In the midst of a “rousing comment” at a morning session of the Organization of American Historians meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 20 April 1985, Warren Susman collapsed from a heart attack; he died at the hospital shortly after noon. Though only fifty-eight, Susman had been in chronic poor health and suffered from heart disease. His attendance at the conference despite his physical condition testifies to the importance he ascribed to the traditions and institutions of academic life. Long a member of the history department at Rutgers University, Susman was widely known as a brilliant, creative, and impassioned student of American culture, a person whom Mary Furner thought the “conscience of the discipline.” Perhaps for these reasons, he was a favorite of his students, one of whom fondly recalled his unorthodox texts, such as the Wizard of Oz and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Susman tried to show, the student recalled, that “perhaps Mickey Mouse was as least as important as FDR.”Footnote 1
His friend and colleague Lloyd Gardner remembered Susman's ability to provoke fresh thinking by contradicting expectations. In a lecture on three trials in the 1920s, all of the “good guys” were turned “upside down”: the state of Tennessee was right in the Scopes Trial, if you believed in local control of schools; Darrow was wrong in the Leopold and Loeb case if you believed in personal responsibility; and, between Sacco and Vanzetti, the one who believed in justice and the American way proved to be the more naive of the two.Footnote 2 In Susman's hyperbolic idiom, the film director John Ford did not simply possess a keen historical sensibility but was, in fact, “perhaps the most influential historian of the United States in the twentieth century.” Thus, when seeking to convey the influence of popular culture, he delivered himself of the opinion that “Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to an understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt.”Footnote 3
Friends and colleagues were extravagant in their praise of Susman. Paul Buhle, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin a generation after Susman had taken his Ph.D. there, described him as the “unacknowledged magus of 20th century American history.”Footnote 4 Alice Kessler-Harris, a former graduate student, considered him “one of the transformative minds of his generation.”Footnote 5 The “magnitude” of his “impact,” argued David Suisman, a younger scholar who maintains a website devoted to Susman's work, “was in inverse proportion to the quantity of his published output.”Footnote 6 Gardner called him the most famous unpublished historian in the United States; many treasured Susman's samizdat—“unpublished articles, lectures and talks, letters, reports on manuscripts, napkins with notes from conversations in the coffee shops of convention hotels.”Footnote 7 Susman considered himself a failure, having never published a major monograph. A volume of collected essays, most of which were previously published, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984), appeared only the year before his death.
Robert Westbrook attributed his authority within the discipline to his long career as a teacher, not his essays, which were often difficult to find and, Westbrook admitted, frustrating due to the fact that “many of his interpretations stand naked of the evidence required to make them persuasive.”Footnote 8 Susman's chosen form was the speculative essay marked by bold claims, erudition, and leaps of imagination. They teemed with illustrative examples and provocative ideas, often drawn from art, music, literature, and social theory as well as history. The cultural references were dense and dazzling, the tone authoritative and all-seeing. Evidence was not lacking, but absent was the careful and cautious sifting of evidence characteristic of the scholarly monograph. While Susman often discussed particular texts and writers, he rarely attributed decisive historical importance to any one text or idea. As Alan Brinkley pointed out in a review of Culture as History, Susman's predilection was for “broad generalizations on the basis of small fragments of evidence”; he would cite a text in support of a point but never explain why this particular historical artifact was more important than another.Footnote 9
Susman made sweeping, imaginative claims about American culture (for example, he claimed that in the 1920s there was a “growing concern among writers, philosophers, and students of language about the relationship between language and reality”), which were made compelling by carefully chosen details (one “cannot help but link the enormous popularity of word games, especially of the crossword puzzle in the 1920s, with this increased fascination with the issue”).Footnote 10 He was unlikely to make an argument for the importance of, say, pragmatism as an influential discourse. Rather, individual writings reflected a larger cultural trend or become important for their deployment or encoding of values or symbols, as when Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade becomes a prime example of the quasi-existentialist commitment to a “special code of belief and values” in the 1930s, or when a final scene of triumph over a pinball game in a William Saroyan play illuminates Susman's notion that games served as vital metaphorical devices in that decade.Footnote 11 Or individuals become symbols of the age, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred Adler, or Mickey Mouse; or they become “culture heroes,” as in Susman's analysis of the 1920s through the lives of Bruce Barton, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth.Footnote 12 Mickey Mouse exemplified the broad comedy of the humiliated hero, which in turn reflected the fear and shame characteristic of the flailing middle class in the 1930s, which in turn was central to Susman's revisionist assessment of the 1930s as ultimately a conservative decade. He became known as a pioneering student of popular culture.Footnote 13 Susman is most remembered for an essay entitled “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” a subtle reworking of David Riesman's social analysis from the 1950s, in which Susman postulated a distinctive twentieth-century “culture of personality,” which he made clear he embraced.Footnote 14 He was a cultural democrat, eschewing any snobbery about popular culture. His analysis of the culture of personality reflected his late conviction that the “culture of abundance” contained “utopian possibilities” in addition to its better-known capacities for vulgarity and repression.Footnote 15
Susman was widely respected, even beloved, as a writer and teacher, but the qualities that accounted for this high regard—his depth of knowledge, range of reference, fertile historical imagination, “brilliance”—were matched by other qualities that undercut his professional success, including his predilection for the intuitive essay and his inability to write the “big book.” He had a profound influence on many historians but his work did not fit well within the academic trends of his own day. He is revered, but his work bears little relation to what cultural history is today. Despite containing Susman's most influential essays on the cultural history of the 1920s (not a frivolous decade but a very serious one, in Susman's analysis) and the 1930s (much more conservative than appreciated), Culture as History was not widely reviewed and the reviews that appeared, notably ones by Brinkley and Jackson Lears, were critical.Footnote 16 How could his influence be so profound and yet his work be at odds with the profession as a whole? Though Susman pioneered the serious treatment of popular culture, his historical approach did not match that of the generation of historians who came of age in the 1960s. They focused on how power infiltrates daily lives; Susman was more likely to make assertions about the governing themes of American culture as a whole. As social historians adopted postmodern theory and colonized cultural history in the 1970s and 1980s, Susman's impressionistic essays became even more out of fashion. His updating of Riesman's analysis of the postmodern self, because aptly suited to the social-constructivist assumptions of younger scholars, became his primary legacy.Footnote 17
Susman's career stands as a peculiar monument to the persisting appeal of the form of mid-century cultural criticism even as the content has been discarded or repurposed. Susman did much of his most creative thinking about American culture and history in the 1950s and 1960s and used methods of cultural analysis firmly rooted in that era. His work advanced neither the radical imperative of telling history from the bottom up nor the explication of oppression as a function of cultural or discursive power. Rather he both historicized and articulated the intellectual project of left-leaning and reformist historians and cultural critics between the 1890s and 1930s and reflected their conviction that a shared historical understanding was a prerequisite for social change. Rather than contributing to the emergence of the New Cultural History, Susman did something rather like the opposite. He resisted New Left cultural politics, which he believed threatened the academy; retained a belief in an organic and holistic culture; and believed that historical scholarship was the necessary basis for the creation of a shared cultural consciousness and radical social reform.
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Born in upstate New York to a middle-class Jewish family (Susman's father owned a pharmacy in Rochester), Susman matriculated at Cornell University in 1944 and graduated five years later, his undergraduate career having been interrupted by one year of service In the army from 1945 to 1946.Footnote 18 Susman tried dramatic writing, music, and art but felt his best chance at making a contribution lay with history. His “high school ideal” had been Carl Becker, and he steeped himself in the work of Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington before entering Cornell.Footnote 19 Located about a hundred miles southeast of Rochester, Cornell was a logical choice for Susman geographically, but it was also the school where Becker taught for much of his career. Susman just missed him; Becker died in 1945. At Cornell, Susman met James Weinstein, who claimed Susman as his best friend and, like Susman, became a historian and a socialist. They both worked on former vice president Henry A. Wallace's failed 1948 Progressive Party presidential bid.Footnote 20 Susman fondly recalled the Henry Wallace campaign, drives in Weinstein's car, the recordings of Walter Geiseking, a youthful romance, “and the poets and the Marxists and the controversies and the pizza at Joe's and the damn good talk from which I learned so much.”Footnote 21
Susman's undergraduate mentors were Paul W. Gates and Curtis P. Nettels. Gates wrote landmark volumes on American land policy and was a leading historian of the American West, having studied with Frederick Merk, a student of Frederick Jackson Turner. (Becker, too, had been a student of Turner.) A Democrat who served in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in the New Deal, Gates was also active in Henry Wallace's campaign, serving as treasurer of the New York Wallace for President Committee. Gates remembered Susman's “fantastically rapid rate of reading and assimilating that made it possible for him to do twice or three times the work required, carry seven courses and still have time to drop in and chin by the hour.”Footnote 22 Nettels, who earned his graduate degrees at Wisconsin, was expert in colonial history and economic history, wrote influential histories of the money supply in the colonies, followed Charles Beard in applying class analysis to American history, and proudly claimed some credit for developing Keynesianism. Like Gates, he joined the Progressive Party campaign in 1948. Susman also came to know the leftist historian Lee Benson, who was a graduate student at Cornell and shared his interest in the progressive historians Turner and Beard. The author of debunking histories of the nineteenth-century Jacksonian and reform traditions, Benson became an ardent and controversial advocate of social-scientific history—in fact, the “enfant terrible of the movement,” according to Peter Novick.Footnote 23
Susman admired another student of Turner, Merle Curti, and claimed to have read the preface to Curti's The Growth of American Thought (1943) repeatedly (“over and over to the point I could almost recite it verbatim”); it formed the conviction in him that he would someday study with Curti. The Growth of American Thought treated the capacity for intellectual life, in a Turnerian fashion, as an organic feature of national growth and the reflection of its democratization. The growing capacity of Americans to think for themselves was what made the country democratic. Curti categorized the subjects of intellectual history as, first, what is known about human nature, society, and the university at any given point; second, speculations or guesses about what is not yet known; and, finally, the values that guide human action. Significantly, he foregrounded a fourth subject, the institutions such as schools, colleges, libraries, the press, foundations, or research centers that provided the conditions for thought to occur; they are the “agencies of intellectual life.” The book was, he declared, a “social history of American thought, and to some extent a socio-economic history of American thought.”Footnote 24
Susman's choice of the progressive bastion of Wisconsin for graduate school was in the cards: Gates knew Curti when they both were both in graduate school at Harvard in the 1920s; in the 1950s he worked with Curti to transform the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, challenging racial discrimination and democratizing the association's governance. Nettels had taught at the University of Wisconsin before joining the faculty at Cornell.Footnote 25 In 1949, Susman attained his youthful dream and began graduate studies in history at Wisconsin, enrolling in Curti's seminar. Beard, Parrington, and Turner were still revered at Wisconsin, comprising the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the Wisconsin “god-head.”Footnote 26 “This is certainly where I belong for now,” Susman wrote Gates soon after arriving on campus. “The pictures on the wall, the tradition, the people . . . the constant reminder of Turner, Ely, Commons—yes, I feel at home.”Footnote 27 Susman later remembered the sway that Beard held over the department (“Uncle Charlie”) and noted that everybody in the department voted for Norman Thomas in 1948 and opposed Wallace.Footnote 28 There were many East Coast influences at Wisconsin, including an influx of Jewish students like Susman from New York and New Jersey. However, strains of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism existed within a fractious and political department.Footnote 29 Susman recalled the economist Selig Perlman inviting all new Jewish graduate students in history to tea and urging them to switch to economics or sociology because history was an Anglo-Saxon discipline closed to Jews.Footnote 30 Susman became active on a committee attempting to unseat Senator Joe McCarthy.Footnote 31
Susman's historical approach and style owed much to Curti, a pioneering figure in American intellectual and cultural history and American studies; he lauded Curti's fine-grained writing—“every detail counts, every piece of evidence is directly related to his view of intellectual history.”Footnote 32 As Conkin observed, Curti's approach to intellectual history consisted of “a wide sampling, and selective quoting and paraphrasing” of “cultural arbiters” like educators, journalists, critics, reformers, novelists, ministers, and philanthropists rather than analysis of complex systems of thought.Footnote 33 Although Susman always respected and even loved Curti, their relationship was not without friction. Used to spending hours talking with Gates in his office, Susman found the peripatetic Curti, who was on campus only two days a week, more distant. Curti wanted his seminar students to study the impact of Americans abroad, which dovetailed with his current research project on foreign-aid programs, but Susman led a mini-revolt, causing Curti to divide the seminar and lead a smaller group of students in the study of the 1920s. Though the smaller group's seminar was a success, Susman believed it rankled Curti. Moreover, he became convinced that his own criticisms of Curti made their way back to him, sometimes in distorted form. Wisconsin's Reconstruction and diplomatic historian, Howard K. Beale, befriended Susman, confiding his own criticisms of Curti but, Susman believed, also telling Curti things falsely attributed to Susman.Footnote 34
Susman's strongest ties were with fellow graduate students, including William Appleman Williams, Herbert Gutman, William Preston, and Charles “Pete” Forcey. An avid smoker (another source of irritation with Curti, as Susman's habit kept him out of the office and so open to charges that he was slacking off as a research assistant), Susman fondly remembered the vigorous discussions that took place in the smoking room of the Wisconsin Historical Society with fellow graduate students. He jokingly referred to this group as the “Smoking Room School of American Historians,” but it aroused resentment amongst others. The culmination of these various tensions occurred when Susman and some of his Smoking Room colleagues demanded that the preliminary exams for 1951 be voided on the grounds that Beale was unfairly aiding his students. Though Susman passed his exams and the group's demands were apparently ignored, their charges led to a break in relations with some faculty, including Beale, and to discipline for Susman (the precise nature of which is unclear, though he was given a huge teaching load in the fall, which he enjoyed). Curti later traced the strain in his relations with Susman to his pressuring Susman to take the preliminary exams.Footnote 35 In 1959, Susman wrote nostalgically to his fellow Smoking Room Historian Bill Preston about their outsider status: “all of us really refuse to play the game by the rules set up by a lot of impossible fools who know nothing of real scholarship or real love of learning.” To Susman, the smoking room bull sessions allowed the young historians to “just be ourselves, no worry about status, no competition between any of us,” just a group of people sharing common interests and the delight of addressing challenging intellectual problems, “living the life of the mind without being stuffy and above all regarding what we were doing seriously, but without pretense, always able to make fun of ourselves or for that matter everything else . . . We had the great advantage of being alive and real.”Footnote 36
Susman settled on a study of expatriate intellectuals for his dissertation, “Pilgrimage to Paris: The Backgrounds of American Expatriation, 1920–1934,” which he wrote in the spirit of Curti, which meant a social history of intellectuals with a strong emphasis on the agencies of intellectual life, paying particular attention to the conditions that made expatriation possible as well as the meaning of expatriation itself.Footnote 37 Susman explained why American intellectuals in the early twentieth century chose expatriation, what they felt they were accomplishing, why they chose Paris, and how they managed to do it. He rooted expatriation in the intellectual life of the United States in the years before World War I, explained the appeal of Paris (including a detailed analysis of the cost-effectiveness of expatriation), categorized the types of expatriate before and after the 1920s, defined the conditions that made expatriation possible, and analyzed the motives of the 1920s expatriates and the meanings they ascribed to their experience.Footnote 38 Among other topics, he provided an insightful discussion of African Americans in Paris in the 1920s, noting the peculiarities of their experience.Footnote 39 Susman had been influenced by the trend toward social-science history represented by Lee Benson. He declared to Curti that modern historians should have as part of their “equipment” knowledge of statistical method (though he admitted lacking it himself).Footnote 40 The entire ethos of Wisconsin in the 1950s, with its reverence for Beard and Turner, mandated rigor in methodology and research. Susman recalled Herbert Gutman's “very Madisonian” discovery of understudied historical resources, “a Beardian piling up of data and local study” in the spirit of Turner. Curti shared the impulse to dig deeply into quantitative data, spending much of the decade analyzing census data for a community study of a rural Wisconsin county.Footnote 41 Susman claimed to have dreamed up the idea of testing Turner's frontier thesis with a local study and to have found a county with sufficient records, Trempealeau County. Curti had dispatched Susman to investigate the university's computer center and Susman suggested to Curti that he make use of the “IBM computer service” to tabulate and correlate data for his study using punch cards. He even did some punching of the cards.Footnote 42
Susman's dissertation reflected this Wisconsin-style empiricism. Susman read widely, consulting numerous memoirs of expatriates, turn-of-the-century literary journals, and avant-garde “little magazines.” He made a painstaking compilation of biographical data on a hundred prewar expatriate artists and 985 expatriates from the years 1920–34 (out of a total number that he estimated to be between three thousand and four thousand).Footnote 43 The biographical research allowed him, at one point, to catalogue a hundred different motives declared by American intellectuals for their expatriation.Footnote 44 More significant for his analysis, Susman discovered that the European editions of the New York Herald and Chicago Tribune contained extensive coverage of the “Young Intellectuals” living abroad, often publishing their writings and letters to the editor. He pored over these papers, reading every issue of both papers for specific periods of interest. He later claimed that his reading of three expatriate dailies, amounting to eight to ten hours of daily reading for almost six months, led him to create false memories. Not unlike the lead character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), Susman had moments of imagined communion with his subjects. He would later reminisce to his wife about events they had experienced only to have her remind him, “You just read about that. We really weren't there.”Footnote 45 All told it was an effort up to rigorous Wisconsin standards.
Susman clearly wanted to focus on intellectuals as a class, an interest that only seemed to increase as he neared completion of the dissertation. He read Karl Mannheim's Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge in 1956, finding it helpful, and that fall focused his advanced course on the intellectual and cultural history of America from 1877 on the “whole problem of the intellectual in America.”Footnote 46 He began to think the dissertation might be a step toward a larger study of this problem.Footnote 47 Susman discussed bohemianism, but he minimized its role in understanding expatriation. Rather, he focused on the way in which expatriate intellectuals made Paris into a place where they could refine their skills, sort out their relation to America, and craft a critical and vocational identity. Van Wyck Brooks and Ezra Pound became Susman's preferred spokesmen.Footnote 48 The expatriates may have felt compelled to exile themselves from America, but they retained their Americanness: “Exile made an American no less an American.”Footnote 49 The expatriation of the 1920s became an episode in the history of reform-oriented social criticism, in contradistinction, Susman noted to Curti, to his committee member Frederick Hoffman's thesis that “expatriation was a strategy against puritanism.”Footnote 50 It is an insight taken up recently by Brooke Blower, who depicted the troubled and conflict-ridden Paris the expatriates encountered as a place where Americans abroad were able to “rethink their sense of self, to forage for new insights, and to sharpen critiques that had seemed harder to articulate back home.” Americans abroad in Paris gained a “clearer sense of themselves as Americans.”Footnote 51
Paris became a “laboratory of ideas and the arts,” a place where writers and artists would be free of censorship, the single greatest need in the minds of a generation of writers and artists who felt stifled and ignored in the US.Footnote 52 This was Paris as a “place of communication,” with salons, studios, cafés, and bookshops providing the venues and the little magazines, the tools for intellectual life. The lesson to American writers and artists was that “culture was somehow whole,” that art could not be separated from other aspects of culture, that the nation was a “total culture” resulting from its art and various institutions, and that the artist's “positive responsibility” was to create a new American civilization.Footnote 53 The meaning of expatriation, for avant-garde intellectuals made famous by Malcolm Cowley, “was in fact a meaning which might very well lead to the end of expatriation as a cultural problem.” Cowley's group “sought a way of once again integrating the artist and the intellectual into society by giving him new functions and responsibilities.” Expatriation was no simple critique of America, Susman concluded, but rather “was essentially an attitude one held towards one's self as an individual, toward art, and toward society.”Footnote 54
The expatriate scene in Paris does not seem to have captured Susman's most deeply felt interests, however. Susman had pursued other ideas before settling on this topic, casting about in the intellectual life of early twentieth-century America (making inquiries for a study of the philosopher Josiah Royce and corresponding with the poet Ezra Pound) and proposing studies on historical thinking and “The Middle West: Image and Reality (1890–1930).”Footnote 55 He displayed a strong predilection for a non-Curtian myth-and-symbol analysis of American culture, writing to Gates of the importance of “key symbols, essentially historical” that were important to intellectuals and publicists in the 1920s, which he identified as the Puritan, the Philistine, and the Pioneer. He intended to put together an anthology on the “Image of the Puritan” with Frederick Hoffman. He was “working privately” on the intellectuals’ attack on the frontier and some of the key ideas associated with Turner's frontier thesis in the 1920s. In fact, he seems to have originally planned an analysis of the frontier idea as myth or symbol in the spirit of Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950). Despite encouragement from Curti and others, for various reasons, including time, available materials, and “personal difficulties here,” he set the frontier topic aside.Footnote 56
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Though Susman successfully defended the dissertation in 1957, the actual writing of it had been an ordeal. Highly strung and insecure, Susman was painfully self-conscious about his slow progress writing the dissertation. He sometimes despaired of his future in the profession, despite his love for teaching and scholarship. From 1953, Susman held three full-time faculty positions, including a five-year stint at the teaching-intensive Reed College, which exhausted him. (Reed College in the 1950s fostered an incredible culture of meetings: In addition to individual paper conferences with students, Susman attended weekly two-hour staff meetings and an additional four-hour evening meeting every third week—“No Kidding!” he wrote to Bill Preston. He recounted one week's schedule, which included fourteen hours of faculty meetings. “Reed is a mad place—I mean really mad.”) In addition to his teaching, Susman got caught up in the politics of the college, maneuvering for one of his Wisconsin mentors, Fred Harvey Harrington, to assume its presidency and joining in protests when three Reed faculty were investigated on suspicion of being Communists as a result of a visit from the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Harold Velde in summer 1954. Originally receiving a one-year appointment at Reed, Susman stayed through 1958 and was eligible for tenure in his fifth year but failed to receive it.Footnote 57 He subsequently received one-year appointments at Cornell and Northwestern, but much of Susman's professional life in the 1950s was consumed by a hunt for a regular position, attendant with all the indignities and absurdities that entails. At an interview for a position at Princeton, the general sentiment, Susman reported to Curti, was that “all social and intellectual history was nothing but glorified literary history”; one member of the interviewing committee reminisced about the war and asked Susman with what unit he served, resulting in each member present regaling the others with talk of their outfits and war experiences. They had all been officers, Susman recalled; he had been a corporal. They then discussed golf, which Susman did not play.Footnote 58
His fortunes began to change in early 1960. Susman delivered a well-received paper at the Modern Language Association before an audience of four hundred, which resulted in requests for publication. Moreover, he reported to Curti, Columbia University Press accepted his dissertation for publication after only six days of review; the response “floored” him, as the press was enthusiastic, anticipated few revisions, and expected a fall publication.Footnote 59 He continued his success with a paper at the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in the spring; he was so overwhelmed by the positive response he received that he was sometimes on the point of tears. Capping things off, Susman received a tenure-track job offer from Rutgers. Even discounting Susman's passionate nature, such a sudden change of fortunes unsurprisingly elicited strong emotions. “I felt once again that perhaps I belonged and would be accepted,” he confided to Curti.Footnote 60
Columbia University Press never published Susman's dissertation. Susman claimed he withdrew the manuscript, and it never appeared in print.Footnote 61 He was still promising to deliver the manuscript as late as 1963 and an editor at the press was still asking for it in 1964 (“but not if it kills you!”). What explains the failure remains unclear. Susman had felt the pressure to publish from the beginning of his graduate career at Wisconsin. He early fell into a pattern of self-lacerating criticism of his lack of productivity and the quality of the work he did produce.Footnote 62 He had planned optimistically to write his dissertation quickly in January 1953; however, the actual process became long and arduous (understandably, given his teaching load), with the dissertation only defended three and a half years later in October 1957.Footnote 63 Curti later remembered Susman laboring over the dissertation and holding on to it year after year (although Susman seems to have written it fiercely over the summer of 1957).Footnote 64 Curti never understood whether this delay was due to trepidation over his advisers’ standards, an impulse to perfectionism, or insecurity.Footnote 65 At the time, Susman confessed that his difficulty was less the writing than a fear of submitting his work to criticism.Footnote 66 His difficulty accepting criticism was evident in his reaction to the rejection of his essay on Turner's frontier thesis by the American Historical Review, which the editors did not consider to be history. Furious and discouraged, Susman displayed a prickly sensitivity that compounded insecurity with arrogance. “Those who succeed these days are absolute traditionalists in all ways; since I can never be one of those perhaps I should look for something else,” he wrote Curti, declaring he had “just about decided to stop trying to publish anything.”Footnote 67 Gates, who evidently “drilled” him constantly on the issue during Susman's one-year appointment at Cornell University, provided a tough-minded assessment that seems apt: “Perfectionism I generally associate with men of less talent than Susman has but this is his major disease.”Footnote 68
There may be a second and equally important explanation of why Susman pulled the manuscript: he had changed his mind about what he wanted to say. In fall 1961, Susman confided to James Weinstein that few were interested in the “kinds of things I do.” “The kinds of things I can publish I am no longer satisfied with—a terrible problem which keeps my book (in part) from coming out because I simply feel I haven't done what ought to be done and because I believe I will be read as saying something I don't believe, etc.” He refused to compromise: “I will not write what I am not interested in writing and I will not publish that in which I cannot believe.”Footnote 69
Susman drifted away from the social history of intellectuals toward the analysis of intellectuals as generators of myths, symbols, and images and of the role of history in social criticism. He became less interested in the material conditions and social environment that enable intellectual life and more in the idea systems and frames of reference by which people come to understand their world. “I'm fascinated increasing[ly] with the whole idea of the use of historical image as a key to an understanding of intellectual history,” Susman wrote Curti in 1960. “My idea: history and philosophy of history has in a special sense functioned as an ideology in America.”Footnote 70 It seems likely that over the 1950s, Susman's interests drifted away from Paris expatriates to a topic that engaged him more deeply—the intellectual project of left cultural critics in the early twentieth century, the progressive historical tradition, and the role of history in social change.
Susman worked out his ideas in a series of papers—one on the importance of history to cultural change delivered to the American Historical Association in December 1960 and published in the American Quarterly in 1964 as “History and the American Intellectual: The Uses of a Usable Past”; a second on the frontier thesis as both a usable and useless past, his successful Mississippi Valley Historical Association Paper of April 1960, which appeared in the Bucknell Review in 1963; and a third on the historical interpretation of Puritanism that appears to have been written at about the same time but only published in Culture as History.Footnote 71 Susman began with a distinction between myth and history taken from Benedetto Croce. Myth unifies society and is characteristic of traditional status societies; history enables philosophies of change and is characteristic of modern contract societies. Myths purport to explain everything; they may be utopian but are fundamentally static in impact. History rationalizes institutions and can be instrumental in change; it is dynamic and therefore ideological. Myth and history often impinge on each other: History can be put to mythic purposes; conversely, utopian promises can be made into ideology in an effort to make them real.Footnote 72
The context for Susman's ruminations was controversies over the Beardian imperative to make history relevant to the solution of contemporary social problems derived from his conviction that every scholar necessarily writes out of a historically specific “frame of reference.” Curti had used his 1952 American Historical Association presidential address to defend this type of history against the conservative Samuel Eliot Morison.Footnote 73 Susman signaled his agreement in a 1952 paper delivered to his fellow graduate students excoriating historians like Morison, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, and Allan Nevins as servants of Cold War power rather than critical intellectuals. They eagerly subsumed their work in national imperatives and, gallingly, attacked their left critics for being relativists, declaring the superiority of the “Whole Truth,” even as, Susman pointed out, partiality of perspective meant that no account of the “whole of reality” was possible. Truths were partial and multiple; “history was likely to be rewritten by each generation in view of its own problems and ‘frame of reference,’” Susman declared. “‘Frame of reference’ history suggested that we might not be able to discover the Whole Truth and that what is considered Right is only a socially conditioned value judgment, devoid of objective reality.”Footnote 74
“Frame of reference” history was progressive history, and the attacks on it informed Susman's consideration of myth and history. “Why does anybody bother to attack the past?” Susman asked the Columbia University Seminar on American Civilization in March 1961. “Because,” he answered, “the past somehow justifies the present, and unless you attack the past you cannot move anybody to change the present.”Footnote 75 His viewpoint had not changed by 1984. In the preface to Part I of Culture as History, he cited George Orwell on how control of the past allows control of the future; “if we want a new order of affairs, we must rewrite our history to justify it.”Footnote 76 In his essay on intellectuals and the usable past, Susman focused on the interplay between myth and history in Puritan and frontier studies. Puritan intellectuals had buttressed their colony through historical accounts defined by Christian mythology, thus demonstrating the uses of mythologized history in early America. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, American intellectuals discovered that analytical history—history functioning as ideology—could be a “vehicle of intellectual and social influence and power.”Footnote 77 The ultimate premise of the progressives, and of left cultural critics like Brooks who insisted on a “usable past,” was that historical understandings were essential to the world views that shaped civilizations and propelled historical change. Between 1890 and 1940, Susman believed, reformist intellectuals rightly attached an “extraordinary importance” to controlling the past.Footnote 78 “Since current ideology is based on a particular view of the nature of the past, since present problems are frequently solved by reference to the way past experience dealt with similar problems, the control over the interpretation of the nature of the past becomes a burning cultural issue,” Susman claimed.Footnote 79
When mythical understandings can be supplanted by history, real change can occur. This was the significance of Turner. Today, Turner's frontier thesis, which posited a democratic American character as the product of the unique American environment and the continually receding frontier, is more a historiographical reference point than a live hypothesis. It has been superseded by more sophisticated accounts of democracy, studies of cultural pluralism and hybridization in the borderlands between societies, and the multiculturalist and anti-imperialist sensibilities of post-1960s historians. However, Susman found important lessons in Turner's achievement. The “genius of Turner was essentially a simple and yet vital one culturally,” Susman wrote. “He took a major American myth and made from it effective history. He took a utopian set of attitudes and beliefs and made them ideologically effective for his own times.” Turner achieved the rare trick of harnessing the utopian impulses of a myth in a compelling historical analysis and, in doing so, creating a “major tool for social analysis.”Footnote 80 The nineteenth-century liberal–radical tradition, Susman told a Socialist Scholars’ Conference in 1965, too often focused on self and not on the “Idea of Civilization,” which was the concern for the institutions that structure and organize society and the economy; it ignored historical study and as a consequence was nostalgic and nonideological. “It cut itself off from possible uses of history and thereby from the chance to build an ideology.”Footnote 81 Turner showed how to promote social action as opposed to accepting the Cold War status quo in a fit of Niebuhrian resignation at the “tragedy of the human condition.”Footnote 82 Cold War apologists had retreated from history and declared an end of ideology, but pre-World War II progressives transmuted the tensions between history and myth into ideologies designed to regenerate civilization.Footnote 83 American culture between 1890 and 1940, Susman believed, “was based in large measure on a view of the importance of history in solving human problems on every level and on a firm commitment to the special role that the intellectual might develop for himself in a world in which he felt alien as critic of the official ideology and champion of the truer meanings of the nation.”Footnote 84
In his essay on the frontier thesis as both a “usable” and a “useless” past, Susman took up the early twentieth-century left manipulation of the Turnerian story of American development, examining what had become, by the 1910s, a critical disparagement of the pioneer (as prone to business practicality over culture, and conformist) and the Puritan (as repressive). Such attacks on the Puritan and pioneer heritage of America were so influential among literary and cultural critics before World War II that they saw the menacing troika of Puritan, Pioneer, and Philistine strangling every effort of American artists to create a more free, expressive, and individualistic culture. According to these intellectuals, the artist was systematically thwarted by the inherited prejudices that defined the middlebrow masses. The frontier that Turner assumed could be an analytical tool for progressive action had become for left intellectuals an impediment to cultural growth and thus useless. Susman perceived the rather high self-regard lurking beneath the intellectuals’ continual protestations of their own irrelevance; “every intellectual,” he argued, shared some idea of how history functions and some particular understanding of American history that formed the basis of their own social criticism. “Such useful pasts are the commonplaces of intellectual history and part of the Weltanschauung of intellectuals that the intellectual historian must examine.”Footnote 85 Susman betrayed in himself a personal faith in the project of academic history and American criticism that tracked these views. For the intellectual, making a past that is usable usually entailed dispatching a past that had become useless.
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In the 1960s, Susman was active in socialist conferences, participated in protests on campus, advised the editors of the influential Studies on the Left, and worked on creating a “Left Caucus” in the American Historical Association to defend against pressures on the university to be relevant, whether they came from the right or the left.Footnote 86 Speaking at a 1965 Rutgers teach-in at which his colleague Eugene Genovese called for a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam, Susman galvanized the audience with a speech against the war, pounding the lectern with his fist so hard he broke his watch. (The next day, the student newspaper noted a collection to buy Susman a new one.)Footnote 87 Susman scorned Cold War liberals and the consensus history they promoted, which he believed merely buttressed the Cold War state. He rejected Daniel Bell's end-of-ideology argument and tangled with him at a seminar in 1961, demanding to know why his “moral pronouncements” should be accepted. The end-of-ideology debate annoyed Susman “because the whole idea that ideology has somehow disappeared is simply the worst kind of cover for the persistence of the most vicious ideology of all—the one currently operative here.”Footnote 88 Susman read C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956) when it came out (it posed “some fairly monumental problems for historians,” he observed to Curti); Mills led a session of Susman's seminar at Cornell on the topic of the intellectual's role in America.Footnote 89 He lauded James Weinstein's manuscript on corporate liberalism for revealing how ideologically adept business was, creating an ideology based on corporate-driven rationalization and a technocratic “New Middle Class” that was comprehensive (“a whole view of social order”) and immensely significant.Footnote 90
Nevertheless, Susman became highly critical of New Left uses of history and attempts to mobilize the institutions of the profession against the Vietnam War. Faced with a generation of younger historians determined to use history to fashion new ideologies from a frame of reference different from his own, he saw an escapist absorption in the self and not a hardheaded attempt to grapple with the idea of civilization. Like other older left historians in the 1960s, including Genovese, Gutman, Weinstein, Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, Gabriel Kolko, and Christopher Lasch, Susman hoped both to rejuvenate the discipline with fresh and more critical historiographical approaches and to use history to promote social change, to, as Lasch urged, “pick up the thread of radical thought and action where it was broken” in the early twentieth century.Footnote 91 Unlike Lynd, Lemisch, and Howard Zinn, Susman stopped short of prioritizing political engagement over scholarship and came to be critical of the increasingly radical student left. He opposed efforts to politicize the American Historical Association and backed Genovese's effort to block Lynd's insurgent campaign for the presidency of the association at the 1969 meeting. Genovese labeled Lynd's backers “totalitarians” and screamed that the association must “put them down, put them down hard, and put them down once and for all.”Footnote 92
Susman joined an effort led by Weinstein, which included Genovese and other leftwing scholars, to create a new socialist party that would lay the groundwork for a decentralized, socialist political economy. William Appleman Williams joined the group, as did several Wisconsin historians (including Mari-Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, Martin J. Sklar, Ronald Radosh, and James Gilbert), Jesse Lemisch, David Horowitz, Ann Lane, Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Naomi Weisstein, and Saul Landau. Christopher Lasch joined as well. The group circulated planning documents, or “Pre-Party Papers,” which contained strategies for organizing the new party, creating a “new culture,” and formulating an alternative world view. Nothing came of the project and the group disbanded by May 1969; however, their premises echoed the project of the neo-Marxist historical Left in England at the time, led by E. P. Thompson, to make historical scholarship relevant and to bring radical theory, including Gramscian analysis, to bear in effective ways on social action.Footnote 93
Weinstein's socialist party planning group anticipated the disintegration of corporate capitalism and believed that a revolution would only succeed if a “mass revolutionary consciousness” capable of formulating a socialist alternative were already in place.Footnote 94 The members of the group circulated various drafts of a document that defended the “disinterested pursuit of truth and knowledge” that was endangered in the corporate-oriented university and called for university intellectuals to create the counterhegemonic “autonomous and comprehensive world view” necessary for a new consciousness.Footnote 95 Ideas have priority; conceptualization comes before the ability to live a new life. The first task was to gain ideological hegemony over civil society—to create a nation of socialists.Footnote 96
Even as the group project collapsed, Susman, who was ill and on leave, placed great importance on writing a left statement on universities and scholarship and creating a journal to develop the group's ideas. In October 1970, he wrote a pleading and revealing letter to a reticent and skeptical Lasch, asking him to intervene with Genovese to continue the project. He justified Genovese's effort to put down a genuine “intellectual threat” to the profession even as he disavowed Genovese's personal animosities and overreactions. Susman was critical of the “casual and careless nonsense” about the nature of history and its use by scholars like Zinn, Lynd, and Martin Duberman. (“I do want to put them down intellectually,” he wrote, echoing Genovese's rhetoric.) He took the threat seriously because, “unfortunately,” he believed in the “enormous consequences of ideas.” A journal was necessary for a “new consciousness”; “Consciousness is the key,” he stressed. Genovese wanted to create a journal like Studies on the Left and Gutman wanted one like the English historical journal Past and Present, but Susman envisioned something that was neither scholarly nor political in any traditional way. It would have a distinct editorial position, but the articles would be about the “nature and purpose of knowledge, especially historical knowledge, about the nature of culture, about approaches to the study of man, proper and improper, about effective methods of analysis, about the key scholarly and cultural questions that ought to be investigated and why.” The journal Susman envisioned, which was to look at what knowledge means and the ends to which it should be used, would be a political act and fulfill the responsibility of left intellectuals. It would create its own school. Susman compared their efforts to the work of Lewis Mumford, Vernon Parrington, and Charles and Mary Beard in 1926 and 1927.Footnote 97
Susman eschewed any leadership role for himself. “I am perfectly aware that professionally I am a failure,” he noted. He was thinking of leaving academia. “I have no reputation, no following, no role of any significance.” While Genovese wanted him to edit the journal, he dismissed this idea as foolish. Rather, he believed that Lasch should lead the project because he had “special authority” in the universities and Genovese would listen to him (as he did not to Susman). “I suspect that scholarship, ideas, the university, the profession, historical study mean too much to me; I take them too seriously,” he declared.Footnote 98 As it transpired, both Lasch and Genovese embraced Susman's vision and planned on Susman being the general editor of the new journal, which, however, never got off the ground.Footnote 99
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By the 1970s, theoretical trends in the profession were marginalizing Susman's approach to cultural history and challenging the type of bottom-up cultural analysis associated with E. P. Thompson. Thompson played the role for his generation of left scholars in the 1960s that Turner had played for the progressive historians. He provided a way to understand the past that would foster the possibility of change. By depicting lower-class artisans, craftsmen, and laborers as creative agents of their own future, working collectively and inventively to subvert the dominant institutions of power in their society, Thompson and the British Marxist historians broke through the obsessive materialism and rigid class analysis characteristic of radical scholarship.Footnote 100 However, as Geoff Eley observes, by the 1970s the “New Cultural History” was emerging as a challenge to neo-Marxist historians. The need to better connect ideology, politics, and the “ground of material life” led to new theories of cultural power.Footnote 101 With its emphasis on the importance of language in constructing reality and the diffusion of power throughout a variety of social actors and texts, recognizing the agency of both authors and audience, holistic conceptions of “uniformly well bounded and coherent” cultures came to seem historically inaccurate. Culture is not a pattern or world view; it is the fight for interpretive authority.Footnote 102 The terms in which Susman thought and wrote about culture seemed increasingly remote.
Despite his training as an empiricist at Wisconsin, Susman embraced the holistic tendencies of postwar intellectual history—the “American-mind” model of intellectual history (or the “intellectual history synthesis”) that had defined the field of American studies as it emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and rapidly lost authority in the 1960s.Footnote 103 As social historians began to fill in the canvas of American history with the heterogeneous, distinctive, and multitudinous voices of previously marginalized groups, Susman deployed totalizing terms like myth, symbol, and ideology with gusto.Footnote 104 In his dissertation Susman had held out a “whole” vision of American society, or a view of a “total culture,” as a goal to which any reform-minded intellectual aspired. A “whole” vision of culture was an aspiration, a necessary premise for socialist reform and the opposite of a fragmenting individualism. It was a tendency he retained until the end of his career, writing in Culture as History, “I have tried to look beyond what is frequently isolated as high culture, popular culture, and folk culture and to see the tensions and contradictions of a larger cultural whole.”Footnote 105 While acknowledging that various cultures existed, Susman continued to write in loose and holistic terms. In a 1985 essay, Susman cited approvingly Vico's conviction that antiquities reveal the “beliefs of the age” and the “common sense” of the people, and that the analysis of an age's words and images would allow historians to create a “morphology” of its “symbolic system.”Footnote 106 He thought film might be analyzed in a very similar way, revealing the “symbolic system basic to the culture,” “the fundamental patterns of belief,” “the essence of a society, its style.”Footnote 107 In Culture as History, he declared his unwillingness to distinguish high culture from popular culture or folk culture, believing instead that the cultural historian's focus must be on the “larger cultural whole.”Footnote 108 Acclaimed by Paul Buhle as the avatar of the New Cultural History, Susman seemed immune to the allure of the academic trends of his time: the new, “bottom-up” social history of the 1960s and 1970s (when Alice Kessler-Harris decided to study wage-earning women, Susman, shaking his head, inquired, “When are you going to do something serious?”) or its post-1970s sociocultural variant.Footnote 109
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It is not difficult to find evidence of Susman's charisma and influence or the excitement he generated in his students with his brilliant lectures (“brilliant” was an adjective that he generously applied from early in his career to work he liked), his willingness to take things like popular film seriously, and the occasional burst of classroom singing.Footnote 110 Susman “taught many of us to take seriously musicals and situation comedies,” remembered Leo Ribuffo, who had Susman as a teacher while an undergraduate at Rutgers. “Not only did he know everything, upperclassmen reported,” Ribuffo recalled, “but he could talk about anything at a moment's notice, sometimes providing his own musical accompaniment.”Footnote 111
It may be that the give-and-take of conversation, the flexibility and openness of this type of exchange to new ideas and provocative hypotheses, best captured what Susman valued in academia and the life of the mind. The socialist journal he proposed to Lasch and Genovese in the late 1960s bears remarkable resemblance to an idle thought he shared with his former “Smoking Room School of History” friend Bill Preston in 1959. He imagined a new “more informal journal” that would be open to all scholars, whether credentialed with a Ph.D. or not, and focused on “matters of interpretation, new views, critical expositions of current approaches, issues of general interest in philosophy of history—a critical and never stuffy journal whose job it would be to keep us alive and give us an outlet for the kind of work we really want to do.” He proposed a name for it: “The Smoking Room Review.”Footnote 112 History, Susman wrote John Higham, is a “kind of social inquiry,” concerned with the consequences of holding certain ideas, world views, attitudes, and values.Footnote 113 What went on in smoking room conversations and college classrooms was not only enjoyable, it was important. Knowledge of the past is often essential for identifying values for the future. Humans can be united by a common consciousness, by myth, which historians might use to foster social change. One could explain the imperial conquest of the continent as also the birth of American democracy and in doing so make the nation more democratic. Cultural myths were, as Kenneth Burke argued in the 1930s, the “social tools” by which to unite a nation, but historians show how to make change occur.Footnote 114
