William I. Bacchus
We mourn the loss of our friend—and for some of us, our classmate—William I. Bacchus, who died on January 23, 2013. Mary, his wife and best friend for 47 years, was at his side when he slipped away peacefully.
After graduating from Princeton in 1962, Bill spent four years in the Navy's submarine service, initially based in the Philippines where he and Mary met, and then in San Diego. In 1966, he arrived in New Haven, along with some of us, to begin graduate study in political science. Bill received his PhD in only four years, which must have been close to a land-speed record for the political science department during that era. After spending a year as an APSA Congressional Fellow, working for Mo Udall and Fred Harris (with whom he remained in touch for decades to come), Bill joined the faculty at the University of Virginia where he remained for three years.
Having written his dissertation on the organization of government in the arena of foreign affairs, Bill decided to pursue that interest by returning to Washington and devoting the next 30 years to public service. He first spent two years as the Associate Research Director of the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy (known as the Murphy Commission). He then joined the Department of State where he occupied various personnel and management positions for the next 11 years. During that time, he was one of the principal authors of the Foreign Service Act of 1980. From 1986 to 1993, Bill was the Senior Legislative Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Management, and then the Executive Secretary and Co-Study Director of “State 2000,” a major management study that became the primary transition document for the incoming Clinton Administration. Transferring to the Agency for International Development in 1993, he served as Executive Director of two successive management organizations, the Quality Council and then the Management Council. After his formal retirement in 2001, Bill remained actively involved as a consultant on foreign affairs issues until shortly before his death.
As this brief summary of his professional career indicates, Bill was a widely recognized and highly respected expert on questions of how the US government should organize and manage the conduct of its international affairs. At the same time, he somehow managed to find time to share his expertise with an even wider public affairs and political science community by writing four books: Foreign Policy and the Bureaucratic Process (Princeton University Press, 1974), Staffing for Foreign Affairs (Princeton University Press, 1983), Inside the Legislative Process: The Passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980 (Westview Press, 1984), and The Price of American Foreign Policy: Congress, the Executive, and International Affairs Funding (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
In short, Bill achieved a goal to which many political scientists aspire but few attain: to contribute meaningfully to the world of governance and to the world of analysis by keeping his feet planted firmly in both worlds and ensuring that his contributions to each enhanced and enriched his contributions to the other. He was consistent in his endeavors to make this a goal of the APSA as well.
Never let it be said, though, that Bill's interests were so limited. We think it fair to say that, ranking only behind his devotion to Mary and his commitment to his two-dimensional profession (and perhaps his cats) were Bill's love of travel and what was to him its essential concomitant, food. For many years, he would make at least one annual trip to Europe, usually but not only to France, to dine with friends or family at the most distinguished restaurants then extant. If he had had a banner that showed the Michelin stars of all the restaurants at which he ate, it truly would have been star-encrusted, not merely star-spangled. Bill was a gourmet not a glutton, and there never was anything pretentious about his love of great food. He talked about the strengths and weaknesses of restaurants in much the same way he might talk about this year's Princeton basketball team.
Nor did Bill have to leave the country to find restaurants that merited his attention. Closest to home, for years he put out his own guide to Washington area restaurants under the misleading moniker of “Arlington Fats.” And each year at the APSA Annual Meeting, which he attended unfailingly, he would arrange a dinner, at which some of us joined him, at what he considered to be one of the very finest restaurants in whatever city in which we were meeting. For those of us who were present, those annual events will remain one of our fondest memories of our good friend and distinguished colleague.
Not too long before his death, Bill contributed some thoughts and reminiscences to a Princeton publication on the “Class of 1962.” Here is a bit of what Bill wrote to his classmates about himself and, more important to him, the times in which he lived:
“Mary and I have had a wonderful life together. We met and married in the Philippines, where I was home-ported in the Navy and she was a DOD teacher. Although we did not have children, we have had many great adventures, and by and large have enjoyed good health although we both can see advantages of being 21 again! We moved to the Washington DC area for good in 1973, and are very likely to stay forever. Potomac fever is a hard disease to cure!”
“Looking back more broadly, the changes we've seen have been immense, and in spite of current difficulties, I think our future is bright. To have gone from the height of massive resistance to the flowering of the civil rights movement just after we graduated to having elected an African-American president is both a source for collective pride, and something that I am sure few of us thought we would see during our lifetimes. The broadening role of women in our society, not least their inclusion at Princeton, has greatly enriched both our national talent pool and our sensitivity to all aspects of our collective life. The increasing inclusion of the next wave of immigrants, and of minorities in general and of all Americans, whatever their sexual orientation, has the same positive effect.”
“It's not been all positive, of course. We have found ourselves, for what seemed initially as good and sufficient reasons, engaged in a series of wars and military activities that later proved problematic. The growing inequality in the distribution of wealth between those at the top and at the bottom is clearly worrisome, and could be our single most difficult future problem. Our educational system has not kept up with what we need, and our health system, in spite of the beginnings of reform, is clearly lacking, both in terms of access to it for all and because of excessive cost. Our infrastructure is rapidly decaying and desperately needs massive investment. And we have to get a handle on both expenditure and revenue issues by the various levels of government. As my uncle, the science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, is credited by many with saying, ‘There's no such thing as a free lunch!’”
—Stanley Bach, Congressional Research Service, retired
—James Warner Bjorkman, Institute of Social Studies (the Netherlands), emeritus
—Jon R. Bond, Texas A&M University
—Gary C. Jacobson, University of California, San Diego
—Barbara Sinclair, University of California, Los Angeles, emeritus
—Harvey Starr, University of South Carolina
Milton Hobbs
Celebrations of the professional lives of colleagues are usually for those whose academic careers bear the garlands of many scholarly publications. If these were the exclusive criteria for inclusion, an obituary for Professor Milton Hobbs (1927–2012) would be brief, for his sole scholarly publication was a slim volume titled The Objectives of Political Science. But the length of one's publication list is not the sole reason for honoring a member of our discipline. Milton Hobbs is remembered and honored here not only for writing a unique book, but also (even primarily) for enriching the intellectual vistas and analytical skills of many students. Let us first reflect on his research and then on his teaching.
The Objectives of Political Science is a cohesive, comprehensive, and incisive treatise on fundamental issues in the study of politics. Its chapters focus on “Logic: An Introduction to Arguments,” “Knowledge of Politics,” “Explanation,” “Moral Evaluation,” and “The Resolution of Practical Problems.” The book illuminates the feasible and desirable objectives and achievements of political science. It is not a short textbook, which illustrates methods and topics of political inquiry; it is a long “executive summary,” which encapsulates a philosophy and logic of political inquiry.
Hobbs' book is the only work that analyzes political inquiry from the philosophical perspective of logical positivism (logical empiricism). He endorsed this approach unabashedly, unapologetically, and without concessions to other approaches. For he was driven to expose and root out the lack of rigor in the formation and usage of key concepts, explanations, and theories in the discipline of political science. Specifically, he responded to three imperatives in his logic of inquiry: identification and elimination of concepts with ambiguous empirical meaning and/or unverifiable theoretical significance; explanation of observably general phenomena rather than description of purportedly unique phenomena; and emulation of theories in the more universal and statistical disciplines of the social and natural sciences.
Hobbs pursued these goals with cogency and unstinting dedication to clarity in his logical positivist perspective. But he had embarked on a “mission impossible.” Not surprisingly, his unsparing and unvarnished criticisms of alternative perspectives elicited rejoinders. He became a foil for proponents of constructivist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and other logics of inquiry, including the majority of political scientists who had no explicit logic of inquiry at all. Unsurprisingly, too, he was unwilling to compromise his strongly held philosophical views, especially as his draft book and articles were repeatedly rejected for publication. He eventually curtailed his writing and concentrated on his teaching.
We cannot speak to Hobbs' years at the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana), but we can attest that he made a deep and lasting impression on graduate students in political science during the 1960s at Indiana University (Bloomington). He raised issues that most students had not previously perceived, recognized, or engaged, and these issues elicited various responses that significantly enriched the vibrant intellectual atmosphere in the graduate student culture. His impact has been described as “remarkable,” “powerful,” “profound,” “seminal,” and “epiphenal,” among other laudatory testimonial terms. Such praise was voiced by future luminaries in diverse subfields of political science, including the most distinguished member of our cohort—the late Professor Rita Mae Kelly.
As a junior faculty member, Hobbs welcomed the opportunity to teach a required graduate seminar called “The Study of Politics.” The seminar had previously been taught by Charles Hyneman, who published a book with the same title in 1959 and was president of the APSA in 1961–1962.
With Hyneman's blessing, Hobbs transformed the seminar by focusing on the logic of inquiry in political science. Hyneman's book was early reading on the history of the discipline and was followed by rigorous analysis of concept formation, inductive and deductive arguments, nomological explanation, theory construction, model building, and meta-ethics versus normative ethics. Featured authors were Gustav Bergmann, May Brodbeck, Carl Hempel, and other philosophers of science with various logical positivist perspectives from the original Vienna Circle to later logical empiricism. Excerpts from such writings, as well as from major works of distinguished social scientists and area specialists, were systematically analyzed and compared. Students invariably discerned philosophical and logical shortcomings in these works as well as in the publications and lectures of their own faculty members.
Logical positivism equipped Indiana students with analytical tools that shaped their doctoral dissertations, journal articles, and conference presentations. The authors of this obituary took courses in both the department of government and the Russian and East European Institute. The latter was a first-rate interdisciplinary program, but, inspired by Hobbs, we increasingly saw philosophical and logical weaknesses in Soviet Area Studies and the need to clarify concepts, explanations, and theories.
As newly minted junior faculty, we collectively applied a Hobbsian perspective at the national meeting of Slavic specialists held in Washington, DC, in 1967. Our papers on scientific concept formation, intermediate theory construction, and systematic explanation were so novel that the conference organizers installed us in a grand ballroom, which was jammed for the occasion. The focus of our critiques was the dominant “totalitarian model,” especially its limitations for analyzing de-Stalinization in Soviet Russia. More criticism than praise was received from that audience, but we may have seeded and strengthened doubts about the conventional wisdom, especially among younger colleagues. Only two years later, our critiques and those of like-minded scholars were collected in a widely adopted book, Communist Studies and the Social Sciences: Essays on Methodology and Empirical Theory, edited by F. J. Fleron. This volume clearly bore the imprint of Hobbs, and upon presentation of a copy he took pride in his influence.
Hobbs developed the intellectual capabilities of Indiana students in ways he intended, but there were also unintended consequences. He introduced students to fundamental philosophical questions, provided unequivocal answers to these questions, and demonstrated the relevance of both questions and answers to political science. But some of his most enthusiastic students—the three present writers included—eventually refined, revised, or rejected his answers to classic questions, while retaining a keen interest in the questions themselves. Ironically, a number of us later employed critical skills and abilities developed by Hobbs to decouple his questions and answers. We were spurred by increasing knowledge and understanding of philosophical alternatives to logical positivism, which we acquired incrementally and in “aha” experiences during our own research and teaching. Rethinking and reassessing political inquiry and didactic pedagogy were important learning experiences, however, and they increased our intellectual debts to Hobbs.
Elusive to this day are the genesis and chemistry of Hobbs' highly influential teaching. He was on a quest to advance “scientific” political studies, and he sparked and fueled the intellectual growth of students who shared and did not share his views. Some of us, perhaps many, still employ conceptual distinctions, explanatory patterns, and theoretical constructs first engaged in his legendary seminar “The Study of Politics.” And we appreciatively recall the very generous amount of time Hobbs spent in out-of-class conversations with graduate students, often on philosophical and logical questions related to widely diverse doctoral dissertations, which later reached larger audiences through publication in whole or part. Fortunate students participated in small readings courses on political behavior and political psychology, the fruits of which led to publications by his students, including in the American Political Science Review.
We are grateful for this opportunity to salute and honor Milton Hobbs. He was an exceptionally inspiring teacher and uncommonly caring mentor, who exponentially expanded the intellectual horizons and analytical abilities of numerous students.
—Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., Research Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Westfield (MA) State University
—Erik P. Hoffmann, Vincent O'Leary Emeritus Professor of Political Science, State University of NewYork at Albany
—Robert Sharlet, Chauncey Winters Research Professor of Political Science, Union College
Richard Iton
The department of political science at the University of Toronto mourns the loss of our former colleague, Richard Iton, who passed away on April 24, 2013, in Evanston, Illinois, of leukemia. Richard joined the department as an assistant professor in 1994, having completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins University and, before that, his BA and MA degrees at McGill University. After receiving tenure here in 1999, Richard moved to Northwestern University as a professor of African American studies and political science. We were fortunate to have him rejoin us as a colleague in 2008–09, when he was cross-appointed between political science and diaspora and transnational studies. To our regret, he decided to return to Northwestern in 2009.
Richard's brilliant scholarly career was marked by the publication of two award-winning books. His first book, Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture and the American Left (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), makes a distinctive case about exceptionalism and the historical weakness of the American Left: that the Left has been divided against itself from the beginning because of its incapacity to come to terms with the defining place of race in the American social order. This book won the Gustavus Meyer Outstanding Book Award and the Best Book Award of the APSA Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section.
Richard's second book, In Search of the Black Fantastic (Oxford University Press, 2008), is a magisterial overview of the intersection of African American culture and politics. The work traces the transformation of collective black consciousness through a breathtakingly intricate study of representations of black identity in literature, film, and music. The period of African Americans' relative invisibility on the main political stage did not, he shows, signify black depoliticization. To the contrary, the disillusionment with mainstream politics—the post-civil rights judgment that such politics hold little promise of overcoming racial hierarchies—produced a shift of energies to the cultural sphere. Through this period, the “black superpublic”—encompassing black Atlantic intellectuals as well as pop music and film—was the place to look for an understanding of black politics. The work's meticulous historical research and profound theoretical analysis were recognized through the prestigious APSA Ralph Bunche Award in 2009.
Richard was working on a third book, Ghosts, Text, and Play: Politics Beyond the Boundary.
Richard's premature death is tragic for our discipline, as we all had a great deal more to learn from him. His scholarly career was at its peak. But it is a heavy blow as well because of Richard's extraordinary qualities of character. His warm, wry smile conveyed a deep wisdom about the human condition, but also a gentleness of spirit that formed a powerful contrast with the bright edge of his social criticism. Humble and self-effacing, he was the epitome of still waters running deep. His kindness and generosity as a colleague, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend were unfailing. He was taken far too soon, and he will be deeply missed.
—Melissa Williams, department of political science, University of Toronto
“Call me Richard”
“If we think of the fantastic as a genre that destabilizes, at least momentarily, our understandings of the distinctions between the reasonable and the unreasonable, and reason itself, the proper and improper, and propriety itself, by bringing into the field of play those potentials we have forgotten, or did not believe accessible or feasible, I would suggest its effects are not all that dissimilar from those of blackness, with its compulsive externalities and unintended consequences.”
Richard Iton, the authorial ‘I’ of these compelling insights about the diasporic nexus of black politics and black popular cultures, our colleague and a special friend to many of us in the department of African American studies at Northwestern University, passed away unexpectedly on April 24, 2013. He was 51 years old. Richard lived within the cultural and political membrane that entangled and connected the western nation and the black diaspora. This affectively and performatively located his biography across four main cities with significant black populations. He was born in Montreal and undertook his undergraduate studies there at McGill University. Baltimore was where he attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. Toronto was where he secured his first academic appointment at the University of Toronto, department of political science and where he gained tenure. And Chicago was where he lived while he was teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, where he became a full professor. Richard, whose parents migrated to Montreal from the Caribbean (Jamaica and St. Vincent), was deeply marked and influenced by all these traces of blackness, in profound and subtle ways. More specifically, these were modes of engaging and interrogating blackness that always escaped and subverted the container of nation-states and were deeply suspicious of the seductions of populist nationalisms that repressed the equitable distribution of citizenship rights as well as corresponding public goods and services. Registering in the forms of cultural, political, and intellectual activisms that he brought to his life as a black professor in the academy, Richard's work as a political and cultural theorist can only really be understood once we begin to appreciate the worlds of modernity, coloniality, race, blackness, and culture that he both inherited and inhabited. He came of age during the liberal consolidations and conservative reversals around race that began to fuse in the post-colonial and post-civil rights settlements to maintain hierarchies and segregations. Like recidivism, these were especially evident in the United States, Canada, and Britain during the late 1980s–1990s, where uneasy truces and at times antagonistic rapprochements occurred between anti-racism and racism, and between the over-representation of black populations in popular culture, particularly music, and exclusions and estrangements of black populations from the public sphere and the realms of political decision making. Heavily influenced but not exclusively defined by the literatures, musics, and politics of civil rights, black power, black Marxism, negritude, Rastafari, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, blues, jazz, reggae, Afro-beat, soul, rock, hip-hop and neo-soul, Richard's engagement with the post-colonial and post-civil rights eras, also drew great sustenance from a political and intellectual Leftism that resonated as much with the Caribbean and Africa as it did with Canada and the United States. His Leftism was not to be confused with liberalism, as the latter's individualism, while important, had become so hegemonic and fetishized that it had begun to repress all political imagination around the significance and value of collective provisions in public policy, something that could only be achieved if greater attention were turned to infusing political democracy with social democracy. But it was not simply at the level of the intellectual that Richard understood these things. He had spent some time as a hospital porter in Montreal, where he also learned the industrial pragmatics of speaking French to power, while his experience as a DJ in Toronto's club scene during the 1990s especially endeared him to the power of black music in creating communities, affinities, and possibilities. All within the reach of his political imagination, these influences were in gestation and at play in his intellectual work. Richard was a political thinker on the Left of politics, particularly the Black Left, although any aspect of progressive politics, and particularly progressive black popular culture, galvanized his interests and attention.
Richard's first book Solidarity Blues—Race, Culture and the American Left, published in 2000, was written while he was at the University of Toronto. Encapsulating Leftism, blackness, politics, and popular culture in an iconic title of two words, it was a long meditation on and a critical answer to the compelling question: ‘Why is there no “real” American left’? Solidarity Blues navigated its critique of American exceptionalism deconstructively by unraveling the very idea of exceptionalism usually associated with the image of the Shining City on the Hill. Richard demonstrated that on closer historical inspection it was actually the imaginary product of white forms of solidarity, buttressed by the moribund persistence of the American Left and sutured by the hegemony of racial rule. What was exceptional was the United States' lack of a credible public policy and recognizable welfare state, compared to other western nations, and the role afforded to white coalitions to compromise universal citizenship rights with the social institution of racial hierarchies and racial segregations. As Richard observed, “In every Western society except the United States, there are relatively viable leftist parties and significant labor movements.” Not only had a failure to oppose racial rule weakened the Left, but also the “universal acceptance of race” had restricted the “benefits accruing to all Americans,” and insofar as the Left had succumbed to the hegemony of race, it was complicit with this racism.
Richard, a political scientist by training, was a political thinker with a complex methodology of cultural analysis. It was directly subversive of his training as a political scientist (a description he was extremely ambivalent about), and it transformed the cultural studies influences he so readily drew upon, infusing them with a political lineage they often lacked, to advance his analyses of race, gender, class, sexuality, blackness, diaspora, popular culture, and the Left. His marshalling of these different domains of data and different disciplines would be developed and honed to great effect in his second book, In Search of the Black Fantastic—Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, which is quite simply a masterpiece. Published in 2008 and written during his first stint in the department of African American studies at Northwestern University, it inaugurated a radically new paradigm for thinking about diaspora, black politics, and black popular culture. The central questions posed by In Search of the Black Fantastic were “How do the excluded engage the apparently dominant order? Does progress entail the marginalized, accepting mainstream norms and abandoning transformative possibilities?” Describing this as “a familiar dilemma,” Richard's focus was both African Americans and other black populations in the diaspora, but he was particularly interested in the “linkage between popular culture and this thing we call politics,” as well as the significance of “reading culture as politics in the context of the post-civil rights era.” Some idea of what Richard envisioned as the “Black Fantastic” was captured in his sense of a peformative repertoire of black politics that cut across institutional, social movement, and popular culture distinctions. It generated “minor key sensibilities” from the “underground, the vagabond” and “constituencies marked as deviant.” These sensibilities were also articulated with the surreal and underdeveloped possibilities, bringing into “the field of play practices and ritual spaces that are often cast as beyond the reasonable and relevant—to the point indeed of being unrecognizable as politics.” This meant the socially inherited and instituted forms of politics and popular cultures were not always responsive to or equipped to carry the desires, pleasures, anxieties, fears, imaginations, and oppositions of black populations. Consequently the black fantastic “would entail unsettling these governmentalities and the conventional notions of the political, the public sphere, and civil society that depended on the exclusion of blacks and other nonwhites from meaningful participation and their ongoing reconstitution as raw material for the naturalization of modern arrangements.” Always critical and lyrical, philosophical and personal, poetic and polemical, the book charts the post-civil rights fortunes and failures of black politics across the United States, the Caribbean, and Britain. It investigates a dazzling array of politically expressive cultures in music, novels, comedy, theatre, movies, and autobiographies, weaving these together as commentaries and reflections in their entanglements with the circuits, exchanges and calibrations of nation-states, civil societies, subaltern communities, and diasporas. Particularly attentive to the debates around race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and politics, In Search of the Black Fantastic provides through its innovative conceptualizations, the most nuanced, diverse, and insightful twenty-first century account of post-civil rights black politics.
While Richard's scholarly pursuits and intellectual endeavors leave an extremely revered and important legacy to the black scholarly community and the next generation of scholars, it would be misguided to simply remember Richard this way. He was not someone who could be summarized by his intellectual achievements alone. His way of being with and engaging in university life, his relationships with colleagues, students, friends, and family all seemed to be touched by a humility and graciousness that has left many mourning his absence in their lives. It is as if the light at the end of a tunnel has not only been turned off but the tunnel and the vision it offered has also been closed. For many years Richard was an incredible influence and presence in the department African American studies at Northwestern University. His capacity to stimulate and maintain contacts and friendships with all kinds of different personalities meant he was always a conciliatory, mediating figure if there were conflicts, a person who could find the compromise, and the professor whose wise counsel would be sought by students before all others. Richard could hold people and ideas in tension and yet hold them together. It was as if in his quiet, understated way he was asking us to see what might be generative, transformative, and progressively read through, much as he did in his wide-ranging analyses. Reminiscent of the meter and tone of the prose in his writing, in Richard you encountered a humane kind of engagement that invited rather than insisted, intimating profound insights and artful displays of good humor and holding onto community. Just as in the beautiful tensions, rapports, and entanglements of black politics and popular culture, it was Richard's generosity of spirit coupled with deep investments in communities of thought and participation that allowed him to become a special person to so many. Richard was a serious, funny, and humane intellectual who offered our department, both faculty and students, a reassuring but nevertheless challenging light by which to read the possibilities of critique, integrity, and community in university and political life; we will mourn the absence of his illuminating presence. In the light that remains, we are all now so dearly indebted to him for earlier encouraging us and now reminding us to take the next step in search of the Black Fantastic.
—Sylvester A. Johnson and the department of African American studies, Northwestern University
Hanes Walton, Jr.
Hanes Walton, Jr., professor of political science at the University of Michigan, passed away on January 7, 2013. Professor Walton was born September 25, 1941, in Augusta, Georgia. In 1948, the family moved to Athens, Georgia, home to the University of Georgia. Ironically, Hanes' father worked as a janitor at the university during an era in which Hanes himself was prevented from attending due to his race. Hanes Walton, Jr. was educated in the public schools of Athens. In 1963, he earned his undergraduate degree in political science from Morehouse College. In 1964, he completed his master's degree in political science at Atlanta University. In 1967, Hanes became Howard University's first PhD graduate in political science. When Walton completed his graduate training, few major white institutions hired black scholars. None offered Walton an interview. In 1967, Dr. Walton began his career at Savannah State College, a small historically black institution in his native state. He was hired as an associate professor and was appointed full professor in 1971. In 1972, he was appointed the Fuller E. Callaway Professor. In 1992, Walton left Savannah State to assume a professorship at the University of Michigan.
The year 1967 was a significant time for Walton's entrance into the discipline. Until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black political participation was severely restricted. Walton entered political science just as the very basis of African American electoral politics, the black voter, came to the fore. As a young scholar, Walton set out to study the significance of this new phenomenon.
Dr. Walton worked for much of his career at a small college that required its faculty to devote most of its time to teaching. Walton was an outstanding teacher, known for providing personal mentoring to the small number of students who majored in political science. He helped shaped the lives of thousands of his former students who went on to accomplish wonderful achievements in their various professions. Many of his students went to law school and became lawyers, legislators, and judges. Others are making tremendous contributions in the areas of local, state, and federal governments.
Despite a large teaching load, Walton nevertheless distinguished himself as an academic researcher. Walton was the author of 25 books, many of them completed while on the faculty at Savannah State. He specialized in American politics, race and politics, political parties, and elections. Walton became nationally known for his pioneering scholarship in the area of African American politics, an academic subfield of political science that, as he lamented, was once considered “an academic graveyard for the young scholar who sought academic respectability and an opportunity to rise to the forefront of the discipline.” He was a black politics pioneer, establishing it as a legitimate sub-field of political science. His Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans, was the first book-length study of African Americans in the Republican Party. Black Politics: A Theoretical and Structural Analysis was one of the first political science textbooks focused totally on African-American politics. Walton's Black Political Parties: An Historical and Political Analysis is a ground-breaking study of the creation of black political parties as an expression of the desire of African Americans to be included in the mainstream of American political life. In Invisible Politics, Walton demonstrated how standard political science treatment of African American political behavior has significant methodological and theoretical shortcomings. Invisible Politics remains required-reading in many graduate programs. One of Walton's most recent books, The African American Electorate: A Statistical History, is a stunning two-volume set that unearths and chronicles previously unknown information about African American political behavior from the Colonial era to the present. Walton's sustained and consistent attention to African American political behavior developed the subfield of black politics as a subject worthy of sustained interest and reflection.
Walton was deeply committed to the promotion of an academic scholarship on racial politics that moved away from what he once called a “race relations perspective.” In the preface of his textbook, American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom (co-authored with Robert C. Smith), Walton observed that a “race relations perspective” was focused on the “concerns of whites about stability and social peace.” Hanes Walton was intensely devoted to a scholarly perspective of racial politics focused on “how an oppressed group might achieve power so as to provide solutions to long-standing social and economic problems. This perspective deals with freedom and power rather than stability and social peace.”
Walton's academic honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship, APSA Congressional Fellowship, Ford Foundation Fellowship, and Howard University's Distinguished Alumni Award. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Kappa Mu, and Pi Sigma Alpha honor societies. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics, National Political Science Review, Western Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Negro History, and The Black Scholar. Dr. Walton was a life member of the APSA. He served on the APSA's Executive Council from 1992–1993. He was elected to serve as vice president of the APSA for the 2012–2013 term.
Hanes was a wonderful colleague and student mentor. His encyclopedic knowledge of the political science literature was freely shared to all who asked. He collaborated with many in the profession. He was especially devoted to the small but growing number of African Americans who worked in the discipline, many of whom he trained at the University of Michigan. Hanes was extremely unselfish with his time. For many decades he served as an informal adviser and strategist for the African-American leadership establishment in Savannah and Chatham County, Georgia. He was the consummate academic who loved both teaching and research. He is survived by his two sons Brandon Walton and Brent Walton, and their mother Alice, and a younger brother Thomas Nathaniel Walton.
—Marion Orr, Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Urban Studies and Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University
—Pearl K. Ford Dowe, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Arkansas
—Tyson Kings-Meadows, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
—Joseph P. McCormick, Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science, Howard University
—Robert C. Smith, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University
James P. Young
March 4, 1934–April 7, 2013
I first met Jim Young in the spring of 1962 when I was applying for a job at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton). He was then an assistant professor and was part of my interviewing committee. I knew from our earliest conversations that Jim and I would become close intellectual colleagues and personal friends.
Our discussions on politics and political theory were long, unhurried, and focused. His mind was agile and alert, quick to respond to obvious errors, thoughtful and reflective when serious issues were being discussed. Jim was deceptively quiet and could demolish an argument of his opponent hardly ever raising his voice.
In class, he was respected for his serious commitment to political theory, his ability to communicate directly to students his love of the subject, and to make complex ideas accessible to them.
He also respected his students as revealed in the acknowledgment section of his book on American liberalism. There he thanks them individually by name, as students who have engaged with him in discussions in his various classes and seminars and contributed to his thought process and to the development of his own ideas.
During the years that Jim was at SUNY Binghamton, he established himself as a leading member of the political science department and was an Emeritus Professor at the time of his passing. He authored many articles and reviews for professional journals and wrote three books, among them his major work Reconsidering American Liberalism, which drew very favorable reviews from distinguished political theorists when it was first published and is still widely cited and highly regarded.
Our lives took us in different directions. Jim remained in Binghamton and I moved to New York City and then to Poughkeepsie. But distance has never interfered with our need to touch base every so often.
Despite our geographical distance, we have remained close and dear friends, and our solid intellectual bond has not suffered as a result. One could not have wished for a better colleague, friend, and intellectual alter.
I am thankful to have had the good fortune to engage with Jim in a long lasting friendship, to have benefited from our conversations, and to have become close to his family, his wife Gladys and his children Jim Jr. and Susan.
Jim was a dear friend and spirited intellectual colleague. His passing leaves me deeply moved and saddened, and ends a chapter of my life that I so deeply cherished.
Submitted by colleague and friend,
—James Farganis, Emeritus Professor, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
