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“I’m an academic brat,” he began. “My father was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I grew up in the ‘50s. My dad was as much a historian as he was a political scientist, so I knew many historians, especially Merle Curti, who was born ten years to the day before my father, both in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a widower for decades, and Mother would always have him over for their shared birthday party. He was so kindly that people always considered him a saint, but there was some really interesting political energy in that group of historians who were central to the Progressive movement. He was Frederick Jackson Turner’s last student. Isn’t it fantastic that I grew up with this ‘uncle’ who was Frederick Jackson Turner’s last student? That’s some of the environment I grew up in, and then, in 1962, I went off to Oberlin College, an exciting place.” “In 1962, Martin Luther King came to give a talk, and I came into Finney Chapel, late as always. I went down one of the side aisles, and I stood maybe twenty feet from him, looking at him in profile, and I swear, Lee, he had an aura. It could’ve just been the lights behind him from the windows, but there was something about that man that radiated. I still think of all the twentieth-century American figures, he’s the one I most admire. The civil rights movement was very formative for all of us, even though I was mainly an observer. In 1963, I passed up a chance to go to Mississippi Freedom summer. Alan Dawley asked me to come down, and I don’t know if it was cowardice or if I just wondered what a white boy from Madison would be doing going to Mississippi telling black folks to register to vote. I took a pass, and I’ve often wondered about myself because of that, but in any event, just as later during the Vietnam War, we were all engaged one way or another. I was just a foot soldier in the war against the war, but those were stirring and frightening times.” I asked Fellman what, besides the influence of growing up around historians in Madison, led him to choose history for his graduate work and his career. “Well, part of it,” he said, “was I did pretty well in history courses. I took a lot political science, sociology, and literature, but I didn’t like the way English professors wrote their very arid articles and I didn’t want to learn a special language of social science. I loved the fact that history was all written in English, that you could do whatever you wanted methodologically as long as you converted it into English. You could actually convey your scholarship to a broader readership, which attracted me. The other major consideration was I couldn’t face going to law school,” which his father had encouraged him to consider. “I talked to a few lawyers, and I was not interested in crooks or contracts or helping one corporation take over another.” “Because of the modeling I’d had in Madison of all these history professors, I thought I’d do that. So, in that sense I backed into it. I was a graduate student at Northwestern, which was filled with talented young American historians at the time, especially Bob Wiebe, whose premature death I still mourn.” “During this time, as graduate students, there didn’t seem to be any demarcation between our ideological sensibility, our political activities, and our historical ones. The main lesson of that whole period for me was challenging authority, because, well, the Johnson administration was lying to us. I realized in my gut that you can’t trust authority—I can even remember the moment when that realization happened. It was one Sunday morning, I had a little kid, Josh, and Anita and I were driving down Ridge Avenue to my mother-in-law’s apartment in Chicago. I turned on the radio and the Tet Offensive was on, and it was “the Vietnamese are here, the Vietnamese are there, the Vietnamese are everywhere,” and I said, “Hot damn, we’re winning.” Whether I said that out loud or not, I can’t remember, nor do I recall if “we” was the antiwar movement or the Vietnamese. And then I had this great shock—I was twenty-four. I remember that something dropped out of me at that moment, a kind of innocence and belief in American righteousness, and I realized instantaneously that I’d never get that back. I’d never believe again. This deconversion experience was a great turning point.” “This change has remained at the core of what I’ve done as an historian. I don’t know if that makes me the village scoffer, but I just cannot see history as a branch of nationalism. Especially given the powerful American empire, there is a great danger that historical work, especially on the Second World War and the Civil War, can turn out to be celebratory, a kind of history that is, intentionally or not, supportive of militarism.” “Part of what I think you have to do in Civil War history is get beyond the idea of the glory of battle. Many of those Civil War reenactors have this notion that it was a great era, that soldiering was a wonderful experience. It was a dreadful war, unbelievably ghastly, as Drew Faust has just depicted powerfully. There was a huge human cost for a modest political gain. I’m not saying they could have avoided it, but you’ve got to look at that war in a realistic fashion, an unsentimental fashion, without subscription or worship. That sense of ruthless realism runs through my work. Your religious faith, if you’ve got one, is fine, your own business, but when you’re doing history, you shouldn’t interpret events as pageants, morality tales, or inevitably progressive steps on the road to Freedom. Americans are infected with the religion of American exceptionalism to a considerable degree, and I blame PBS for a lot of it. The American Experience programs are almost all elegiac—isn’t he great? a great American? another great American—and I don’t find that to be a historical attitude. Historians should continue to strive to challenge received patriotic wisdom, to stand outside and look at history not without compassion but from an anthropological distance. Being in Canada helps.” I asked Michael how he came to be in Canada. The position at Simon Fraser “was the only job offer I had. It was done after two drinks at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City. I was hired after ninty minutes, having met three people. Everybody back then was at least 20 percent hippie, and Vancouver sounded like hippie heaven, and the idea that it was a refuge from the American colossus was refreshing. I was already twenty-six and had a kid, so they weren’t going to draft me, so I wasn’t a war resister or a dodger, although many people assumed I was when I got to Simon Fraser. There were several hundred American dodgers and resisters and their girlfriends—they all broke up by the way—at Simon Fraser. So that’s where I started teaching. It was a pretty exciting time.” “Over the years I became a Canadian citizen. I’m a dual citizen, actually, and my joke has always been that I’m equally alienated from two societies, but in truth, since Ronald Reagan and especially since W, I would have to say I’m more alienated from American society.” “As a student of American history, it has been an advantage for me to live in Canada. It may not be very far, but it’s off shore, and Canada has gone through similar experiences at times, which are useful for comparative purposes. For example, what would have happened if the Populists had lasted longer on the American prairies and made links with urban unions. That happened in Canada, it was called the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), later renamed the NDP (New Democratic Party), and it has all gotten watered down since, but these reconstructed Populists became an enormous influence pushing the Liberal Party to the left. In a way, Norman Thomas’s Socialists had some of that effect on the New Deal. So Canadian experience provides another way of looking at American history. To give a second example, what would have happened if Andrew Jackson had lost the bank war? Well, they had a bank war up here too, the equivalent of one. It was a revolt in 1837, and the “Jacksonians” who made that revolt lost; the Tories dug in, only grudgingly admitting the Liberals to the political system. Therefore, the whole developmental pattern of Canadian capitalism was more guarded. They developed a national banking system—it’s five banks, but still a national banking system—while the Americans had wildcat banking all over the place, and so the whole development of Canada was different. Isn’t that an interesting comparison? I don’t recall reading this anywhere in an American history textbook. There are advantages to being an Americanist here in Canada.” “And you’re not living in the belly of the whale. Canada is pleasant. We have a budgetary surplus and an inclusive national health scheme. It’s got its problems, but we’ve got one. Poor people are not excluded. Life is brutal enough if you’re poor anywhere, but Canada is a somewhat more civilized place—half way between Europe and the United States. Canadians are not always conducting foreign wars. I don’t like the adventure in Afghanistan, and I’ve been writing about that up here. I do scold Canadian audiences too. I’m not saying Canada is nirvana, but every time there’s another war or another right-wing electoral triumph, I get these e-mails from friends asking can I come up there?” I wanted to know more about Fellman’s research and writing. “When I think about my work, I can make it sound more coherent than it really has been, because basically I’ve always worked out of intuition. I hope I have been introspective about my personal role in writing history. I’ve always seen history as an art form. I mean, social science is interesting, and there’s no reason not to use every tool you can. I’m a pragmatist that way, but the things that push me are not all academic. They are political, and they are deeply personal: there are certain aspects of my life and certain historical themes that obsess me. That I’m a Civil War historian was entirely unexpected. I started off as an intellectual historian of a sort, but I never believed in the primacy of ideas. I see us as hungry beasts, who tend to gild the lily, both about our history, our own personalities, and our social beings. We can be clever, logical, and learned, but a lot of that is about covering up more than exploring, and so I think part of the lesson of the ‘60s for me was to be aware that emotionality is central to everything we do, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just as important as what we do with our ideas. This makes me a heretic, actually.” “Professors, on the whole, are people who are really good at overintellectualizing, the best are bloody clever, and sometimes their work is beautiful in itself, which I honor. But sometimes I read autobiographical interviews with professors, and they say I had this professor, and I read those books—that seems to explain their sense of intellectual development. For me it wasn’t; the project didn’t grow from that. It grew out of much more personal responses to becoming a human during the wars of the ‘60s. And in addition, the Holocaust affects me deeply, maybe because I’m Jewish, although I do not think the Holocaust presents issues just for Jews. The human capacity for mindful slaughter is always there in my mind when people celebrate the Civil War.” When I asked Fellman about his Civil War work, he remarked, “Well, my most widely-read book is Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (Oxford, 1989). In The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction, Mark Neely recently blamed this book for pushing what he calls a ‘cult of violence’ into the center of Civil War historiography—a pernicious tendency that needs to be stopped. I spent ten years in the archives on that one. I don’t remember who said, ‘Oh, Michael, you’ve got to go and look at the military records at the National Archives in Washington.’ But I went and I ordered up the Missouri records from Record Group 153. It’s huge and poorly catalogued—box after box of manuscripts had been bundled together, tied with red ribbons, and sent in to Washington at the end of the war. So I’m untying these red ribbons that were tied in 1865, and I’m reading these incredible depositions given to the local provost marshal. There is a union outpost in each county, and the guerillas control a lot of the countryside at night, and it ain’t just Quantrill, it’s all over the place. To survive you had to collaborate, and yet you’re angry because they also ripped you off and maybe killed somebody, so you go to town and you swear out a deposition the next day for a variety of reasons, and these are storytelling people, so their testimony is shattering. I realized after a few days that this is the famous trunk of letters in the attic times a thousand, and I wondered, would I be up to writing such primal history.” “Well, it took me a long time, because a lot of what I learned is that war is hell and people are shits. That’s true, but insufficiently explanatory, so I had to find ways to become detached enough to write in a coherent and humane fashion. So I read a lot of psychiatric literature about returning Vietnam war veterans who had committed atrocities, which was, by the way, very common. I read also in the literature about concentration camp guards. The book is not just about guerilla war in Missouri, but it’s certainly about that. Much work since then on guerilla warfare has challenged the traditional narrative.” Fellman anticipated my next question: “So why did I decide to write a biography? I felt I had done history from the bottom up with Inside War, and I realized that of course leaders matter a lot too: the mentality of leaders who fight wars, how they get themselves to do that, what they think they’re doing, how they use ideology, all those things matter. Sherman seemed the most interesting of the generals on either side—was he ever. For example, he and his wife were apart for at least half of their thirty-eight-year-long marriage, and they hated each other. Or at least they fought like cats and dogs, both aiming for the jugular. She was a pious Roman Catholic who raised her kids Catholic. He was an agnostic. He was out in the world, not successfully before the war, but he was out there, and she was reclusive. She was the rich man’s daughter, who happened to be the man who took little Cump Sherman in as a ward when his father died.” “And he was (although I didn’t use the word) bipolar. I included a long discussion of his depression in Kentucky at the beginning of the war, which had never been analyzed fully. His wife asked the right questions in her correspondence with General Halleck. They knew about depression. I ended up calling the book Citizen Sherman, because it’s as much about him as a Victorian male as it is about the war. It’s also about the war, and my argument is that there’s a lot of rage there, and he finally found a vocation. He was an extremely lucid writer, a bit of an artist, and his war propaganda is devastating—he knew that that was part of making war on a democracy. You demoralize the citizenry, and they’ll tell the boys to quit and come back home. He was an utterly ruthless genius, but at the same time attractive, so the biography got to be a whole lot richer than I might have expected.” In his next book, Fellman explored The Making of Robert E. Lee. “The problem with Lee is that he’s such a legendary figure. So I said to myself, okay, what if I start out as if there are no stories about Robert E. Lee? Can I just read the letters from the various archives de nouveau, and see him within his context, separating his life from the legendary Marble Man? Not to ignore the legend, but to deal with it as a separate issue rather than letting it infuse the book.” “I have an iconoclastic streak too. Lee was the avatar of white supremacy in the postwar period. Many believe that if he was so noble the segregation system really was okay. If you’ve never seen the statue of him at Washington and Lee in the chapel, it’s worth a trip. It’s a white, white, white marble statue, and he’s lying recumbent on the field of battle, booted and spurred, his hat and sword by his side, ready to rise again. It’s a shrine for the white South.” “I looked closely at him on the slavery issue. He wasn’t opposed to slavery; he thought it was that old argument, a necessarily evil. He wrote about it once in 1856, where he says yes, slavery is wrong, but you know Jesus only came 2,000 years ago, only a day in the eyes of God, so liberation will take a very long time. In the meantime, when he made his choice to go with Virginia in 1861, it was with his class, and in defense of slavery.” “And then after the war, he was deeply involved in the Virginia effort to destroy Reconstruction. I think that’s something people probably didn’t know much about. Lee’s own sensibility is even more apparent in several nasty letters to his nephew in far-off Paris, which excoriated everything to do with Reconstruction and black independence.” “I’m not saying Lee was a bad man but a man of his times; that he was a human being. This take has elicited interesting responses. In Civil War history, the real opposition is neo-Confederate, and they still assert Lee’s perfection, insisting that he wasn’t a racist. On the other hand, southern “tradition” is correct—they use all the code words for white supremacy. These are diehards whose grandfathers had controlled the South. Their last gasp of traditional power was when they tried massive resistance to desegregation. Then the Republican Party taught them how to move in a subtler, long-term counterattack against black opportunity.” “The Civil War historical mainstream tends toward unionist triumphalism. The War and Reconstruction, many argue, were ‘the second American Revolution.’ Where others stress the advance of freedom I see some of that and a lot more continuity of domination and oppression. Moving past the chronological confines of the Civil War, my next book will concern terrorism and state formation.” We ended up talking a bit about the Organization of American Historians which he feels could be better at “engaging Americans who don’t live in the United States. If you look at offices that have been held over the years, the OAH is not sufficiently inclusive. Perhaps it’s an unconscious reflex that somehow you’re disqualified if you live abroad—a kind of unintended xenophobia, of which the OAH, consisting of perfectly well-intentioned liberal-minded people, is not fully aware.” The vast majority of our members (96 percent) live in the U.S. and it may be easy to forget the more than 300 members who live outside the country. Fellman reminds us that we lose a lot in forgetting them, especially the nearly 100 members who live just north of the border. |
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Civil War historian Michael Fellman reminded me some years ago not to forget our American history colleagues laboring away in Canada. When I had talked to him then, the Canadian dollar was weak, and he pointed out how much more expensive OAH membership was for Canadians and how OAH failed to proactively seek the active involvement of its members who lived outside the U.S. Now, just having returned from Australia where I learned something about the practice of American history down under (see p. 13), I thought it would be interesting to talk with Michael more at length about what it was like to practice the craft north of the border. Shortly before Christmas, I reached him by phone at his Pender Island home where he spends part of his time this year on leave from Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver. I wanted to know how this Wisconsin native came to study history and how he ended up in British Columbia.