Are Public History and Public Intellectuals in Danger of Becoming Oxymorons?

I have begun to worry that public history and public intellectuals are in danger of becoming oxymorons. Public history, to be sure, is alive and well in the states and, paradoxically, in private museums such as the Autry in Los Angeles, but its heartland is always going to be in Washington, D.C., and there it is not doing as well as it might. I taught a class in Washington, D.C. last year that involved dealing with many museums and many public historians, some of them people I have known for years and very much admire. I, like the students, was struck by how demoralized many of them were and how critical they were of the practices of the very institutions with whom we, as an organization, seek to collaborate. At least in the Smithsonian, as recent controversies make clear, what is going on may not be history and it may not even be public.

Public intellectuals are certainly public; it is the intellectual part that worries me. Raritan is not a history journal, but it is a very good journal edited by a historian. I read it and write for it occasionally. The current issue captures the dilemma nicely. There is an article by the editor Jackson Lears that brings considerable scholarship and learning to bear on an important public issue. This is what public intellectuals should do. There is also an article by Todd Gitlin, a sociologist, on why we need public intellectuals. It is a good example of why we might actually need fewer public intellectuals. It is a rant. That it is a rant in favor of reason and the Enlightenment does not make it any less of a rant. I happen to agree with at least some of Gitlin’s politics, but that is why I find the article so embarrassing. It is lazy. There is not a single idea that we have not heard many times before. It deals with difficult intellectual issues by denouncing them. Ranting fills a niche already crowded to overflowing.

What currently passes as public history in our premier national institutions and the rather low bar for being a public intellectual raises questions about what scholars should, and should not, do as citizens. I don’t want to treat the Mississippi Valley Historical Review like the I Ching, but with the one hundredth anniversary of the Organization of American Historians approaching, I have found myself occasionally squatting down in the stacks of Stanford Library and pulling old copies of the Review off the shelves. This is archaic, I know. They are all on JSTOR, but I find libraries reassuring. I like the smell of old paper, and I have even come to find comfort in undergraduates who, even in the summer, are sleeping nearby. They keep things in perspective; I try not to disturb them. And in any case, I am not after the articles; I am after the back matter, the section of journals that I otherwise rarely read: the “News and Comments” section.

When the first volume of the Review appeared in 1914, World War I had begun, and the “News and Comments” section of the third issue opens with the war. “The war in Europe has brought the test to critical scholarship throughout the world, and, on the whole, scholarship has not withstood the strain. All historians know, when they are working among events of the past that the superficial is rarely conclusive.”

The article, meant to speak for the editorial board, is easy to misread. “The situation respecting historical scholarship calls for warning and rebuke,” the author wrote. The papers were filled with “statements from scholars of belligerent and neutral states in which rumor is argued upon as though it were established, and in which the demonstrably untrue is certified to without attempt at truth.” The board had no problem with scholars taking political positions. What worried them was “when, from any side, they forget the difference between the scientific truths, established in the laboratory, and the political convictions born in heat and tumult, they reveal the weakness of their scholarship and bring disgrace upon the world of letters. If there is today any place in which the world needs cold, hard truth, and refusal to be swayed from the proved fact, it is on the platform of the historian and in the columns of the critical journal.”

My first readings of this were misreadings. Seeing words like “laboratory” and “scientific” applied to history, I mistook it only as a brief for scientific history (which it was) and missed its complexities. The article speaks of truths and political convictions. The board had its convictions; I have mine, and you have yours. The board, however, expected more than convictions and more of scholars, speaking as scholars, than they did of politicians or journalists. We can rant to our families or colleagues. They are used to ignoring us, but when we go public we should apply the standards of our work. They have worn well since 1914. They are, the board wrote, “detachment and suspicion.”

The best public interventions by scholars are when the stars align and a matter of urgent public interest corresponds to topics to which we have been giving considerable thought and research. Then we have a responsibility to speak out no matter how unpopular our positions might be. The worst moments are when we become pundits—experts on everything, masters of the superficial, purveyors of opinion for opinion’s sake. We also need to be harder on people whose opinions we share. We are, after all, implicated in the stupidities of our allies not our opponents. We need to recognize when the stars align; at other times, we might just let other people talk.

I have sometimes considered endowing yet another award in our seemingly endless series of awards. It would go to the year’s Most Embarrassing Historian. The winner, almost by definition, would be someone who became too public of a public intellectual. We are all eligible. I might win it myself one day.