Stanford Today
Edition: July/August, 1996
Section: Forum
WWW: Cultural Diversity

Forum Panelists

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for The Age of Jackson. In 1966 he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for A Thousand Days, a chronicle of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger is professor emeritus of history at City University of New York.

Albert Camarillo, a professor of history at Stanford, is an expert in Mexican American history and in the comparative history of U.S. urban ethnicity. Camarillo is the author of Chicanos in a Changing Society, among other works.

Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford, is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project and the author of the prize-winning In Struggle: The History of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Gordon Chang, associate professor of history at Stanford, teaches Asian American history and is the author of the prize-winning Friends and Enemies: The United States, China and the Soviet Union.

Patricia Limerick, professor of history at the University of Colorado, is a leading exponent of the “new Western history.” She is president-elect of the American Studies Association and is the author of Legacy of Conquest, among other works.

Gary Nash, professor of history at UCLA, is a former president of the Organization of American Historians and author of several works on race and class in early American history. He recently chaired the American History Standards Project for the National Association for History in the Schools.

The following article is condensed from a forum held at Stanford as part of a conference sponsored by the School of Humanities and Sciences called "E Pluribus Unum?" In the conference keynote address on Feb. 8, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger told several hundred faculty and students that, in its "militant" form, multiculturalism "becomes an alternative to, even a holdout against, the concept of a common nationality." The next day, a panel of historians addressed the role of cultural diversity in the writing and teaching of American history. The panel was moderated by Stanford history Professor George Fredrickson.

GEORGE FREDRICKSON: Last evening, Professor Schlesinger gave us his view on the current state of the multicultural debate, and this morning we're going to turn to a more specific question -- the ways that debate has affected, or should affect, the way American history is written and taught.

American history has been a crucial battleground in this debate. During the past 20 or 30 years, there has been growing attention on the part of American historians, and teachers of American history, to the story of previously neglected segments of the population. And this new direction of historical interest raises questions about how these uncovered stories unearthed from obscurity relate to the narrative of white male achievement that used to constitute the essence of our history.

Is this one story with several subsidiary themes, subplots, or is it several narratives of equal significance? If the latter is true, is any synthesis possible?

ALBERT CAMARILLO: I want to comment first on the core issue that Professor Schlesinger raised yesterday in his talk about the oftentimes intense debate between what he calls the "monocultural ideologues" and the "multicultural ideologues."

You have to understand that the debate arises out of nearly 25 years of changes in the historical profession -- the way we write history, the topics that we've identified for analysis and interpretation.

The new histories, the new Western history; the so-called ethnic histories -- African American history, Chicano history, Asian American history -- all these are relatively new in the academy.

Our understanding of American history has been expanded, has become more inclusive over the course of the last two decades. Why is it now that we see this intense political debate?

I was involved in the discussion [when Stanford changed its Western Culture requirement] as were many of us on this campus. The way it was seized on by the media, it set up this ideological bifurcation. That was simply not the case. They were talking about changing a bit of the reading list, changing a little bit of the approach to the study of Western culture -- or, as it became, CIV [Cultures, Ideas and Values] -- not a fundamental change.

There weren't monocultural ideologues at the throat of the multicultural ideologues. That's not been the case. It still isn't the case, I don't think, in most places.

Can we go back to the way American history was taught when I was a youngster? There was no room [in that history] for me or for the people from which I arose, of which I was a part. There was no history for me. I was excluded and so many other Americans, segments of American society, were excluded from the American past. That's changed, and it's changed for the good.

CLAYBORNE CARSON: Most historians understand that creating a narrative is always problematic, that it should be controversial. We create narratives to give some meaning to our evidence, but I think any good historian recognizes that it's an artificial construct, it's part of a product of the imagination. We are trying to create narratives that make some sense, given the enormous outpouring of new material in American history over the last 20 years.

The question that brings us here is: What is the context in which that intellectual ferment will take place? I think one of the few things that the right and the left agree on is that there is a danger that intellectual ferment will take place in a climate that's open to intimidation and
coercion.

The question is: From what side? And I think that that's where we do get into some disagreement.

I knew leftist intimidation. I went to school during the late '60s and early '70s. I knew people who knew how to intimidate teachers. Those people do not have very much influence on the university these days. I think we are in a quite different climate and I don't think very many people would claim that we live in an era in which leftist multiculturalists are politically dominant. We live in a very conservative era.

GORDON CHANG: I recently went back and looked at a text that I use in my graduate courses. This is a work broadly surveying the American social history and political history from the late 19th century to the present, and [the author is] speaking of the politics of the late 19th century, and the result or the consequences of influx of a new wave of European immigration. He says that what was most remarkable about the American immigrant experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not that in a single nation American immigrants became assimilated, but that so many different people somehow retained their separate identities.

"The United States never entirely lost the flavor of diaspora," it read. "While the United States took for its motto the Latin cliché e pluribus unum, a more appropriate motto might have been e pluribus plura."

[In other words], American national politics would remain a politics of regions and of groups of different immigrant origin.

[The author] goes on to celebrate a specific case study, which was of the Irish, and he argues through this chapter that the Irish made a great contribution to American politics, not by simply blindly assimilating, but the Irish kept their own identities, and he concludes: "Each group in its own way kept its identity and by keeping its identity, secured a place in the nation.

"The American nation, then, would be a confederation among past and present, a federal union of emigrant groups, memory tied and sentiment bound, and these groups would produce new national institutions by their very ways of remaining distinct."

And this is written by a historian that would be certainly not considered a multiculturalist. It was written by Daniel Boorstin, who was appointed Librarian of Congress by Richard Nixon in 1973.

PATRICIA LIMERICK: As recently as 10 years ago, there were a lot of obituaries for the field of Western American history. Maybe the most poignant and memorable moment [for me] came in a job interview with Harvard in 1979 where this Southern historian said to me, "Patricia, I'm just curious why you would go into this backwater of a field?" And this from a Southern historian, when you think about it. [Laughter.] So, there's no question that we were in a slump, in a really bad slump, maybe a terminal slump, and what saved us was reckoning with the Trans-Mississippi West's cultural diversity, because in truth, the West had and has a greater range of Indian societies -- the continuum from pueblos to northwest Indians to plains and so on. Many of the eastern Indian populations get driven as refugees into the West, so we pick up the eastern cultural diversity of Indian people as well, Spanish and Mexican colonists, immigrants, the point of arrival and residence of Asian immigrants, plus the early and significant presence of African-Americans and the whole range of peoples with European-derived ethnicity.

I probably have been extreme on the occasions where I have said that the American West makes the eastern United States look like a family reunion and I don't want to overstate the harmony of the eastern United States, but there's no question that the West is the most diverse of America's regions, where that habit of mind that narrows American race relations primarily to a bipolar white and African American model just won't work. That was the primary reason for Western [U.S.] history's revitalization.

Does this provide the basis for one historical narrative, for several intertwined narratives or for several separate and disengaged narratives?

When historians fell into the habit of lamenting the hard times on which narrative history had fallen, we lamented the loss of one particular narrative -- the kind of narrative structured around one's subject, a group of people who are central on opening pages, the middle and at the end. What we have before us now is a much more interesting kind of narrative, more of a Dickensian narrative. This is not necessarily a weaker sort of story. It is instead a story in which a bunch of very unrelated people are separately introduced and then, not necessarily with any great speed, they move toward one another. By the last third or so of the story, as in a Dickens' novel, they are all entangled in one another's lives. They have met, fallen in love, quarreled, stolen from or murdered one another. Even though their stories began very separately, they end up interwoven in a way that will not let them ever again be detached from one another. Region, then, becomes one strand in the converging and entangling of these narratives.

If you are reluctant to give up a sense of crisis and dilemma, I would redirect that anxiety to a more appropriate target which is the resistance to reading that one encounters in teaching the American history survey course at a place like University of Colorado. Of course, my assumption is that at Stanford you have to hold the students back from reading [laughter], that they are ready to roll.

For those of us with ancient, conservative, maybe reactionary beliefs in the centrality of books and reading in education, those of us who see the ability to take pleasure in reading as the center of intellectual culture, then here is the real crisis -- not multiculturalism, not monoculturalism, but this repetitive plaintive cry -- "Too much reading."

GARY NASH: We need to think about multiculturalism as something more than multiracialism. I think too often multiculturalism and multiracialism [are] used synonymously. Women were a part of multiculturalism, and women were as left out of the grand narratives, as were racial groups. I challenge anyone to look back at the textbooks kids read coming forward all the way to the 1960s and find how ordinary Americans have been included, whether they be female of different racial ancestries, or white European.

It's an oddity in a democratic society, where we live by the model that, politically, we are to be of and for and by the people, but in our textbooks, we find that the ordinary people aren't there. They're not part of the American story.

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER: History written by historians is in a constant flux. Syntheses are regularly shattered. The reason they are regularly shattered is that the present constantly recreates the past. "All history is contemporary history." We are prisoners of our own experience -- even historians. We are all affected by current preoccupations, and they lead us to look into the past in a new way and find new phenomena.

The first course in American diplomatic history was given before the First World War. The first course in socialism was given by my father in the University of Iowa in 1919 or 1920. The first courses in intellectual history began to be given in the late 1930s and really after the Second World War. Urban history was a kind of post-war creation. Labor history, economic history, history of immigration -- all these have enriched and complicated and diversified the field of history. The multicultural challenge is only the most recent of a series of waves which have expanded the scope, enlarged the domain of history.

In my own professional lifetime, American history has been revolutionized by two movements. One is the women's rights movement; the other is the racial justice movement. And both of these movements have compelled historians to look back into the past to see things that were always there, but which they had not noticed particularly because their attention had not been directed toward them. The women's rights movement compelled historians suddenly to illuminate a large sector of the national experience. In the same way, the civil rights movement had suddenly focused historians' attention into the injustices and scandals and failures of the American past.

The problem that really concerns me is [the teaching of history] in the public schools, because public education has been the great agency of acculturation in this country. My objection to multiculturalism is not at all the enlargement of the historic palette; it is the use of history to disassemble the country -- a view of history which I say is bound to be defeated by the superior powers of sex and love.

The answer to George's question, "Is it possible to have a single master narrative?" all depends on the level of instruction. Obviously, if you're giving a survey course, it is quite possible. It's an artistic challenge as well as an intellectual challenge to devise a single, integrated narrative of American history. But then beyond that, we're bound to have courses in diplomatic history, economic history, social history, intellectual history, urban history, labor history, courses in black history, women's history, Mexican-Latino history, East Asian American history -- all these are of immense value and contribute to our knowledge of the past.

In other words, I think that the processes of history are going to continue to change, they're going to continue to reflect the urgencies of the present. As Oscar Wilde said, "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it," and it's bound to continue. I'd like also to quote a great Dutch historian, who said, "History is an argument without end."

[Applause.]

CARSON: One of the reasons I'm so disturbed is that the alarmist literature seems to focus on multiculturalism, which is usually left undefined and with few names mentioned. For example, last night, we did not hear any real examples of the multiculturalism that was threatening.

SCHLESINGER: Leonard Jeffries [black studies chairman at the City University of New York].

CARSON: Leonard Jeffries is not a multiculturalist. If he were here, he would say that he is strongly against multiculturalism. He is a monoculturalist, and anyone who is familiar with the Afrocentric literature knows that there are a wealth of attacks on multiculturalism. It is not the route that they wish to take. . . . Arthur, would you identify a person who identifies himself or herself as a multiculturalist historian who is guilty of the, of the things which you're warning us against?

SCHLESINGER: It's some years since I did immerse in all of this but I can recall someone in some meeting here in California, in San Francisco, denounced assimilation from a Latino viewpoint, a historian, I forget who it was. There are other examples. There are particularly the kinds of things which you find in the public schools, again. I'm not panicked about the university.

NASH: One of [historian] Lynne Cheney's favorite lines is that the National History Standards, the curricular framework, are grim and gloomy. I figure it gets to the heart of what you're saying. We have had textbooks that kids have learned from for many generations back which have been celebratory, highly affirmative, mostly triumph and very little tragedy, and it's said that is the only way you're going to get kids to be patriotic, to love their country. My view is that the story of the Ku Klux Klan is grim, and kids ought to learn it, but the story of overcoming the Ku Klux Klan is a glorious story, a heroic story, so most of these things which can be painted as grim and unsuitable for kids are essential to the learning of these young Americans. Every society's history is bittersweet, and I don't think kids who are fed sugar pill history are likely to become the best citizens.

I am really offended by this notion that the history standards are grim and gloomy. If you applied the same criteria to literature, we would throw out Mark Twain, we would throw out Alice Walker, we would throw out almost our entire literary accomplishment because literature reflects the good and the bad, the heroic and the dismal. History is about human beings, just as literature is. My feeling is simply that if a democracy can't look history in the face, and if kids can't learn what they know anyway, then we are a rather peculiar democracy. ST

THE PANELISTS

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for The Age of Jackson. In 1966 he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for A Thousand Days, a chronicle of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger is professor emeritus of history at City University of New York.

Albert Camarillo, a professor of history at Stanford, is an expert in Mexican American history and in the comparative history of U.S. urban ethnicity. Camarillo is the author of Chicanos in a Changing Society, among other works.

Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford, is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project and the author of the prize-winning In Struggle: The History of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Gordon Chang, associate professor of history at Stanford, teaches Asian American history and is the author of the prize-winning Friends and Enemies: The United States, China and the Soviet Union.

Patricia Limerick, professor of history at the University of Colorado, is a leading exponent of the "new Western history." She is president-elect of the American Studies Association and is the author of Legacy of Conquest, among other works.

Gary Nash, professor of history at UCLA, is a former president of the Organization of American Historians and author of several works on race and class in early American history. He recently chaired the American History Standards Project for the National Association for History in the Schools.