What is a Historian?

[Rob Wick]

It's taken me a few days to think about this and produce the following. I apologize for the length, but as I imagine those who make it to the end will understand, this subject is very important to me.

If one is merely asking "what is a historian" then a dictionary definition would suffice. I would say a historian is someone who gathers all the relevant data on a subject (both primary and secondary), analyzes that data, and then presents his or her findings in some form, although written is obviously the most prevalent medium. However, if one asks "who is a historian" or more specifically "what makes someone a good historian" that is a more pungent proposition.

First, some terms should be explored. Forum member Ed Steers provided, in my opinion, the best way to differentiate between historians. Vocational historians would be those who work full-time in a history-related field. While it doesn’t necessarily require one to be a professor, that would likely be the largest employer of vocational historians. Other places would be museums or historic sites such as battlefields or Lincoln’s home.

Avocational historians are those who work other jobs outside of the usual roles for vocational historians, yet provide historical information, usually, although not always, for a popular audience. Journalists and freelance writers would likely be the largest contingent of this group, but there could be many from several other professions (Ed was a research scientist at the NIH). However, the end result would be the same. Some type of media is utilized to present findings from a research project.

Most vocational historians I know downplay any talk of a conflict between themselves and avocational historians, saying that there are no rules for being called a historian or for writing good history other than those all historians must follow. Those rules would include a stringent attempt at objectivity, fairness, not misusing or mischaracterizing evidence, and properly citing sources (although how that is accomplished can be debated). The one unforgivable sin above all else is not engaging in plagiarism. Anyone who accepts and follows those precepts can rightfully and freely call themselves a historian.

II

In many ways in my own experiences that it true. I’ve been published in three peer-reviewed journals and the only standards I’ve been held to are the same that vocational historians had to meet. I’ve presented papers at three academic conferences and not once was I ever made to feel unwelcome, although some of the things the vocational historians in the audience focused on seemed somewhat esoteric for my tastes, but c’est la vie. Yet, there have been instances where my lack of a Ph.D. caused a questioning of my ability.

One pointed example came in 2011 when I applied for a Summer Stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Federal funding for these grants, which provide scholars up to $6,000 for a two-month period in which to do research on a topic that will result in either a book or some other project, has been severely curtailed. Getting these grants is very difficult. I applied on behalf of my research into Carl Sandburg. I had applied in 2010 and was turned down. I spent several weeks in 2011 working on my package, including consulting a historian named R.B. Bernstein, who is one of the most conspicuous scholars on the founding generation and the author of a short biography on Thomas Jefferson as well as one of the best histories of the founders, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered. I approached Richard after reading his Founding Fathers Reconsidered, and he kindly responded to my entreaties, and in the process became a good friend. As a reference, I have attached a copy of the final narrative for the application I made.

Given the sharp competition I faced, I knew the chances of getting a grant were going to be difficult, but I figured my chances were as good as anyone. Again, however, I was rejected. Both times I was given the referee’s comments, which would have served as a guide should I decided to apply again (I didn’t after 2011.) Most of the comments were favorable.

“A very well chosen subject, of appeal to several constituencies, as the applicant points out. He clearly understands Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, academic historians, and the American public all very well. This work can make a significant contribution to assessing the relationship between academic and popular history.” Another wrote “This is a compelling proposal on many levels. Aside from the wide interest in Lincoln and Sandburg themselves, Wick's project of exploring the divide between professional historians and the perception of history written and produced by non-professional historians is important and well-framed in the proposal. I also find the work plan focused and compelling, recognizing the importance of hiring researchers at multiple smaller archives traveling to each of these sites would be prohibitive.”

One, however, wrote the following. “This project raises interesting questions about the relationship between popular history and academic history, and it will undoubtedly hold some interest for Lincoln scholars. However, the questions of Sandburg’s approach and process seem limited in their significance. Although Mr. Wick has published in small scholarly journals, I am concerned that he has only a BA in History, and I question whether he is qualified to offer a fair evaluation of the approaches and standards of academic historians given his limited professional training.”

Now this person is certainly entitled to his or her opinion. But they had no idea who I was or what my qualifications were. Instead, they looked at the fact that I only had a BA and saw only limited ability because I didn’t fulfill THEIR requirements for being a historian. This person couldn’t believe that those of us who chose not to practice in what Paul Angle called “the graves of academe” had anything relevant to say.

III

Historians who command a large public audience are consistently denigrated by some vocational historians, especially when it comes to reviewing their work. One conspicuous case in point has been David McCullough, the poster boy for academic horse-whipping. In all honesty, I have a love-hate relationship with McCullough. His history of the Johnstown Flood was one of the top five books I’ve ever read in my life. His biography of John Adams was, in my opinion, insufferable, and I couldn’t finish it. His book on Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, took me forever to finish, because I kept putting it down in favor of something else. His biography of Harry Truman, in my opinion, stands as one of the yardsticks that other presidential biographies should be measured by.

McCullough is rightly considered one of the greatest, and most-read, of American historians, yet he is anathema to most in vocational circles. Indeed, most of the criticism against him is ad hominem and rarely touches upon the book that McCullough wrote. One example of a vocational historian who did at least try to review what McCullough wrote instead of what he believed he should have written, came from Sean Wilentz, who is one of the most prolific vocational historians and one who knows the secret of audience engagement—an ability to write well. When John Adams appeared, Wilentz wrote a scathing review in the New Republic not only of McCullough’s book, but popular history in general. I’ll let those of you interested read it yourselves.

Prior to McCullough, one could point to Carl Sandburg as the avocational bogeyman. Throughout the history of Lincoln studies, no one writer has sold more books on Lincoln than Sandburg. When Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years appeared in 1926, it sold 14,000 two-volume sets in the first three months and a total of 48,000 in the first year. It made Sandburg a very rich man and a celebrity. Also, it made him the public’s sage on all things Lincoln. Before him, although not as susceptible to the limelight, came Ida M. Tarbell. Both led the field in sales, yet both were the bane of many vocational historian’s existence.

IV

Tarbell’s main enemy, ironically, was not a vocational historian, but one who so longed for admission into the club that he fawned unashamedly at their feet. Former Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge turned Tarbell’s name into a verb. To Tarbellize, according to Beveridge, was to take the man out of Lincoln and to replace him with an almost feminine quality that in Beveridge’s mind sanitized Lincoln to the point of sainthood. As he was writing his biography of Lincoln, Beveridge constantly sent chapters to various historians begging for their wisdom.

Beveridge claimed that in his work he refused to make judgements or take sides on any issue. The facts, Beveridge said, will speak for themselves. Yet, at least one vocational historian tried to disabuse Beveridge of that notion. Charles Beard, in the remembrance of Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, told Beveridge that by the very act of choosing facts he was making a judgement call.

Stephenson also had sharp words for Tarbell’s work. In the pages of the New Republic, under the title of “A Bourgeois Lincoln”, Stephenson accused Tarbell of being “an ardent hero-worshipper.” Calling Tarbell “A vestal of the sacred fire of tradition,” Stephenson further accuses Tarbell of wanting to drag Lincoln into the propertied bourgeoisie (hence the title) in order to bring him into “the shadow of her own ideals.”

It’s the next paragraph, however, that causes the reader to wince. “To the detached historian who goes to history without any thesis to defend, this preoccupation with property, this horror of confessing any truth that links the hero with the lower social strata, is quite inexplicable.” That Stephenson, or any other vocational historian, could honestly say that they approach history “detached” and “without any thesis to defend” is in itself inexplicable. It is beyond the pale to believe that the historian, either vocational or avocational, doesn’t approach his or her subject with his or her own biases clearly defined. The astute historian does all he or she can to suppress those biases, but it would take a superhuman effort indeed to keep them completely out of one’s work (a point, in fairness, that most vocational historians today accept).

In their correspondence, Beveridge and Stephenson are quite open in their contempt for Tarbell, and neither couch it in the terms expected in polite society. One exchange will suffice. On March 7, 1925 Stephenson wrote Beveridge, “By the way, I discovered just the other day after talking with you that the wonderful, gullible, altogether irritating Ida has stumbled on the truth with regard to the Lyceum address. How she got there, being what she is, heaven knows, but in her “Footsteps of the Lincolns” she dates it with approximate correctness as having been delivered subsequent to the death of Lovejoy. And yet, with her usual inconceivable blindness, having spread this fact before her eyes, she either cannot see any implication in Lincoln’s silence on the subject of Lovejoy, or deliberately dodges it.”

Beveridge added injury to insult in his reply of March 10. “I am not at all surprised at what you tell me about the dear old lady who has written so much language about Lincoln. The fact that she does not cite her sources renders her books of no value to me—on the contrary, they are most irritating and confusing because I never know whether a statement is true or false, although, of course, she would fervently believe everything to be true.”
Further, he wrote, “If the dear lady saw any connection between the date of the Lyceum address and the failure to mention the Alton riots and Lovejoy killing which I greatly doubt, it would not be unlike her to gather up her skirts and walk away from it; for, as you know, that has been done time and time again.”

Now I have to admit that I’m still looking to find the significance of this. In reading Beveridge’s account, he mentions that the Lyceum Address was given weeks after the Lovejoy murder and that Lincoln was very careful as to what he would say to the crowd, insinuating (as far as I can see) that Lincoln didn’t mention Lovejoy by name due to his conservativism where abolition was concerned, even though Lincoln mentioned mob violence in general. In fact, Beveridge’s entire biography has been criticized for his painting of Lincoln as a conservative almost in the strain of Stephen Douglas, to the point that one sees little difference between them. More research will be needed before I can give a more plausible answer, but my point in bringing this up is the ad hominem attacks on Tarbell rather than her work.

My final point about the vocational-avocational divide where Tarbell is concerned came from Benjamin Thomas, although he was certainly not as severe as Beveridge and Stephenson. Four years after Tarbell’s death in 1944, Thomas was invited to speak at her alma mater, Allegheny College, on her role as a Lincoln biographer. The following is from the first draft of my book on Tarbell and comes from the first essay in which I discuss Tarbell’s historical education. This may, or may not, appear in the book if I can ever get it finished.

“Thomas’s most critical conclusion came from his inability to define her work as scholarship, as he understood the term. ‘Will Miss Tarbell take rank as one of the great Lincoln scholars of all time?’ Thomas asked those present that evening. ‘I am afraid I must conclude that she will not.’ In Thomas’s opinion, Tarbell lacked the ‘cold impartiality of the scholar’ adding that Tarbell was ‘too warm, too human, too graciously impulsive to take permanent rank as a great scholar.’

Such a description wasn’t meant to denigrate Tarbell’s work, Thomas insisted. ‘Primarily Miss Tarbell was a popularizer and with the passing years her books are becoming outmoded.’ Tarbell ranked high as an interpreter, which Thomas defined as ‘one who aids others to understanding. That was her role.’ Noting that biographical understanding of Lincoln came only through the collective work of succeeding generations, Thomas added that as an interpreter of Lincoln her ‘work is incorporated in [Lincoln biography] for all time, not readily recognizable as hers perhaps, but there, nevertheless, helping to hold it together, contributing to its stability.’

Forget, for a moment, the audacity of Thomas’s question. As the historical philosopher Michael Kammen has noted, one of the boldest features of vocational practitioners of American history is their “penchant for introspection.” From the first historical seminar in the mid-19th century to the present day, those who labored in what Paul Angle once referred to as “the graves of academe” have made it a point to constantly ask what exactly defines history and who is qualified to interpret it. Does an advanced degree provide a critic an intellectual or moral right to determine if another’s work can be considered scholarly? By what formal decree does this action come? It should say something that such intellectual naval-gazing rarely happens in the writings of non-academic historians. The often sought after but seemingly mythical ‘intelligent lay reader’ cares even less, although one could make a case that when said reader spends money on popular histories instead of monographs, that too is a vote.

Although he shared an academic background, throughout his life Thomas was highly supportive of popularizers, even allowing Carl Sandburg the opportunity to read his chapter in Portrait for Posterity before it was published. Thomas wasn’t stuck in his ivory tower throwing literary lightning bolts at those he deemed unworthy of Clio’s attention. He sincerely admired Tarbell and her contribution to Lincoln historiography. Yet, Thomas, like everyone before or after him, was a slave to his own times and his methodological approach to history and biography.

If Thomas’s analysis, cold and impartial as it was, had any flaws, it was that it was quite limited in that he failed to follow the path of Tarbell’s intellectual journey from beginning to end. Even in a short, mostly laudatory, speech it would seem incumbent on a speaker who asks if Tarbell could be considered a scholar, and answers his own question in the negative, to dig deeper into what drove an author toward a specific goal and how he or she arrived. Tarbell’s early love of the natural sciences is mentioned, but Thomas failed to correlate that with the emerging view (mistaken as it was) at the turn of the 19th century that history was also a science. Tarbell’s association with the Chautauqua Movement was highlighted, but Thomas didn’t explore how that movement corresponded with the teachings of the father of modern American historiography, Herbert Baxter Adams and his influence both personally and professionally on Tarbell.

He mentioned in passing Tarbell’s appreciation of the French medievalist Charles Seignobos, but never explored in any detail just what she learned from her deep friendship with Seignobos or as a student studying historiography and biography at the Sorbonne or the College de France in the early 1890s. Nowhere in his speech did he mention Tarbell’s early association with the American Historical Association and how academics and non-academics alike were welcomed into the preeminent historical organization of the country until the non-academics were marginalized to the point of being forgotten. It is ironic given Thomas’s standing as a biographer of Lincoln that one gets a whiff of the vocational historian’s disdain for biographical writers in his interpretation of Tarbell’s work.

Thomas’s definition of “scholar” obviously came from his own understanding of the term, based, as it was, on his own experience, beliefs and the time in which he lived. He erred, however, in his assumption that the definition of “scholar” and “scholarship,” at least as it applied to the historian, was static from the time Tarbell began her study of Lincoln to the time he spoke (almost 50 years). Missing from his interpretative analysis of Tarbell was the possibility that in a different era she could have been, and in reality was, considered as much of a scholar as any biographer or historian, regardless of professional affiliation. Thomas failed to allow for the possibility that Tarbell had never abandoned the ideal of scholarship, but rather that ideal had been snatched from her due to the changing nature and development of American historiography.”

V

If Tarbell was bruised by vocational historians, Sandburg was beaten to a bloody pulp. Once Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years appeared, many in the profession set their sights on Sandburg. The literary critic Edmund Wilson spoke for many when he, with evident snarky glee, wrote “The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” Probably the most vitriolic attack came from Milton Milo Quaife, who wrote a review of the Prairie Years for the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (later to become the Journal of American History).

Quaife acknowledged historians could take a lesson from Sandburg’s writing ability. He bristled at Sandburg’s refusal to footnote his sources. “It will be evident from the foregoing that Mr. Sandburg approached his biography of Lincoln free from any conceptions or training engendered by the professional school of historians,” Quaife wrote. Closing his screed, Quaife added “whatever else it may be, it is not history as the reviewer understands the term.” Allan Guelzo recently studied the Mississippi Valley Historical Review’s choices to review books on Lincoln and noted they “were not taken up by the best and brightest among Lincoln scholars,” placing Quaife second in numbers of reviews written. Although speaking of journal editor Arthur C. Cole, the following would also apply to Quaife. “Few of them argue about any large interpretive issues, but they abound in meanness, pedantry, and parade the reviewers’ own unappreciated virtues.”

Vocational historians had a field day when Sandburg (and Tarbell) gave an initial imprimatur to the Atlantic Monthly when it ran the Wilma Minor letters. While Tarbell hedged her words and admitted to Atlantic editor Ellery Sedgwick that she wanted the letters to be genuine, and that such feelings might cloud her judgment, Sandburg dived in head-first without first checking to see if there was any water in the pool. He ended up terribly embarrassed.

Paul Angle, whom I mentioned earlier, performed some critical detective work and methodically proved the letters to be a forgery, and not a very good one at that. While Angle later showed that some of his work was based on personal enmity (he referred to Minor and her mother privately as “whores”), historical methodology classes used this as a case study of how to look at evidence with a critical eye. Even my own methods class used this object lesson.

While those professors who hated Sandburg (and the fact that his writing made him a rich man) privately and sometimes publicly sneered at what the popular historians were doing, Angle approached him with words of understanding. “Anyone can go wrong,” Angle wrote, “but it takes a man to admit it.”

Another vocational historian who overcame his prejudices where Sandburg was concerned, although those prejudices were initially just as strong, was James G. Randall. Instead of going through the entire story in this book of a post, I will refer anyone interested to the article I wrote on Randall and Sandburg for the Journal of Illinois History.

As I said at the beginning of this missive, in asking the question as to what is a historian, the answer, at least in my opinion, is straightforward. Asking who is a historian or what makes a good historian is a much different proposition. While some might look at what I’ve brought forth here and accuse me of creating an artificial divide between the two camps, I would go back and say that this divide began long before I was even a gleam in anyone’s eyes.

But I want to add one more point. The divide is there not just because of the arrogance of one side or the other. I think a strong case can be made that both sides need to exist and maybe even apart. The audience for a professor from Nebraska or New York is much different than David McCullough or Carl Sandburg or even Ida Tarbell. The informed reader shouldn’t look at one and avoid the other. To stay informed, that reader should encounter both and take them for what they are…people who want to share their love of history with others. Getting along isn’t only a laudable goal, it’s a must if we want to ensure that the next generation knows where it came from.

Best (whew)
Rob