Michael Jackson: The King of Pop Made His Mark

How Jackson healed America Performer used his celebrity to blur the lines between black and white

By Gil Troy, History News Network, 6-25-09 – Montreal Gazette, 6-27-09

Michael Jackson’s death at age 50 parallels Elvis Presley’s death in 1977, at age 43. By the time both performers died, they were walking punch lines, symbols of the coddled celebrity’s dissipated lifestyle. But each was the premier entertainer of his time, and each shaped history. It is not stretching to credit Michael Jackson as one of the trailblazers for Barack Obama, himself just three years younger than Jackson.

Long after Michael Jackson’s tragic ending is forgotten, his important role bridging the gap between American blacks and whites will be remembered. Jackson used his celebrity to blur the lines between black and white, as well as between gay and straight. Jackson grew up in the public eye as the soprano of the Motown powerhouse, the Jackson Five. The group sold over 100 million records and inspired a Saturday morning cartoon. In the 1970s Jackson thrived as a solo artist too.

For those of us, like Obama, born toward the end of the baby boom in 1961, Michael Jackson was not just a phenomenon but our phenomenon. In the 1970s, amid Watergate corruption and Arab oil-induced gas lines, humiliation in Vietnam and aggression by the Soviets, here was someone our age, living the American dream. That our generation’s most famous person – until Obama – was a poor black kid from Gary, Indiana, reaffirmed America’s promise during a

decade of disillusion. That gift of hope to millions early in Michael

Jackson’s career trumps his own pathetic ambivalence about his racial

identity and his tragic ending, coming cinematically as the age of Obama began.

Jackson was a great dancer and a superb businessman. He choreographed the release of his 1982 album “Thriller” to undermine what the Washington Post called “the cultural apartheid of MTV and pop radio.” Rock and roll had become resegregated since the days of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. MTV was overwhelmingly white. On radio, “Rock and roll” was usually white; “R and B,” rhythm and blues, usually black. For three weeks running in October 1982, and for the first time since the pre-rock and roll era, no black singers made the top 20 charts.

Defying pigeonholing, Jackson’s enticing rhythms had great “crossover” appeal. Still, to ford the gap when marketing “Thriller,” Jackson first released “This Girl is Mine,” a playful duet with the Beatle great Paul McCartney. This pairing created “a Trojan horse to force white radio’s hand,” Steve Greenberg, the president of S-Curve Records, later explained. Jackson paved the way for other “crossover” hits including Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” and Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money.”

Building “Michaelmania,” Jackson would market the usual T-shirts, posters and buttons, a million-dollar memoir – at the age of 25 – edited by Jacqueline Onassis, and an 11-inch doll, with Jackson in the “Thriller” outfit easily posed in his more famous dance steps.

“Thriller” was the fastest selling album ever, selling 40 million copies. “Michael Jackson is mass culture, not pop culture – he appeals to everyone,” said a radio program director. “This kind of performer comes once in a generation.” In 1984 alone, Jackson earned $30 million from record sales and another $50 million from tie-ins.

In typical 1980s style, “Thriller’s” marketing included a $1.1 million-dollar, 13-minute video. In one of the era’s most culturally powerful and technically sophisticated images, Jackson morphed into a monster. Here was an American icon, transforming himself from an inspiring symbol of how far a black man could go into the hateful stereotype of the black man as monster, as sexual predator.

Nevertheless, this inversion somehow helped seep some of the poisons from American society. This was especially true because – although it is hard to remember it now – Michael Jackson was incredibly likable then. In fact, Jackson was a central figure in one of the 1980s’ biggest do-good projects, helping to write “We Are the World.”

In December 1984 Bob Geldof of “The Boomtown Rats,” had organized some British stars to fight famine in Ethiopia by singing “Do They Know Its Christmas?” They sold 3 million copies and raised $11 million. In the United States, the singer Harry Belafonte assembled some black musicians to raise money for Africa. A producer, Ken Kragen, broadened the project, calling it “Live Aid.”

On January 28, 1985, the night of the American Music Awards, Quincy Jones produced a song Jackson wrote with Lionel Ritchie. “We are the world, we are the children, We are the ones who make a brighter day so let’s start giving” the chorus belted out, which also included Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, and 5 more Jacksons.

“We are the World” sold millions and won top Grammy awards. The popular video challenged viewers to identify the famous in a rhythmically bobbing sea of famous faces, and charmed viewers with the seemingly spontaneous, “private” glances, handclasps, and hugs these pop music demigods exchanged with the cameras rolling.

That July, 1985, “Live Aid” built on this megawatt munificence, with pop greats performing in London and in Philadelphia for sixteen hours, attracting 1.9 billion viewers from 152 countries. “I’m glad to be helping the hungry and having a good time” 22-year-old Kim Kates of Philadelphia told a reporter. The initiative inspired many imitators, including Willie Nelson’s “Farm Aid” and “Hands Across America,” a Coca Cola-sponsored venture raising money for America’s homeless by enlisting 5 million people, including Bill Cosby, Kenny Rogers and other celebrities, to create a human chain coast-to-coast.

Alas, by 1985 Jackson was already on his way to becoming an object of pity and disgust. As he approached his 30th birthday, he still seemed frozen in childhood. His friendships with older women, especially Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross, along with his smooth skin and high-pitched voice, generated this sense of sexual ambiguity. “I’m not like other guys,” Jackson told his girlfriend in Thriller. “’I mean I’m different.” Beyond the androgyny, Michael Jackson seemed to be getting “whiter” — his skin was getting lighter, his nose getting smaller. By 1987, many in the record business wondered, “What’s that guy done to his face!”

Even more impressive was what Jackson had done to the record business – which was booming – and to race relations – which were improving. Jackson, like all entertainers, rode a wave, himself benefiting from various historical phenomena including the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution. Still, the King of Pop made his mark.

Adapted and updated from Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Dueling Narratives: Obama’s Deconstructionist Diplomacy versus Netanyahu’s History as Tragedy

By Gil Troy, HNN, 6-16-09

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Sunday imitated yet countered U.S. President Barack Obama’s earlier speech in Cairo. Both leaders are best-selling authors, proud of their mastery of the written and spoken word. Both chose symbolically-significant university settings. Obama was co-hosted by Cairo University and Al-Azhar University, founded in 975, honoring Islam’s rich religious and political history. Netanyahu spoke at Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center of Strategic Studies. The setting invoked the two great peacemakers Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at a modern Israeli religious Zionist university founded in 1955 whose emblem features the Torah as the eyepiece of a microscope. But in addition to their policy divergences, the dueling speeches reflect a fundamental clash of worldviews, with Netanyahu playing the historian to Obama the deconstructionist.

Barack Obama wants to synthesize, reconcile, heal. The son of a white Kansan mother and a black Kenyan father, he attended Harvard Law School during the Critical Legal Studies revolution, whose slogan “law is politics,” taught that law, like all human constructs, is mutable, and can be tailored to changing agendas. In his historic 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Obama represented the red-white-and-blue American fording the overplayed red-blue and historic black-white divides. In reading Obama’s second book – written with his eye on the White House – Joe Klein of Time magazine counted “no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness.” “I had to reconcile a lot of different threads growing up–race, class,” Obama told Klein. “For example, I was going to a fancy prep school, and my mother was on food stamps while she was getting her Ph.D.” Klein continued: “Obama believes his inability to fit neatly into any group or category explains his relentless efforts to understand and reconcile opposing views. But the tendency is so pronounced that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic.”

Obama was in full “on-the-one-on-the-other-hand” mode in Cairo. Facts and ethics were putty in his hands as he constructed an “I’m ok, you’re ok, because we all are sinners” kind of world. Rejecting the “cycle of suspicion and discord” he sought a relationship between the United States and Muslims “based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.” The speech took a series of flash points and extinguished them by balancing them out: Muslim “extremists” murdered Americans but America overstepped in response. America undermined Iran in the 1950s, and Iran responded harshly since the 1970s. Back and forth, back and forth, went Obama’s seesaw of history.

Similarly, Jews suffered persecution in Europe, especially during the Holocaust, but “[o]n the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people … have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” When discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama articulated his approach to history and diplomacy: “It is easy to point fingers,” he preached.… But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states….”

Obama’s Cairo speech paralleled his crucial March 18, 2008 speech, in Philadelphia, on race in America. At the time, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s unpatriotic ravings threatened Obama’s campaign. As the son of a black father and a white mother, acknowledging pain on both sides, Obama reconciled – or triangulated, as we used to say in Bill Clinton’s day. Obama said he could “no more disown” Wright, his spiritual mentor, “than I can my white grandmother,” who occasionally “uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” Fans swooned, praising Obama’s evenhandedness; critics muttered that to get elected Obama would even run over his own grandmother.

Obama’s approach worked in Philadelphia – and charmed many Muslims in Cairo. This morally-blind accounting makes for bad history but it might make for effective diplomacy. It reduces tensions, and breaks through previous impenetrable barriers. But whether it can solve intractable problems, or overcome the evils that do exist, remains to be seen.

If Obama demonstrates the love-thy-neighbor touch of Jesus, Bibi Netanyahu is often consumed by the wrath of Jeremiah. Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech was less fiery than usual. But his argument was suffused with a tragic sense of history. Trained at MIT’s empiricist schools of architecture and business in the 1970s, raised by an historian father steeped in the tragedy of the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492, still mourning his brother killed by terrorists in 1976, Netanyahu feels the pain of yesterday warning us against the perils of today.

Rejecting Obama’s distorted view that Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, Netanyahu reversed it saying, “if the state of Israel would have been established earlier, the Holocaust would not have occurred.” To Obama, because both Jews and Palestinian have been powerless, both merit saving. To Netanyahu, Jews’ “tragic history of powerlessness explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense.”

Netanyahu bristled at Obama’s deconstructionist refusal to point fingers. The “simple truth is that the root of the conflict was, and remains, the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own, in their historic homeland,” Netanyahu insisted. After chronicling Israel’s attempts at peace and Palestinian rejectionism, Netanyhau used history to rebut Obama’s recipe of land for peace. Unfortunately, “every withdrawal was met with massive waves of terror, by suicide bombers and thousands of missiles…. The claim that territorial withdrawals will bring peace with the Palestinians… has up till now not stood the test of reality.”

Two “truths” are colliding. Without letting go, as Obama advocates, there will never be peace; without remembering, as Netanyahu insists, unrealistic and dangerous pipedreams will proliferate. The Harvard philosopher George Santayana’s quip that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it has become cliché. Obama risks making that mistake. Despite his tremendous efforts, President Bill Clinton could not get Yasir Arafat to make the necessary compromises, on the Palestinian side. Instead, Clinton presided over the start of the terror wave that killed a thousand Israelis, and now haunts most Israelis as they yearn for peace. Do Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, or Clinton’s former aide and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel ever remind the incumbent president about that debacle? But Santayana’s aphorism needs a qualifier: those who are imprisoned by the past are imprisoned. That is Netanyahu’s risk. Great statesmen seize the moment in the present to evolve from the past toward a better future. Whether Netanyahu or Obama can achieve such greatness remains to be seen.

In Memory of David Herbert Donald (1920-2009)

By Gil Troy, HNN, 5-18-09

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents. His other books include: Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. His website is giltroy.com.

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HNN Doyen: David Herbert Donald

One of the first real history books I ever bought was Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald. I was nine and, did not open the book for years. Still, Professor Donald was probably the first historian I ever heard of, so studying with him in graduate school was like learning hitting from another boyhood hero, Mickey Mantle. Those of us lucky to have learned from him knew we were blessed. For many of us, he remained a powerful presence in our lives, decades after he finished supervising us. Moreover, despite having been born in1920, he was still publishing, and there seemed to be many more books in him, germinating in his still sharp mind. All of this explains why it was a shock to hear that Donald died suddenly this past Sunday.

David Herbert Donald faced a formidable obstacle as a dissertation adviser. We his students knew we could never equal him. He was so dedicated, intelligent, and accomplished in his lecturing and his writing. To watch David Donald as he conjured up the Jacksonian era, what he called “the Age of Ambiguity,” to hear him map out the road to disunion, to see him in action dominating the lecture hall or the seminar room, was intellectually inspirational – yet professionally intimidating.

To his credit, Professor Donald used his high standards to empower us as future historians rather than demoralize us as potential failures who better seek different lines of work. Donald stretched us, widening our horizons so the seemingly unattainable became possible. He never talked about our dissertations, but about our “books.” Appalled by academic prose, he urged us to write for intelligent people not three colleagues in elite universities. When we, his graduate students, threw a lunch celebrating his second Pulitzer Prize, he deflected our praise with a toast – and elegant challenge – that he looked forward to hosting a lunch in the future when one of us won such a prize. Hearing these words from this gentleman fiercely committed to excellence, this pipedream somehow seemed reachable, despite our healthy awareness of our inadequacies.

Professor Donald was a model academic, using his scholarship to teach us how to be better historians. One day, Professor Donald recalled how when writing his Sumner biography he wondered what made a radical radical during Reconstruction. Were radicals younger, wealthier, nobler, or crankier than their moderate peers? To show us how he answered the question years before personal computers were invented, Professor Donald whipped out a knitting needle, a hole puncher, and the note cards he made for each congressional Republican, recording particular characteristics or actions in different areas of the card. He then punched holes in one particular spot, say, for Midwesterners, another for Northerners. Using his knitting needle, he poked through his stack, seeing which group of congressmen emerged depending on which hole he poked. His conclusion that congressional moderation emerged from electoral vulnerability resulted in his influential book, The Politics of Reconstruction. In this scholarly and educational tour de force, Professor Donald showed us how to think through a problem, improvise around the methodological thicket, inject the excitement of scholarly discovery into the classroom, and turn the problem-solving he was doing in writing one book into a second book.

What made Donald legendary was his tremendous ability as a master storyteller. His description of how the Southern Congressman Preston Brooks caned Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate still gives me chills when I read it — or feebly try to recreate it in my own lectures. Nevertheless, Professor Donald taught that truth comes before showmanship. Without theorizing or bloviating, and simply by example, he taught that a meticulous commitment to accuracy is the historian’s primary obligation. Without it, there is no history. When I was writing my thesis, Donald once chided me for a footnote that inaccurately referred to two consecutive pages, when, because I had edited down the text before submitting it to him, the actual quotation I used came from only the first page. Moreover, as an adviser, the time and skill he invested in going over our drafts was breathtaking. In addition to checking our footnotes, he caught our errors, corrected our style, improved our structure, sharpened our arguments.

David Donald was popularly known as a “Lincoln scholar” and he will probably be most remembered for his majestic 1995 best-seller Lincoln. When I studied with him in the 1980s, his reputation rested on his vivid Pulitzer-Prize-winning two-volume biography of the Northern abolitionist and radical Senator Charles Sumner, as well as the 1969 revision of the classic 1937 textbook he inherited from his mentor James G. Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps the most personal of his books, was Look Homeward: a Life of Thomas Wolfe, published in 1987, for which he won his second Pulitzer in 1988. Wolfe’s story of a Southern boy achieving tremendous success among the Northern elite, paralleled Donald’s equally unlikely climb from being born in Goodman, Mississippi, graduating from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and spending his career at Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard universities.

Nevertheless, I think my favorite of Donald’s thirty or so books is the second edition of Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, published in 1961. Each essay is a gem, beautifully structured, elegantly argued, resonant and convincing. “A. Lincoln, Politician,” anticipates the Lincoln book he wrote three decades later, seeing Lincoln as a working politician not a martyr or a saint. “An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil War and the Social Process,” gives his interpretation of the causes of the Civil War – and some of the inherent weaknesses in freewheeling, democratic America. A few years ago, trying to show a prominent journalist how historians work, I gave her Lincoln Reconsidered, saying the essays reflected historical storytelling at its best, while also offering brilliant, stimulating analyses.

A few years ago, honoring Donald as one of HNN’s first “Doyens,” I wrote that while teaching, researching and writing, I often recall what I learned from Professor Donald, or wonder how he would have approached particular questions. David Herbert Donald turned me into a thief. I regularly find myself stealing his lines, echoing his analysis, appearing smart based on his smarts. This is most apparent to me when I hear my students “stealing” from me what I “stole” from him. This echo chamber, with each successive generation adding its own accent or twist, is education at its best.

It is hard to believe that David Donald is gone. But he will live on in his lively works of history – and in the seeds he planted within me and so many others of his grateful students over generations.

Gil Troy: Obama’s 100 Days: Partisan, Moderate or Both?

By Gil Troy, HNN, 4-21-09

Countering America’s tradition of moderate, bipartisan presidential leadership is an equally vibrant tradition of moderate masqueraders, partisans obscuring their sharp political elbows with bipartisan rhetoric. In 1968, Richard Nixon now the “New Nixon,” ran to heal his fragmented nation. Six years later, Nixon resigned, his presidency derailed by his partisan overreaction to student protests which triggered the Watergate scandal. In 2000, George W. Bush promised to unite America, only to govern as a divisive president. One hundred days into his presidency, Barack Obama wavers. At his best, he has wooed Republicans, seeking a new, welcoming center for a nation reeling from economic cataclysm, continuing foreign threats and Bush’s tumultuous tenure. At his worst, President Obama has indulged Congressional Democrats and party sensibilities rather than offering the moderate statesmanship America needs.

The First Hundred Days is an artificial benchmark rooted in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Obama’s presidency is unfolding. John Kennedy proved more successful than his first hundred days suggested, marred as it was by the failed Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion; Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush ended their respective presidencies less successfully than each began. Still, a presidential character starts forming. The First Hundred Days launches many story lines that ultimately determine a president’s destiny.

President Obama’s debut has been less bold than he promised and, frankly, confusing. Regarding foreign policy, his rhetoric has veered left but his actions have stayed centrist. Domestically, his rhetoric has been more moderate than his policies.

Obama’s foreign affairs messaging has positioned him as the “unBush.” From apologizing for American “arrogance” in Europe to smiling with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to denouncing torture, Obama has enraged conservatives. But Obama has not acted like the pushover he sometimes appears to be. He is keeping troops in Iraq. He has intensified the military push in Afghanistan. And he gave the shoot to kill order when Somali pirates held an American hostage.

At its best, Obama’s foreign policy has used George W. Bush as a straw man, to appear to be hitting the oft-mentioned “reset button,” without acting irresponsibly. Obama’s approach to the Durban anti-racism review conference exemplified his strategy. In sending diplomats to preliminary meetings, Obama showed he would engage the world, unlike his predecessor. By nevertheless boycotting because too many delegates from Muslim countries pushed their anti-Israel, anti-Western, and anti-free speech lines, Obama acted properly, but with greater credibility.

Ultimately, Obama must define his foreign policy more clearly. He will have to remind Muslims how many Americans died trying to protect Muslims in Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than simply apologizing for Bush’s “war on terror.” And the Obama administration will have to find its moral center, rather than disappointing dissidents worldwide when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says human rights issues will not divide the United States and China. Still, this has been a clever, cautious start for a president with a thin foreign policy resume.

Obama’s greatest challenge has been righting America’s economic ship of state. Watching the confusion among our supposed experts, seeing how many very smart people made such a mess, the President probably is as baffled as the rest of us. Just as it is easy during boom times to forget that a bust may soon come, it is easy to forget downturns are cyclical and fleeting too. Of course, the President lacks the luxury of waiting it out. Obama argues that too little governmental response in the 1930s made matters worse – forgetting that too much governmental intervention in the 1970s was equally harmful.

Rhetorically, Obama has been thoughtful and reasonable. His April 14 speech at Georgetown was a model of moderate leadership. Acknowledging critics left and right, he sounded balanced, systematic and visionary. He invoked the Sermon on the Mount – not to perpetuate squishy liberal sentiments about helping others, but to explain the importance of rebuilding on firm foundations. He affirmed his liberalism by delineating new “pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century,” including “new rules for Wall Street” and new investments in education, renewable energy and technology, and health care. But Obama showed he was a liberal who had learned from Ronald Reagan. He added a fifth pillar, “new savings in our federal budget” and insisted that like a good doctor, the government primarily must do no harm.

Unfortunately, on Capitol Hill and in practice Obama has been less artful. While he watched the Super Bowl with some Republicans, most Republicans resented how Democrats burdened the economic stimulus package with so many items that long lingered on Congressional wish lists. More broadly, Obama is trying to spend his way out of the recession with a classically Keynesian, big government approach. At Georgetown, Obama invoked Bush’s policies to justify his actions as centrist moves – even though conservatives criticized Bush’s big-spending deviation from Reaganite orthodoxy.

Given the economic bewilderment and despair, Obama is angling for a win-win. If the economy is not as broken as the conventional wisdom now suggests, all Obama needs is a recovery before 2012, which would be a very long recession. If the economy revives, he will replicate Ronald Reagan’s position in 1984, declaring a new “morning in America” that validates Obamanomics as he coasts to re-election.

Of course, much history could intrude between now and then, ruining this scenario. But considering the headaches he inherited, Obama is governing in the politically shrewdest way for him – shifting left while speaking reasonably domestically, then sounding more radical than he actually acts in foreign affairs. That strategy mirrors Ronald Reagan’s strategy in shrinking taxes but ultimately negotiating with the Soviet Union. Obama admires Reagan’s ability to transform the country. Clearly, Obama hopes he can do the same – in the opposite direction.

Gil Troy: The 2008 Election as History (OAH)

The History News Network recorded this video of Gil Troy’s talk at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on March 26, 2009 in Seattle, WA. You can read a print version here.

Gil Troy: The 2008 Election as History (OAH) Part 1

Gil Troy: The 2008 Election as History (OAH) Part 2

Gil Troy: The 2008 Election as History (OAH) Part 3

Gil Troy “G20: America’s golden couple”

Gil Troy “G20: America’s golden couple Sarah Wildman: If Michelle Obama is the new Jackie Kennedy, will she upstage her husband on their European trip?”:

To be fair to the Obamas, there’s another reason the couple should shun the Kennedy comparison – one that historian Gil Troy shared in an email. When Kennedy famously declared himself simply the “man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” the line was barbed, not humble.

“True, Michelle Obama is generating the kind of excitement Jackie Kennedy generated, but Mrs Kennedy upstaged President Kennedy,” says Troy.

“JFK was making the best of a bad situation, but he envied his wife’s popularity, bristling a bit at Charles de Gaulle’s flirtation with Jackie. Even more ominous if the comparison holds, while that first European trip was triumphant for Jackie, it was a disaster for Kennedy.

“At the meeting which counted – a superpower summit with Nikita Khruschev of Russia in Vienna – Kennedy failed. ‘He savaged me,’ Kennedy later confessed to James Reston of the New York Times, bruised by Khruschev’s blustering performance when they met. For the first time in his life, it seemed, (or certainly in a long time), Kennedy met someone impervious to his charm. Obama may too.”

Source: UTV, 4-2-09

Gil Troy: Blogging from the Center as an Historian During a Contested Campaign

Blogging from the Center as an Historian During a Contested Campaign: Politically Anomalous and Academically Tenuous?

By Gil Troy

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. He is the author, most recently, of Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents. His other books include: Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN.

Mr. Troy delivered the following remarks at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians on March 26, 2009 at a panel considering “The 2008 Election as History.” A video of this talk will be posted in the coming weeks on HNN.

I am faced with an odd dual mandate today. I have been asked to reflect on my experiences as a blogger during the 2008 campaign, and to analyze that elusive concept of centrism during a hotly contested presidential campaign. I am comfortable talking about centrism to this audience, having recently written a book about it. But speaking autobiographically, using the first person rather than the third person on an OAH panel, feels illicit, like reading literature at a chemists’ convention or, even worse, preaching the Bible to a convention of atheists.

I am also uncomfortable talking about blogging because in truth, I am not a very good blogger. I blog regularly for HNN the History News Network – and I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of the superhuman force behind HNN, Rick Shenkman, who has done so much to forge a sense of community among historians – in a profession, I regret to say, where that sense is often lacking. After years of posting my occasional op-eds and reviews, Rick asked me to blog regularly for the campaign, starting in January 2008. I did it at least weekly, usually twice a week, and daily for two weeks in an exhausting marathon building up to Election Day.

But, as I said, I am not a very good blogger. I am not a good blogger because I write more in the style of an oped than a blog – my posts averaged 600 to 800 words rather than the ideal 300 to 500 words; and my style is more formal and less personal more historical and less hysterical, more complex and less black-and-white, than most bloggers.

I am also not a good blogger because I don’t try to be a “good citizen of the blogosphere,” as one of my blogging friends calls it. I do little cross-posting, blog-rolling, or any other insider blogging rituals. Rather than aggressively marketing my blog, I invest in the writing – coming more from the “If you build it they will come” school – although, in truth, I wrote it, and I’m not sure how many readers actually came.

Finally, and perhaps most relevant for today’s discussion, I am not a good blogger because I chose not to be a verbal flame-thrower, I preferred to write historically and from the center. I did not consider it my mission in my writing as an historian for the History News Network to elect either Barack Obama or John McCain president. To the extent I wanted to push an angle, I wanted to encourage both candidates to move to the center, with the hope that whoever won would govern from the center. But my priority was to bring some historical perspective to the discussion, to try placing these fast-moving events in historical context. Moreover, I wanted to inject some complexity into the discussion, to take issues which reporters and politicians usually reduce to simplistic either-ors and make them multi-dimensional ands-and-buts. I think that is part of our mission as academics – to acknowledge the messiness of this world, to resist the urge toward polarization, partisanship, and simplification, without, of course, being obtuse. And if that makes me – and us – counter-cultural, it’s a status – and a mission – I proudly embrace.

As a blogger, I applied the rules I had imposed on myself over years of writing op-eds and giving radio and television interviews. I should note that my impressions of insta-history, and of academic pundits, were formed in the late 1980s, when I was just finishing my Ph.D. – and Communism was collapsing. Suddenly, the same “Sovietologists” and “Kremlinologists” (which I believe was a worse media moniker than “Presidential Historian”) who had spent years explaining to us on TV and in the press that the Soviet Union would never fall, were now, without acknowledging their errors, just as authoritatively explaining why it was so obvious that the Soviet Union fell. (our modern equivalent of course, is all the Jim Cramers and Larry Summers of the world who went just as quickly from singing the song of never-ending prosperity to describing this downturn prematurely as “the worst crisis since the Great Depression”). With these cautionary tales in mind, I have followed (or tried to follow) these basic rules:

For starters, no predicting. I cannot tell you how many times producers have called me saying they want “historical perspective” on something, then, with the cameras rolling, the anchors asked “so what’s going to happen next?” I have my set response: “It’s hard enough to predict the past I cannot begin to predict the future.” But it is quite dismaying how much of the modern news business has become about anticipating what’s next rather than providing the proverbial “first draft of history,” rendering our historical judgment irrelevant.

Second, no roving – and that has nothing to do with George W. Bush’s “brain|” Karl Rove. I am an American historian. My job when commenting in the public sphere as an historian is to stick to my area of expertise and not to fall into another common media trap of appearing to be an expert on whatever is hot at the moment.

Third, no rushing to judgment. We are historians. Our job is to be the brakes on the conventional wisdom even when it speeds ahead to make premature pronouncements. Our professional commitment to patience puts us in conflict with the dizzying immediacy of the blogging world – and the media.

I was on CTV – Canadian Television – when the Supreme Court released its decision in Bush v. Gore 2000. The CNN feed showed a reporter leafing through the pages of the decision, seeking the relevant passages. After this incomprehensible spectacle, the anchor in Toronto asked me in Montreal, “Well, Professor Troy, what’s your analysis of this decision?” What could I say? I said – with a straight face I’m proud to add – “sometimes, in the life of a democracy you have to keep silent and listen to the sounds of democracy in action – let’s take a minute and appreciate the silence – we don’t hear rumblings of tanks in the streets, staccato shots being fired in the air, rather we hear reporters reading the words of the Supreme Court trying to decipher and analyze them.”
More recently, I was in the distinct minority of historians who refused – one-third, half-way, two-thirds, even three-quarters of the way through George W. Bush’s term, to answer the question whether W was the worst American president ever. That’s a parlor game for journalists – we’re supposed to be the ones who slow things down, wait for administrations to end, assess the data — and then start quibbling, labeling and oversimplifying….

Fourth, keep it historical. In almost every blog posting I write, as in every media appearance I do, I try to inject some historical perspective, some context, some dimensionality to the discussion. I try to avoid the Beschlossization of historical commentary – reeling off a series of historical parallels using history as window dressing.

Instead I try (I confess I don’t always succeed) to link events, ideas, personalities to more enduring historical phenomena, conversations, figures. It’s the difference between analyzing the McCain-Obama debates by saying the age difference reminds you of the Mondale-Reagan debates in 1984, versus comparing what McCain, Reagan, Obama and Mondale were saying about government’s role in American life, about the causes of their respective economic challenges, about their governing philosophies, then placing these resonances in a broader historical conversation.

Now, here’s where the instant feedback of the blogosphere – and the smart, demanding-in-the-best-sort-of-way readers of HNN keep you honest. Toward the end of my two-week pre-election day blogathon, I succumbed to a case of blogger’s envy. I saw how short, snappy, contentious entries – and titles – generated all the traffic. I was also exhausted, from juggling teaching, grading, family, and other writing commitments. So after Barack Obama’s closing infomercial, I wrote more of a quick reaction piece than an historical analysis, titled: “Barack’s Infomerical: Too Cheesy for a Potential President?” One reader objected to my punting, and immediately threw down a penalty flag: “The piece is OK, unlike its title, but where is the history? the sociological analysis? This is Troy’s reaction. I have mine. I didn’t write mine up, because it wasn’t a whole lot better than yours! Neither is Troy’s. To make the grade and get on HNN, shouldn’t a piece have some WORK in it? So we can LEARN from it?”

Fifth, and finally, keep ‘em guessing – as to where I stand politically. I have always said that the best compliment I can get, at the end of a contemporary US history class – or when invited back by a TV producer — after having tackled major, controversial issues, is when I am asked: “Professor Troy, I’m confused, are you a liberal or a conservative?” I believe my job in the classroom – and as a blogging historian – a historiblogger? — is to avoid plunging into partisanship, and to stimulate debate rather than dictate thought or preach to the converted. I also think that partisan positions have become too rigid and frequently simplistic in this country, whereas our job as academics is to embrace the complexity of reality even at the cost of ideological consistency. I take as my standard, the words of New York’s former Mayor Ed Koch, who said, “if you agree with me on nine out of twelve issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on twelve out of twelve issues, see a psychiatrist.”

In this spirit, I try to avoid what we could call the Zinn not Zen of History (Howard Zinn), marshalling the forces of history to prop up my own contemporary partisan position. Historians should use the public platforms we are privileged to be offered to give historical perspective rather than partisan screeds with some historical camouflage.

Our profession would benefit from a fuller discussion about the perils of insta-history, our dos and don’ts to follow when we are invited to appear in the media or blog as historians. As a lowly historian in the trenches, I am not aware of any OAH or AHA guidelines. (In preparation for this talk, I did search around. I found some relevant statements one could apply from the AHA Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, and a fascinating set of guidelines on “The Rights and Responsibilities of Historians in Regard to Historical Films and Video” from 1992, but nothing else – and no one who knew of anything else).
More broadly, I think we would benefit from a more developed conversation about what we would call our fiduciary role if we were in the financial sector. (Ok, maybe this is not the time to hold up bankers as ethical role models…)

So many historians have spent so much time over the less few decades blurring the line between the personal, the political, and the professional. Nevertheless, it is worth asking what professional and yes specifically political constraints, if any, we impose on ourselves when we operate in our professional capacity as historians? (And let me emphasize that whatever restraints we consider should be self-imposed not dictated by Big Brother or Big Sister). I am well aware that I am in the minority here. Many of my colleagues disagree with my attempts to hover above the fray and champion the center.

In fact, my two most controversial posts during the campaign – one at the beginning, one at the end, illustrate this tension. Early on, I objected when the group “Historians for Obama” formed. I was not arguing against Obama or against individual historians supporting Obama as citizens. I did object to hijacking our collective credibility and giving any candidate our imprimatur as historians.

If we remember what we learned in graduate school about the 1896 campaign, and remember Robert Wiebe’s Search for Order,we will note that Mark Hanna’s masterstroke in organizing what we would now call interest groups and reference groups in favor of William McKinley, was a clever attempt to build on the emerging identity and shared expertise of professionals in service of a presidential candidate. I suggested that we be more cautious when we act as historians collectively, not frittering away our scholarly authority on divisive partisan issues and fleeting candidacies. Many respondents strongly disagreed, arguing that they were exercising their democratic rights and following the rules of the game that so many others followed.

Toward the end of the campaign, my most controversial post was: “A Partisan Myopia Test: Who is Willing to Denounce both Sarah Palin and Al Franken as Unqualified?” Few respondents objected to the doubts I cast on Governor Palin’s credentials. But, boy, were respondents steamed by my daring to suggest that Al Franken was unqualified to be a senator, that his brand of simplistic, punch-line driven, vulgar, polarizing political rhetoric harmed the American political system and was precisely the kind of approach we as intellectuals, as educators, as academics, should reject. Franken would be thrilled to know just how many Al aficionados there are among history Ph.Ds. I, for one, was disappointed by how difficult it was for Republicans to question Palin’s suitability and for Democrats to question Franken’s.

I say disappointed, but of course, not surprised. These days, in the historical profession and beyond, it is not easy being a moderate. Despite widespread grumbling that President George W. Bush was too headstrong and polarizing, both John McCain and Barack Obama were scorned this summer whenever they played to the center. Reporters mocked McCain’s “Macarena,” sliding right then left, along with Obama’s “policy pirouettes.”

More disturbing, we saw how the gravitational physics of American politics pulled candidates to the right or to the left – there were few institutional, ideological, or media forces pulling them to the center. In mid-June, when John McCain insisted on reading the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo decision before condemning it, conservative bloggers blasted his “tepid” response. In the all-too-familiar media echo chamber that reinforces the conventional wisdom, the New York Times reported the NRO’s verdict on McCain, to reinforce the pre-Palin narrative of the restive Republican conservatives. Now, maybe I’m a little off, but isn’t it a good thing to have a candidate who reads a Supreme Court decision before bashing it (or praising it)?

Similarly, Obama’s musings that by visiting Iraq, he might refine his position angered so many supporters he backpedaled quickly. You will recall that on the eve of his visit to Iraq, the simple suggestion that he needed to consult with U.S. commanders and do a “thorough assessment of the situation,” triggered such a firestorm that he hastily called a second press conference on July 3 in Fargo, ND, saying, “We’re going to try this again. Apparently I wasn’t clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq. Let me be as clear as I can be. I intend to end this war.” Once again, maybe it’s me, but on the eve of a trip to a war zone, isn’t it admirable to have a potential president willing to adjust his positions based on realities he encounters on the ground?

Watching the vacuum in the center, seeing how the moveon.org crowd pulled Obama left and the National Review-Rush Limbaugh types pulled McCain right, I sought metrics to assess moderation – and forces to encourage centrism. I invited student volunteers to develop a “moderometer” to gauge a candidate’s centrism both tactically and ideologically, charting particular positions and moves on a color coded spectrum between red and blue, with the elusive purple the desired spot in the middle.

More broadly, in my book, Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents, I argued that our constant descent into partisanship is destructive. America needs muscular moderates—nimble and adaptable but anchored in core values. We need presidents who think first and bluster later, who adjust positions based on often messy facts. Running toward the center to lead from the center is the right thing to do and the shrewd political move to make, especially with the contest so close and the issues so serious. Neither McCain nor Obama was a Johnny-come-lately to centrism—moderation was central to their political identities. Both appealed to independents disgusted by the perpetual fights pitting Fox News cheerleaders against MoveOn.org critics. Like most Americans, both candidates understood that crises in finance, healthcare, energy, immigration, and national security require thoughtful analysis, not shrill attacks, complicated compromises, not partisan sloganeering.

Barack Obama first wowed Democrats as a lyrical centrist. The son of a white American and black African, celebrating a purple America, promised to heal the red-blue and black-white divides. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama crossed ideological wires, fusing the normally conservative critique of American cultural excess with liberals’ faith in government.

John McCain was even better known for legislative bridge-building. From leading the “Gang of 14,” breaking the logjam over judicial nominations, to spearheading the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, McCain long was one of Washington’s most passionate moderates. That track record, plus his reputation as the Republican maverick, propelled his candidacy.

Historically, muscular moderates, not spineless centrists, inhabited the great American center. This moderation is rooted in principle, tempered by practicalities, anchored in nationalism, modified by civility. In the White House, it included George Washington’s reason, calling on Americans to rally around their “common cause,” Abraham Lincoln’s pragmatism, focusing on union, not abolition, to keep the border states in the Union, Theodore Roosevelt’s “bully, bully” romantic nationalism to inspire the people, Franklin Roosevelt’s visionary, experimental incrementalism to solve the Great Depression, and Harry Truman’s workmanlike bipartisanship in the face of the Cold War. On Capitol Hill, Henry Clay’s tradition of great compromising inspired the roll-up-your-sleeves horse-trading of Sens. Bob Dole and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose bipartisan “Gang of Seven” saved Social Security in 1983.

Presidents preside most effectively over this diverse country by singing a song of centrism rather than indulging in partisan sloganeering. Following the George W. Bush-Karl Rove 2004 strategy of using slim majorities to impose radical changes violates the implicit democratic contract between the leader and the people. Great presidents –and shrewd candidates — aim for the center, targeting the popular bull’s-eye, sometimes after repositioning it.

During the general presidential campaign, with the nominees wooing swing voters, not party warriors, this push to the center is frequently tonal and tactical. As nominees realize that selling simplistic solutions to complicated problems may shackle them when governing, many moderate their policy positions and philosophies, too. Alas, partisans yank their nominee left or right while journalists caricature policy refinements as pandering.

American citizens tired of the toxic red-blue bickering must push for the center. Finding energy alternatives, fighting terror, stabilizing Wall Street, and ensuring quality healthcare are national needs. Always seeing issues through Democratic or Republican prisms distorts reality. Some issues beg for bipartisanship.

Not all adjustments are betrayals. In accepting a different FISA domestic surveillance bill from the one he initially opposed, Obama was nuanced. By contrast, his turnaround from supporting public campaign financing to spurning it was dizzying. Similarly, many Republicans’ recognition that the Wall Street crisis required government intervention reflected maturity, not spinelessness.

The push for moderation is ultimately a push to reinvigorate American nationalism. This approach of minimizing clashes, of seeking the public good, depends on a vigorous, romantic faith in American nationalism. Nationalism is a dirty word among too many academics and too many liberals these days, tarred by the cruelty which aberrant forms of nationalism unleashed in the twentieth century. But nationalism has also fueled many modern miracles, with American’s liberal democratic experiment perhaps the greatest success story. Without appeals to the national conscience, without a strong sense of a national purpose, Americans might not have healed the sectional divide, settled the West won world wars, explored outer space, formed successful businesses or created the Internet. We need a creative leader to tap into that spirit of American nationalism at its best, and renew a sense of collective mission even as we retain our individual freedoms and prerogatives.

Moreover, in the last generation, we as historians have become so skilled at explaining America’s shortcomings, we have too often forgotten that our job is also to explain America’s many successes – without idealizing, but also without always criticizing.

By blogging through this election, by watching up close and occasionally plunging into the fray, I like to think that I sharpened my ability to interpret this election in the future, as they say, for the history books – without compromising my integrity (too much). For starters, I have a kind of writer’s diary; I have a log of my impressions as Hillary Clinton – remember her — sputtered then surged, of John McCain’s shifting identities, of Barack Obama’s remarkable discipline and charisma. When I get to researching this election, I will be able to compare more sharply what I thought was happening with what insiders saw and tried to accomplish. I can see how my appreciation for Obama’s skills grew, and also see how the economic tsunami that so few foresaw, roared through this campaign in remarkable ways.

Moreover, in blogging from the center during this campaign, in watching the remarkable rise of this young, talented, hope-generating politician, I as an historian, felt privileged to see America’s strengths not just weaknesses, to see a vision of American nationalism that was not narrow but broad, and to help –in my small, insignificant way – try shifting the conversation – in our profession and beyond – from focusing on the margins to celebrating the center, from an obsession with extremists to an appreciation for moderates, from too many attempts at polarization and partisanship to Barack Obama’s – and John McCain’s joint attempts – at their respective bests – to build a broad, inclusive, inspiring narrative, for a nation that badly needed it, as an initial step in emerging from the economic, diplomatic, social, cultural, and existential muck of the Bush-Clinton years.

Gil Troy “Is Obama Repeating Bush’s Mistakes?”

The hardest part of being an ambitious president at a moment of crisis and opportunity is contriving not to overshoot.

by Jonathan Rauch, National Journal Magazine, 3-28-09

….Well, Obama did campaign on “change.” And it is natural for a politician to press every advantage and make use of every opportunity. But the presidency is surrounded by what the historian Gil Troy has called invisible trip wires. Step beyond them, and you get zapped. Maybe not right away, but soon enough….

McGill on the Move with Gil Troy: Mar. 24, 2009 – 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

McGill on the Move with Gil Troy

Mar. 24, 2009 – 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

• 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Choate Room, Carnegie Endowment for Int’l Peace, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

McGill on the Move with Gil Troy: “Welcome to the Age of Obama: The Historic Campaign and the Presidency to Come”

Barack Obama’s presidency has triggered tremendous excitement, but the man remains something of an enigma. Will Obama turn to the left or lead from the center? Can he (or anyone) succeed in such daunting circumstances? What is his vision of America, and will Americans accept it? This lecture will look at the 2008 presidential campaign and the start of Obama’s presidency in order to consider and appreciate how his actions and intentions fit into historical context.

A native of Queens, New York, Gil Troy is a Professor of History at McGill and a Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s” and “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady”. He comments frequently about the American presidency on television and radio, and has published articles in the “Wall Street Journal”, “New York Times”, “Washington Post”, “Boston Globe” and “USA Weekend”.

Marc Weinstein, McGill’s Vice-Principal (Development and Alumni Relations), will also be in attendance, and Barnes & Noble will be selling Professor Troy’s latest book, Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents at the event.

Note: You must pay in advance to reserve your place.

Cost: $15 US

Online registration is available on Alumnilife.

Gil Troy: Professors can stop campus hooligans

By Gil Troy, Toronto Star, 3-5-09

AARON HARRIS/TORONTO STAR A protester stands in the Wallberg Building at U of T on March 3, 2009, during lectures for Israeli Apartheid Week.

Day after day we read about aggressive student protesters and dithering administrators at universities across Canada, but particularly at York University.

Radical student hooligans there intimidated and even temporarily incarcerated Jewish students last month as cries of “Die, Jew, get the hell off campus,” were heard.

This week, tensions are bound to escalate at York and other campuses as Palestinians try equating Israel with the now-defunct racist South African apartheid regime. Even the posters advertising the week have sparked tensions. Recoiling at the violence at York and elsewhere, we need to ask: Where are the professors?

During times of political trouble we tend to forget that campuses are primarily educational institutions. They are also the professional homes of professors who need to take a stand when violence and hooliganism invade their academic sanctuary.

With all due respect to campus security and police officers, when the call goes out to them for help, we as professors have failed.

A campus that needs the “thin blue line” of law enforcement is a campus that has violated its fundamental obligation to keep students safe and to host the free exchange of ideas so essential to good learning.

Yet even when disaster strikes and the 911 call goes out, professors can still step in.

Professors underestimate their own moral authority. Our power goes far beyond the ability to give out As or Fs. We are the university’s public face, the basic service providers, the campus role models.

The human dimension in education remains central in our hypertechnological age. Our students are always watching us. They learn from our actions – and our inactions. At York University and any other university where even one student feels physically threatened, professors must mobilize and – as the feminists say – take back the night.

For starters, a broad range of York professors, from different fields and from across the political spectrum, should denounce the violence. Professors highly critical of Israel should take the lead, teaching that the issue is not about Israel, pro or con, but about student security and campus civility.

Professors should volunteer to escort any students or student groups who feel unsafe. And yes, if necessary, professors should stand between rival groups on campus, literally standing for civility not just endorsing it.

Rather than relying on the monochromatic uniforms of campus security, the professors should don their multicoloured academic gowns. If professors feel comfortable parading around in these robes at commencement to celebrate student achievement, shouldn’t we don them when the core values of our university are threatened?

Finally, professors should turn these traumatic events in the university’s life into what we in the education biz call “teachable moments.” Both regular class time and special teach-ins should be devoted to learning about free speech; about the mutuality of rights so we don’t have “free speech for me and not for thee”; about the centrality of civility to campus life; and about the historic roles of campuses as centres of civility.

Professors at places like Carleton, where the apartheid posters have sparked controversy, should also step in and work to keep the debate civil and avoid the violence that erupted at York.

I do not mean to single out my colleagues at York University. We at McGill or anywhere else in North America would do no better – and have done no better.

Since the 1960s, we as professors have abdicated responsibility for campus life outside the classroom, ceding it to students and administrators.

Most professors have preferred to dodge the politically charged issues that have periodically roiled campuses since those days, and there is often little political consensus among colleagues. Avoidance has been safer than engagement.

Moreover, we live in the age of the academic careerist, where most of us are too overextended as well as too cautious to take bold stands.

Unfortunately, the ugly violence that now threatens York’s reputation and its future demands professorial action and leadership. Students and administrators have failed. Donors are understandably getting restive. Parents and potential students are worried.

York professors have a responsibility to defend their academic home and a great opportunity to heal it.

No one goes into academics these days because it is the easy path. And most of us who research and teach believe in the redemptive power of learning.

York professors have a responsibility and a privilege to help solve the problem plaguing their university. Teaching is not just a job, it is a calling. It is time for York’s professors to answer the call and redeem their university.

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University.