The Passion of Sean Wilentz

 

One of the more interesting minor stories of this political season for me has been how the Obama campaign has played out in the historical profession.  Being a center-right historian (though this alignment makes me a reactionary in the field), I have watched with some amusement and more than a little horror the way that Sean Wilentz has morphed from a outstanding man in the field to a near outcast over the course of the last 12 months. 

 

By all objective measures, Wilentz should be a scholar at the pinnacle of his career.  He has published one of the seminal works on political culture in the 19^th Century, Chants Democratic.  He single-handedly revitalized the moribund Jacksonian Democracy thesis of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Rise of American Democracy.  He recently published a groundbreaking work, The Age of Reagan, that interprets the era of Republican dominance from 1968-2008 through the prism of comparison to the Age of Jackson and Roosevelt (which seems somewhat obvious to a lay person, but is a major admission by a historian).  In addition, Wilentz is a brilliant, kind, and engaging man.  The panel on which he appeared at this year’s American Historical Association annual meeting was so packed that the false wall had to opened to accommodate the crowd. 

 

Wilentz, however, made two fatal mistakes.  First, he decided that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President.  Second, he publicly supported Hillary Clinton.  Soon, historian friends of mine who knew and cared nothing about Wilentz’s and my field started coming up to me to ask about what was going on with him.  Knowing that I was critical of his work (I disagree strongly with the Jacksonian Democracy thesis, though I respect Wilentz deeply as a historian), they figured I would be up for some bashing.  I was shocked at how angry they were at him.  He was a traitor, a closet Republican, drunk with celebrity, and was not a very good historian anyway.  The first time, I chalked it up to a fluke.  When European medievalists started coming to me to complain about Wilentz, though, it had gotten creepy.  I found myself in the strange position of sticking up for a very liberal Democrat, whose narrative interpretation I hope to some day debunk, against other very liberal Democrats.  By June, I was hearing Wilentz being mentioned in the same breath as Eugene Genovese, the heretical ex-Marxist historian who fell in love, abandoned revolutionary Leninism, converted to Catholicism, and endorsed Ronald Reagan.  Genovese went from being President of the AHA to an outcast in the field.  Hopefully, Wilentz’s apostacy will not earn him the same fate. 

 

Luckily for Wilentz, he is sticking to his guns.  Hopefully, he knows that there are a few of us out here sticking up for him.