Portrait For Posterity

[Rob Wick]

Gene,

I completely agree with you that Thomas's book is well worth the effort. He did cause some eyebrows to be raised when he allowed Sandburg to read over his chapter before he published it, although Sandburg did not ask Thomas to change anything.

I personally have some criticisms of Thomas. In the opening essay for my (alleged) book on Tarbell's study of Lincoln, I wrote about Thomas's interpretation of Tarbell. This is very long, but I would like to share with everyone here what I have written so far.

Benjamin P. Thomas took the stage of Allegheny College’s Playshop Theater on a frigid February evening in 1948 full of warm enthusiasm. Although some in his audience might have felt otherwise, in Thomas’s mind he had not come to bury Ida M. Tarbell, but rather to praise her. Earlier in the day, Thomas spent time in her legacy, the school’s Lincoln Room, informally discussing with students the contributions Tarbell had made to the study of the 16th president. Before his 8:15 p.m. formal address, Thomas took time to be interviewed in the late afternoon by Meadville’s first radio station, WMGW, which had just started broadcasting the year before. The college newspaper The Campus assured its readers that Thomas would be “glad to answer questions about Ida Tarbell.”

Thomas’s formal speech further marked his attempt to classify Tarbell’s place in the pantheon of Lincoln biographers that he had begun in 1947 with the publication of Portrait for Posterity. In this he classified Tarbell as a transitory figure between those he termed as “idealists” and “realists.” While laudatory of Tarbell’s determination and desire to paint a full portrait of Lincoln, Thomas nonetheless found severe shortcomings in her work. Despite his obvious admiration for the woman whom Carl Sandburg once referred to (to Thomas, no less) as “that tall, keen gracious woman” Thomas was too much the cold, impartial scholar to leave his audience with only laudatory plaudits of his subject.

Thomas asked rhetorically if Tarbell was qualified to undertake the study of Lincoln. In doing so, however, he never defined exactly what qualifications were required, speaking only in generalities. “Did she have the patience and persistence required of one who does worthwhile research? Was there any reason to think she could understand or interpret Lincoln better than those who had actually known him? Could she draw meaning from things that were meaningless or unintelligible to them?” Then, with some hint of irony, Thomas asked whether Tarbell, even in her transitory position among Lincoln biographers, had anything in common with Lincoln, which had been the hallmark of the preceding reminiscent school of Lincoln biographers who had either known him or were contemporaries.

Thomas couldn’t resist alluding on several occasions to Tarbell’s sex. Noting that Tarbell was “a career woman in an age when such women were rare” Thomas found it mysterious how, as a student at Allegheny, Tarbell escaped marriage. He sighed that as a biographer Tarbell was “never able to suppress the womanly romanticism of her fervent feminine nature” noting that Tarbell had long defended the Ann Rutledge story, guided, perhaps by her “feminine intuition that it was true.” Thomas was pleased, however, that “her romanticism never tempted her into sickly sentimentality.”

While our modern ears might cringe at such blatant examples of paternalism and sexism, Tarbell likely would have looked past Thomas’s words and accepted his praise. After all, in her 86 years, she had heard much worse from men who made no pretense of being supportive.

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 mean 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.” Tarbell’s femininity again was raising its head. After all, even Tarbell had noted that the main role of woman was to serve as an aid to understanding, for both children and adults. 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 Michael Kammen has noted, one of the boldest features of the academic practitioners of American history is their “penchant for introspection.” From the first historical seminar in the mid-19th century to today, 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” does so 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, seemingly laudatory, speech it would seem incumbent on a speaker who asks if Tarbell can be considered a scholar and passes judgement on her work 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 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. 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 banned and forgotten. It is ironic given Thomas’s standing as a biographer of Lincoln that one gets a whiff of the academic historian’s disdain for biographical writers in his interpretation of Tarbell’s words.

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, had been the same from the time Tarbell began her study of Lincoln to the time he spoke. 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 a lack 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.

Best
Rob