The Cold War and Civil Rights
I am writing in reference to your article on “Teaching the History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement” (Perspectives, Oct. 1991, p. 20). I was surprised that the article, and presumably the panel on which it was based, did not mention an important historiographic trend that places this important movement within the context of the Cold War. My work for example, and an important article by Mary Dudziak in the Stanford Law Review of November 1988—entitled appropriately “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative”—stress that Washington found it difficult to justify charging Moscow with human rights violations when a significant percentage of its own citizens were subjected to an atrocious apartheid. This notion was reflected in government briefs filed in most of the leading civil rights cases of that era, including Brown vs. Board of Education. It is curious that this obvious point has managed to escape the attention of so many historians and speaks directly to the restricted nature of discourse in this “free marketplace of ideas.” It is not just a minor debating point either for African-Americans, other national minorities, non-minority women. All need to ponder soberly what will be the impact of the collapse of the Cold War on their future.
Gerald Horne, Research Fellow
Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia
Teaching—A “Kiss of Death”?
“Is Research the Whole Enchilada?” Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.
A new emphasis on teaching is to be applauded. Yet quality teaching takes an enormous amount of time and energy. Graduate students and junior professors, however, are quite aware of the fact that the road to tenure and promotion is through scholarly articles and monographs. Indeed, at some institutions awards for teaching have become a “kiss of death.”
What is really needed is some kind of signal that superb instruction—with a flexible definition of scholarly activity—can lead to a successful career in academia.
Stephen G. Weisner
Springfield Technical Community College
Springfield, Massachusetts
In the Interest of Women
We express our deep appreciation to Professors Barbara Harris and Gabrielle M. Spiegel for their thoughtful reflections on the many contributions of the late Dr. Catherine M. Prelinger toward the promotion of interests of women historians and advancement of women’s history (Perspectives, Nov. 1991, p. 17). We would like to add that Dr. Prelinger also served as president of the Coordinating Committee for Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) from 1979 to 1982. She was instrumental in getting affiliated status for independent scholars at U.S. universities. Under her leadership, CCWHP joined the Coalition to Save Our Documentary Heritage to restore funding for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at a time when nearly one-tenth of the CCWHP membership was engaged in documentary editing.
Nupur Chaudhuri
Former Executive Director, CCWHP
Margaret Strobel
Former President, CCWHP
Presidential Libraries—Another View
“NCC News” in the October issue cites an evaluation of presidential libraries made by a “task force” of the National Academy of Public Administration. As summarized, the evaluation deplores the decentralization of the presidential library system as “expensive and inconvenient for scholars” and bad for sound scholarship because it encourages researchers to overemphasize the uniqueness of discrete presidential administrations.
Another issue, involving as it does matters of judgment and emphasis, may safely be left to scholars of the presidency and recent American history. Presumably, as a group they have enough sense to deal with it. Clearly, it is not a matter to be settled by any task force.
The declaration about expense and inconvenience, however, appears to avoid one central question—for whom? One wonders how many faculty and graduate students at Midwestern universities have found it more expensive and inconvenient to do research at the Hoover, Truman, or Eisenhower libraries than to travel to Washington and stay there for several days, or weeks depending on the character of their project.
A good many scholars with presidential library experience—I daresay the vast majority—are inclined to argue that the decentralization of the presidential library system is a virtue that has both quantitatively and qualitatively enhanced scholarship in the history of twentieth-century American politics. The system has been important in facilitating the development of strong graduate programs in American political history at a number of institutions outside the Northeast; one finds it hard to believe that the task force would want to reverse this happening. One doubts in addition that the centralization of presidential papers in Washington would produce more scholarship.
It may well be that an individual living a Metroliner ride away from Washington finds it inconvenient to go to West Branch or Independence or Abilene to do research on the Hoover or Truman or Eisenhower administrations. It is a least possible, however, that our fictional researcher will have a grant-in-aid from an endowment raised by a private, nonprofit institute connected to the library. That researcher will encounter a facility staffed by archivists who have an intimate knowledge of the library’s collections, frequently possess many years of experience there, are capable of giving good advice, and without fail provide prompt, helpful service. Moreover, collections at the presidential libraries consist not simply of a president’s manuscripts, but those of many other members of his administration, drawn together by the library’s existence.
Can any reasonable person believe that the grants-in-aid, the expert archivists with long tenure, and the unified administration collections would survive centralization in Washington? The presidential library system is not perfect, but its virtues, rooted in its decentralized, regional character, have far outweighed its vices, which are largely those of the National Archives. Any proposal to create a central facility in Washington needs to pay much more attention to the likely real-world consequences than this one apparently does.
Alonzo L. Hamby, Fellow
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Washington, DC
