Irving H. Bartlett (1923-2006) and American Studies

I first met historian Irving Bartlett in 1980 when he was appointed John F. Kennedy Professor and chair of the American Civilization department at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Professor Bartlett had already gained national recognition for his biographies of Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster and his study of American ideas in the antebellum era. 1 He was particularly excited about the fact that the university shared Columbia Point with the JFK Library (where I served as historian) and we immediately began discussing how his American studies students could take advantage of the historical resources at the Library. This collaboration, also involving political science professor Paul Watanabe, resulted in the creation of the jointly-sponsored Summer Institute for Teachers, which has been held annually at the Kennedy Library for the last 25 years.

When I learned in the early 1990s that Irving was writing a biography of John C. Calhoun, I asked him why he had chosen to write about the most articulate defender of American slavery in the half century before the Civil War. He explained that he had spent his professional life trying to understand America in the ante-bellum era by shining a series of spotlights (that is, different perspectives) on that period and analyzing the lives and conflicting ideas of some of its most important leaders and thinkers: Phillips, the fiery abolitionist; Webster, the great orator for the federal union; and Calhoun, the uncompromising defender of the South’s “peculiar institution.”  Studying Calhoun, Irving later wrote, was part of his “continuing attempt to understand how the political culture of this country has been expressed and shaped by leaders conventionally described as liberal, conservative, radical, or reactionary.” Bartlett ultimately concluded that Calhoun’s legacy was much more complex than his attempt to justify and expand slavery; the South Carolina senator, for example, also advocated amending the Constitution to protect the rights of political (not racial) minorities and urged his contemporaries to choose “leaders with character, talent, and the willingness to speak hard truths to the people.”2 Bartlett, in short, was always careful to avoid the trap of presentism because he understood that studying the past often “requires pretending you don’t know the present.”3

This point of view is not surprising. Bartlett was one of the first graduate students to earn a Ph.D. in the new American Civilization program at Brown University in 1952—in what would later be called “the golden age of an academic discipline called ‘American Studies.’”4 (The American Studies Association itself was founded in 1951.)  Irving was exploring yet another viewpoint on the antebellum era by writing a biography of Edward Everett, the “other” speaker at Gettysburg, when he died at the age of 83 at his Hingham, Massachusetts home on July 1.

In many of our colleges and universities, American Civilization and American Studies programs are currently dominated by an inherently contradictory mélange of Marxism and post-modernism. The syllabus of a typical course, “Introduction to Theories and Methods in American Studies,” promises to “teach students how American Studies scholars think, argue, research, and write. Students will trace the changing definition of American Studies as a field of study from the ‘myth and symbol’ school to projects…[utilizing] theoretical categories, including Marxism, cultural studies, and class; feminism, gender, and sexuality; and anticolonialism, post colonialism, race, and ethnicity.”5 The word “history,” strikingly, is never even mentioned.

Irving Bartlett believed that his responsibility as a historian was less to provide answers than to ask tough questions about the past. Many of today’s American Studies professors accuse their predecessors of naive triumphalism about American history—a charge refuted in Bartlett’s case by his consistently critical, balanced, and superbly-researched books. Irving Bartlett the man, the teacher, and the scholar will be missed by his family, friends, and colleagues. But, ironically, the field he helped to put on the academic map now seems far removed from the substance and purpose of his life’s work.