Capitalism in History Class

This letter to the editor appeared in The New York Times (online) on April 14, 2013.

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To the Editor:

“In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar” (front page, April 7) creates the mistaken impression that this development represents a departure “after decades of ‘history from below,’ focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people.” The subject matter may be new, but the partisan, left-wing perspective is the same.

I’m sure that some valuable insights and historical linkages will emerge from this round of scholarship. But I doubt that these college courses will describe how, along with the rise of monopoly, the American market system also provided openings for tens of thousands of people with few resources — including ethnic minorities and women — to create businesses, offer needed services and commodities to their communities, and provide a route for themselves and their families into the middle class.

Capitalism entered world history at roughly the same time that individual freedom caught on as a widespread goal, and this linkage was not accidental. Any fair-minded historical treatment of capitalism would have to explain why this economic system has proved so popular, despite its many failings.

TONY FELS
San Francisco, April 7, 2013

Be Proud of Being "Colorblind"

This letter to the editor of the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, appeared on March 28, 2013 (print) and March 27, 2013 (online). The online version omitted my name as the letter’s author.

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Regarding anti-racism activist Tim Wise’s appearance before 600 people at USF (Foghorn, March 21, 2013), it’s hard to believe that most of the students in that crowd were not “encouraged” to attend by faculty, either as a class assignment or for extra credit. Why would white students of their own free will wish to go hear someone berate them for their alleged racial privilege? I could imagine Wise’s presentation would make students of color feel uncomfortable too. And how about those students who don’t identify so readily with either category?

In my 24 years of teaching at USF, I have noticed that most students, regardless of race, work hard to do well in school, many hold down jobs at the same time, and a very large number will go into debt in order to finance their educations. These are traits that students can be proud of in themselves. Pride, not guilt, offers the healthiest foundation on which to form solid friendships and work relationships, and that goes for relationships across racial lines or within them.

Thanks to the successes of the civil rights movement, we are all lucky enough to be living in a new era – for the past forty years – in which the vicious racial divides of America’s past are no longer powerful. Among the young in northern California and especially in the Bay Area, racial advantages in themselves are practically nonexistent. What does divide people are disparities in wealth, which include the residual effects of discrimination on past generations. But the antidote to that continuing problem is certainly not the cultivation of white racial guilt but a common effort by all to remove the economic and educational impediments to equal opportunity.

The great nineteenth-century African-American activist Frederick Douglass, whose second marriage was with a white woman at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most states, used to paraphrase in many of his speeches the stirring Biblical words from Acts 17:26: that God had made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. If Douglass could maintain this wonderful, integrationist vision in the midst of some of the darkest days for African Americans, surely we can do the same when racism is practically dead.

Bobby Seale Disappoints, Says USF Professor

This opinion essay appeared in the San Francisco Foghorn, the official student newspaper of the University of San Francisco, on March 3, 2011 (print) and March 2, 2011 (online). The online version omitted my name as the essay’s author, although I do appear as a “Tag” below the article!

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On Feb. 24, some 250 people jammed into McLaren Hall to hear Bobby Seale interviewed by my colleague, Professor Candice Harrison, of the History Department. The crowd showed an admirable mixture of USF’ers and people from the wider Bay Area community. Bobby Seale exhibited much charm and humor in his replies to Professor Harrison’s questions, relating stories of his rebellious youth along with a moving account of his awakening to racial pride. Toward the end, when he recited by heart and at double-time the long, angry poem that once got him arrested for obscenity on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue back in the early 1960s, it brought the house down. I left feeling well entertained.

But that was exactly the problem. The more I thought about it, I realized that I hadn’t learned very much about the issues of importance raised by Bobby Seale’s place in history as one of the founders and leaders of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the most significant black power organization in the United States from 1967 until the early 1970s. Seale actually said almost nothing about those years. And most strikingly, he shared none of his reflections back on that time from the vantage point of today. Bobby Seale today is a man of age 75 or so. How does his mature vision take stock of what he and others did in their twenties and thirties in the heat of a great national upheaval?

Perhaps the central issue raised by the history of the BPP is the place of violence in movements for social justice. When the Panthers showed up in 1967 at the State Capitol in Sacramento armed with guns, it created a sensation. How does he look on that moment now?

Assessing the Panthers’ violent history is no easy task. Emerging out of a social milieu itself subject to violence of many sorts, including brutality by urban police forces that were nearly exclusively white, the Panthers took up the challenge of defending African Americans from attack. Yet they brought violent responses with them, both within their own membership and to the outside world. And the whole picture was complicated by the presence of government informants planted within the organization. This difficult historical record is exactly what today’s activists and the general public could benefit from thinking about as they look for models from the past to guide future actions.

Near the end of his interview Seale recalled an altercation which ensued when a Berkeley policeman tried to arrest him. The two fell to the ground, and Seale reached for a knife in his pocket and cut the officer on his hand. Seale minimized this action, telling the audience that it was only a very small, scouting knife, the kind that has a corkscrew and nail file attached. The audience laughed with him, though this time a little more nervously than before. The perfect opportunity for Seale to add his mature reflection on this youthful incident and raise the general subject of violence passed, and the incident was left glorified, as if nothing had been learned from fifty years of subsequent experience. In the end, I’m afraid, the evening offered little more than a reliving of the sixties, with all its heroism and illusions still intact.

WASC: Accreditor Foxes Guard Collegiate Henhouse

This opinion essay was published on the website of The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy on January 25, 2010. The organization is now known as The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

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The nation’s recent financial crisis has highlighted the importance of regulatory watchdogs in exercising oversight of the nation’s financial institutions. Given my university’s experience with its educational regulator, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), maybe it’s time to pay as much attention to college accreditation as we’re paying to such credit-rating services as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. 

Colleges and universities are mostly insulated from any regulatory structure.  Although public universities are subject at least to the intervention of state governing boards, private institutions of higher learning appear to have no one looking over their shoulders, except when they come up for reaccreditation. 

In the United States, six regional accrediting agencies have arisen to provide this function. WASC is one of them, responsible for schools in California, Hawaii and the American territories in the Pacific.  If the instance I report on here is any indication of a larger state of affairs, a close examination of the accreditation system is in order.

Colleges and universities trade in ideas rather than money, so their principal ethical danger isn’t greed, but excessive zeal in service of some ideology. Nothing is more ruinous to the reasoned pursuit of truth, without which education becomes indoctrination.

Thus, you would think that WASC would take an interest in my charge that a dean’s office at my university likely rigged a departmental review to make the department look bad—a result in line with the administration’s political goals.

But if you think that, you’d be wrong.

In 2004-05, I was serving as chair of the history department at the University of San Francisco (USF) when, by school custom, our department came up for its ten-year review. The centerpiece of the review process is a report written by three outside evaluators who have visited the campus, read the department’s lengthy self-study, and consulted with students and faculty.  The method by which the three evaluators are selected is obviously important. 

At USF, when external reviewers are chosen by the dean’s office, formal guidelines call for the dean “to accommodate some of the department’s preferences” in the choice of the evaluators and in general to select reviewers, professionally competent within their field, who can supply “an objective outsider’s perspective on the quality of the program.”

In forming the history review team, however, the dean’s office ignored all nine of the history department’s qualified nominees and made no attempt to find even a single candidate mutually agreeable to the department and the dean’s office.  This was not its usual procedure and for the two other departments undergoing program reviews that year, the administration fully accommodated the preferences of department members. 

For the history department, the dean’s office selected a politically homogeneous team of three left-wing (not simply “liberal”) reviewers.  Contrary to the administrators’ later denials, the political leanings of at least two of these reviewers were known to the dean’s office in advance of their selection.  According to their official university websites, one reviewer taught a course entitled, “Historical Materialism: The Marxist Theory of the Past” (a highly unusual offering for a U.S. social historian), while a second reviewer had taken her students on a study-trip to Cuba.

The dean’s office further misled the history department when introducing its choices to us in advance of their site visit by omitting those parts of the reviewers’ resumes that displayed their political leanings.

It also chose for these same three evaluators two ethnic-minority males and one white female, at a time when the tenured historical profession in the United States was made up of 70% white males. Taken alone, this discrepancy could have indicated an admirable desire to make the team demographically diverse, but in the context of all the evidence in this case, it suggested an ulterior motive on the dean’s part to engineer a specific outcome. And when later asked to reveal the specific steps that it took in its selection process, the dean’s office failed to disclose any, including the size of its original pool of candidates and the number and names of candidates on its acknowledged short list.

While each of these separate actions might alone have been explained by chance or unusual circumstances (although this is doubtful), taken together they suggest intentional bias. The point is not that a Marxist historian, or even three Marxist historians, could never be objective or that it takes a white male on a committee to conduct a fair-minded evaluation (our department’s own nominees included six white women and one ethnic-minority man). 

Rather, the question is what motivated the dean’s office to form a review team in this way. I believe that the dean acted as she did because she wanted an evaluation that would criticize the department for failing to move quickly enough to diversify its faculty by race and gender.

At the time of the review the history department consisted of ten full-time members, including seven white men, two white women and one ethnic-minority man. While these proportions approximated national averages, they were considered insufficiently diverse by most personnel at USF, both inside and outside the department. And in the ten years preceding the review, the department had assembled a creditable record in efforts to achieve greater diversity, including voluntary participation in five ethnically-targeted searches, resulting in two job offers, one of which was accepted. Evidently, those and other efforts were not good enough for the dean’s office. Rather than speak to the department openly about its concerns, it apparently chose the devious path of attempting to engineer a negative program review.

When USF came up for reaccreditation in 2007, WASC, as is customary, solicited grievances from faculty, employees and students.  My submission charged that the dean’s office had violated the ethical principles of fairness, professionalism, transparency, accountability, honesty, and a commitment to follow stated procedures in an attempt to influence the outcome of the history review.

The ethical principles I listed are embraced under Standard One of WASC’s standards of accreditation. Standard One requires that a university “functions with integrity,” “exhibits integrity in its operations,” and “upholds sound ethical practices….” I asked WASC to investigate my charge that USF had failed to adhere to those principles.

WASC dismissed my charges without any investigation. Had it accepted my submission as a legitimate grievance, WASC would have been obligated by its own rules to ask for a formal reply from USF, to pursue questions of fact, and to render a judgment. It wished to do none of these things.  Executive Director Ralph A. Wolff explained that the issue was merely “an internal matter.” “Given that the selection of program reviewers is an internal matter at the institution,” Dr. Wolff wrote to me, “there is no basis for us to consider this as a breach of integrity.”

It is hard to imagine WASC taking such a hands-off position had the same charges originated, for example, in a review of a biology department where evidence pointed to tampering with the review team in order to bring the teaching of intelligent design into the curriculum.

I appealed the decision to Dr. Sherwood Lingenfelter, WASC’s chair of the board.  He  endorsed Dr. Wolff’s reasoning, writing, “the situation you describe does not demonstrate ‘significant non-compliance’ [with the Standards of Accreditation]…” Without having conducted an inquiry into my charges, it is hard to see how WASC could judge that the ethical non-compliance I alleged was either significant or insignificant.

It was also revealing that Dr. Lingenfelter referred to this dispute as a “political conflict.”  To call a dispute a “political conflict” is to relegate it to a domain of mere opinion (or, worse, personal animosity), as if the outcome has no consequences for the integrity of the institution. WASC probably wanted to view this dispute as pitting a university trying to advance faculty diversity against a faculty member trying to thwart it—which was not the case at all. 

My defense of fairness, due process, and transparency is indeed political, but not in the pejorative sense that WASC meant. Rather, it defends an Anglo-American liberal tradition that underwrites rules of a civil society by which disagreements can be channeled into constructive outcomes rather than into violence.

These same political values safeguard universities as places of free expression and reasoned argument. To some people on the left (as on the right), by contrast, all politics is tainted by crass group interest. The goal is simply to defeat your enemy by any means at your disposal and, if on top, as the left currently finds itself at USF and apparently at WASC, to stay on top.

In the case of the history review, because the dean’s office had circumvented its own stated procedures for ensuring balance and objectivity in the selection of reviewers, the evaluation written by the chosen team became an inflammatory document that distorted the department’s record in multiple areas, tarnished reputations, touched off a minor witch hunt for “racists” and “sexists,” created bitter factions, and hastened the departure of one member. The dean’s apparent breach of ethics produced a terribly destructive outcome.

It is not too late for WASC to reverse course, since USF’s reaccreditation process is still ongoing through 2009-10. If the accrediting body’s decision to reject an investigation into what happened in the selection of the history review team stands, college administrators in California and the Pacific region will know that they can “stack the deck” with impunity when they choose outside readers and evaluators for tenure cases and program reviews—that is, provided the results agree with WASC’s political orientation.

The depressing lesson from all this is that both college administrators and accrediting agencies, no less than groups of faculty members, are sometimes so politicized that fairness and integrity get trampled.

Ethnic Integration in Gilded Age Freemasonry: Universalism Versus Exclusivity during the Golden Age of Fraternity

This article was presented as a paper at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Boston, Massachusetts, on March 28, 2004.

Robert Morris

This article was published in American National Biography, published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, 24 volumes, John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, general editors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 15: 911-913.

Freemasonry

This article was published in The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, 2 volumes, Edward L. Queen II, Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., editors (New York: Facts on File, 1996) 1: 241-242. In the article I mistakenly assert that the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782, contained the Masonic symbol of the All-Seeing Eye. Rather, the Seal’s symbol appears to have derived from the older Christian depiction of the Eye of Providence, which was equally picked up by the fraternity just slightly later in the 1780s, eventually becoming one of the brotherhood’s most prominent symbols. (The Egyptian pyramid is not a mainstream Masonic symbol at all.)

Sacred Subordination among Free Individuals: Freemasonry and California Religion

This article was presented as a paper at the meeting of the American Society of Church History, San Francisco, California, on January 8, 1994.

The Religion of Freemasonry: The Persistence of an Enlightenment Tradition

This article was presented as a paper at the meeting of the American Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, on November 2, 1991.

No, Christine Blasey Probably Isn't Behaving Like the Children Who Leveled False Accusations in the Salem Witch Trials

This article was originally published on History News Network on September 25th, 2018

Note: This opinion essay was written on the eve of Christine Blasey Ford’s and Brett Kavanuagh’s public testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The title was not my own (which was “Salem Analogy Misapplied to Christine Blasey”) but was supplied by the editor of the History News Network, reflecting his belief, even before both antagonists had presented their cases, that Ford was telling the truth and Kavanaugh was not. (I managed to get the editor to insert the word “Probably” into his title to soften the strength of his conviction.) The point of my essay was not, at this moment in the unfolding controversy, to pass judgment on Ford’s claim but rather to call attention to the historical advances in legal proceedings since 1692 (the time of the Salem witch hunt) that provided both sides in such conflicts a reasonably fair hearing. The Salem lessons for me, unlike for Wall Street Journal columnist Lance Morrow, whom I was addressing in this piece, lay not in quickly validating one side or the other but rather in not rushing to judgment. Had I written this essay after Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s public testimonies, however, I could have embraced more fully the perspective implied by the existing title.

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President Trump isn’t the only one citing the Salem witch hunt to shape public opinion these days. Reference to the infamous witch hunt of 1692 has again entered public discourse to explain psychology professor Christine Blasey’s accusation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers. Columnist Lance Morrow used the Salem analogy in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay to cast doubt on the truth of Professor Blasey’s charge, likening it to the wild imaginings of the Salem girls and young women whose accusations of witchcraft led to the execution of twenty innocent women and men (five others died in prison awaiting trial). For Morrow, ideological extremism – religious in nature for Salem’s seventeenth-century Puritans, political for today’s progressives supposedly behind Professor Blasey’s effort to derail Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination – offers the common denominator in the analogy to Salem.

Morrow’s reasoning is plausible, but the lessons of the Salem events for this bitter conflict of today lie deeper and point in a different direction.

The plausibility of his interpretation begins with the adolescent aspect to the charges. The core group of about seven Salem accusers were girls and young women ages 11 to 20, just as Christine Blasey has, in effect, returned to her own age of 15 to recall what she says happened to her on the night in question. We know further from the controversy over recalled memories of sexual abuse that broke out in the early 1990s that memories of childhood traumas, as “recovered” by sessions with psychotherapists much later in life, can be filtered through distortions of multiple sorts, making the truth of such claims suspect.

The Salem accusations of witchcraft, moreover, came forth within a social context of local, village grievances that often stemmed back generations to the belief that a mother or grandmother of the accused had also been a “witch,” who had earlier injured members of the accuser’s extended family. The upper-middle-class world of suburban Washington D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s may similarly be regarded as a relatively self-enclosed “village,” in which most people knew one another by sight or reputation. And, as several sources have reported, Professor Blasey’s parents suffered an adverse legal ruling at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh’s mother, also a judge.

Add to these circumstances the political penchant today to assign stark labels of good and evil to public figures with whom one agrees or disagrees, and the parallel to the Salem events appears quite compelling. At Salem the witch hunt gathered its greatest momentum when a former minister of Salem Village, Reverend George Burroughs, stood accused (he would soon be executed). Similarly, to bring charges of sexual assault against a man who has been a highly respectable judge for many years may be seen as an act of great audacity, raising the “Me-Too” movement to its highest profile yet.

On the other hand, the truthfulness of Professor Blasey’s charge is just as plausible. The fact that she only very slowly and over a long period of years gained self-awareness about the alleged attack – sufficient even to know what to call it – is a common feature of the stories of genuine sex abuse victims. Her process of coming to terms with the trauma of this alleged event from her teenage years is corroborated by what she confided to her psychotherapist and husband, beginning in 2012, six years before anyone knew that Judge Kavanaugh would become a Supreme Court nominee. That she wavered over the past couple of months before making her identity known reflected real fears that she and her family would be seriously threatened with reprisals, a fear that has been fully borne out by the harassment she has suffered from the public in the few days since her anonymity ended. She and her family have even been forced into hiding for their own safety. She now faces the prospect of a grueling public appearance before a congressional committee that is likely to include strenuous attempts by Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters to discredit her, not to mention the judge’s own forceful denial of her account. In short, she seemingly has nothing to gain from her public accusation of Judge Kavanaugh except precisely what she claims is her only motive: to do her civic duty in preventing a man who is not as upstanding as he appears from gaining a seat on the nation’s highest court.

This is where the Salem events from 1692 offer some valuable lessons for today. Those lessons do not come down to raising doubts about the veracity of Professor Blasey’s charge against Judge Kavanaugh, since at this moment we simply don’t know enough about her accusation to be able to determine who is telling the truth. One forgets from the vantage point of today just how rational the charge of witchcraft seemed to nearly everyone, whether educated or not, in seventeenth-century New England. Nearly all believed in a cosmos of spirits, including good spirits (or angels) and bad spirits (or demons). Given this practically universal belief, it was perfectly reasonable to think that some individuals might be enlisted by Satan to help carry out his plans to overturn the pious Puritan commonwealth. It was not the accusers’ beliefs (or delusions, depending on your point of view) that are the hallmark of the Salem witch hunt but rather the rush to judgment by a fearful community intent on finding scapegoats to punish for perceived misfortunes. That this community would utilize its own beliefs to do so is no more unusual than later communities or nations using their own beliefs to persecute innocent people or groups.

What is different between the events of Salem and today is that the legal system of seventeenth-century Massachusetts had few safeguards against such perversions of justice. Criminal defendants were not yet entitled to the aid of counsel. Judges did not see themselves as neutral upholders of legal ground rules but rather entered into the proceedings on one side or the other. Examinations and trials lay vulnerable to the emotions of the crowd. And non-empirical evidence was ruled admissible in court. A congressional committee is not a court of law, but if it fails to take advantage of modern legal protections for both sides in this dispute, we will find ourselves back in a horrifying era which we thought we had outgrown.

"Occupy" Movement Must Move to the Center

This opinion essay was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (print) on December 13, 2011. It appears on the SFGate website at the same date.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has reached a tactical dead end. This much has been apparent for weeks. Remarkably, its fundamental message of seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth in America has not been lost, despite the extremism and eccentricity of the protests.

The message clearly resonates with a majority of Americans, as many polls have indicated. The problem is not that the movement needs a sharper focus or a more detailed list of demands. Social movements do not have to make policy, much less write legislation. They simply need to articulate the strength of feeling in the population for a change of course.

The more all-embracing its message, the better. But how can the latent sentiments that so many Americans feel today for a return to the principles of fairness and equality of opportunity be expressed in all their fullness?

An analogy might be found in the movement to end the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Protests against the war were started by small minorities of radicals among students, religious figures and draft-age youth. But in 1967 an umbrella organization calling itself the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed the "Mobe") formed to sponsor huge marches against the war in New York, Washington D.C., and other cities.

Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in New York on April 15, 1967, to protest U.S. involvement in the war. Another 100,000 or more showed up at the Lincoln Memorial in October of the same year. In November, 1969, half a million people again demonstrated in the nation's capital to speed up the process of bringing the troops home.

Because these rallies were thoroughly peaceful protests, conventional in form and held on weekends, they attracted the widest range of participants, including thousands of middle- and working-class families.

Today's movement for economic fairness would equally benefit from a tactical turn toward the center. In fact, there is no good reason to continue to refer to it as an "occupation."

Americans do not want to live in tents; they want to live in their own houses with mortgages that are reflective of their homes' actual value and that can be paid off at reasonable terms. Americans do not want to form "affinity groups"; they want to be able to spend time with their families and friends without the anxieties of having to hold on to their jobs for dear life or being without work at all. Americans do not want to gather nightly to make political decisions by consensus; they want their traditional, representative form of democracy to work for them in an honest, straightforward manner.

There may not be 99 percent of the population ready to join a march on a Sunday to "tax the rich." But if even 30 percent showed up, that would create quite a stir.