1 of 6
In The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese embark upon a task of rehabilitative intellectual history remarkably similar to that undertaken by the Harvard historian Perry Miller in the 1930s. Both have chosen a decidedly unfashionable subject for serious study. In the 1920s and '30s, the Puritans were the bete noires of serious American culture. When he began work on the two-volume opus that would become The New England Mind, Miller recalled in the foreword to the 1954 edition,
In The Mind of |
Oddly enough, I found myself driven to study the structure of the original Puritanism of New England in a time when the perverse tendencies of the American sensibility were most excited against my subject. All around me, in the 1920s, I was being shown by pundits and philosophers whom I respected, that "Puritanism" was the source of everything that had proved wrong, frustrating, inhibiting, crippling in American culture.
In his magisterial reassessment Miller came to the opposite conclusion. Far from being incidental or marginal to "serious" American intellectual history, the Puritans represented "one of the major expressions of the Western intellect" in American culture. Whatever feelings of personal revulsion or disagreement Miller harbored for his subjects (and as a self-confessed atheist they were certainly present), he recognized that an enormously significant component of America's cultural and intellectual legacy had been missed by his smugly superior intellectual peers.
In 21st-century America, antebellum Southern slaveholders are the new Puritans, who stand for everything that is repulsive in American history. Racist, violent, misogynist, willing to destroy the nation to preserve their "peculiar institution," slaveholders in post-civil rights movement America are about as politically incorrect a subject for sympathetic study as any scholar could choose to explore. "To modern sensibilities," the Genoveses recognize, "it is a preposterous idea that a slave system could engender admirable virtues. … In our own time it seems perverse, not to say impossible, to try to separate the horror of slavery from the positive features of an ordered and independent social system."
Yet, like Miller, the Genoveses have chosen to invest years of significant research into reconstructing the slaveholders' intellectual world and its place in the larger currents of Western thought. They do not come to their subject as fellow-believers caught up in some neo-Confederate madness, and in fact have written often and compassionately on the inhumanity of slavery. But still they persist in their intellectual project. In so doing, they disentangle the "horror" of slavery from the genuine virtues of a corporate social ethic that has virtually disappeared in modern industrial America. As well, they issue a powerful critique of northern conceits by showing how the defeat of the Confederacy meant not less racism, but more. Northern victory promoted a "new racism" that empowered the American white race "to rule the world, civilize the heathens of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and rightfully put them to work for the master race."
The parallels between Miller's intellectual history and the Genoveses' go beyond engaging hostile intellectual cultures to encompass remarkably similarities in style, method, and argument. First, style. Both Miller and the Genoveses adopt a style of discourse and argumentation that might best be labeled bombastic. For both, ideas are not trivial matters for casual talk at cocktail parties but utterly serious pursuits worthy of being treated in life-and-death terms. Occasionally humor appears, but usually with the object of satire or reductio ad absurdum arguments. Neither are they shy to put forward their interpretation or belittle their opponents, both historical and contemporary. It is a style of discourse whose roots are ultimately medieval, grounded in what the Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong termed "agonistic structures," in which words are weapons. In these embattled terms, the really critical question becomes, do they fight fair? And to this reviewer, the answer—in both cases—is yes.
share this page
RSS Feed
