# 105, September 12, 2006

Of Epigrammatology

Omaha

Hey Mister, if you you’re going to walk on water

You know you’re only going to walk all over me.

One of my favorite singer-songwriters, perhaps my favorite at the moment, is Adam Duritz, the front man for The Counting Crows. My fondness for his work dates from the very first album, “August and Everything After” (1993), not just because of its undeniable quality, but also because it provided me with one of my very first epigrams.

I had used epigrams all the way back to my first book, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression, but these epigrams were clearly apposite and in a way positivistic in their role in the work; they seemed to speak exactly to the content of the chapter that they headed, and the connection was fairly obvious and straightforward for the reader. The newer ones, which generally followed in the wake of the Duritz quote sometimes required explanation (though one wasn’t necessarily going to be given), and often went against the grain of the text that followed. They might complement the text, in a way, but they might also aim at a confrontation with it. As such, they might very well annoy the reader, as they would leave her or him scratching her/his head wondering what the connection might be. In some instances, that connection might have been evident to the author at some point and yet later forgotten, placing the author in a position of alienation from the text, in the same way that the reader inevitably would be (to some degree or other). Such alienation might lead down its own avenues and the text might “live” longer as a result – the familiar becoming less so, and the text taking on an air of quasi-independence by default.

But the ideas in Duritz’s lines, for me at least, speak to a fundamental understanding of society that goes against the grain of much of social history, and since this was what I felt I was grappling with at the time, they struck a chord with me when I heard them first in 1994. The particular section of the essay, “Apropos Exceptionalism,” for which I used the Duritz epigram, dealt with the historiography of Populism. What I argued was that when placed in a comparative framework and understood in terms of empire, Populism took on an altogether different character from that described in most historians’ works. While most historians were trying to determine whom the Populists were railing against – was it Eastern Capitalists or African Americans? – and while they attempted to create singular answers or determine which Populists were radical and which ones were reactionary, I argued that they needed to be considered in terms of a triangulation characteristic of all farmers placed in a frontier-like situation and confronting the growth of commercial capital. They needed to be understood in terms of their imperial location – as I termed it – placed in the middle between Capital and the Other – in this case, American Indians. It was instructive, I felt, that Omaha, Nebraska, the site of the most important Populist conference where demands against Eastern capitalists and the establishment were fashioned, was in the heart of territory where the American Indians were being viciously put down. One might compare American Populists, therefore, with Afrikaner farmers, who were, at about the same time, railing against both the British and the Bantu.

Duritz’s words, unwittingly I would imagine, picked up on this “middling” aspect, and in mentioning Omaha obviously fit my needs to perfection. Also, in indicating that if the person described in the song was going “to walk on water” he was going to have to walk on someone else, Duritz encapsulated both the self-righteousness of the Populist and the fact that his alternative utopia would not be free of its own exploitation or denigration – women, blacks, American Indians, immigrants. One of the questions most frequently asked of the Populists is how did people like Tom Watson turn against their liberal intentions after 1896. Understanding imperial location and seeing them comparatively would have made such a question unnecessary. [I should also mention that if my analysis corresponded with that of any earlier American historian, then it would have to be that of Richard Hofstadter who used status anxiety so effectively – status anxiety is the currency that keeps empire in tact.]

One last plug for the “Apropos Exceptionalism” essay: written when it was, for a conference at the University College, London, in 1995, and published in American Exceptionalism? in 1997, the work was very much ahead of its time, and received excellent reviews both at the conference and afterwards from some very prominent historians in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Several people, of course, didn’t like the tone of it, or my rather jet-lagged and flippant presentation at the conference itself; but they could not deny the overall uniqueness of the essay and its important implications. Much of what I said, not especially about the Populists (because they have not really been treated comparatively still – to my knowledge) has become commonplace thinking to some degree. But I would still contend that while internationalizing American history and comparative analysis have become central to American historiography, much of what I suggested about imperial location still needs to be more fully developed. I have done some of this work in my second book, Inside Out, Outside In, and in a number of my articles – particularly the two on policing in India, the U.S., and Britain – but I am just a lost soul on the edge of the academy. Violins please.