Ray, George, and Mabel: Friendship, Politics, and the Tragedies of American Liberalism

Ray, George, and Mabel:Friendship, Politics, and the Tragedies of American Liberalism Thomas G. Andrews (bio) Historians simultaneously react to and build upon the work of other scholars. At some point in our training—possibly as undergraduates but at least in the first year or two of graduate school—we should begin to treat the study of the resulting dynamics of critique, corroboration, and creative leaps forward as worthy of scrutiny in its own right. Often, the critical examination of historical literature and how it has changed over time, a pursuit which most now refer to as historiography, veers into rarefied theoretical debates or intricate methodological disputes.1 When we go to the trouble of considering our fellow historians as actual human beings as well as abstracted intellects, though, richer and more interesting vantage points on what historians do and why can open up. Historical work, like any other human endeavor, has always been and will always be shaped by personalities and personal relationships. Think back on your own career within the profession, and note how your triumphs and traumas have been shaped by your fellow historians. An unkind intellectual smackdown from a tyrannical advisor. A late-night round of drinks with kindred spirits at a conference hotel. A moment of frailty during a barbed exchange when another scholar's inability to hide their feelings belied the conceit that history could ever be a purely intellectual pursuit. An unbidden act of kindness from a senior scholar who needn't have but nonetheless did. A bond of true friendship forged amid the posturing and performativity that prevail with disconcerting predictability whenever scholars gather. In such moments, we can no longer overlook the irreducible humanity of the people who do the thing we collectively call history. The personal politics of history, as all of us realize sooner or later, story our field. Only rarely, though, do historians subject these peculiar, closely held narratives to systematic research or concerted analysis. Our reluctance to get personal is hardly surprising. Who among us, after all, can discern any margin in conceding just how much an enterprise that we frequently lionize, [End Page 177] particularly to undergraduates, as the "historians' craft," has been indelibly shaped not just by the disciplined endeavor of applying our intellects to the past's sundry remnants, but also by pettier factors including jealousy and envy, intimacy and alliance? Although each of us can testify about the ways that those and an array of other dynamics have affected our own careers, we nonetheless typically exhibit a concerted inclination to tuck away our own personal stories about how the historical sausage actually gets made into categories—lore, insider knowledge, trade secrets, gossip, dirt—that we almost always treat as unworthy of scrutiny. What I want to suggest in this essay, though, is that historians might learn a great deal about history and historiography if we were to subject at least some of the historians-as-humans stories that many of us heft around in our back pockets to fuller examination. Thinking and writing about such stories, I'll contend, can advance the important work of personalizing historiography, a branch of historical inquiry that too often strikes me as oddly bereft of humanity. By treating our fellow historians as complex people to whom we would do well to extend our vaunted (though perhaps underdeveloped) capacity for empathy, such an approach can remind us of the beautiful, baffling contingencies that constantly inflect the work we do—as historians, to be sure, but also as human beings. ________ The back-pocket story that will serve as the text for this exegesis is one that I have been carrying around for nearly two decades. On a lovely Southern California day in the mid-aughts, I first came across this wrenching tale of the relationship between two men who happened to be historians and one woman who was not. I was paging through correspondence between Ray Allen Billington, the prize-winning historian of the U.S. West who had done more than anyone else to rehabilitate and champion Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis" between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, and George S. McGovern, the...