Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Writing Biography Historians Their Craft
Writing Biography Historians Their Craft
Writing Biography Historians Their Craft
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2 Writing Biography
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5 Historians & Their Craft
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8 Edited by Lloyd E. Ambrosius
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33 University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London
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1 Copyright © 2004 by the Board
2 of Regents of the University of
Nebraska. Chapter 5 copyright
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© 2004 by Nell Irvin Painter. All
4 rights reserved. Manufactured
5 in the United States of America.
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29 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
30 Writing biography : historians and their craft / edited
by Lloyd E. Ambrosius.
31
p. cm.
32
Includes bibliographical references and index.
33 isbn 0-8032-1066-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)
34 1. Biography as a literary form. i. Ambrosius, Lloyd E.
35 ct21 .w735 2004 808'.06692–dc22 2003019697
1 Contents
2
3
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6 Lloyd E. Ambrosius vii Introduction
7
Shirley A. Leckie 1 1. Biography Matters: Why
8
Historians Need Well-Crafted
9
Biographies More than Ever
10
11 R. Keith Schoppa 27 2. Culture and Context in
12 [-5], (5)
Biographical Studies: The Case
13 of China
14 Lines: 76 to 11
15 Retha M. Warnicke 53 3. Reshaping Tudor Biography:
Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves ———
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17 ———
John Milton Cooper Jr. 79 4. Conception, Conversation,
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and Comparison: My Experiences
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as a Biographer
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21 Nell Irvin Painter 103 5. Ut Pictura Poesis; or The [-5], (5)
22 Sisterhood of the Verbal and
23 Visual Arts
24
25 Robert J. Richards 133 6. Did Friedrich Schelling Kill
26 Auguste Böhmer and Does
27 It Matter? The Necessity of
28 Biography in the History of
29 Philosophy
30
155 List of Contributors
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32 159 Index
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1 Introduction
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4 Lloyd E. Ambrosius
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[First Page]
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15 Between 7 and 9 September 2000, the Department of History of the
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16 University of Nebraska–Lincoln held its first Carroll R. Pauley Memorial
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17 Endowment Symposium on the topic “Biography and Historical Analy- ———
18 sis.” We invited six prominent historians in various fields to reflect on Normal Page
19 their experiences as biographers. From their different perspectives, these PgEnds: TEX
20 scholars offered their insights into the writing of biography as a form
21 of historical analysis. Professors Shirley A. Leckie of the University of
[-7], (1)
22 Central Florida, R. Keith Schoppa of Loyola College of Maryland, Retha
23 M. Warnicke of Arizona State University, John Milton Cooper Jr. of the
24 University of Wisconsin–Madison, Nell Irvin Painter of Princeton Univer-
25 sity, and Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago presented their
26 original scholarly papers at the symposium. This volume is the product of
27 their work.
28 Chosen because of the diversity of their perspectives on the sympo-
29 sium’s theme a reflection of their various personal and academic back-
30 grounds, fields of expertise, and methodological approaches these six
31 scholars offered a broad range of interpretations. The three women had
32 written biographical studies of women from different social classes in
33 England and the United States. Their subjects included U.S. soldiers’
34 wives and a historian, English queens, and an African American slave who
35 became a leading feminist and abolitionist. Like their female subjects,
viii Introduction
1 these authors focused on social issues of gender and race. Their studies
2 shed new light on politics too. The three men had written biographical
3 studies of men. Their subjects included a revolutionary Chinese leader, a
4 U.S. ambassador, two U.S. presidents, and a German philosopher. While
5 focusing on male political and intellectual leaders, they, too, addressed
6 social issues of class, gender, and race. They, too, appreciated the cultural
7 connections between the personal and public aspects of a subject’s life.
8 All six scholars, notwithstanding their diversity, agreed on one cen-
9 tral point: Biography and historical analysis are inextricably intertwined.
10 For them, biographical studies offer a way to analyze important histor-
11 ical questions. Moreover, they affirmed, biographers must use the best
12 historical methodologies, utilizing all available primary sources and in- [-8], (2)
13 terpreting them in creative ways, to reveal the life stories of subaltern as
14 well as prominent and powerful women and men. Lines: 14 to
15 As requested, these six historians focused on the symposium’s theme
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16 of biography and historical analysis. They analyzed the problems of con-
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17 ceptualization and methodology with which historians in various fields ———
18 must deal. They addressed questions such as the following: How does Normal Pag
19 the biographer sort out the individual’s role within the larger historical PgEnds: TE
20 context? How do biographical studies relate to other forms of history?
21 Should historians use different approaches to biography depending upon
[-8], (2)
22 the societies or cultures in which the subjects lived? What are the appro-
23 priate primary sources and techniques that scholars should use in writing
24 biographies in their fields? The original contributions of this book come
25 from the various answers that the six historians gave to these questions.
26 A specialist in the American West, Shirley A. Leckie argued that biogra-
27 phy is an important form of historical analysis that can enable readers to
28 transcend their own personal experiences and encounter another person
29 from a different time and place. For that to occur, however, the biographer
30 must present the subject in such a way that “a living being walks off the
31 pages.” This requires empathy to recognize both internal and external
32 influences, both the psychological dimensions and the environmental
33 circumstances that shaped a person’s life. While retaining a certain de-
34 tachment from the subject to achieve as much historical objectivity as
35 possible, so as to distinguish between fact and fiction, the biographer
Introduction ix
1 must see the world from that other person’s perspective. This kind of per-
2 sonal understanding must be fully informed by research in all available
3 records, both public and private. When, as is often the case for women
4 or people of color, primary sources are inadequate to answer important
5 questions about a person’s life, biographers must make creative use of
6 whatever is available. Historian Angie Debo employed this approach in
7 her study of Geronimo, as did Leckie in her biography of Debo. Leckie
8 urged historians to undertake biographical studies of other historians in
9 order to explore the “participant-observer” relationship inherent in writ-
10 ing biography. Along with Leon Edel, she contended that a biographer
11 must become a participant in the world in which the subject lived but at
12 the same time remain outside that world as a critical observer. By doing [-9], (3)
13 this well, Leckie concluded, historians can write biographies that enable
14 readers to experience the lives of others. Thus biography matters as a way
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15 of providing meaningful access to other people in different times and
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16 places.
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17 R. Keith Schoppa, whose specialty is modern China, stressed that cul- ———
18 ture and context of both the biographers and their subjects profoundly Normal Page
19 influence the renderings of the past that different people embrace as his- PgEnds: TEX
20 tory. In Chinese history, he explained, the dominant understanding of
21 relationships between individuals and groups has been quite different
[-9], (3)
22 from that in the modern West. To avoid imposing an erroneous interpre-
23 tation onto a Chinese subject’s life, a Western biographer, like Schoppa
24 himself, must therefore recognize this essential difference between the
25 individual-group dynamics operating in the Chinese context and those
26 operating in the West. He stressed the role of social connections and
27 networks in defining the identity and controlling the life and death of Chi-
28 nese people, such as Shen Dingyi, whom he studied. Emphasizing this
29 difference between Chinese and Western cultures, Schoppa noted that
30 individualism has contributed to the popularity of biography as a form of
31 history in the West. Western cultural assumptions about individualism,
32 which Western historians have shared, have encouraged the writing and
33 reading of biography that features an individual rather than a group. But
34 in China a person’s identity derives from the group, from the inherited
35 name, not from individual choice. The biographer of a Chinese subject
x Introduction
1 must therefore recognize the reality of this cultural context and interpret
2 that person’s life story within the framework of social connections and
3 networks. Schoppa illustrated this approach with his analysis of Shen’s
4 murder in 1928.
5 Retha M. Warnicke, a specialist in Tudor England, likewise focused on
6 networks in English history. She suggested that the contrast between the
7 East and the West, which Schoppa had stressed, was not so great, at least
8 in the early modern era. Especially in women’s history, she emphasized,
9 family and kinship networks were vitally important. These connections
10 shaped not only the lives of queens, such as Anne Boleyn and Anne of
11 Cleves, but also the workings of politics at the Tudor court. In early mod-
12 ern English history, she argued, customs and rituals of the time influenced [-10], (4)
13 perceptions of the royal family at the time and have continued to influence
14 the way historians since then have written about the people of the Tudor
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15 era. Traditional beliefs about gender, which privileged men over women,
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16 and about religion, which exalted Protestantism over Catholicism after
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17 the English Reformation, have remained embedded in even recent biogra- ———
18 phies. To escape these prejudices, Warnicke urged historians to reexamine Normal Pag
19 their own cultural biases as they rewrite their accounts of Tudor England. PgEnds: TE
20 Reshaping Tudor biography, which she did with Anne Boleyn and Anne
21 of Cleves, requires historians to take a fresh look at the available his-
[-10], (4)
22 torical records, recognizing the falsehoods and prejudices within these
23 documents and reading them without imposing the traditional stereo-
24 types onto their content. This approach, Warnicke concluded, offers new
25 insights not only into early modern women’s history but also into English
26 history in general. It enables the biographer to contribute not only to the
27 social and cultural understanding of Tudor England but also to its political
28 history.
29 John Milton Cooper Jr., a specialist in late nineteenth- and early
30 twentieth-century American history, shared his experiences as a biogra-
31 pher of Walter Hines Page and of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wil-
32 son. Like Leckie, he stressed the importance of acquiring an empathetic
33 understanding of the subject (or subjects, in the case of a comparative
34 biography) while not sacrificing scholarly objectivity in other words,
35 striking a balance between personal empathy and critical detachment. He
Introduction xi
1 acknowledged its own external reality. Deeply wounded by the death and
2 the allegations, Schelling had experienced the impact of external events
3 upon himself. He could no longer doubt their existence outside of himself
4 or take full responsibility for these painful experiences, as Fichte’s “sub-
5 jective idealism” would require by its assertion that the outside world was
6 merely a product of one’s own consciousness. In other words, an intensely
7 personal experience provided the motivation for Schelling to modify his
8 ideas. As this case exemplifies, Richards concluded, the history of phi-
9 losophy needs biography to explain the development of ideas. Emotions,
10 not logic alone, propel changes in thinking, and thus shape the nature
11 of intellectual history. Just as Leckie and Warnicke advocated the removal
12 of barriers between personal and public aspects of life, building upon [-13], (7)
13 the insight from women’s history that the personal is political, Richards
14 adopted this approach in the history of ideas. Biography matters in this Lines: 30 to 3
15 field too. Biography is thus essential in historical analysis.
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16 All six historians focused on the multiple relationships that shape
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17 the work of historians as biographers. Their essays, which comprise the ———
18 chapters in this volume, explored the overlapping connections between Normal Page
19 autobiography and biography, between truth and subjectivity, between * PgEnds: PageB
20 biographers and the people they choose as subjects, between these indi-
21 vidual subjects and their society or culture, between biographers and their
[-13], (7)
22 own society or culture, between the personal and public aspects of the sub-
23 jects’ lives, and between various subjects and their legacies of historical
24 records available to biographers. By examining all these relationships, the
25 six historians offered insights from their own experiences as biographers
26 into the important topic of biography and historical analysis.
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1 1. Biography Matters: Why Historians Need
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6 Shirley A. Leckie
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15 In September 1999, Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and
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16 Sciences at the University of Illinois–Chicago, attacked modern biography
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17 as “Minutiae without Meaning” in the New York Times. It had fallen into this ———
18 sorry state, he maintained, because the old “master narrative models” had Normal Page
19 lost their meaning for contemporary readers. These included “the prov- PgEnds: TEX
20 idential model,” based on the idea that humans, tainted by original sin,
21 inevitably repeat the failings of Adam and Eve, and the “wheel of fortune
[1], (1)
22 model,” which sees cycles of luck and misfortune as determining life’s
23 outcome. Hence, modern biographers furiously collect details and then
24 “invent or fabricate a meaning,” based on their “favorite hobby horse,”
25 to hold their narratives together. But, in reality, Fish argued, they are “left
26 with little more than a collection of random incidents, and the only truth
27 being told is the truth of contingency, of events succeeding one another
28 in a universe of accident and chance.” 1
29 Since “cause and effect” remains the biographers’ “stock in trade,”
30 Fish accused modern biographers of imposing on their work their own
31 contrived “explanatory structure.” 2 In the end, he concluded, every biog-
32 raphy is actually autobiographical, but rather than revealing that fact to
33 their reading audience, as true autobiographers do, they “can only get
34 it wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story
35 of their announced subject.” Such chicanery renders the medium “a bad
2 leckie
1 game,” dishonest for its practitioners and a waste of time for readers who
2 would be better served by watching wrestling on television. 3
3 Whether one agrees with Fish or not, he is right on one count. All
4 biography is, in part, autobiographical. Few, if any, biographers would
5 choose a subject if the themes of that life were not interesting enough to
6 sustain research and writing over the course of years or even decades. 4
7 Thus, one can assume that some aspect of the theme explored resonates
8 deeply within the author. As for the rest of his argument, Fish performed
9 a service by challenging biographers to think more deeply about the value
10 of their writing and the methods of their craft.
11 Fish’s essay will not diminish the number of biographies written or
12 discourage avid readers from looking for the newest title. As William [2], (2)
13 McFeely noted, biography has always mattered, for all of us share a “basic
14 human curiosity about our fellow humans.” 5 The late Barbara Tuchman, Lines: 17 to
15 best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Guns of August (1962) and
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16 Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), advised historians to
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17 exploit this human interest by using a biographical approach in their ———
18 writings. As a “prism of history,” biography attracts and holds the reader’s Normal Pag
19 interest in the larger subject. 6 PgEnds: TE
20 If Tuchman saw biography as a tool of history, the Greek writer
21 Plutarch, author of Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, most of which was
[2], (2)
22 written in the first two decades of the second century ce, saw biography
23 as a study that revealed who humans are. History, by contrast, examined
24 their deeds. 7 In any case, in his time and for centuries afterward, both
25 history and biography centered on members of the elite or those who had
26 achieved political, military, or intellectual fame. Nonetheless, Plutarch,
27 like many since, responded to his subjects in personal terms. Noting that
28 he had begun his studies for “the sake of others,” he soon found the
29 enterprise useful for himself, “the virtues of these great men serving me
30 as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn
31 my own life.” 8 In that statement, he identified the strong interest humans
32 have shown in extracting moral lessons from past lives.
33 Although many readers of biography still seek moral inspiration, the
34 British author Lytton Strachey rescued modern biography from the didac-
35 ticism into which it had fallen during the Victorian era. In works such as
Biography Matters 3
1 Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), he used Freudian con-
2 cepts to identify the hidden drives behind individual acts. 9 Consequently,
3 modern readers are now more likely to seek a deeper understanding of hu-
4 man motivation and behavior as opposed to lessons that inculcate virtue.
5 We also seek knowledge about the human condition. As men and
6 women, we do not simply live out the life of our species. Instead, we dis-
7 play a wide variety of native abilities, and our personalities and characters
8 are shaped by our consciousness of our race and gender, environmental
9 influences such as the class we belong to, our early education, indoctri-
10 nation, and the choices we make. Well-written biography gives us a study
11 of how these factors operate in the life of another person, based on the
12 assurance that what appears in the work will rely on “discovery, not inven- [3], (3)
13 tion,” according to Ira Bruce Nadel. 10 The finished product represents the
14 biographer’s attempt, within this restriction, to interpret the subject’s life Lines: 25 to 3
15 so that the personality of that individual is evoked. When that happens,
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16 according to Frank E. Vandiver, “a living being walks off the pages.” 11
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17 Then we experience the immense and often addictive pleasure of living ———
18 someone else’s life, while we go about the business of leading our own in Normal Page
19 the here and now. PgEnds: TEX
20 Everyone who writes biographies has been inspired by the work of
21 those who have succeeded in explaining the dynamics of a personality and
[3], (3)
22 a subject’s hidden motives so that “a living being walks off the pages.”
23 Among the works that have breathed life into a figure, for me, is Fawn
24 Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. 12 The work is psychobiogra-
25 phy, a category that many historians and biographers alike regard with
26 suspicion, and with good reason. Neither historians nor biographers are
27 usually trained professionals in the behavioral sciences. Moreover, many
28 of the psychological or psychoanalytical theories that psychobiographers
29 have often invoked have been discredited or at the very least subjected to
30 scathing criticism. 13
31 But it was not Brodie’s use of Erik Erickson’s psychological theory that
32 struck me most forcefully. Rather, although the women’s movement of
33 the 1960s had emphasized that “the personal is political,” in the early
34 1970s that insight was applied largely to the female half of the population.
35 Biographers of male figures described their upbringing and family life
4 leckie
1 sons haunted him and Alice Grierson. Army life, which required frequent
2 moves and often the separation of school-age children from parents, ex-
3 acerbated this couple’s ongoing difficulties. Thus, Benjamin Grierson’s
4 entire military career was marked by severe turmoil as he struggled to
5 reconcile his family’s emotional needs with their financial requirements.
6 That element became for us not a side bar but a vital part of his life story. 19
7 Although middle-class families, such as the Griersons, saw men and
8 women as living and working in their “separate spheres,” the lines blurred
9 for this couple. We discovered that Alice Grierson often functioned as
10 an informal, but very real, adjutant to her husband when he was away
11 from various frontier posts. She not only sent him information regarding
12 military matters but intervened on behalf of the buffalo soldiers. In her [6], (6)
13 view, the soldiers were often unjustly confined to the guardhouse, and she
14 wanted them released immediately. 20 Lines: 41 to
15 Besides turning to biography to learn from an informed scholar his
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16 or her interpretation of a person’s life in all its aspects, both public and
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17 private, readers want to know how a subject confronted the existential ———
18 issues and questions that all humans face. These include more than “Why Normal Pag
19 am I here?” and “What does my life mean?” At crucial times in their PgEnds: TE
20 lives, individuals define or redefine themselves when circumstances force
21 them to make difficult choices or when they remain unable to extricate
[6], (6)
22 themselves from their past.
23 Louis Harlan, in his two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington,
24 treated such issues in ways that are immensely instructive. 21 He gave
25 his readers no simple answers but allowed the evidence to yield both
26 insights and contradictions. In his interpretation, Washington, the last
27 black leader born in slavery, grew up during Reconstruction and saw that
28 African Americans could not protect their political rights in the South
29 without an economic base. In his thirties, as he built Tuskegee, he split
30 his public and private personas and became “willing to trade political
31 independence for educational and economic gain.” 22 Thus, Washington
32 endorsed the idea that only the educated and propertied should vote,
33 which was another way of saying that black men, most of whom were
34 poor in the South, should avoid politics. His message comforted white
35 Southern leaders, especially when he also advised members of his race
Biography Matters 7
1 to eschew the drive for social equality, thereby pledging black acceptance
2 of segregation. That was, Harlan informed us, the point of his famous
3 speech at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, when he counseled blacks to
4 accept a Faustian bargain as the price of peace. Simultaneously, he told
5 Southern whites, wedded to the New South dream, and Northern capital-
6 ists, who sought lucrative investments in the region, that members of his
7 race wanted their share of the hoped-for but never-realized prosperity as
8 the price of their compliance with segregation. 23
9 That said, Washington, as a black man, never took his own advice, de-
10 spite his outward demeanor. Armed with contributions from industrialists
11 and financiers, he began transforming Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
12 Institute into the headquarters of his own political machine. At the same [7], (7)
13 time, a product of his environment, he ran that school as if it were his
14 own plantation. 24 A man of many masks, Washington had the intuitive Lines: 47 to 5
15 ability to penetrate the facades of others. He played a variety of roles,
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16 depending on his objectives at any given time and the groups with which
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17 he interacted. ———
18 In the end, Harlan found that the “wizard” of Tuskegee used the power Normal Page
19 of his political machine surreptitiously at times to maintain his power PgEnds: TEX
20 base, and at times to serve his people. To accomplish the first goal, he
21 infiltrated the organizations of his rivals. To achieve the latter goal, he
[7], (7)
22 secretly financed suits against segregation in public facilities and against
23 the grandfather clause, one of a number of methods that white authorities
24 used in several states to prevent blacks from voting. 25 In that sense, the
25 man who counseled accommodation also contributed to the emergence
26 of the Civil Rights movement. It was, however, a movement that he never
27 could have joined since it flourished in urban settings, and he remained
28 throughout his entire, life the rural leader of a rural population. 26
29 Nonetheless, Harlan’s attention to the discrepancy between Washing-
30 ton’s public persona and his private realities, as well as the wizard’s way
31 of exploiting the best of a bad situation to extract the maximum possi-
32 ble gain, left a deep impression on me that affected my thinking about
33 Elizabeth Bacon Custer’s widowhood. The death of her husband, George
34 Armstrong Custer, was a severe blow, for she was left entirely alone in the
35 world with no parents or siblings but only grieving in-laws who had lost
8 leckie
1 three sons, a son-in-law, and a nephew at the Battle of the Little Bighorn
2 in 1876. 27 And yet, in a very real sense, Elizabeth Custer’s widowhood gave
3 her a second life. Through her books “Boots and Saddles”; or, Life in Dakota
4 Territory with General Custer (1885); Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in
5 Kansas and Texas (1887); and Following the Guidon (1890) she transformed
6 her imperfect husband into the model soldier and considerate comrade
7 she wished he had always been. Her compatriots accepted her version
8 because, as she understood so well, they needed a martyred rather than
9 a discredited soldier as they wrestled with the complex moral problems
10 of driving Indians from their land. At the same time, this woman, whose
11 severest loss was that she never bore children, vicariously fulfilled her need
12 to raise children by making her husband into a hero for boys. 28 Without [8], (8)
13 in any way trivializing her sorrow over her husband’s death and her fifty-
14 seven years of widowhood and loneliness, the George Armstrong Custer Lines: 53 t
15 that Elizabeth Custer resurrected in her books was closer to her desired
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16 ideal than the actual man. Consequently, by exploiting public sympathy
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17 and the predominant gender roles that made challenging her veracity an ———
18 unchivalrous act, she reaped the benefits of being the widow of a hero Normal Pag
19 and basked in the reflected glory she worked so hard to maintain. 29 It was PgEnds: TE
20 a stunning achievement, but it came at a very high price: her ability to
21 live a fully autonomous life. Still, just as Booker T. Washington never tran-
[8], (8)
22 scended his rural South of the Reconstruction era and its tragic aftermath,
23 so Elizabeth Custer, a quintessential Victorian woman, never surmounted
24 her view of herself as a family member first and an individual second.
25 I have learned from Brodie, who emphasized the importance of re-
26 searching the private as well as public concerns of all individuals, and
27 Harlan, who was willing to confront the discrepancy that often existed
28 between public and private faces and the inability of some figures to tran-
29 scend their larger environments. But other scholars have also affected my
30 thinking about writing biography. In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, a
31 theoretical work, the late Leon Edel, best known for his five-volume work
32 on Henry James, set down his thoughts on the medium and the pitfalls
33 inherent in its practice.
34 The most difficult problem a biographer confronts, according to Edel,
35 is dealing with himself. He has to be a “participant-observer,” meaning
Biography Matters 9
1 free from anger and resentment, despite gender and class discrimination
2 and years of poverty and professional marginalization. 43
3 In addition to counseling the biographer to search for “the life of his
4 subject’s self-concept,” Leon Edel also reminded biographers to place
5 their subjects securely within the historical context of their times. Indeed,
6 biography was a part of history and demanded “the same skills.” But
7 beyond that, no subject ever lived outside of human time and history.
8 Therefore, Edel concluded, “No biography is complete unless it reveals
9 the individual within history, within an ethos and a social complex.” 44
10 One author who has demonstrated his ability to weave biography and
11 history together so that the two illuminate each other is Garry Wills.
12 In Reagan’s America, he narrated President Ronald Reagan’s life. Simul- [12], (12)
13 taneously, based on his own painstaking research, Wills compared and
14 contrasted the factual information with the often inaccurate passages in Lines: 73 t
15 Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? 45 Throughout the Reagan
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16 biography, Wills also provided a larger historical context that contra-
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17 dicted much of Reagan’s personal mythology. By including descriptions ———
18 of army campaigns against native peoples, federal road-building projects, Normal Pag
19 and governmental railroad subsidies, as well as New Deal programs that PgEnds: TE
20 sustained the Reagan family during the Great Depression, Wills under-
21 scored the discrepancy between Reagan’s version of the American past
[12], (12)
22 and the historical record. Ironically, the federal government that played
23 such an important role in the larger historical context of Reagan’s life was
24 the same entity that Reagan castigated to achieve its highest office the
25 presidency of the United States. 46
26 Toward the end of this remarkable work, Wills asks us, as readers,
27 to think of ourselves as drivers who cannot see the road ahead when
28 we try to use history as a means of discerning the future. “To steer at
29 all, we must go forward looking into the rearview mirror, trying to trace
30 large curves or bending forces in prior events, to proceed along their
31 lines. But what happens if,” he asks, “when we look into our historical
32 rearview mirror, all we can see is a movie?” 47 His message was clear;
33 Reagan’s psychological needs and projections created a fiction of his own
34 life and American history that he used to navigate the United States. More
35 important, large numbers of Americans served as his “complicit” public.
Biography Matters 13
1 and mobility in the East. The New Western Historians, by contrast, have
2 argued that non-Indian movement into the American West represented
3 conquest rather than settlement. Moreover, they have seen no broken past
4 of the American West as a result of the Bureau of the Census’s declaration
5 that the frontier had closed in 1890 and the nation no longer had within its
6 midst areas of unsettled land. Instead they argued that the problems that
7 persist in the region often stemmed from the earlier period when Euro-
8 Americans seized the land and its resources from native and Hispanic
9 peoples. To make matters worse, they added, these newcomers to the
10 West created a caste system that relegated people of color to inequality
11 and sought to destroy their culture. 54
12 The ideas of the New Western Historians have won widespread, al- [15], (15)
13 though not universal, acceptance among academics. Certainly, their es-
14 says appeared frequently in academic journals. The general public, how- Lines: 89 to 9
15 ever, has preferred the Old Western History, which revolves largely around
———
16 prospectors, cowboys, and cavalrymen. Wild West, a celebration of the tra-
0.0pt PgVa
17 ditional Turnerian story, still boasts sales that total more than 150,000 ———
18 bimonthly. Old West and True West also enjoy large circulations. The Western Normal Page
19 Historical Quarterly, the foremost scholarly journal in the field, by contrast, PgEnds: TEX
20 prints about 2,500 copies of its periodical every three months. 55
21 How do professional historians, especially those who wish to incorpo-
[15], (15)
22 rate some of the insights of the New Western Historians into their work,
23 bridge this gap and reach that larger audience? Clear and well-written
24 revisionist history is one way of attacking this problem. Here Patricia
25 Limerick has achieved a high standard of readability by using humor
26 and self-disclosure and by having a wide-ranging knowledge and strong
27 convictions. 56
28 Another way of reaching a wider audience is to exploit the readers’
29 strong interest in other people by writing biographies that tell the story
30 of the American West from the perspective of individuals who belonged
31 to groups that have been marginalized in the past. In other words, bi-
32 ographers need to tell the story from the perspective of those who stood
33 on the other side of Turner’s frontier. To succeed in their task, they must
34 incorporate the more complicated context of current historical studies
35 into their works. At the same time, they must write their works to the
16 leckie
1 attainment of social justice for farm laborers who worked for a pittance
2 in the western “factories in the field.” 59
3 Because Mexican Americans in the United States have faced intense
4 discrimination, especially in a part of the West that had belonged to Mex-
5 ico until 1848, Griswold del Castillo and Garcia have performed a valuable
6 service for general readers and historians alike. The general reader can
7 profit from a clearer understanding of the difficulties Mexican Americans
8 have faced by viewing them through the engaging and moving prism of
9 Chávez’s life. Moreover, after reading this biography, that reader, very
10 likely, will be more interested in learning about the larger context of U.S.-
11 Mexican relations and the way that shifts in that relationship have affected
12 [18], (18)
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the southwestern borderland. 60 This
13 increased interest results because, in their prizewinning biography, the
14 authors have brought César Chávez to life as the most prominent leader Lines: 109
15
of his ethnic group in America and also as one who spoke for the rights ———
16
of all working Americans. 14.0pt P
17 ———
Because the West is the part of our nation that has given us our origin
18 Normal Pag
myth, we need biographies of historians who have written about that area.
19 * PgEnds: Ej
The general public often views history as facts waiting to be discovered
20
in a repository somewhere. Presumably, once historians find the facts
21
and put them down on paper, the past will have yielded its secrets. Many [18], (18)
22
have little understanding that both history and biography are the result of
23
constant interpretation and reinterpretations based on new questions and
24
concerns that arise in every decade and generation. Learning more about
25
26 the life of historians would inform a wider audience of the true nature of
27 historical inquiry and its value to their lives.
28 Some progress has been made in this area. In 1997 Allan Bogue pub-
29 lished his magisterial Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down,
30 which shed light on Turner’s world. Significantly, Turner came of age as
31 the work of the historian was becoming professionalized through train-
32 ing in university seminars. 61 Although Bogue did not discuss at length the
33 gendered nature of this process, it was obvious in Turner’s relations with
34 students such as Louise Kellogg. A protégée of the master, Kellogg spent
35 her working life at the Wisconsin Historical Society, rather than teaching
Biography Matters 19
1 mind,” the subject would enjoy, at best, only a flicker of afterlife. Edel
2 quoted novelist Joseph Conrad’s statement on this point: “The dead can
3 live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by
4 the living.” 65 There is no other way, and that is why biography has always
5 mattered.
6 Today, because professional historians need the biographers’ life sto-
7 ries as a way of helping bridge the gap between themselves and a larger
8 reading public, biography matters more than it mattered in the past. As
9 our globe becomes smaller and our communities more diverse, biography,
10 which breathes life into dry census data and puts faces on demographic
11 tables, will become the means by which to weave the stories of new groups
12 into our national fabric. In the “intensity and quality of the life imparted” [20], (20)
13 lies our best hope for the revitalization of history as an academic disci-
14 pline that will reach and engage the larger audience and bring to it the Lines: 131 t
15 perspectives of those who, for far too long, have been relegated to history’s
———
16 margins.
2.62411p
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 Notes PgEnds: TE
20 1. Stanley Fish, “Just Published: Minutiae without Meaning,” New York Times, 7
21 September 1999, Section A, p. 19. [20], (20)
22 2. Fish, “Minutiae without Meaning,” p. 19.
23 3. Fish, “Minutiae without Meaning,” p. 19.
24 4. For a discussion on this point, see Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn Brodie: A
25 Biographer’s Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), xiii–xiv.
26 5. William McFeely, “Why Biography?” in The Seductions of Biography, ed. Mary
Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), xiii.
27
6. Barbara Tuchman, “Biography as a Prism of History,” in Telling Lives: The
28
Biographer’s Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington dc: New Republic Books, 1979),
29
134.
30 7. Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York: Twayne, 1996), 6.
31 8. Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, trans. John Dryden et al., 3 vols. (New York:
32 John Wurtele Lovell, [1880?]), 1: 375. For a slightly different translation, see: Greek
33 Lives: A Selection of Nine Lives, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University
34 Press, 1998), xiii.
35 9. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918); Queen
Biography Matters 21
1 Victoria (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921). For a discussion of Strachey’s use of
2 Freud, see Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton,
3 1984), 84.
4 10. Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (New York: St. Martin’s
5 Press, 1984), 55.
11. Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” The Biographer’s
6
Gift: Life Histories and Humanism, ed. James F. Veninga (College Station: Texas A&M
7
University Press, 1983), 16.
8
12. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W.
9
Norton, 1974).
10
13. See Cushing Strout, “The Uses and Abuses of Psychology in American
11 History,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 324–42.
12 [21], (21)
14. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 16.
13 15. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 15–25; quote, 25.
14 16. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 126–29, 162–68. Lines: 153 to 1
15 17. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 127–28, 229–33.
———
16 18. For excellent recent works on Jefferson, see Andrew Burstein, The Inner
11.60022pt
17 Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia ———
18 Press, 1995), and Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson Normal Page
19 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). PgEnds: TEX
20 19. William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, Unlikely Warriors: General Benjamin
21 Grierson and His Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
20. Leckie and Leckie, Unlikely Warriors, 155–56, 161–62. Linda Kerber, “Sepa-
[21], (21)
22
rate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,”
23
Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39, identified the idea of separate
24
spheres as an imperfectly realized ideal that many women exploited to expand
25
their power even within the public sphere.
26
21. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901
27
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard
28 of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
29 22. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 157–75; quote, 158.
30 23. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 204–28.
31 24. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 254–87.
32 25. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 288–303.
33 26. Harlan, Washington: Wizard, 435–37.
34 27. Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman:
35 University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 191–206.
22 leckie
1 28. The first and third of Elizabeth Custer’s books were published by Harpers
2 & Bros.; Charles L. Webster published the second. One critic suggested that “Boots
3 and Saddles” was suitable Sunday-school reading. Norman Fox, “Christianity and
4 Manliness,” review from untitled newspaper, 30 April 1885, “Boots and Saddles”
5 Scrapbook of Reviews, Custer Collection, box 7, Monroe County (Michigan) His-
6 torical Commission Archives. More important, by 1901, Charles Scribner & Sons
7 had condensed Custer’s three books into The Boy General, a textbook that purported
8 to teach children civic virtues, including “lessons in manliness that mean more
9 than dates and statistics.” See “Opinions of the Press on The Boy General,” brochure
10 58–60, 70, 74, 82–85, 103, 143, 149, 199–203, 263, 267, 280–4, 295–96, 324–31,
339–43. For Reagan’s statements about his life, Wills quotes extensively from
11
12
Ronald Regan, Where’s the Rest of Me? With Richard G. Hubler (New York: Duell, [23], (23)
Sloan & Pearce, 1965).
13
46. Wills, Reagan’s America, 93–111, 332–43.
14 Lines: 218 to 2
47. Wills, Reagan’s America, 460.
15
48. Wills, Reagan’s America, 466–67. ———
16
49. Reagan’s America was published in 1987 under the title Innocents at Home: * 24.50021p
17 ———
Reagan’s America, which emphasized the naïveté of the American public, but it
18 Normal Page
was changed with the 1988 Penguin edition. For a recent biography that is fairly
19 * PgEnds: Eject
balanced, see William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald
20
Reagan (Armonk ny: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
21 50. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford [23], (23)
22 University Press, 1997), 200.
23 51. Lerner, Why History Matters, 200.
24 52. As renowned scholars gathered at the Wellesley College forum, “The Future
25 of History,” in April 2000, they heard warnings of a discipline that “is in danger
26 of becoming too fragmented to be meaningful to students and too obscure to
27 have much impact outside academe,” according to Elizabeth Greene, “Plotting a
28 Future for History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 April 2000, Section A, 18. See
29 also David Oshinsky, “The Humpty Dumpty of Scholarship,” New York Times, 26
30 August 2000, Section A, 17, 19.
31 53. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American
32 History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Ray
33 Allen Billington (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 37–62. According to
34 Lerner, Why History Matters, 202, the narrative of American History, as traditionally
35 taught in schools and colleges, “used the doctrines of American exceptionalism
24 leckie
1 and Manifest Destiny and the myth of the triumphant conquest of the West as a
2 legitimizing explanatory system.”
3 54. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American
4 West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 18, emphasized continuity, stating that “the
5 conquest of Western America shapes the present as dramatically and sometimes
as perilously as the old mines shape the mountainsides.”
6
55. Richard W. Etulain, Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry
7
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 151–52.
8
56. Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
9
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 333–43.
10
57. Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of
11 Oklahoma Press, 1976), xi.
12 [24], (24)
58. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman (Norman:
13 University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
14 59. Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, César Chávez: A Tri- Lines: 247
15 umph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). Carey McWilliams,
———
16 “The Mexican Problem,” Common Ground 8 (spring 1948): 3–17, coined the phrase
11.60022
17 “factories in the field.” ———
18 60. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, Normal Pag
19 and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, PgEnds: TE
20 1995), another prizewinning work, achieved a very high level of scholarship, but
21 many sections are theoretical as the author analyzes arguments about legal issues
and debates over affirmative action. Thus it presupposes a depth of understanding
[24], (24)
22
on the reader’s part that is usually lacking in a popular audience. However, were I
23
teaching a course on ethnic minorities in the southwestern United States, I would
24
assign César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit to my students, and once we had discussed
25
the issues raised in this work, I could then assign Walls and Mirrors. The clearly
26
written and moving biography would have elicited student interest, and, even
27
more important, a measure of student empathy for the situation Mexicanos and
28 Mexicanas have faced in the U.S. borderlands of the Southwest.
29 61. Allan Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman:
30 University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
31 62. Bogue, Strange Roads, 123.
32 63. See, for example, Annie Eloise Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and
33 Secessionist (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1915); Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run
34 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940); Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange
35 Man of the Oglalas: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942).
Biography Matters 25
1 64. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 5th ed. (Fort
2 Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 40.
3 65. Edel, Writing Lives, 43.
4
5
6 Selected Bibliography
7 Bogue, Allan. Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. Norman: University
8 of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
9 Bringhurst, Newell G. Fawn Brodie: A Biographer’s Life. Norman: University of Okla-
10 homa Press, 1999.
11 Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton,
12 1974. [25], (25)
13 Debo, Angie. Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place. Norman: University of Okla-
14 homa Press, 1976.
Lines: 272 to
Edel, Leon. Writing Lives: Principia Biographica. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
15
Etulain, Richard W. Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. Albu- ———
16
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 5.3002pt P
17 ———
Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. César Chávez: A Triumph of
18 Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Normal Page
19 Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New PgEnds: TEX
20 York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
21 . Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford [25], (25)
22 University Press, 1983.
23 Hood, Edwin Paxton. The Uses of Biography, Romantic, Philosophic, and Didactic. Lon-
24 don: Partridge and Oakey, 1852.
25 Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman. Norman:
26 University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters: Life and Thought. New York: Oxford University
27
Press, 1997.
28
Limerick, Patricia N. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.
29
New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
30 McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
31 Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
32 1984.
33 Pachter, Marc, ed. Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art. Washington dc: New Republic
34 Books, 1979.
35 Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Twayne, 1996.
26 leckie
1 Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men. Translated by John Dryden et al. 3 vols.
2 New York: John Wurtele Lovell, 1880?
3 Rhiel, Mary, and David Suchoff. The Seductions of Biography. New York: Routledge,
4 1996.
Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.
5
. Queen Victoria. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921.
6
Veninga, James F., ed. The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism. College
7
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983.
8 Wills, Garry. Reagan’s America. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
9
10 [Last Page]
11
12 [26], (26)
13
14 Lines: 314
15
———
16
370.8110
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 PgEnds: TE
20
21
[26], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 2. Culture and Context in Biographical Studies:
2
3 The Case of China
4
5
6 R. Keith Schoppa
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [27], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 18
15 Robert Rosenstone, observing the essential relationship between histori-
———
16 ans and the past as they interpret it, concluded that “History does not exist
0.0pt PgVa
17 until it is created. And we create it in terms of our underlying values. Our ———
18 kind of vigorous, ‘scientific’ history is in fact a product of our history, our Normal Page
19 special history that includes a particular relationship to the written word, PgEnds: TEX
20 a rationalized economy, notions of individual rights, and the nation-state.
21 Many cultures have done quite well without this sort of history, which is
[27], (1)
22 only to say that there are as we all know but rarely acknowledge many
23 ways to represent and relate to the past.” 1
24 Perhaps the most telling clause in Rosenstone’s historiographical re-
25 flections is the parenthetical “as we all know but rarely acknowledge.”
26 Historians and biographers-as-historians are rooted in their particular
27 cultures and contexts. Their created histories in subject matter, ap-
28 proach, interpretation, methods, nuance will reflect to some degree or
29 other the culture and context that constitute their “special history.” But, as
30 in most endeavors, people rooted in a particular culture take that culture
31 and its values as the norm and often quite unthinkingly assume its uni-
32 versal applicability. In his presidential address to the American Historical
33 Association more than thirty years ago, noted China specialist John K.
34 Fairbank argued that “historians in America have been, like historians
35 elsewhere, patriotic, genetically oriented, and culture-bound.” 2
28 schoppa
1 It is a commonplace to say that while the basic social unit in the modern
2 West is the individual, in China it is the group. But the social reality is much
3 deeper than is apparent in this simple generalization. It is when one is
4 asked to describe the group in each society that one comes to see that
5 there is a fundamentally different definition for both the individual and the
6 group in these two cultures. For while in the modern West it is accurate
7 to say that other than in the family individuals precede the group,
8 in China the group precedes the individual. Put another way, in the West
9 individuals make up a group; in China a group is composed of individuals.
10 Because in the West individuals “make up” a group, they can also, as
11 independent actors, freely make demands on the group or even leave the
12 [31], (5)
group. In China, because the group has precedence over its individuals,
13 maintaining the group and its harmony is of primary concern. The group
14 constrains individuals, for they cannot make claims of individual “rights” Lines: 34 to 3
15
within the group without threatening the group’s unity and cohesion. In ———
16
this sense, the individual in traditional Chinese society was a much less 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
“independent” actor than an individual in Western society. Contemporary
18 Normal Page
poet Bei Dao ends his “Notes from the City of the Sun” with the line
19 * PgEnds: Eject
“Living, A net.”
20
A Chinese individual is constrained by groups and his or her relation-
21
ships within groups as if he or she were linked to others by invisible [31], (5)
22
threads that tied them all into a net. As in the West, individuals can leave
23
the group, but in the process they will tear or break the net, and social
24
and personal damage can be severe. Thus, in approaching a Chinese
25
26 individual as a biographical subject, one must focus much attention not
27 simply on the individual but on those people in the various groups that
28 hold him or her in their nets. While the biography of a Westerner might
29 likely consider people who play a large role in the subject’s life or who
30 help provide context and support, their presence would not likely loom so
31 large because of the difference in the Western understanding of the greater
32 autonomy or degree of “separateness” of the individual. Thus Nell Irvin
33 Painter described the “networks” of Truth’s antislavery feminism, but
34 they seem to have existed primarily for her individual benefit; Painter told
35 us that “those networks sustained her materially and spiritually, steadily
32 schoppa
1 the connection, making its “tensile strength” very great indeed. The ac-
2 cumulation and repaying of obligations is a continual social reality that a
3 skillful biographer must take into consideration.
4 China’s most famous twentieth-century sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, has
5 written about the importance of connections and networks in the funda-
6 mental structure and processes of Chinese society. Networks may include
7 many people, but it is important to note that their structure is dyadic,
8 based on the connections between two people, and then two others, and
9 so on. The strength of any two connections varies. Similarly, individuals
10 may find themselves a part of a number of networks. The strength of the
11 personal connections to people in each network also varies. This situation
12 has definite ethical implications. Noting that Chinese society is structured [33], (7)
13 as “webs woven out of countless personal relationships,” Fei argued that
14 “to each knot in these webs is attached a specific ethical principle.” In Lines: 47 to 5
15 this society, “general [ethical] standards have no utility. The first thing to
———
16 do is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and
0.0pt PgVa
17 what kind of relationship is appropriate with that figure? Only then can ———
18 one decide the ethical standards to be applied in that context.” 10 Thus, Normal Page
19 there is no universal ethic to be applied to all people and in all situations. PgEnds: TEX
20 Ethics in China were traditionally determined by connections; they varied
21 with particular people and situations. The biographer of a Chinese sub-
[33], (7)
22 ject must be aware of this reality while interpreting the actions of that
23 person.
24 These kinds of social realities and relativities gave Chinese social life
25 considerable fluidity, in many or perhaps most cases providing a consid-
26 erable challenge for the biographer. A person’s social identity and place
27 in society largely depended on those to whom he or she was connected.
28 In the end, if someone with whom a person had spent years establishing
29 and cultivating connections was kicked out of power, lost a job, was
30 incapacitated, or died, then he or she was back to square one in trying to
31 establish his or her own social position. Developing and nurturing per-
32 sonal connections was understandably a full-time, lifelong undertaking.
33 Thus, though I, as a modern Western biographer of an early twentieth-
34 century Chinese man named Shen Dingyi, was interested in the individu-
35 ality of my subject, my primary focus necessarily had to be on questions
34 schoppa
1 restructure his party, the Guomindang (or, Nationalist party) and to set
2 up a military academy to train a party army. Sun accepted, also making
3 the decision that individual Communist party members could join the re-
4 vamped Guomindang. Shen became a member of both parties. The goal
5 of the parties, joined in a “united front,” was twofold: first, to undertake
6 a military campaign to unite China and wipe out the plague of warlords,
7 who had fought each other for territory and control of China since 1916;
8 and second, to drive out the imperialist powers, whose presence had con-
9 tinued to grow. For the two parties, the mid-1920s were spent preparing
10 for revolution. In 1924 a series of minor irritants began to drive a wedge
11 between Shen and more radical members of the provincial Guomindang,
12 which was led at this time by the young teachers whom Shen had brought [38], (12)
13 to teach at the Yaqian Village School. Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925
14 unleashed party factionalism, which Sun had held in check until then. Lines: 88 t
15 By the summer of 1925 the party had erupted into open, strident feuding
———
16 between conservatives and radicals. This bitter party factionalism was
0.0pt Pg
17 exacerbated by the upsurge in nationalism following the British killings ———
18 of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai on 30 May. It was clear that the Normal Pag
19 time for a revolutionary military campaign was nearing. Revolutionary PgEnds: TE
20 choices frequently the source of party factionalism could no longer be
21 postponed. In August, when a left-wing leader of the Guomindang was
[38], (12)
22 assassinated, the right wing was implicated.
23 In November 1925 Shen met with right-wing members before Sun Yat-
24 sen’s coffin in the Western Hills near Beijing. Their purpose was to call
25 for the ouster of all Communist party members who had joined the Guo-
26 mindang, in effect halting the united front that had linked the parties, and
27 for the expulsion of the chief Soviet adviser in China, Michael Borodin,
28 who, they believed, had become too powerful. This meeting of what be-
29 came known as the Western Hills faction openly split the Guomindang.
30 In early 1926 both factions held their own party congresses. Shen was
31 bitterly attacked by former colleagues who were active on the left in the
32 province; the Western Hills faction was quickly tagged as far to the right
33 or reactionary.
34 In the summer of 1926, the military campaign to unite the country,
35 known as the Northern Expedition, got under way. Its military comman-
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 39
1 der was Chiang Kai-shek, first associated with neither Right nor Left, but
2 gradually moving into the rightist camp, though not so far right as the
3 Western Hills group. Chiang and the National Army were successful in
4 reaching the main Yangzi cities by the spring of 1927, when they struck
5 out at the Guomindang Left and the Communists in bloody purges. The
6 so-called White Terror, which lasted into 1928, temporarily ended all Com-
7 munist party power. Shen emerged in Zhejiang Province in the summer
8 of 1927 as head of purge activities and in the fall (October to December)
9 as one of the provincial government leaders when circumstances brought
10 Western Hills partisans to leadership in a number of provinces.
11 Ousted in December 1927 and distraught over the new provincial gov-
12 ernment that was discarding some of his goals, particularly the estab- [39], (13)
13 lishment of farmers’ associations and the adoption of a 25-percent-rent-
14 reduction plan, Shen returned to his village of Yaqian. There in his native Lines: 92 to 9
15 East Township he began his own experiment in what generally came to
———
16 be called rural reconstruction. That meant establishing mass organiza-
0.0pt PgVa
17 tions (of farmers, merchants, unskilled laborers, construction workers, ———
18 and women) and undertaking reconstruction (building irrigation facilities Normal Page
19 and roads) and reforms (establishing a self-government association, set- PgEnds: TEX
20 ting up credit and retail cooperatives, building schools, and sponsoring
21 sericulture reforms) within the township. It was an effort to start the re-
[39], (13)
22 construction of China from the grassroots. But Shen did not have enough
23 time: He was assassinated on the afternoon of 28 August 1928.
24 In interpreting the life of Shen during the revolution of the 1920s,
25 there are several challenges presented by culture and context. The first
26 is an aspect of Chinese political culture. Shen commented on it in an
27 essay in 1919: “I know that ultimately for the Chinese people the name
28 is more important than the deed.” 16 Throughout Chinese history many
29 people contended that action or deeds had to be brought to fit the name;
30 there was no sense that names should be changed to fit the action. When
31 Confucius analyzed the disharmony in Chinese society, he found part of
32 the reason to be that people were not doing what their names prescribed.
33 The son must be a son; the father must be a father. If a father tries to be a
34 friend to his son instead of a father, there will be problems. A ruler must
35 be a ruler and not allow others to make decisions for him. In other words,
40 schoppa
1 the name prescribed the action that the named should perform. This
2 obviously conservative Confucian idea is referred to as the “rectification
3 of names.” In the twentieth century, this obsession with names reached its
4 peak during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when society was divided between
5 the red (good) and black (bad) forces. No matter what his actions, if he
6 were the son or grandson of a landlord (black), he would always be ranked
7 with the landlords as an enemy of the people; on the other hand, however
8 bad their actions, the offspring of the proletariat (red) would always be
9 good.
10 How does this tyranny of names make analyzing Shen more chal-
11 lenging? Every person in every culture has multiple identities stemming
12 from the various roles that he or she plays and the various relationships [40], (14)
13 that he or she maintains. These identities come from oneself (emerging
14 from personality, goals, abilities, lifestyle, particular incidents); from con- Lines: 96 t
15 nections to others; and from others who choose for whatever reason to
———
16 bestow a particular identity upon one. In Chinese culture, more than in the
4.0pt Pg
17 West, those identities that emerge from connections to others are often ———
18 decisive in helping fix one’s identity. Shen was a part of at least seven Normal Pag
19 networks the extended family, the native-place connections in Yaqian PgEnds: TE
20 and East Township, the provincial assembly colleagues, the Shanghai in-
21 tellectuals, the graduates of Hangzhou’s First Normal School whom Shen
[40], (14)
22 brought to teach at his school, the provincial Guomindang hierarchy, and
23 the Western Hills faction. In addition, Shen had countless connections of
24 greater or lesser strength with others. Shen himself said it in a poem:
25
Within the mirror there I am.
26
Outside the mirror there I am.
27
When I break the mirror, I don’t see me.
28
The broken fragments of the mirror become pieces of me.
29
When I break the mirror, I am nowhere in the mirror.
30
When I break the mirror, I have even broken me.
31 When I have broken me, I don’t know how many of me there are. 17
32
33 In any culture, to be sure, identity is best seen as “process, . . . perfor-
34 mance, and . . . provisional.” 18 But with the necessity for continual guanxi
35 construction, nurturing, repair, and repayment, the fluidity that we have
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 41
1 how much more uncertain were they among his contemporaries in the
2 1910s and 1920s? Yet it was those very contemporaries who ascribed to
3 Shen many of his identities and names and have left most of the historical
4 records with which we have to evaluate him. Most of those people wrote
5 from the vantage point of later times when they knew what Shen would
6 never know the end results of the developments of the 1920s. Surely
7 that knowledge also shaped and colored their depiction of Shen and
8 his times. Given these circumstances, determining Shen Dingyi’s most
9 appropriate identity is a mystery not easily solved. Careful (sometimes
10 tentative) judgment of sources, including Shen’s own writings and public
11 records, is the key to getting as close to an answer as possible. Important
12 in understanding the “doing” of a biography of a Chinese subject are the [42], (16)
13 difficulties arising from both culture and context.
14 To bring the issues of culture and context into sharper focus as they Lines: 122
15 shaped Chinese lives and my study of Shen Dingyi, I focus here on his
———
16 involvement with the Western Hills faction, and his assassination. Of all
0.0pt Pg
17 Shen’s actions during his controversial career, none is more puzzling ———
18 than his participation in the Western Hills meeting in late 1925. Here he Normal Pag
19 was less than half a decade away from being a founding member of the PgEnds: TE
20 Communist party, from supporting socialism and feminism, from spon-
21 soring a rent-resistance movement against his fellow landlord elites now
[42], (16)
22 joining with men who were known as the most ideologically reactionary
23 men in the Guomindang. And yet, from his later actions, we know that he
24 had not given up his progressive ideas. As I put it in an essay title, “What’s
25 a Man Like You Doing in a Group Like This?” 20 Even the Western Hills
26 group did not believe that he was for real: Three days before the meeting
27 opened, Shen and his close friend Dai Jitao were kidnapped from their
28 hotel and beaten by ultraconservative Guomindang goons who believed
29 that Shen was a Communist agent attending the meeting as a mole.
30 The Western Hills faction has traditionally been cast primarily in ideo-
31 logical terms. Though most who attended this meeting were conservative,
32 there was a range of ideological viewpoints. Ideological commitment was
33 not the basis or raison d’être for the meeting. It was instead concerned
34 with practical revolutionary politics. The proceedings of the conference
35 show that the men came together because of specific political grievances
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 43
1 young men saw Shen’s attendance at the conference as the first volley in a
2 bitter political war that would last into the spring of 1927 when, following
3 the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek would kill or imprison Shen’s
4 challengers in the general White Terror that he unleashed.
5 In the end, Shen came out over his rivals, not through his actions
6 but through the course of revolution. In the summer and fall of 1927 he
7 headed the anti-Communist purge in Zhejiang and was a key figure in
8 the provincial government in the fall. Throughout this period, however,
9 he labored under the new identity that his attendance at the Western
10 Hills conference had given him among his contemporaries that of ul-
11 traconservative. It did not matter that that name had no connection to the
12 reality of Shen’s actions or thought. It did not seem to matter when he [44], (18)
13 undertook the radically reformist rural reconstruction program in 1928.
14 For his enemies, the name became a political weapon; for those who Lines: 131 t
15 had always thought Shen was unpredictable, the name was corroborative.
———
16 For his friends, it was mystifying. For these reasons, Shen’s involvement
0.0pt Pg
17 with the Western Hills group from November 1925 to April 1926 had ———
18 “drastic and permanent implications for his image and his future. . . . It Normal Pag
19 was a stigma that Shen could not in the end overcome.” 21 How strong PgEnds: TE
20 the connection of Shen was with the Western Hills group is shown by the
21 popular name of the Hangzhou house of Shen’s relative in which Shen
[44], (18)
22 met with fellow Guomindang members in late 1927: the “Western Hills
23 Zhejiang Garrison.”
24 On 28 August 1928, after more than six months working at his rural
25 reconstruction experiment, Shen was assassinated in Yaqian on return-
26 ing from Moganshan, a resort north of Hangzhou. On the spur of the
27 moment, he had gone to meet several leaders of the Guomindang, one
28 of them being Dai Jitao, whom he had not seen since their joint Western
29 Hills conference attendance almost three years earlier. He did not know
30 how long he would stay in Moganshan or when he would return. Three
31 days later, on his return trip, after he took a ferry across the Qiantang River
32 from Hangzhou, he boarded a bus for the forty-five-minute ride from the
33 river depot to Yaqian, and his killers boarded the bus with him. They killed
34 him after he got off the bus in Yaqian.
35 As Shen’s assassination had never been solved, I set out to solve it,
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 45
1 have been able to coordinate the plan. Since one man arrested in the case
2 confessed that a landlord had hired him to kill Shen, the possibility exists
3 that a landlord had served as middleman and hired the killer. However, we
4 will never know because the confessor ended up mysteriously murdered
5 in his prison cell.
6 Communists obviously had motives to do away with Shen. His lead-
7 ership of the anti-Communist purge the year before gave them a strong
8 grievance. But their involvement was not logical. At this point they were
9 demoralized, bankrupt, and, for all practical purposes, defunct. Why
10 would they have expended precious resources on a man who no longer
11 had any provincial power and had antagonized so many people that he
12 would likely never be brought back into the power elite? The timing is [46], (20)
13 also a problem. Why would they have used this plan, the timing of which
14 was tricky at best, when they could have chosen any number of public Lines: 139
15 meetings at which Shen appeared?
———
16 Men in Shen’s own party, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang, had the
0.0pt Pg
17 motives and the wherewithal to carry out Shen’s murder. We are led to ———
18 them by those elements of Chinese culture that have been the focus of Normal Pag
19 this paper: networks, the power of names, and the fluidity of identity in PgEnds: TE
20 the revolutionary context. Two questions need to be addressed: Who was
21 behind the assassination; and why now, when Shen’s political power was
[46], (20)
22 weaker than it had been earlier in the decade? The answer to the first
23 question is based on circumstantial but compelling evidence. The “who”
24 question goes back to the bus ride of Shen and his killers: How did the
25 killers know Shen would be on that bus? Since Shen himself did not know
26 until the morning of 28 August that he was returning to Yaqian, one of
27 the four Guomindang officials staying at the Moganshan resort had to
28 have sent messages to set the assassination plot in motion. No one else
29 would have known Shen’s departure time. There are other circumstantial
30 clues. In the weeks prior to the assassination, Shen had received two
31 warnings about his rural reconstruction self-government project from
32 a former Zhejiang official and from the current head of the provincial
33 Guomindang, Zhang Jingjiang, a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek.
34 Chiang, who also hailed from Zhejiang Province, had disliked Shen from
35 the beginning of their acquaintance, had never accepted him in any of
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 47
1 his networks, and had treated him indifferently and kept him at arm’s
2 length. The party’s warnings cautioned Shen to curb his radicalism and
3 outspokenness.
4 Further, the post-assassination coldness of the Guomindang suggests
5 that the party was glad to be rid of Shen. Chiang refused requests for a state
6 funeral and for the appointment of a special court to hear the case. The
7 provincial government said that the East Township rural reconstruction
8 project could remain as a permanent memorial to Shen; but it shut it down
9 in little more than a year. At a large exposition in Hangzhou in 1929, party
10 leaders rejected out of hand the request that Shen should be included as a
11 martyr in the Memorial Hall of the Revolution.
12 The question of “why now” brings us to issues of Chinese culture. [47], (21)
13 We know there was concern in the party about Shen’s “radical” self-
14 government experiment. At a time when Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror Lines: 143 to 1
15 was unabated and when the party’s revolutionary goals had not yet been
———
16 accomplished, Shen’s alternative strategy of rural reconstruction likely
0.0pt PgVa
17 seemed threatening in its dissent. Many people wondered whether Shen ———
18 was simply trying to build a base for himself from which he might plan Normal Page
19 military action. Rumors about Shen’s plans spread rapidly. A photograph PgEnds: TEX
20 of a rack for fire-fighting equipment was taken to be a gun rack for a ru-
21 mored township militia said to be twenty-thousand-strong. Quarriers on
[47], (21)
22 Phoenix Mountain at Yaqian were said to be building a military garrison.
23 In a premodern culture, such as China’s was at this time and earlier, rumor
24 was “the news” and almost always played a major role in determining what
25 people thought about their world.
26 Part of Shen’s difficulty was that he had allowed connections to party
27 leaders and participation in national and even provincial networks to
28 lapse; this stemmed from his focus from 1925 to 1927 on his battle with
29 the leftists for control of the province, a struggle waged mostly in local
30 county bureaus. Thus, he had no strong guanxi to ensure his own safety and
31 standing. Dai Jitao was one of those lapsed connections, and a tragic lapse
32 it was. Then Shen compounded his difficulties by making the mistake of
33 being boldly frank with Dai at Moganshan. He had reportedly told his
34 erstwhile friend, “The revolution that originally rose in people’s hearts has
35 not been satisfied. Because the situation was [originally] unsatisfactory,
48 schoppa
1 attended the Western Hills meeting, but the cultural hegemony of name
2 persisted. About this judgment by the party, Shen’s son wrote, “They put
3 the hat of the extreme rightist counterrevolutionary Guomindang on his
4 head, and there was no scientific analysis of the specific situation.” 26
5 I have argued in this chapter that culture and context are crucial per-
6 spectives that must be taken into account by the biographer; put briefly,
7 they inform and alert the researcher to elements that might be substan-
8 tially different or unrecognizable or missing in a different culture and/or
9 in a different context. Not to consider the cultural perspective is to commit
10 the “culture-bound” error of considering one’s own culture and worldview
11 as the norm. Not to consider the contextual perspective prevents us from
12 fully understanding the changes over time in our subject’s life some [49], (23)
13 large, but most incremental and, above all, the importance of contin-
14 gency in the course of a life. Lines: 153 to 1
15 Yet it is important to stress that culture and context are not every-
———
16 thing: They do not necessarily determine the decisions and actions of a
1.22403pt
17 person. The biographer must study his subject as an individual person ———
18 within a particular culture and context, who in the end, under particular Normal Page
19 circumstances or in certain situations, may or may not play a role in PgEnds: TEX
20 helping shape or confine or direct his actions. In many ways, Shen Dingyi
21 seems culturally quite “atypical” of Chinese a brash knight-errant, will-
[49], (23)
22 ing (sometimes, it seems, almost eager) to make enemies, relishing the
23 flaunting of tradition, almost reveling in his individuality. Yet, however
24 atypical he seemed, what I continue to find striking about Shen’s life
25 and death his individuality is how they were shaped by and within
26 the confines of his culture and the contexts in which he acted. We must
27 understand culture and context to know what questions we should ask
28 about him and to interpret appropriately the meaning of his actions and
29 the trajectory of his life.
30
31
32 Notes
33 1. Robert Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on
34 the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93
35 (December 1988): 1185.
50 schoppa
10 February 2000.
7. “Biographies New Literary Trend in China,” Beijing Review 38 (13–19 No-
11
12
vember 1995): 35. [50], (24)
8. Painter, Sojourner Truth, 113.
13
9. Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in a Bitter Sea (New York: Times Books, 1982), 74–
14 Lines: 163
75, cited in Ambrose Yeo-chi King, “Kuan-hsi and Network Building,” Daedalus
15
120 (spring 1991): 64. ———
16
10. Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Berkeley and Los * 24.5002
17 ———
Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 78–79.
18 Normal Pag
11. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New
19 * PgEnds: Ej
York: Vintage Books, 1962); on adolescence, see Joseph F. Kett, “Adolescence and
20
Youth in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn
21 1971): 283–98. [50], (24)
22 12. Kenneth Keniston, “Psychological Development and Historical Change,”
23 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 342–43.
24 13. Quotes from Tu Wei-ming, “The Confucian Perception of Adulthood,”
25 Daedalus 105 (spring 1976): 113, 115.
26 14. Quoted in Theodore DeBary et al., eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York:
27 Columbia University Press, 1960), 1:24.
28 15. Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China (Hong Kong and New York: Oxford
29 University Press, 1991), 196.
30 16. “Mingyi zhong? Shishi zhong?” Xingqi pinglun [“Is the name or the deed
31 more important?” Weekly Review], 24 August 1919.
32 17. “Du Dabaide ‘Duijing,’ ” Juewu [“On Reading Liu Dabai’s ‘Facing the Mir-
33 ror,’ ” Awakenings], 20 September 1920.
34 18. Liz Bondi, “Locating Identity Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed.
35 Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993), 97.
Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 51
1 19. R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road. The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China
2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 253.
3 20. R. Keith Schoppa, “Shen Dingyi and the Western Hills Group: ‘What’s a
4 Man Like You Doing in a Group Like This?’ ” Republican China 16 (November 1990):
35–50.
5
21. Schoppa, Blood Road, 166, 209.
6
22. Shenbao, 3 September 1928.
7
23. “Shen Dingyi beici jingguo” [“The Assassination of Mr. Shen Dingyi”],
8 (n.d.), unpaginated, Zhehiang Provincial Library, Hangzhou.
9 24. Schoppa, Blood Road, 247.
10 25. Schoppa, Blood Road, 250.
11 26. Shen Jianyun, letter to author, 30 June 1993.
12 [51], (25)
13
14 Lines: 196 to 2
Selected Bibliography
15
“Biographies New Literary Trend in China.” Beijing Review 38 (13–19 November ———
16
1995): 35. 5.3002pt P
17 ———
Bondi, Liz. “Locating Identity Politics.” In Place and the Politics of Identity, ed.
18 Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. Normal Page
19 Darnton, Robert. “Looking the Devil in the Face.” New York Review of Books (10 PgEnds: TEX
20 February 2000): 14–16.
21 Fei, Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley and Los [51], (25)
22 Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
23 Keniston, Kenneth. “Psychological Development and Historical Change.” Journal
24 of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 329–45.
25 Kett, Joseph F. “Adolescence and Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal
26 of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 283–98.
Kohut, Thomas A. “Psychohistory as History.” American Historical Review 91 (April
27
1986): 336–54.
28
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
29
Rosenstone, Robert. “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the
30 Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” American Historical Review 93
31 (December 1988): 1173–85.
32 Schoppa, R. Keith. Blood Road. The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China.
33 Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
34 . “Shen Dingyi and the Western Hills Group: ‘What’s a Man Like You
35 Doing in a Group Like This?’ ” Republican China 16 (November 1990): 35–50.
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6
7
8
9
10 [Last Page]
11
12 [52], (26)
13
14 Lines: 242
15
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16
435.257
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
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[52], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 3. Reshaping Tudor Biography: Anne Boleyn
2
3 and Anne of Cleves
4
5
6 Retha M. Warnicke
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [53], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 16
15 Recapturing the history of Englishwomen is difficult, for the great ma-
———
16 jority of them can only be glimpsed briefly in court records; other official
0.0pt PgVa
17 documents, such as wills; parish registers; or the letters of their male rel- ———
18 atives. It is only from the late sixteenth century that some women’s diaries Normal Page
19 and journals have survived. Despite this limited and inadequate evidence, PgEnds: TEX
20 a great interest emerged among professional historians in the 1970s in
21 researching the lives of medieval as well as modern Englishwomen. It
[53], (1)
22 took another decade before historians turned seriously to studying the
23 lives of early modern Englishwomen, essentially those who lived from the
24 sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In their 1998 study of early modern
25 Englishwomen, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford referred to the
26 neglect of this period as the “Dark Ages of women’s history.” 1
27 The findings of Mendelson and Crawford have contributed signifi-
28 cantly to the history of elite women and even to that of poor women,
29 although there is far less direct evidence for the latter, most of whom
30 were illiterate. All women, regardless of their social rank in this hi-
31 erarchical society, shared common life experiences, partly because the
32 fundamental structure of society politically, socially, economically, and
33 culturally was based on a clear division between the sexes. Women were
34 considered the inferior sex, were deemed more lecherous than men, and
35 were expected to accept subordination to a patriarchal authority: a father,
54 warnicke
1 narratives. Under the “illusion” that “facts speak for themselves,” 3 these
2 Victorians purposely limited their analyses of the documents’ origins and
3 contents, sometimes quoting “lengthy” and “undigested” 4 excerpts from
4 them. 5 In tune with their culture’s marginalization of women, they not
5 only rarely allowed for a gender bias in the archives and in the early
6 modern secondary sources but also underestimated the importance of
7 women’s lives, 6 often ignoring their contributions entirely.
8 Except in the cases of some major political figures, such as Henry VIII
9 or Elizabeth I, these historians, as well as their early twentieth-century
10 successors, mostly eschewed biographies. They based their careers and
11 built their scholarly reputations upon grander surveys. 7 Valuing the “great
12 scene,” they denigrated as a “trivial” exercise the “study of a single individ- [55], (3)
13 ual and the slight thread of happenings” that formed her or his life. They
14 regarded biography as being at most a minor subfield within historical
Lines: 20 to 2
15 studies; some even characterized it as a “province of literature.” 8 Sir John
———
16 Neale, for example, who earned a knighthood for his only biography,
0.0pt PgVa
17 the 1934 study of Queen Elizabeth I, is best known in academia for his ———
18 numerous parliamentary investigations. 9 Normal Page
19 At least one modern historian has even denied that a biography of PgEnds: TEX
20 a key Tudor figure should or even could be composed. Throughout his
21 career, G. R. Elton, the dean of early Tudor studies, declined to write a full
[55], (3)
22 biography of Thomas Cromwell, the principal secretary and Lord Privy
23 Seal of Henry VIII who was executed in 1540, because so little informa-
24 tion has survived about his childhood and adolescence. 10 These gaps in
25 Cromwell’s life led Elton to believe that an analysis of Cromwell’s career
26 from a close reading of the public documents was as much as we could
27 understand of the man whom he identified as the architect of the English
28 Reformation.
29 As late-twentieth-century Tudor historians have increasingly turned
30 to writing biographies, which, for the reading public, is the most pop-
31 ular nonfiction genre, 11 they have often failed to take advantage of the
32 advances made in women’s history, the history of sexuality, or family
33 history. For example, in 1986, when the established scholar E. W. Ives
34 decided to publish a biography of Anne Boleyn, he chose to frame her life
35 using a version of C. S. Lewis’s outdated theory of courtly love that was
56 warnicke
1 “zones of silence” about personal matters. 16 That the court’s secrets re-
2 mained impenetrable to outside observation is unfortunate because the
3 difference in the analysis of Henry’s and Anne’s characters that these two
4 theories evoke are enormous and far-reaching. On the one hand, either
5 Anne was a flirtatious woman who refused to take her position as the
6 crowned queen of England seriously, or she failed in her primary task of
7 presenting the king with a healthy male heir. On the other hand, either
8 he knowingly had six innocent people executed to sate his lust for Jane
9 Seymour, or he acted out of ignorance of the natural laws of human
10 reproduction. The more probable explanation, given the cultural attitudes
11 of early modern Christendom, is that he assented to Anne’s death be-
12 cause he believed her immoral activities had led to the miscarriage of her [57], (5)
13 fetus. 17
14 Another reason for reshaping Tudor biography is that until recently Lines: 33 to 3
15 historians of Protestantism, who interpreted the reformed movement as a
———
16 progressive event in accordance with the Whig view of history, dominated
0.0pt PgVa
17 historical writing. John Foxe’s providential tales of the Protestant martyrs ———
18 of Queen Mary’s reign have influenced analyses of the Reformation to Normal Page
19 the current period. 18 A. G. Dickens’s study of English Protestantism in PgEnds: TEX
20 1964, for example, offered his readers the deterministic view that it was
21 an inevitable and intrinsically superior religious movement. In his deeply
[57], (5)
22 felt argument, Dickens remarked: “Even if Henry VIII had remained a
23 model of matrimonial respectability, even if the ministers of Edward VI
24 had been converted by a stray Jesuit, even if Queen Mary had survived
25 for another decade, it still requires a vivid imagination to envisage the
26 English as dutiful children of the Holy See at the end of the century.” 19
27 Using oceanic imagery, he characterized English Catholicism as “an old
28 unseaworthy and ill-commanded galleon.” 20
29 This historical view of Protestantism as an inevitable or providential
30 movement has shaped the depictions of the Tudors. Both Anne Boleyn and
31 Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s second and fourth wives, for example, loom
32 inaccurately in some accounts as facilitators of Protestant doctrine. 21 This
33 approach has also marred studies of Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary and
34 Elizabeth. The Victorian scholar James A. Froude viewed Elizabeth as a
35 great stumbling block to the advancement of reform: “With malicious
58 warnicke
1 Later, after the king had wed Anne, the hostile ambassador referred to her
2 as the royal concubine. 28
3 Because Chapuys’s dispatches are so full of news, which, however,
4 is mostly misinformation, historians have relied on them extensively.
5 His records formed the major primary source for Paul Friedmann’s full-
6 length, two-volume biography of Anne Boleyn in 1884. Friedmann, who
7 claimed that the diplomats “spoke the truth or what they believed to be
8 the truth,” accepted whole cloth every scurrilous story about Anne that
9 Chapuys reported to his correspondents. These biased documents, which
10 Friedmann considered “of the greatest value,” still shape how some mod-
11 ern historians approach her life. 29
12 Other important, but equally biased, evidence can be found in judi- [60], (8)
13 cial records. In his important studies of criminal trials in early modern
14 England, Malcolm Gaskill has pointed out that deponents who believed Lines: 45 t
15 that a particular event had occurred chose to explain their beliefs through
———
16 fabricated or invented narratives, which the justices accepted as valid even
0.0pt Pg
17 when the testimony contained supernatural allegations. Gaskill charac- ———
18 terized this as sincere behavior that arose from a different “ordering of Normal Pag
19 reality in the early modern period . . . a lost social context of communi- PgEnds: TE
20 cation” that slowly disappeared after 1700. 30 His findings are reminders
21 of how important it is for researchers to determine which data in the ju-
[60], (8)
22 dicial records are false; the evidence requires careful analysis to discover,
23 whenever possible, where facts end and fiction begins. Two famous cases
24 in which fabricated evidence is an important issue involve the failed royal
25 marriages of Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves. In 1536 the Crown charged
26 Anne Boleyn with enticing five men, each on two separate occasions, to
27 have sexual relations with her at specific places between October 1533
28 and December 1535. The ten dates are problematic for, even with the
29 paucity of extant evidence, it can be proved with certainty that at some of
30 those times she was not at the places specified. For example, her brother,
31 George, Lord Rochford, stood accused of having committed incest with
32 her at Westminster on 5 November 1535, but irrefutable evidence places
33 her with Henry at Windsor on that day. 31
34 The king’s annulment from Anne of Cleves in July 1540 greatly relied on
35 depositions with fictional information. Especially significant to Anne of
Reshaping Tudor Biography 61
1 Cleves’s life story is the one signed by three of her ladies-in-waiting. The
2 critical evidence Crown attorneys needed to support the king’s case was
3 Anne’s confirmation of his failure to consummate their marriage. Asking
4 Anne, who still mainly spoke German, about her evenings with the king to
5 get legal evidence to end the union that she hoped to preserve would have
6 proved awkward at best. Instead, three of Anne’s ladies signed a depo-
7 sition detailing some conversations with her that supposedly took place
8 but without an interpreter present. Her allegedly innocent responses to
9 their questions about whether or not she was pregnant provided evidence
10 of her complete misunderstanding of how conception occurs. Writers
11 who have validated the details of this deposition have not only ignored
12 the problem of language barriers that would have prevented these con- [61], (9)
13 versations from occurring at least as they were reported but also other
14 references that indicate that Anne was quite well aware of what a woman’s Lines: 51 to 55
15 “bodily integrity” was. In fact, in January 1540, shortly after her marriage
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16 to Henry, she had attempted on several occasions to converse privately
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17 with Cromwell about her marital problems, but he had refused her re- ———
18 quests. Since knowledge of Henry’s incapacity is largely based on letters Normal Page
19 Cromwell later addressed to him, it would certainly have been interesting PgEnds: TEX
20 to the details of Anne of Cleves’s life if Cromwell had discussed with her
21 those trying times with the king. 32
[61], (9)
22 Forged documents, especially letters, offer another kind of archival
23 fiction. Three letters that Anne Boleyn allegedly wrote, for example, are
24 almost certainly forgeries. It is entirely likely that the seventeenth-century
25 Catholic writer Gregorio Leti either created or mistranslated two of them
26 to prove her guilty, in the Chapuys tradition, of lasciviously destroying
27 Henry’s union with Catherine of Aragon. These two documents reveal
28 her as aggressively seeking to wed Henry and as contemplating avenging
29 the perceived wrongs of his minister, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, who did
30 not favor her marriage. Most scholars now recognize them as forgeries
31 primarily because Leti’s transcripts are the earliest version of them. 33
32 A third alleged letter of Anne’s can be traced somewhat further back in
33 time but only to an Elizabethan transcript. She supposedly sent this mes-
34 sage to Henry after he had ordered her imprisoned in the Tower of London
35 for adultery with five men. The document has inaccurate information and
62 warnicke
1 alludes to his “fancy” for other women, a charge that she was unlikely to
2 make in a message pleading for justice and clemency. Furthermore, at the
3 Tower the king’s officials monitored her activities closely and prevented
4 her from sending communications abroad. 34
5 Like the Leti documents, this Elizabethan letter is probably a forgery,
6 but it is possible that the intent of its author was not so malicious as Leti’s
7 seems to have been. The Elizabethan transcript could have been a product
8 of educational practice in the premodern world. It was the custom, as
9 can be seen from Lady Grace Mildmay’s youthful experience, for tutors
10 to require their pupils to compose letters to improve their writing skills.
11 It was also one of three usual domestic activities, the other two being
12 needlework and Scripture reading, that their guardians assigned to girls [62], (10)
13 to prevent them from falling into the idleness that bred wicked thoughts
14 and deeds. 35 Some students could have composed letters that they believed Lines: 55 t
15 famous people, such as Anne Boleyn, might have written. B. A. Lees has
———
16 determined, for example, that the letters allegedly written by Eleanor of
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17 Aquitaine to Pope Celestine III were instead created in a schoolroom. 36 ———
18 Besides fictitious archival statements, misinformation in numerous Normal Pag
19 secondary early modern accounts has entered the infrastructure of Tudor PgEnds: TE
20 biographies. Thomas More’s portrait of Richard III with a misshapen
21 back and Nicholas Sander’s depiction of Anne Boleyn with six fingers and
[62], (10)
22 a wen have come to frame their lives. Except in the case of Richard III,
23 these accounts have usually implanted a more negative attitude toward
24 female than male subjects. Sander, a Catholic priest who wrote several
25 decades after Anne’s death, almost certainly reversed the neo-Platonic
26 ideal in drawing up his now famous description of her, since no extant
27 contemporary record describes her with irregular features. To disparage
28 her and her daughter, Elizabeth, the Protestant queen of England, he
29 created Anne’s fictitious body, which outwardly represented the evil that
30 he believed permeated the core of her inner self. In this example, his
31 gender bias reinforced and intersected with a religious bias that resulted
32 in the creation of a monstrous, witchlike woman. 37
33 Another example of a religious bias informing a gender bias can
34 be found in the work of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, the late
35 seventeenth-century Protestant historian of the English Reformation.
Reshaping Tudor Biography 63
1 Burnet had valid reasons for favoring the marriage of Henry and Anne of
2 Cleves in 1540 since her brother-in-law, Frederick, duke elector of Saxony,
3 was a principal leader of the German Lutherans. The king’s successful
4 union with Anne could have greatly solidified English contacts with Ger-
5 man reformers and, from Burnet’s point of view, could have led to the
6 Protestant conversion of England at an earlier date than that at which
7 it actually occurred. In his disappointment at the marriage’s failure, the
8 bishop chose to ridicule and demean Anne’s looks. Having noted that,
9 upon viewing her for the first time, Henry questioned whether she was
10 as “fair” as others had claimed, Burnet labeled her a “Flander’s Mare”
11 and charged the great artist, Hans Holbein the Younger, with having
12 painted a flattering portrait of her to deceive the king. No contemporary [63], (11)
13 evidence supports these assertions. Several eyewitnesses referred to her
14 as beautiful, and Nicholas Wotton, an English ambassador who in 1539 Lines: 62 to 6
15 viewed both Holbein’s portrait and Anne’s visage, judged that it was a
———
16 realistic image of her. Just as important to the refutation of the bishop’s
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17 accusations, which were not written until well more than one hundred ———
18 years after the marriage ended, is the career of Holbein, whom Henry Normal Page
19 continued to employ as an artist until Holbein died from natural causes. 38 PgEnds: TEX
20 Modern biographers of Tudor women have, with few exceptions, in-
21 discriminately blended gender bias in the archives with gender bias in the
[63], (11)
22 secondary sources. Most writers quote Burnet’s statements about Anne
23 of Cleves verbatim, as though he were one of her contemporaries. On
24 the other hand, since Sander’s description of Anne Boleyn’s body was
25 truly excessive, scholars have often reduced her sixth finger to an extra
26 fingernail and her wen to a mole. 39 In these works, the woman’s looks,
27 motivations, goals, and significance lie buried under centuries of fictions.
28 Freeing Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, among others, from this bias in
29 which they are judged largely by their appearance is a serious and ongoing
30 enterprise, and much work has yet to be done.
31 In addition to authenticating the fiction in the archives and validating
32 the erroneous claims of early modern accounts, some biographers, in pro-
33 cessing evidence from Tudor rites of passage, have committed the error
34 that Robin Winks warned against when he said, “It is profoundly unhistor-
35 ical to read back our habits and behavior into an age many hundred years
64 warnicke
1 past.” 40 Part of the confusion arises from the assumption that Christian
2 practices have remained constant over time, but just the opposite is true.
3 For example, today’s parents, as well as godparents, when it is relevant,
4 attend the christenings of infants, and widowed spouses routinely par-
5 ticipate in public funeral services. Early modern protocol was different,
6 especially with reference to the royal family.
7 First, as to christenings, since new mothers remained secluded in their
8 lying-in chambers until up to forty days after childbirth, they were un-
9 able to attend the first rites of their infants, who were usually christened
10 when they were a few days old. Moreover, since the children, especially
11 in royal christenings, held the premier place in the ritual, monarchs, who
12 would necessarily upstage them by their presence, had to be absent. Thus, [64], (12)
13 although historians have claimed that Henry was disappointed with Eliza-
14 beth’s sex, his dismay was not the reason he did not attend her christening; Lines: 67 t
15 custom required his absence. To prove this assertion it is necessary to note
———
16 only that in 1537 he did not participate in the christening of his son, the
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17 future Edward VI. 41 ———
18 Although the next example of the misinterpretation of a religious cer- Normal Pag
19 emony does not apply to either Anne of Cleves or Anne Boleyn, it is PgEnds: TE
20 important in further documenting recent modern confusion about early
21 modern practices. Monarchs did not usually attend the last rites of passage
[64], (12)
22 for individuals of lesser social rank. Unaware of this custom, historians
23 have speculated erroneously as to why James I was absent in 1619 from the
24 funeral of his somewhat estranged wife, Anne of Denmark. He may well
25 have been ill, and he seems to have harbored a “horror of death,” as they
26 suggest, but even had he been perfectly healthy and with no particular
27 revulsion for mournful scenes, he still would not have been present at
28 his wife’s public services. Since heralds were in charge of conducting the
29 death rituals of the reigning monarch, if custom had dictated James’s
30 attendance at the last public rites of his wife, the mother of his children
31 and a representative of Denmark in England, he would have complied
32 unless, of course, he had actually lain bedridden. Otherwise, his breach
33 of protocol would have greatly offended members of the Danish royal
34 family. 42
35 To support this conclusion, it is possible to point to the absence of
Reshaping Tudor Biography 65
1 two Tudor monarchs from their wives’ burial services, for which they have
2 received no negative criticism in modern writings. Elizabeth of York’s hus-
3 band, Henry VII, who has often been characterized as financially shrewd,
4 funded a lavish funeral for her. Despite this great expenditure, he was
5 not present at her public rites in 1503 because, according to Michael
6 van Cleave Alexander, who quoted a Tudor writer, the inconsolable king
7 “Privily departed to a solitary place, and would no man should resort unto
8 him.” 43 In 1537 his namesake son, Henry VIII, deeply upset about the
9 death of his wife Jane Seymour in childbirth, ordered Thomas Howard,
10 third duke of Norfolk, and Sir William Paulet to arrange her burial, and
11 then retired to a solitary place. 44
12 Another death custom perplexing to modern historians is the con- [65], (13)
13 demned persons’ expressions of their feelings in their final speeches.
14 Many, such as the alleged lovers of Anne Boleyn, who were probably Lines: 73 to 7
15 innocent of the specific crimes for which they were to suffer execution,
———
16 nevertheless admitted their guilt, although mostly in a general sense. 45
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17 They confessed for at least three reasons: the wish to protect their families ———
18 from further punishment, the desire to obtain more merciful or quicker Normal Page
19 deaths, and the hope to facilitate their passage through purgatory. Since PgEnds: TEX
20 early modern Christians identified themselves as the heirs of Adam, whom
21 God had expelled from paradise, they believed that they had inherited his
[65], (13)
22 sinful nature and were deserving of death. Even as they admitted their
23 general guilt as human beings, they begged the king’s forgiveness and
24 remarked kindly about his character. This was the expected procedure.
25 Whether the condemned actually felt that much remorse is another mat-
26 ter, but in the ars moriendi tradition, they were preparing for death in the
27 hope of eternal bliss: One’s final speech was not a time to settle earthly
28 scores. 46
29 Two other rituals concerning Henry VIII’s family are also interesting.
30 Henry absented himself, as expected, from the public celebration of Anne
31 Boleyn’s coronation in 1533 because of hierarchical considerations, but
32 he actually performed a customary greeting ceremony for Anne of Cleves
33 in 1540. While his expected absence from Anne Boleyn’s coronation has
34 caused little comment, since he was clearly still hoping his pregnant
35 wife would be delivered of a live male child, 47 his incognito greeting of
66 warnicke
1 From their early years, while they did not anticipate marrying a monarch,
2 they expected to wed the heir of a noble house. The problem with this
3 conceptualization was that it seemed to reduce their lives to their sexual
4 and biological functions. Kathleen Berry later articulated this dilemma
5 in an essay on the life of Susan B. Anthony when she said, “To define
6 women by their sexuality and reproductivity is to remove them from the
7 progression of history.” 52 It is also true, however, as Carolyn Heilbrun
8 has affirmed, that until the eighteenth century the two topics on which
9 women could speak with some authority were those concerning family
10 and religion. 53
11 Earlier biographers viewed Anne Boleyn as a religious reformer, as a
12 home wrecker, as a witch, and even as a courtly lover, but the bulk of the [68], (16)
13 extant evidence did not seem to support those roles. As the title of my
14 book indicates, I chose to place her life within the larger framework of Lines: 85 t
15 her family ties and patronage relationships at court. So much information
———
16 in the study processed the evidence of her networking with relatives and
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17 clients that I felt it necessary to deny in the preface that my work could ———
18 be defined as a traditional biography. 54 In so doing, I accepted, without Normal Pag
19 knowing it, the spirit of Richard Wortman’s earlier statement in 1985 PgEnds: TE
20 about Russian intelligentsia: “The experiences of the individual become
21 historically meaningful to me only when they are set in the context of
[68], (16)
22 the experiences of others with similar concerns.” He went on to explain,
23 “I have approached biography as a way to comprehend history, to un-
24 derstand movements and currents of thought by examining the lives of
25 individuals who contributed to them.” 55 In other words, interpreting Anne
26 Boleyn’s life within her family and kinship network not only leads us to a
27 fuller understanding of her as a person but also to a fuller understanding
28 of the workings of politics at the Tudor court.
29 Far from viewing Anne Boleyn as a flirtatious, manipulative woman
30 who single-handedly wrecked the king’s first marriage, I saw her as an
31 important player in family and kinship strategies. That the king eagerly
32 courted her is irrefutable, for he expressed his love in seventeen extant
33 letters to her. It seemed to me that once they were wed, she operated on the
34 assumption that the political future of herself and her ambitious relatives
35 depended on her ability to bear a healthy male heir. In that sense, her
Reshaping Tudor Biography 69
1 Carl Pletsch (Hillsdale nj: Analytic Press, 1985), 1; Parke, Biography, xv, reports that
2 in public libraries biography stacks are located next to fiction, a placement that
3 signals the libraries’ recognition of their popularity; Stephen B. Oates, ed., “In-
4 troduction,” in Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on Their Art (Amherst:
5 University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), ix, reports that biographical titles have
6 doubled since the 1960s.
7 12. Retha M. Warnicke, “The Conventions of Courtly Love and Anne Boleyn,”
8 in State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Charles Carlton (Thrupp,
9 England: Sutton, 1998), 103–18.
10 13. Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 375.
14. Winks, Historian as Detective, xiv.
11
12
15. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (1837–41; [74], (22)
reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1965), 5:136.
13
16. J. H. Plumb, “The Private Grief of Public Figures,” Biography and Truth, ed.
14 Lines: 133
Stanley Wientraub (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967), 12–14.
15
17. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry ———
16
VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191–233. For a survey of * 24.5002
17 ———
the historical caricatures of Henry VIII, see Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Truth in
18 Normal Pag
Masquerade: A Study of Fashions in Fact (New York: Roy Publisher, 1951), 100–118.
19 * PgEnds: Ej
18. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, vol. 8.
20
19. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964),
21 108. [74], (22)
22 20. Dickens, English Reformation, 108.
23 21. Both resided at schismatic courts and were probably antipapal, but no
24 evidence exists that they otherwise doubted the validity of the seven sacraments of
25 the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 151–62; Warnicke, The
26 Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge
27 University Press, 2000), 63–93.
28 22. James A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of
29 Elizabeth (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1870), 8:67, 74, 134–147.
30 23. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 216.
31 24. See also Natalie Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Other Tellers in
32 Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
33 25. W. C. Richardson, Mary Tudor: The White Queen (London: Peter Owen,
34 1970), 3.
35 26. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 8–10; Lacey B. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and
Reshaping Tudor Biography 75
1 Times of Catherine Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 209–11. For Christina, see
2 Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 40–43.
3 27. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 12–35.
4 28. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 1–3, 104, 114.
5 29. Paul Friedmann, Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History, 1527–1536 (Lon-
6 don: Macmillan, 1884), 1:viii. For a modern history that relies on Chapuys, see E.
7 W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
8 30. Malcolm Gaskill, “Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Mod-
9 ern England,” Social History 22 (1998): 1–30. See also Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities
1 43. Michael van Cleave Alexander, The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VII and
2 His Reign (Totowa nj: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 185.
3 44. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S.
4 Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
5 1862–1932), 8:ii, #1060.
45. Froude, History of England, 2:482–87.
6
46. K. Jankofsky, “Public Executions in England in the Late Middle Ages: The
7
Indignity and Dignity of Death,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 10 (1979): 43–4;
8
Lacey B. Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,”
9
Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 482; Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 232, 303, n. 57.
10
47. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 124–30.
11 48. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 127–35; idem, “Henry VIII’s greeting of Anne of
12 [76], (24)
Cleves, and Early Modern Protocol,” Albion 28 (1996): 565–86.
13 49. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 135–36.
14 50. For a discussions of how biographers choose their topics see Baron, “In- Lines: 202
15 troduction,” Introspection in Biography, 3.
———
16 51. Craig Kridel, ed., “Introduction,” Writing Educational Biography: Explorations
11.60022
17 in Qualitative Research (New York: Garland, 1998), 94; Nadel, Biography, 154. ———
18 52. Kathleen Berry, “Toward a Theory of Women’s Biography: From the Life of Normal Pag
19 Susan B. Anthony,” Women and Biography, 28. PgEnds: TE
20 53. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton,
21 1988), 25.
54. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, ix.
[76], (24)
22
55. Richard Wortman, “Biography and the Russian Intelligentsia,” in Introspec-
23
tion in Biography, 157.
24
56. Ives, Anne Boleyn, 374.
25
57. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 11.
26
58. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 184–86, 229–57. Actually, one of the official
27
grounds for divorce was that she was already married to the heir of Lorraine.
28 Documentation that Henry VIII did not possess proves that she was not. She and
29 her Cleves contemporaries were all in agreement on this point.
30 59. Milton Lomask, The Biographer’s Craft (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 41.
31 60. Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (London:
32 MacMillan, 1999), 4–6, has not entirely successfully used this method. She tried to
33 compensate for the difficulty with her presentation by giving her readers a short
34 synopsis of his life in the Introduction.
35 61. Nadel, Biography, 7, 103, discusses a point of view.
Reshaping Tudor Biography 77
1 efforts. Undertaking this study helped push me down the road toward
2 becoming a professional historian.
3 My next experience was similar. In graduate school I had to write a
4 master’s thesis. I was already interested in foreign policy, and I wanted to
5 knock off this thesis with dispatch. Therefore, I used what I had learned
6 about the era of Reconstruction to write about Charles Sumner’s role in
7 blocking the Grant administration’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo.
8 This was also a good experience, but, as I said, I regarded this as a means
9 to an end.
10 The end was to get on to twentieth-century political history, especially
11 as it affected foreign policy. Since there have been many persons who have
12 played great roles in that arena, I could have stuck with biography. As a [80], (2)
13 matter of fact, my first published article was a speculative biographical
14 essay about a great isolationist, Senator William E. Borah of Idaho. But Lines: 18 to
15 for my dissertation I forsook biography to study isolationism itself. That
———
16 dissertation became my first book. 1
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17 For my second book, it was back to biography. My subject was Walter ———
18 Hines Page. I shall say more about him and about this book when I get Normal Pag
19 into the three aspects of writing biography. All I want to say about Page PgEnds: TE
20 now is that he was good company over the several years that I spent with
21 him, and he confirmed me in my taste for biography. 2
[80], (2)
22 My next book and thus far only other published biography was differ-
23 ent. It belongs to a rare genre: comparative biography. In this case, the
24 subjects I was comparing were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
25 This was also a most enjoyable and stimulating experience. 3
26 Those reflect nearly all of my experiences as a biographer. I have not
27 done a book-length biography since the comparative one on Roosevelt
28 and Wilson, but I do plan to get back into the trenches quite soon.
29 Now, let me turn to the three “c” words that make up the title of this
30 chapter conception, conversation, and comparison. I want to discuss
31 each one in light of what people in the eighteenth century called “the
32 lamp of experience.”
33 By conception, I do not mean the formation of interpretative concepts,
34 although that is an important aspect of biography. What I mean here is
35 how biographers choose their subjects. From my reading of biographers
Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 81
1 with his name. It stuck in my head when I read Allan Nevins’s Ordeal of the
2 Union in a class on the Civil War era. Then I repeatedly encountered him,
3 first as one of the maverick Republicans in the Johnson trial, next as an
4 1872 Liberal Republican, and finally, near the end of his life, as a Populist
5 and legal mentor to Clarence Darrow.
6 With Page, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of him.
7 As a college senior, while I was waiting for a class section to begin in
8 the office of my favorite professor (an English, not a history, professor)
9 I picked a book off his shelf. It was The Training of an American: The Earlier
10 Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page by Burton J. Hendrick. Later, in grad-
11 uate school, I encountered Page as a full-throated imperialist in 1898,
12 and then, when I worked with the Wilson papers for my dissertation, [86], (8)
13 I kept encountering his letters as ambassador. These epistles stood out
14 for several reasons. They were much longer than almost anything that Lines: 69 t
15 passed across the president’s desk. Moreover, although most people’s
———
16 correspondence was typewritten, these letters were written in a clear,
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17 beautiful handwriting that even then usually came from the pens of only ———
18 professional calligraphers. Finally, also unlike most of the letters Wilson Normal Pag
19 received, these were not restrained, balanced statements of pros and cons PgEnds: TE
20 of policy. They were unabashed pleas for the United States to back the
21 Allies, especially Britain, in the war. The only element of restraint in these
[86], (8)
22 letters was the muted criticism of Wilson’s policies, which Page vented in
23 his sporadically kept diaries. I kept wondering, who was this guy? Where
24 did he get off writing to the president like that? 9
25 Likewise, with Roosevelt and Wilson, I can remember exactly when the
26 thought of comparing them first crossed my mind. It was when I first
27 read these two sentences in Robert Osgood’s great book Ideals and Self-
28 Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: “In some respects, Roosevelt comes
29 into sharpest focus when he is placed opposite Wilson, for there was
30 something elemental in his antipathy for that good gentleman. One is
31 reminded of Nietzsche’s distinction between the Warrior and the Priest.”
32 Those sentences fascinated me in part because of the time and place at
33 which I read them. It was 1964 and I was a graduate student at Columbia,
34 just starting my dissertation. For more than a decade before, questions
35 about the relationship of intellectuals to power had been rife, especially
Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 87
1 among New York’s literati and scholars. Frankly, the way those folks
2 asked and answered questions bothered me. They argued over intellectu-
3 als’ “alienation” from power, and, despite their being smitten with Adlai
4 Stevenson and John Kennedy, they usually came down on the side of
5 exalting such alienation as the only proper stance toward power. 10
6 Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson struck me as outstanding
7 counterexamples to those views. Here were two persons who were intel-
8 lectuals as well as seekers after and wielders of power. Moreover, they be-
9 lieved that they could pursue both callings with little or no friction, much
10 less contradiction. The invocation of Nietzsche’s figures seemed to me
11 to differentiate them perfectly. That loose term “intellectual,” I thought,
12 covered two distinct types the artist on one side and the scholar or [87], (9)
13 scientist on the other. Roosevelt appeared to me an artist whose medium
14 was political power, someone who used ideas and concepts to inform Lines: 73 to 7
15 and refine the practice of his art. Wilson struck me as the scholar whose
———
16 medium was also political power, someone who used power to implement
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17 his ideas and ideals. ———
18 Why, you may ask, do I mention that interpretation now, as part of the Normal Page
19 personal fascination? Doesn’t this fit the category of scholarly inspiration PgEnds: TEX
20 that often animates historian-biographers when they choose subjects?
21 Isn’t this an example of conception in the other sense, that is, the intel-
[87], (9)
22 lectual concepts that a scholar brings to the subject? In one way, it is,
23 but it fits into my experience differently. Perhaps if I had run with those
24 concepts right away and done a scholarly article or book rather quickly
25 I would have stuck with those concepts. Fortunately for me, well over a
26 decade and two books intervened before I began work on the book on
27 Roosevelt and Wilson.
28 I say fortunately because the kind of conception for a biographer that
29 I am talking about saved me from the hazards of the other kind of
30 conception namely, having preconceived notions and thereby making
31 a biography, or any other work of history, a self-fulfilling prophecy. One
32 of the things that neither historians nor biographers talk much about is
33 the need to surrender themselves in some measure to their subjects. We
34 need to retain the capacity for surprise and the willingness to follow our
35 subjects down paths that we did not foresee or even down paths that take
88 cooper
1 repeating what had gone before him. There is, therefore, an inescapable
2 obligation to read your predecessors carefully in order to discover where
3 you are original and where you are not. In the case of Roosevelt, I found
4 that I was following in the footsteps of George Mowry and John Morton
5 Blum. When I read their works, I was continually struck by how right they
6 had gotten it with Roosevelt. What I was doing, I hoped, was traveling
7 further down the trail that they had begun to blaze. 14
8 With Wilson, however, I found myself largely on my own. Of my pre-
9 decessors, I found that only Arthur Link had begun to see Wilson the
10 way I did, and Link had done that only in the later volumes of his Wilson
11 biography. In those volumes, he had quietly overturned his central inter-
12 pretation of Wilson in the earlier volumes and in his widely read book, [90], (12)
13 Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. I was doing more openly what Link
14 had done quietly. I was rejecting the Nietzschean priest view of Wilson as Lines: 91 to
15 an uptight, rigid, self-righteous, sometimes messianic idealist who could
———
16 not bend to the needs of the real world. I also overturned the view that
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17 Link, Richard Hofstadter, and many others had propounded of Wilson as ———
18 a conservative who became a progressive slowly, reluctantly, and strictly Normal Pag
19 opportunistically. Instead, I recognized that Wilson was always a worldly PgEnds: TE
20 thinker, a person who loved power almost as much as Roosevelt did, and
21 someone whose political evolution had really gone from disengagement
[90], (12)
22 to engagement and from the general to the particular. 15
23 Those are perhaps the most important advantages that I gained from
24 picking subjects who interested me in and of themselves, apart from any
25 views and ideas that I brought to them. Frankly, I distrust any biographer
26 who does not have a similar interest. This is what allows her or him to
27 question and change preconceived ideas and to appreciate the subject in a
28 richer and truer way.
29 Now let me turn to my second “c” topic conversation. In one way, all
30 biographies are conversations with their subjects. By reading their written
31 words or, with many subjects since the 1930s, listening to their recorded
32 voices or watching their actions on film or videotape, biographers engage
33 in conversations with their subjects. Most of those conversations but
34 not all consist of listening to the subjects, then questioning and talking
35 back to them by examining their actions, motives, and thoughts. That
Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 91
1 conversation can sometimes take bizarre forms. I have never had a dream
2 in which I talked to one of my subjects, but I have seen and heard them in
3 dreams. Once, in the case of Page, I awoke in a cold sweat, worried about
4 whether I was being fair to him and maybe wrongfully imposing my view
5 of him. Such experiences do count as conversations.
6 What interests me most, however, about biographers’ conversations is
7 something less common: when biographers can actually talk to and mine
8 the memories of their subjects and people who knew them. In some cases,
9 the subject is still living and the biographer can talk directly to her or him.
10 Two of my favorite recent examples are Randall Woods’s biography of
11 William Fulbright and Robert Goldberg’s biography of Barry Goldwater. 16
12 Both of them have told me that they gained a lot from meeting and talking [91], (13)
13 with their subjects, but they have also told me that what they gained was
14 a feeling for those men rather than specific information. They have said Lines: 97 to 10
15 that friends, family, and associates were more helpful for specifics and
———
16 perspectives.
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17 My subjects were long dead by the time I came to study them. In fact, ———
18 they had been gone so long that I had few opportunities to talk with anyone Normal Page
19 who had known them. Personal encounters came in my work on Page. An PgEnds: TEX
20 aged nephew of his gave me some valuable personal impressions, as did
21 the economic historian Broadus Mitchell, who, when a boy, had met Page.
[91], (13)
22 Most of my conversations with people who knew my subjects have been
23 secondhand, that is, reminiscences about them, and others’ interviews
24 of their contemporaries. This is called “oral history.” That term has long
25 amused me. It is a fancy name for something that people have been doing
26 since time immemorial. Even the ancients talked to their subjects when
27 they could, and picked the brains of their friends and foes.
28 In its twentieth-century usage, “oral history,” the systematic search for
29 and recording of memories of a subject, antedates the coining of the term.
30 It really began with the biographers of two of my subjects. Both Page’s
31 and Wilson’s first, authorized biographers were journalists Burton J.
32 Hendrick and Ray Stannard Baker. This pair did what came naturally
33 to them. They interviewed people who had known their subjects. They
34 sought out reminiscences. They targeted their inquiries to shed light on
35 particular aspects of their subjects’ lives and events in their careers. Finally,
92 cooper
1 they preserved transcripts of their interviews and copies of the letters they
2 received for use by others. They were practicing oral history two decades
3 before the term was coined because they were doing things that it had
4 never occurred to them not to do. 17
5 Hendrick’s and Baker’s records of their interviews and the reminiscing
6 correspondence that they solicited constitute vital records about their sub-
7 jects, second in importance only to the actual correspondence and diaries
8 by and about the men. In addition, Baker had Wilson’s brother-in-law,
9 Stockton Axson, read and criticize the manuscript of the biography. Ax-
10 son’s observations give a kind of blow-by-blow commentary on Wilson’s
11 life. At about the same time, in the 1920s, Axson also wrote a memoir of
12 [92], (14)
his acquaintance with Wilson, although it was not published until 1993.
13 That book ranks alongside Owen Wister’s Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
14 as the most intimate and insightful account of its subject by a contempo- Lines: 103
15
rary. Comparing what Axson wrote in that memoir with his comments on ———
16
Baker’s manuscript adds to the insights about Wilson. 18 14.0pt P
17 ———
With the Wilson oral histories there is an additional advantage. In
18 Normal Pag
the late 1930s Henry W. Bragdon reinterviewed many of the people whom
19 * PgEnds: Ej
Baker had talked to a decade earlier. Bragdon was also able to talk to some
20
people who had either refused to talk to Baker or had spoken with him only
21
guardedly. This second round of interviews provides both more informa- [92], (14)
22
tion and a second set of perspectives on Wilson’s earlier years. Another
23
of Wilson’s journalist-biographers, William Allen White, interviewed a
24
number of people, including some of Wilson’s enemies. Unfortunately,
25
26 White does not seem to have saved his notes from those interviews. If he
27 had, it would be possible to use those notes along with the work done by
28 Baker and Bragdon to triangulate Wilson in people’s memories. 19
29 That kind of triangulation or multiple perspective is even more im-
30 portant in oral history than in traditional document-based work. There
31 is an old Chinese saying, “Palest ink is stronger than brightest memory.”
32 Fresh ink isn’t always completely reliable, however. The clearest examples
33 of this come from diaries. My first subject, Page, kept sporadic diaries,
34 and it is sometimes possible to compare what he says there with what it
35 says in other contemporary documents. Page was pretty reliable, but the
Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 93
1 way things looked to him did not always square with how they looked to
2 others.
3 With Wilson, the problem is more acute. The greatest diary about him
4 was kept by his close friend and adviser, Edward M. House. Everyone who
5 works on Wilson and his politics and foreign policy between 1913 and 1920
6 has to rely on Colonel House’s diary. This indispensable source provides
7 information about Wilson’s thought and actions that often cannot be
8 found anywhere else. But the great problem with House’s diary is that it
9 stands alone for most of the time that he knew Wilson. 20
10 As others have noted, people who keep diaries and write memoirs rarely
11 portray themselves in a bad light, and they almost never minimize their
12 own importance. This is especially so with Colonel House. Furthermore, [93], (15)
13 he was a devious, manipulative person. His diary has to be used with
14 great caution, not so much because he tells lies although he sometimes Lines: 111 to 1
15 does but more because he makes himself look more important, and
———
16 Wilson less important, than he was. House also attributes motives and
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17 attitudes to Wilson that are questionable, especially in cases in which ———
18 Wilson was not following House’s advice as much as the colonel wanted Normal Page
19 him to. PgEnds: TEX
20 Fortunately, there are two possible ways of checking on the reliability of
21 the House diary. One way is to consult one of the few recorded comments
[93], (15)
22 that Wilson made about House to a third party. In August 1915, Wilson
23 was in hot pursuit of Edith Bolling Galt and wrote intimate letters to her.
24 The widow Galt had taken an instant dislike to House and may have been
25 jealous of his intimacy with her suitor. Though he defended House to her,
26 Wilson did admit that “you are right in thinking that intellectually he is
27 not a great man. His mind is not of the first class. He is a counselor, not
28 a statesman. And he has the faults of his qualities.” That comment alone
29 casts House in a different light from his self-portrait in his diaries. 21
30 The other check on those diaries comes from 1919, when House and
31 Wilson were at the peace conference in Paris. At the president’s side were
32 several other people who kept diaries. Particularly notable were Wilson’s
33 physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, and the chief press officer of the del-
34 egation and future Wilson biographer, Ray Stannard Baker. Frequently,
35 Wilson would tell one of them, most often Grayson, about the same
94 cooper
1 are two kinds of music country and western and I like them both.” I
2 spoke sincerely because there is a lot I do like in both men, and there is
3 also plenty that I dislike in both of them. But I was ducking the question
4 because the world really is divided into two sects, each worshipping one
5 and despising the other. I tried my best to avoid taking sides, but in the
6 eyes of some people I did not succeed.
7 The book I wrote is not a comparative study of these men. Rather, it is
8 a comparative biography. I followed them in parallel through their lives.
9 I told each man’s story with an eye on the other. At first they led widely
10 separated lives that truly did run parallel. But at a critical point in both of
11 their lives, the parallel lines bent into intertwining ones and never again
12 separated. [95], (17)
13 I do not pretend to be a unique practitioner of this form of biography.
14 Coincidentally, my book appeared at roughly the same time as two other Lines: 131 to 1
15 comparative biographies. One was Alan Brinkley’s book on Huey Long
———
16 and his fellow radical demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin. The other
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17 was John Thomas’s biography of Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and ———
18 Henry Demarest Lloyd. They did the same thing that I did. They examined Normal Page
19 and recounted their subjects’ lives and careers in parallel and in conjunc- PgEnds: TEX
20 tion, always with an eye on the other or others. More recently, Charles
21 Royster has done a comparative biography of those two overweening Civil
[95], (17)
22 War generals, Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman. 24
23 I think all these books succeeded in exploring dimensions of their
24 subjects that could not be captured, or at least not captured so well, in
25 single-life, freestanding biographies. If I may be immodest, I think I did
26 fairly well at this job too.
27 Let me give some examples of what I believe I contributed by writing a
28 comparative biography of Roosevelt and Wilson. Comparison is a matter
29 of judging both similarities and differences. The similarities between
30 these two men too often got lost, even in comparative studies of them.
31 Nietzsche’s warrior and priest seemed to explain them to most of the
32 people who studied them, even when those students were not aware that
33 they were using those categories. For me, there was a real danger that I
34 might have remained enthralled by those categories if I had not ventured
35 beyond a comparative study into a comparative biography.
96 cooper
1 Examining both men’s early lives and first attractions to politics made
2 the profound similarity, often identity, of their views unmistakable. I have
3 already recounted how I came to reject the Nietzschean priest category
4 for Wilson. Let me give another example of their profound similarity.
5 One of the biggest surprises for anyone who looks at Wilson between
6 1898 and 1900 is discovering what an enthusiastic imperialist he was.
7 Only a keen ear for the differences in the two men’s styles enables one
8 to tell Roosevelt’s utterances about the Spanish-American War and its
9 imperialist consequences from Wilson’s. They were making the same two
10 basic points. First, they argued that the acquisition of an overseas empire
11 signified America’s ascent into the ranks of the world’s great powers a
12 development that they both welcomed. Second, they saw this event as a [96], (18)
13 good thing in itself and perhaps more important to them they believed
14 that this newfound involvement in world politics would supply a new, Lines: 141 t
15 nobler, more elevating agenda for politics at home.
———
16 Let me dwell on this particular similarity just a bit longer. This was not
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17 just a case of Wilson’s being an armchair Rooseveltian, somebody who ———
18 cheered the troops and the fleet from the sidelines. According to Stockton Normal Pag
19 Axson, Wilson was going through what was perhaps a mild midlife crisis PgEnds: TE
20 at this time and told him, “I get so tired of a talking profession.” There is
21 no evidence that the forty-one-year-old Wilson thought of joining up and
[96], (18)
22 going to war, but it may well have crossed his mind. His deep discontent
23 with the content of current politics led to an abortive collaboration with
24 Roosevelt, whom he had met several years earlier. During his brief service
25 as vice-president, Roosevelt hatched a plan to interest young men from
26 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in public affairs, and he invited Wilson to
27 visit him at Sagamore Hill to discuss the idea in the summer of 1901. Roo-
28 sevelt’s sudden succession to the presidency soon afterward sidetracked
29 that scheme, but when Wilson became president of Princeton the next
30 year, Roosevelt applauded and exclaimed, “Woodrow Wilson is a perfect
31 trump.” 25
32 This particular similarity also serves to illustrate the other advantage of
33 comparative biography exposing and delving into differences between
34 the subjects. Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt did go off to fight, and he became
35 a war hero and a rapidly rising political star. Why is there this difference?
Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 97
1 I think it comes down to one thing the disparity in their economic and
2 social backgrounds and circumstances. Both men had young children,
3 but Roosevelt was moderately wealthy and did not have to support his
4 family through his earnings, as Wilson did.
5 F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The rich are different from you and me.”
6 Ernest Hemingway retorted, “Yes, they have more money.” But there is
7 more to the difference than the comparative weights of Wilson’s and
8 Roosevelt’s pocketbooks. I would amplify Fitzgerald’s comment to note
9 that it makes a huge difference by what means and how long ago the rich
10 people in question acquired their money and the social standing that went
11 with it.
12 The most striking difference between Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s back- [97], (19)
13 grounds even more striking than their families’ being on opposite sides
14 in the Civil War was that Roosevelt belonged to an aristocracy. He came Lines: 145 to 1
15 from a family that had enjoyed wealth and social position for so long
———
16 that it could and did disdain newcomers to the ranks of the wealthy, and
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17 the moneygrubbing practices that had gotten them there. An individual’s ———
18 pursuits were to be valued more than his wealth. Such pursuits might Normal Page
19 include art, science, literature, learning, public service, and, in Roosevelt’s PgEnds: TEX
20 view, military service. Roosevelt defied his social peers’ disdain for politics
21 by becoming a quasi-professional politician, but aristocratic assumptions
[97], (19)
22 and values always guided him, even when he believed he was most radical
23 in his policies and programs. Much about Roosevelt really did come down
24 to an effort to preserve aristocratic values in a democratic and materialistic
25 time and place.
26 Contrast Roosevelt and Wilson. As a youth, Wilson was equally at-
27 tracted to politics and public service. He would have loved to take the
28 route that Roosevelt took. But he had neither the wealth nor the social
29 status of the other man. I am not trying to make Wilson seem a com-
30 moner. He came from a social and intellectual elite within his region and
31 culture the ministry, specifically, the Presbyterian ministry. But such a
32 background made him what is now called a “meritocrat” an exemplar
33 and exponent of the triumph of talent, particularly intellectual talent.
34 Moreover, unlike Roosevelt, he did not come from the richest and most
35 powerful part of the country. Rather, he hailed from an impoverished and
98 cooper
1 have said it before, and I will say it again: I think this was the greatest
2 campaign in American history bar none. Of course, doing a compara-
3 tive biography was not the only way to come to an appreciation of the
4 profundity of their differences, but it certainly helped. Knowing what
5 brought the two men to where they stood in that campaign serves better
6 than anything else to make one recognize what was at stake.
7 Finally, on this point, let me turn away from my own experience to
8 make a comment on this type of biography. There are some other com-
9 parative biographies around. I have named four that have appeared in
10 the last twenty years. Comparison is a rich and fascinating approach. But
11 I also think it is a severely limited approach. I believe that comparative
12 biography has limited application because there are relatively few his- [99], (21)
13 torical figures who are truly comparable. In order for this approach to
14 work for the historian-biographer, the subjects need to be at least roughly Lines: 155 to 1
15 contemporary and to have interacted with each other. It can be argued
———
16 that in other fields, such as literature or science, it would be possible to
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17 do comparative biographies of people who were widely separated in time ———
18 or unknown to each other. I think, however, that subjects such as these Normal Page
19 push the work back into comparative study. For comparative biography in PgEnds: TEX
20 other fields, I think you need subjects to have been contemporaries and
21 at least known of each other. Bach and Handel might be good candidates
[99], (21)
22 for a comparative biography, if one does not already exist.
23 Comparative biography is a powerful method. From my own experi-
24 ence I believe that this approach can supply perspectives that yield rich
25 results that may not be attainable otherwise. But that experience also led
26 me to believe that this approach is extremely limited. There are lots of
27 subjects who can lend themselves to dual biographies with some compar-
28 ative features. Three examples that come to mind are Abraham Lincoln
29 and Stephen Douglas, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur,
30 and John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. 27 But I do not think that in
31 the end truly comparative biographies of these subjects can be written.
32 I wish this method had a wider applicability, but I do not think it has.
33 For myself, despite my delight and respect for this approach, I have no
34 plans to write another comparative biography. My most recent work, a
35 study of the debate and conflict over American membership in the League
100 cooper
1 Harvard University Press, 1983), and Charles Royster, Destructive War: William Tecum-
2 seh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
3 25. Ray Stannard Baker interview with Stockton Axson, 12 March 1925, Ray
4 Stannard Baker Papers, Library of Congress, box 99; Roosevelt to Cleveland H.
Dodge, 16 June 1902, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cam-
5
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 3:275.
6
26. White, Wilson, 264.
7
27. I am indebted to Professor Kenneth Winkle of the University of Nebraska–
8 Lincoln for suggesting Lincoln and Douglas as subjects for comparative biogra-
9 phy.
10 28. The book on the League fight is Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow [Last Page]
11 Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press,
12 2001).
[102], (24)
13
14 Lines: 216
15 Selected Bibliography
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16 Bowen, Catherine Drinker. Adventures of a Biographer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. 16.21121
17 . Family Portrait. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. ———
18 . The Writing of Biography. Boston: The Writer, 1951. Normal Pag
19 Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression. PgEnds: TE
20 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
21 Coben, Stanley. A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University Press,
1963. [102], (24)
22
Cooper, John Milton, Jr. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American. Chapel Hill:
23
University of North Carolina Press, 1977.
24
. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cam-
25 bridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
26 Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
27 Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
28 Royster, Charles. Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson and the
29 Americans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
30 Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest
31 Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
32 Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
33 Woods, Randall B. Fulbright: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
34
35
1 5. Ut Pictura Poesis; or, The Sisterhood of
2
3 the Verbal and Visual Arts
4
5
6 Nell Irvin Painter
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [103], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 18
15 As a biographer, I propose to bring together two ordinarily separate fields,
———
16 black studies and art history. I urge biographers particularly of subal-
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17 tern subjects to break their methodological habits and make full use of ———
18 pictures. “Subaltern subjects” refers to individuals who are oppressed on Normal Page
19 account of their group identity, for instance, white women and members PgEnds: TEX
20 of stigmatized minorities. In recognition of the possibility of subaltern
21 subjects’ exercising power over others, the term “subaltern” conveys the
[103], (1)
22 complexity of subordinate identities. Images contain a wealth of meaning
23 about biographical subjects and about the cultural and historical conven-
24 tions that mold subaltern identities.
25 African American studies understandably regards European cultural
26 history with a certain distrust, for Western civilization has denigrated peo-
27 ple of African descent since the institutionalization of the Atlantic slave
28 trade and the building of American culture around the political economy
29 of African slavery. Scholarship and popular culture express their negro-
30 phobia differently; whereas much scholarship pretends black people do
31 not exist, popular culture has offered an abundance of stereotypes. Before
32 the late twentieth century, black people all too often appeared in words or
33 pictures as objects of insult. The combination of blindness and indignity
34 still dismays Africana scholars and discourages us from burrowing too
35 deeply into Western thought.
104 painter
1 Truth published her Narrative of Sojourner Truth and presented her life
2 story to feminists and abolitionists, the Harvard naturalist Louis Agas-
3 siz commissioned a South Carolinian daguerreotypist to take “specimen”
4 photographs of enslaved plantation workers (figure 2).
5 Agassiz’s photos show black adults naked to the waist, facing the
6 camera, captured as “types,” such as became common throughout the
7 colonized world for more than a century. The unnamed people who appear
8 in these specimen photos are always foreign and nearly always of color.
9 They do not represent themselves as individuals but as “types” of people,
10 like exhibits in museums of natural history precisely their instigators’
11 intention. Today students of cultural studies see such photographs as
12 prime examples of Othering, of establishing hierarchies of race and “civ- [108], (6)
13 ilization.” This is not the way Sojourner Truth chose to present herself.
14 Truth also avoided the other typical representation of black women, Lines: 51 to
15 the happy darky of minstrelsy and the cook-mammy of the illustrators
———
16 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling 1851–52 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
0.0pt Pg
17 Stowe’s Aunt Chloe drew upon and phenomenally reinforced the stereo- ———
18 type of the dark-skinned, female plantation slave cook, invariably a fat, Normal Pag
19 bossy mammy. Subsequent mammy figures are legion the most famous PgEnds: TE
20 comes from the twentieth-century descendant of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in popu-
21 lar culture. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and the 1939
[108], (6)
22 movie it inspired brought Hattie McDaniel an Oscar for best supporting
23 actress. (She was the first black actor to receive an Oscar, which remains
24 a rare honor for black actors to this day.) This famous black woman of
25 Gone with the Wind has no name beyond “Mammy.” Her predecessors, too,
26 existed only as satellites of white characters. By contrast, no other people
27 appear in Sojourner Truth’s photographs. She alone occupies the entire
28 frame.
29 Minstrelsy, although predominantly a male medium, occasionally fea-
30 tured the odd blacked-up woman or men dressed as women. This un-
31 dated image literally a stereotype circulated for some forty years in the
32 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dressed in work clothes,
33 this figure expresses unrestrained motion. Her dance takes her off her
34 feet and thrusts her backward. Her big-lipped white mouth gapes open,
35 her big feet and hands are spread wide apart. The very embodiment of
1
2
1. Cover, Nell Irvin Painter,
3 Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol
4 (New York: W. W. Norton,
5 1996). The photo was taken in
1864 by an unidentified pho-
6
tographer. National Portrait
7 Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-
8 tion, Washington dc.
9 2. Daguerreotype by Louis
10 Agassiz. Joseph T. Zealy, 1850.
Courtesy of the Peabody Mu-
11
seum of Archaeology and Eth- [109], (7)
12 nology, Harvard University.
13 Photographs by Hillel Burger.
14 Lines: 95 to 9
15
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16
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17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 PgEnds: TEX
20
21
[109], (7)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
110 painter
1 more completely framing a dark face), a black suit, and a waistcoat. But
2 the shoulders are less wide and the clothing less perfectly tailored. Most
3 striking to this viewer is the hair, here visibly African, despite careful
4 combing. This Douglass, betraying hints of anger or distrust, is conceiv-
5 able as a former slave, for his demeanor conveys less complacency and his
6 complexion appears less smoothly flawless than in the painted portrait.
7 This Douglass has known fear and rage.
8 A detour from this daguerreotype of Douglass leads to a daguerreotype
9 portrait of Douglass’s colleague on the antislavery circuit, Charles Lenox
10 Remond (figure 6).
11 A few years older than Douglass, Remond (1810–1873) had been born
12 free in Salem, Massachusetts. He and Douglass toured together in the [114], (12)
13 1840s. Although Douglass quickly began to outshine Remond as a public
14 figure, they remained colleagues, not only against slavery, but also in favor Lines: 156
15 of women’s suffrage. Remond belongs to the legion of distinguished
———
16 black Americans without full-length, scholarly biographies. When his
0.0pt Pg
17 appears, I hope it will follow Remond’s visual clues of self-fashioning. ———
18 Historiography invariably describes him merely as African American. But Normal Pag
19 this daguerreotype presents an additional dimension of his identity, his PgEnds: TE
20 Native American lineage and culture.
21 Today brown-skinned Massachusetts Indians appear regularly in
[114], (12)
22 courts of law to protect their tribal rights. In the 1850s Remond was
23 telling everyone looking at his portrait that he was Indian as well as
24 African. Frederick Douglass’s daguerreotype contains no Indian iconog-
25 raphy, such as Remond’s hairdo. But regarded in light of Remond’s hair,
26 Douglass’s facial features raise questions about his ethnic background
27 that biographers have so far ignored. 15
28 The 1845 engraved frontispiece of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick
29 Douglass (figure 7) falls between the painted and daguerreotype portraits.
30 Here Douglass appears less romantic than in the painting, less coiled than
31 in the daguerreotype. The floppy cravat reinforces the literary appearance
32 of the gentleman above the signature and corroborates the subtitle of his
33 narrative: Written by Himself.
34 These three portraits of Frederick Douglass present a schema he con-
35 trolled, in terms of the media (paint, photograph, engraving) and the
1
2
6. Charles Remond daguerreo-
3
type. Samuel Broadbent (1810–
4 1880). Daguerreotype, 10.8 x 8
5 cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.), circa 1850.
6 Boston Public Library/Rare
Books Department Courtesy of
7 the Trustees.
8
7. Narrative frontispiece and title
9 page, Frederick S. Voss, Majestic
10 in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of
11 Frederick Douglass (Washington
dc: National Portrait Gallery and [115], (13)
12 the National Park Service, United
13 States Department of the Interior
14 by the Smithsonian Institution
Lines: 199 to 1
Press, 1995). Courtesy of the Li-
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116 painter
1 way he presented himself in dress and pose. None of these three por-
2 traits includes the kind of background that usually appears in the studio
3 images of the 1860s. Nonetheless it is clear from his posture and his
4 dress that Douglass is a man of the indoors. He looks more or less
5 refined, more or less authentic, more or less literary in each represen-
6 tation. The differences among them shrink further in comparison with
7 another contemporary image of Douglass, which appears on the cover
8 of sheet music by the Hutchinson singers, the musical stalwarts of the
9 antislavery movement. Douglass’s self-fashioning effaces visual traces of
10 his slave origins and emphasizes his mastery of the codes of gentlemanly
11 autonomy. The Hutchinson music’s image, however, connects him to his
12 degraded past (figure 8). [116], (14)
13 In both its iconography and its caption, this image reinforces Dou-
14 glass’s connection to slavery. Barefooted and in work clothes (a loose, Lines: 199
15 open-necked, patterned shirt, no tie, light-colored trousers), Douglass
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16 carries his meager belongings in a pillowcase and holds a cudgel. The
0.0pt Pg
17 slave catchers in the background to the left (barely visible in this repro- ———
18 duction, unfortunately) remind viewers that he is in peril and that he Normal Pag
19 is owned. The trees and bushes put him out of doors and in proximity PgEnds: TE
20 to nature. The words surrounding the image also reinforce Douglass’s
21 usefulness as an antislavery icon: “The Fugitive’s Song,” “A Graduate from
[116], (14)
22 the Peculiar Institution,” “His Brothers in Bonds,” “Fugitives from Slavery.”
23 This was emphatically not Douglass’s own self-fashioning, not as a young
24 man, not as an elder statesman.
25 Throughout his life Douglass continued to protest racial injustice, even
26 though the success of his greatest cause propelled him out of the role of
27 radical and into the rank of éminence grise. Times changed as well, so that
28 the Great Man of the Gilded Age, the stalwart of the reigning Republican
29 party dressed and expressed himself differently from the younger, ante-
30 bellum abolitionist. Two post–Civil War portraits one photographic, the
31 other sculptural materialize his mature greatness in conventional terms.
32 In about 1865 Douglass sat for Marcus Aurelius Root, the most skilled
33 portrait photographer of the era and author of the 1864 photographic
34 textbook The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic Art. 16 A master of
35 the semiotics of every facet of photographic portrait making, Root set
1
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33 8. The Fugitive’s Song. Cour-
tesy of the Library Company of
34
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
35
118 painter
1 women. The few such images that existed were likely to be highly stereo-
2 typed and/or degrading images of the black woman, not of a particular
3 person, and certainly not having biographical intent.
4 Douglass’s and Truth’s portraits declare black Americans’ continuing
5 preoccupation with the documentation of their existence as people worthy
6 of respect. Douglass’s and Truth’s imagery supplied information that, in
7 its absence, was assumed not to exist. Douglass was cognizant of ne-
8 grophobic stereotypes, but Duke Ellington’s photographs from the 1920s
9 and 1930s appeared in a popular culture full of degrading depictions and
10 much closer in time to our own era. Ellington’s image of elegant sophis-
11 tication simultaneously contradicts and interrogates the racial caricature
12 surrounding him caricature that has faded from the historical record. [120], (18)
13 Absence was one fact of nineteenth-century black iconography; stereo-
14 type was another. Frederick Douglass railed against the latter in 1849, well Lines: 254
15 before the full elaboration of antiblack imagery of the following century:
———
16 “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists.
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17 It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black ———
18 men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And Normal Pag
19 the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have developed PgEnds: TE
20 a theory dissecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.” 18
21 In the nineteenth century (as in the twentieth and twenty-first), stereo-
[120], (18)
22 typical depictions of black people appeared far more frequently than
23 those black people themselves projected. The increasing prevalence of
24 all kinds of images in the twentieth century lent increased prominence
25 to the antiblack, controlling images against which black self-fashioning
26 contended. By the time Duke Ellington became well known, black bod-
27 ies appeared often in American popular culture. Symbols of ridiculous
28 fun, uproarious entertainment, or criminal menace, they remained ab-
29 sent from depictions of respectability except as servant-accoutrements.
30 Duke Ellington, the subject of both conventional, text-based biography
31 and abundant visual documentation, provides an ideal case study of the
32 role of controlling images in black visual autobiography.
33 Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899–1974) was called “Duke” early on
34 in tribute to his elegance. Ellington was born into a working-class fam-
35 ily with ambitious style, and he credited his father, a butler, for having
Ut Pictura Poesis 121
1 through the first half of the twentieth century. uso entertainment dur-
2 ing World War II included blackface minstrelsy. “Amos ‘n’ Andy” lasted
3 nearly forty years and more than ten thousand broadcasts on radio
4 and television. 21
5 Minstrelsy so dominated modernist New York theater that even the
6 great breakthrough black shows and performers of the 1920s could not
7 escape its reach. In Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s 1921 Broadway hit
8 Shuffle Along, the most influential black comedy team of the era, Flournoy
9 Miller and Aubrey Lyles, appeared in blackface (figure 15). Even leading
10 performers in this Harlem Renaissance showcase of black talent by black
11 writers had to repeat the minstrel-darky tropes of open mouths, rolling
12 eyes, white lips, and utter mystification. [124], (22)
13 Josephine Baker came out of the same milieu (figure 16). She began
14 her rise to stardom in the New York entertainment world of Blake, Sissle, Lines: 325
15 and Ellington, figuring in the chorus line of Shuffle Along and appearing in
———
16 Sissle and Blake’s second Broadway show, The Chocolate Dandies, in 1924.
0.0pt Pg
17 The crossed eyes and little-girl outfit could be seen on other contemporary ———
18 female performers like Fannie Brice, but the white lips, spread legs, and Normal Pag
19 gigantic feet come straight from minstrelsy and reproduce its Sambo- PgEnds: TE
20 esque motifs.
21 Biographies of Ellington and histories of American popular culture
[124], (22)
22 seldom mention the plethora of stereotypical images that filled the en-
23 tertainment media of his time. The silence from the black side of a long-
24 standing color bar relates to the preservation of dignity: Not wishing to
25 diminish their own humanity, black people refrained from commenting
26 on these all-too-familiar but degrading images. In an article on Duke
27 Ellington, the critic and essayist Albert Murray complained of this kind
28 of self-censorship. Murray grumbled that black biographies and auto-
29 biographies read like “case histories” and “sociopolitical abstractions”
30 intended to illustrate theories of blackness rather than evocations of real,
31 fully rounded lives. 22
32 Coming to terms with stereotype has been no easier on the other side of
33 the color line. Nonblack observers and scholars also find minstrel images
34 embarrassing and generally forego mention of everyday manifestations
35 of the humiliation of Negroes. Unless an author’s subject is antiblack
1
2
15. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey
3 Lyles, Shuffle Along. Billy Rose
4 Theater Collection, The New
5 York Public Library for the Per-
forming Arts, Astor, Lenox and
6
Tilden Foundations.
7
16. Josephine Baker, 1924. Billy
8 Rose Theater Collection, The
9 New York Public Library for the
10 Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations.
11
12 [125], (23)
13
14 Lines: 366 to
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[125], (23)
22
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25
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33
34
35
126 painter
10 10. For a fuller discussion of Truth’s portraits, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner
Truth, A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 185–99.
11
12
11. Important biographies of Frederick Douglass include the following: Philip [128], (26)
S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, A Biography (New York: Citadel Press, 1964); Benjamin
13
Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Waldo E.
14 Lines: 387
Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
15
Press, 1984); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, ———
16
1990). * 24.5002
17 ———
12. Frederick Voss, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Wash-
18 Normal Pag
ington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery and the
19 * PgEnds: Ej
National Park Service, 1995).
20
13. Voss, Majestic in His Wrath, 22. Emphasis in original.
21 14. On nineteenth-century depictions of black men, see Richard Powell, [128], (26)
22 “Cinqué,” American Art 11 (fall 1997): 48–73, and Richard Yarborough, “Race,
23 Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic
24 Slave,’ ” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist
25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 166–88.
26 15. The Douglass daguerreotype also contains hints that Douglass might have
27 shared an ethnic background with a Southerner from a later century, Elvis Presley.
28 16. Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic Art (Phil-
29 adelphia, 1864; reprint, Pawlet vt: Helios, 1971). Regarding Root, see Trachten-
30 berg, Reading American Photographs, 28–32, 41–42.
31 17. The Douglass carte-de-visite from the Root studio was by Samuel Root. See
32 Voss, Majestic in His Wrath, 71.
33 18. Quoted in Deborah Willis, Reflections in “Black”: A History of Black Photogra-
34 phers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), xvii.
35 19. Ellington received the Presidential Medal of Honor on his seventieth birth-
Ut Pictura Poesis 129
1 day in 1970. See United States Postal Service, I Have a Dream: A Collection of Black
2 Americans on U.S. Postage Stamps (n.p., n.d.), 17.
3 20. My analysis builds on Hazel Carby’s perceptive discussion of Paul Robe-
4 son’s images in Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45–83.
But whereas Carby contrasts the way Nickolas Muray photographed Robeson
5
with how Robeson presented himself (64–66), I contrast the controlling images
6
surrounding Ellington with his own self-fashioning.
7
21. Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York:
8 Oxford University Press, 1986), 86–89, 167–173.
9 22. Albert Murray, “Duke Ellington Vamps ‘Til Ready,’ ” in Chant of Saints: A
10 Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and
11 Robert B. Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 441. See also Albert
12 Murray, “Ellington Hits 100,” The Nation, 22 February 1999, 23–29.
[129], (27)
13 23. Several recent studies focus on blackface minstrelsy and stereotype, e.g.,
14 Boskin, Sambo; Thomas Laurence Riis, More Than Just Minstrel Shows: The Rise of
Lines: 410 to 4
15 Black Musical Theatre at the Turn of the Century (Brooklyn ny: Institute for Studies in
American Music, 1992); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American ———
16
Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Annemarie Bean, James V. * 61.1572pt
17 ———
Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-
18 Normal Page
Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover nh: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Dale
19 * PgEnds: PageB
Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge:
20 Cambridge University Press, 1997); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Per-
21 formance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1997); [129], (27)
22 William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and AnteBellum
23 American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and an insight-
24 ful novel by Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters. (Cane Hill Press, 1994; Amherst:
25 University of Massachusetts, 2000).
26 24. Quoted from Herman Gray, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” Black:
27 Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 175. See also Henry Louis Gates
28
Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,”
29
Representations 24 (fall 1988): 129–55, and Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel,
30
eds., Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
31
32
33
34
35
130 painter
1 Selected Bibliography
2 Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford
3 University Press, 1986.
4 Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
5 Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics
6 of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.
7 Foner, Philip S. Frederick Douglass, A Biography. New York: Citadel Press, 1964.
8 Gardiner, James. Who’s a Pretty Boy Then? One Hundred and Fifty Years of Gay Life in
Pictures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
9
Golden, Thelma. Black: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.
10
New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.
11
Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro- [130], (28)
12
American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
13
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
14 Martin, Waldo E. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: University of North Lines: 426
15 Carolina Press, 1984. ———
16 McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. 8.60022
17 Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago ———
18 Press, 1986. Normal Pag
19 , ed. The Language of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. PgEnds: TE
20 , ed. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
21 Quarles, Benjamin. Frederick Douglass. Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
[130], (28)
22 Reid-Pharr, Robert F. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New
23 York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
24 Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: mit
25
Press, 1996.
26
Stecopoulos, Harry, and Michael Uebel, eds. Race and the Subject of Masculinities.
27
Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
28
Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
29 Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Cam-
30 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
31 Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
32 Walker Evans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.
33 Voss, Frederick. Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass. Washington
34 dc: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery and the
35 National Park Service, 1995.
Ut Pictura Poesis 131
1 Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying The Underground
2 Tradition of African American Humor that Transformed American Culture, Slavery to
3 Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
4 Willis, Deborah, ed. Picturing US: African-American Identity in Photography. New York:
New Press, 1994.
5
Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.
6
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
7
8
9
10
11
12 [131], (29)
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1 6. Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer
2
3 and Does It Matter? The Necessity of Biography
4 in the History of Philosophy
5
6
7 Robert J. Richards
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [133], (1)
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15 On 10 August 1802, an anonymous review appeared in the influential
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16 journal Die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, a journal that was a bit like the
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18 a rather obscure pamphlet, “Lob der allerneusten Philosophie” “Praise Normal Page
19 of the newest Philosophy.” It was a title ironically meant. 1 The broad- PgEnds: TEX
20 side reported that a medical candidate, Joseph Reubein, had produced
21 a thesis very much like that of Friedrich Schelling, the young ideal-
[133], (1)
22 istic philosopher at Jena that showed how death could be overcome.
23 To the sardonic description of Reubein’s views, the author added and
24 this sentence was prominently quoted in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung:
25 “Heaven protect Reubein that he does not meet a patient whom he idealis-
26 tically cures but really kills a misfortune that befell Schelling at Bocklet
27 in the case of M. B. as some malicious people say.” On reading this,
28 Friedrich Schelling became benumbed with fury and, I suspect, rather
29 depressed with not a little guilt. His first thoughts were to seek judicial
30 action against the alz or to go directly to the ducal court for redress. The
31 death to which the review referred was that of Mademoiselle Böhmer
32 M. B. Auguste Böhmer. Auguste’s death a year and a half earlier had
33 had a cataclysmic effect on Schelling’s life, and he obviously still had
34 not gotten over it. 2 Auguste Böhmer was thought by some to have been
35 Schelling’s fiancée probably not, I think. She was, though, the daughter
134 richards
1 didn’t collapse and return to the ancient order. The initial wave of German
2 successes finally crashed against debilitating dysentery, shortage of food,
3 and a regrouped French force, which now began moving the enemy armies
4 out of France and back into Germany. Indeed, the French troops began
5 taking German cities in the Rhineland, and finally Mainz fell. Forster’s
6 wife, Therese, with their two children, abandoned the city; but Forster
7 remained to help establish a new democratic government. He thus dared
8 treason, braced only with an enlightened faith in democracy and Caroline
9 Böhmer by his side. Caroline moved into his house to help secure the
10 new dispensation, and thus herself became, in the eyes of the opposing
11 German authorities, a dangerous and degenerate traitor.
12 During the French occupation of Mainz, Caroline had a brief liaison [142], (10)
13 with a French lieutenant, Jean Baptiste Dubois Crancé. It lasted only about
14 a month and a half. He had to depart in advance of the counterattacking Lines: 66 t
15 German armies. The city was put under siege, but Caroline escaped with
———
16 Auguste. However, on the way back to Braunschweig, where her mother
0.0pt Pg
17 now lived, they were captured. Caroline was thought to be the mistress ———
18 of Forster she was called the whore of the Revolution. She was thrown Normal Pag
19 into prison with her daughter. In these wretched conditions, with many PgEnds: TE
20 of the Mainz revolutionaries going to the gallows just outside her cell, she
21 discovered that she was pregnant with the French lieutenant’s child. In
[142], (10)
22 this pitiable state, she wrote to all her friends and those of her father. Wil-
23 helm von Humboldt and her brother Philip bargained with the Prussian
24 king for her release. Meanwhile, the faithful Wilhelm Schlegel rushed to
25 her side with the poison she had requested, to end her misery and her
26 disgrace. Before she could take the fatal draught, she was released on her
27 brother’s bond and promise. Schlegel brought her to Leipzig, and there
28 arranged for his brother, Friedrich, to care for her during her pregnancy,
29 while he returned to Amsterdam to earn the money necessary to keep
30 them all going.
31 Friedrich Schlegel, who would be the instigator of the Romantic move-
32 ment in Jena, was a man of remarkable intellectual gifts, with a genius
33 for love, and, as it turned out, hate. Friedrich fell deeply in love with this
34 pregnant radical, the woman he thought destined for his own brother. He
35 stayed with Caroline through her pregnancy and the baptism of the infant,
Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 143
1 whom Friedrich referred to as the little Citizen Wilhelm Julius Cranz; the
2 child died shortly after baptism.
3 Caroline returned with her daughter to her mother’s house in Braun-
4 schweig, and in July 1795 Wilhelm Schlegel came from Amsterdam to be
5 with them. Caroline wrote Friedrich Schlegel that his brother now pre-
6 ferred to speak and write in French and that he “thinks differently of my
7 friends, the republicans, and is certainly no longer an aristocrat. . . . And
8 I will soon teach him passion then will my instruction be complete.” 18
9 The next year the instruction seemed to have taken, for they married,
10 and then immediately moved to Jena, where Schlegel had been called to
11 the university. Caroline helped in her husband’s literary ventures, com-
12 [143], (11)
menting on his translations of Shakespeare into German and even writing
13 some essays under his name. Their home became a favorite meeting place
14 for friends sharing their temperament, which did not include the misogy- Lines: 70 to 7
15
nistic Friedrich Schiller. He still regarded Caroline as a dangerous radical, ———
16
and later referred to her as Madam Lucifer. When Friedrich Schlegel came 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
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18 Normal Page
with Novalis living close by, the salon of the Schlegels was the place to be.
19 * PgEnds: Eject
And Schelling was there. They would gather in the evenings with some
20
good wine and cold beef, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, “to sympoetize
21
and symphilosophize, and yes to symlaze-about.” 19 This group of friends [143], (11)
22
constituted the Jena Romantics, and their interactions gave rise to the
23
literary, philosophical, and scientific movement of that name.
24
From the beginning, Caroline found the young philosopher Schelling
25
26 he was twelve years her junior to be a fascinating intellect, and more.
27 Initially they waged the typical sexual-intellectual wars that bespoke an
28 underlying deeper attraction. She gave an account of their preliminary
29 skirmishes to Novalis in a letter in the fall of 1799: “Concerning Schelling,
30 no one ever dropped so impenetrable a veil. And though I cannot be to-
31 gether with him more than six minutes without a fight breaking out, he is
32 far and away the most interesting person I know. I wish we would see him
33 more often and more intimately. Then there really would be a wrangle.
34 He is constantly wary of me and the irony of the Schlegel family. He is
35 always rather tense, and I have not yet found the secret to loosen him up.
144 richards
1 had meddled (pfuschet) in the treatment. 27 And, indeed, he did alter the
2 treatment prescribed by the doctor.
3 When Schelling returned from visiting his parents at the beginning
4 of July, he found Auguste ill. He called in a local doctor, who followed
5 the Brownian medical practice. The doctor prescribed opium mixed with
6 gum arabic and tincture of rhubarb. The rhubarb was presumably to
7 moderate the constipation that opium would induce. Schelling removed
8 the gum and rhubarb from the prescription he thought them too much
9 an emetic for her condition and saw to it that the opium was in a smaller
10 dose than originally recommended. Actually, all of this was probably a
11 wise move, since typhus kills through dehydration. But Schelling did
12 confess to Wilhelm Schlegel that he felt terribly guilty because he had [146], (14)
13 trusted the local physician. 28 These circumstances were sufficient and
14 the moral offense at his relations with Caroline so heated that rumors Lines: 99 t
15 of his culpability took wing, eventually bringing the charge that appeared
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16 in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, quoted at the beginning of this essay.
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18 affair with Caroline and it eventuated in her divorce from her husband Normal Pag
19 Wilhelm Schlegel and her marriage to Schelling in 1803 during this PgEnds: TE
20 time, when he also felt the crushing guilt, however unwarranted, for the
21 death of Auguste, he was moving toward a break with his mentor Fichte.
[146], (14)
22 Though Schelling initially endorsed Fichte’s epistemological and meta-
23 physical conception that everything exists for and in the ego, his scientific
24 work and his developing ideas about the independence of natural phe-
25 nomena moved him slowly away from that starting point. Nevertheless,
26 as late as March 1800 he proclaimed, in his System des transzendentalen
27 Idealismus, that his position was essentially the same as that of the author
28 of the Wissenschaftslehre.
29 But during this time of reconsideration of his philosophical stance,
30 from the beginning of 1801, Schelling interpreted Fichte’s absolute ego
31 as an individual subject one of many such subjects; and as such it, too,
32 needed to be explained, not simply assumed. Schelling now believed that
33 the explanation had to invoke an absolute, a state that was neither subject
34 nor object, but both indifferently something akin to Spinoza’s Deus sive
35 Natura whence individual egos and their world would emanate. Method-
Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 147
1 And wouldn’t that emotional fuel be required to alter the path that one
2 might take through a logical maze of ideas? That is, seen from the jejune
3 perspective usually attained by scholars writing the history of philosophy
4 or science, bare ideas have, I think, no power to urge one this way or
5 that. From this perspective, ideas, as David Hume, for instance, portrayed
6 them, are completely effete, impotent. Schelling, simply from the logical
7 point of view, could have stayed on the path originally cut by Fichte, a path
8 he seemed content with as late as March 1800. Nothing in the antecedent
9 ideas per se required him to move as he had. Certainly the logical thicket
10 became no less dense along the path he finally took; rather, it was fraught
11 with more difficulties. Schelling needed emotional fuel and direction to
12 propel him one way rather than another. His love of Caroline certainly [148], (16)
13 the arrow that pierced the solipsistic Fichtean ego to convince him of a
14 reality beyond the self and the death of Auguste a burden impossible Lines: 113 t
15 for a lonely ego to bear provided, I think, both the impetus and the
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16 direction for his change of philosophical position.
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17 The final push came from Caroline. She wrote Schelling in March ———
18 1801, as their desperate love hardened into an impervious shield against Normal Pag
19 the world: PgEnds: TE
20
21 It occurs to me that for all Fichte’s incomparable power of thought, his
powerful mode of drawing conclusions, his clarity, exactness, his direct [148], (16)
22
intuition of the ego and the inspiration of the discoverer, that he is yet
23
limited. . . . When you have broken through a barrier that he has not
24
yet overcome, then I have to believe that you have accomplished this,
25
not so much as a philosopher if I’m using this term incorrectly, don’t
26
scold me but rather because you have poetry and he has none. It leads
27
you directly to production, while the sharpness of his perception leads
28
him to consciousness. He has light in its most bright brightness, but
29 you also have warmth; the former can only enlighten, while the latter
30 is productive. . . . In my opinion, Spinoza must have had far more po-
31 etry than Fichte if thought isn’t tinctured with it, doesn’t something
32 lifeless remain therein? 30
33
34 I believe Caroline was correct. Without the poetical and affective configu-
35 ration of ideas, which give direction and power to those ideas, something
Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 149
1 lifeless does remain therein. Schelling’s own ideas could hardly have
2 found a more loving efflation to lift them from the reflective plane of pos-
3 sibility and send them on the trajectory they actually took. Three months
4 after receiving that letter, Schelling quickly published his Darstellung meines
5 Systems der Philosophie, which explicitly signaled his break with Fichte.
6 What I’ve tried to show in this essay is the general proposal concerning
7 the nature of intellectual history, namely that ideas must be pulled along
8 by more than merely logical cords. After all, from a set of premises, an
9 infinite number of conclusions can be drawn, but only a finite trail can
10 be taken. What, then, will force the decision to take one permissible path
11 rather than another? I think it will be the usual springs of action the
12 interests, passions, and desires that can be comprehended only by unrav- [149], (17)
13 eling the fabric of a life, rather than merely by dissecting abstract ideas.
14 The historian has to unknot the skein, so that all the strands can be Lines: 123 to 1
15 appreciated. But to be convincing, the good historian will also reweave
———
16 the threads to touch the emotions of readers, so that they might feel
8.92407pt
17 something of the forces that drove the actors to take one path rather than ———
18 another. I think that’s the only way to produce real conviction, rather than Normal Page
19 simply notional assent. PgEnds: TEX
20 To answer, then, the question of my title: Yes, Auguste’s death, and all
21 that it represented, mattered a great deal to Schelling’s life and to his
[149], (17)
22 philosophy, as well as to my general thesis.
23
24
25
Notes
26
1. Anonymous review of “Lob der allerneusten Philosophie,” Allgemeine Literatur-
27
Zeitung, no. 225, 10 August 1802, 329.
28
2. The screed against Schelling was more than a veiled protest against the
29
untimely death of a young girl. Franz Berg, author of the Lob der allerneusten Philoso-
30 phie, was a religiously conservative theologian who connected Schelling’s ideas
31 with those of the atheist Fichte. And Berg and Schütz, editor of the alz, also
32 reacted against the Brownian medical theories and the Romantic attitudes that
33 supported those views.
34 3. William Earle, “William James,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Ed-
35 wards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 4:241.
150 richards
10 for a philosophical system is not a dead stick of furniture that one can lay aside or
select; rather it animates the very soul of the man who has it.”
11
12
6. I treat Schelling’s difficulties more extensively in my Romantic Conception of [150], (18)
Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
13
2002).
14 Lines: 138
7. Friedrich Schelling, Über Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosopheme der Altesten
15
Welt, in Schellings Werke (Münchner Jubilaumsdruck), ed. Manfred Schroter, 12 vols. ———
16
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927–1959), 1:1–44. * 24.5002
17 ———
8. Fichte works out these ideas in a treatise he composed between 1794 and
18 Normal Pag
1795. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, in Fichtes
19 * PgEnds: Ej
Werke, 1:83–328.
20
9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Friedrich Jacobi, 30 August 1795, Johann Gottlieb
21 Fichte, Briefe, ed. Manfred Buhr, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag Philip Reclam, 1986), [150], (18)
22 183–84.
23 10. Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus,
24 in Schellings Werke, ed. Schroter, 1:205–66.
25 11. Friedrich Schelling to his parents, 4 September 1797, F. W. J. Schelling. Briefe
26 und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, 3 vols. to date (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1962-),
27 2:122.
28 12. Friedrich Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das
29 Studium dieser Wissenschaft (1797), in Schellings Werke, ed. Schroter, 1:77–350.
30 13. Friedrich Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Schellings Werke,
31 ed. Schroter, 2:349.
32 14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Schiller, 6 January 1798, Der
33 Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Emil Staiger (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag,
34 1966), 537–38.
35 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Christian Gottlieb Voigt, 29 May 1798,
Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 151
1 Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe (Hamberger Ausgabe), ed. Karl Mandelkow, 6 vols.
2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 2:349.
3 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tag- und Jahres-Hefte (1796), in Samtliche Werke
4 nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe), ed. Karl Richter et al., 21 vols.
5 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–1998), 14:41.
17. Caroline Böhmer to Friedrich Meyer, 17 December 1792, Caroline: Briefe aus
6
der Frühromantik, 2 vols., ed. Georg Waiz and expanded by Erich Schmidt (Leipzig:
7
Insel Verlag, 1913), 1:279.
8
18. Caroline Böhmer to Friedrich Schlegel, August 1795, in Caroline: Briefe aus
9
der Frühromantik, 1:36–67.
10
19. See the Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, 1794–1802: Seine prosaischen Jugenschriften,
11 ed. J. Minor, 2 vols. (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1882), v.
12 [151], (19)
20. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Hardenberg, 4 February 1799, Car-
13 oline: Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 1:497.
14 21. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Schelling, February 1801, Caroline: Lines: 160 to 1
15 Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:42.
———
16 22. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 28 April 1800, Friedrich Daniel
11.60022pt
17 Ernst Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Han-Joachim Birkner et al., 11 vols. ———
18 to date (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980-), 5.4:9. Normal Page
19 23. August Wilhelm Schlegel to Ludwig Tieck, 14 September 1800, quoted PgEnds: TEX
20 in Gisela Dischner, Caroline und der Jenaer Kreis (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach,
21 1979), 154.
24. Henrik Steffens to Friedrich Schelling, 20 August 1800, in Gustav Plitt, Aus
[151], (19)
22
Schellings Leben. In Briefen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869–1870), 1:305. Steffens’s
23
reaction to Auguste’s death, as his letter to Schelling indicates, was obviously
24
profound. His deep affection for Auguste can also be gleaned from Caroline’s
25
characterization of his behavior with her daughter, which she communicated to
26
Johann Diederich Gries, a Privatdozent in Philosophy at Jena and a friend of
27
several in the circle. See Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Johann Diederich Gries, 27
28 December 1799, Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 1:592–94.
29 25. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 28 July 1800, Schleiermacher,
30 Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5.4:175.
31 26. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Wolfgang von Goethe, 26 November 1800,
32 Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:19.
33 27. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 22 August 1800, in Schleierma-
34 cher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5.4:222. Dorothea maintained that Caroline treated
35 Auguste as an adult much too soon, which, along with Caroline’s affair with
152 richards
1 Schelling, had a debilitating effect. She went on to say: “The Brownian technique,
2 in this case, is not to blame. They had no physician with her other than a completely
3 unknown man from the region of Bocklet, who was no less than a Brownian. To
4 top the whole thing off, Schelling meddled in it [hinein gepfuscht]. They sent for
a physician from Bamberg only as she grew cold from the waist up. Röschlaub
5
came and found her already dead. He maintained that her sickness was lethal
6
right from the beginning; all the more unforgivable, then, is the confidence they
7
showed in not sending for a doctor right from the beginning. Shortly And now
8 the ostentation of the sorrow! We are going to remain completely silent about
9 all those people. I won’t write you anything more on this, since I am simply too
10 indignant.”
11 28. Friedrich Schelling to Wilhelm Schlegel, 3 September 1802, in F. W. J.
12 Schelling, Briefe und Dokumente, 2:432.
[152], (20)
13 29. Friedrich Schelling, Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige
14 Art, ihre Probleme aufzulösen, in Schellings Werke, 2:718.
Lines: 187
15 30. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Schelling, 1 March 1801, Caroline,
Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:58. ———
16
5.3002p
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 Selected Bibliography PgEnds: TE
20 Berg, Franz. Lob der allerneusten Philosophie. Halle: Unbekannt, 1802.
21 Dischner, Gisela. Caroline und der Jenaer Kreis. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenback, [152], (20)
22 1979.
23 Earle, William. “William James.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. vol. 4. Edited by
24 Paul Edwards. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
25 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Fichtes Werke. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte. 11
26 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971 [1834–1846].
. Briefe. Edited by Manfred Buhr. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Reclam, 1986.
27
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Stimtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münch-
28
ner Ausgabe). Edited by Karl Richter et al. 21 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag,
29
1985–1998.
30 . Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe (Hamburger Ausgabe). Edited Karl Man-
31 delkow. 6 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988.
32 . Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe. Edited by Emil Staiger. Frank-
33 furt: Insel Verlag, 1966.
34 James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et
35 al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 153
12
118–20, 124–26. See also Douglass, Bach, Johann Sebastian, 99 [159], (1)
Frederick; Ellington, Edward Kennedy Baker, Josephine, 124, 125
13 “Duke”; Truth, Sojourner Baker, Ray Stannard, 91–94
14 Agassiz, Louis, 108, 109 Barthes, Roland, 105, 107, 127n5, 127n6
Lines: 0 to 137
Albion, 71 Barzun, Jacques, 19
15
Die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 133, 146 Battle of Little Big Horn (1876), 8 ———
16 Alliance of Farmers’ Associations, 37, 45 Beard, Charles, 82 0.0pt PgVa
17 American Historical Review, 28–29 Bei Dao, 31
———
American History, teaching of, 23n53 Beijing Review, 29–30
18 Normal Page
American Indians, 11 Beiträge zur Optik (Goethe), 140
19 American West, 14–19, 24n53, 24n54 Bell, Daniel, 89 PgEnds: TEX
20 “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” 124 Bellamy, Edward, 95
Analects, 35 Berry, Kathleen, 68
21
Anne of Cleves: appearance of, 63; Betzinez, Jason, 16 [159], (1)
22 endurance of legends about, 72; biographers: approaches of, 70–71;
23 framework for biography of, 69–70; comparisons by, 94–100; conversations
and German sources, 58; greeting with subjects, 90–94; empathy of, x–xi;
24
ceremony for, 65–66; importance of and neglect of images, 105; selection of
25 family relationships to, x; judicial records subjects, 80–90; subaltern, 126
26 of, 60–61; and official grounds for Biographia literaria (Coleridge), 139
27 divorce, 76n58; and Protestantism, 57; biography: opinions about field, 55;
Warnicke’s reasons for studying, 66, 67, popularity of, ix–x, 74n11; self-
28 70–71 censorship in black, 124–26; value of,
29 Anne of Denmark, 64 13
30 annulments, 59–61, 69 Birth of a Nation, 84
Anthony, Susan B., 68 black studies, 103
31 archives, Tudor, 58–63 Blake, Eubie, 124
32 Aristotle, 105 Blum, John Morton, 90
33 Ars Poetica (Horace), 104, 105 Bogue, Allan, 18–19
art historians, 105 Böhmer, Auguste, xii–xiii, 133–34, 141,
34 art history, 103, 104 144–46, 148
35 arts, definition of, 104 Böhmer, Georg, 141
160 Index
12
for execution of, 56–57; Warnicke’s class, 14, 16–19 [160], (2)
reasons for studying, 66–67, 70–71 Coben, Stanley, 81–82
13 Book of Genesis, 137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 139
14 Book of Hours, 59 Collins, Patricia Hill, 106
Boots and Saddles (Custer), 8, 22n28 Communist party, 37–39, 42–48
Lines: 137
15 Borah, William E., 80 comparative biography, xi, 80, 94–100 ———
16 Borodin, Michael, 38, 43 complementarity, 104–5
Bourne, Randolph, 82 conception, explanation of, 80–90
0.0pt Pg
17 ———
Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 81 Confucius, 34–35, 39–40
18 The Boy General (Custer), 22n28 Congressional Record, 83 Normal Pag
19 Bragdon, Henry W., 92 Conrad, Joseph, 20 PgEnds: TE
20 Braunschweig, 143 context, ix–x, 27–28, 30, 34, 39–42, 48, 49
Brice, Fannie, 124 controlling images, 106, 120, 123, 126. See
21 Brinkley, Alan, 95 also images [160], (2)
22 Brodie, Fawn, 3–5, 8 conversation, xi–xii, 90–94
23 buffalo soldiers, 5–6 Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa
Burke, Edmund, 89 Whitman (Jeffrey), 17
24
Burnet, Gilbert, 62–63 Cooper, John Milton, Jr., vii; approach to
25 biography of Roosevelt and Wilson,
26 The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic 88–90; early experiences as biographer,
Art (Root), 116 79–80; on empathy of biographer, x–xi;
27
Carby, Hazel, 129n20 selection of subjects, 83–87
28 Carroll R. Pauley Memorial Endowment Cotton Club of Harlem, 121–23, 122
29 Symposium, vii Coughlin, Father Charles, 95
cartes-de-visite. See portraiture Crancé, Jean Baptiste Dubois, 142
30
Castillo, Richard Griswold del, 17–18 Crawford, Patricia, 53
31 Catherine of Aragon, 59, 61, 69 Creeks, 11
32 Cayuse Indians, 17 Croly, Herbert, 82, 83
Celestine III, Pope, 62 Cromwell, Thomas, 55, 58, 59, 61
33
César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (Castillo and cultural revolution, Chinese, 37, 40–41
34 Garcia), 17–18, 24n60 culture: and biography of Shen Dingyi,
35 Chapuys, Eustace, 59–60 39–42, 46–48; and challenges of writing
Index 161
1 biography, 30–35, 49; contrast between England: and cultural biases, x; gender
Eastern and Western, 29–36; and biases in, 53–56, 67–68, 70–71;
2
controlling images, 106; and history, inadequacy of archives on, 58–62;
3 ix–x, 14, 27–28; and Sojourner Truth’s judicial records of, 60–61; rites and
4 portraits, 107 customs in, 63–67; teaching history of,
5 Custer, Elizabeth Bacon, 7–8, 22n28 71–72
Custer, George Armstrong, 7, 8 Englishwomen, 53–54, 67–68, 73
6 Erickson, Erik, 3
7 Dai Jitao, 42–44, 47–48 ethics, 33
8 Dante, 136 ethnicity, 14, 16–19
Darnton, Robert, 29–30 ethnohistory, 11–12
9 Darrow, Clarence, 86 Eugen, Karl, Duke of Baden-Würtemberg,
10 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie 136
11 (Schelling), 149 Eurocentric thought, 103–4
12
death customs, Tudor, 64–65 [161], (3)
Debo, Angie, ix, 11–12, 16, 19 Fairbank, John K., 27
13 Debo, Edward, 11 family, x, 70–73
14 Debs, Eugene, 82 Family Portrait (Bowen), 81
demagogues, 82 “farmers’ associations,” 37, 45
Lines: 271 to 4
15 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 82 Fei Xiaotong, 33, 35–36 ———
16 diaries, 92–94. See also personal papers The Feminization of American Culture (Douglas),
Dickens, A. G., 57 88
0.0pt PgVa
17 ———
Dixon, Thomas, 84 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xii–xiii, 134, 136,
18 Doebler, Bettie Anne, 66 137, 139–40, 146–49, 150n5 Normal Page
19 Douglas, Anne, 88 Fish, Stanley, 1–2 PgEnds: TEX
20 Douglas, Stephen, 99 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 97
Douglass, Frederick, xii, 106, 107, 110–20, Five Tribes of Oklahoma, 11
21 113, 128n15 Following the Guidon (Custer), 8 [161], (3)
22 DuBois, W. E. B., 82, 84, 110 foreign ambassadors, 59–60
23 Forster, Georg, 141–42
Early Romantics. See Jena Romantics Foucault, Michel, 127n5
24
East Township, Yaqian, 39, 40, 47 Foxe, John, 56, 57
25 Edel, Leon, ix, xi, 8–9, 11, 12, 19–20 Frederick, duke elector of Saxony, 63
26 Edward VI, King of England, 64, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going
69–70 Down (Bogue), 18–19
27
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 99 Friedmann, Paul, 60
28 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 62 friendships, Chinese, 32
29 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 53–55, Frost, Robert, 82
57–58, 62, 64 Froude, James A., 57–58
30
Elizabeth of York, 65 The Fugitive’s Song, 116, 117
31 Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke,” xii, Fulbright, William, 91
32 106, 110, 120–24, 122, 128n19 funerals, 64–65
Elton, G. R., 55, 66–67
33
Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 2–3 Galt, Edith Bolling, 93
34 empathy, x–xi, 9 Garcia, Richard A., 17–18
35 The End of Ideology (Bell), 89 Gaskill, Malcolm, 60
162 Index
1 gender, 14, 16–19, 53–56, 62–63, 67–68, christenings, 64; on death of Jane
70–71, 73, 88 Seymour, 65; and marriage to Anne of
2
General Custer in Kansas and Texas (Custer), 8 Cleves, 60–61, 63, 65–66; and marriage
3 George, Henry, 95 to Catherine of Aragon, 61; relationship
4 George, Lord Rochford, 60 with Anne Boleyn, 56–57, 68
5 German sources, 58 Henry VII, King of England, 65
Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place Herder, Johann Gottfried, 137
6 (Debo), ix, 16 Heyme, Therese, 141–42
7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 139–40, historians: art, 105; challenges to, as
8 145 biographers, 81–83; comparisons by,
Goldberg, Robert, 91 94; need for biographies of, 18; of
9 Goldwater, Barry, 91 philosophy, 134–35, 147–49; relationship
10 Gombrich, Ernst, 105 with past, 27–29; tasks of intellectual,
11 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 108 135–36
12
Goodman, Nelson, 105 historical analysis, viii–xiii, 27–28 [162], (4)
Göttingen, 141 historical materials (wenshi ziliao), 36, 48
13 Graff, Henry F., 19 history: creation of, 27; and cultural biases,
14 Grant, Ulysses S., 5, 9–11 x; and gender, 14, 88; of ideas, xii–xiii;
Grant: A Biography (McFeely), 9–11 importance of placing subject in, 12–14;
Lines: 420
15 Gray, Herman, 126 interpretation through individuals, 68; ———
16 Grayson, Cary T., 93–94 oral, xi, 83, 91–94; political, 66–67, 72,
The Great Plains (Webb), 89 80; revitalization through biography, 19–
0.0pt Pg
17 ———
Grierson, Alice Kirk, 5–6 20; teaching English, 71–72; Tuchman
18 Grierson, Benjamin, 5–6 on biography as tool of, 2; women’s, Normal Pag
19 Gries, Johann Diederich, 151n24 3–4 PgEnds: TE
20 groups, cultural, 31–32 Hofstadter, Richard, 90
guanxi, 32, 34, 40, 47 Holbein, Hans the Younger, 63
21 Guanxi clique, 48 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 136 [162], (4)
22 The Guns of August (Tuchman), 2 Holmes, William, 82
23 Guomindang (Nationalist party), 38–40, Horace, 104, 105
42–49 Houghton Library, 85
24
House, Edward M., xi, 84–85, 93–94
25 Handel, George Frideric, 99 Howard, Catherine, 59
26 Hangzhou, 44, 47 Howard, Thomas, 65
Hangzhou’s First Normal School, 40 Humboldt, Alexander von, 138, 139, 142
27
Hardenberg, Friedrich von, 140, 143 Hutchinson singers’ sheet music, 116, 117
28 Harlan, Louis, 6–8
29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 136 idealism, 136, 147
Heilbrun, Carolyn, 68 Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign
30
Hemings, Madison, 5 Relations (Osgood), 86
31 Hemings, Sally, 4–5 ideas, history of, xii–xiii
32 Hemingway, Ernest, 9, 97 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Schelling),
Hendrick, Burton J., 86, 91–92 138–39
33
Henry, Patrick, 72 identities, ix, x, 32–33, 40–42, 44–46
34 Henry VIII, King of England: attitudes images, xi–xii, 103–8, 110, 120, 123–26. See
35 toward biographies of, 55; and also portraiture
Index 163
12
Joly, Martine, 105 Louis XIV, King of France, 66 [163], (5)
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 Lyles, Aubrey, 124, 125
13 judicial records, English, 60–61
14 justice, 56, 70, 71 MacArthur, Douglas, 99
Mainz, 141–42
Lines: 555 to
15 Kant, Immanuel, 136–38 Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick ———
16 Kellogg, Louise, 18–19 Douglass, 110, 112
Keniston, Kenneth, 34 Mao Tse-tung, 40–41
0.0pt PgVa
17 ———
Kennan, George, 82 marriage, 70–73
18 Kennedy, John, 87, 99 Mary I, Queen of England, 57–58 Normal Page
19 Kohut, Thomas, 28–29 Mary (sister of Henry VIII), 58–59 PgEnds: TEX
20 Ku Klux Klan, 10 Mattingly, Garrett, 56, 70
May Fourth Movement, 37
21 La Follette, Robert, 82 McDaniel, Hattie, 108 [163], (5)
22 “lamp of experience,” 80 McFeely, William, 2, 9–11
23 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent de, 138 McLaren, A. N., 54
League of Nations, 99–100 Memorial Hall of the Revolution, 47
24 Leckie, Shirley A., vii; on barriers between Mendelson, Sara, 53
25 personal and public, xiii; on empathy Mendelssohn, Moses, 141
26 for subjects, x–xi; on historical analysis, Mexican Americans, 18, 24n60
viii–ix; work on Griersons’ biography, 5 Michaelis, Caroline. See Böhmer-Schlegel,
27
Lees, B. A., 62 Caroline
28 Leonardo da Vinci, 126n2 Michaelis, Johann David, 141
29 Lerner, Gerda, 13–14, 23n53 Michaelis, Philip, 142
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 126 Mildmay, Lady Grace, 62
30
Leti, Gregorio, 61 Miller, Flournoy, 124, 125
31 letters, 61–62, 86. See also personal papers mimesis, 105, 110, 118
32 Levy, David, 82 minstrelsy, 107–10, 111, 122, 123–26
Lewis, C. S., 55–56 Mitchell, Broadus, 91
33
Lewis, Sinclair, 94 Mitchell, Margaret, 108
34 Life in Dakota Territory with General Custer Mitchell, W. J. T., 105
35 (Custer), 8 “mixed media” structure, 70
164 Index
1 Riedesel, Baron von, 138 and Western Hills faction, 40, 42–44,
Robeson, Paul, 129n20 48–49
2
romantische Naturphilosophie, 139 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 95
3 Roosevelt, Theodore, x, xi, 80, 83, 85–90, Shore, Miles, 28–29
4 94–100 Shuffle Along, 124, 125
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (Wister), 92 Sidonia, Medina, 56
5
Root, Marcus Aurelius, 116–18, 119 “The Significance of the Frontier in
6 Rosenstone, Robert, 27–29 American History” (Turner), 14–15
7 Royster, Charles, 95 Simonides of Ceos, 105, 127n4
rural reconstruction, 39, 44–47 Simpson, Brooks, 10
8
“sincerity,” 29
9 Sander, Nicholas, 62, 63 Sissle, Noble, 124
10 Sandoz, Mari, 19 Smith, Jean Edward, 10
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 128n8 sociology, 29
11
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph: and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (Painter),
12 [165], (7)
Auguste’s death, 145–46, 148; break with 107, 118
13 Fichte, 146–49; education of, 136–38; Souls of Black Folk (DuBois), 82
life-altering experiences of, xii; marriage sources, 35. See also primary sources;
14 to Caroline, 146; philosophy of, 133, secondary sources Lines: 885 to
15 134; relationship with Caroline, xii, 134, Spalding, Eliza, 17
143–44, 148–49; Richards’s approach to Spanish-American War, 96
———
16
biography about, 135–36; at University of Stafford, Barbara Maria, 126n2 0.0pt PgVa
17 Jena, 139–40, 143 Steffens, Henrik, 145, 151n24 ———
18 Schiller, Friedrich, 139–40, 143 stereotypes, 103, 106–8, 120, 123–26 Long Page
19 Schlegel, Friedrich, 140–45 Stevens, Thaddeus, 83 PgEnds: TEX
Schlegel, Wilhelm, 140–46 Stevenson, Adlai, 87
20 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 144, 151n27 Stilwell and the American Experience in China
21 scholarship, 103–5 (Tuchman), 2
[165], (7)
22 Schoppa, R. Keith, vii, ix–x Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 108
Schorer, Mark, 94 Strachey, Lytton, 2–3
23 secondary sources, 62, 63 structuralism, 128n8
24 self-censorship, 124–26 subaltern biographers, 126
25 self-concept, 9–12. See also private lives subaltern subjects, 103, 105, 106
self-fashioning, 123, 126 subjective idealism, xii–xiii, 136, 147
26 self-positing, 137 subjects: avoidance of preconceived
27 self-recognition, 137 notions about, 87–90; conversations
28 Seminoles, 11 with, xi–xii, 90–94; empathy for,
semiotics, 104–7, 118, 127n5, 127n8 x–xi; placement in history, 12–14;
29 sexuality, 72, 73 selection of, 80–90; subaltern, 103, 105,
30 Seymour, Jane, 56, 57, 65 106
31 Shanghai, 38, 40 Sumner, Charles, 80, 83
Shanghai Marxist cell, 37 Sun Yat-sen, 37–38
32 Shenbao, 45 System des transzendentalen Idealismus
33 Shen Dingyi: assassination of, 39, 42, (Schelling), 146–49
44–49; focus of biographer of, 33–34;
34
identities of, ix, x, 40–42, 44–46; Tenting on the Plains (Custer), 8
35 individuality of, 36–37, 49; networks of, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, 61
43, 45–49; political activities of, 37–38; Thomas, John, 95
166 Index