Goody Bags Bad
The eloquently nasty James Wolcott made a sharp comment on the historical contribution to what he called “the Charlie Rose post-[State of the Union] all-star cud-chew” Monday night. Actually I would have generalized Wolcott’s point to most of the people I have seen on supposedly serious TV talk shows labeled as a “presidential historian.” Panelist Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wolcott wrote, has
become a major irritant with her . . . goody bag of presidential anecdotes that she dispenses to humanize everybody on the same glorious continuum, as if the crimes and calamities of Vietnam and Iraq were crucibles of character-building for our chief executives, the crowded backdrops to personal tragedy and greatness. (So many faraway nobodies have to die so that History can come alive.)
This is not a new irritant at all, of course, as Goodwin and a number of her pop history colleagues have been handing out these sugary snacks regularly ever since the great Founder Chic eruption of 2001. It would be nice if the middlebrow media and popular political history would work on their addiction to this kind of thing, but somehow I doubt we will be seeing Charlie Rose in intellectual rehab anytime soon.
What? One post ago, you gave us a nugget of Scarboro and Buchanan and now you are criticizing someone else for “handing out these sugary snacks”.
Which is it?
Comment by chris — February 1, 2008 @ 9:30 am
Middlebrow media? Intellectual rehab? Give us a break.
Weisberg and Goodwin’s comments could be read less like “surprise” and more like “shattered hopes”. The nation — and probably the world — would be relieved to see some sort of humility in our “illustrious leader”. An apology would be too much to ask for — but some humanity instead of a bag of political garbage would be refreshing.
During the State of the Union Address, we didn’t receive anything hopeful. Instead, we watched a lame duck flexing his muscles and threatening Congress. Nice.
I believe Goodwin and MANY presidential historians are trying to find a way to humanize the current Bush. Failing miserably, but trying nonetheless.
Comment by Jane Rothchilde — February 1, 2008 @ 9:32 am
It seems what is often lost is perspective about the historiography behind a story, which is ironic because it seems that perspective was exactly what the media pretends to be looking for.
Comment by Krista Ferrante — February 1, 2008 @ 9:42 am
Chris, I am confused. I enjoyed the Scarborough-Buchanan bit because it was not sugary at all. Tangy, even.
Comment by Jeff Pasley — February 1, 2008 @ 10:47 am
I am puzzled by yet another reference to the legendary “Founder Chic” explosion of 2001. Evan Thomas, who coined the phrase in an article for NEWSWEEK that year, lumped together a whole bunch of historians — those who clearly are practicing the archetype of Founder Chic [Joseph J. Elllis and David Mccullough] — with historians who are doing probing, nuanced examinations of the era of the nation’s founding [David Waldstreicher, Joanne B. Freeman, and Jeffrey Pasley]. The problem is that now far too many historians use the label for any work, scholarly or popular, reverential or critical, incense-burning or reflective, that focuses on that period from the vantage-point of an elite national politician. As with the recent but thankfully short-lived attempt to create a scholarly ghetto called “Founder Studies,” this sweeping use of “Founder Chic” proves too much. So, too, the dismissal of certain scholarly works as “Founder Chic” relegates an important part of the nation’s political history to the hands of the original-intent-mongers and their culture-war kin.
I hope that we can retire these cliches and talk about writing the history of a complicated and thorny period from a variety of perspectives, all of which illuminate one another.
Comment by R. B. Bernstein — February 3, 2008 @ 7:34 am
I think it’s entirely fair to academics who leverage that authority in popular media contexts (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin); if they’re going to be saying on TV, implicitly, “hey, I’m a professor-expert on this topic, so listen to me”, then they should expect professor/expert-level criticisms. But now you take David McCulloch, whose books I’ve enjoyed a lot, and I don’t think he should be pilloried for the same offense. As far as I can tell (haven’t researched it), he’s pretty much always been a writer who finds gold in biography and popular history. THE GREAT BRIDGE is his earlier work, and I was impressed to see that he was very good at that kind of writing even when he started out. I read TRUMAN after my mother-in-law gave it to me as a gift, assuming that Rod the erstwhile political scientist would like it. Frankly, I dreaded reading such a thing, but I dutifully started in and was enthralled by McCulloch’s gift for evoking a period. –But I should say, his gift for evoking that particular period, not so, so long ago. The main reason I snatched up JOHN ADAMS was to see if he could pull off the same trick for Adam’s day. Of course, who knows?, since one can hardly test the written account against one’s own take on What It Was Really Like Then, but I must say that I found the book quite satisfying in that respect.
So, first, I’d like to defend McCulloch as a writer who needs make no apology for being a popularist (unlike academics who do the same thing, assuming they’re leveraging academic authority). Second, I’d even defend his tendency toward hagiography: If the writer is trying to show us the man in his times, then the sympathetic, rather partisan perspective that McColloch betrays is wholly of a piece with what it’s like to perceive a political leader in our own time. I don’t have to survey comments and responses on this very site to predict confidently that most comments (that are about politicians today) will betray attitudes informed by projection, partisanship, prejudice, etc. It’s just the way we are, it would seem. Third, I wonder if others (especially historians) find his period evocations plausible? Fourth, about Adams, one thing in McCulloch’s account that rather amazed me was the apparent degree to which Adams saw, or believed in, the huge potential of what those “Founders” were about. In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine that most of the Founders had some sense of what a big deal America would become (not the modern nation-state, of course, but huge in the terms of the times). Yet I doubt that was so. But Adams seemed to have had a remarkably intense vision of the future; perhaps that’s part of the reason he was so “Hamiltonian” in policy attitudes, without such a clear technical grasp of precisely what to do and how.
Comment by Rod Bell — February 4, 2008 @ 1:35 pm
You’ll be pleased (or perhaps not) to know that the next president to receive the Full Goodwin Treatment is…
Taft. Order early.
Comment by Mr. Sidetable — February 5, 2008 @ 11:03 am
[...] response to commenters R.B. Bernstein and Rod Bell, I was not complaining about the study of elite white males per se, or even about the [...]
Pingback by Publick Occurrences » Sugar Candy — February 10, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
Where can I buy messenger bags for school?
Comment by messenger bags for women — September 17, 2011 @ 2:52 am