Stirring the Sauce

Lee W. Formwalt

Less than four months before the annual meeting was to start the sauce began to simmer when the Justice Department sued the Adam's Mark Hotel for racial discrimination. At times, it looked like the pot would boil over and the meeting would not take place; at other times it appeared that it might happen but with much smaller than usual attendance. Then there were those times when we allowed ourselves a glimmer of hope that this would be one of the best meetings ever. By the end of March, optimism triumphed, the sauce was cooked to perfection, and we, indeed, had a successful meeting.

The success had a lot to do with the way OAH reached out to its members and to the people of St. Louis for help and guidance in this struggle. For the first time the OAH executive office sent mass e-mailings to its members. These postings detailed the background to the racial discrimination lawsuit against the OAH convention facility. Not only did our members tell us how they felt about the Adam's Mark situation, they expressed their appreciation on being consulted in such matters. We also turned to our members and other citizens and leaders in St. Louis and found that they were very interested in the Adam's Mark case. Together we were able to make alternative plans for the annual meeting and to take an important stand against racism.

The annual meeting in St. Louis also provided American historians with an opportunity to carry the story of America's past out of the lecture hall and hotel conference room to the larger public and to shatter the stereotypes that many Americans have about historians, if not all academics. A St. Louis policeman observing the hundred or so historians gathered for a rally against racism across from the old federal courthouse where the Dred Scott case was first heard remarked, "That's a bunch of professors? I thought they just talked. I didn't know they do things."

American historians attending the annual meeting in St. Louis did do things and we came away from the convention having learned a number of important lessons. For some of us, these were not new, but a confirmation of what we already knew. If anyone had the impression that the civil rights movement began and ended in the middle of the twentieth century, that illusion was dispelled by the lawsuits and subsequent events in St. Louis. The timing of the Adam's Mark settlement, about a week before the meeting, suggests that individuals working together in common cause can make a difference.

In the last three months before the meeting, we scrambled to meet and learn from as many St. Louisans as we could. In return, they embraced us and worked closely with us to deconstruct the original meeting and then reconstruct it at Saint Louis University. Once we stepped outside the hotel and the convention and visitors commission and began speaking with the residents of St. Louis we began to see the city in a whole new way. As we look to future meetings in other cities, we will be consulting with local residents as well as the hoteliers and the chamber of commerce in an effort to get a much fuller picture of the community in which we plan to meet.

Community college historians from St. Louis and elsewhere, a small but growing number of the OAH membership, were important players at the annual meeting. They joined in the Friday evening March Against Racism carrying their own banner proclaiming, "Community College Historians Against Racism." An hour earlier I had heard them stirring their own sauce at a session where they complained how their voices were often drowned out in large national organizations like OAH. They reminded listeners that the value of scholarship resides in its being taught to the next generation and that more college students learn their American history from community college historians than from anyone else. Although the OAH is often associated with The Journal of American History and the annual meeting where the latest scholarship is discussed and disseminated, it must not be limited to that role. In the end, all historians are teachers in one way or another and the OAH is the appropriate forum that unites all American historians wherever they teach.

For many years, the OAH has recognized the importance of historians at the precollegiate level and in two- and four-year colleges. We publish a quarterly Magazine of History for history teachers. The OAH also has included Focus on Teaching sessions at its annual meetings and has established regular committees on Teaching and on Community College Historians. But our numbers of precollegiate, community college and 4-year college members are still low. Currently more than two-thirds of OAH members teach or are historians in training (i.e., graduate students). Of those 62 percent are at universities, 18 percent are at 4-year colleges, 13 percent are precollegiate teachers, and 7 percent are in community colleges. Clearly then, most of the OAH's future members work outside the large research universities.

As we learned the value of reaching out to the local St. Louis community during the recent crisis, we applied this lesson to our efforts to bring more two- and four-year college historians into the organization. We decided to go out to where these historians gather at the local, state, and regional level. In March, in the middle of the Adam's Mark imbroglio, several of us took some time out to attend the annual meeting of the Indiana Association of Historians in New Harmony to meet with Indiana historians and talk about OAH and the developments relating to the St. Louis meeting. Then following the OAH annual meeting, we attended the Georgia Association of Historians annual meeting. Both of these state organizations tend to include historians from the states' community and four-year colleges with relatively few colleagues from the flagship institution in either state. We will be visiting other state organizations of historians as we expand our efforts to bring more American historians at all levels into the OAH.

Another major initiative we are undertaking to bring more historians into the fold is our first Midwest Regional Conference that will be held at Iowa State University in Ames on 3-6 August. At the recommendation of two- and four-year college historians already in the organization, the OAH executive board decided on an innovative format for the conference. In addition to regular sessions one would find at a typical annual meeting, the regional conference will have professional development sessions to update historians on the historiography in various fields over the last twenty years or so. These state of the art sessions will include such notables as Mark Summers and Allan Lichtman on political history, Kenneth Lockridge and David Edmunds on biography, Lee Ann Whites and Catherine Kelly on gender and women's history, David Montgomery on labor history, David Goldfield on urban history, and Paul E. Johnson on history of religion. By having the conference on a university campus in the summer, we sought to make it inexpensive and convenient. We hope to hold future regional conferences cosponsoring them with institutions in the region.

High School and college historians are not the only practitioners who stir the sauce. In his interview (p. 1), National Museum of American History Director Spencer Crew, reveals how public historians at times expand our understanding of the past by addressing controversial issues. No matter where historians practice their craft, we cannot forget that the power of history is often grounded in the local community in which the historian either lives or comes from. As the OAH moves from the Adam's Mark crisis and successful 2000 meeting on into the twenty-first century, it will make the effort to strengthen its connection with historians at the local and regional level while meeting the needs of American historians as only a national professional organization and learned society can. We hope to stir up a national sauce with many fine local and regional ingredients that will enhance the historical understanding of all who partake.