A Case of Censorship?
Historical Society Pulls Journal from the University of Georgia

Robert Cohen and Sonia Murrow

Few divorces have been more bitter than the one which occurred last February between the Georgia Historical Society (GHS) and the University of Georgia (UGA). For seventy-six years these two institutions partnered to publish the Georgia Historical Quarterly (GHQ), one of America's most distinguished state journals of historical scholarship, and a leading outlet for historians of the Peach State and the South. In this marriage both partners traditionally helped pay the bills, while the university's history department provided the editors and academic expertise needed to set the intellectual direction of the Quarterly. Over the past two years, however, Georgia Historical Society Executive Director Todd Groce strained the GHS's relationship with both the journal's editor, John Inscoe, and the University of Georgia history department by demanding that the GHS be given authority to determine the length and cost of the Quarterly, as well as the composition of half of its editorial board. Groce also sought to assert economic control of the editorship by insisting that future GHQ editors draw their salary from the GHS instead of the traditional arrangement in which the editor had been a UGA history professor paid by the university. Critics charge that Groce made these demands because he had become agitated about funding a journal he regarded as too scholarly, voluminous, and critical of the South. When Inscoe and UGA refused to meet his demands, the small GHS executive committee dominated by Groce unilaterally dissolved the Historical Society's partnership with the university, leaving the Quarterly temporarily homeless. Groce contends that he made numerous attempts to keep the Quarterly at UGA, but felt that with Inscoe leaving to assume the position of secretary-treasurer of the Southern Historical Association there was not an appropriate candidate in the UGA history department to edit the journal. According to Inscoe, however, UGA's history department was in the final stage of lining up a new editor when the GHS leadership initiated its "hostile takeover" of the Quarterly.

Leading Georgia historians have been highly critical of the GHS decision to pull the Quarterly from UGA. Last September, Professor Glenn Eskew, of the Georgia State University's history department, and at that time a member of the Georgia Historical Society's Board of Curators, sent an open letter to GHS members and "friends of the Georgia Historical Quarterly" accusing Groce--and ally Lisa White, who was then President of the GHS--of spearheading a "movement to censor" the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Eskew's letter charged that the GHS's leaders were "meddling in the editorial structure" of the journal by attempting to seize from the University the power to "select the [GHQ's] editor," requiring that the editor allow the GHS's executive leadership to "preview the Quarterly before it went to press," and taking from the editor the power to appoint half the editorial board. These moves were, according to Eskew's letter, "designed to give" the GHS leaders "censorship control over the content of the Quarterly. It will jeopardize the academic freedom that currently exists and destroy the scholarly integrity of the journal." The University of Georgia's history department concurred in this estimation and voted unanimously to oppose the Society's attempt to assert these new controls over the Quarterly.

Groce and White deny that they were interested in either censoring the Quarterly or violating the academic freedom of its editors. They contend that their attempts to change the journal were motivated by a desire to make it more efficient financially. Economic arguments were clearly the initial wedge for the Historical Society's apparent assault on the autonomy of the Quarterly. Tensions between Groce and Inscoe began back in May 1998 when Groce complained that the journal's book review and news sections "took up almost 90 pages," and that he needed to find ways to "reduce GHQ to a more affordable size." In response to such complaints Inscoe did move to reduce the size of the journal, agreeing to keep all future issues under 230 pages. Nonetheless, Groce persisted in complaining about the cost of the journal, prompting James C. Cobb, chairman of the UGA history department and Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History, to write Groce in July 1999 asking him "to curtail what is starting to look more and more like a campaign of harassment directed at the Editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly." But Groce held that his leadership position in the GHS entitled him to make complaints and changes in the journal because "The Georgia Historical Quarterly belongs to the GHS. We've always paid the bills."

Cobb and Inscoe challenged the veracity of Groce's economic complaints. In their September 1999 memo to the Georgia Historical Society's Board of Curators, Cobb and Inscoe noted that based upon available figures the journal's "total cost per issue this year is about the same [as] it was in 1989." They also pointed out that in relative terms, the financial burden that the journal placed upon the GHS was shrinking: the Quarterly absorbed 8.1% of the Historical Society's budget in 1989, but only 4.9% in its most recent budget. Groce's critics also wonder why, if he was truly seeking to save the GHS money in publishing the Quarterly, he was willing to risk and ultimately lose UGA's sizable financial contribution to the journal--which annually amounted to at least $94,000--by requiring that the editor work directly for him as a salaried GHS employee.

These figures led historians close to the controversy to dismiss Groce's economic arguments as a smoke screen. One former member of the GHS Board of Curators charged that the attack on the Quarterly was part of a broader campaign by Groce to limit the influence of professional historians in all aspects of the GHS; he pointed out that during Groce's five-and-a-half year tenure as director of the GHS the percentage of academic historians on its Board of Curators declined dramatically, from roughly 25% to close to zero. By limiting the involvement of historians in the GHS and replacing them with business figures and other non-academics, Groce, according to his critics, hoped to raise more money for the Society and consolidate his authority within GHS, since non-historians tend to be less active and less critical Board members. James Cobb came away from the dispute saying, "In my opinion Todd Groce believes ... the fewer scholars in positions of influence in the GHS, the better... The Curators Board is loaded with high profile people who seldom involve themselves in meetings or policy, while the small executive committee, which some people think is hand-picked by Groce, now has sweeping powers...." Critics also charge that the purge of academics from the GHS Board and the take-over of the Quarterly are the way that Groce and a small, Savannah-based elite have taken control of a historical society that is supposed to serve the entire state.

Most opponents of the GHS's move to exercise more control over the Quarterly see an ideological dimension to the dispute over the journal. Under Inscoe's editorship, the GHQ had published scores of articles and several special thematic issues on controversial questions concerning race, class, and gender, reflecting the cutting edge of the new Georgia and southern history, with its critical perspectives on the region's past. "There are certainly a lot of people who suspect that the GHQ's emphasis on Blacks, women, and labor put off certain members of the [Georgia Historical] Society," observed Cobb. The tension between the Quarterly's critical historiography, with its liberal and even radical implications, and the GHS's increasingly conservative and affluent southern curators, can be seen in a special labor history issue of the GHQ, for example. This issue featured a historical painting depicting the exploitation of southern textile workers on its cover. Incidentally, the husband of one of the GHS's curators is among Georgia's leading owners of textile mills. He "threw the issue on labor in the garbage as soon as he saw it," recalled one former curator familiar with this incident. Laurie Abbott, a member of the GHS Board, told Inscoe that the Historical Society was "losing members because of the type of history we were publishing in the Quarterly.... They didn't like all those articles about civil rights, slavery, labor, and women. He couldn't see why we had to focus on all the negative things about the South."

Some GHS members and curators were reportedly offended by the GHQ's featured essay reviews in which prominent historians wrote at length about such books as Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic and Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow that were highly critical of the Confederacy and the segregated South. According to several Georgia history professors, the Confederates in the Attic review essay by W. Fitzhugh Brundage made waves because it started with an anecdote suggesting that Civil War re-enactors could "achieve greater authenticity and perform a public service if they used live ammunition" in their mock battles. Thus one Georgia historian Groce interviewed for the GHQ editor position was not surprised when Groce mentioned that among the first changes he wanted to make in the journal was the elimination of review essays. This historian had heard that there had been "substantial complaints" about the Confederates in the Attic essay, and had also learned before Groce interviewed him that some vocal GHS members were irate that, as one of those members put it, "all we see here [in the GHQ] is women and niggers." Ironically, it was the review essay feature which helped to distinguish the Quarterly from most state historical journals. William McFeely, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who canceled his subscription to the GHQ after being "dismayed" by the GHS take-over of the journal, believed that the reviews linked local and regional history to large historical questions, and "made it one of the best state quarterlies."

Groce denies that ideologically-charged factors played any role in his campaign to change the Quarterly. The GHS executive director contends that, as a historian himself, he desires that articles submitted to the journal "not [be] looked at from their political perspective but their scholarship." The only journal-related tensions he would acknowledge concerned a kind of highbrow/lowbrow clash between academic and popular history. Groce observed that when a historical society has a journal edited by professional historians and members who are not academics "you are going to have problems." Groce continued, "Occasionally, I get letters and phone calls from members who say they do not understand what is in the journal."

When word of the dispute over the journal reached historians on the Internet via H-South, letters and e-mails came pouring in to the GHS both from individual historians and history departments praising the Quarterly and demanding that its independence and high-quality scholarship be preserved. Eight leading history departments in Georgia passed resolutions in support of the Quarterly.

Among the more suggestive of the individual letters of protest sent to the GHS was one by Joan C. Browning, a GHS member who had edited the Greenbrier Historical Journal, a local history journal in West Virginia. Browning had hoped this publication could "earn respect from scholars" and foster critical scholarship on this area. She changed the publication's focus and tone, taking it beyond its traditional contribution, which was, in her words, the "European settler puff piece cum genealogical resource." Browning converted it into a journal containing thoughtful, well-researched articles that put local history into a broader context, including some on "that significant [non-white] segment of the area's population that had remained invisible." Under her stewardship, the journal made its first major ventures into African American history, winning praise from historians, but not, Browning noted, from the Greenbrier Historical Society's Board. "My tenure as editor," Browning wrote, "came to an abrupt end." In her view, the journal returned to its "previous fare": lists of deeds and marriages, and extolling the virtues of European settlers. Browning noted that the Society instituted an educational program called "Tea and Manners" to "show our multiethnic population the grandeur of the white upper class in Greenbrier's past."

Browning's letter suggests that the controversy over the GHQ is not some peculiar Georgia feud, but is rather symbolic of a larger dispute over how much of a say professional historians--promoting critical history--should have over the publications traditionally subsidized by state and local historical societies. Such conflicts are linked to the fact that, as James Cobb noted, "some non-scholars resent the critical and theoretical, esoteric, etc. nature of what they read in the [regional and local historical] quarterlies and seek a version of history with which they feel comfortable.... [They are] headed in a direction of softer history," which avoids the tough issues and unflattering questions about the American past. If Browning and Cobb are correct, then, these historical society/historical quarterly disputes are regional manifestations of the kind of cultural wars fought (and lost) by historians on the national level--the highly controversial Enola Gay exhibit in the Smithsonian, for example.

The fate of the Georgia Historical Quarterly is uncertain. Under Inscoe, the journal had thrived, recently winning an award from Georgia's governor and praise from such distinguished southern historians as the late C. Vann Woodward. John Boles, the Journal of Southern History's managing editor, in his e-mail message of protest to Groce, said that during Inscoe's tenure the GHQ had "emerged as the absolutely best state history journal in the nation." With Inscoe gone and the old relationship with the University of Georgia over, Groce left himself with the unenviable task of finding a new editor and home for the journal after alienating so many leading Georgia historians. Rumors abounded that Groce was out to, as Boles put it, "downgrade or 'popularize' this premier journal," converting it from a publication devoted to historical scholarship to some kind of glossy antiquarian magazine. Thus Groce reportedly had great difficulty hiring a new editor with academic credentials, and was turned down by several historians before finally hiring Anne J. Bailey, a Civil War historian from Milledgeville's Georgia College and State University. In the wake of this backlash by historians, Groce has promised to grant Bailey editorial control of the journal and maintain its devotion to serious historical scholarship. "I have a contract that provides me with complete editorial freedom.... In fact, I worded the clause myself," Bailey explained. "I am independent of Savannah.... My hope is that you won't be able to tell there is a different editor," she said, referring to the shift from Inscoe to her. But with the funding of the journal now solely in the GHS's hands and the book review and staff members coming out of the GHS office in Savannah, many historians are already speaking of the old, independent Quarterly in the past tense. It is somehow fitting that the last GHQ issue to appear out of the University of Georgia, published this month, had on its cover a historical etching of a cemetery.

Robert Cohen, director of NYU's Social Studies program, is a historian who formerly served on the Georgia Historical Quarterly's board of editors. Sonia Murrow is a historian who teaches in NYU's Department of Teaching and Learning.