In Memoriam |
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In this issue: George M. Fredrickson |
George M. Fredrickson
Fredrickson was born in Bristol, Conn., on July 16, 1934. He had an outstanding undergraduate career at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude. His dissertation at Harvard, published as The Inner Civil War (1965), attracted attention that marked him as a rising star in the field. He taught at Harvard for three years before becoming the William Smith Mason professor of American history at Northwestern. After moving to Stanford, he was for nearly twenty years the Edgar E. Robinson professor of United States history. Fredrickson’s White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981) towers above all previous studies in the field. David Brion Davis, reviewing the book when it appeared, called it “one of the most brilliant and successful studies in comparative history ever written” and remarked that Fredrickson “ventured into South African history in order to escape the provincialism that has often distorted discussions of American race relations.” In Davis’s view, White Supremacy “shed new light on the entire sweep of American and South African history from the time of the first white settlers to the present.” Further, Davis noted, Fredrickson argues that in both societies the “system of racial slavery was closely related to divisions and tensions within the white social order, with the degradation of non-whites giving a cohesiveness and solidarity to an essentially frontier community far removed from the controls of a metropolitan authority.” Davis identified the “two-pronged drive toward self-government and white supremacy” as “perhaps the most striking common feature” of the two societies. When asked about the book recently, David Roediger, a former student of Fredrickson, replied: “White Supremacy wears incredibly well as a model of comparative history written with an awareness of lived connections between the two nations being compared. Above all, it shows a consummate historian constantly challenging himself to learn new literatures and languages, to break out of the black/white framework around which the book is partly organized with brilliant sections on settlers and native peoples, and then to come back to the centrality of black and white, to challenge liberal assumptions and even his own training in intellectual history with carefully materialist and deeply radical analyses.” The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), Fredrickson’s study of black character and destiny in America, helped prepare him for White Supremacy in much the way that White Supremacy prepared him to research and write Black Liberation (1995), his study of the history of black ideologies in South Africa and the U.S. These works demonstrate that Fredrickson, applying a comparative perspective and working intricately from multiple angles of vision, pioneered a scholarly approach that greatly extended our understanding of racism across geographical and cultural boundaries. His deep knowledge of South African black ideologies will be a special boon to future American scholars. His rejection, in Black Liberation, of stereotypes of an important advocate of African liberation, Paul Robeson, is a relatively rare and admirable intellectual stance. Moreover, systematically and with great clarity and analytic force, Fredrickson, in The Black Image, treated the study of “Negro character” as seen by whites from 1817 to 1914. Before this book, there simply was no text of such quality for this crucial period of American intellectual history. In a beautiful example of intertextuality, made possible by the thoroughness and incisiveness of Fredrickson’s scholarship, the book provides the historical backdrop for understanding an important character in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In the novella, Amasa Delano stands as a metaphor for the nineteenth-century “romantic racialists” that are treated at length by Fredrickson. Echoes of Melville’s Delano resound in The Black Image. Fredrickson’s Big Enough to Be Inconsistent (2008) takes its name from a W. E. B. Du Bois postulate concerning Abraham Lincoln. The book, which comprises three lectures Fredrickson gave at Harvard, treats Lincoln’s changing status in black America in the twentieth century and contrasts it with the manner in which he was once widely revered by blacks. Fredrickson did not prepare for the subject of racism, especially in South Africa, by visiting archives and by consulting books alone. He made on-the-spot inquiries in that country and in America, at times acutely feeling the damage from the racial segregation he was studying. Feeling the need to oppose racism actively, he participated in the March on Washington in 1963 and, with anthropologist St. Clair Drake, took part in a teach-in and secured the signatures of 206 faculty members in protest against Stanford’s investments with companies doing business in South Africa. More than one black professor who spent time socially with Fredrickson has marveled at talking unguardedly about race in his presence. Their sense of the humanity that animated the man and his scholarship helps to account for such trust. Something of that attitude toward him undoubtedly led David Dennard, on the occasion of Fredrickson’s retirement from Stanford, to refer to his “single-minded commitment to academic honesty, integrity, and independence of thought,” and to note Fredrickson’s “bold and unsqueamish stance on matters of race, gender, and ethnicity.” In addition to his wife, Hélène, Fredrickson is survived by daughters Anne Hope Fredrickson of Grass Valley, California, Laurel Fredrickson, of Durham, N.C., and Caroline Fredrickson, of Silver Spring, Maryland; his son, Thomas of Brooklyn, New York, his sister, Lois Rose, of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and four grandchildren. Sterling Stuckey is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside. Alan Dawley
Alan Dawley’s influential scholarship reflected his tireless personal involvement in the major political struggles of his times, which began with his editorship of the Mississippi Free Press (1963-1964). Alan’s longtime involvement in movements for civil rights, peace, and the rights of working people led him to undertake a fresh examination of past struggles for social justice. His first book, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (1976), was among the most influential of these historical studies. Columbia University awarded it the Bancroft Prize in 1977. Class and Community analyzed the industrialization of shoe making, the centrality of class conflict to nineteenth-century society, and the failure of this conflict to empower Lynn’s working class. Labor politics, Dawley argued in one of his memorable formulations, was the “coffin of working-class consciousness.” Dawley’s interest in labor and politics led him subsequently to coedit a widely read anthology on the history of workers’ political movements, entitled Working for Democracy: American Workers from Revolution to the Present (1985). By the end of the 1980s, he turned to a new subject: the history of American reform from the Progressive Era through the New Deal. His field-defining book, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (1991), explored the interaction between grassroots activism, reform movements, and the state. Situating the era’s social reforms amid international politics and war, Dawley maintained that Progressive reforms short-circuited movements for socialism and nurtured a perilous reliance on a liberal state to defend the “public interest.” Nonetheless, he stressed the transformative role of social reformers and distanced himself from the concept of “corporate liberalism.” In all his work, Dawley merged theoretical sophistication with rich empirical research. He was an exceptionally learned scholar who always read far beyond his field, American history, in which he did most of his written work. His greatest historical concern was to understand the inequalities that American capitalism generated at home and abroad, the social movements those inequalities inspired, and the way in which America’s political system responded to those challenges. In the second half of his career, Dawley worked creatively to incorporate considerations of gender, race, and transnationalism into his history. But he always insisted that the history of women, racial minorities, and internationalist movements must be understood as part of the history of capitalism. Political economy was the subject to which he always returned. He was a formidable thinker and critic—the kind of intellectual that many of us aspire to become. Dawley’s most recent book, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003), expands his interest on the interplay of global conflict and domestic politics, offering perceptive case studies of numerous early twentieth-century American reformers from Jane Addams and W.E.B. DuBois to Robert M. La Follette and John Reed. Dawley argued that the employment of military power abroad suffocated civil liberties and social reform at home. Dawley’s analysis of America’s experience in World War I influenced his own ardent commitment against the war in Iraq, impelling him to become a moving force in Historians Against the War. Alan Dawley’s life and work exemplified the adage “Think Globally, Act Locally.” He played a critical role in recent efforts to bring a transnational perspective to American history. He lectured in Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and Germany, and was a prominent participant in scholarly conferences in all those countries. In 2006, he presented the concluding paper at a conference in Bergamo, Italy, on the internationalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. He spent the last days of his life studying in Mexico and meeting with colleagues involved in struggles for justice in the Americas. Alan was also active in community economic development, the cooperative movement, and grassroots education in his adopted hometown, Philadelphia. John A. GarratyJohn A. Garraty, Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, died on December 19, 2007 at his home in Sag Harbor. Born in Brooklyn on July 4, 1920, he received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1941. After serving as an instructor in the Merchant Marine during World War II, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1948. His dissertation on Silas Wright was published in 1949. That same year he began teaching at Michigan State University. In 1959 he returned to Columbia, where he remained four decades, chairing the department during part of the 1970s. From 1969 to 1971, he served as president of the Society of American Historians. In an era of increased specialization within the profession, Garraty moved in the opposite direction. After writing biographies of political figures of the Progressive Era—George Perkins, Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson, among others—Garraty undertook major works of synthesis, including The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890 (1968), a balanced treatment of what had long been caricatured as the Gilded Age, and The American Nation (1966), an influential college text. (The thirteenth edition appeared this past January.) His book Unemployment in History (1979) surveyed economic thought from the ancient Greeks to the aging Greenspan. The Great Depression (1987) showed how similarly (and ineffectually) governments throughout the world responded to the calamity. Especially controversial was his assertion that Roosevelt’s depression policies resembled those of the Nazis: “Roosevelt and Hitler, the one essentially benign, the other malevolent, justified far-reaching constitutional changes as being necessary for the improvement of economic institutions in a grave emergency. But they also used change as a device for mobilizing the psychic energies of the people,” Garraty wrote. Garraty’s increasingly synthetic approach to history was reflected in his editorship of Supplements 4 through 8 of the Dictionary of American Biography, covering 1946 through 1970. By the 1980s, however, Garraty regarded the original volumes of the DAB as irreparably outdated and campaigned for a new biographical foundation for the nation. In 1999 his goal was realized in the American National Biography, a 20-million-word collection of 17,500 scholarly essays published under his general editorship by the American Council of Learned Societies and Oxford University Press. “Not since putting a man on the Moon,” declared the Times of London, “has an American organisation undertaken such an ambitious logistical project” (April 8, 1999). The ANB received numerous awards. Garraty’s expansive approach to history extended to his own life. He loved music, especially Mozart, but in art favored modernists, collecting paintings by Jean DuBuffet, Georges Rauault, and Robert Indiana, and sculpture by Alexander Calder and Fernand Leger. Garraty took up running in his late fifties, immediately displaying his characteristic perseverance. While in his sixties, he completed six marathons, mostly in New York but also in Paris. With his first wife, Joan Perkins, he had three children: Katherine (deceased), Sarah Kerr Garraty of Concord, Massachusetts, and John A. Garraty, Jr., of New York City. They divorced in 1964. In 1965 he married Gail Neilson, who died in 1992. In 1995 he married Rita Angelo, who died in 2001. His son and daughter, Sarah, survive him. —Mark C. Carnes
Edward LurieEdward Lurie, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware, died on March 8, 2008. He had been in declining health for several months. Lurie was the author of the pathbreaking biography, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (1960, 1988), a book described by the late Stephen Jay Gould as “the best work on this central figure in the history of American biography and probably the best biography in the last fifty years on the life of an American biologist.” Louis Agassiz was designated one of the one hundred classic works of Americana in the John F. Kennedy White House Library. Lurie also wrote Nature and the American Mind: Louis Agassiz and the Culture of Science (1974), and was editor and author of numerous scholarly articles on American science and culture. Lurie was born April 10, 1927, in New York City, the son of Alexander and Ella (Lottman) Lurie. He served in the United States Navy in World War II, and was stationed on Saipan when the war ended. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Sarah Lawrence College in 1949, then a master’s degree in 1951 and doctoral degree in 1956 from Northwestern University. He taught American history and the history of science and culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center at Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Delaware, where he was a professor for twenty-five years. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Social Science Research Council Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. He also held research fellowships at Yale University and at Harvard University. Ed Lurie’s friends, colleagues, and students will remember his ready sense of irony and his way with words. I especially recall an instance from 1996, when I received an award from the University of Delaware. By then Ed had retired and moved to Arizona. While I was basking in self-congratulation, I received a telephone call from a man with a pronounced southern accent. The caller was Ed Lurie, but Ed didn’t identify himself. Instead, the caller said he was “Frank Vandiver” (that is, “Vandivah” – with no consonant at the end of the name). He said he was a former “Govenah” of Georgia, and he wanted to extend a word of personal congratulation. He said he was “delighted to know that a university was giving an award to someone who had written about American race relations with sympathy and understanding for the special problems of southern white folks.” I didn’t know what to say about that, but as I was fumbling for words “Govenah Vandivah” continued to say that he regarded my work so favorably that he was going to nominate me for membership in a special southern society, the Peachtree Branch of the Knights of the White Camelia. I was still perplexed when Ed identified himself as he lapsed back into his usual New York accent. Ed Lurie was a scholar and a character, and a lot of fun to be around. He was married first to Nancy Oestreich in 1951; they were divorced in 1963. He is survived by his wife of forty years, Janice Ferguson Lurie; his stepchildren, Kathy Wilson, of Avondale, Pennsylvania, and Russell Snodgrass, of Albuquerque, New Mexico; his sister, Sharon Herald, of Los Gatos, California; and his stepgranddaughter, Kathryn Freeman, of Greensboro, North Carolina. —Raymond Wolters John G. SproatThe Department of History at the University of South Carolina lost longtime colleague, former chair, and eminent American historian John G. “Jack” Sproat on Friday, March 11, 2008, just a few weeks shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. Jack Sproat was trained by Kenneth Stampp at the University of California, Berkeley, and was author of a study of liberal reformers in Gilded Age America, The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (1968), which remains the definitive work on the subject. He also wrote a number of important articles and essays as well as a successful textbook. After moving to South Carolina, Jack turned to southern history for his subject matter and published an influential essay on white reaction to the civil rights movement in South Carolina and coauthored a valuable history of modern banking in the state. Jack Sproat came to USC to chair the Department of History in 1974 and served in that capacity for nine years. During those years, Jack encouraged the department to participate more aggressively in national scholarly dialogue. To promote this effort, he initiated a visiting scholars program in American history which brought some of the nation’s finest young scholars (Eric Foner, Leon Litwack, Jim Stewart, John McCardell, Carol Bleser, William Tuttle, along with a number of others) to USC. Moreover, during Jack’s nine years as chair, the Department initiated the Public History Program, which developed quickly into the one of the most acclaimed programs in the nation. Jack Sproat also worked hard as chair to strengthen the graduate program at USC and to prepare its students for the national job market. He encouraged graduate students to write publishable dissertations and supported graduate participation at national and regional conferences. He also established an impressive program of dissertation fellowships that helped a generation of graduate students enter a highly competitive job market with a solid work of scholarship in hand. As a graduate student during the years Jack Sproat served as chair, and later as a colleague and friend, I can personally attest to the value of his efforts to improve the graduate program as a whole. I can also express my deep appreciation for the role Jack played as a mentor to me personally. I surely learned more from Jack about how to write than anyone, and, as I suspect my own graduate students would affirm, about how to run a demanding graduate seminar! After retiring from USC in 1992, Jack remained active as a professor emeritus of history and senior fellow in the Institute for Southern Studies, serving as general editor of the impressive Southern Classic Series. Jack was active in the community, serving on the boards of the Columbia Museum of Art and the Historic Columbia Foundation. Jack never lost his jaunty optimism and flair for political discussion. Jack Sproat is survived by Ruth, his wife of forty years and a gracious presence in the Columbia community, and his daughter Bobbie Sproat and son-in-law Judson Leonard of Newton, Massachusetts, and two granddaughters Emily and Margot Leonard. —Lacy Ford
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George M. Fredrickson, a prominent scholar of American history and former president of the Organization of American Historians (1997-1998), died of heart failure on February 25, 2008, at his home in Palo Alto, according to his wife, Hélène Osouf. He was seventy-three. Just days before his death, Fredrickson talked by phone to a former student about his recent book on Abraham Lincoln, Big Enough To Be Inconsistent, and a forthcoming collection of his essays. In a good mood and looking forward to further work despite health problems, he invited the former student to dinner at his home on the Stanford campus.
Alan Dawley, the distinguished historian of the American working class and social reform, died on March 12, 2008, from heart failure. He was sixty-four. Dawley, who received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1971, taught for thirty-seven years at the College of New Jersey and as a visiting professor at New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the University of Warwick.