In Memoriam

Kenneth Cmiel

On February 4, 2006, the world of American letters lost a leading historian of modern intellectual and cultural life and a great and generous colleague. Ken Cmiel, professor of history at the University of Iowa and director of its Center for Human Rights, fell victim to an undetected brain tumor and died at the age of fifty one. The shock and grief that Ken’s sudden death brought to family, friends, and colleagues indicate the depth and strength of his ties to communities both local and global. With an engaging and unpretentious manner that cloaked an eager, brilliant, and idiosyncratic mind, Ken had an easy connection to those around him. In their absence, these rare qualities are thrown into high relief. It was not uncommon to walk down a street in Iowa City or sit down for lunch at a restaurant and encounter Ken—absorbed in thought or some book—and be greeted with his warm, great smile. In no time, Ken would offer a thought or insight regarding his work, yours, or another’s that would never have occurred to you. For those lucky enough to have known him, Ken’s open and winning demeanor, penetrating critical intelligence, breadth of interests, and playful intensity were familiar features. Ken took his many interests very seriously, but never took himself too seriously. He had so many friends because Ken was fun to know—being with him made you happier and smarter, and his loss has left us immeasurably sadder and poorer.

Ken was a native of Chicago’s southwest suburbs. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, where he met his future wife, Anne Duggan. He then returned to his hometown and pursued his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, where he worked primarily with Neal Harris in American intellectual history. His dissertation won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize in 1987 for the best dissertation on a significant subject in American history. It was published by William Morrow in 1990 as Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. As the book’s title and honors suggest, Ken was a gifted writer and speaker who cared deeply about language in all its guises, who knew and respected the power of words. Democratic Eloquence charts the evolution of American rhetoric in the nineteenth century without either falling into a sentimental lament for a world of speech we have lost, or failing to understand that democratized speech could also be crass, commercial, and exploitative. With his skill at moving adroitly across high culture, low culture, and everything in between, Ken’s method as a scholar and teacher was not to valorize one form over another, but to show the rich potential in a truly democratic approach to the life of the mind and its public expression. In the last years of his life, Ken’s interest in these problems moved beyond written and spoken communication to embrace visual culture, and he spent considerable effort collecting material for a projected history of the explosion of American visual culture in the twentieth century.

Ken also turned his scholarly commitments toward the implications of intellectual endeavor for social relations and public policy, both large and small. The carefully worded title of his second book, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (1995), spoke volumes about the dilemmas raised when reformers attempt to put benevolent intentions into practice, and about how, when embodied in institutions and enmeshed in a web of conflicting interests, benevolent intentions have decidedly mixed and unintended consequences. Yet Ken shied away from harsh judgments. The penetrating power of his insights stemmed from his deeply tragicomic sense of human foibles and the limits history places on us. The generosity of his spirit as a man was matched by the generosity of his imagination as a historian. Not only his friends and colleagues, but also those who encounter Ken only through his writing, will continue to benefit from this.

A similar spirit, raised to a much larger scale and broader scope, framed the project on which Ken was engaged at the time of his death, a pioneering study of the global idea of human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the work as a whole remains unfinished, pieces of Ken’s wide ranging research on this subject had begun to emerge over the past decade, including his 1999 article, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” in a special issue of the Journal of American History devoted to Transnational Perspectives on U.S. History. Ken began this article by describing a scene in 1996 typical of global commerce and politics nowadays, a conflict between the Nike Corporation and international labor unions over alleged mistreatment of Asian workers. Joining the negotiations at the White House over this matter were two human rights organizations. Ken’s question: “Why were representatives of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights or the [Robert F.] Kennedy center, without a dollar of their own capital in play and unelected by anyone in the whole sweet world, sitting at the table of what potentially were some of the most important international negotiations of the day?” Those who knew Ken personally will instantly recognize his voice and hear him speaking. But even those who did not will continue to benefit from his lifelong concerns about who gets to speak and be heard, and how the ideas and plans spoken by those with power shape the lives of ordinary people.

At the time of his death, Ken was the director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Iowa, and recent past chair of the Department of History. Colleagues and friends in these institutions mourn his loss and struggle to continue his work. Ken is survived by his wife, Anne Duggan, and by three children, Willa, Cordelia, and Noah. Contributions may be made in Ken’s honor and memory to a charity of choice or to a memorial fund for Ken’s children: Cmiel Children Memorial Fund, UI Community Credit Union, P.O. Box 2240, Iowa City, IA 52244-2244. 

Mark Peterson
Allen Steinberg
University of Iowa