March 1, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:45 PM EST Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., died yesterday. Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of interviewing him for American Heritage magazine, and we talked for a couple of hours about a book he had just written, The Disuniting of America. In that book Schlesinger had analyzed and in part lamented academic pressures for what he thought some destructive and dishonest multicultural curricula, and he took issue with a political and intellectual tendency he thought misconceived and a little dangerous—but not very dangerous. He thought the drive to preserve certain forms of cultural difference and identity perverse, but also, happily, almost certainly doomed to failure. He made at least one mistaken prediction: He remarked that “I am sure that once the great majority of college professors bestir themselves, we’ll see an end to the sillier stuff,” but I think most of the rest of what he said has held up pretty well. Schlesinger was confident about his country’s prospects in an era of increasing ethnic and racial diversity. He noted that America was still assimilating immigrants very effectively, and that we were in fact the most successful multi-ethnic society the world had yet seen. This was an interesting and somewhat bold thing to say in 1992, and not only because of the risk of outraging the guardians of academic piety. In 1992 Jim Crow was not yet a generation in the past, and anti-black racism was still seen as the feature that had most strikingly distinguished the United States from other modern societies. On this score, however, history has so far been very kind to Arthur Schlesinger. I recently had occasion to reflect on just how kind, and to do so in an unlikely place. Last weekend the editor of American Heritage took me to see Madame Tussaud’s, in Times Square, apparently the most popular tourist attraction in New York City, but one few if any native-born New Yorkers of our acquaintance had ever seen. We were both native-born New Yorkers, and we decided to buck a trend. There are a number of things to say about Madame Tussaud’s, but for this purpose, I’ll restrict myself to the effigy of Josephine Baker, born in St. Louis, Missouri, who died a French citizen, with a croix de guerre to her credit, and a Place Josephine Baker in Montparnasse. She was a famous refugee from American racism, and her name still evokes the shameful fact that some people once fled not from Europe to escape degradation, but to Europe for the same end. This very pointedly inverted a great American myth, but in the face of a widespread suspicion that racism is a rising tide in Europe, and a receding one here, who would do it now? And Paris, once a Mecca to expatriate black Americans—more recently the scene of protracted clashes between Muslim Frenchmen and the police, and a city anticipating a rising vote for the National Front—was in those days not alone in being a better place to be of an ethnic or racial minority than was the United States. When I was in my twenties, if you patronized the Yorkville bars in Manhattan, you could still see black ex-GIs talking in pretty fair German to the locals, fondly remembering a country where they had felt less racial hostility than they had in their own. Those days, too, are past. Arthur Schlesinger, to his great credit, saw this one coming. From one perspective, it is a little odd that he did. Historians are not normally credited with any great prophetic powers, and there is a strong sense that by its very nature the study of history does little if anything to let you predict the future—the owl of Minerva, as the saying goes, only takes wing at dusk. The unalarmed and generally optimistic tones of Schlesinger’s little book on American multiculturalism nonetheless suggest that a good historian can get a sense of the logic and trajectory of a culture as it moves and mutates over time. It remains true that we usually remember the future and imagine the past, and Schlesinger was fully aware that the present sets at least parts of historians’ agendas. His historical work often reflected his own political concerns, and he was in retrospect not uncritical, on this very score, of some of the books that had made him famous. But on the evidence of Schlesinger’s case, a careful study of history is unlikely to make you sillier about the future.
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