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Don’t Know Much About History

Review: Andrew M. Schocket’s ‘Fighting over the Founders’

Signing of the Consitution Howard Chandler Christy Wikimedia Commons
Signing of the Consitution / Howard Chandler Christy / Wikimedia Commons
March 20, 2015

The academic discipline of cultural studies has its origins in journalism, and specifically in George Orwell’s classic 1940 essay "Boys Weeklies." Orwell’s innovation was to take popular culture seriously, reading what would now be called "young adult" fiction set in English public schools for what it had to say about English attitudes towards politics and history. The investigation led him to conclude that such stories were "censored in the interests of the ruling class" and "sodden in the worst illusions of 1910."

The extraction of deeper significance from an element of pop culture was a clever trick that, in Orwell’s hands, produced a brilliant essay. As a scholarly method, however, meant for application on an industrial scale by less-than-brilliant writers hidden away in colleges across the land, it is doubtful. This is principally because so much must be assumed by the practitioner. There was no burden on Orwell to re-litigate his assumptions for why the illusions of 1910 were bad or why the British Empire was, at core, an exploitative enterprise. As an essayist, he could just take a certain interpretation of history and politics as given. There is an implicit generalism and partisanship in the approach that is no problem for a journalist, but which ought to be concerning to a scholar.

To see the pitfalls of the now widespread elevation of this approach to academic method, consider Andrew M. Schocket’s new book, Fighting over the Founders. Schocket is associate professor of American history and the director of American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His book is not about the founders per se, but about contemporary debates regarding the founding generation, the American Revolution, and the Constitution.

This is a book shot through with a very specific kind of bad faith: that of an author who seems to be lying to himself. Again and again (and again, and again) Schocket makes a gesture at elevating himself above partisan politics, acknowledging his biases while claiming that his aim is to fairly characterize the debates over the founding that are his subject. Indeed, he claims that teaching in his American Culture Studies program has widened his view of politics: "I’ve always been fairly liberal in the contemporary American sense … but I am much less dogmatically so than I used to be, or, perhaps more accurately, maybe I’m just more willing to see multiple sides to complicated questions."

Thank goodness for that—one shudders to think how dogmatic he used to be. In Fighting over the Founders, you know that the fix is in when, instead of describing the two broad ways of looking at the founding in contemporary American culture as "left-wing" and "right-wing," or "liberal" and "conservative"—terminology that might tempt us slapdash partisans in the press—Schocket instead describes them as "organicism" and "essentialism," which sound much more impressive.

Essentialism "relies on the assumption that there was one American Revolution led by demigods, resulting in an inspired governmental structure and leaving a legacy from which straying would be treason and result in the nation’s ruin." By this, and despite the occasional, weak qualification, Schocket of course means to speak about conservatives, though his formulation of the position is so dishonestly extreme that no one who actually gave it a moment’s thought would endorse it. Organicists, on the other hand, "believe that Americans are ever in the process of trying to complete a Revolution that the founders left unfinished." They are comfortable with the fact that there are "many pasts that may share elements but no one fixed truth"—you know, the kind of folks who are good at seeing "multiple sides to complicated questions."

What organicists are not, but essentialists are, is racist:

Essentialism is also a reaction to what most conservatives rightly perceive as the multicultural challenge to their basis of power, especially given the increasing reality of self-identified conservatives who are predominantly white men. Despite this demographic disparity, speakers can no longer overtly praise Anglo-Saxonism or the white race explicitly, as they used to do, without being flogged in the media and, for the most part, rejected at the polls…. But as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has demonstrably noted with his elaboration of ‘racism without racists,’ it does suggest that American conservative language, of which essentialism is a part, retains to many of its practitioners and much of its audience an implicit racial tinge.

Ah, yes, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Who could forget him? This theme of dog-whistlism comes up repeatedly in the argument, typically in this painfully couched language, the effect of which is like listening to a kindly, sweater-vest wearing doctor who sits down to tell you that the diagnosis is in, and it’s that you are an awful human being. (It’s okay though—he can see your side of it!) Because essentialists/conservatives are driven more by fear for the loss of their Anglo-Saxon culture than by carefully reasoned positions, it’s not necessary to engage with them. In this avoidance of debate, the nature of the Culture Studies genre helps a great deal, allowing Schocket to devote as much space to an analysis of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot as he does to the originalist school of constitutional jurisprudence.

One of the unintended delights of the book is that Schocket is, in a fairly systematic way, guilty of every intellectual vice he ascribes to essentialists. For Schocket, essentialists are by definition shallow thinkers. Even the professional writers among them, biographers like David McCullough or Joseph Ellis or Ron Chernow, are engaged in a self-evidently silly pursuit not only for "men of their time but men of all time." Schocket knows that this pursuit is silly because we are all products of our time and place, and so there is no such thing as lasting wisdom or virtue. But the shallowness he attributes to essentialists is generously matched by his own failure to show even the slightest bit of evidence that he has considered the historicist premises that underlie his own argument.

Most tellingly, and despite his occasional, vague allusions to some kind of postmodern relativism wherein there is no "fixed truth," Schocket is capable of dramatic "essentializing," in the root sense, whenever he gets into the business of actual historical interpretation. Criticizing the Tea Party for ignoring the racism of the founding (and taking Glenn Beck as his intellectual sparring partner, natch) Schocket writes:

When drafting the Constitution, delegates haggled over how many people should be in each House district and who should be counted…They would count the number of white people…exclude Indians who didn’t pay taxes, and then add three-fifths of the number of "all other persons." Those "other persons" were the 700,000 slaves, mostly concentrated in the five Southern states. Lest this seem trivial, it was anything but: delegates understood that the balance of power in the House between the number of representatives from Southern and Northern states hinged on how slaves might be counted. The three-fifths compromise ensured Southern states enough votes in the House to stave off attempts to regulate or abolish slavery. That African Americans could be counted as three-fifths of a person would certainly offend most Americans today.

Certainly it would, and should. But for a man who believes it’s important to complicate and contextualize historical matters, Schocket doesn’t concede the point on which Beck is correct, that the southern states would have preferred to count slaves (for purposes of representation, though not taxation) as full persons. As Schocket mentions, without seeing the irony of it for his position, it was in the interest of those who detested slavery to count the slaves not at all, as that would reduce the influence of the South in Congress. The compromise that settled the matter, and kept the South locked into the Union, was proposed by delegates from Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Schocket comes down on Beck like a ton of tenured bricks for failing to emphasize the elements of the compromise that were acceptable to Southerners, but presents a narrative in rebuttal that is just as one-sided. I often wonder if liberals who suggest—as Schocket repeatedly does—that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document realize that they are in effect taking Stephen Douglas’ side against Abraham Lincoln’s in the debates of 1858. The best summation of Lincoln’s argument that a majority of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention saw slavery as an evil that the Union would limit and eventually stamp out can be found in the Cooper Union address of 1860. If he can spare a moment from his analysis of Mel Gibson movies, Schocket should really read it some time.

In his conclusion, Schocket writes, "Like most historians, I’d like to think my work is good history, but I know it’s lousy politics." As far as this book is concerned, precisely the opposite is true.

Published under: Book reviews