate, even if we were both speaking the same language. To say, on the basis of reading a poem about her house burning down, that I understand how she feels, is more likely to trivialize her experience than honor her memory.

And yet I feel drawn to her. Some of this can be expressed in simple geography. I, too, have seen and marveled at “the trees all richly clad, yet void of pride” (as she describes the New England landscape in her celebrated poem "Contemplations"), trees that remain even after the advance of the interstate highway and cellphone tower. But there's more to it than that. Across the centuries, she and her children, literal and figurative, have shared a belief that their destinies would be found on these shores.

This is, of course, a familiar myth, though it isn't quite elastic enough to effortlessly incorporate other Americans, like slaves who didn't choose to immigrate, or Indians who (in this millennium anyway) didn't immigrate here at all and in fact were forced to emigrate further away. Still, for all its obvious shortcomings, the myth of America as adopted home has helped explain – better yet, it has helped unify – a nation that could, and did, find plenty of other reasons to be a house divided.

But I now realize that what may be the most important thing I share with Anne Bradstreet is a sense of shame. Her shame derive from a deep, but not altogether justifiable, love for the house that burned down in 1666. My house – our house – has not burned down. Yet we live in it with a sense of foreboding, because we know it cannot last forever, and we sometimes fear it may be demolished sooner rather than later. But our unease is not simply a sense of anxiety about the future; it also involves a sense of nagging unease about the past. We love the house even as are aware, however vaguely, of the displacements that made it possible, as well as the evasions that allow it to stand even as I sit to write these words. We cannot really expect mercy. But, God help us, we hope for it anyway. Here, for now, for the grace of Anne, we lie in our beds on summer nights.

A notably good recent biography of Anne Bradstreet is Charlotte Gordon's Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet (2005). For a nicely sculpted introduction to Bradstreet's work, I recommend Heidi Nichols's compact paperback Anne Bradsteet: A Guided Tour of the Life and Thought of a Puritan Poet (2006) Much of Bradstreet's poetry is available online.

Guelzo's Charge

In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, Allen Guelzo brings a battle back to life in all its messy glory

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

I didn't expect to see a book about Gettysburg from Allen Guelzo. His early work focused on religious history; in recent years he has emerged as a Lincoln scholar of first rank on the strength of work like Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Shaped America (2008).  Making a typical move for a senior historian seeking to bolster his credentials, he published Fateful Lightning, a survey of the Civil War and Reconstruction, last year. But Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is a work of straight military history.  I had my doubts that an essentially intellectual historian could really master a distinct subgenre. But the recent sesquicentennial prodded me to pick up this sizable tome, which I read during the anniversary ofthe battle. I'm glad I did.

Guelzo delivers the goods you expect with a book like this: an overview that sets the stage, a blow-by-blow account of the fighting, thumbnail sketches of the principals, counterfactual assessments of the might-have-beens. We get lots of active verbs: regiments and brigades don't simply attack; they "lunge," "bang"or "slap" each other. In his recent review of the book in the New York Times, David Blight criticized Guelzo for this, invoking the great John Keegan's complaint about a “'Zap-Blatt-Banzai-Gott im Himmel-Bayonet in the Guts' style of military history." I take the point. But overall I have to say that Guelzo's approach animates his narrative without really trivializing his subject. Indeed, he uses statistics to suggest the gravity of the three-day battle, noting that in the most conservative estimate, the damage the Army of Northern Virginia was the equivalent of two sinkings of the Titanic, ten repetitions of the Great Blizzard of 1888 and two Pearl Harbors -- and two and a half times the losses taken by Allied armies in Normandy from D-Day through August of 1944. Union losses were comparable.

In sifting through the massive documentary record, Guelzo, who teaches at Gettysburg College and whose command of the landscape is evident, also has an eye for the colorful quote. He describes a slightly wounded soldier screaming "I'm dead, I'm dead," and the reply of his colonel to two stretcher bearers: "Go and take that dead man off -- if you can catch him." He offers a Union prisoner lying on the ground observing General George Pickett bracing for his fateful charge and speculating that "in looking at his cheeks and nose, we divined that their color was not caused by drinking sodawater only." Guelzo is no worshipper of Robert E. Lee -- like a lot of observers, he concludes that Lee badly overplayed his hand at Gettysburg -- and he's particularly critical of what he regards as Lee's passive-aggressive way of blaming subordinates and soldiers by saying he asked too much of them (in other words, they let him down). But he still manages to capture the understated essence of what made the man appealing to so many people. When one of his division commanders, reputedly Jubal Early, says of the the Yankees, "I wish they were all dead," Guelzo notes Lee's reply: "I wish they were all at home, attending to their own business, leaving us to do the same."

Of course, this is all pretty much standard issue stuff when it comes to a military narrative. But Guelzo has a series of interpretive statements to make as well. Among the most important is his rejection of the conventional wisdom that the Civil War was the first modern war. What he emphasizes instead is how backward looking it seems in terms of what came later, not just in the usual ways (like medicine), but in the lethargy, confusion, and technology of the armies -- Gettysburg was more like Waterloo than the Somme. Yes, rifles could fire a lot further. But that didn't make them any more accurate. Artillery shells moved so slowly through the air that soldiers could see them approach. That hardly made them less deadly, of course. But the rhythm of the fighting was different.

Guelzo also emphasizes the political intrigue that laced through the high command of both armies. In the case of the Confederates, it was the perception that Lee favored Virginians over others. In the Union army ideological conflict was sharper; many senior officers remained loyal to the recently sacked George McClellan -- and shared McClellan's anti-abolitionist views. Guelzo feels that in some cases, such perspectives had important military consequences in terms of how vigorously these people were willing to prosecute the war. Though it's clear that temperament and a concern for personal reputation were also important variables in shaping the conduct of soldiers, it's no accident that stalwart Republicans like Oliver Otis Howard were among those who nudged the recently appointed Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, George Meade, to engage the Confederates. Meade, a McClellanite, was motivated primarily by a fear of making a mistake, and was dragged into a confrontation with Lee in Pennsylvania against his instincts.

On the other hand, it was another McClellanite, John Fulton Reynolds, who forced Meade's hand. Thanks to works like Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, Reynolds has long been recognized as one of the heroes of the battle for his far-sighted recognition on the value of the high ground outside of Gettysburg. But Guelzo emphasizes there was a political dimension here, too: a native Pennsylvanian, Reynolds believed it was necessary to protect Pennsylvania from being ravaged by a hungry army (Guelzo emphasizes that northern Virginia had largely been picked clean by this point) and to drive invaders from native soil.

Guelzo engages in subtle revisionism with some other familiar figures as well. Yes, J.E.B. Stuart made a serious mistake by going off on his own to raid the Pennsylvania countryside rather than stay near the main body of the army. But that's not because his absence meant Lee was flying blind, as has often been asserted, but rather he wasn't around to screen the Confederate army as it sought maximum tactical advantage.  Guelzo clearly believes that Captain Joshua Chamberlain, the Bowdoin College professor who led the valiant defense of Little Round Top, has gotten too much attention from Shaara and others. He has no interest in denying that Chamberlain and the 20th Maine regiment's valor, but he thinks that other figures, notably Meade's chief engineer, General Gouverneur Warren, and Pennsylvania Colonel Strong Vincent were more pivotal in recognizing the crisis caused by the actions of General Daniel Sickles (a scoundrel whom Guelzo finds endlessly entertaining) in Sickles's abandonment Little Round Top and taking the necessary action to shore it up. As is evident by the space he assigns to it, Guelzo clearly feels the battle was decided on the Cemetery Ridge.

My chief complaint with the book is something that's not Guelzo's fault: inadequate maps. There are plenty in the book, and they're very good -- at the highly localized level. What we never get, and desperately need as we wade through the minutiae, is an understanding of the bigger geographic picture. There's no map that situates Gettysburg strategically relative to places like Philadelphia, Washington, or New York. Nor do we get an overview map that encompasses the town of Gettsyburg and major sites of fighting like Cemetery Ridge, Culp's Hill, and the like. In a book with a $35 list price, it would have been nice to have some endpapers that a reader could refer to throughout. 

My minor complaint is a certain truculence of tone that Guelzo reveals early on. "The lure of the Civil War remains strong," he notes, "but dealing with its battles has acquired among my academic peers a reputation close to pornography." Guelzo attributes this in part to "a generation of professional historians whose youth was dominated by the Vietnam War." If it was ever fair, such a perception is dated; indeed, military history is by some standards thriving. Of course, Guelzo is hardly going to warm many academic hearts with a book that bears a jacket endorsement from Newt Gingrich.

But all of this is largely beside the point. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion is the work of a consummate professional, and an excellent one-volume treatment for novice, fan, and scholar alike.

The Window

In honor of our Founding Fathers, an archive edition of American History Now

So there they are, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, one a youthful 70 and the other a fussy 41, sharing a bed at an inn in New Jersey. They’re on their way from Philadelphia to Staten Island, part of a delegation sent by the Continental Congress to negotiate with Admiral Lord Richard Howe of the Royal Navy, in the hopes of avoiding a full-blown war between England and her American colonies. Two weeks earlier, George Washington’s fledgling army escaped seemingly certain destruction in Brooklyn and is for now, at least, alive to fight another day. Lord Howe hopes he can talk his American friends out of making a huge mistake. Adams considers Howe a phony, his overtures nothing more than “Machiavellian maneuvers.” That’s why he was chosen to be one of the negotiators. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, a man who had been reluctant to support independence (he has, and will, worry about the preservation of slavery) is another. And old Ben Franklin, who knew Howe back in England, will be the third.

It is the evening of September 9, 1776. The negotiators pause in their journey to spend the night in Brunswick, New Jersey. Unfortunately, there’s not much lodging to be had in the local taverns. Franklin and Adams agree to share a tiny room, no fireplace, with a single bed and a single open window. It is chilly, and Adams, a self described invalid, is “afraid of the air in the night” and shuts it. “Oh!” says Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.” When Adams relates his fears of coming down with an illness from the bad night air, Franklin, ever the scientist, replies by saying that the air in the room is far more likely to be a problem than that outside. “Come!” he tells Adams. Open the window and come to bed and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.”

Adams complies and joins Franklin in bed. He is curious, even at “the risqué of a cold,” to hear Franklin’s reasoning. Lying there in the dark, side by side, Franklin begins his explanation, which, while apparently of some interest to Adams, literally puts him to sleep (“I left him and his Philosophy together,” he will later write, hearing Franklin trail off just as he does.) They will argue the point again, and in his account of their exchanges Adams will muse on Franklin’s reasoning but remain unconvinced.

At this point in his life, Adams admires Franklin. He likes to say that had Franklin done nothing more than invent the lightning rod, the world would justly honor this “great and good man.” But the next time they team up again, this time in Paris to negotiate an alliance with the French government – a phase of the two men's careers brilliantly captured in the 2008 HBO series, John Adams, from which the above photo was taken – Adams begins to have his doubts. Mr. “Early to Bed and Early to Rise” sleeps late all the time. (He slept through a lot of the Continental Congress, and though Adams will not be there to catch him, Franklin will sleep through a lot of the Constitutional Convention as well.) He drinks too much; he spends too much. And his behavior with French women is downright embarrassing. Adams feels self-conscious about his French, but as he learns it himself he begins to realize that Franklin understands a lot less than he lets on. And when Adams – once again playing bad cop, albeit a bit over his head – annoys the French foreign minister, Franklin writes a letter to Congress telling them that Adams is foolishly tampering with Franklin’s own delicate diplomacy. Adams will never forget or forgive Franklin for that.

Franklin is probably right to dump Adams. Adams probably knows Franklin is right, too. He is over his head. Adams is an intelligent and decent man. But he’s too stubborn, moralistic and vain to be a successful diplomat. He’s honest to a fault – he can’t play the game the way Franklin, who laughs right along when the King puts his image on the bottom his courtesan’s chamber pot, does. He tries not to lie, even to himself.

Part of the reason why someone like Franklin is such a trial to Adams is that he understands that the man really does exhibit traits Adams himself would be lucky to have. Franklin’s cool cheerfulness is a rebuke to Adams’s repressed stolidity. But a hunger for recognition, a hunger that’s never really sated, will not give Adams rest. His wonderfully acidic expression of resentment in 1790 encapsulates his frustration: “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thenceforth these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war.” (It was Adams who had proposed Washington take command of the Continental Army – an excellent idea, and one he can’t help but at least partially regret.)

Adams had about as successful a career as any person could ever rationally hope. From modest beginnings as a shoemaker’s son, he became a self-educated lawyer, political activist, and diplomat. He collaborated with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence, and his work on the Massachusetts constitution was a major influence on the federal one. He managed to spend eight years generally keeping his mouth shut as vice president (no small achievement, particularly for him), and went on to become president himself. And he had the good sense and good fortune to marry Abigail, who brought wisdom, humor, and joy into his life. He lived to see his son John Quincy, become president. We should all be so lucky.

But somehow, you rarely get the impression that John Adams was happy. To be sure, he had legitimate sorrows, among them a son who drank himself to death and a daughter who died of cancer. He had powerful enemies, notably Alexander Hamilton and his erstwhile friend Thomas Jefferson, who, despite hating each other, worked to deny Adams a second term as president. (It’s to their credit that Adams and Jefferson were later able to patch things up – though perhaps it’s no accident that they did so while remaining 500 miles apart.) Still, you get the sense that the hardest single thing about John Adams’s life is that he had to live with John Adams. Feeling that way is hard enough. But it’s even harder when you’ve got people like Franklin, so seemingly self-assured, by your side.

Adams recorded the scene of his night with Franklin in the autobiography he began writing after his forced retirement from politics following his failed bid for re-election in 1800. Though he had a diary to draw on, the editor of the Adams Papers, L.H. Butterfield, reported in 1961 that he wrote this scene “from unaided memory.” I see him at his estate, Peacefield, in Quincy, Massachusetts, an old man remembering himself as a younger one, with Franklin, who had been dead for years, alive and likeable. Adams had been upset earlier that September day when he saw what he regarded as the indiscipline and “dissipation” of the American soldiers he had seen on the road (my guess is that he was being prudishly unrealistic). But he was “determined that it should not dishearten me.” I can’t be sure, but it seems like he’s succeeding, and that the memory of that night brings him pleasure and maybe even comfort in the long twilight of his life. Writing it down gives him something to do.

And us something to celebrate. Thank you, Mr. Adams. And Mr. Franklin.

Jim is in southern Vermont, vacationing with his in-laws. In recent years, mountains have replaced the sea (that would be Maine) as the destination of choice, though he tends not to get too close to either. Instead, most of the traveling is interior (that would be books). Summer reading for this trip -- the assigned summer book for his school -- is Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This 2007 book is considered Diaz's debut novel, but it's one that had a long gestation with a writer who first emerged as a literary star on the strength of his 1996 collection of related stories, Drown. Both books feature Dominican characters toggling between their native island and the states -- here more likely to be the suburbs of New Jersey than NYC. In its emphasis on migration back and forth, and a diaspora that moves beyond the city, Diaz's work reflects the contemporary accents of the immigration saga of the Americas, a saga in which Latinos currently occupy center stage. A stage which increasingly includes places like the previously lily-blanco environs of northern New England

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an ambitious work of art that blends politics (notably that of the brutal Trujillo regime of the mid-20th century, aided and abetted by the U.S.), myth, and a vivid cast of inter-generational characters. But what really sets it apart is Diaz's unique voice, in which sinuous English prose is peppered with profane Spanish slang, much of circling around a fluid politics of race that has a distinctively Latino tint. It's a tour de force piece of writing, and the herald of a new, browner world.

But for now, an interval in the Green (Mountains).

Horace's Resurrection

In the closing years of the last decade, my father-in-law, Ted Sizer, whose struggle with cancer ended in 2009, worked on a book in which he tried to distill a life's work in education reform -- one most vividly documented in his famous trilogy of books Horace's Compromise (1984), Horace's School (1991) and Horace's Hope (1996) -- into a vision of high school for the twenty-first century. When he died, my mother-in-law, Nancy Sizer, the author of a number of books herself and with Ted, promised to finish the project and shepherd it into print. I'm happy to report that both of them achieved their goal, which takes the form of the newly published The New American High School, which was issued last week by the well-known education house Josey-Bass. (Nancy wrote the introduction, which includes a foreword from Ted's dear friend collaborator, Deborah Meier.)

The  New American High School, which begins, literally, with an overview of the place of high schools on our national landscape, touches on a number of key Sizerian themes, always having at the center of them the primacy of a student-centered approach to learning. Ted scrambled some of the categories when it came to contemporary debates on education: a skeptic of standardized testing, he was also an advocate for school choice (he helped found a charter school) and here argues for the importance of religion as a component of a high school curriculum. He evinced the empiricism of a John Dewey, but an empiricism of inner experience, attuned to the sensory dimensions of schooling in everyday life. He was an American original, and is deeply missed. Fortunately, his deeply appealing voice lingers.

Jim is in Philadelphia. He's there with his son Ryland on a trip that's a birthday gift -- Ryland, whose school year ended yesterday, is the one of all his four children who shares his parents' affinity for American history. The trip, which will cover the territory Jim took with his oldest son in in 2002, will cover familiar terrain like Valley Forge and Independence Hall, along with a newer venue or two like the National Constitution Center.

Reading on the trip will be Jill Lepore's latest book The Story of America, a collection of essays. Lepore is a rock star in the history business: besides holding a tenured appointment at Harvard, she's a staff writer at The New Yorker, where most of the pieces in this book appeared. She evinces the very rare gift of the serious scholar who can write very accessibly, endowing familiar topics (the Puritans, Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster) with a sense of freshness in terms of detail while at the same time putting an interpretive spin on them. Many of these pieces have a historiographic dimension; Lepore doesn't simply write about these people, but rather other people writing about these people and what their efforts reveal in the process. Her talents are enviable. But one puts aside one's avarice in the face of work that's so engaging.

Best to all now that summer is officially, undeniably, truly underway.

In The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, New Yorker writer George Packer turns his reportorial gaze toward a people who are losing their country

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.   

Though probably unfair, my graduate school recollection of the three books comprising the John Dos USA trilogy of novels -- The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) -- is that of a better idea than reality. The sheer sprawl of the work, a veritable scrapbook of experimental prose that sought to encompass a broad swath of American experience, was impressive in ambition, but a bit tedious in execution. In terms of scale, at least, George Packer's The Unwinding is a more modest enterprise. It's also a piece of reporting rather than fact-based fiction. But the effect of such relative trimmed sails is a tighter, if more melancholy, book. And one at least as resonant in capturing its historical moment.

Coming in at over 400 hefty pages, The Unwinding offers a granular, empirical confirmation, at the level of lived experience, of what many of us experience as the defining perception of our time. And that is that we are moving backward, that the hard-won gains of the welfare state -- a story whose lineaments Richard Hofstadter sketched in The Age of Reform (1955) and whose trajectory extended into the Great Society -- are unraveling at an accelerating rate. This unspooling, or unwinding, became discernible during the presidency Ronald Reagan and its effects have been shaping the lives of an ever-greater proportion of Americans. For the few (i.e. those at the top), this has been an experience of liberation; for the many, it amounts to a dismantling of the American Dream among people reluctant to relinquish their loyalty to a myth that is ossifying into a lie.

Like Dos Passos, Packer's signal strategy is biographical. He gives us a kaleidoscopic array of characters centering on a three not-quite undistinguished Americans: North Carolinian Dean Price, a southern entrepreneur pursuing the promise of biodiesel fuels; Tammy Thomas, an Ohio factory worker turned community organizer; and Jeff Connaughton, a Washington DC political operative who struggles to maintain his optimism amid his growing disillusionment with American government (and, in particular, his disillusionment with his one-time hero, Joe Biden). These three portraits are augmented by others, among them Michael Van Sickler, a Tampa-based journalist with a front-row seat for the real estate crash of the last five years, and the Hartzells, also based in Tampa, a family perpetually poised on the brink of poverty-induced disaster. 

These primary-source sketches are mixed with ten other, secondary source ones of famous Americans, among them Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, and Sam Walton, each of whom embody different aspects of our zeitgeist. These pieces are short, self-contained, and written with an edge that seeks to puncture the prerogatives of self-presentation that are the particular province of our celebrity aristocracy. "They had the things she didn't -- children, debts, spare time," Packer writes of Oprah's audience. "They consumed the products she advertised but would never buy -- Maybelline, Jenny Craig, Little Caesar's, IKEA." Packer notes that anyone who met Oprah had to sign a non-disclosure agreement signing away the right to talk about it, and notes similar excesses among the much lionized Gingrich (low-hanging fruit, to be sure) and Jay-Z (perhaps less so). His portraits of Raymond Carver and in particular Elizabeth Warren are more charitable; that of Silicon Valley libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel attempts to be fair-minded, but the more time you spend in the company of the man the more repellent he becomes, however perspicacious his observations. Packer's compassion -- and he has plenty of it -- is largely reserved for his primary subjects like Tammy Thomas (so deeply admirable in her quiet decency) and Dean Price, who, from the perspective of a bi-coastal liberal seems seriously deluded in his affection for crackpot New Thought disciples like Russell Conway, but who you nevertheless find yourself rooting for.

In a recent review in The New York Times, David Brooks expressed admiration for the quality of Packer's reporting -- he first rose to promise on the strength of his 2005 book on Iraq, The Assassin's Gate -- but lamented the lack of an explicit ideological scaffolding with which to interpret his subjects. Brooks is certainly right that Packer avoids prescription, but such a criticism probably misses the point (indeed, it seems at least as likely that in the event such scaffolding was evident, Brooks and others would complain that Packer was too polemical). Here I'm reminded that Dos Passos, who certainly did wear his politics on his sleeve, moved sharply to the right later in life and became a staunch champion of Richard Nixon. Such an outcome seems less likely for Packer (who himself comes from a storied, and quite politically diverse, family -- see his memoir Blood of the Liberals), if for no other reason that his deep personal engagement in the lives of his subjects, many of whom have a skepticism about politics that often seems misguided to elites but all too often has a sensible foundation rooted in memory and history. One could accuse Packer of fatalism, but as he reports, that's not a perspective that's the sole property of the left -- Thiel seems to arrive at a similar conclusion from a very different direction. But where Thiel's fatalism leads him inward toward a literal quest for immortality, Packer takes his cue from his subjects, all of whom look outward. If this particular unwinding -- Packer begins by suggesting there have been many in American history, though he never really returns to the point -- is final, it really does seem better that we go down together.

Regraduating

To mark the end of the school year, here's a reprise edition of my old running series.

  

The Felix Chronicles, # 35

 In which we survey the annual spring harvest

I make a detour when I arrive at school for a final round of faculty meetings to take a look at the Quad. Surprisingly, there are no obvious traces of yesterday’s ceremonies. Less than 24 hours ago, this space was teeming with parents, grandparents, alums, along with hundreds of students —- some of whom were wearing caps and gowns and about to dissolve into living ghosts. Today, all that remains is a sole folding chair. And since it’s brown, not black like the hundreds that had been set up, I’m not even sure it was here yesterday. The only sign that anything relatively unusual had happened are the distressed stripes of grass running horizontally across the Quad. The maintenance crew will take care of that in pretty short order, and this space will revert to a stretch of silence, punctuated only by the occasional round of elementary school kids singing here on summer afternoons, or administrators walking to and from their cars. Birds and bees will hold dominion for a season.

I’m relieved it’s finally over. It’s been three weeks since the seniors finished classes, a period punctuated by end-of-the-year parties, final exams, the prom, the senior dinner, and other rituals. Graduation is the most tedious. People typically experience a string over a string of a dozen or so years: elementary school and middle school, then high school, college, each a little more bittersweet and dogged by anxiety, followed perhaps by a postgraduate degree. And then that’s it for a generation. But we teachers (especially high school teachers) go through the motions every year. The students, the speeches, the recitation of the school song: they all tend to run together. If anything is likely to be memorable, it’s the weather: hot or rainy, surprisingly cool or surprisingly beautiful. There’s usually a moment of genuine gladness at some point in the morning, as we witness the visible signs of maturity in some of our charges. And there’s often a moment of genuine regret, too, when we face an esteemed colleague’s retirement, the graduation of the final child in a cherished family, or a fond farewell from a clutch of friends who complemented each other so nicely. Any of these people may reappear at some point, in some perhaps transfigured way. But the uncertainty of such scenarios, and the certainty of time’s passage, make such moments bittersweet at best.

It’s always a relief when you get in the car and head home after such rituals, and I’m glad to seize a life, however quotidian, that’s truly my own. For years now, it’s been my habit to come home from graduation and mow the lawn. I think of Winslow Homer’s 1865 painting “Veteran in a New Field,” which depicts a recently returned Civil War soldier threshing wheat. Figuratively speaking, my campaign is over, and I’m eager to get back to my farm.

This notion of closure is among the greatest satisfactions of teaching. Other walks of life are comparably cyclical. But I don’t think any afford the kind of clean lines and closed books that a life in schools does. Many working people take extended summer vacations, but few of them are as expansive and sharply chiseled as that afforded by an academic schedule. As we are all veterans of schooling, this experience is a virtual birthright. But only teachers refuse to relinquish it.

The time will come—unexpectedly quickly —when my longings will turn away from completion and repose toward the rebirth that comes with the fall. In my case, the longings typically return long before it's time to actually return to the classroom. But as I make my way from meeting to meeting, from a final faculty softball came to a final trip to the local watering hole before we all disperse, I pause to savor the cadence. The present is past. And history will be born anew.

Big School

 In this graduation season, a reprise of the address I delivered the Senior Dinner, held at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School on June 8, 2010.

When I learned that I was to be the speaker at Senior Dinner, which I regard as one of the great honors of my career, my first reaction was joy. My second, of course, was dread, dread of the sort I’ve been inflicting on my students for years. Now it’s my turn to try and be interesting. Touché, kids. That’s a French term. It means "also awake at 3 a.m."

One thing I’m always telling my students when they sit down to write for me is that they should always begin with a question of audience: To whom are you speaking? This is a simple question, but a necessary one. The answer for this particular assignment seems obvious enough: I’ve been chosen by the student body to address the student body. But insofar as it’s true, I’m not only addressing the student body. As my students know, if I was only addressing the student body, this speech would have a great many four letter words in it. But that would get me into a bit of trouble with some of the people our principal, John Love, generously calls “grownups.” Of course, it should be said that my penchant for using four letter words is a piece of pedagogic stagecraft I learned from one of the important grownups in my life, my father. I don’t know whether my dad acquired his distinctive patois from his years on the New York Fire Department, or whether he got it from his father, a longshoreman down at Chelsea Piers, also known, thanks to our good friends the Bernsteins, as ECF South. Now, there, ladies and gentlemen, was a workingmen’s school. I will also tell you, good students of Fieldston, that if your apartment was on fire, my Dad would be cursing you every step of the way as he carried you from the burning building. That’s just the kind of guy he is. (When I mentioned this to him, he laughed and said, “Goddamn liberals.”)

Now, my dad isn’t here tonight. But of course your parents are here tonight. That’s why, as part of a Senior Dinner speech, I probably should be using phrases here like “precious cargo,” and expressing thanks on behalf of the faculty for lending us your children, and all that crap. This is also the place where I insert a joke about how writing that check to Wash U is going to feel downright painless compared to all these years of paying Fieldston tuition. Then I can cross parents off the checklist.

 Then it’s on to the faculty and staff. This is the point in my speech where I gently rib my colleagues by wondering how long it takes the inimitable Bob Montera to metabolize a cannoli (in some ways, probably about fifteen seconds). This is also where I reveal, on good authority, that Felix Adler loved Broadway theater, because Bill Werner used to take him to backstage to meet people like Eugene O’Neill and Lena Horne. “Act like you’ve been here before,” Bill would whisper to the starstruck Adler.

Then we come to the audience participation part of the speech.  I say, “blah blah blah Dotty Hanson, ladies and gentlemen, let’s give her a hand.” (Please applaud.)  I say “blah blah blah Mark Stanek. (Please applaud.)” I will now demonstrate my good progressive credentials: “Blah blah blah catering crew.” (Gesture.)  We’re like family, right, Liz? Never around when it’s time to clean up.

That done, I will pivot and turn my focus to the people who are texting about the party that will be starting about an hour from now, and that of course is you, soon to be ex-Fieldstonians. (Semiolon; close parentheses.) But insofar as I can possibly make things interesting tonight, I thought I’d tweak the formula by addressing you not as who you are tonight, but instead as the people you will be in ten years, because I think that’s about the length of the next segment of life course you’ve now embarked upon, that increasingly long stretch in our society  between when childhood ends and adulthood begins.


I want to begin the process of talking to your future selves, however, by first inviting you for a quick trip down memory lane and asking you to remember that long ago time when you were just starting the college process. Actually, as some of the people in this room know, I happen to be the father of a Form V Fieldston student, and this spring break we began that journey that you all recently finished. You remember how that goes: You start by thinking in terms of broad categories: near versus far; city versus country, and, of course, big versus small. From the start, my son Jay has been very open-minded about the process, but he was also clear at the outset that he wasn’t much interested in a small liberal arts college. Can’t be small. No Williams, no Amherst, no Sarah Lawrence, where his mother teaches (God forbid he should avail himself of the free tuition.) Small is been there, done that. Jay has loved going to Fieldston, but let’s face it: Fieldston is small – my own graduating class was one and a half times the size of this whole high school. Now Jay is a good kid, and he indulged his father and his college counselor Harry Dawe by paying a visit to Davidson College down in North Carolina three months ago, which is, by liberal arts college standards, on the small side. As it turned out, he really likes it, and he plans to apply. As you know, experiences like these can be formative ones in the life of a family. So it is only natural that a father like myself will bring his paternal instincts to bear and helpfully say, “I told you so.”

We of course have no idea what will happen with Jay and the whole college process. Though I will say that if all goes well, this time next year I’ll be sitting where you are now, glancing surreptitiously at my watch, and grousing that at least at Fieldston you don’t have to pay housing fees.

Now by that point, you all will have your first year of college behind you. You will have had that bizarre experience of freshman orientation, meeting and befriending people for little reason other than the fact that they happen to live two matchbox-sized rooms away from you and don’t like their roommate any more than you like yours. And in the coming days, you will find yourself standing beside one of these people at three o’clock in the morning, lending your moral support as she vomits profusely beside you behind the frat house. And as she retches, you will marvel how it is that you find yourself placing a gentle hand on her back – that in a life that has been so much a matter of deciding what you want, of choice, that you find yourself in relationships that are not entirely a matter of your control. Five years from now, you’ll be a cherished guest at the wedding of this cookie-tosser. Twenty years from now, you’ll be writing a check for her kid’s bar mitzvah. He’s a spoiled brat, but what can you do? This is what friendship means.

 But I’m getting ahead of myself. About four years from now, you’ll be graduating from college. It will turn out to be much easier than you expected, because after surviving a year of intensive chemistry with Compton Mahase, pretty much anything seems easy by comparison. And so your parents will once again be trudging through another set of rituals not unlike the ones you’re finishing up now. They’ll be gazing surreptitiously at their watches listening to some speaker making a lame joke about how paying tuition at Duke Law School will be a breeze because it’s only be a matter of three years rather than four. You’ll bounce around for a while in the months and maybe years following your college graduation – it’s likely to be one of the more unsettling moments in your life – while you try to figure out what you’re going to do with yourself. By your late twenties, you will either have started graduate work or started kidding yourself that you might go; you’ll be married or starting to wonder why you’re not; and a few of you will actually have children of your own while the rest of you try to avoid making the same mistake. Hopefully, by the time you’re at the end of your twenties you’ll have a pretty good idea about what you want from your life. You’ll spend your thirties chasing what you want; your forties realizing you’re not going to achieve what you want; your fifties realizing you’re going to lose what you have; your sixties actually losing what you have; and your seventies trying to find your glasses. In your eighties you’ll be hallucinating that you’re back in Form IV, telling a bewildered Coach Bluth that it doesn’t matter that you suck at basketball. You’re still a good person. “He knows,” your daughter will be telling you, placing her hand gently on your back. He knows.” But again I digress.

 My real point is that over the course of the next decade, I expect you’ll be paying periodic visits to your high school alma mater. At first it will feel weird, because life will have actually gone on without you, and you’ll walk into Lorenzo Krakowsky or Nancy Banks’s office to find that the kids there actually seem to think they own them the way you did. And as you walk around the campus, you’ll think: Jeez, this place is small. Way back when you were in seventh grade – and, of course, you’re old enough to have attended Fieldston before there was a separate middle school, back in those golden days before the catastrophic decline in admissions standards – the place seemed huge. Then it seemed to fit you just right. But now it’s shrinking. And it will keep shrinking over the course of the next few years.

And then a surprising thing will start to happen: Fieldston will start to get big again. You will have spent the last decade feeling so palpably that you’re a free agent, moving from school to school, job to job, city to city, establishing yourself. It will only be then, about ten years from now, that you’ll begin to see in a way you never quite fully grasped how much you’re a product no less than an agent, that you’ve been imprinted by an institution that has defined you all the time you thought you were inventing yourself. 

But here’s the funny thing about this institution: it’s based on an idea. Actually, this doesn’t happen all that often. Survival, economic gain, pleasure: these are some of the reasons institutions, even academic institutions come into being. But this one is premised on an idea, namely that the world can, in fact, be made into a better place.  Now, I will confess to you that I, who has been educated somewhat differently than you have, am not entirely sure the world can be made into a better place. And I’m mindful, as I know many of you are, that the people who came up with this idea, and those who of us who sustain it, can be a little full of ourselves.  But it’s a proposition that I’m willing to entertain, particularly because it’s one that has somehow conjured up a building in which toilets flush, emails get sent, and meals get eaten every day. Not bad for an idea.

But that’s not all this notion that the world can be a better has conjured. It’s also conjured up an institution where you can find a teacher whose work has been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (That’s Nancy Fried; check it out.) It’s conjured up a place where an adolescent can not simply participate, but design, a community service action project that actually helps people. It’s conjured up things called MADs and FADs and ALPs.

All of this was in place when you arrived. But there are other things which, as you reflect on them in the decade since you graduated, were of your time, and which are now beginning to seem more striking. Perhaps that’s because they’ll seem ahead of their time, or perhaps it’s because they will be the kind of thing people make fun of, though more likely than not the people who do so will be ones you don’t like that much, like the idiot president we will no doubt soon have. (Because, let’s face it, kids: it’s all downhill from here.) I’m talking about things like fact that you had a “green dean” way back in 2009. Or that in a time when gay people were still being demonized in public life, you had a gay head of school, about whom the most relevant facts were how good he was at his job and how sorry everyone was to see him go.

And you’ll ask yourself: What does this mean for me? Who does this mean I am? And it’s at this point that I’m going to have to bail out on the prediction side of things.  Nor, since I am now a former teacher as far as you’re concerned, will I be dispensing any pearls of wisdom, which was never my strong suit anyway. Instead, I will end by expressing a series of hopes. One, that you will prosper in your chosen endeavors. Two, that you will savor the joy of friendship – which, among other things, will involve placing a reassuring hand on the back of a barfing friend at three a.m. behind a frat house. (You can always use the opportunity to reminisce at length about a speech you once heard by an old History teacher back at your high school, which I’m sure will go over very well.) And finally, that you will always have room for an idea – a good idea – a possibility that will remain alive because at the start of a life in which you remain blessedly young, you had the good fortune to attend a surprisingly big school.

All right, kids. That’s all for now. See you on Facebook.

Fast food for the mind

In College (Un) Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, Jeffrey J. Selingo surveys the a transformation that is already underway

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.    

My teeth were on edge a few pages into the introduction of this book when Jeffrey Selingo first deploys the term he uses repeatedly to describe higher education in the United States: he calls it an "industry." The first sub-heading is called "A risk-averse, self-satisfied industry." A few pages later, he writes, "Colleges [by which I think he means administrators, or perhaps more specifically admissions officers] now view students as customers and market their degree programs as products." The proposition that students might be the product, and that this product might be civic, as opposed to simply economic, never appears to have crossed his mind -- or, at any rate, be taken seriously.

But of course I'm speaking from the point of view of a vanishing species on the cusp of virtual irrelevance, if not extinction in this ecosystem (even though I don't happen to be a member of it myself): the liberal arts professoriate. Whether or not such people actually deserve their marginality is in any case beside the point: change is coming. Actually, it's already here: barely a third of all college students today are 18-24 year-olds attending traditional college institutions. And that, Selingo seems to believe (and seems to believe most other people with skin in the game also believe) is a good thing. They're right -- to a point.

The title of this book is indeed apt: Selingo describes an educational landscape in which the traditional bundling of educational services into a single collegiate experience is replaced by one in which an à la carte menu of goods and services gets procured in a way comparable to one buys an airline ticket or telecommunications services. Actually, the book itself seems redolent of the same logic: Selingo is an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, where parts of this book first appeared. It's published by New Harvest, an imprint of Amazon.com, and distributed through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

But I digress: the point here is that a college education is increasingly a matter of a student attending a series of institutions with different kinds of accreditation; of classes that are held in office parks rather than campuses; and courses that begin and end at all hours of the day or months of the year.

At the center of this transformation is technology, specifically online classes of the MOOC or Coursera stripe. Though widely viewed by traditional educators as cheap, freeze-dried learning of dubious value, Selingo makes a persuasive case that such a view is far too simplistic. For one thing, such courses are often produced by rock-star faculty who are far more engaging than "risk-averse, self-satisfied" lecturers relying on stale notes and a dry manner. For another, the interactive features in many online courses allow students to tailor their pace and zero in on difficult material in ways that are genuinely superior to that of the one-size-fits-all approach of the traditional classroom. Even the supposed unique strength of the intimate seminar -- serendipitous conversation and interaction between student and teacher -- can at least be approximated in the growing social dimension of study groups, social events, and other tools of community-building. In fact, Selingo argues, any notion that the future of education pits online vs. classroom learning against each other is mistaken: they're increasingly converging toward each other, and a hybrid experience (of admittedly varying proportions) is likely to be the default setting for college education wherever it takes place.  

Such developments are putting already cash-strapped institutions under enormous pricing pressures. Colleges and universities have long used low-cost, high margin basic courses to subsidize the cost of more expensive specialized ones, which makes them reluctant to cede ground to challengers that will destroy their economic model. But in this regard they hold a trump card: As Selingo notes, a website can compete with a newspaper at any time, but online schools can't issue diplomas. Online educators are experimenting with credentialing devices like "badges" that its graduates can sell on employers, and over time that may well work in breaking the credentialing firewall.

Then again, it may not. One of the more striking near-silences in College (Un) Bound is the dearth of space Selingo gives to for-profit institutions and the genuinely plausible skepticism they have engendered in their financing and the experience they purvey to students. DeVry University gets a single entry in the index; the University of Phoenix gets a passing mention two times before getting a paragraph in the conclusion that notes that it's not faring so well. Amid all this breathless discussion of the "the disruption" reshaping higher education, one might have liked to see a chapter on how the disrupters themselves have been disrupted, and whether or not there are cautionary tales for those who think they know what the future looks like.

As a high school teacher, I also found myself wondering what the implications of all this might be for secondary education. Adolescents, for example, are no less likely to learn better online than they do in a classroom (indeed their tolerance for sitting still in a for more than ten minutes without an electronic device is virtually nonexistent). But also it's hard to imagine adults leaving children to those devices. Perhaps schooling really truly is more than information, a grade, a degree. Then again, I too may soon be out of a job.

Still, as Selingo notes, Harvard isn't going anywhere. And, he faithfully reports, employers regularly invoke the need for critical thinkers, people who are as more likely become that way by reading novels than by clicking boxes. But such people are -- have always been -- a minority. Notwithstanding the pastoral imagery landscape architects conjure on country-club campuses, the finest institutions of higher learning have usually been scruffy places. It's a small price to pay for that precious (yes, in both senses of that term) freedom: a life of the mind.