History Today

Imperial
By William T. Vollmann
Viking, 2009
Reviewed by Jared Farmer

As a history professor, I get annoyed when student papers refer to history books as novels.  Novel = fiction; history book = non-fiction, I scribble in the margins again and again.  But my students unwittingly remind me of a larger truth: novelists and historians both invent stories, the main difference being that the rules of novel-writing are less rigid than the rules history-writing.  So what happens when a novelist writes history?  William T. Vollmann’s epic perusal of the U.S.-Mexico border, Imperial, defies categorization.  The author crosses various genres—fiction, memoir, journalism, history—to spawn a hydra-like book.  Under the amorphous category of creative non-fiction, it may go down as a minor magnum opus.  Judged solely as a history book, Imperial doesn’t conform to scholarly norms, but that could be considered a compliment.  In its unrestrained messiness, this book is more honest about the human experience than most exemplars of historical writing.

Vollmann focuses on the Imperial Valley, a little-known, little-loved corner of his home state, California.  Most of the nation’s winter lettuce and cantaloupes come from here—a desert basin below sea level where the brackish remains of the Colorado River disgorge from canals onto stubbly green fields.  The U.S.-Mexico border divides the valley in two.  On the U.S. side, legal and illegal immigrants toil in the ferocious sun.  Although the federal government brought water to this land to promote small farms, the U.S. side of the Imperial Valley belongs to agribusiness.  Every year, hundreds of prospective workers defy the U.S. Border Patrol, and thousands more try.  The odds of getting across are probably better than getting ahead.  Imperial County typically has California’s highest unemployment rate—up to forty percent in the peak of summer, the fieldworkers’ off-season.  Dreams and despair coat the dry air in Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico, the Imperial Valley’s estranged twin cities.  On the Mexican side, maquiladoras and water shortages threaten the future of communal farming.  Downstream from the factories and farms, at the bottom of the landlocked valley, the Salton Sea shimmers and smells like a dystopian oasis.  This accidental lake formed in 1905 when the Colorado burst through a dike.  Sustained by agricultural and now industrial runoff, the Salton Sea grows saltier and more polluted every year, and will become a dead sea unless government agencies intervene to save what has become a critical habitat for migratory birds.  Ecologically and socially, Imperial is a paradox.  This divided binational wasteland of abundance would be the perfect setting for a major American book, even the Great American Novel.

Vollmann wanted to write that novel, or at least a stateside counterpart to his WWII mega-fiction, Europe Central, winter of the 2005 National Book Award.  The first 180 pages of Imperial are a longwinded prologue explaining how Vollmann embarked on his borderlands fiction and how he foundered.  Along the way, he shares his thoughts on his hero Steinbeck, Flaubert, and The Winning of Barbara Worth, a pulp novel from 1911 (later made into a movie) set in the Imperial Valley.  Vollmann is generous about everything, especially himself: we learn that he needed to write about the valley after he won and lost the adoration of a local painter, a one-of-a-kind woman, the love of his life.  He chronicles their breakup in agonizing detail, complete with footnotes.  To ease his heartache and to sublimate his erotic desires, Vollmann turned to Mexico.  He fell in love with the place, or at least the people there—the whores and junkies of Mexicali, the pollos (illegal border-crossers) and the campesinos (fieldworkers).  Only history could do justice to their pathos, he decided.  He repurposed his novelistic research; he turned it into a non-fiction book about the research itself.

When the book’s historical section approaches, Vollmann loudly cautions the reader with a sign-box, “WARNING OF IMPENDING ARIDITY.”  This warning must be flippant, you think, but Vollmann follows through: Imperial becomes a tedious compendium of local history facts.  However, the book is not boring like a standard history book based on the same sources.  History professors tend to be dull in print because of their express functionality; they present contextualized facts in logical order in service of a thesis.  An academic book of history must look like a “history book”—introduction, main chapters, conclusion, notes, bibliography, index.  The author’s feelings generally have no place, nor does the personal pronoun.  By contrast, Vollmann has built a career, and inspired a cult of personality, as a self-revealing macho poet who dares to explore the extremities of the planet and the psyche.  He seeks out warlords, drug dealers, and pimps for inspiration.  Sex workers serve as his muses.  His omnipresent voice—sarcastic yet tenderhearted, erudite yet conversational—doesn’t sound like a historian.  And certainly he doesn’t organize his thoughts like one.  Imperial contains over 100 pages of non-traditional endnotes yet no index despite having more than 200 chapters, many of which consist of a single paragraph or a single sentence; others go on and on with discursive paragraphs that stretch to multiple pages.

So how can such a book by such an author be tedious?  Vollmann’s lack of restraint is his debilitating strength.  The author shows all of the enthusiasm of a top history student, tracking down primary sources in government archives and small-town newspapers,  but none of the discipline of a tenured history professor.  This is full immersion historical writing; you sink or swim with the author as he unleashes a flood of information.  Professional historians are like dams: they capture a flood of data, and release a manageable stream.  Imperial is like the undammed Colorado—a muddy red swirl with rocks and trees.  There is method behind the debris, however.  Vollmann has developed a novel way of capsulizing historical themes, a method of summarization that paradoxically requires prolixity.  As he unleashes a flood of quotes (none of them in quotation marks), he calls attention to certain evocative phrases.  These catchphrases or memes—his favorite being “WATER IS HERE,” an old newspaper headline about the onset of irrigation—get repeated and restated in different fonts and guises throughout the text.  After this long, wordy process of accretion, Vollmann can in the end compose a powerful, succinct meta-summary chapter composed of nothing but strings of these memorable phrases in various visual styles: a poetic distillation of the local past.

Vollmann plays with voice as well as form.  To map one locale with words, he deliberately draws on multiple stylistic traditions.  Like de Tocqueville, he looks for the essence of America on its backroads.  Some of his rhetorical flourishes are decidedly Whitmanesque.  On the meta-level, Vollmann resembles the American metafictional authors John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace—postmodern novelists who write the act of writing into their texts.  Yet his dogged pursuit of the real-life underlife takes more after the “New Journalism” practiced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and especially Hunter S. Thompson, who would approve of Vollmann’s gonzo predilections—trying meth and crack, hiring prostitutes, hopping trains.  At other times, however, Vollmann assumes the sober, fact-finding persona of Depression-era California muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, and Paul Taylor.  Overall, Imperial seems to be saying that no one style, no one method, no one perspective can capture the beautiful disarray and savage beauty of the U.S.-Mexico border; no standard history could honestly capture this messy, messed-up place.

Imperial pushes the limits of the history book, but does so at time when the future of the printed book as the leading form of learned communication is in doubt.  Only a famous author with a canny agent and a cult following could convince a publisher to produce a $55 book that weighs four pounds.  Within academia, historians continue to churn out manuscripts even as presses drastically pare down their catalogues.  The old academic business model—university professors write books, university presses publish them, and university libraries purchase them—is falling apart.  At my university, for example, the proposed budget for monograph acquisitions this fiscal year is $0.  For academic historians, this crisis presents an opportunity to rethink the profession.  Like it or not, more of our book-length projects will have to migrate to the Internet.  But they shouldn’t necessarily take form as e-books.  We should look around for creative ways to repackage our histories.  In this regard, Vollmann provides a great anti-inspiration.  Not his book but his research would make a fantastic website—an interactive map of the border where hyperlinked geo-points lead to site-specific illustrations, sound and video clips, interview transcripts, essays, primary sources, and more.  Such a website would convey the interconnectedness of the U.S.-Mexican border better than any thick tome.  Unfortunately, in its printed form, Imperial resembles a miniature version of the entire World Wide Web: a forest of links, many of them broken; a swamp of rambling, egocentric blogs; an ocean of pseudo-scholarly encyclopedia entries; and, most of all, webpage after webpage of girls, girls, girls.

More than any other discipline, history remains wed to the monograph—a particular form of book.   This form has hardly changed since the creation of the historical profession in the nineteenth century.  Even though we professors have lost faith in Truth and Objectivity, even though we know about the challenge of postmodern theory to the authority of the text, we continue to write single-topic books in the omniscient third person voice.  As convention dictates, we present our books as logical outcomes of research plans, not compromises between imperfect documentary sources and limited human resources.  Only when you talk to historians in private do you learn about the personal, prosaic, and random reasons why histories take particular shapes.  Here are some fictional examples from imaginary American professors:

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but my Spanish skills are so limited that I chose a project that permitted me to exclude Mexico from my study.

My editor was a stickler about the word limit, so I had to cut the chapter on Mexico and turn it into a journal article.

Although I’d become totally disenchanted with my project, I’d worked too long on it to abandon it, so I did a streamlined version, giving up my original intention to do research in Mexico, focusing instead on the American sources.

Sigh.  I didn’t get any of the fellowships I applied for so I couldn’t afford to go to Mexico—not on my salary.  Nor did I have the means to hire any researchers there.

My mother got sick and I had to take care of her while dealing with my own kids; but I still had to get the book out in time for tenure review, so out of necessity I dropped my plan to add a comparative chapter on Mexico.  I simply didn’t have the time.

The Mexican archive where I was supposed to do research shut down indefinitely because of earthquake damage, so I had to change the scope of my project.

My book would be stronger if I could spend at least six additional months doing research in Mexico City, but the smog there aggravates my asthma so much that I literally can’t.

In other words, the mess of life intrudes into history.  It happens all the time.  However, when you read an academic history book (or fellowship application, or tenure file) you almost invariably get neat statements of success: I have advanced the historiography, I have filled a gap in the literature, I have produced knowledge, I have recovered forgotten stories.  Job promotion in academia requires institutional validation of such progress statements.  No wonder, then, that history books tend to be conservative in form.  “Maybe I’ll do a more creative project once I’ve been tenured,” assistant professors often say.  Most of us never follow through.  We rarely use our vaunted academic freedom to do something dangerously interesting, to risk falling on our faces.

As a prize-winning non-academic, Vollmann can be refreshingly candid about his failures.  In ten years of research in Mexico he never learns Spanish!  His efforts at investigative journalism go nowhere.  He risks bodily health testing the claim that the New River—Mexico’s wastewater discharge into the Salton Sea—is the “most polluted river in America,” but his results are inconclusive.  He tries unsuccessfully to track down the stories of nameless pollos who die in the desert.  Even with the help of genealogists, he finds next to nothing about the life of one of first white girls born in Imperial Valley—a girl he’s obsessed with because her parents gave her a striking, symbolic first name: Imperial.  Imperial’s longest chapters are about even more quixotic researches.  Vollmann hears rumors from Mexicans in Mexicali that there are tunnels beneath the city built long ago by Chinese immigrants (the original “illegal aliens” in America).  After many failed attempts to ingratiate himself into the surviving Chinese community, Vollmann finally enters a few deteriorated subterranean chambers and even finds some letters written in Chinese, but the historical scope and use of the tunnels remains elusive.  This partial exhumation of the past was achieved only after Vollmann hires some Chinese-speaking assistants from his hometown, Sacramento.  Imperial is full of hired help: drivers, translators, river guides, street guides, lab technicians, snoops.  When Vollmann hears stories about the systematic sexual harassment of female workers in the maquiladores of Mexicali, he embarks on a quest to discover the truth.  Being, as his publisher says, “one of our most important writers,” Vollmann obtains a $20,000 advance from Playboy.  How quickly the money evaporates!  He spends a Mexican fortune on a digital spy camera; the software malfunctions, and the hardware scorches his penis.  When a woman-for-hire finally gains entrance as a mole, Vollmann discovers little more than a truism of economics: outsourced factories in developing nations take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulation.

I enjoyed reading these stories of failure, and identified with them, for I know from experience that most historical research leads to dead ends.  Unlike Vollmann, academic historians just keep looking until they find enough material to fashion some credible account of some past.  A history book is the end-product of an institutionalized process, whereas Imperial is a stream-of-consciousness record of a lay historian’s idiosyncratic practice.  Vollmann writes his writer’s voice—his conflicted inner dialogue about his own research project—into every section of Imperial, a quality that makes this book more postmodern than most academic treatises about postmodernism.  With unveiled honesty, the author reminds us that knowledge is a commodity that can be bought and sold.  He pays crackheads to show him around; he pays prostitutes to sing him narcocorridos.  But understanding is one thing you can’t buy.  After all the time and money Vollmann blows on bargirls and taxi drivers along the border, he concedes his greatest failure of all: he doesn’t understand the entity he calls “Imperial,” the object of his obsession, his Great White Whale.  He calls “Imperial” many, many things, starting with the “continuum between Mexico and America,” but finally he calls it unknowable.  I found this admission—after 1,000 pages!—maddening but also refreshing.  Not knowing is, after all, the essence of scholarly pursuit.  We keep studying because we still haven’t reached a perfect state of understanding, which will forever remain out of reach.

Is this doorstopper worth your time as a reader?  If you want a passionate book that embraces the historical practice but challenges the history book genre, this is the book for you.  For those primarily interested in the U.S.-Mexico border, I would recommend targeted reading.  Parts of the book—especially the interviews with ordinary Mexicans—gave me a heightened, palpable awareness of how and why illegal immigrants cross the border.  Vollmann has also produced a large-format companion book of photographs, also called Imperial (powerHouse Books, 2009), which contains gritty portraits of some of the pollos and prostitutes described in the book—though without commentary.   It’s a shame that these two overlong and overpriced books could not have been combined into one shorter and cheaper one.  As published, Imperial (the text) could never be assigned in the classroom, though individual chapters might make great discussion material.

Luckily, history teachers have at their disposal other examples of creative non-fiction about the American West, starting with John McPhee’s books on California and Alaska. Other notable titles include Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams (1994), which treats Indian removal at Yosemite National Park and atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site as flipsides of an American land ethic.  Dan Flores’s Caprock Canyonlands (1990), combines history and memoir to explore the past and future of wilderness in West Texas. And Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land (1996) uses the boom-and-bust history of eastern Montana (including the tale of a town that desperately renamed itself Joe, Montana) to explain the culture of boosterism that led to the settlement of the marginal areas of the arid West.  But the best book in this vein—and perhaps the best genre-bending history I’ve ever read—is William deBuys’s Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (1999), a study of … the Imperial Valley. Barely acknowledged by Vollmann, this underappreciated volume covers the exact same ground with greater insight and greater humility. Best of all, deBuys manages to rewrite the rules of historical writing without breaking the rules of history. Salt Dreams has a clear, concise, powerful thesis: “in low places consequences collect.”  At the bottom of the Imperial Valley, “the lowest of the low,” we see the American Dream in concentrated form. William T. Vollmann sees this, too, but he’s too busy writing to say it.

Jared Farmer, Assistant Professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, winner of the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize.

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
by Gordon Wood
Oxford University Press, 2009
Reviewed by Sarah Bowman

Gordon Wood begins Empire of Liberty, the latest installment of The Oxford History of the United States series, with Rip van Winkle, the title character in Washington Irving’s 1819 story about a man who falls into a twenty-year sleep just before the American Revolution, awakes years after it to find his New York village unrecognizable. Where once existed a sleepy hamlet on the Hudson was now a bustling commercial town, full of citizens who talked of political rights, parties, and elections. For Rip Van Winkle, these changes were traumatic: colonial America, the only world he had ever known, had vanished. 

The massive changes that Rip Van Winkle awoke to are at the center of Wood’s magisterial narrative. The story of the early republic is a story of change. Of population growth and increasing commercialization, of the democratization of politics and the development of parties, of the emergence of the non-aristocratic, enterprising “middling sorts” and of Americans’ confidence that their culture and their country could be refashioned. It is also a story that echoes/evokes Rip Van Winkle’s bewilderment at his society’s transformation—an exploration of how the founders’ enlightened political and cultural ideals fractured under the rising egalitarianism they themselves had set in motion.

Wood’s book narrates a period of American history whose broader transformative qualities may be neglected in school textbooks or the curriculum, lost beneath the political story of the ratification of the Constitution and the contest between the Federalists and the Republicans.  But Wood deepens our understanding beyond the political ideals and events that typically define the era in the classroom, teasing out the multiple meanings and complexities of America’s new “empire of liberty.”

The phrase, which Thomas Jefferson used to describe his vision of America, is an apt title for Wood’s exploration of how the founders’ “liberty-loving principles” helped create a democratic, egalitarian nation far different from the one they had intended— a nation that finally turned away from the cultural authority of England and Europe, confident in its own national character, a nation that valorized the word democracy instead of denigrating it. The classical aristocratic political ideal was dying. The young nation valued the striving of the ordinary people in its emerging commercialized society, even as it expanded its own territory, thereby perpetuating slavery and sowing the seeds for the crisis of the Civil War.  Empire of Liberty is both a masterful synthesis for the general reader and critical reading for teachers looking to deepen their own, and their students’, understanding of this era.

Importantly, Wood establishes early on that even after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the founders struggled to determine what America’s liberty should look like.  His first chapters trace the ideas of these men—Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Adams, Madison, and others—as they sought to answer the many questions raised by their “experiment in republicanism”: how would a society not bound by patriarchal relationships cohere? how much power should the President and Congress actually have, and how should politicians behave? how would a republic conduct itself in the world? how would the government raise money? how to deal with the rise of the non-elite “middling sorts”—commercial farmers, manufacturers, merchants—in a political culture that still valued aristocratic leadership?  Wood’s emphasis on the contested nature of these principles are key for any teacher seeking to communicate the uncertainties that lie behind America’s founding documents and early events—that the country’s development was not pre-ordained even after the Constitution’s ratification, but emerged as the citizens of the early republic dealt with these and other questions.

Wood also focuses on the great contradiction embodied in the “empire of liberty” —by analyzing the continued existence of slavery in the United States.  The issue of African American servitude is present throughout the book, but teachers will find in the chapter “Between Slavery and Freedom” a nuanced account of the unique character and development of slavery in various regions of the United States: the tobacco-based small plantations of the Chesapeake with their high proportion of American-born slaves; the rice-based large plantation slavery of the South Carolina Lowcountry and the emergence of a distinctive slave culture there; the emergence of cotton production in the Carolina upcountry with the invention of the cotton gin and its spread to new Southwestern territories; the presence of slavery in the North but the provisions for its gradual abolition there by the early nineteenth century.  Wood also explores how the American Revolution, with its rhetoric of liberty, helped give rise to the anti-slavery movement, and how the initially widespread hope for its eradication gave way as Southerners-reacting to the Haitian rebellion and the slave Gabriel Prosser’s conspiracy-increasingly defended, and sought justification for, their slave system. More generally, Wood emphasizes slavery’s differential effects on Southern society; while the North grew increasingly egalitarian, and commercialized, the slave system bred a pervasive sense of hierarchy, he writes, that more than anything else distinguished the South from the North.

America began its first forays into the West during the Early Republic, transforming both the nation’s physical and political landscape. In a chapter on “The Jeffersonian West,” Wood shows how Jefferson’s expansionist vision of the “empire of liberty” as “a nation of citizens spread over vast tracts of land” played out in Americans settlement of the Old Northwest and Southwest, in the Lousiana Purchase and the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and in Americans’ attempts to “civilize” the Native Americans and take their lands. (This chapter, along with one on the Federalist agenda in the 1790s, gives the most attention to Native Americans, along.) As Wood notes, Jefferson’s ideal of territorial expansion could be seen as “demographic imperialism.” Indeed, a central strand in Wood’s explanation of this era is that the young nation’s project to create an «empire of liberty» contained its own irresolvable contradictions over slavery and the presence of Native Americans that were to have tragic consequences later in the century.

Empire of Liberty demonstrates why Gordon Wood is one of the preeminent scholars of the Revolution and the Early Republic: he combines an astounding depth and breadth of knowledge with an ability to illuminate concepts and events in an accessible manner.  His chapters are readable without simplifying the topics at hand, and teachers planning upper-level courses might even consider assigning selected chapters or passages for classroom use.

Empire of Liberty is so engaging it almost demands to be read in its entirety, but time-starved teachers may find it profitable to focus on specific chapters as their needs dictate.  Teachers looking to give students a more detailed understanding of the founders’ ideas about politics and of the political developments of the era (beyond, for instance, the traditional yet simplistic “Hamilton-commerce vs. Jefferson-agrarian” division common to high school textbooks) can turn to any of the first eight chapters of the book for useful summaries of republicanism, the distinctions between the Federalists and the Republicans and the story behind the emergence of these parties, and the United States’ involvement in the international political developments of the period.  Two later chapters, “Republican Diplomacy” and “The War of 1812″ are must-reads for their explanations of how republican foreign policy entangled the U.S. in a second war with Great Britain and the importance of that war in finally establishing our independence.

There is also rich material for teachers who want to give students social, cultural, and economic perspectives on the early national era.  The chapter on “Republican Society” details how the egalitarianism and “commercial expansion” of the period helped transform a rural, agricultural, hierarchical society into one characterized by the economic and cultural rise of the “middling sorts” and the challenging of “traditional subordinations.” Other chapters on “Republican Reforms” and “The Rising Glory of America” capture the American project of remaking the culture “to push back ignorance and barbarism and increase politeness and civilization.”  It was this quest to transform society, and the fracturing of that goal as the “mass of ordinary people” rose with a newly commercialized, democratic world, Wood argues convincingly throughout the book, that lay at the heart of our development between 1789 and 1812.

Sarah Bowman is native of Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is  a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University.

The Ghosts of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights
By Anders Walker
Oxford University Press, 2009

Reviewed by Abigail Perkiss

In this provocative retelling of the Jim Crow South, legal historian Anders Walker offers a nuanced analysis of how white political moderates successfully manipulated the rhetoric of both civil rights and segregation to sustain a system of racial hierarchy.  Positioning Brown v. Board of Education at the center of the Civil Rights struggle, Walker contends that the contest over integrated schooling was more than simply a struggle between progressives and extremists; it was a struggle among segregationists over how best to manage the problem of integration.

This work is not a reinterpretation of Southern resistance.  Rather, Walker seeks to illuminate a little-known piece of the battles over civil rights in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Interweaving the tales of three Southern governors – J.P. Coleman of Mississippi, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and LeRoy Collins of Florida – Walker tells the story of those moderate politicians who subverted integration by both defusing the urgency of the civil rights agenda and reigning in the extremist efforts toward massive resistance to integration.  According to Walker, these southern governors believed that by avoiding racialized violence, offering token advances to black Southerners, and shifting the onus of uplift from the courts and the federal government to the African American community itself, they could maintain a system of segregation that was, as Walker writes, “peaceful, legal, and attuned to northern sensibilities.”

Walker’s intellectual might shines brightest in his nuanced legal analysis.  Using the phrase ‘strategic constitutionalism’ to explain the process through which these moderate governors were able to manage integration in the Jim Crow South, Walker argues that  their efforts were not simply to resist the Supreme Court but rather to provide the court with the opportunity to “bow out of the political thicket.” Rather than seeking a complete reversal, these politicians worked to debunk the credibility of African Americans and convince the federal judiciary to dilute the potency of their Brown opinion.

For instance, in 1956, Governor LeRoy Collins announced that once black Floridians raised their own standard of living, he – and the rest of the white community – would welcome the opportunity for integration.  “[Whites],” Collins is quoted as saying, “…require that blacks advance significantly in a variety of areas before they could be enrolled in schools with whites.” Though Collins enacted programs to facilitate such progress, his rhetoric implicated a moral deficiency within the black community as the cause for such problems as illiteracy, illness, slum housing, and illegitimacy.  By framing it this way, and by spreading the message through the local and national press, Collins was attempting to circumvent the Supreme Court and persuade the general public that integration would not solve the problems of black Americans.

Walker argues that it was this very approach that ultimately led (in the cases of Hodges and Collins) to the end of their gubernatorial careers.  This ‘strategic constitutionalism’ appeared too nuanced for the majority of southern white voters.  While these leaders were, in fact, attempting to subvert the integration mandate, in creating programs aimed at uplifting the black community and presenting a facially accommodationist agenda, Hodges and Collins lost the support of ardent white segregationists.

While this work marks an important contribution into the ever-expanding scholarship on the fight for racial justice, at times Walker seems to ignore the distinction between ideology and strategy in assessing the actions of his subjects.  For instance, Walker writes that, to Luther Hodges, segregation was a “progressive legal arrangement that allowed African Americans and whites to coexist peacefully, even allowing state programs aimed at aiding both races to continue without losing popular support.” Two pages later, however, he tells us, “much like white extremists, who argued that integration would bring whites down, Hodges seemed to argue the corollary, namely, that integration would bring blacks down as well.” It seems unclear, then, whether Walker believes that Hodges legitimately adhered to such a position, or whether he was simply employing such rhetoric to appeal to the black community.   Walker at times makes rather significant analytical leaps, inferring psychological understandings in his subjects without the sufficient evidence to back up such claims.  When describing Collins’ reluctance to testify against an old friend who had worked to keep blacks out of the Tallahassee Country Club, Walker writes, “even if his commitment to Carswell was strictly a personal one, the fact that he would place personal ties above the constitutional hopes of African Americans for decades to come is suggestive of just how unsympathetic Collins truly was to civil rights.” One wonders whether Collins refrained in order to protect his friend, rather than out of ideological fervor.

That said, none of these qualms detract from the strengths of Walker’s overall argument.  And in fact, they may serve to provide teachers with material for complementary classroom discussion, for instance, on the difference between values and tactics. With its thorough research, sophisticated analysis, and innovative arguments, The Ghosts of Jim Crow offers a critical intervention into our understanding of the modern civil rights movement. Walker’s case is highly sophisticated—most high school students would certainly struggle with it—but for teachers seeking to add depth to their knowledge of the civil rights struggle or add nuance to classroom discussions, the book is an excellent resource.

Abigail Perkiss is a doctoral candidate at Temple University, currently in the final stages of a joint JD/PhD in U.S. history.  Her dissertation, titled Racing the City: Intentional Integration and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in Post-War America, explores the movement to create intentionally integrated residential space in the latter half of the twentieth century, and how these efforts complemented, challenged, and interacted with the fight for racial justice in northern cities.

It’s been about a year since we started History Today, the “official” blog of History Now, with Q&As, and American history news. We’re happy to introduce our latest feature, an occasional series of book reviews that we’re calling Teach This Book. These reviews, written by scholars and teachers, will feature books of interest to teachers and students of American history– books that might be used in the classroom or used to enrich a teacher’s knowledge of a particular area of American history.

As always, we’re eager to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment or drop us an email. Thanks, and happy reading!

We’re lucky here at History Now– we get to work with historians and teachers the world over, we have at our disposal the estimable Gilder Lehrman Collection, but most of all, we’re lucky to have Carol Berkin as our editor. Not only is Carol a distinguished scholar, she does great work with elementary, middle and high school history teachers. She’s sharing her educational philosophy in a video over at the National History Eduction Clearinghouse. Check it out– it’s virtually guaranteed to get you excited to start the school year.

Nick Taylor (Photo by Manny Millan)

Nick Taylor is the author of eight books, including Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty Year Patent War, In Hitler’s Shadow: An Israeli’s Journey Inside Germany’s Neo-Nazi Movement (with Yaron Svoray), and most recently American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. He wrote about the WPA in the March 2009 issue of History Now. Visit his website at nicktaylor.us.

What are you working on?

I’m exploring a couple of ideas. History offers us some remarkable moments, watersheds when the past gives way to the future. One of those times was 1939. Hitler invaded Poland starting World War II, Einstein wrote President Roosevelt about the possibility of an atomic bomb, passengers could fly for the first time between the United States and Europe, television emerged from the laboratory to the living room. There were two world’s fairs that year, in New York and San Francisco, both looking optimistically at the future in the wake of the Great Depression despite the looming threat of war. I’m trying to find the characters to tell that story.

I’m also intrigued by the role American technical genius played in creating an anti-aircraft defense system that saved London from the German V-1 “buzz bombs.” This was another watershed moment, albeit a very short one – the summer of the D-Day invasion, 1944 – and in a more limited arena. The buzz bombs were the first cruise missiles. Anti-aircraft gunners couldn’t bring them down when they aimed by sight, but when early computers developed by Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey processed radar information and directed guns armed with shells that exploded when they got close to the V-1s without having to hit them, the success rate was phenomenal. Again, it’s a matter of finding the right characters to bring the story to life.

What are you reading?

My escapist reading is fiction, and I’m staying in my favorite period with David Downing’s Zoo Station and Silesian Station, set in Berlin in 1939. My non-fiction reading tends to be on subjects I don’t know enough about, most recently Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money. At the moment I’m reading Pictures at a Revolution, in which Mark Harris uses five movies released in 1967 to paint a picture of America in that significant year.

You’ve covered a lot of ground in your books—the invention of the laser, neo-Nazis, the WPA, death, bass fishing—how do you choose a book topic?

Don’t forget the Mafia. Sometimes I choose my topics, as in the WPA and the deaths of my parents, and sometimes they choose me. My bass fishing and Mafia books started as magazine articles. The laser book started out as a proposal about another inventor altogether. In those cases I try to follow my curiosity until I find something that I think will resonate with readers and have some bearing on their lives. It doesn’t always work out, as Gay Talese has described brilliantly in A Writer’s Life.

I wrote about the WPA because while the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Roosevelt administration had been covered hundreds of times, no book had focused solely on the New Deal’s job programs, the range of work they did, and the people who did it. And the more research I did the more I realized how much of what those programs did remains part of our lives today, all these years later. I thought it was time to revive that legacy.

I told the story of my parents in their final years in A Necessary End because it was the story that every baby boomer was going to experience. I realized that when several friends and I were coping at the same time with their parents in decline, and we shared our stories. We laughed a lot because the old folks did such crazy things. They were stubborn and difficult, but they were clinging to life on their own terms. Sometimes my friends and I laughed to keep from crying. I wanted to let readers know it was okay to laugh in the face of sadness, and okay to take care of their own lives at the same time.

How did you go about researching the WPA? Where did you start? Did you uncover anything unexpected?

I started by reading overviews of the Depression and the New Deal, biographies of characters like FDR and Harry Hopkins, and autobiographies and memoirs by some of the participants, such as John Houseman and Hallie Flanagan. When I got a feel for the specifics that illustrated the big picture, I spent time at the FDR Library and at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I also sent out feelers on the Internet and elsewhere for survivors of the WPA, and found several whom I interviewed. I did a lot of reading through old newspapers to get a sense of public attitudes for and against the WPA and the people who ran it. It took a long time because I kept discovering things I didn’t know. If anything was unexpected, that was it — things like the WPA’s role in preparing the country for World War II, for example, had never really been explored.

What’s your writing process like? Do you start every book the same way or does it depend on the story or the research you have to do for each one?

I work kind of by feel. I like to gather information and try it on for size. I try to place characters and their stories against the larger backdrop. There’s a lot of trial and error. Finally it’s a matter of choosing what to leave out, which is harder than deciding what to put in. You’ve done the research and you don’t want to waste it, but only by stripping away what is extraneous and marginal do you give what you finally include its necessary impact. I’d say the ratio of what you need to know to what you write is ten or more to one.

There’s been a lot of talk in the current recession (and with the new Obama administration) about FDR’s New Deal and the similarities between our historical moment and that one almost eighty years ago. Do you think a direct comparison is valid?

Absolutely. The parallels are eerie. The political arguments and even the words used are the same. Nothing has changed in the progressive and conservative points of view since the Great Depression. In my talks and lectures, I mix quotes from the 1930s and today and ask the audience if they can tell what was said when. They almost never know the difference.

The comparison maintains in the events themselves. Lax regulation and cavalier behavior caused the Great Depression, and the same factors contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Only the safety net created by the New Deal kept conditions from approaching the same degree of hardship for foreclosed homeowners and the unemployed. Obama is addressing infrastructure shortfalls and providing stimulus at the same time in his recovery plan, just as Roosevelt did with the WPA and its companion agencies. A direct comparison is not only valid, but Obama and his people should use the WPA and the Public Works Administration as examples of the long-term benefits of investment in public works when they argue for their programs. It’s not just the people getting jobs who benefit. We all, businesses included, get a better-working, more efficient country.

Print of Benjamin Franklin, Paris ca. 1789. (The Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC07582)

Maria Kalman has yet another lovely graphic essay on American history on the New York Times website. “Can Do” is an exploration of the life and character of Benjamin Franklin, statesman, inventor, writer, and printer. Even if you know all about Franklin, Kalman’s work is worth a look– it will reignite that spark of curiosity.

After Kalman, kick off your weekend with the Gilder Lehrman podcast of Walter Isaacson’s lecture on Benjamin Franklin.