One of the promises I make as CheeseQuest is never to bore you with whining and complaining about my work. I know I've broken this rule on occasion, but the Quest is all about bringing you enough fun facts to make you wish you were writing my dissertation. I hope you'll also cheer me on when it comes to this crazy article I'm writing. Seriously, I thought it would take me two weeks to bang out a first draft. But production is a bit slow. I feel like Nestor Almendros waiting for "the golden hour" to shoot Days of Heaven, by which I mean I can only write the equivalent of Almendros shooting twenty-five minutes of film for an entire day. The Paramount Studios breathing down my back, freaking out about the budget overruns, my narcissistic perfectionism, and the long delays, is my dissertation.
Let me get back on track before I run too far with this analogy and turn into Terrence Malick, the brilliant but underproductive director of Days of Heaven. (CheeseQuest! Step away from the analogy!) What I meant to write about was the state of knowing too much, which one of the Cheeseville U. faculty members always says can torpedo a work. As I'm finding out now, knowing too much causes you to write in too much detail. Each detail leads to more qualification, which, if you're not careful, can lead you to make razor-thin changes in your interpretation. If you're writing from a particular theoretical standpoint, it can cause you to do backflips in order to get your evidence to fit your thesis, which you should never do. And because you've got tons of evidence, your thesis becomes ever more complicated; you may lose track of it completely. I have the additional problem of finding each detail endlessly fascinating. Ultimately, as I am finding, knowing too much makes your work very late, and you're often unhappy with the result. I spent all of yesterday trying to figure out my protagonist's views on race. This was actually one of my priorities as I was gathering my evidence, because the minor political dustup I am writing about happened in 1954, pretty much to the day of the Brown decision, and my protagonist was an adopted southerner. He personally benefited from segregation and opposed Brown as inimical to southern tradition. The problem that has stumped me is that he had an opportunity to spread a rumor smearing an African American man as a communist, and to the best of my knowledge, he didn't.
Why? I tried to answer this question by looking at his autobiography, but I give that masterpiece almost no credence because the letters he wrote at the time directly contradict it. I looked at his libertarian magnum opus, and while it gave me a good idea of his philosophy in 1960, it was quite unlike what he was writing in 1954. What caused him to shift his views so radically? I tried to figure out his political lineage: which conservatives influenced him? This also stumped me, most likely because he cut his teeth on anti-FDR politics during the Depression, and I've read absolutely nothing in graduate school on contemporary opposition to the New Deal—only the anti-ND conservative movement that culminates (maybe) in Reagan's presidency. I looked at the liberals he seemed to be attacking, but this only led to more confusion because they didn't say what I thought they'd say.
You can see where I'm going with this. Despite all these lacunae, I know too much. I wouldn't even have been asking these questions had I not known this rumor was spreading. It does figure in how the scandal played out, but it's kind of a sideshow. It has to do with race, however, and I'm pretty stubborn about figuring out racial politics. It's political that this guy apparently chose not to spread this rumor. But is it important? I can no longer tell.
8 comments:
1--Analogies are fun.
2--I'm fascinated. How can you give up on this sideshow story? Maybe you have TWO articles in front of you.
Footnotes are your friend.
I was at a colloquium last week where a historian's thesis was, essentially, that he was going to explain slavery using one legal case...without ever mentioning or engaging race to do it. Nope, he argued that the answer is in British common law. To paraphrase: the best way to explain slavery (whatever "explain slavery" means) is by using logic and reading American law against British common law...and then my head exploded.
All of that is to say, I'm happy I read your post and that someone is actually agonizing about how to best include a race analysis in their work. It cancels out the ridiculous session I had to sit through on Wednesday.
I wrote 1,150 words that say, essentially, "I don't know why this guy didn't spread the rumor." I just don't think racial politics were all that important to him. Brown freaked him out because he thought it was about big government, not because he disliked African Americans. Of course, that was the line the states' rights people/respectable racists took. But seriously, this guy was obsessed with "collectivist" threats to private property and had almost nothing to say about the African American activism that was happening right under his nose. Even when he talked about "world government," he didn't really mean being ruled by China or the decolonizing nations (for instance); it was about threats to U.S. sovereignty. Same thing? Maybe.
You could argue that by 1954 some (many? most?) people on the right automatically associated activist government with the push for racial equality—Lincoln freeing enslaved men and women, etc. But there were so many schisms on the right at the time that they don't break down neatly into "conservative = racist." That would only really take hold with the southern strategy.
I mean, this guy was out there enough to have second thoughts about dispossessing the Indians because it was an example of the government taking away property! He also liked William Lloyd Garrison for burning a copy of the Constitution, which, of course, legally protected slavery.
So I don't know! It's complicated.
I just found your blog via That Cagey Girl who sent me the item about the collectivist cookie-pushers. Nice stuff--thanks.
As to this
there were so many schisms on the right at the time that they don't break down neatly into "conservative = racist." That would only really take hold with the southern strategy.
I'm not absolutely sure I agree, though I'm relying on direct memory, not research, and although I'm a genuine Old Fart I don't think memory is a more reliable support--on the contrary in fact. All the same, when Robert Welch went after Earl Warren--first with billboards calling for him to be hanged, then (I suppose on advice of counsel) ratcheting this down to impeachment--it was universally understood that Brown was the reason. If "big government" insisted on collecting taxes or recognizing unions or regulating product safety, that was a scandalous imposition on liberty, but when it insisted (or seemed to insist) on "social equality" between the races, it was time for patriots to start tying nooses. I can't figure out who your unnamed non-rumor-monger was (Scott Paper?) but he sounds to me like an anomaly.
omg, somebody commenting on my blog who I don't even know! Welcome, Rootless!
Thanks for pointing that out...I always assume Welch just appeared in 1958, when he founded the JBS, and I did not know about the noose billboard.
The schisms within postwar conservatism that I was thinking of included the Wall Street Eastern Establishment, the Bob Tafters, and the southern Democrats. Of course, there's lots of overlap among them (which certainly included racial politics), but I think these splits were there right down to Nixon's time, when the Establishment types were trounced.
I'm concluding that the guy I am studying was an anomaly for his time in that racial politics were not so much on his radar screen. His politics were changing rapidly, though, and by 1960 he was a pacifist libertarian who thought all government was a form of Fabian socialism. He was not against tolerance, but he did think it was wrong to compel people to undo barriers they had erected themselves. So no on Brown, no on the U.N., but a big believer in uplift through owning private property, which he thought everyone should be able to do. As long as you could maintain restrictive covenants. Maybe there's no difference there. There are just so many contradictions in his thought that he's hard to figure out.
He hated the Klan too.
Two pieces of advice:
1) Worship chronos.
2) Serve the story.
RP, your advice is nothing if not timely. I think I lost the story at about 8,000 words. Back to the first outline I go.
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