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AS IF NOTHING SHOULD BE LOST: MICHAEL O'BRIEN, THE AMERICAN SOUTH, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IDEAL
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2016
Extract
When groups of historians studying the American South got together in the late 1970s there was a clannish feel, mostly white, mostly male. Mostly southern, too, and while non-southerners were not unwelcome they were noticed. Why are you interested in studying us? was asked politely, with a hint of a hidden punchline, a question for outsiders. So it is a strange turn that an outsider, Michael O'Brien, a soft-spoken, level Englishman, began a career in that decade which would make him one of the leading historians of the South in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Maybe even stranger is that he did this as a historian of southern intellectual life.
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References
1 O'Brien, Michael, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar. I am grateful to David Moltke-Hansen and Joel Isaac for the thorough and helpful reading each gave to this essay.
2 The sober grandfather of the joke was often taken to be Henry Adams, a historian much admired by O'Brien, who famously wrote in 1918 that the southerner “had no mind; he had temperament.” As O'Brien went on to explore, however, Adams was far from either making a joke or dismissing the South. See O'Brien, Michael, Henry Adams and the Southern Question (Athens, GA, 2005)Google Scholar. Adams's observation is in his The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston and New York, 1918), 57–8.
3 O'Brien, Michael, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941, paperback edition with new preface (Baltimore, 1990; first published 1979)Google Scholar. The principal Agrarian work is Twelve Southerners, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York, 1930).
4 O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, xi; O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” Mississippi Quarterly, 58/1–2 (2004–5), 205–13, at 208; O'Brien, “A Paradox of Intellectual Life since the 60’s: We Are Cosmopolitan; Our Scholarship Is Not,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 35 (21 Sept. 1988), B1–B2, at B2. An expanded version of the Chronicle essay, and his most passionate explication of the cosmopolitan ideal for doing history, is O'Brien, Michael, “On Transcending the Mollusk: Cosmopolitanism and Historical Discourse,” Gettysburg Review 1/3 (1988), 457–68Google Scholar. The “mollusk” of the title is an ironic riff on Jules Michelet's image of the corrupt wealthy, minds decayed, falling to “the level of a cosmopolitan, of just any man, and from there to the level of a mollusk!” For O'Brien, of course, the cosmopolitan is many levels above the mollusk. See O'Brien, “Transcending the Mollusk,” 457.
5 O'Brien, Michael, “The South in the Modern World,” in O'Brien, Placing the South (Oxford, MS, 2007), 10–25Google Scholar, at 12 (this is a collection of O'Brien's essays, his second; this essay originally appeared in 1998); O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 210; O'Brien, “The South in the Modern World,” 14; O'Brien, , “Thomas Wolfe and the Problem of Southern Identity: An English Perspective;” South Atlantic Quarterly 70/1 (1971), 102–11Google Scholar, at 104, 106.
6 O'Brien, “Thomas Wolfe,” 103. My sketch of O'Brien's student days and his growing interest in the South draws on this essay; on O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” O'Brien, “The South in the Modern World”; and on my conversations with him over the years. For other of his brief written reflections on his personal history (he did not do this often), see Michael O'Brien, “Happy Endings,” Times Literary Supplement, 5516–17 (19 Dec. 2008), 34; O'Brien, “Afterword: On the Irrelevance of Knights,” in Joseph P. Ward, ed., Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll (Jackson, MS, 2003), 215–27; O'Brien, “Autobiography,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, esp. 79–80. As for Wolfe, O'Brien once recalled, as a student, telling a Cambridge don that he was interested in Thomas Wolfe and being corrected: “Not Thomas,” said the don. “The name is Leonard, Leonard Woolf,” about which O'Brien remarked, “Provincialities have a way of colliding.” See O'Brien, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1988), 207–18, at 209. This volume is O'Brien's first collection of his essays, with this essay dating from 1984.
7 Parrington, Vernon Louis, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, vol. 2, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860 (New York, 1927)Google Scholar; Hubbell, Jay B., The South in American Literature, 1606–1900 (Durham, NC, 1954)Google Scholar; Davis, Richard Beale, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South (Knoxville, 1978)Google Scholar. The literary criticism of Lewis P. Simpson and Louis D. Rubin Jr was substantial even by the 1970s. See, e.g., Simpson, Lewis P., The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Athens, GA, 1975)Google Scholar; Rubin, Louis D. Jr, William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays in the Southern Literary Imagination (Baton Rouge, LA, 1975)Google Scholar. Eaton, Clement, The Mind of the Old South (Baton Rouge, LA, 1964)Google Scholar; Osterweis, Rollin G., Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, 1949)Google Scholar. O'Brien comments on the received wisdom of southern intellectual life in need of revision in O'Brien, All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South (Fayetteville, AR, 1982), 19–22. The excitement over the eighteenth century among many American intellectual historians was, of course, generated principally by Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967)Google Scholar; and by Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. Perry Miller's work, older but still influential, included The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA, 1953); and The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1954). O'Brien wrote respectfully, but only briefly, about Miller as a founding practitioner of American intellectual history, and he had next to nothing to say about Miller's posthumous (and unfinished) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1965), in which the South is in no way featured and only a few southern thinkers make an appearance. Nor did O'Brien find reason to engage with another influential study on the historiographical landscape in the 1970s, Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), which also scants the South when it does not simply identify it with the Confederacy.
8 Michael O'Brien, “A Private Passion: W. J. Cash,” in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 179–89, at 179; this 1988 essay had origins ten years earlier when O'Brien was working on the Agrarians. For a 1992 assessment see Michael O'Brien, “W. J. Cash,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 197–204, where he had cooled somewhat on Cash, seeing him as more Victorian than modern, and likening his book to a “tear-jerker”(201). See Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York, 1941)Google Scholar.
9 Michael O'Brien, “William R. Taylor,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 213–21, at 214, 215, 219. See also, on Taylor, O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 29, 51, 208; and O'Brien's characterization of Taylor as “hanging between the literary critic and the political historian . . . His achievement and limitation was to ask the historian's question of the literary critic's agenda of texts.” O'Brien, All Clever Men, 14. See Taylor, William R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961)Google Scholar. The model American studies work, acknowledged as such by Taylor on page 2 of his introduction, is Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950)Google Scholar. Other works contemporary to Taylor's that also became stars in the American studies sky are May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time,1912–1917 (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; and Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.
10 Included in the wave of new antebellum histories were Faust, Drew Gilpin, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore, 1977Google Scholar); Thornton III, J. Mills, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1978)Google Scholar; Brugger, Robert J., Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar; Holifield, E. Brooks, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, NC, 1978)Google Scholar; Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Baton Rouge, 1981)Google Scholar; Bruce, Dickson D. Jr, The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829–30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South (San Marino, CA, 1982)Google Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Farmer, James Oscar Jr, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, GA, 1986)Google Scholar; Stowe, Steven M., Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore, 1987);Google ScholarFord, Lacy K. Jr, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. Interestingly, the new literary criticism in these years focused almost entirely on the twentieth century: King, Richard H., A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Jones, Ann Goodwyn, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981)Google Scholar; Singal, Daniel Joseph, The War within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1982)Google Scholar; Hobson, Fred, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983)Google Scholar; Kreyling, Michael, Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987)Google Scholar. For other reading that engaged O'Brien around this time, see his notes in O'Brien, Conjectures, esp. 12–17, and in O'Brien, “The Endeavor of Southern Intellectual History,” in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 1–15.
11 O'Brien, Michael, A Character of Hugh Legaré (Knoxville, TN, 1985)Google Scholar, esp. 54–5, 74–90.
12 O'Brien, All Clever Men, 13. The 1982 Charleston conference resulted in a volume, coedited with fellow conference organizer David Moltke-Hansen, later director of the South Carolina Historical Society, Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, TN, 1986).
13 Michael O'Brien, “A Retrospective on the Southern Intellectual History Circle, 1988–2013,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle, Mercer University, Macon, GA, 21 Feb. 2013 (typescript), 4; O'Brien, “Paradox of Intellectual Life,” B2. The initial meeting in Oxford, OH included historians Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Gilpin Faust, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, James Turner, Daniel Singal, and Steven Stowe. Literary critics attending were Richard King, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and Michael Kreyling.
14 The group being called a “circle” was not O'Brien's doing, but Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's, who started using the term (“without asking anyone,” O'Brien observed) when she hosted the group with Eugene Genovese in 1989. O'Brien did not particularly like the word “circle” as it “smacked of religion and of circles being unbroken and the like,” but the name stuck; O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 10. The Southern Texts Society first published its volumes with the University of Virginia Press and then, after 2001, with its current publisher, the University of Georgia Press.
15 O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 23–4.
16 Ibid., 11, 25, 26.
17 C. Vann Woodward (1908–99) was, after his early years at Johns Hopkins University, at Yale University and authored, among other, later works, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1951); and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955). Eugene D. Genovese (1930–2012) taught at several universities and was the author of, among other studies, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); and (with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York, 2005).
18 O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 14; O'Brien, “Eugene Genovese,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 222–33, at 226. This latter is a reprint of a 1992 review.
19 O'Brien, “Eugene Genovese,” 227.
20 On Woodward see the introduction to The Letters of C. Vann Woodward, ed. Michael O'Brien (New Haven, 2013), ix–xliv; O'Brien, “C. Vann Woodward,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 205–12 (an assessment written upon Woodward's death which draws on essays published in 1990 and 2000); O'Brien, “From a Chase to a View: C. Vann Woodward,” in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 190–206, based in part on an essay first published in 1973.
21 O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 200. On southern identity see C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (New York, 1960), 3–25.
22 Woodward argues these points most fully in Origins of the New South and throughout the essays in Burden of Southern History.
23 O'Brien, “C. Vann Woodward,” 205; O'Brien, Conjectures, 7.
24 O'Brien, Conjectures, 7, 24, 1161. For a post-Conjectures observation on the style of southern modernity see O'Brien, Michael, “The Proslavery Argument and Nazi Ideology,” in Arsenault, Raymond and Burton, Orville Vernon, eds., Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney (Montgomery, AL, 2013), 3–14Google Scholar.
25 O'Brien, Conjectures, 1183, 1199, 1202.
26 O'Brien, Michael, “Amoralities Not for Turning: Response to Cotkin,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 69/2 (2008), 323–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 325; O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 209, 212.
27 O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 211; O'Brien, , “Our South or Theirs?” Southern Literary Journal, 44/1 (2012), 144–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 147; O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 10; O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 209. Southern historians’ preoccupation with a central theme can be traced to historian Ulrich Phillips's work, especially to “The Central Theme of Southern History,” American Historical Review, 34/1 (1928), 30–43, at 31, in which, after discounting cotton farming and states’ rights, Phillips pointed to race—to white southerners’ determination that the South “shall be and remain a white man's country.”
28 O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 209; O'Brien, Conjectures, 1172.
29 O'Brien, Michael, “Afterword,” in Kloppenberg, James T., Isaac, Joel, and Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York, forthcoming 2016)Google Scholar, typescript, 1 (I am grateful to the editors for making this essay available to me); O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 206. In the latter essay, O'Brien expressed his dislike for long footnotes with specific reference to Conjectures, maintaining that a lengthy book was no place for discursive notes. Truth be told, though, O'Brien did not write expansive historiographical notes in any of his books. To the reasons he gives here for eschewing them can be added another he mentions: that detailed references to debates among historians quickly become dated and tiresome. About all of these reasons it can be pointed out (if I may risk a discursive note of my own) that he enjoyed such commentary when he found it in his primary sources and valued it for its evidence of intellectual nuance, networking, and references. For O'Brien's state-of-the-field commentary see O'Brien, Michael, “Southern Intellectual History,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Kloppenberg, James T. (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 647–50Google Scholar; O'Brien, , “Orpheus Turning: The Present State of Southern History,” in Stokes, Melvyn, ed., The State of U.S. History (Oxford, 2002), 307–24Google Scholar; O'Brien, , “Historians,” in Wilson, Charles Reagan, Thomas, James G. Jr and Abadie, Ann J., eds., The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 3, History (Chapel Hill, 2006), 115–18Google Scholar.
30 O'Brien, “Transcending the Mollusk,” 467; O'Brien, “Search for Southern Identity,” 218.
31 O'Brien, “The South in the Modern World,” 18; O'Brien, , “Victorian Piety Practiced,” Modern Intellectual History, 5/1 (2008), 153–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 159.
32 O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 208; O'Brien, “Transcending the Mollusk,” 460; O'Brien, “Response to My Critics,” 211; O'Brien, “Intellectual History,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 100–22, at 114. This last essay was originally a 1993 keynote address to the annual meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle.
33 O'Brien, “Amoralities,” 324; O'Brien, book review, Journal of Southern History, 70/2 (2004), 485–6, at 485.
34 O'Brien, “Afterword,” 3–4. Even in the issue of Modern Intellectual History you are presently reading, O'Brien continued to recommend the cosmopolitan ideal, though sounding a little less certain, by praising James Turner's new book for being “alert to national idiosyncrasies, whilst also giving the impression that scholarship should be seen as a cosmopolitan enterprise, such that the logic of ideas has its own force, which somehow transcends particularisms.” See “Where Have You Gone, Joseph Scaliger?” Modern Intellectual History, 13/1 (2016), (* need pp. #s and quotation p. # ).1
35 O'Brien, Conjectures, 13, 52, 677.
36 Ibid., 15.
37 O'Brien, , “Finding the Outfield: Subregionalism and the American South, Historical Journal, 38/4 (1995), 1047–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1053; O'Brien, “Southern History,” in O'Brien, Placing the South, 123–41, at 130. For an earlier expression of concern for the field of southern history, see O'Brien, “Search for Southern Identity,” 210–11.
38 O'Brien, “Southern History,” 130; his reading of Gates and Appiah at 130–31.
39 O'Brien, Conjectures, 252.
40 O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, xi.
41 There were several female colleagues of O'Brien's in SIHC who over the years engaged him on issues of gender. Those who did so in the earlier years included Drew Gilpin Faust, Ann Goodwyn Jones, Susan Donaldson, and Patricia Yaeger.
42 O'Brien, Michael, An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827–1867 (Charlottesville, VA, 1993)Google Scholar, xv–xvi.
43 O'Brien, All Clever Men, 337. O'Brien did not comment in 1982 on the irony of including McCord in a volume he described (borrowing a line from Lord Byron for his title) as being about men. Many years later, I recall him publically apologizing for his levity at McCord's expense, probably at a SIHC meeting. Daughter of a former South Carolina Congressman and president of the Bank of the United States, Louisa McCord (1810–1879) lived with wealth and influence until the Civil War. In the antebellum years, she had made the unusual (for a female author) transition from poet published anonymously, as befitted a lady, to social critic writing under her own name.
44 O'Brien, Conjectures, 284; on McCord as thinker and writer see esp., 274–84, and on her poetry see 714–17.
45 O'Brien, All Clever Men, 19, 339; O'Brien, Conjectures, 1196, 1197; see the entire discussion of Chesnut at 1185–98. Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–86), like Louisa McCord, was among the South Carolina elite by birth and marriage. The definitive edition of her Civil War diary is Mary Chesnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, 1981).
46 O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 26; O'Brien, , Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon (New York, 2010), xviGoogle Scholar. For O'Brien's edition of Woodward's letters, see n. 20 above. O'Brien identified with Henry Adams as an outsider in a number of ways, and although O'Brien did not frequently put it into words, that Adams was an alter ego was clear. O'Brien once related being introduced by Woodward as “the South's Perry Miller” and thinking that if Woodward must exaggerate it would be preferable to be introduced as the South's Adams. See O'Brien, “Retrospective,” 22.
47 O'Brien, Mrs. Adams, xiv; O'Brien, Henry Adams and the Southern Question, 115. For the Henry Adams quotation see n. 2 above.