#8, October 8, 2003

History as Penis Envy

I admit it. I was one of those taken in by that humorous piece in the New York Times recounting astonishing claims made by Doris Kearns Goodwin about her past. The article was a spoof that combined nicely two of the important stories about historians to emerge in the last few years – the charges of plagiarism and those of lying about personal backgrounds. Goodwin of course has been shown to be guilty of only the former, but the article suggested that she had been following in Joe Ellis’ well-worn path by inventing a past for herself as well.

The plausibility factor was strong. The article referred to appearances Goodwin made on Ken Burns’ baseball documentaries. Now there was enough blurring of fact and fiction, myth and reality, in Burns’ nine extremely long innings to provide fodder for this particular spoof, and as far as I can recall Goodwin was right up there contributing with the best of them. While the spoof went a little far, suggesting that all Goodwin’s National Public Radio appearances had drawn mainly on scenes from movies – “The Natural” and “Fields of Dreams” in particular – it nonetheless picked up on an important feature of both historical practice and the falsehoods that have been witnessed in the last couple of years.

There has, after all, been a strong tendency among some historians to want to inflate their images, and compensate, in print or in the classroom, for some sense of deficiency with regard to masculinity. The fact that Joe Ellis claimed to have scored the winning touchdown for his high school and hadn’t even made it onto the team, that he wanted to be known for fighting with the 101^st Airborne in Vietnam, and for his service as an aide-de-camp to Westmoreland, as well as for his contributions to the anti-war and Civil Rights movements (braving the threats of those nasty racists in the South) speaks volumes in this regard.

More generally, though, I think social historians have endeavored to do the same kind of thing in their scholarship as Ellis was doing for his own personal self-image, not through deliberate falsehoods, but by selective emphasis. In other words, part of the impulse behind some social history has been the desire to rescue people from, to use E.P. Thompson’s words, the condescension of history. In practice, this has meant remasculinizing them, rebuilding their families, placing the men at the head of the families and so forth. Daniel P. Moynihan’s almost simultaneous remasculinization of the Irish (in Beyond the Ghetto) and feminization of African Americans (in “The Problem of the Negro Family”) serves as a good example of this. If in the process of establishing these narratives, stories of prostitutes, suicides, murderers, perpetrators of irrational violence, and delinquents have fallen into the background (or have emerged in the foreground of others’ histories) so much the better.

© Rob Gregg, 2003