Balancing Scholarship and Activism: An Interview with Lawrence J. Friedman

The earliest influences in Larry’s life came from two very different sources: his activist parents and his scholarly grandfather. “Both my parents were very active in the Communist Party,” Larry remembers. “They were middle level party people, so it seems to me, as historiography has shown, that their intentions were fairly noble. So that’s very much where I picked up the activism.” This activism, however, was “balanced,” he recalls, by his grandfather, “an Orthodox Jew and a Talmudic scholar, who would always be at the kitchen table going through books, the Old Testament, everything else, and it was insisted that I would study with him, that I would be clear, be logical, be precise, and I could sometimes win some arguments against my folks by doing that.”

“So it was that combination, the scholarly life from my grandfather, the political activism from my folks, that was very crucial to my early life.” Larry’s mother “received a M.A. in chemistry and bacteriology and was pursuing a M.D. degree in the Depression and wasn’t able to complete it for financial reasons and remained pretty much a lab bacteriologist much of her life, coupled with political activism.” His father “worked in a family business making grave stones, sometimes he would work in auto plants, sometimes he’d work in other ventures—life insurance for awhile. The making money part was always very secondary to the activism.”

In the late 1940s, Larry’s family moved from Ohio to California, ostensibly for health reasons as Larry “was always getting sick. The real reason, as Dorothy Healy later explained to me, is the Party reassigned my father to California to organize.” His parents’ activism shifted after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Khrushchev revelations of what had happened under Stalin. They “never formally quit the Communist Party, but they became considerably less enthusiastic and at the same time became more and more active in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the point where my father was on the national board of the ACLU and my mother was the Southern California chair of the ACLU.”

“I remember once asking my father how he could reconcile basically a Marxism that never left him and a formal allegiance to Soviet Marxism to civil liberties, and his reply was that one day we academics will wake up to the fact that people are layers, and often contradictory layers, and that’s what makes us human.”

At this point I asked Larry how he balanced political activism with professional scholarship. With little hesitation, Larry replied, “I don’t think there’s a conflict or a contradiction. I don’t think scholars are ever totally unbiased, and it’s actually very helpful if we discover our own biases. They won’t necessarily always (once we know of them) totally control our scholarship. I think a case in point where this came together for me was as a junior at the University of California at Riverside. I was in a student group—this was sort of the beginnings of the New Left—and we sponsored a forum on American dissent, far left and far right, and found out that the university allowed the members of the John Birch Society to present but wouldn’t let communists present, because there had been a long-standing University of California ban on communist speakers. At that point I was really shaken. How could some wonderful professors—a friend of mine, Robert Nisbet, the dean of the college at UC-Riverside—go along with something like this? Where was the scholarship? Where was the openness? So with my mother as chair of the Southern California ACLU, we filed suit against the university. We beat them, and removed the ban on communist speakers.”

When I asked how he got into the history business, Larry observed that “it emerged during my college years. There was a group of six or seven of us at the University of California at Riverside in 1958 to 1962, and some of us were in philosophy, some in history, some in political science. We’d shift around, but whatever the classes we took together, we found all of the people, whatever their discipline, were in essence giving us history. Robert Nisbet in sociology was really giving what was my first experience in the history of ideas. David McClellan in political science was basically giving me German and French history. It didn’t matter what the form of discipline, we were all history, and it sort of struck me here that history, very clearly, embraces every other discipline and is fairly welcome to it. So history was just the thing to pursue.”

Larry graduated with a history degree after writing his senior thesis on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. His interest in civil liberties led him to enroll in the UCLA law school, which he “found easy, boring, and not very consequential. But at the time I was in law school I was clerking in an L.A. office which had civil liberties, labor law, civil rights law, and what I found there in the clerking process is that you have to spend about 90 percent of your time in business law making money to spend 10 percent of your time on the fun stuff­—civil liberties, civil rights, and so forth—and I didn’t want to spend only 10 percent of my life on the fun stuff, so that was clearly a sign that I needed to do what was 100 percent fun, and that was history, so I went to graduate school.”

“Shortly after I began graduate school, things were happening in Mississippi that led to the Mississippi Freedom Summer project in 1964, and I was very much interested, so I went as a graduate student organizing for the undergraduate students coming in from Ohio. I was organizing a number of freedom schools in Jackson, Mississippi, under the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). I knew Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, the three civil rights workers who had been killed that summer. After about six or seven weeks of organizing freedom schools, I too was arrested for vagrancy (when they take your wallet you’re a vagrant), so a deal was cooked up. Rather than be in Mississippi jails, I would leave the state, and I went on and then spent the rest of the summer and some subsequent years with Anne and Carl Braden in Louisville, largely working on segregated housing issues.”

“It was clear that after the Freedom Summer that I wanted to do my dissertation on race relations.” So Larry returned to UCLA where he developed his interest in psychohistory. “I was working then with Donald Meyer, who was an American social intellectual historian. He was an important figure in my life, because he was really a public intellectual. He wrote regularly for the New Republic and the Nation, he spoke in public schools everywhere, was active in the ACLU, and he was just a brilliant interdisciplinary scholar. In 1963, my first year of graduate school, he taught one of the earliest seminars on the history of women. He was also very much interested in African American history, and with my background starting out as certainly sympathetic to Marxism, you can see that the interest in race, class, and gender of current vintage has been with me a long time. I’m very glad it has spread to the entire profession.”

“In addition to the breakthroughs in race, class, gender, Don Meyer introduced me to the works on psychology and history. He told me to read Erik Erikson, of whom I’ve subsequently done a biography; he told me to read Freud, and Jung, the behaviorists, the cognitive sciences, and be attentive to psychology in history. By the mid-1960s, we called that psychohistory, which was very much a mix of psychology, psychological theories, and making connections with time and place. And so that added to the interest in race relations coming out of Mississippi. I wanted to do something psychological too, and Meyer let me.”

The result was first a seminar paper and then his dissertation on the southern rape complex. In his dissertation, which became his first book, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South, Larry took on C. Vann Woodward’s thesis that there was a late nineteenth-century lull in the racial hatred and animus that characterized the post-Reconstruction South until the turn of the century when segregation and lynching became pervasive in the Deep South. According to Larry, “there was no period in the late nineteenth century of a relaxation in southern race relations. Things had been pretty tough, pretty vicious through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.” Larry admits that he may have been intemperate in his attack on Woodward. “I guess I regret that I took him on too directly, too bluntly.” It was Woodward’s students rather than the master himself who attacked Friedman in the book’s reviews. When I asked about Woodward, Larry replied, “He was fine. It wasn’t a problem. He enjoyed the discussions, he enjoyed the disagreements. I didn’t convince him, he didn’t convince me.”

In Larry’s career, Ronald Takaki played an important role from graduate school to the present. Larry met Takaki, a founder of the University of California, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department, when they were both researching their dissertations together in Durham, North Carolina, “and scared like hell because the Ku Klux Klan was active in the area at the time. We were both doing research in the Duke archives, and there was a Klan rally in town. We were both renting a place in town, and we wondered what the hell we should do, so we started talking together, and Ron and I have in essence written and helped frame each other’s books for the last forty years. He came up with the title, The White Savage. And with every book since we sort of re-work each other’s stuff, and we still do.”

Racism and sexism played important roles in Friedman’s second and third books, Inventors of the Promised Land, and Gregarious Saints. Then Larry’s scholarship turned in a new direction—the history of psychiatry, psychology, and mental health. “Quite by accident in 1982, on a leave at the Menninger Clinic Foundation, I bumped into the founder of the Menninger Clinic, who was about eighty-eight at the time, Karl Menninger. Karl was sort of pushed aside in the organization, and the first time we met he started pulling books off the shelves, asking ‘Have you read them?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve read most of them.’ Then he pulled out The Brothers Karamazov and says, ‘Let’s both read this tonight and talk about it tomorrow,’ which we did, and that is the beginning of a good ten years with Karl Menninger as I wrote a book on the Menninger Clinic and traveled the whole state of Kansas with him talking about his own life. We became very good friends, and working on this book (Menninger: The Family and the Clinic) enforced my commitment to activism because Karl Menninger was very active against capital punishment, for the banning of nuclear weapons, for civil rights. So that was, again, the activism on the one hand—admiring an activist; and the scholarship—dealing with a person who is very much a public intellectual, a scholar.”

“Then the book after that, which is probably my best book, coming out in 1999 was a biography of Erik Erikson (Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson). Erikson is often considered the founding figure in psychohistory, and what I found that I was attracted to in Erikson was this idea that what we are is the intersection of our inner emotions and our outer social circumstances, with a lot of factors feeding into the intermixture of the two. It’s just very broadening, non-reductionist. I had been making contact with Erikson since the 1960s, and then in 1990 when I finished the Menninger book, my friend Robert Lifton said, ‘Well, you’ve been talking to Erikson for a few decades, why don’t you do his biography?’ This was a wonderful period. This was in the 1990s, he was living right nearby his papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library. I would simply go through the archives much of the day and in the afternoon go over and sit and talk to him based on photocopies of his letters. It was fun and it was broadening.”

I asked Larry about his current work: “I’m about to finish a biography of Erich Fromm—if you want to frame someone who’s an activist and a scholar, that was Fromm, the author of Escape from Freedom. One thing I found about Fromm, in addition to very much sharing Erikson’s orientation, the intersection of outer social circumstances and inner psyche, I found out that he was able to pitch his books, which have considerable depth, to a very popular audience. He would sell anywhere from five million to thirty-seven million copies of each book. So one day I’m wondering where all this money goes, and I got hold of his tax returns, and he’s giving it all away. He gives everything away to the civil rights movement, to the ACLU, to all these other groups which brought him considerable influence, and he was just writing out large checks all the time. So with this dimension I see somebody who has been an activist, a scholar, a donor, and I’m very comfortable with him, and it’s a very wonderful life he lived.”

I wondered how Larry’s teaching fit in with his research and writing. “I think, even in retirement I’m going to teach, because I could never continue writing effectively without teaching. I’m just always bringing my writing documents into the classroom, after the class session I go to my notepad and jot down ideas. They’re just always inseparable. My first teaching job was at Arizona State University in Tempe in the late 1960s, early 1970s. One thing I found when I got there on the teaching side is they didn’t have a course in African American history, so though my basic area was American intellectual and cultural history, I taught African American history there.”

“The first semester I arrived there, I agreed to join the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) executive board, and we had our first case. The university had fired Morris Starsky, who was a Trotskyite activist, for dismissing class to go to a peace rally and so all of a sudden here am I, and by my second semester I’m president of the AAUP, and we moved toward censure of the university, which is a sure ticket to academic success at Arizona. We brought censure, we got it, and Arizona State was censured for a number of years. ACLU helped. So I found myself again in the activism role not only with the AAUP, but also active in Vietnam peace efforts, active in civil rights, working in the Phoenix area ACLU, and bringing all of this into classroom stuff. I don’t think we ever had a period in my forty years of academe like the late 1960s, early 1970s, where what you did in the classroom–say, read Thomas Jefferson or Emerson–are always connected to what was going on directly in the outside world.”

“The next job after Arizona State was at Bowling Green State University in Ohio from 1971 to 1993. When I got there, no one did any women’s history, no one wanted to, so I taught women’s history. It’s just something that should have been. In Bowling Green I got on right away to the Ohio ACLU board, always ACLU, and actually did seminars and classes on civil liberties in American history in the classroom, connected to the ACLU work.”

“I did something else at Bowling Green. I was graduate director of the history department for a number of years, and we brought in a doctorate in policy history, which was  fairly new stuff at the time. It was the application of current social, political issues, the policy dimensions, to the historic dimensions to current conditions. I did stuff on mental health policy, others did it on trade policy, etc., and then the cuts came later in the Ohio doctoral programs in history, but the policy history program is still alive and well.”

I asked Larry why he left Bowling Green after twenty-two years. “I think when you’re at any place for a few decades, you have the same conversations over and over, and it was very pleasant, it was a little too comfortable. I knew Dave Thelen here at the Journal of American History and a few people here at Indiana University. My wife loved Bloomington, so it wasn’t that hard a decision. So I came and have been at Bloomington since 1993.”

I asked Larry how he came to be involved with OAH. “When I came to Bloomington, Arnita Jones, who was at the time OAH executive director, was very important to me, because both of us being scholars and activists, we started talking about getting historians more active. So with her help, we created in the history department, about 1994, I think it was, a regular public advocacy committee so that we could take on issues. I wrote a piece for the OAH Newsletter on how all departments should have advocacy committees, and then with Arnita we created a statewide advocacy committee for the humanities. We went to a lot of agencies lobbying, and it was just very comfortable. Here’s a historian, she’s director of the OAH, and she believes in activism and scholarship. It was just a very nice fit, and Arnita to this day has been a very good friend and really made me see how important OAH’s advocacy role was.”

“I had been a member of OAH, but I didn’t quite realize that OAH could be a primary agency for advocacy and could do the same kinds of things as the ACLU, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), peace groups, and yet represent the other part, the scholarly side, in a nice balance.”

“For me, another crucial turning point beyond Arnita’s advocacy was the decision on the Adam’s Mark in St. Louis. The issue of the Adam’s Mark was, of course, an unabashed discrimination against African American guests, and the question was whether the OAH, after learning of this, should go ahead with its contract to meet there. For me this was sort of a litmus test. I certainly wouldn’t attend a conference in a hotel that discriminated, and I probably couldn’t stay a member of the OAH if it had maintained that contract. It did the right thing, and I knew about this, especially from one of my doctoral students, Damon Freeman, who was active in organizing the alternate site at Saint Louis University for the conference. It was a good conference. It was a very difficult one for the OAH financially, but I’m glad it did that. I’m glad it then basically later at San Francisco, would not cross a picket line for workers on strike in a hotel there and relocated to San José. I find it very difficult to deal with an organization dedicated to scholarship that isn’t at the same time committed to principle, which now gives the OAH, in my sense, a very very good track record.”

I mentioned to Larry that we appreciated his recent efforts to make sure that the OAH was included in his estate plans. “Yeah. What I’ve done in my estate plan, I’ve seen to it that the most important organizations in my life are going to get a chunk, which is not only the OAH, but the ACLU and the NAACP. They’re all very important to me.”

I mentioned that a lot of people say that a professor’s loyalty is often to the institution where he or she taught, and that when we started getting involved in development at OAH, that was one of the things that we had to deal with. I asked him what argument he would make for why one’s loyalty should also be with one’s professional organization. “It seems to me,” he said, “and this is my perspective and I realize it’s not going to be shared by others, but American higher education, especially large institutions like Indiana University are heavily status quo institutions, they have very wealthy CEOs on their board who are dedicated to the acquisition of funds, to public relations, and so forth. So whereas one can make some changes in a university, I don’t see universities today as primary institutions of social change, which is very important to me. It’s much easier to render social change through the OAH, the ACLU, or activist groups dedicated to select principles for change than a university. So it really didn’t enter my mind to give significant funding to the universities I was at, but it did enter my mind to fund organizations that stood for change.”

Larry Friedman, a dedicated scholar, teacher, activist, and loyal supporter of the OAH is an inspiration for us. Many of us have shared our time, talent, and treasure with the Organization of American Historians. But what Larry and a few others have done is to show how we can make a final tribute or gift in our estate plans for the learned society and professional group that provides the world’s leading scholarly journal in American history and an opportunity each year for thousands of us to gather, share our latest scholarship, and make the connections with old friends and new colleagues that are the glue that holds us together as a profession.