May 17, 2009
Because of the near-death experience that our department recently managed to
survive, my task this morning is to explain what our contributions to the curriculum and
to scholarship have been, and to suggest why they are worthy of appreciation. Let me try
to offer some perspective on our own departmental past.
The two scholars who have dominated the history of American Studies at
Brandeis have been Max Lerner and Lawrence H. Fuchs.
Lerner was born in Minsk in 1902, joined the faculty at Brandeis University in
1949, retired from teaching here in 1973, and died just short of his ninetieth birthday.
Having served as the managing editor of one of the great intellectual projects of the last
century, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Lerner came to know a formidable
number of the most creative and productive academicians of the middle third of the
century; and he drew upon a prodigious range of contacts in the scholarly community in
conceiving and writing his most important book, America as a Civilization.
Published in 1957, it is a kind of summation of knowledge about the United
States, at a historical moment when the nation was enjoying an economic and military
power that no previous empire had ever matched. America as a Civilization clocked in at
over a thousand pages, making it about as long as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America combined with Moby Dick, which may explain why the historian Henry Steele
Commager told readers of the New York Times Book Review that Lerner’s magnum opus
“is a veritable Leviathan of a book.” The two-volume paperback edition is divided into
what he called “The Basic Frame” and “Culture and Personality,” which indicates his
indebtedness to the design of Tocqueville’s masterpiece. Indeed Lerner was the last
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specialist in American Studies who had the audacity to believe that a single intelligence
could grasp the magnitude and complexity of the nation’s past and present. He showed a
flair for the exposition of ideas, and had written brilliantly on a number of intellectuals,
especially Professor Thorstein Veblen and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. By contrast
Lerner’s short book on Tocqueville is disappointingly weak, perhaps because by 1966 so
much unraveling had occurred that the sense of American civilization as a discrete unit
could no longer be effectively defended.
Lerner’s course on this topic was required of all Brandeis sophomores. In 1957,
the year that his book appeared, one of those sophomores was about to help shape the
Sixties, the decade characterized by the decomposition of a coherent American culture
and polity. That sophomore would have been Abbie Hoffman ’59, about whom,
incidentally, one of our graduating seniors this morning, Jeremy Botwinick, has rather
insightfully written. Lerner’s book appeared in the late fall, which was bad timing,
because Sputnik had been launched less than three months earlier. The Soviet
achievement in outer space made even America’s technological supremacy open to
serious doubt, and thus undermined the aura of complacency and confidence that hovers
over America as a Civilization. Its weakness is its static quality; and even though Lerner
would come to see his adopted land as an “unfinished country” and later as “a wounded
civilization,” he could not help, as Time Magazine said of him in 1960, having “a crush
on America.”
When I joined the Department of American Studies, I had an occasional lunch
with him. Because of my awareness that he had known just about everyone, from
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Justice Felix Frankfurter to Professor Harold Laski, I
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expected a name-dropper, perhaps a bit like the financier Bernard Baruch, whose
significant career in public service had begun by chairing the War Industries Board
during the First World War, and who in his retirement was heard to reminisce as follows:
“I remember telling Woodrow, with Oliver Wendell standing right there, that, next to
Winston, Franklin is the young man to watch.” But Lerner wasn’t like that at all, and in
our conversations I was struck by his unpretentiousness and his openness. I also knew
him to be something of an ideologue of sex; he offered a popular course in our
Department entitled “Eros in America.” In our plaid, plain academic lives, Lerner added
color because of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor, who had been tagged as “the world’s
most beautiful woman.” Indeed, at what may have been my first departmental meeting, I
proposed to offer a new course that would emphasize the thematic similarities in the ways
that Americans recounted their own lives, from Benjamin Franklin through Booker T.
Washington down to Malcolm X. My new colleague Jerry Cohen warned me, however,
that Max was already teaching a course on “Autobiography in America,” but under the
title of “Eros in America.”
Lerner had a gift for inspiring loyalty from younger colleagues, including the
second pivotal figure in the history of the Department. Indeed it was created, though not
ex nihilo, in 1970, by Lawrence Fuchs, who came to Brandeis in 1952 and served the
longest stint as our chairperson until his retirement half a century later. Like Lerner,
Fuchs had deepened his academic understanding of America by political engagement,
though through public service rather than through journalism. He served as the first
director of the Peace Corps in the Philippines, with the rank of ambassador, and then
twice as executive director of commissions formed to revise immigration and refugee
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policy. Having co-taught a celebrated course at Brandeis with Eleanor Roosevelt, he too
seemed to know everyone--at least in politics. After President Jimmy Carter picked
Fuchs to serve as executive director of the commission assigned to recommend
immigration reform, he had felt compelled to fire a staffer, who promptly sued him for
employment discrimination. No one who knows Larry Fuchs could have imagined any
likelihood whatsoever of such discrimination. But just to be sure, Larry alerted the
disgruntled ex-staffer that, were the case to come to trial, three character witnesses would
be called who could testify to his reputation in the community. The three were the two
U. S. Senators from Massachusetts (Ted Kennedy and John Kerry) as well as the nation’s
chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Griffin Bell. No extra credit for
guessing who won the case.
Fuchs had been a speech-writer and strategist for Senator and then President John
F. Kennedy, and wrote a classic, first book about the voting patterns among American
Jews. A sequel covered the political profile of Roman Catholics, and Fuchs confirmed
the persistence of ethnicity and religion as factors that determined how ballots are cast.
He thus had something to do with scuttling the emphasis upon national unity that marked
the early Cold War era, when difference could easily be interpreted as divisiveness. The
Sixties that Kennedy’s election inaugurated would ensure that heterogeneity would
replace homogeneity as the key component of “the civic culture,” a phrase that Fuchs
apparently introduced into our public discourse, just as he is credited with being the first
or almost the very first author to refer in print to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as
“WASP’s.” Since 1960 the weakened hegemony of the WASP’s is perhaps the most
striking feature of the American experiment in self-government. Only a minority of the
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current members of the U. S. Supreme Court are even Protestants, much less white
Protestants.
These changes were traced in Fuchs’s most important work, The American
Kaleidoscope, which appeared in 1990 and won the John Hope Franklin Prize of the
American Studies Association for the best book in our field that year. The American
Kaleidoscope has exerted so much impact that it has even been translated into Turkish.
When People Magazine did a story on Fuchs, he was photographed while contemplating
the deserted hall of Ellis Island, as though he incarnated the promise of hospitality that
the republic has offered to all those immigrants who yearned to breathe free. The
editorial decision of People Magazine was apt. No scholar in the entire history of this
university did more to make the ideal of diversity idiomatic. The American Kaleidoscope
showed how various races and other ancestral groups have gotten absorbed into the civic
culture. They have done so without entirely betraying their own cultural and ethnic
origins and without enfeebling the fundamental institutions that the Framers had created
two centuries earlier. With scholarly rigor and political passion, Fuchs demonstrated how
so much of the rest of the world, in coming to America, changed it.
But that great theme leaves unanswered the question of how this country changed
the rest of the world; and if there is a way to foresee the next phase in the evolution of our
interdisciplinary discipline of American Studies, it is to examine the profound impact that
the nation has exerted outside its own borders. This mini-commencement ceremony is
not the forum even to sketch out how such a study might proceed, but let me offer two
illustrations--both taken from episodes in Japan.
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When the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performed there, the program
ended one evening--as it so often did--with the company’s signature work, “Revelations,”
a sublime tribute to the Southern black church which had helped shaped the sensibility of
the choreographer himself. The response to “Revelations” that evening was
overwhelming; indeed the very walls seemed to be shaking. That was certainly not an
unusual experience for Ailey’s dancers. They were told only afterwards, however, that
an earthquake had occurred; they hadn’t noticed anything special amid the rumbling.
Several years earlier the singer and actor Harry Belafonte, who would receive an
honorary degree from Brandeis in 1991, visited Japan. There, he later claimed, he had
the single most memorable experience of his career on the concert stage. Upon singing
the opening bars of one of his standards, “Hava Negila,” Belafonte was stunned to realize
that six thousand Japanese fans were singing it along with him. Such familiarity with a
Hebrew folk song that had emerged in Palestine about a century ago, which a black
American calypso singer of Jamaican origins helped to inject into the world’s first truly
global culture, hints at the paradoxes that punctuate our civilization. It is a culture that
we hope that the students who are about to graduate from our Department will continue
to find fascinating, and continue to explore, and maybe even to enrich as well.
Stephen J. Whitfield