What Is a Historian?

Every year in April, Tallahassee has a number of Springtime festivals.  In recent years, even with the pandemic, the one that has garnered the most attention is called “Word of South,” where the promoter, Mark Mustian, invites musicians, poets, novelists and non-fiction writers to perform in tandem.  I’ve never really been sure about the reasoning for that, but it’s popular.  Mark usually invites one or more headline writers and pairs them on stage with a musician.  Given that Tallahassee is a university (and state government) town, most of the people here lean left and so do most of the writers and musicians invited.  Sometimes, however, organizers can be surprised at what they get.  In 2017 they invited John Shelton Reed, former head of the Sociology Department at UNC Chapel Hill and were stunned when it turned out he liked Donald Trump, particularly his taste in BBQ, of which Reed considers himself an expert.  Go figure.

This year’s featured author was Jon Meacham, author of books on Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, the first George Bush, and others.  He is perhaps best known as confidant and speech writer for President Biden, who adopted the title of one of Meacham’s books, The Soul of America as his campaign theme in 2020.  Judging by the president’s statements, it will be major theme in 2024 as well.

Meacham does not refer to himself as a historian, but commentators, looking for some sort of shorthand, often do.  Meacham kind of belongs in a netherworld, along with figures like Michael Beschloss, Jonathan Alter, Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas and a few others who started out as journalists but who, when the industry began to contract, had to do something to make a living.  Most of them have assumed the mantle of “public intellectual,” particularly in the realm of history, without having any real formal training in the subject.  Meacham has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of the South in Tennessee, where he was one of the last groupies to Andrew Lytle, the last of the Agrarian writers of the 1930s, associated with Vanderbilt.  From Sewanee, as it is known, Meacham went to New York, edited Newsweek Magazine through its death throes (there is still an on-line magazine with the same name, but it bears as much resemblance to the original,  as a bear to a bird), moved on to Random House and now is a visiting professor at Vanderbilt, again not in the history department, but in a kind of hybrid with history and political science.  Evans was also with Newsweek (and a law school graduate), Isaccson was with Time and CNN, Alter at Newsweek, Beschloss majored in Political Science and has an MBA, and most of the others are not professionally-trained historians either, but are happy to play the part on television.  Besides, a university like Tulane asking someone like Isaacson to join the faculty means celebrity, and clicks, so to speak.  They are salesmen, particularly of themselves, “influencers” in words the Gen Z generation would understand.

So is this bad?  One of the great themes of American history is the ability of people to re-invent themselves, often dramatically.  Isn’t that what this is ?  Besides, people without PhDs in history often turn out to be pretty good historians:  Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton come to mind, who between them kept the vitality of the Civil War very much alive for a long time.  One of my two favorite historians, Thucydides, was a failed army commander, who when he was exiled, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War that still displays more acuity about human nature than most historians I read today.

The answer to my question is I don’t know.  On the one hand, you have “amateurs” like Meacham and Evans who write some pretty popular books; on the other hand you have historians with the academic goods like Douglass Brinkley who, in his book on John F. Kennedy and the race to the moon, wrote that the Tennessee River flows into the Atlantic Ocean and that Werner von Braun was the head of the Houston Manned Space Center, not the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where my dad worked. Minor points, I suppose, but enough to raise my antenna about who did Brinkley’s research and fact checking.  An advanced degree in history is no guarantee of good historical perception or judgment.  I’m thinking particularly of a couple of cases:  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (who was not a PhD) and Sean Wilentz.  Schlesinger wrote a number of pretty important books, one about Andrew Jackson that never mentioned Indian removal, (for which he apologized shortly before his death) and another one, aimed at Richard Nixon about the dangers of the “imperial” presidency, which in the years since its publication has proved to be prescient (but not, perhaps as Schlesinger anticipated).  But Schlesinger allowed himself to be sucked into the mystique surrounding John F. and Robert Kennedy and when it came time to writing biographies of each ignored such things as “Operation Mongoose” (the repeated attempt to kill Fidel Castro) that led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis, plus the comings and goings to the White House of Judith Campbell Exxner, a mob boss’s girlfriend who also slept with the president and whose existence, of course, has fed the myriad conspiracy theories about Dallas.  And then there is Wilentz, who still teaches at Princeton and damaged his reputation by getting involved in both the impeachment of Bill Clinton (con) and Donald Trump (pro).  Wilentz cudgeled 400 historians (including a very old and ill C. Van Woodward) into signing a full page ad in the New York Times whose message was that the House of Representatives could not impeach Clinton for lying to a grand jury because he was lying about sex and “everybody lies about sex” and then enlisted most of the 400 (and more) still living into signing a document insisting on the impeachment of Trump because of his  phone call to the president of Ukraine seeking an investigation of Hunter Biden.  In short, Wilentz came across as a partisan which perhaps most historians are, but which has sown distrust of the profession, particularly from the right.

Historians always think they know more than they do, which is why politicians don’t trust them unless they’re on the payroll, like Schlesinger, though there is some indication that the Kennedys considered him an ornament to confer legitimacy more than anything else.  On the other hand, the insistence of politicians on “objective” history, particularly on the postsecondary level, is entirely misplaced.  There is no such thing as “objective” history unless you just have students memorize dates, or “objective” journalism, because both are made and reported by human beings who are not rational creatures.  The most we can ask for in either category is fairness which, I will admit, is in short supply, too.   No historical question only has one side; the question is whether there are historians willing to risk opprobrium by presenting them, which too often there are not; the “right side of history” and all that.

When Jon Meacham’s book, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House was published in November 2008, Amazon asked me to review it.  Most of the other reviews were giving it four or five stars—high praise, indeed—but I couldn’t do that because I had some specific problems with it, which may be esoteric to the general reader, but which should have engendered red flags from the pros, many of whom had offered effusive dustjacket blurbs.  One had to do with research.  It is common for academic historians to connive undergraduate or graduate students into doing a lot of the grunt work of looking through old wills, deeds, diaries, or whatever, looking for specific references.  If you’re a student, you will often get academic credit, or even money for your work.  But academic historians generally do at least some of their own research, particularly at the beginning of their careers.  There is no indication that Meacham did.  He hired a couple of researchers in Gallatin, Tennessee, near Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, and he fashioned the narrative.  Certainly not a major infraction of historical standards, but one that raised questions among some historians in Nashville who had spent years doing their own work on Jackson.  Anne Toplovich, then executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society, working on a biography of Rachel Jackson, was incensed by the acclaim Meacham received. Then there was the sourcing.  Meacham claimed to have discovered a cache of letters involving Jackson’s niece Emily Donelson, previously unknown.  The only problem was that the letters had been used as source material in a biography of Emily Donelson written in the 1930s.  A passage in the letters led to a historical theory on Meacham’s part that was, frankly embarrassing.  The passage had to do with Jackson’s 1828 campaign manager, John Eaton, who became his Secretary of War after the election.  Eaton, a widower, took up with the daughter of a boarding house owner in Washington D.C., Peggy Timberlake, who was already married to a sailor in the American navy.  When word came of the death of Peggy’s husband, Jackson pushed the couple into a quick marriage, which caused a scandal in 1830s Washington when the social arbiters of the capital—the women, many of whom were married to Jackson’s cabinet members, including his vice president, John C. Calhoun—refused to have to have anything to do with the Eatons.  It was the first sex scandal touching the White House, and it eventually led to the resignation of most of Jackson’s cabinet who when forced to choose between their wives or their president, chose their wives.  The letters revealed that John Eaton, in order to quell the controversy, offered to resign from the cabinet before any of the others, but that Jackson wouldn’t let him. Meacham took that passage and suggested that if Jackson had let Eaton go, it would have prevented a rupture with Calhoun that, when Jackson left the White House in 1836, would have made him Jackson’s natural successor as president.

I will admit that if you are a lay person, with only a passing knowledge of American history that the above paragraph may make your eyes gloss over with fatigue.  But if you know anything at all about Jacksonian America, you know that the Andrew Jackson/John C. Calhoun relationship was a powder keg waiting to explode regardless of Calhoun’s feeling about Peggy Eaton.  At the time of the Eaton affair, Calhoun’s role as James Monroe’s Secretary of War in wanting Jackson punished for his unauthorized invasion of Florida in 1818 that led to the First Seminole War, was about to hit the fan.  So was his role in formalizing South Carolina’s reaction to the 1828 “Tarriff of Abominations” that would lead to the Nullification Crisis and nearly to civil war.  In short, John C. Calhoun was not going to succeed Andrew Jackson as president. Period.  Whether John Eaton remained in the cabinet or not.  Apparently none of the real historians, like Daniel Walker Howe, who provided blurbs, bothered to point this out.

Finally, the last thing about American Lion that made me suspicious was its timing.  There are no coincidences in the publishing industry.  Books come out on a certain day for a reason.  American Lion was published one week after Barack Obama was elected president.  It seems like ancient history now, but one of the secondary themes of the 2008 election was whether Obama was tough enough to be president, to go toe-to-toe against Mitch McConnell, et al.  It was, in retrospect, a legitimate concern, though Obama got tougher as time went on.  American Lion seemed to me then—and still does—as a political primer for someone Meacham desperately wanted to succeed, rather than as a genuine study of the Jackson presidency.  I gave the book one star out of five, which must have caused some consternation at Amazon, because they pulled my review after 48 hours and made it disappear.  American Lion, of course, went on to win the Pulitzer, won Meacham great acclaim and, essentially, created his role as a “Public Intellectual,” and as the apparent court historian to the Biden Administration, and the author of some of the president’s most memorable and—in the case of last September when Biden stood bathed in red light in Philadelphia—most intemperate speeches, where he attacked half the country.

The problem with being a politically-connected Public Intellectual, is not just the problem of fairness, although listening to Meacham, Beschloss, or even Doug Brinkley or Jonathan Turley on MSNBC,   CNN, or Fox can bring home just how slanted commentary can reinforce suspicions of all intellectuals, which is a problem of contemporary American society.  There is often a lack of self awareness about appearances.  Meacham was suspended from his gig as MSNBC when he refused to tell the company he was writing speeches for Biden and then extolling them on Joe Scarborough’s TV show; in 1980, the conservative wonderkind George F. Will came under great criticism when it was revealed that he was coaching Ronald Regan in his debate prep, and then going on ABC and telling us all how well Reagan did against Jimmy Carter.

This column is not intended as an attack on Jon Meacham (well, not much anyway) as much as it is a concern about claims of intellectual rectitude and how those claims are very hard to maintain in the era of social media, cable news and all the rest; the celebrity culture that has engulfed all of us.   The people that we see on TV, claiming some kind of historical expertise, are often just former journalists looking for a place to expound, with no more genuine knowledge than the rest of us.  They get paid for offering their political opinions, and, frankly catastrophizing. (Have you noticed that every major presidential scandal is worse than Watergate?).  A lot.  If there is anything constant in America, it is the ability of Americans to turn a buck on anything.  The downside of all these historical talking heads and their catastrophizing is to raise the level of distrust toward all expertise.  Americans do not deal with ambiguity very well; we always want somebody to give us the easy answer.  Which is why Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, and all the rest will continue to do very well, thank you.