History Doyen: Bernard A. Weisberger

What They're Famous For

Bernard A. Weisberger is a distinguished teacher and author of American history. Weisberger formerly was a professor at Wayne State University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester where he was full professor and chair of the department. He has written more than a dozen books and worked on documentaries with Bill Moyers and Ken Burns. His Charles Ramsdell Prize winning article "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography," is considered a standard in the study of the Reconstruction period. Retiring in 1970, Weisberger has devoted himself full time to writing both books and articles in popular history media and magazines. He is best known as a longtime contibuting editor for American Heritage. He started writing his first article for the magazine in 1955, and he then wrote the "In the News" column for more than ten years from 1989 to 1999. Additionally he published many of his books for American Heritage's book series.

Weisberger's area of research stretches accross the landscape of American history. His most recent book When Chicago Ruled Baseball The Cubs-White Sox World Series of 1906 recounts how in 1906, the baseball world saw something that had never been done: two teams from the same city squared off against each other in an intracity World Series, pitting the heavily favored Cubs of the National League against the hardscrabble American League champion White Sox. In honor of its centennial anniversary Weisberger tells this tale of a unique time in baseball, a unique time in America, and a time when Chicago was at the center of it all. In an interview Weisberger discussed his wide area of research stating: "I've stuck to one subject area--U.S. history--but within that, I've managed to turn out textbooks, juveniles, illustrated popular books, biographies, standard trade books, [and] television presentations."

Personal Anecdote

How did I become a historian? It may have begun on a Saturday afternoon in the early 1930s when I was about ten years old. My mother took me for diversion to a "convict ship" --one of those used to transport convicts from Great Britain to Australia--a restoration or a replica, I guess, which was being exhibited at a pier on the west side of Manhattan, where we lived. It's my first recollection of an historical exhibit, and it was real to me--too real, in fact. It showed the shackles and the below-decks dungeons and the whips used to deal with unruly "passengers" and my imagination translated those objects into vivid pictures of actual, bleeding men being shoved into those dark enclosures lit only by what came through tiny, barred openings in the heavy doors. That's been a lasting feature of my mind's eye--when I write about anything historical it's all actually taking place right in front of me; I can see it and hear it--and I try, as best I can, to get that into my writing. Why not historical fiction, then? Of that, more in a moment or two.

I can't say that on that afternoon I decided "Gee, I wanna be an historian, Mom." At that age , of course, I didn't know what an historian was. What I did know that I was scared stiff by the vivid scenes I had just "witnessed" and plainly showing it. My mother thought I obviously needed an antidote. It happened that it was one of the years when the U.S. Atlantic fleet--maybe the Pacific one, too, for all I know--made a visit to New York, and anchored in its spacious harbor and also in the Hudson River for some distance. Visits were offered and encouraged; the Navy knew the value of good public relations even then. So we finished the day's excursion by going to the appropriate pier, getting in a launch, and being shown around a cruiser by a very polite young swabby who was virtually a walking recruiting poster. I did recover from my panic attack and I did enjoy the experience.

If I'd enjoyed it even more, I might have become a professional sailor. But history won--and that was even before I got seasick for the first time in 1943, crossing the Pacific.

I loved to read and discovered some ability to write by the time I was in high school. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, I had a short story published in my Stuyvesant High School literary magazine, the Caliper.What a thrill. I decided then that I would be a writer. In the ensuing couple of years, I wrote another dozen to dozen and a half stories. The faculty advisor to the magazine, one, Irving Astrachan, was a fine teacher who luckily hadn't fallen for the patois about not damaging the self-esteem of adolescents. I got about two of them published, and the other sixteen he would hand back to me with a terse comment: "Burn it." I knew his judgment was correct. I still wanted to write--but nonfiction was going to be my metier. And by college time I got inspired. I still loved history. And history furnished me all the plots, characters, and dramatic episodes that I had a hard time making up. History even forbid making things up! (And it still does!!!) As I acquired more sophisticated understanding of how historians worked, I did come to realize that there is an inescapable element of imagination, even for the most scrupulous dryasdust scribe, in recreating a past that is accessible only through the saved recollections of those who experienced it, but let that pass. History it was for a vocation, and still is.

I attended Columbia College as a subway commuter, and encountered a couple of sensational teachers, one of them Jacques Barzun, for whom, in my junior year I wrote a paper on the Paris Commune of 1871, which earned an "A" of which I am still proud and some personal encouragement. However, there were some other pressing engagements in June of 1942, and that September I was off to war. (No trumpets here; I'm one of those who "fought" from behind a desk.) Had the Japanese not attacked Pearl Harbor, I might have become an historian of France, and I almost regret that I didn't, because it would have provided excuses to spend more time in Paris. But when I returned in 1946 and wound up in graduate school at the University of Chicago--actually marking time, because at that moment, I was equally attracted to the idea of becoming a journalist-- and bang, another great teacher lit my fuse. He was Avery Craven, a specialist on the origins of the Civil War, some of whose views about its causes and consequences I never shared and never will, but that doesn't matter. I signed up for one of his classes, he walked in, opened his mouth, and in five minutes I was a goner. He lectured from folders crammed with source documents--I never heard him quote another historian, though there were plenty of them on his reading list--and as he spoke, a parade of politicians, slaves, ex-slaves, pioneers, promoters, preachers, editors, soldiers, housewives, oh, a perfectly Walt Whitman-esque cast , strutted and fretted their little hour on the stage. (He was, by the way, an amateur artist.) I gobbled every course he offered, and it was a two-way romance, I guess, because he liked the papers I handed in. One day he asked me to sign on as his research assistant and push my way through to a PhD, and that's how I became a Professor of American history. By the way, he never demanded "discipleship." My subject matter and my ideas often strayed from his, and while he may have regretted my heresies, he was always a kind and supportive friend--an intellectual father in some ways, primarily as an inspiration to work always towards being the best and most honest writer of history I could.

The record will show that I "professed" about eighteen years before quitting to write full time. I enjoyed the "teaching" part of academic life--e.g., dealing with the students close up--and made some lifelong friends among them and some of my colleagues, but I cared little for any other aspect of life behind the ivied walls. So I quit, did some freelancing, worked two years as an Associate Editor, took a part-time position at Vassar (where I met Rick Shenkman) and finally took to supporting myself fulltime as an historian-writer. It reminds me sometimes of Archibald McLeish's definition of being a poet "A hardy life, with a boot as quick as a fiver." But I've loved it.

I don't know as how I have written any "famous" books, but I think there's a generation of historians trained in the nineteen-sixties who probably knew me through an article called "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography," which was reprinted and circulated fairly widely. It appeared in the Journal of Southern History in 1959, and the thrust of it was pretty much along the lines of what is now the more familiar story of Reconstruction best summarized in Eric Foner's book on the subject. In short, it repudiated the "Dunning school" views that were common up until then-- Reconstruction was a carnival of corruption and violence that forced the humiliated and conquered South to endure the revolting experience of being governed by an alliance of ignorant ex-slaves and trashy whites. What utter bunk!! I don't get credit for discovering that--good black historians had known it for years, and Howard Beale had said as much in 1930 in the American Historical Review. But I was lucky enough to be surfing that wave at the dawn of the 20th century civil rights revolution. Well, anyway, the article won my only academic prize--the Charles Ramsdell Prize for the best article published that year in the JSH. Ramsdell was, like E. Merton Coulter whose book on Reconstruction was then a reigning favorite, a neo-Confederate who embraced the white supremacist view totally.

My first book was my dissertation, extended. My second, They Gathered at the River, was on revivalism mostly in the 19th century US, and took me to the Moody Bible Institute to consult the papers of Dwight L. Moody, the "Billy Graham" of the 1870s and 1880s (but not one who so sedulously cultivated politicians and became the White House preacher of conservative Presidents.) I was welcomed, especially after the kind folks there were reassured that I was a Jew whose interest was purely historical, and not a "liberal Christian" on a mission to write a debunking article about them. Far from it, I rather respected and admired Moody for a number of reasons, remote as was his world outlook from mine. In fact, while there were some characters in the book for whom I had pretty low regard, I tried, as always, not to criticize or mock them or their followers, but to tell their story as they might have seen it. Well, I must have succeeded because something called the Religious Book Club adopted it as an alternate choice for one month in 1958, describing it as an "offbeat" selection. And the MBI's house organ reviewed the book, naturally focusing on the Moody chapter, and said that it was good, but added--and I have to paraphrase, having long ago lost the original--"Professor Weisberger has no understanding of the supernatural." Which was true, to be sure--I had explained Moody's success in practical terms from information historically accessible, and they believed it was all God's doing. Who knows? Might be so, but an historian's license doesn't extend to the supernatural.

 A little postscript, by the way; the good folk there (only name I remember is Bernard de Remer, at the time in their public relations office) had explained to me that my Jewishness wasn't a bar to admission to the archives--they had missions to the Jews and in fact taught Hebrew and Yiddish courses among their offerings. (This is all fifty years ago, I have to note; I have no idea what the Institute is like now.) For a while after I left I did get mailings urging me to recognize the mistake I had made in not recognizing Jesus as true heir to Judaism, until I finally told them that much as I'd enjoyed my excursion into evangelical Christianity during the writing of the book, I could not be persuaded out of my Jewishness.

I'm pretty proud of both the above stories--that concerning the Ramsdell Prize because I don't think that "objectivity" stands in the way of a forthright expression of one's own values even in a carefully documented and fairly written piece. And that about the MBI, because if history is worth anything, it is because, if studied rightly, it teaches you to recognize that even your most cherished opinions need to be recognized as open to question, and based on life experiences that are transitory.

In some ways my favorite 'teaching' experience was the ten years I spent writing a column for American Heritage (1989-99) finding historical parallels for events that were then current "In the News," which was the column's title. My 'class' consisted of general readers of every kind, bound together by enough interest in history to buy the magazine. I was, and still am, trying to spread theword that history, and by that I mean sound, well-researched, thoughtful history, with all the virtues of perspective that it brings, is out there to think about and enjoy, even for the non-professional reader. And I don't mean by that to disparage all academic historians. Nor the academic undertaking in general, but it has to keep an awareness of its connection to the purposes and expectations of the larger society in which it exists, if it wants to avoid clannishness, sterility and irrelevancy. Making that point has been the nearest thing I've had to a mission, and I'm happy to air that opinion on History News Network, which pretty much serves the same function.

Quotes By Bernard A. Weisberger

Bernard Weisberger in "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography

These observations are only the framework of an answer to the question of why Reconstruction represents a challenge not met by academic historians. Underlying the problem is the fact that Reconstruction confronts American writers of history with things thet things which they prefer, like other Americans, to ignore-brute power and its manipulation, class conflict, race antagonism. Yet these things make it an essentially modern period. Reconstruction cannot be properly "gotten at" by well-worn roads of agrarianism, sectionalism, or constitutional analysis. It cannot be approached without perhaps requiring of American historians that they yield up some of their marvelous ability to read unity, progress, and patriotism into every page of the American record-that they face problems which all their piety and wit cannot dismiss or solve with credit to all. Yet those who teach and write the American story cannot be a mere priesthood of patriotismm unless they wish to invite dominion of the second-rate. If they do not confront tragedies, paradoxes, tidal forces in the culture--if they do not show the forces eroding the compromises of the post-Civil War period illustrate the fustrating complexity of the problems now awakened again--then Reconstruction will have added the historical guild to the list of its 'victims.'

Bernard A. Weisberger in "America Afire Jefferson, Adams, and the First Contested Election"

The Constitution, in the 1790s, was still considered a fragile work-in-progress-- more a provisional outline than a charter for the ages. It didn't yet have the emotional power to unite people automatically behind it. And it showed early signs of misjudgments and of business unfinished. First of all, since they shared a general coolness toward "democracy," the framers failed to foresee the growth of a drive toward more widespread participation in "popular governments." Second, they never anticipated that "factions" could embrace whole sections of the new Union, or that there might be large-scale permanent coalitions of "factions" in the form of political parties. And of course they could not know that the new ship of state would be launched into a wrenching tempest of international warfare caused by a French Revolution that was soon to begin. 

All of these developments unleashed the passions of special interest and thwarted the hopes of immediately setting up a national government dedicated purely to the "permanent and aggregate interests of the community." One result was that the machinery of succession to the presidency would be out of date in the very first election after the most popular man in the country had stepped down from power, and seriously dysfunctional by the time of the second. The seeds of the crisis of 1800 were planted in 1787 In Philadelphia. The Constitutional Convention set the stage for the drama and introduced some of the cast. One delegate, South Carolina's Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, would become Adams's running mate. Two others would be far more significant players--James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, friends in 1787, intense foes thirteen years later. The whole story of the nation during that interval reflected their unraveling alliance. Madison was so much at the heart of the convention that he has been called the Father of the Constitution. Hamilton had only one highlighted moment, but it was enough to foreshadow a career whose impact on America's future may have been the most lasting of all.

By 1800, Madison was a chief planner for the new Republican Party, which backed Jefferson for president. It strongly supported states' rights, and history remembers Madison in part for his eloquent defense of that stance. But when he arrived in Philadelphia early in May 1787, days before the scheduled opening session, Madison was still a nationalist and with good reason. He came fresh from months in New York City as a frustrated member of the one-house Congress created by the 1781 Articles of Confederation.

Bernard Weisberger in his farewell "In the News" column for American Heritage, July, 1999

After ten years of writing this column, I am saying a fond farewell. Not to American Heritage or to writing in general, merely to "In the News." I had intended to slip away unnoticed, but my good friend and editor Richard Snow offered me the opportunity for a parting word or two, and I find it irresistible. If, however, you turned to this page expecting another essay on the historical echoes of a recent news item and are disappointed, there will be no hard feelings if you stop here. 

Why am I quitting now? Mainly because I find myself getting a little repetitious, at least in my own view. Each issue's "story" is different, but the message is the same: that seeing a current event in historical perspective is a very good thing to do. It's a safeguard against pontification of all sorts-against "thesky-is-falling" alarms at one extreme and the "we-are-thegreatest-ever" exultation at the other. It shrinks self- importance, rebukes dogmatism, and builds courage. As a teenager I learned and loved a corny verse from A. E. Housman that runs: "The troubles of our proud and angry dust / Are from eternity and shall not fail / Bear them we can, and if we can we must / Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale." I can laugh, many decades later, at the final words, the half-cynical, half-heroic posturing, the stoic shrug with nose buried in the ale mug. But there's still a portion of truth in the first three lines.... 

I end this personal recollection by repeating once more my commitment to "popular" history, which I've been writing for all these years, with a bit of television work thrown in. I don't like the term. It has a pejorative flavor, much like its antonym of "academic" history. I've read good and bad examples of both, I know good people who do both, and I wish the wall between the camps weren't so high. But I know where I stand. I'm unchangeably a storyteller. I never had any interest in research that didn't lead to a narrative able to move the hearts and imaginations of nonspecialist readers, and I have a hard time comprehending the justification for any other kind of historical inquiry. I've heard the argument that just as science became more sophisticated and necessarily inaccessible to the generalist, so it has been with history. I won't try to rebut it ex parte (that is, without some representative of that view present). But I frankly doubt it.

It is wiser always not to linger at the door. My thanks to the editors and fact checkers with whom I have worked pleasantly over these years. Likewise, to those readers who troubled to write to me or the "Correspondence" page in support or dissent, I appreciate your attention. To all of you, I want to say that I have gotten unqualified enjoyment from history since my first childhood visit to a museum, my first reading of a "juvenile" biography, my first high school term paper, my first thrilling graduate school encounter with an actual manuscript letter laid on my desk by an archivist. I still do. I hope that it's been reflected in these little excursions and that some of it has rubbed off on you. Good-bye for now.