1 Writing Biography

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2 Writing Biography
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5 Historians & Their Craft
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8 Edited by Lloyd E. Ambrosius
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33 University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London
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1 Copyright © 2004 by the Board
2 of Regents of the University of
Nebraska. Chapter 5 copyright
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© 2004 by Nell Irvin Painter. All
4 rights reserved. Manufactured
5 in the United States of America.
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29 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
30 Writing biography : historians and their craft / edited
by Lloyd E. Ambrosius.
31
p. cm.
32
Includes bibliographical references and index.
33 isbn 0-8032-1066-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)
34 1. Biography as a literary form. i. Ambrosius, Lloyd E.
35 ct21 .w735 2004 808'.06692–dc22 2003019697
1 Contents
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3
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6 Lloyd E. Ambrosius vii Introduction
7
Shirley A. Leckie 1 1. Biography Matters: Why
8
Historians Need Well-Crafted
9
Biographies More than Ever
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11 R. Keith Schoppa 27 2. Culture and Context in
12 [-5], (5)
Biographical Studies: The Case
13 of China
14 Lines: 76 to 11
15 Retha M. Warnicke 53 3. Reshaping Tudor Biography:
Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves ———
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John Milton Cooper Jr. 79 4. Conception, Conversation,
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and Comparison: My Experiences
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as a Biographer
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21 Nell Irvin Painter 103 5. Ut Pictura Poesis; or The [-5], (5)
22 Sisterhood of the Verbal and
23 Visual Arts
24
25 Robert J. Richards 133 6. Did Friedrich Schelling Kill
26 Auguste Böhmer and Does
27 It Matter? The Necessity of
28 Biography in the History of
29 Philosophy
30
155 List of Contributors
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32 159 Index
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1 Introduction
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4 Lloyd E. Ambrosius
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[First Page]
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15 Between 7 and 9 September 2000, the Department of History of the
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16 University of Nebraska–Lincoln held its first Carroll R. Pauley Memorial
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17 Endowment Symposium on the topic “Biography and Historical Analy- ———
18 sis.” We invited six prominent historians in various fields to reflect on Normal Page
19 their experiences as biographers. From their different perspectives, these PgEnds: TEX
20 scholars offered their insights into the writing of biography as a form
21 of historical analysis. Professors Shirley A. Leckie of the University of
[-7], (1)
22 Central Florida, R. Keith Schoppa of Loyola College of Maryland, Retha
23 M. Warnicke of Arizona State University, John Milton Cooper Jr. of the
24 University of Wisconsin–Madison, Nell Irvin Painter of Princeton Univer-
25 sity, and Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago presented their
26 original scholarly papers at the symposium. This volume is the product of
27 their work.
28 Chosen because of the diversity of their perspectives on the sympo-
29 sium’s theme a reflection of their various personal and academic back-
30 grounds, fields of expertise, and methodological approaches these six
31 scholars offered a broad range of interpretations. The three women had
32 written biographical studies of women from different social classes in
33 England and the United States. Their subjects included U.S. soldiers’
34 wives and a historian, English queens, and an African American slave who
35 became a leading feminist and abolitionist. Like their female subjects,
 viii Introduction

1 these authors focused on social issues of gender and race. Their studies
2 shed new light on politics too. The three men had written biographical
3 studies of men. Their subjects included a revolutionary Chinese leader, a
4 U.S. ambassador, two U.S. presidents, and a German philosopher. While
5 focusing on male political and intellectual leaders, they, too, addressed
6 social issues of class, gender, and race. They, too, appreciated the cultural
7 connections between the personal and public aspects of a subject’s life.
8 All six scholars, notwithstanding their diversity, agreed on one cen-
9 tral point: Biography and historical analysis are inextricably intertwined.
10 For them, biographical studies offer a way to analyze important histor-
11 ical questions. Moreover, they affirmed, biographers must use the best
12 historical methodologies, utilizing all available primary sources and in- [-8], (2)
13 terpreting them in creative ways, to reveal the life stories of subaltern as
14 well as prominent and powerful women and men. Lines: 14 to
15 As requested, these six historians focused on the symposium’s theme
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16 of biography and historical analysis. They analyzed the problems of con-
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17 ceptualization and methodology with which historians in various fields ———
18 must deal. They addressed questions such as the following: How does Normal Pag
19 the biographer sort out the individual’s role within the larger historical PgEnds: TE
20 context? How do biographical studies relate to other forms of history?
21 Should historians use different approaches to biography depending upon
[-8], (2)
22 the societies or cultures in which the subjects lived? What are the appro-
23 priate primary sources and techniques that scholars should use in writing
24 biographies in their fields? The original contributions of this book come
25 from the various answers that the six historians gave to these questions.
26 A specialist in the American West, Shirley A. Leckie argued that biogra-
27 phy is an important form of historical analysis that can enable readers to
28 transcend their own personal experiences and encounter another person
29 from a different time and place. For that to occur, however, the biographer
30 must present the subject in such a way that “a living being walks off the
31 pages.” This requires empathy to recognize both internal and external
32 influences, both the psychological dimensions and the environmental
33 circumstances that shaped a person’s life. While retaining a certain de-
34 tachment from the subject to achieve as much historical objectivity as
35 possible, so as to distinguish between fact and fiction, the biographer
 Introduction ix

1 must see the world from that other person’s perspective. This kind of per-
2 sonal understanding must be fully informed by research in all available
3 records, both public and private. When, as is often the case for women
4 or people of color, primary sources are inadequate to answer important
5 questions about a person’s life, biographers must make creative use of
6 whatever is available. Historian Angie Debo employed this approach in
7 her study of Geronimo, as did Leckie in her biography of Debo. Leckie
8 urged historians to undertake biographical studies of other historians in
9 order to explore the “participant-observer” relationship inherent in writ-
10 ing biography. Along with Leon Edel, she contended that a biographer
11 must become a participant in the world in which the subject lived but at
12 the same time remain outside that world as a critical observer. By doing [-9], (3)
13 this well, Leckie concluded, historians can write biographies that enable
14 readers to experience the lives of others. Thus biography matters as a way
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15 of providing meaningful access to other people in different times and
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16 places.
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17 R. Keith Schoppa, whose specialty is modern China, stressed that cul- ———
18 ture and context of both the biographers and their subjects profoundly Normal Page
19 influence the renderings of the past that different people embrace as his- PgEnds: TEX
20 tory. In Chinese history, he explained, the dominant understanding of
21 relationships between individuals and groups has been quite different
[-9], (3)
22 from that in the modern West. To avoid imposing an erroneous interpre-
23 tation onto a Chinese subject’s life, a Western biographer, like Schoppa
24 himself, must therefore recognize this essential difference between the
25 individual-group dynamics operating in the Chinese context and those
26 operating in the West. He stressed the role of social connections and
27 networks in defining the identity and controlling the life and death of Chi-
28 nese people, such as Shen Dingyi, whom he studied. Emphasizing this
29 difference between Chinese and Western cultures, Schoppa noted that
30 individualism has contributed to the popularity of biography as a form of
31 history in the West. Western cultural assumptions about individualism,
32 which Western historians have shared, have encouraged the writing and
33 reading of biography that features an individual rather than a group. But
34 in China a person’s identity derives from the group, from the inherited
35 name, not from individual choice. The biographer of a Chinese subject
 x Introduction

1 must therefore recognize the reality of this cultural context and interpret
2 that person’s life story within the framework of social connections and
3 networks. Schoppa illustrated this approach with his analysis of Shen’s
4 murder in 1928.
5 Retha M. Warnicke, a specialist in Tudor England, likewise focused on
6 networks in English history. She suggested that the contrast between the
7 East and the West, which Schoppa had stressed, was not so great, at least
8 in the early modern era. Especially in women’s history, she emphasized,
9 family and kinship networks were vitally important. These connections
10 shaped not only the lives of queens, such as Anne Boleyn and Anne of
11 Cleves, but also the workings of politics at the Tudor court. In early mod-
12 ern English history, she argued, customs and rituals of the time influenced [-10], (4)
13 perceptions of the royal family at the time and have continued to influence
14 the way historians since then have written about the people of the Tudor
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15 era. Traditional beliefs about gender, which privileged men over women,
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16 and about religion, which exalted Protestantism over Catholicism after
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17 the English Reformation, have remained embedded in even recent biogra- ———
18 phies. To escape these prejudices, Warnicke urged historians to reexamine Normal Pag
19 their own cultural biases as they rewrite their accounts of Tudor England. PgEnds: TE
20 Reshaping Tudor biography, which she did with Anne Boleyn and Anne
21 of Cleves, requires historians to take a fresh look at the available his-
[-10], (4)
22 torical records, recognizing the falsehoods and prejudices within these
23 documents and reading them without imposing the traditional stereo-
24 types onto their content. This approach, Warnicke concluded, offers new
25 insights not only into early modern women’s history but also into English
26 history in general. It enables the biographer to contribute not only to the
27 social and cultural understanding of Tudor England but also to its political
28 history.
29 John Milton Cooper Jr., a specialist in late nineteenth- and early
30 twentieth-century American history, shared his experiences as a biogra-
31 pher of Walter Hines Page and of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wil-
32 son. Like Leckie, he stressed the importance of acquiring an empathetic
33 understanding of the subject (or subjects, in the case of a comparative
34 biography) while not sacrificing scholarly objectivity in other words,
35 striking a balance between personal empathy and critical detachment. He
 Introduction xi

1 emphasized the need for sufficient primary sources but acknowledged

2 that historians do not always have all the documents they would like for
3 every biographical subject. If a person did not leave behind a collection
4 of letters, diaries, or other private papers, historians must rely on the
5 public record. Cooper observed that a biographer’s own autobiographical
6 experiences influence the choice of a subject and the particular perspective
7 on that person’s life. He emphasized that a biographer must enter into
8 “conversation” with the subject, so as to allow that person to speak for
9 himself or herself. What is now called “oral history,” but which existed
10 before it was given that name, has provided a way to engage in “con-
11 versation” with the subject or with others who knew that person. Using
12 himself as an example, Cooper illustrated the “participant-observer” re- [-11], (5)
13 lationship that Leckie, following Leon Edel, advocated. Like Warnicke, he
14 warned against accepting interpretations that appear in the documents
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15 without first questioning the reliability and biases of the sources, such
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16 as Edward M. House’s diary for the Wilson era. Cooper recommended
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17 the methodology of comparative biography to explore two or more lives ———
18 that ran parallel and intersected, as did those of Presidents Roosevelt and Normal Page
19 Wilson. He recognized the limits of this approach, however. Above all, PgEnds: TEX
20 he advised historians to become biographers by doing the research and
21 writing the life stories of other people, for there is no substitute for one’s
[-11], (5)
22 own experience.
23 Drawing upon her experience as the biographer of Sojourner Truth,
24 Nell Irvin Painter, whose specialty is African American history, urged
25 historians to use images as well as written documents. Especially in the
26 case of subaltern subjects, for whom primary sources are typically scarce,
27 the biographer must utilize all available materials, whether written or
28 pictorial. She observed that in the Western intellectual tradition words
29 have been regarded by scholars as more reliable sources of truth than
30 pictures. This privileging of words over images, however, favors the elite
31 over subaltern subjects, for wealthy and powerful people are more likely
32 to leave a legacy of written documents. Because the slave Sojourner Truth,
33 who became a leading abolitionist and feminist, was illiterate, she could
34 not bequeath a collection of letters and diaries. She did, however, leave
35 pictures that revealed her own presentation of herself. By using them,
 xii Introduction

1 along with written sources from Truth’s contemporaries, Painter could

2 gain better access to the way Truth saw herself and wanted others to see
3 her. Combining black studies and art history, Painter advocated the revival
4 of ut pictura poesis, “the sisterhood of the arts,” literally, “as in painting, so
5 in poetry.” From this perspective, images would not merely supplement
6 words as accessories but complement them on an equal basis. In subaltern
7 biography, the use of portraiture enables historians to escape the racist or
8 sexist stereotypes that the dominant culture has imposed upon women or
9 people of color. Painter illustrated this approach with images of Sojourner
10 Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Duke Ellington. She compared their own
11 carefully presented self-images with the “controlling images” both writ-
12 ten and pictorial that flourished in the dominant white society. This [-12], (6)
13 approach to subaltern biography, Painter argued, permits the subjects to
14 speak for themselves and presents their “symbolic webs of meaning” that Lines: 28 t
15 words alone could not convey. Moreover, it allows historians to expand
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16 the “conversation” using Cooper’s term to include persons other than
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17 the usually prominent white men. With this kind of creative methodology, ———
18 a biographer can write the life story of an illiterate black woman as well as Normal Pag
19 those of U.S. presidents. PgEnds: TE
20 Robert J. Richards, too, advocated the removal of artificial boundaries.
21 In particular, he argued that biography is a necessity in the history of
[-12], (6)
22 philosophy. He emphasized the connection between the life-changing ex-
23 periences of real people, such as Friedrich Schelling, and the shifts in their
24 thinking. Ideas do not exist and develop on their own, unconnected with
25 the scientists or poets who conceive them, Richards stressed, although
26 one might get this impression from traditional accounts of the history
27 of science and philosophy. He demonstrated this point by examining the
28 allegation against Schelling that he was somehow responsible for the
29 premature death of Auguste Böhmer, the daughter of his lover and, later,
30 wife, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel. Prior to Auguste’s death, probably from
31 typhus, he had embraced the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, including his
32 “subjective idealism.” More than the other Jena Romantics with whom he
33 was intimately associated, he had attributed the external world to the ego,
34 making it the projection of one’s own self-consciousness. After Auguste’s
35 death, however, he shifted away from that egotistical view of the world and
 Introduction xiii

1 acknowledged its own external reality. Deeply wounded by the death and
2 the allegations, Schelling had experienced the impact of external events
3 upon himself. He could no longer doubt their existence outside of himself
4 or take full responsibility for these painful experiences, as Fichte’s “sub-
5 jective idealism” would require by its assertion that the outside world was
6 merely a product of one’s own consciousness. In other words, an intensely
7 personal experience provided the motivation for Schelling to modify his
8 ideas. As this case exemplifies, Richards concluded, the history of phi-
9 losophy needs biography to explain the development of ideas. Emotions,
10 not logic alone, propel changes in thinking, and thus shape the nature
11 of intellectual history. Just as Leckie and Warnicke advocated the removal
12 of barriers between personal and public aspects of life, building upon [-13], (7)
13 the insight from women’s history that the personal is political, Richards
14 adopted this approach in the history of ideas. Biography matters in this Lines: 30 to 3
15 field too. Biography is thus essential in historical analysis.
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16 All six historians focused on the multiple relationships that shape
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21 vidual subjects and their society or culture, between biographers and their
[-13], (7)
22 own society or culture, between the personal and public aspects of the sub-
23 jects’ lives, and between various subjects and their legacies of historical
24 records available to biographers. By examining all these relationships, the
25 six historians offered insights from their own experiences as biographers
26 into the important topic of biography and historical analysis.
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1 1. Biography Matters: Why Historians Need
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3 Well-Crafted Biographies More than Ever
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6 Shirley A. Leckie
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15 In September 1999, Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and
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16 Sciences at the University of Illinois–Chicago, attacked modern biography
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17 as “Minutiae without Meaning” in the New York Times. It had fallen into this ———
18 sorry state, he maintained, because the old “master narrative models” had Normal Page
19 lost their meaning for contemporary readers. These included “the prov- PgEnds: TEX
20 idential model,” based on the idea that humans, tainted by original sin,
21 inevitably repeat the failings of Adam and Eve, and the “wheel of fortune
[1], (1)
22 model,” which sees cycles of luck and misfortune as determining life’s
23 outcome. Hence, modern biographers furiously collect details and then
24 “invent or fabricate a meaning,” based on their “favorite hobby horse,”
25 to hold their narratives together. But, in reality, Fish argued, they are “left
26 with little more than a collection of random incidents, and the only truth
27 being told is the truth of contingency, of events succeeding one another
28 in a universe of accident and chance.” 1
29 Since “cause and effect” remains the biographers’ “stock in trade,”
30 Fish accused modern biographers of imposing on their work their own
31 contrived “explanatory structure.” 2 In the end, he concluded, every biog-
32 raphy is actually autobiographical, but rather than revealing that fact to
33 their reading audience, as true autobiographers do, they “can only get
34 it wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story
35 of their announced subject.” Such chicanery renders the medium “a bad
 2 leckie

1 game,” dishonest for its practitioners and a waste of time for readers who
2 would be better served by watching wrestling on television. 3
3 Whether one agrees with Fish or not, he is right on one count. All
4 biography is, in part, autobiographical. Few, if any, biographers would
5 choose a subject if the themes of that life were not interesting enough to
6 sustain research and writing over the course of years or even decades. 4
7 Thus, one can assume that some aspect of the theme explored resonates
8 deeply within the author. As for the rest of his argument, Fish performed
9 a service by challenging biographers to think more deeply about the value
10 of their writing and the methods of their craft.
11 Fish’s essay will not diminish the number of biographies written or
12 discourage avid readers from looking for the newest title. As William [2], (2)
13 McFeely noted, biography has always mattered, for all of us share a “basic
14 human curiosity about our fellow humans.” 5 The late Barbara Tuchman, Lines: 17 to
15 best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Guns of August (1962) and
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16 Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), advised historians to
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17 exploit this human interest by using a biographical approach in their ———
18 writings. As a “prism of history,” biography attracts and holds the reader’s Normal Pag
19 interest in the larger subject. 6 PgEnds: TE
20 If Tuchman saw biography as a tool of history, the Greek writer
21 Plutarch, author of Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, most of which was
[2], (2)
22 written in the first two decades of the second century ce, saw biography
23 as a study that revealed who humans are. History, by contrast, examined
24 their deeds. 7 In any case, in his time and for centuries afterward, both
25 history and biography centered on members of the elite or those who had
26 achieved political, military, or intellectual fame. Nonetheless, Plutarch,
27 like many since, responded to his subjects in personal terms. Noting that
28 he had begun his studies for “the sake of others,” he soon found the
29 enterprise useful for himself, “the virtues of these great men serving me
30 as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn
31 my own life.” 8 In that statement, he identified the strong interest humans
32 have shown in extracting moral lessons from past lives.
33 Although many readers of biography still seek moral inspiration, the
34 British author Lytton Strachey rescued modern biography from the didac-
35 ticism into which it had fallen during the Victorian era. In works such as
 Biography Matters 3

1 Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), he used Freudian con-
2 cepts to identify the hidden drives behind individual acts. 9 Consequently,
3 modern readers are now more likely to seek a deeper understanding of hu-
4 man motivation and behavior as opposed to lessons that inculcate virtue.
5 We also seek knowledge about the human condition. As men and
6 women, we do not simply live out the life of our species. Instead, we dis-
7 play a wide variety of native abilities, and our personalities and characters
8 are shaped by our consciousness of our race and gender, environmental
9 influences such as the class we belong to, our early education, indoctri-
10 nation, and the choices we make. Well-written biography gives us a study
11 of how these factors operate in the life of another person, based on the
12 assurance that what appears in the work will rely on “discovery, not inven- [3], (3)
13 tion,” according to Ira Bruce Nadel. 10 The finished product represents the
14 biographer’s attempt, within this restriction, to interpret the subject’s life Lines: 25 to 3
15 so that the personality of that individual is evoked. When that happens,
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16 according to Frank E. Vandiver, “a living being walks off the pages.” 11
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17 Then we experience the immense and often addictive pleasure of living ———
18 someone else’s life, while we go about the business of leading our own in Normal Page
19 the here and now. PgEnds: TEX
20 Everyone who writes biographies has been inspired by the work of
21 those who have succeeded in explaining the dynamics of a personality and
[3], (3)
22 a subject’s hidden motives so that “a living being walks off the pages.”
23 Among the works that have breathed life into a figure, for me, is Fawn
24 Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. 12 The work is psychobiogra-
25 phy, a category that many historians and biographers alike regard with
26 suspicion, and with good reason. Neither historians nor biographers are
27 usually trained professionals in the behavioral sciences. Moreover, many
28 of the psychological or psychoanalytical theories that psychobiographers
29 have often invoked have been discredited or at the very least subjected to
30 scathing criticism. 13
31 But it was not Brodie’s use of Erik Erickson’s psychological theory that
32 struck me most forcefully. Rather, although the women’s movement of
33 the 1960s had emphasized that “the personal is political,” in the early
34 1970s that insight was applied largely to the female half of the population.
35 Biographers of male figures described their upbringing and family life
 4 leckie

1 but only as part of environmental influences. They might describe, for

2 example, the effect of a father on a male figure, but domestic issues and
3 concerns belonged to women, who appeared in supporting roles and
4 often received only brief mention. The idea of separate spheres for men
5 and women had been articulated in the emerging field of women’s history,
6 but, more important, it was accepted as a given in biography as a whole.
7 What Brodie did was apply the insight that “the personal is political” to
8 an intellectual giant in American history a true American philosophe. In
9 the process, the sage of Monticello emerged from the pages of her book
10 as a truly human figure for the first time.
11 Jefferson, as Brodie noted in her opening survey of historical opinion,
12 was an elusive figure, despite his extensive writings. She was not deterred [4], (4)
13 in her investigation into his character. By reexamining the evidence that
14 other scholars had used and by searching for “feeling as well as fact, for Lines: 31 to
15 nuance and metaphor as well as idea and action,” she offered a new inter-
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16 pretation of his life story. 14 It was one that was based on “the connections
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17 between his public life and his inner life, as well as his intimate life.” 15 ———
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19 points in his career, earlier writers had viewed Jefferson’s withdrawals as PgEnds: TE
20 an inexplicable flaw in his temperament or character. Brodie saw it differ-
21 ently. She noted, for example, that Jefferson’s refusal to join the American
[4], (4)
22 delegation in France in 1776 stemmed, in all probability, from his wife’s
23 pregnancy. Since each successive pregnancy placed Martha Jefferson’s life
24 in jeopardy, he could not leave the country when she might die in child-
25 birth. Brodie uncovered a similar situation, in which Jefferson resigned
26 from the Virginia legislature in December 1781 and refused a seat in the
27 Continental Congress. Again his wife was pregnant, and this time, after
28 giving birth the following May, she never recovered, dying in September
29 of that year. Jefferson’s fears for her safety had been warranted, and his
30 refusal to accept public responsibility had stemmed, Brodie surmised,
31 from his concern with intimate family matters, an area that statesmen of
32 his era seldom discussed publicly. 16
33 Brodie’s biography aroused controversy when she argued that, dur-
34 ing his widowhood, Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hem-
35 ings, his late wife’s half-sister. Brodie based her claim on the narrative of
 Biography Matters 5

1 Madison Hemings (a son of Sally Hemings, who remembered Jefferson

2 as an aloof father and master at Monticello), circumstantial evidence of
3 the dates of Sally Hemings’s pregnancies, and accounts from Jefferson’s
4 enemies. With dna evidence indicating in 1998 that either Jefferson or
5 a very close relative fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children,
6 Brodie’s conclusions about their relationship have greater credence today
7 than they did in 1974. 17 Moreover, even if Brodie was wrong about the
8 Jefferson-Hemings relationship (and I doubt that she was), and one of
9 Jefferson’s relatives actually fathered Sally Hemings’s children, a deeper
10 truth emerges from her work. Many of the slaves on Southern plantations
11 were family members, and they and their owners were bound together by
12 ties of love, guilt, and denial. [5], (5)
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14 make critical decisions in their lives on the basis of intimate or domestic Lines: 37 to 4
15 concerns. Thus, attention to a man’s private concerns could illuminate
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18 ography for the best analysis of Jefferson’s intellectual development and Normal Page
19 contributions to American political thought, or of his career as a party PgEnds: TEX
20 leader and president, one should not leave her out of those discussions.
21 By considering the ties between the personal and the political and bring-
[5], (5)
22 ing them concretely into historical discussion, Brodie was a pioneering
23 scholar who still deserves the gratitude of those who grapple with the task
24 of writing biography. 18
25 The value of Brodie’s insight was revealed to me in the early 1980s.
26 At that time, my husband, William Leckie, and I were examining the
27 immense correspondence of Benjamin and Alice Kirk Grierson in the
28 Illinois State Historical Library in preparation for writing a biography of
29 the couple that would include their children. Grierson was a cavalry com-
30 mander who led a diversionary raid through Mississippi during the Civil
31 War while General Ulysses S. Grant was assaulting Vicksburg, and led
32 an even more devastating raid through the state in 1864. Later, Grierson
33 commanded the Tenth Cavalry one of the units of “buffalo soldiers” in
34 the post–Civil War frontier army. The deaths of three of seven children
35 and the predisposition to manic-depressive psychosis of two surviving
 6 leckie

1 sons haunted him and Alice Grierson. Army life, which required frequent
2 moves and often the separation of school-age children from parents, ex-
3 acerbated this couple’s ongoing difficulties. Thus, Benjamin Grierson’s
4 entire military career was marked by severe turmoil as he struggled to
5 reconcile his family’s emotional needs with their financial requirements.
6 That element became for us not a side bar but a vital part of his life story. 19
7 Although middle-class families, such as the Griersons, saw men and
8 women as living and working in their “separate spheres,” the lines blurred
9 for this couple. We discovered that Alice Grierson often functioned as
10 an informal, but very real, adjutant to her husband when he was away
11 from various frontier posts. She not only sent him information regarding
12 military matters but intervened on behalf of the buffalo soldiers. In her [6], (6)
13 view, the soldiers were often unjustly confined to the guardhouse, and she
14 wanted them released immediately. 20 Lines: 41 to
15 Besides turning to biography to learn from an informed scholar his
———
16 or her interpretation of a person’s life in all its aspects, both public and
0.0pt Pg
17 private, readers want to know how a subject confronted the existential ———
18 issues and questions that all humans face. These include more than “Why Normal Pag
19 am I here?” and “What does my life mean?” At crucial times in their PgEnds: TE
20 lives, individuals define or redefine themselves when circumstances force
21 them to make difficult choices or when they remain unable to extricate
[6], (6)
22 themselves from their past.
23 Louis Harlan, in his two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington,
24 treated such issues in ways that are immensely instructive. 21 He gave
25 his readers no simple answers but allowed the evidence to yield both
26 insights and contradictions. In his interpretation, Washington, the last
27 black leader born in slavery, grew up during Reconstruction and saw that
28 African Americans could not protect their political rights in the South
29 without an economic base. In his thirties, as he built Tuskegee, he split
30 his public and private personas and became “willing to trade political
31 independence for educational and economic gain.” 22 Thus, Washington
32 endorsed the idea that only the educated and propertied should vote,
33 which was another way of saying that black men, most of whom were
34 poor in the South, should avoid politics. His message comforted white
35 Southern leaders, especially when he also advised members of his race
 Biography Matters 7

1 to eschew the drive for social equality, thereby pledging black acceptance
2 of segregation. That was, Harlan informed us, the point of his famous
3 speech at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, when he counseled blacks to
4 accept a Faustian bargain as the price of peace. Simultaneously, he told
5 Southern whites, wedded to the New South dream, and Northern capital-
6 ists, who sought lucrative investments in the region, that members of his
7 race wanted their share of the hoped-for but never-realized prosperity as
8 the price of their compliance with segregation. 23
9 That said, Washington, as a black man, never took his own advice, de-
10 spite his outward demeanor. Armed with contributions from industrialists
11 and financiers, he began transforming Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
12 Institute into the headquarters of his own political machine. At the same [7], (7)
13 time, a product of his environment, he ran that school as if it were his
14 own plantation. 24 A man of many masks, Washington had the intuitive Lines: 47 to 5
15 ability to penetrate the facades of others. He played a variety of roles,
———
16 depending on his objectives at any given time and the groups with which
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17 he interacted. ———
18 In the end, Harlan found that the “wizard” of Tuskegee used the power Normal Page
19 of his political machine surreptitiously at times to maintain his power PgEnds: TEX
20 base, and at times to serve his people. To accomplish the first goal, he
21 infiltrated the organizations of his rivals. To achieve the latter goal, he
[7], (7)
22 secretly financed suits against segregation in public facilities and against
23 the grandfather clause, one of a number of methods that white authorities
24 used in several states to prevent blacks from voting. 25 In that sense, the
25 man who counseled accommodation also contributed to the emergence
26 of the Civil Rights movement. It was, however, a movement that he never
27 could have joined since it flourished in urban settings, and he remained
28 throughout his entire, life the rural leader of a rural population. 26
29 Nonetheless, Harlan’s attention to the discrepancy between Washing-
30 ton’s public persona and his private realities, as well as the wizard’s way
31 of exploiting the best of a bad situation to extract the maximum possi-
32 ble gain, left a deep impression on me that affected my thinking about
33 Elizabeth Bacon Custer’s widowhood. The death of her husband, George
34 Armstrong Custer, was a severe blow, for she was left entirely alone in the
35 world with no parents or siblings but only grieving in-laws who had lost
 8 leckie

1 three sons, a son-in-law, and a nephew at the Battle of the Little Bighorn
2 in 1876. 27 And yet, in a very real sense, Elizabeth Custer’s widowhood gave
3 her a second life. Through her books “Boots and Saddles”; or, Life in Dakota
4 Territory with General Custer (1885); Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in
5 Kansas and Texas (1887); and Following the Guidon (1890) she transformed
6 her imperfect husband into the model soldier and considerate comrade
7 she wished he had always been. Her compatriots accepted her version
8 because, as she understood so well, they needed a martyred rather than
9 a discredited soldier as they wrestled with the complex moral problems
10 of driving Indians from their land. At the same time, this woman, whose
11 severest loss was that she never bore children, vicariously fulfilled her need
12 to raise children by making her husband into a hero for boys. 28 Without [8], (8)
13 in any way trivializing her sorrow over her husband’s death and her fifty-
14 seven years of widowhood and loneliness, the George Armstrong Custer Lines: 53 t
15 that Elizabeth Custer resurrected in her books was closer to her desired
———
16 ideal than the actual man. Consequently, by exploiting public sympathy
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17 and the predominant gender roles that made challenging her veracity an ———
18 unchivalrous act, she reaped the benefits of being the widow of a hero Normal Pag
19 and basked in the reflected glory she worked so hard to maintain. 29 It was PgEnds: TE
20 a stunning achievement, but it came at a very high price: her ability to
21 live a fully autonomous life. Still, just as Booker T. Washington never tran-
[8], (8)
22 scended his rural South of the Reconstruction era and its tragic aftermath,
23 so Elizabeth Custer, a quintessential Victorian woman, never surmounted
24 her view of herself as a family member first and an individual second.
25 I have learned from Brodie, who emphasized the importance of re-
26 searching the private as well as public concerns of all individuals, and
27 Harlan, who was willing to confront the discrepancy that often existed
28 between public and private faces and the inability of some figures to tran-
29 scend their larger environments. But other scholars have also affected my
30 thinking about writing biography. In Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, a
31 theoretical work, the late Leon Edel, best known for his five-volume work
32 on Henry James, set down his thoughts on the medium and the pitfalls
33 inherent in its practice.
34 The most difficult problem a biographer confronts, according to Edel,
35 is dealing with himself. He has to be a “participant-observer,” meaning
 Biography Matters 9

1 that he has to play contradictory roles. As a participant, he must struggle

2 to see the world as his subject saw it. At the same time, he must remain
3 an “observer,” for only then can he maintain the detachment needed to
4 “distinguish between fact and fiction.” This is important, for once the
5 biographer crosses the line and incorporates fiction, “the enterprise is
6 doomed.” 30
7 While maintaining this balance between empathy and detachment,
8 the biographer must also explain the dynamics of the personality that
9 emerges. Edel characterized this last as discovering “the shape under
10 the rug,” or the hidden myth of a life. 31 To demonstrate his meaning,
11 he subjected Ernest Hemingway’s life, among others, to a brief analysis.
12 Hemingway presented himself as pugnacious and unemotional, especially [9], (9)
13 with other men. Beneath the surface, Edel argued, he was the opposite,
14 for “a manly man doesn’t need to prove his masculinity every moment of Lines: 57 to 6
15 the day.” Edel concluded that Hemingway’s life and art were masks that
———
16 deflected attention from his true self-concept, which was based on his
0.0pt PgVa
17 fears and insecurities. 32 The story of what lay behind those masks “the ———
18 shape under the rug” was the true subject of Hemingway’s life story. The Normal Page
19 same holds true for all life writing, Edel maintained, for “the biographer PgEnds: TEX
20 who writes the life of his subject’s self-concept passes through a facade
21 into the inner house of life.” 33
[9], (9)
22 William McFeely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Grant: A Biography accom-
23 plished Edel’s goal. On the surface, Ulysses S. Grant was modest, unas-
24 suming, and relaxed among common folk. McFeely, however, saw him
25 as a man driven by an intense fear of falling back into the failure and
26 obscurity that had characterized his earlier life, except for a brief period
27 during the U.S.-Mexican War. During the Civil War, his willingness to
28 wage total war and to endure the title “Butcher Grant” catapulted him
29 into the prominence that made him a strong candidate for the White
30 House. McFeely stated that Grant “had forced himself out of the world
31 of ordinary people by the most murderous acts of will and had doomed
32 himself to spend the rest of his life looking for approval for having done
33 so.” He wanted the presidency, for “he had heard those cheers and he
34 could not do without them.” 34
35 Once he assumed the presidency, Grant gravitated toward members of
 10 leckie

1 the creditor and entrepreneurial classes as a way of distancing himself,

2 McFeely maintained, from ordinary men. McFeely saw this tendency dis-
3 played during a crisis in 1874. With the nation in the throes of the worst
4 depression it had yet experienced, Grant vetoed a bill to expand the cur-
5 rency. He thereby killed a measure that would have alleviated the suffering
6 of farmers and laborers many of whom had fought under him at places
7 like Spotsylvania Court House or Cold Harbor in favor of “a policy that
8 brought still greater profit to the successful.” 35 In doing so, Grant not
9 only repudiated himself in terms of who he really was a man who had
10 failed repeatedly at business in his earlier life but he demonstrated the
11 fundamental weakness at the core of his presidency. He affiliated himself
12 so completely with the entrepreneurial class that he turned a blind eye to [10], (10)
13 the corruption that infiltrated almost every aspect of his administration. 36
14 Nor did McFeely find that the Hero of Appomattox displayed presiden- Lines: 63 t
15 tial courage when it came to upholding the constitutional rights of black
———
16 men and women in the South. Instead, as violence, especially the mur-
0.0pt Pg
17 derous events in Mississippi, increased, Grant, concerned about politics, ———
18 could not bring himself to take the strong measures that were needed Normal Pag
19 to ensure justice for newly enfranchised blacks. Thus, for all intents and PgEnds: TE
20 purposes, McFeely found that Reconstruction, as a noble experiment de-
21 signed to bring about a “new birth of freedom,” had failed even before
[10], (10)
22 Grant left office. 37
23 Subsequent biographers have offered less critical views of Grant, both
24 as a commander and as a president. Brooks Simpson interpreted him
25 as a figure who achieved “triumph over adversity” and who was not cal-
26 lous about wartime losses. 38 Jean Edward Smith pointed out that during
27 postwar Reconstruction, Grant strove to win passage and ratification of
28 the Fifteenth Amendment to extend voting rights to black men and, de-
29 spite continuing white Southern intransigency, fought hard for passage
30 of the Ku Klux Klan Act to curb white violence against African Americans.
31 Smith blamed the U.S. Supreme Court rather than Grant for weakening
32 federal protection of newly enfranchised blacks in the South. 39 These new
33 interpretations are exactly what we expect, for the writing of biography,
34 like the writing of history, is always an unfinished business. Nonetheless,
35 whatever the persuasiveness of the new views about Grant, McFeely’s
 Biography Matters 11

1 work remains a riveting example of how one author sought to decipher

2 the dynamics behind an often impenetrable personality.
3 Edel’s counsel that biographers look for the shape beneath the rug
4 played a role in my interpretation of Angie Debo, the Oklahoma historian
5 who pioneered in ethnohistory. The hidden myth of her life, I became
6 convinced, stemmed from her attachment to the “Oklahoma spirit.” In
7 Oklahoma, luck as well as hard work and fortitude played a role in the
8 making and unmaking of fortunes. Some families, for example, acquired
9 the better land in the various runs that opened Oklahoma Territory to non-
10 Indian settlement beginning in 1889. Later, luck smiled on a fortunate
11 few when they discovered oil on their property. 40 Nonetheless, adherence
12 to the “Oklahoma spirit,” as Debo’s parents informed their children, [11], (11)
13 demanded cheerful stoicism in the face of whatever fortune decreed.
14 Since the Debos farmed poor land, they eventually sold it to enter into a Lines: 67 to 7
15 hardware business that quickly failed. Years later, they discovered that the
———
16 new owners of their former homestead had located oil on the property.
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17 Debo told a friend that her father, Edward Debo, never expressed regret ———
18 about selling his quarter section. Instead, whenever he passed the site, Normal Page
19 he recalled the good times they had enjoyed at their old home. 41 Edward PgEnds: TEX
20 Debo’s message was clear: One never expressed anger or resentment over
21 one’s fate but instead rose above it. 42
[11], (11)
22 Later, when Angie Debo was dismissed from West Texas State Teach-
23 ers College shortly after she injured her chairman’s pride by becoming
24 the first female faculty member in the college to earn her doctorate, she
25 fell into despondency. She had no way of acknowledging her anger and
26 resentment except by turning these emotions inward. But when she be-
27 gan investigating the fate of the Five Tribes of Oklahoma the Cherokees,
28 Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles following the termina-
29 tion of their separate republics and their tribal lands, she found her life’s
30 work. She could speak out on behalf of American Indians and the in-
31 justices they had experienced in a way that she could never have spoken
32 out for herself. That channeling of unacceptable emotions into research,
33 writing, and, later, activism on behalf of native peoples as they sought
34 self-determination allowed Debo to sustain her own personal myth. In
35 oral history interviews, she saw herself as a woman of equanimity who was
 12 leckie

1 free from anger and resentment, despite gender and class discrimination
2 and years of poverty and professional marginalization. 43
3 In addition to counseling the biographer to search for “the life of his
4 subject’s self-concept,” Leon Edel also reminded biographers to place
5 their subjects securely within the historical context of their times. Indeed,
6 biography was a part of history and demanded “the same skills.” But
7 beyond that, no subject ever lived outside of human time and history.
8 Therefore, Edel concluded, “No biography is complete unless it reveals
9 the individual within history, within an ethos and a social complex.” 44
10 One author who has demonstrated his ability to weave biography and
11 history together so that the two illuminate each other is Garry Wills.
12 In Reagan’s America, he narrated President Ronald Reagan’s life. Simul- [12], (12)
13 taneously, based on his own painstaking research, Wills compared and
14 contrasted the factual information with the often inaccurate passages in Lines: 73 t
15 Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? 45 Throughout the Reagan
———
16 biography, Wills also provided a larger historical context that contra-
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17 dicted much of Reagan’s personal mythology. By including descriptions ———
18 of army campaigns against native peoples, federal road-building projects, Normal Pag
19 and governmental railroad subsidies, as well as New Deal programs that PgEnds: TE
20 sustained the Reagan family during the Great Depression, Wills under-
21 scored the discrepancy between Reagan’s version of the American past
[12], (12)
22 and the historical record. Ironically, the federal government that played
23 such an important role in the larger historical context of Reagan’s life was
24 the same entity that Reagan castigated to achieve its highest office the
25 presidency of the United States. 46
26 Toward the end of this remarkable work, Wills asks us, as readers,
27 to think of ourselves as drivers who cannot see the road ahead when
28 we try to use history as a means of discerning the future. “To steer at
29 all, we must go forward looking into the rearview mirror, trying to trace
30 large curves or bending forces in prior events, to proceed along their
31 lines. But what happens if,” he asks, “when we look into our historical
32 rearview mirror, all we can see is a movie?” 47 His message was clear;
33 Reagan’s psychological needs and projections created a fiction of his own
34 life and American history that he used to navigate the United States. More
35 important, large numbers of Americans served as his “complicit” public.
 Biography Matters 13

1 Preferring comforting myth to troubling reality, they accepted his more

2 optimistic version of the past and present, rather than engaging in the
3 more strenuous activity of grappling with a host of difficult problems that
4 had no easy solutions. 48
5 My praise of Wills’s work does not mean that his interpretation is
6 unassailable. Reagan remains a contested figure. New biographies have
7 praised him for restoring a sense of confidence to Americans during
8 his presidency. Some credit him with bringing the Cold War to an end,
9 an event that had not yet happened when Wills’s book was originally
10 published. The debate will go on and new interpretations will emerge,
11 not only because new voices will enter the discussion, but also because
12 these voices will have experienced the particular currents of their time. [13], (13)
13 That, in turn, will affect their analyses and evaluations. 49
14 The excellent biographies of the recent past and the increasing sophis- Lines: 79 to 8
15 tication of many of biography’s most able practitioners help account for
———
16 the form’s continuing popularity. Biography matters because we need it
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17 for inspiration, consolation, and companionship, which we derive when ———
18 “a living being walks off the pages” and we feel that we actually know Normal Page
19 another human being more intimately than we know many of the individ- PgEnds: TEX
20 uals with whom we interact daily. At the same time, we also want to know
21 how others have made the difficult choices that confront all of us as hu-
[13], (13)
22 man beings and how they lived with the often-unintended consequences
23 of those choices. We also value biography as a way of encountering the
24 personal myths of others, so that we might reflect on our own personal
25 mythmaking and perhaps achieve a deeper understanding of ourselves
26 through others. Finally, we want to understand the extent to which his-
27 tory molds individuals and, in turn, is influenced by individuals. All these
28 are popular and important reasons that biography matters to the general
29 public and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future.
30 But there is another reason that biography matters today more than
31 in the past, and it is because of its interrelationship with history. Scholar
32 Gerda Lerner, like Wills, argued that history gives a sense of direction to
33 life. In much of the world, she noted, religion, which passed from genera-
34 tion to generation in rural and agrarian societies, had traditionally served
35 as the way people infused their lives with meaning. Now, however, many
 14 leckie

1 people have moved from rural areas to increasingly urbanized regions. 50

2 In that context, history matters more than ever. As Lerner reminded us,
3 “In a world in which personal contact with different generations is often
4 severed,” history can “link people to past generations and root them in
5 the continuity of the human enterprise.” 51 Since our view of the future,
6 moreover, is derived largely from our interpretation of the past, the pre-
7 vailing beliefs about history affect the future and carry immense power.
8 Those outside the academy understand that fact, which, Lerner observed,
9 explains the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. More than ever, his-
10 torians need to bridge the chasm that has opened between them and
11 the public. For without historians’ insights, the public will formulate its
12 views on the basis of myth or, as Wills noted, the movie that replaces [14], (14)
13 the rearview mirror of history. 52
14 History was never easy to write, but it is now a more complex and Lines: 85 t
15 taxing enterprise than ever, and one fraught with new challenges. In part,
———
16 this gulf between historians and the public has opened because many
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17 scholars, aware that their predecessors celebrated a Eurocentric and often ———
18 ethnocentric view of the past, have struggled to weave into their narratives Normal Pag
19 the stories of people of color and women as well as men. Moreover, they PgEnds: TE
20 have sought to show race, gender, ethnicity, and class as social constructs,
21 dependent upon time, place, and changing ideology. This new history
[14], (14)
22 demands more of its readers, making the historian’s task of reaching the
23 general public even harder than before.
24 The effect of these developments is obvious in the study of the Amer-
25 ican West. Historians who chronicle the entry of non-Indian people into
26 the Trans-Mississippi West have witnessed an ongoing debate between
27 adherents of the Old Western History and those of the New Western
28 History. The former, still reflecting the attitudes, if not always the actual
29 ideas, of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the
30 Frontier in American History,” have interpreted their nation’s past as the
31 story of courageous settlers moving westward into free land to achieve
32 freedom and economic and social mobility. 53 When the Bureau of the
33 Census announced in 1890 that the frontier had closed, Turner warned
34 that the United States now faced a turning point. No longer could the
35 nation look to free land in the West as the solution to lack of opportunity
 Biography Matters 15

1 and mobility in the East. The New Western Historians, by contrast, have
2 argued that non-Indian movement into the American West represented
3 conquest rather than settlement. Moreover, they have seen no broken past
4 of the American West as a result of the Bureau of the Census’s declaration
5 that the frontier had closed in 1890 and the nation no longer had within its
6 midst areas of unsettled land. Instead they argued that the problems that
7 persist in the region often stemmed from the earlier period when Euro-
8 Americans seized the land and its resources from native and Hispanic
9 peoples. To make matters worse, they added, these newcomers to the
10 West created a caste system that relegated people of color to inequality
11 and sought to destroy their culture. 54
12 The ideas of the New Western Historians have won widespread, al- [15], (15)
13 though not universal, acceptance among academics. Certainly, their es-
14 says appeared frequently in academic journals. The general public, how- Lines: 89 to 9
15 ever, has preferred the Old Western History, which revolves largely around
———
16 prospectors, cowboys, and cavalrymen. Wild West, a celebration of the tra-
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17 ditional Turnerian story, still boasts sales that total more than 150,000 ———
18 bimonthly. Old West and True West also enjoy large circulations. The Western Normal Page
19 Historical Quarterly, the foremost scholarly journal in the field, by contrast, PgEnds: TEX
20 prints about 2,500 copies of its periodical every three months. 55
21 How do professional historians, especially those who wish to incorpo-
[15], (15)
22 rate some of the insights of the New Western Historians into their work,
23 bridge this gap and reach that larger audience? Clear and well-written
24 revisionist history is one way of attacking this problem. Here Patricia
25 Limerick has achieved a high standard of readability by using humor
26 and self-disclosure and by having a wide-ranging knowledge and strong
27 convictions. 56
28 Another way of reaching a wider audience is to exploit the readers’
29 strong interest in other people by writing biographies that tell the story
30 of the American West from the perspective of individuals who belonged
31 to groups that have been marginalized in the past. In other words, bi-
32 ographers need to tell the story from the perspective of those who stood
33 on the other side of Turner’s frontier. To succeed in their task, they must
34 incorporate the more complicated context of current historical studies
35 into their works. At the same time, they must write their works to the
 16 leckie

1 highest literary standards with a minimum of jargon so that they can

2 engage the reader and win as wide an audience as possible.
3 Biographers who attempt to write the life story of individuals who
4 come from groups that have been marginalized because of their race,
5 gender, ethnicity, or class face problems that writers of more conventional
6 biographies those of “representative men” do not confront. Sources
7 are often lacking, especially for the subject’s early years. When sources are
8 available, intricate questions of interpretation often arise. Nonetheless,
9 such problems can be surmounted. In the only biography that she wrote,
10 Angie Debo indicated some ways in which to do this.
11 In 1976 the University of Oklahoma Press published Debo’s Geronimo:
12 The Man, His Time, His Place. Estimating the Chiricahua Apache’s date [16], (16)
13 of birth as about 1823 and finding little information on his childhood
14 and upbringing, Debo narrated a probable account of his early years. Lines: 95 t
15 She based it on the oral history interviews she had conducted with other
———
16 Chiricahua; the published memoirs of Apache Jason Betzinez, a member
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17 of the closely related Mimbres band; and the writings of anthropologist ———
18 Morris Opler, the foremost authority on the culture of the Apaches. When Normal Pag
19 it came to the ongoing conflicts that affected Geronimo’s life, Debo found PgEnds: TE
20 the record more complete. For the most part the sources originated from
21 Euro-American incursion into Apache land and U.S. government attempts
[16], (16)
22 to curb Apache raiding south of the U.S.-Mexican border, according to the
23 terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
24 At a deeper level, Debo maintained, the conflicts arose because Geron-
25 imo and Euro-Americans, coming from different cultures, “never arrived
26 at the same definition of truth.” U.S. authorities and military leaders saw
27 Geronimo as “a liar whose word could never be trusted.” By bringing
28 to bear the insights of the ethnologist, who understands that different
29 cultures often assign different meanings to behavior, Debo discovered
30 that, measured by his own standards, Geronimo was “a man of essential
31 integrity.” When he promised “with oath and ceremony mere poetic
32 trimmings to the white man he kept his pledge.” 57 The significance of
33 his life story lay in the cultural divide that neither side was capable of
34 bridging.
35 In 1992 historian Julie Roy Jeffrey published a work that delved into
 Biography Matters 17

1 the subject of gender ideology as a factor in non-Indian penetration into

2 the West, and its effect on native people. Converting the West: A Biography
3 of Narcissa Whitman told the story of a female missionary from Auburn,
4 New York. Influenced by the Second Great Awakening and thoroughly
5 imbued with a sense of the superiority of middle-class family life and
6 its prevailing gender roles, Narcissa Whitman worked with her husband,
7 physician Marcus Whitman, in Oregon Territory in the late 1830s and
8 1840s, trying to bring Christianity to the Cayuse Indians. Her efforts to
9 spread the gospel failed to convert a single member of that tribe, largely
10 because she never transcended her ethnocentrism. 58 In 1847 the futility of
11 her effort became apparent when the Cayuse murdered her and her family,
12 [17], (17)
following an outbreak of measles. That disease, which claimed the lives
13 of many native people, left the missionaries and their children with few
14 casualties. Lines: 103 to 1
15
Jeffrey’s work is notable because, in the Turnerian school, Narcissa ———
16
Whitman has been a celebrated figure. As one of the first white women 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
to cross the North American continent in 1836 (Eliza Spalding was the
18 Normal Page
other), she has long served as an icon of the westward movement. Jef-
19 * PgEnds: Eject
frey’s biography, by presenting Narcissa Whitman as a woman thoroughly
20
imbued with a sense of superiority, exposed the cultural arrogance that
21
often persisted among non-Indian settlers in the West. This immensely [17], (17)
22
readable and poignant work brings that message home to readers with an
23
immediacy that will prove beneficial when they turn to the more difficult
24
analytical works dealing with conflict and accommodation between and
25
26 among Americanos and Hispanos (or the original Hispanic peoples, an
27 admixture of Spanish, Mestizo, Pueblo, and nomadic Indian ancestry)
28 and the migrants who moved northward from Mexico over succeeding
29 decades.
30 Although the male icon of the West has been the cowboy in the image
31 of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, no region of the United States has
32 been more ethnically diverse than the Trans-Mississippi West. Richard
33 Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia’s César Chávez: A Triumph of
34 Spirit (1995) explored the life of a Mexican American, or Mexicano, who
35 transformed his personal quest for acceptance into a larger struggle the
 18 leckie

1 attainment of social justice for farm laborers who worked for a pittance
2 in the western “factories in the field.” 59
3 Because Mexican Americans in the United States have faced intense
4 discrimination, especially in a part of the West that had belonged to Mex-
5 ico until 1848, Griswold del Castillo and Garcia have performed a valuable
6 service for general readers and historians alike. The general reader can
7 profit from a clearer understanding of the difficulties Mexican Americans
8 have faced by viewing them through the engaging and moving prism of
9 Chávez’s life. Moreover, after reading this biography, that reader, very
10 likely, will be more interested in learning about the larger context of U.S.-
11 Mexican relations and the way that shifts in that relationship have affected
12 [18], (18)
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the southwestern borderland. 60 This
13 increased interest results because, in their prizewinning biography, the
14 authors have brought César Chávez to life as the most prominent leader Lines: 109
15
of his ethnic group in America and also as one who spoke for the rights ———
16
of all working Americans. 14.0pt P
17 ———
Because the West is the part of our nation that has given us our origin
18 Normal Pag
myth, we need biographies of historians who have written about that area.
19 * PgEnds: Ej
The general public often views history as facts waiting to be discovered
20
in a repository somewhere. Presumably, once historians find the facts
21
and put them down on paper, the past will have yielded its secrets. Many [18], (18)
22
have little understanding that both history and biography are the result of
23
constant interpretation and reinterpretations based on new questions and
24
concerns that arise in every decade and generation. Learning more about
25
26 the life of historians would inform a wider audience of the true nature of
27 historical inquiry and its value to their lives.
28 Some progress has been made in this area. In 1997 Allan Bogue pub-
29 lished his magisterial Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down,
30 which shed light on Turner’s world. Significantly, Turner came of age as
31 the work of the historian was becoming professionalized through train-
32 ing in university seminars. 61 Although Bogue did not discuss at length the
33 gendered nature of this process, it was obvious in Turner’s relations with
34 students such as Louise Kellogg. A protégée of the master, Kellogg spent
35 her working life at the Wisconsin Historical Society, rather than teaching
 Biography Matters 19

1 at the University of Wisconsin. In Turner’s view, which was shared by his

2 colleagues, academic jobs should go to men, rather than women. 62
3 The work that explores more fully the tie between the writing of the
4 history of the West and the importance of gender as a social construct
5 that governed the opportunities for female scholars has not yet been
6 written. When it is, the approach must be biographical. Even a cursory
7 examination of the works of female historians such as Annie Heloise Abel,
8 Angie Debo, and Mari Sandoz shows that they were far less wedded to the
9 idea that non-Indians moved onto “free land.” Instead, they realized that
10 the land belonged to native people who called it their home. Moreover,
11 when these women wrote about native peoples, they described them as
12 agents and actors on the historical stage rather than mere foils for the [19], (19)
13 white man’s saga of conquest. 63
14 Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff defined history as “vicarious experi- Lines: 120 to 1
15 ence.” By this they meant that it gives individuals “a second life extended
———
16 indefinitely into the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ ” 64 Biography
0.0pt PgVa
17 gives us instances of “vicarious experience.” An author who succeeds in ———
18 evoking a life gives us a precious gift that should not be discarded or Normal Page
19 denigrated as “minutiae without meaning.” PgEnds: TEX
20 At the same time, those of us who labor in the libraries and offices
21 in which we write biographies must be humble about our abilities and
[19], (19)
22 mindful of our responsibilities. The biographies we produce are our works
23 in the sense that no other person would have written the same life story
24 of any one individual. If we have done our work well, our biographies will
25 not be “definitive,” in the sense of defining a person once and for all.
26 Instead, our greatest accomplishment will be to present a portrait of that
27 individual that will motivate others to conduct their own research into the
28 existing evidence of the life that was lived. When those new biographies
29 are written, all of us will be richer for the insights they will disclose.
30 “All biography,” Leon Edel informed his readers, “is, in effect, a repro-
31 jection into words, into a literary or a kind of semiscientific and historical
32 form, of the inert materials, reassembled, so to speak, through the mind
33 of the historian or the biographer. His,” Edel continued, “becomes the
34 informing mind. He can only lay bare the facts as he has understood
35 them, in a continuous and inquiring narrative.” Without that “informing
 20 leckie

1 mind,” the subject would enjoy, at best, only a flicker of afterlife. Edel
2 quoted novelist Joseph Conrad’s statement on this point: “The dead can
3 live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by
4 the living.” 65 There is no other way, and that is why biography has always
5 mattered.
6 Today, because professional historians need the biographers’ life sto-
7 ries as a way of helping bridge the gap between themselves and a larger
8 reading public, biography matters more than it mattered in the past. As
9 our globe becomes smaller and our communities more diverse, biography,
10 which breathes life into dry census data and puts faces on demographic
11 tables, will become the means by which to weave the stories of new groups
12 into our national fabric. In the “intensity and quality of the life imparted” [20], (20)
13 lies our best hope for the revitalization of history as an academic disci-
14 pline that will reach and engage the larger audience and bring to it the Lines: 131 t
15 perspectives of those who, for far too long, have been relegated to history’s
———
16 margins.
2.62411p
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 Notes PgEnds: TE
20 1. Stanley Fish, “Just Published: Minutiae without Meaning,” New York Times, 7
21 September 1999, Section A, p. 19. [20], (20)
22 2. Fish, “Minutiae without Meaning,” p. 19.
23 3. Fish, “Minutiae without Meaning,” p. 19.
24 4. For a discussion on this point, see Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn Brodie: A
25 Biographer’s Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), xiii–xiv.
26 5. William McFeely, “Why Biography?” in The Seductions of Biography, ed. Mary
Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge, 1996), xiii.
27
6. Barbara Tuchman, “Biography as a Prism of History,” in Telling Lives: The
28
Biographer’s Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington dc: New Republic Books, 1979),
29
134.
30 7. Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (New York: Twayne, 1996), 6.
31 8. Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, trans. John Dryden et al., 3 vols. (New York:
32 John Wurtele Lovell, [1880?]), 1: 375. For a slightly different translation, see: Greek
33 Lives: A Selection of Nine Lives, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University
34 Press, 1998), xiii.
35 9. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918); Queen
 Biography Matters 21

1 Victoria (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921). For a discussion of Strachey’s use of
2 Freud, see Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton,
3 1984), 84.
4 10. Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (New York: St. Martin’s
5 Press, 1984), 55.
11. Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” The Biographer’s
6
Gift: Life Histories and Humanism, ed. James F. Veninga (College Station: Texas A&M
7
University Press, 1983), 16.
8
12. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: W. W.
9
Norton, 1974).
10
13. See Cushing Strout, “The Uses and Abuses of Psychology in American
11 History,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 324–42.
12 [21], (21)
14. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 16.
13 15. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 15–25; quote, 25.
14 16. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 126–29, 162–68. Lines: 153 to 1
15 17. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 127–28, 229–33.
———
16 18. For excellent recent works on Jefferson, see Andrew Burstein, The Inner
11.60022pt
17 Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia ———
18 Press, 1995), and Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson Normal Page
19 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). PgEnds: TEX
20 19. William H. Leckie and Shirley A. Leckie, Unlikely Warriors: General Benjamin
21 Grierson and His Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
20. Leckie and Leckie, Unlikely Warriors, 155–56, 161–62. Linda Kerber, “Sepa-
[21], (21)
22
rate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,”
23
Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39, identified the idea of separate
24
spheres as an imperfectly realized ideal that many women exploited to expand
25
their power even within the public sphere.
26
21. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901
27
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard
28 of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
29 22. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 157–75; quote, 158.
30 23. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 204–28.
31 24. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 254–87.
32 25. Harlan, Washington: Black Leader, 288–303.
33 26. Harlan, Washington: Wizard, 435–37.
34 27. Shirley A. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman:
35 University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 191–206.
 22 leckie

1 28. The first and third of Elizabeth Custer’s books were published by Harpers
2 & Bros.; Charles L. Webster published the second. One critic suggested that “Boots
3 and Saddles” was suitable Sunday-school reading. Norman Fox, “Christianity and
4 Manliness,” review from untitled newspaper, 30 April 1885, “Boots and Saddles”
5 Scrapbook of Reviews, Custer Collection, box 7, Monroe County (Michigan) His-
6 torical Commission Archives. More important, by 1901, Charles Scribner & Sons
7 had condensed Custer’s three books into The Boy General, a textbook that purported
8 to teach children civic virtues, including “lessons in manliness that mean more
9 than dates and statistics.” See “Opinions of the Press on The Boy General,” brochure

10 issued by Scribner Series of School Reading, 1901, Brice C. W. Custer Collection

(private collection, copy in author’s personal collection). The Boy General was edited
11
12
by Mary E. Burt. [22], (22)
29. Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 195–313.
13
30. Edel, Writing Lives, 62–66.
14 Lines: 191 t
31. Leon Edel, “The Figure under the Carpet,” Telling Lives, ed. Marc Pachter
15
(Washington dc: New Republic Books, 1979), 30. The essay in this work is a ———
16
slightly revised version of the chapter “Myth” in Edel’s Writing Lives, 159–73. * 24.5002
17 ———
32. Edel, “Figure under the Carpet,” 27.
18 Normal Pag
33. Edel, “Figure under the Carpet,” 32.
19 * PgEnds: Ej
34. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), xiii,
20
2. For information on Grant’s military career after he became lieutenant general
21 of the Union army, see 152–215. [22], (22)
22 35. McFeely, Grant: A Biography, 396–67.
23 36. McFeely, Grant: A Biography, 319–99.
24 37. McFeely, Grant: A Biography, 416–25.
25 38. Brooks Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston:
26 Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 416–25.
27 39. Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 542–72.
28 40. I am indebted to essays in The Culture of Oklahoma, ed. Howard F. Stein
29 and Robert F. Hill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). Among those
30 that most influenced my perception of Oklahoma attitudes are Howard Lamar,
31 “The Creation of Oklahoma: New Meanings for the Oklahoma Land Run,” 29–47;
32 J. Neil Henderson, “Spa in the Dust Bowl: Oklahoma’s Hidden Paradise,” 131–
33 42; and Pat Bellmon, “The Passing of Grit: Observations of a Farm Girl, Now a
34 Spectator on the Land,” 186–97.
35 41. Sara Doyle to Angie Debo, 28 March 1958, Angie Debo Papers [hereafter
 Biography Matters 23

1 adp], Manuscript Collections, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University,

2 Stillwater, Oklahoma.
3 42. Angie Debo, “The Debos,” unpublished family history, adp; typescript of
4 interviews conducted with Angie Debo by Glenna Matthew, Gloria Valencia Weber,
5 and Aletha Rogers, 11 November 1984, p. 1, adp.
6 43. See Shirley A. Leckie, Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian (Norman: University of
7 Oklahoma Press, 2000), esp. 43, 71–83, 89, 178–86.
8 44. Edel, Writing Lives, 4.
9 45. Garry Wills, Reagan’s America (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). See 36, 41,

10 58–60, 70, 74, 82–85, 103, 143, 149, 199–203, 263, 267, 280–4, 295–96, 324–31,
339–43. For Reagan’s statements about his life, Wills quotes extensively from
11
12
Ronald Regan, Where’s the Rest of Me? With Richard G. Hubler (New York: Duell, [23], (23)
Sloan & Pearce, 1965).
13
46. Wills, Reagan’s America, 93–111, 332–43.
14 Lines: 218 to 2
47. Wills, Reagan’s America, 460.
15
48. Wills, Reagan’s America, 466–67. ———
16
49. Reagan’s America was published in 1987 under the title Innocents at Home: * 24.50021p
17 ———
Reagan’s America, which emphasized the naïveté of the American public, but it
18 Normal Page
was changed with the 1988 Penguin edition. For a recent biography that is fairly
19 * PgEnds: Eject
balanced, see William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald
20
Reagan (Armonk ny: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
21 50. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford [23], (23)
22 University Press, 1997), 200.
23 51. Lerner, Why History Matters, 200.
24 52. As renowned scholars gathered at the Wellesley College forum, “The Future
25 of History,” in April 2000, they heard warnings of a discipline that “is in danger
26 of becoming too fragmented to be meaningful to students and too obscure to
27 have much impact outside academe,” according to Elizabeth Greene, “Plotting a
28 Future for History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 April 2000, Section A, 18. See
29 also David Oshinsky, “The Humpty Dumpty of Scholarship,” New York Times, 26
30 August 2000, Section A, 17, 19.
31 53. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American
32 History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Ray
33 Allen Billington (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 37–62. According to
34 Lerner, Why History Matters, 202, the narrative of American History, as traditionally
35 taught in schools and colleges, “used the doctrines of American exceptionalism
 24 leckie

1 and Manifest Destiny and the myth of the triumphant conquest of the West as a
2 legitimizing explanatory system.”
3 54. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American
4 West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 18, emphasized continuity, stating that “the
5 conquest of Western America shapes the present as dramatically and sometimes
as perilously as the old mines shape the mountainsides.”
6
55. Richard W. Etulain, Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry
7
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 151–52.
8
56. Patricia Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West
9
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 333–43.
10
57. Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of
11 Oklahoma Press, 1976), xi.
12 [24], (24)
58. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman (Norman:
13 University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
14 59. Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, César Chávez: A Tri- Lines: 247
15 umph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). Carey McWilliams,
———
16 “The Mexican Problem,” Common Ground 8 (spring 1948): 3–17, coined the phrase
11.60022
17 “factories in the field.” ———
18 60. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, Normal Pag
19 and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, PgEnds: TE
20 1995), another prizewinning work, achieved a very high level of scholarship, but
21 many sections are theoretical as the author analyzes arguments about legal issues
and debates over affirmative action. Thus it presupposes a depth of understanding
[24], (24)
22
on the reader’s part that is usually lacking in a popular audience. However, were I
23
teaching a course on ethnic minorities in the southwestern United States, I would
24
assign César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit to my students, and once we had discussed
25
the issues raised in this work, I could then assign Walls and Mirrors. The clearly
26
written and moving biography would have elicited student interest, and, even
27
more important, a measure of student empathy for the situation Mexicanos and
28 Mexicanas have faced in the U.S. borderlands of the Southwest.
29 61. Allan Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman:
30 University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
31 62. Bogue, Strange Roads, 123.
32 63. See, for example, Annie Eloise Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and
33 Secessionist (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1915); Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run
34 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940); Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange
35 Man of the Oglalas: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942).
 Biography Matters 25

1 64. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 5th ed. (Fort
2 Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 40.
3 65. Edel, Writing Lives, 43.
4
5
6 Selected Bibliography
7 Bogue, Allan. Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. Norman: University
8 of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
9 Bringhurst, Newell G. Fawn Brodie: A Biographer’s Life. Norman: University of Okla-
10 homa Press, 1999.
11 Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton,
12 1974. [25], (25)
13 Debo, Angie. Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place. Norman: University of Okla-
14 homa Press, 1976.
Lines: 272 to
Edel, Leon. Writing Lives: Principia Biographica. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
15
Etulain, Richard W. Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. Albu- ———
16
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 5.3002pt P
17 ———
Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. César Chávez: A Triumph of
18 Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Normal Page
19 Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New PgEnds: TEX
20 York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
21 . Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford [25], (25)
22 University Press, 1983.
23 Hood, Edwin Paxton. The Uses of Biography, Romantic, Philosophic, and Didactic. Lon-
24 don: Partridge and Oakey, 1852.
25 Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman. Norman:
26 University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters: Life and Thought. New York: Oxford University
27
Press, 1997.
28
Limerick, Patricia N. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.
29
New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
30 McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
31 Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
32 1984.
33 Pachter, Marc, ed. Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art. Washington dc: New Republic
34 Books, 1979.
35 Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Twayne, 1996.
 26 leckie

1 Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men. Translated by John Dryden et al. 3 vols.
2 New York: John Wurtele Lovell, 1880?
3 Rhiel, Mary, and David Suchoff. The Seductions of Biography. New York: Routledge,
4 1996.
Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.
5
. Queen Victoria. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921.
6
Veninga, James F., ed. The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism. College
7
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983.
8 Wills, Garry. Reagan’s America. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
9
10 [Last Page]
11
12 [26], (26)
13
14 Lines: 314
15
———
16
370.8110
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 PgEnds: TE
20
21
[26], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 2. Culture and Context in Biographical Studies:
2
3 The Case of China
4
5
6 R. Keith Schoppa
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [27], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 18
15 Robert Rosenstone, observing the essential relationship between histori-
———
16 ans and the past as they interpret it, concluded that “History does not exist
0.0pt PgVa
17 until it is created. And we create it in terms of our underlying values. Our ———
18 kind of vigorous, ‘scientific’ history is in fact a product of our history, our Normal Page
19 special history that includes a particular relationship to the written word, PgEnds: TEX
20 a rationalized economy, notions of individual rights, and the nation-state.
21 Many cultures have done quite well without this sort of history, which is
[27], (1)
22 only to say that there are as we all know but rarely acknowledge many
23 ways to represent and relate to the past.” 1
24 Perhaps the most telling clause in Rosenstone’s historiographical re-
25 flections is the parenthetical “as we all know but rarely acknowledge.”
26 Historians and biographers-as-historians are rooted in their particular
27 cultures and contexts. Their created histories in subject matter, ap-
28 proach, interpretation, methods, nuance will reflect to some degree or
29 other the culture and context that constitute their “special history.” But, as
30 in most endeavors, people rooted in a particular culture take that culture
31 and its values as the norm and often quite unthinkingly assume its uni-
32 versal applicability. In his presidential address to the American Historical
33 Association more than thirty years ago, noted China specialist John K.
34 Fairbank argued that “historians in America have been, like historians
35 elsewhere, patriotic, genetically oriented, and culture-bound.” 2
 28 schoppa

1 How do we see this American culture-boundedness in biographies?

2 One of the four elements of American culture noted by Rosenstone, indi-
3 vidualism, is at the center of our public ethos. Biography as a genre of his-
4 torical writing obviously is congruent with that ethos. In the modern West,
5 with its glorification of the individual, a biographer usually focuses on his
6 or her subject’s individuality, those aspects, attitudes, and abilities that
7 separate the subject from the masses. Thus, in Nell Irvin Painter’s mas-
8 terful biography of Sojourner Truth, we find, among others, the following
9 listings in the index under Truth: “anger of,” “anxiety of,” “canniness of,”
10 “clothing of,” “drinking of,” “guilt of,” “humor of,” “magnetism of,”
11 “public speaking of,” “sexuality of,” and “vulnerabilities of.” 3 In other
12 words, Painter strove to let us know who Truth was as an individual. Note [28], (2)
13 one other point. The listings detailing anger, anxiety, guilt, sexuality, and
14 vulnerabilities suggest that Painter intended to open Truth’s psyche as
Lines: 18 to
15 well as can be done long after her death. Modern Western biographers
———
16 often probe for explanations for life decisions and developments in the
0.0pt Pg
17 individual himself or herself by exploring the subject’s psyche. Indeed, ———
18 based upon the centrality of the individual and the importance of such Normal Pag
19 concepts as individual fulfillment and self-realization, it can be said that PgEnds: TE
20 psychology is the social/behavioral science par excellence in the modern
21 West.
[28], (2)
22 In the last several decades biographers have, to some degree or other,
23 used psychological insights and explanations to shed light on their sub-
24 jects. In a 1981 forum on the “new history” published in the Journal of
25 Interdisciplinary History, Miles Shore wrote that the “highest expression of
26 the biographer’s art lies in the elucidation of the nuances of motivation
27 and relationship that form the personal myth and make it possible to
28 see the psychological unity within which action takes on meaning.” 4 In
29 the American Historical Review, Thomas Kohut argued more categorically
30 that the psychological dimension “remains a historical subject of decisive
31 importance. . . . Because it is not possible to comprehend people without
32 dealing with the psychological, historians . . . have always written about
33 it, even if they have rarely acknowledged the fact.” 5
34 As they stand, the statements by Shore and Kohut are blanket general-
35 izations. Shore would likely argue that his stipulation about the “highest
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 29

1 expression of the biographer’s art” applies to any biographer and to any

2 biographical subject; so too with Kohut’s claim of the “decisive impor-
3 tance” of the psychological dimension. In their presentations, both schol-
4 ars seem oblivious to the substance of Rosenstone’s caution that there are
5 “many ways to represent and relate to the past.” Their pronouncements
6 may indeed be appropriate for Western cultures. But can they apply to
7 subjects in non-Western cultures in which values, customs, outlook, and
8 priorities are drastically different?
9 As a measure of the chasm between Western and Eastern cultures,
10 for example, take the meaning of the word “sincerity.” Shore and Kohut
11 would know what the word means in the West, as it fits neatly with their
12 emphasis on psychology “being true to one’s inner feelings.” But in [29], (3)
13 traditional East Asian cultures it has had a strikingly different meaning,
14 which represents a different social reality from that of the West. Sincerity
Lines: 22 to 2
15 in East Asia was “being true to one’s social role.” Thus, willingly marrying
———
16 the fiancé to whom a woman’s parents betrothed her when she was still a
0.0pt PgVa
17 child was an act of “sincerity,” the proper fulfillment of the social role of a ———
18 daughter and woman. In feudal Japan a warrior-vassal committing ritual Normal Page
19 suicide (seppuku) at the behest of his lord showed “sincerity,” dramatically PgEnds: TEX
20 underscoring his social relationship with the lord. The crucial social fea-
21 ture here is one’s relationship to others. Sociology, not psychology, would
[29], (3)
22 be the social science par excellence in East Asia.
23 This West/East, psychology/sociology difference is, not surprisingly,
24 reflected in the perceived reasons that people in these two broad cultural
25 arenas have for reading biographies. In a review published in the New York
26 Review of Books, Robert Darnton stated that “Biography . . . by focusing on
27 one life . . . eliminates the complications that weigh down accounts of
28 entire societies, and it adheres to a narrative line that shows individuals
29 in action. It restores agency to history, giving readers a sense of closeness
30 to the men and women who shaped events. It deals with motivations and
31 emotions. It even answers a voyeuristic desire to see through keyholes and
32 into private lives.” 6
33 Contrast this view with that of a 1995 piece in the Beijing Review, the
34 semiofficial English-language periodical from the People’s Republic of
35 China: “Many biographies are of considerable historical value, presenting
 30 schoppa

1 an important way to understand political figures and political life. The

2 wide attention to such works indicates the public’s interest in China’s
3 destiny and future, as well as their growing awareness of governmental
4 and political affairs. . . . However[, the trend of writing about leaders as
5 ordinary human beings] has produced some works that overemphasize
6 trivialities to the neglect of significant historical events. Readers are be-
7 coming bored by such works, with sales drastically declining.” 7
8 Darnton emphasized the psychological and emotional attraction of
9 biographies for Western readers. First of all, they simplify history, “elimi-
10 nat[ing] the complications that weigh down accounts of entire societies.”
11 They “restore agency to history.” Is this important for understanding the
12 past? No, its main thrust (at least as it is described here) is to give readers [30], (4)
13 a “sense of closeness” to biographical subjects. Heralding the psycholog-
14 ical dimension that attracts readers to biographies, Darnton noted their Lines: 28 t
15 inclusion of motivations, emotions, and lives behind closed doors. The
———
16 Beijing Review article, in contrast, argued that the appeal of biographies to
0.0pt Pg
17 a Chinese readership stemmed from people’s interest in current issues in ———
18 China’s modernizing polity. Nothing about enhancing the “closeness” of Normal Pag
19 the reader and the biographical subject appeared here: Biographies are di- PgEnds: TE
20 dactic, giving people information to help them understand contemporary
21 developments. The piece positively frowns on probing the individuality
[30], (4)
22 of the subject, on the kind of personal, even voyeuristic appeal of bi-
23 ographies for “bourgeois” Westerners, noting that the declining sales
24 of Chinese biographies emphasizing such “trivialities” indicated a bored
25 reading public.
26 The crucial question that any biographer must answer is this: What is
27 the most appropriate way to deal with the biographical subject so as to
28 express in the most meaningful and coherent way the salient aspects of his
29 or her life within its own cultural context? Vast differences in social values,
30 priorities, and contexts, underscored by the ascribed diverse appeals of
31 biographies in China and the United States, suggest that biographers
32 dealing with subjects in cultures different from their own may need to ask
33 different questions, have different emphases and priorities, and perhaps
34 use different approaches. In this chapter, I will argue that this is indeed
35 the case.
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 31

1 It is a commonplace to say that while the basic social unit in the modern
2 West is the individual, in China it is the group. But the social reality is much
3 deeper than is apparent in this simple generalization. It is when one is
4 asked to describe the group in each society that one comes to see that
5 there is a fundamentally different definition for both the individual and the
6 group in these two cultures. For while in the modern West it is accurate
7 to say that other than in the family individuals precede the group,
8 in China the group precedes the individual. Put another way, in the West
9 individuals make up a group; in China a group is composed of individuals.
10 Because in the West individuals “make up” a group, they can also, as
11 independent actors, freely make demands on the group or even leave the
12 [31], (5)
group. In China, because the group has precedence over its individuals,
13 maintaining the group and its harmony is of primary concern. The group
14 constrains individuals, for they cannot make claims of individual “rights” Lines: 34 to 3
15
within the group without threatening the group’s unity and cohesion. In ———
16
this sense, the individual in traditional Chinese society was a much less 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
“independent” actor than an individual in Western society. Contemporary
18 Normal Page
poet Bei Dao ends his “Notes from the City of the Sun” with the line
19 * PgEnds: Eject
“Living, A net.”
20
A Chinese individual is constrained by groups and his or her relation-
21
ships within groups as if he or she were linked to others by invisible [31], (5)
22
threads that tied them all into a net. As in the West, individuals can leave
23
the group, but in the process they will tear or break the net, and social
24
and personal damage can be severe. Thus, in approaching a Chinese
25
26 individual as a biographical subject, one must focus much attention not
27 simply on the individual but on those people in the various groups that
28 hold him or her in their nets. While the biography of a Westerner might
29 likely consider people who play a large role in the subject’s life or who
30 help provide context and support, their presence would not likely loom so
31 large because of the difference in the Western understanding of the greater
32 autonomy or degree of “separateness” of the individual. Thus Nell Irvin
33 Painter described the “networks” of Truth’s antislavery feminism, but
34 they seem to have existed primarily for her individual benefit; Painter told
35 us that “those networks sustained her materially and spiritually, steadily
 32 schoppa

1 broadening her horizons.” 8 By contrast, in China networks tended to be

2 constraining rather than liberating.
3 What kinds of relationships within groups create the particular dy-
4 namics of Chinese society on which a biographer must focus? Basic so-
5 cial identity comes not only from one’s family and his or her place in it
6 but from social connections and the networks that develop from them.
7 An American journalist has written that the Chinese “instinctively divide
8 people into those with whom they already have a fixed relationship, a con-
9 nection, what the Chinese call guanxi, and those with whom they do not.
10 These connections operate like a series of invisible threads, tying Chinese
11 to each other with far greater tensile strength than mere friendship.” 9
12 Connections and their logical next step, networks, were established in [32], (6)
13 various ways.
14 Some relationships were certain to bring “connections.” Friends obvi- Lines: 38 t
15 ously had close connections; the only one of the five Confucian bonds that
———
16 was a bond suggesting equality rather than hierarchy was friendship. Cer-
0.0pt Pg
17 tainly, for this reason friendship was more celebrated in Chinese literature ———
18 than any other social relationship. If a person came from the same home- Normal Pag
19 town or county or even province (in Chinese, “native place”), he or she PgEnds: TE
20 would have a built-in connection with everyone else from that place. The
21 connection was stronger further down the hierarchy of place county or
[32], (6)
22 town or village, for example. Academic and scholarly ties were also signif-
23 icant sources of connections. The men who received civil service degrees
24 in the same year shared a type of alumnus connection. Teacher-student re-
25 lationships endured throughout life, taking on an almost master-disciple
26 dynamic.
27 Certainly social connections are important in every culture, and any
28 biography must consider them. But Chinese culture has, it seems to me,
29 developed connections to the nth degree. They are immensely practical
30 social realities. From the bureaucracy of the traditional state to that of
31 the Communist state to that of the post-Communist state, people have
32 used their personal social connections to get what they want or need. The
33 person who uses connections to gain certain ends expends social capital
34 and builds up social debts to the dispenser of favors or the facilitator of
35 actions. Repaying those debts through reciprocal actions further nurtures
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 33

1 the connection, making its “tensile strength” very great indeed. The ac-
2 cumulation and repaying of obligations is a continual social reality that a
3 skillful biographer must take into consideration.
4 China’s most famous twentieth-century sociologist, Fei Xiaotong, has
5 written about the importance of connections and networks in the funda-
6 mental structure and processes of Chinese society. Networks may include
7 many people, but it is important to note that their structure is dyadic,
8 based on the connections between two people, and then two others, and
9 so on. The strength of any two connections varies. Similarly, individuals
10 may find themselves a part of a number of networks. The strength of the
11 personal connections to people in each network also varies. This situation
12 has definite ethical implications. Noting that Chinese society is structured [33], (7)
13 as “webs woven out of countless personal relationships,” Fei argued that
14 “to each knot in these webs is attached a specific ethical principle.” In Lines: 47 to 5
15 this society, “general [ethical] standards have no utility. The first thing to
———
16 do is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and
0.0pt PgVa
17 what kind of relationship is appropriate with that figure? Only then can ———
18 one decide the ethical standards to be applied in that context.” 10 Thus, Normal Page
19 there is no universal ethic to be applied to all people and in all situations. PgEnds: TEX
20 Ethics in China were traditionally determined by connections; they varied
21 with particular people and situations. The biographer of a Chinese sub-
[33], (7)
22 ject must be aware of this reality while interpreting the actions of that
23 person.
24 These kinds of social realities and relativities gave Chinese social life
25 considerable fluidity, in many or perhaps most cases providing a consid-
26 erable challenge for the biographer. A person’s social identity and place
27 in society largely depended on those to whom he or she was connected.
28 In the end, if someone with whom a person had spent years establishing
29 and cultivating connections was kicked out of power, lost a job, was
30 incapacitated, or died, then he or she was back to square one in trying to
31 establish his or her own social position. Developing and nurturing per-
32 sonal connections was understandably a full-time, lifelong undertaking.
33 Thus, though I, as a modern Western biographer of an early twentieth-
34 century Chinese man named Shen Dingyi, was interested in the individu-
35 ality of my subject, my primary focus necessarily had to be on questions
 34 schoppa

1 of social relationships. In the fluidity that was and is Chinese society,

2 the biographer must be continually concerned about context, because
3 the subject is embedded in different social networks in various arenas of
4 life and action. One must analyze as carefully as possible the sources of
5 individual connections and attempt to judge the relative strengths of con-
6 nections between the subject and those with whom he or she had guanxi.
7 This requires an awareness of the various networks of which the subject
8 was a part, of the strength of each network in its effect on the subject,
9 and of social dynamics within the networks. One must be aware that the
10 subject likely played different roles in each connection and network, and
11 that these different roles gave different identities. The biographer of a
12 Chinese subject must not assume that the modern Western conception [34], (8)
13 of human development with stages of infancy, toddlerhood, childhood,
14 adolescence, early adulthood, middle age, and old age applies to Chi- Lines: 54 t
15 nese. This cautionary note should be fairly obvious since studies of earlier
———
16 times in the West have shown, for example, that during the Middle Ages
0.0pt Pg
17 there was no sense that childhood was a separate stage of life. It was not ———
18 until the nineteenth century that adolescence came to be seen as a separate Normal Pag
19 stage. 11 Professor Kenneth Keniston has argued that “In other societies PgEnds: TE
20 or historical eras, puberty is . . . not followed by anything like what we
21 consider an adolescent experience. . . . If, therefore, a given stage of life
[34], (8)
22 or development change is not recognized in a given society, we should
23 seriously entertain the possibility that it simply does not occur in that so-
24 ciety. And, if this is the case, then in societies where adolescence does not
25 occur, many of the psychological characteristics which we consider the
26 results of adolescent experience should be extremely rare: For example, a
27 high degree of emancipation from family, a well-developed self-identity,
28 a belief system based upon a reexamination of the cultural assumptions
29 learned in childhood.” 12
30 China was one culture that did not have a conception of adolescence
31 as a separate life stage. In Confucianism “adulthood” was thought to be
32 made up of three “equally significant periods of human life” or three
33 “integral aspects” or three “inseparable dimensions” youth, manhood,
34 and old age. “Maturation is perceived mainly in terms of self-cultivation”;
35 adulthood thus is a “process of becoming,” a “process of realizing that
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 35

1 which is thought to be the authentic human nature.” Though there is a dif-

2 ference between youth and manhood, there was no sense of a “ ‘between’
3 period, alleged to be characterized by mental and emotional instability as
4 well as other ingratiating attributes.” 13 In Book 2 of the Analects, Confucius
5 reportedly described the ages of man:
6
At fifteen I set my heart on learning.
7
At thirty I was firmly established.
8
At forty I had no more doubts.
9
At fifty I knew the will of Heaven.
10
At sixty I was ready to listen to it.
11
At seventy I could follow my heart without transgressing what [35], (9)
12 was right. 14
13
14 Indeed, Western psychological theories and insights would be hard Lines: 56 to 7
15 pressed to make any sort of appropriate contribution toward understand-
———
16 ing a Chinese subject without a sense of adolescence and a concept of
4.0pt PgVa
17 discrete stages of life. ———
18 Yet another cultural constraint on writing a biography of a Chinese Normal Page
19 person is the nature of the sources. Chinese sources detail those things PgEnds: TEX
20 that Chinese would see as important and significant. Since biographical
21 sources were expected to provide records of public accomplishments to
[35], (9)
22 serve as a memorial to the subject and grist for didactic accounts, available
23 sources provided the public “facts” of one’s life “and such ideas as have
24 been preserved in his published essays, memorials, and poetry. There
25 [was] precious little else.” 15
26 Those sources that do exist have been shaped by Chinese cultural in-
27 terests and values. Thus, the father-son relationship is frequently talked
28 about and reflected upon; it was the prime Confucian social bond. Yet I
29 have never seen mother-son relationships discussed. Nor were husband-
30 wife relationships described. We may learn how many wives and con-
31 cubines a man had, but we generally know nothing about the nature
32 and dynamics of relationships between (among) them. Fei Xiaotong, in
33 his description of rural society, reported that husbands and wives gen-
34 erally had little to do with each other socially, seeking same-sex com-
35 panionship instead. Men and women were often betrothed in child-
 36 schoppa

1 hood, a practice indicating that childhood was not seen as a discrete

2 stage from early adulthood. The couple often did not see each other until
3 the day of their wedding. Upon marrying, a woman would leave her natal
4 home for her husband’s home. There she was in an inferior position not
5 only to her husband but to her father-in-law and, most notoriously, to her
6 mother-in-law. In the traditionally patriarchal society, females whether
7 wives, concubines, sisters, or lovers were mostly invisible. Thus, the
8 relationships that in the West would be standard fare and perhaps pivotal
9 in biographies mother-son, mother-father-son, husband-wife, lover-
10 lover were not generally noted or recorded.
11 Certainly the public record and facts of the life of Shen Dingyi provided
12 some information about his individuality. We know that at age forty he [36], (10)
13 left his wife and began to live with a much younger woman. From his
14 memorial biography, meant to elevate him in the eyes of his peers, we Lines: 78 t
15 learn that into his late thirties he was a heavy drinker. The biography
———
16 stresses his decision to abandon this habit. From his relationships with
0.0pt Pg
17 others we can glean aspects of his personality and make circumstantial ———
18 conclusions about his individuality. But traditional sources were not rich Normal Pag
19 in insights into personality or individual idiosyncracies. In the 1980s and PgEnds: TE
20 1990s, however, a new type of source emerged in the People’s Republic of
21 China. Called wenshi ziliao (historical materials), these were compilations
[36], (10)
22 of various materials, ranging from accounts of historical events and devel-
23 opments, to personal memoirs, to biographies. The latter, more informal
24 than traditional biographies, often give greater insight into the subject’s
25 individuality. The downside of these sources is that there is no quality
26 control, so errors and biases abound. The biographer may use them at his
27 or her own professional peril.
28 Shen Dingyi was what might be called a “second-tier” Chinese leader in
29 the 1910s and 1920s. He came from a wealthy landlord family in Zhejiang,
30 a central coastal province south of Shanghai. His father, who held sev-
31 eral lower-level official positions, bought the twenty-one-year-old Shen
32 the magistracy of a county in distant Yunnan Province. Shen, however,
33 shamed his father and family by becoming involved in revolutionary ac-
34 tivity, and in the end simply abandoning his post and fleeing to Japan. He
35 spent substantial sums of his family’s money to help bankroll the 1911
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 37

1 Chinese revolution that overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty. Returning

2 to China after the revolution as a political leader in Hangzhou, the provin-
3 cial capital, Shen chaired the provincial assembly and emerged as chief
4 spokesman during several provincial government crises in the late 1910s.
5 Throughout his career he was impulsive and outspoken, an individual-
6 istic knight-errant who made fast friends and just as easily made bitter
7 enemies.
8 Shen went to Shanghai in 1918 at the time of the cultural revolution
9 that would become known as the May Fourth Movement a campaign
10 to purge China of traditional culture (in a slogan of the time, “Down
11 with Confucius and sons”) and to begin to structure a modern Chinese
12 culture. There he coedited a progressive journal, Weekly Review, and wrote [37], (11)
13 essays and poetry that espoused nationalism, socialism, feminism, and
14 the transcendent importance of education. He became involved with a
Lines: 82 to 8
15 Marxist study group and became a member of the Shanghai Marxist cell
———
16 that was a forerunner of the Chinese Communist party.
0.0pt PgVa
17 In 1920 Shen returned to his home village of Yaqian where he organized ———
18 a free public school for the villagers. To teach there, he brought progres- Normal Page
19 sive, idealistic students with whom he had become acquainted. In 1921, PgEnds: TEX
20 reacting to the requests of several farmers, he took the initiative in organiz-
21 ing a farmers’ rent-resistance movement. Although he was still a member
[37], (11)
22 of the provincial assembly and had come from a landlord background,
23 Shen helped organize tenant farmers to strike against landlords. By the
24 fall of 1921, “farmers’ associations” had been established in eighty-two
25 towns and villages in three counties with an estimated hundred thousand
26 farmers and their families involved. The formation of an Alliance of Farm-
27 ers’ Associations at Yaqian finally mobilized landlords. Using their ties to
28 the political and military establishments, they were able to arrange for
29 the military in the area to crush the movement in mid-December. Leaders
30 of the farm organization were jailed. Shen escaped reprisals, but he lost
31 tremendous political capital and raised doubts and suspicions in many
32 circles about his motives in the affair.
33 The Chinese Communist party was established in July 1921. In the
34 early 1920s Soviet agents contacted Sun Yat-sen, the best-known Chi-
35 nese revolutionary leader of the early twentieth century, offering to help
 38 schoppa

1 restructure his party, the Guomindang (or, Nationalist party) and to set
2 up a military academy to train a party army. Sun accepted, also making
3 the decision that individual Communist party members could join the re-
4 vamped Guomindang. Shen became a member of both parties. The goal
5 of the parties, joined in a “united front,” was twofold: first, to undertake
6 a military campaign to unite China and wipe out the plague of warlords,
7 who had fought each other for territory and control of China since 1916;
8 and second, to drive out the imperialist powers, whose presence had con-
9 tinued to grow. For the two parties, the mid-1920s were spent preparing
10 for revolution. In 1924 a series of minor irritants began to drive a wedge
11 between Shen and more radical members of the provincial Guomindang,
12 which was led at this time by the young teachers whom Shen had brought [38], (12)
13 to teach at the Yaqian Village School. Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925
14 unleashed party factionalism, which Sun had held in check until then. Lines: 88 t
15 By the summer of 1925 the party had erupted into open, strident feuding
———
16 between conservatives and radicals. This bitter party factionalism was
0.0pt Pg
17 exacerbated by the upsurge in nationalism following the British killings ———
18 of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai on 30 May. It was clear that the Normal Pag
19 time for a revolutionary military campaign was nearing. Revolutionary PgEnds: TE
20 choices frequently the source of party factionalism could no longer be
21 postponed. In August, when a left-wing leader of the Guomindang was
[38], (12)
22 assassinated, the right wing was implicated.
23 In November 1925 Shen met with right-wing members before Sun Yat-
24 sen’s coffin in the Western Hills near Beijing. Their purpose was to call
25 for the ouster of all Communist party members who had joined the Guo-
26 mindang, in effect halting the united front that had linked the parties, and
27 for the expulsion of the chief Soviet adviser in China, Michael Borodin,
28 who, they believed, had become too powerful. This meeting of what be-
29 came known as the Western Hills faction openly split the Guomindang.
30 In early 1926 both factions held their own party congresses. Shen was
31 bitterly attacked by former colleagues who were active on the left in the
32 province; the Western Hills faction was quickly tagged as far to the right
33 or reactionary.
34 In the summer of 1926, the military campaign to unite the country,
35 known as the Northern Expedition, got under way. Its military comman-
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 39

1 der was Chiang Kai-shek, first associated with neither Right nor Left, but
2 gradually moving into the rightist camp, though not so far right as the
3 Western Hills group. Chiang and the National Army were successful in
4 reaching the main Yangzi cities by the spring of 1927, when they struck
5 out at the Guomindang Left and the Communists in bloody purges. The
6 so-called White Terror, which lasted into 1928, temporarily ended all Com-
7 munist party power. Shen emerged in Zhejiang Province in the summer
8 of 1927 as head of purge activities and in the fall (October to December)
9 as one of the provincial government leaders when circumstances brought
10 Western Hills partisans to leadership in a number of provinces.
11 Ousted in December 1927 and distraught over the new provincial gov-
12 ernment that was discarding some of his goals, particularly the estab- [39], (13)
13 lishment of farmers’ associations and the adoption of a 25-percent-rent-
14 reduction plan, Shen returned to his village of Yaqian. There in his native Lines: 92 to 9
15 East Township he began his own experiment in what generally came to
———
16 be called rural reconstruction. That meant establishing mass organiza-
0.0pt PgVa
17 tions (of farmers, merchants, unskilled laborers, construction workers, ———
18 and women) and undertaking reconstruction (building irrigation facilities Normal Page
19 and roads) and reforms (establishing a self-government association, set- PgEnds: TEX
20 ting up credit and retail cooperatives, building schools, and sponsoring
21 sericulture reforms) within the township. It was an effort to start the re-
[39], (13)
22 construction of China from the grassroots. But Shen did not have enough
23 time: He was assassinated on the afternoon of 28 August 1928.
24 In interpreting the life of Shen during the revolution of the 1920s,
25 there are several challenges presented by culture and context. The first
26 is an aspect of Chinese political culture. Shen commented on it in an
27 essay in 1919: “I know that ultimately for the Chinese people the name
28 is more important than the deed.” 16 Throughout Chinese history many
29 people contended that action or deeds had to be brought to fit the name;
30 there was no sense that names should be changed to fit the action. When
31 Confucius analyzed the disharmony in Chinese society, he found part of
32 the reason to be that people were not doing what their names prescribed.
33 The son must be a son; the father must be a father. If a father tries to be a
34 friend to his son instead of a father, there will be problems. A ruler must
35 be a ruler and not allow others to make decisions for him. In other words,
 40 schoppa

1 the name prescribed the action that the named should perform. This
2 obviously conservative Confucian idea is referred to as the “rectification
3 of names.” In the twentieth century, this obsession with names reached its
4 peak during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when society was divided between
5 the red (good) and black (bad) forces. No matter what his actions, if he
6 were the son or grandson of a landlord (black), he would always be ranked
7 with the landlords as an enemy of the people; on the other hand, however
8 bad their actions, the offspring of the proletariat (red) would always be
9 good.
10 How does this tyranny of names make analyzing Shen more chal-
11 lenging? Every person in every culture has multiple identities stemming
12 from the various roles that he or she plays and the various relationships [40], (14)
13 that he or she maintains. These identities come from oneself (emerging
14 from personality, goals, abilities, lifestyle, particular incidents); from con- Lines: 96 t
15 nections to others; and from others who choose for whatever reason to
———
16 bestow a particular identity upon one. In Chinese culture, more than in the
4.0pt Pg
17 West, those identities that emerge from connections to others are often ———
18 decisive in helping fix one’s identity. Shen was a part of at least seven Normal Pag
19 networks the extended family, the native-place connections in Yaqian PgEnds: TE
20 and East Township, the provincial assembly colleagues, the Shanghai in-
21 tellectuals, the graduates of Hangzhou’s First Normal School whom Shen
[40], (14)
22 brought to teach at his school, the provincial Guomindang hierarchy, and
23 the Western Hills faction. In addition, Shen had countless connections of
24 greater or lesser strength with others. Shen himself said it in a poem:
25
Within the mirror there I am.
26
Outside the mirror there I am.
27
When I break the mirror, I don’t see me.
28
The broken fragments of the mirror become pieces of me.
29
When I break the mirror, I am nowhere in the mirror.
30
When I break the mirror, I have even broken me.
31 When I have broken me, I don’t know how many of me there are. 17
32
33 In any culture, to be sure, identity is best seen as “process, . . . perfor-
34 mance, and . . . provisional.” 18 But with the necessity for continual guanxi
35 construction, nurturing, repair, and repayment, the fluidity that we have
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 41

1 noted as a crucial aspect of Chinese society made the question of identity

2 even more difficult to come to terms with. If we put that fluidity into the
3 context of revolution, which is marked by instability and contingency,
4 fixing identities for a biographical subject becomes extraordinarily chal-
5 lenging. The temptation is to follow the lead of contemporaries trying
6 to deal with that biographical subject: “In the great complexity of revo-
7 lutionary change, the human mind brings order by naming and holding
8 to that name as the key to the identity of the other. The sense of ‘once-
9 named, always-known’ becomes the easiest way for individuals to order
10 their world; though it is certainly possible, it then becomes extraordinarily
11 difficult to change the key.” 19 Thus, as Shen’s identity was continuing to
12 shift amid the twists and turns of revolution, other Chinese, already valu- [41], (15)
13 ing the noun over the verb, pegged Shen in certain ways landlord, elite
14 leader, rent-resistance agitator, Western Hills reactionary many names
Lines: 118 to 1
15 having sinister overtones, depending on the political viewpoint.
———
16 The crucial underlying reality here was the extraordinarily politicized
0.0pt PgVa
17 nature of Chinese society that tended to color most naming and most ———
18 identities. When I went to Yaqian in 1993 to visit Shen’s grave, the local Normal Page
19 officials at first demurred, saying, “We don’t yet know whether Shen was PgEnds: TEX
20 a good or bad man.” This was sixty-five years after Shen’s death. Some of
21 that indecision was a result of Shen’s controversial history (son of a land-
[41], (15)
22 lord, associated with a reactionary political faction but a radical thinker
23 and reformer). But most came from the highly charged politicization of
24 daily life in the People’s Republic. In 1966, during the first year of Mao’s
25 Cultural Revolution, farmers blasted Shen’s mountainside grave open,
26 yanked out his corpse, and threw it down the mountain; at the same time
27 Shen’s family was dispossessed and forced to take shelter in a Buddhist
28 compound. Even in my 1993 interview with Shen’s son and grandson
29 in the presence of a local Communist cadre, I was warned not to probe
30 too deeply into Shen’s life or the affairs of his family. The issue was not
31 knowing what tomorrow’s politics might be: One could not step boldly
32 ahead when the ground beneath the current political line might turn to
33 quicksand overnight.
34 In terms of writing a biography of Shen, the point is this: If Shen’s
35 identity and historical significance were still so indeterminable in 1993,
 42 schoppa

1 how much more uncertain were they among his contemporaries in the
2 1910s and 1920s? Yet it was those very contemporaries who ascribed to
3 Shen many of his identities and names and have left most of the historical
4 records with which we have to evaluate him. Most of those people wrote
5 from the vantage point of later times when they knew what Shen would
6 never know the end results of the developments of the 1920s. Surely
7 that knowledge also shaped and colored their depiction of Shen and
8 his times. Given these circumstances, determining Shen Dingyi’s most
9 appropriate identity is a mystery not easily solved. Careful (sometimes
10 tentative) judgment of sources, including Shen’s own writings and public
11 records, is the key to getting as close to an answer as possible. Important
12 in understanding the “doing” of a biography of a Chinese subject are the [42], (16)
13 difficulties arising from both culture and context.
14 To bring the issues of culture and context into sharper focus as they Lines: 122
15 shaped Chinese lives and my study of Shen Dingyi, I focus here on his
———
16 involvement with the Western Hills faction, and his assassination. Of all
0.0pt Pg
17 Shen’s actions during his controversial career, none is more puzzling ———
18 than his participation in the Western Hills meeting in late 1925. Here he Normal Pag
19 was less than half a decade away from being a founding member of the PgEnds: TE
20 Communist party, from supporting socialism and feminism, from spon-
21 soring a rent-resistance movement against his fellow landlord elites now
[42], (16)
22 joining with men who were known as the most ideologically reactionary
23 men in the Guomindang. And yet, from his later actions, we know that he
24 had not given up his progressive ideas. As I put it in an essay title, “What’s
25 a Man Like You Doing in a Group Like This?” 20 Even the Western Hills
26 group did not believe that he was for real: Three days before the meeting
27 opened, Shen and his close friend Dai Jitao were kidnapped from their
28 hotel and beaten by ultraconservative Guomindang goons who believed
29 that Shen was a Communist agent attending the meeting as a mole.
30 The Western Hills faction has traditionally been cast primarily in ideo-
31 logical terms. Though most who attended this meeting were conservative,
32 there was a range of ideological viewpoints. Ideological commitment was
33 not the basis or raison d’être for the meeting. It was instead concerned
34 with practical revolutionary politics. The proceedings of the conference
35 show that the men came together because of specific political grievances
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 43

1 at a particular historical moment. These grievances included the power

2 of the chief Soviet adviser, Borodin, in party affairs; the continuing mem-
3 bership of Communists in the Guomindang; and the collaboration of the
4 leader of the Guomindang Left, Wang Jingwei, with the Communists.
5 Apart from the existential political situation, what brought this partic-
6 ular group together? Here, connections and networks take center stage.
7 An analysis of Western Hills participants’ various connections (native-
8 place ties, kinship and marital ties, friendships, political patron-client
9 ties, shared voluntary association memberships, and shared revolution-
10 ary experiences) reveals that there were two networks. Shen’s network was
11 composed of four men who were linked by common native place, profes-
12 sional background, and friendship. They were clearly more moderate than [43], (17)
13 the majority of the Western Hills group. On the political grievances aired
14 at the meeting, this network was more tolerant of Borodin’s leadership, Lines: 127 to 1
15 was not ready to support a unilateral break with the Communists, and did
———
16 not favor a backlash against Wang Jingwei. All four in this network left
0.0pt PgVa
17 the meeting early. With reference to the main network, they were clearly ———
18 peripheral both organizationally and in strength of post-conference com- Normal Page
19 mitment. This main network of eleven men was made up of two clusters, PgEnds: TEX
20 one linked by friendship and common work in political associations,
21 the other by friendship, native-place ties, and being disciples of an early
[43], (17)
22 twentieth-century revolutionary leader. These eleven signed a letter to
23 Wang Jingwei detailing why the Communists had to be ousted from the
24 Guomindang. Thus analysis of connections and networks seem, at least in
25 this case, to provide more appropriate explanations for conference atten-
26 dance than assuming that these men were all like-minded reactionaries.
27 Shen, as best we can tell, attended the meeting in large part because of
28 the personal connection of friendship; if Dai had not attended the meet-
29 ing, it is not likely that Shen would have gone. In addition, he attended
30 in part because of a genuine concern about growing Soviet and Commu-
31 nist power in the Chinese revolution. Finally there was likely a personal
32 career motive: His distrust of Communists derived in part from his be-
33 ing challenged for leadership in the Zhejiang provincial Guomindang by
34 idealistic, driven young men, fifteen to twenty years his junior, who had
35 once been his disciples and were also Communist party members. These
 44 schoppa

1 young men saw Shen’s attendance at the conference as the first volley in a
2 bitter political war that would last into the spring of 1927 when, following
3 the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek would kill or imprison Shen’s
4 challengers in the general White Terror that he unleashed.
5 In the end, Shen came out over his rivals, not through his actions
6 but through the course of revolution. In the summer and fall of 1927 he
7 headed the anti-Communist purge in Zhejiang and was a key figure in
8 the provincial government in the fall. Throughout this period, however,
9 he labored under the new identity that his attendance at the Western
10 Hills conference had given him among his contemporaries that of ul-
11 traconservative. It did not matter that that name had no connection to the
12 reality of Shen’s actions or thought. It did not seem to matter when he [44], (18)
13 undertook the radically reformist rural reconstruction program in 1928.
14 For his enemies, the name became a political weapon; for those who Lines: 131 t
15 had always thought Shen was unpredictable, the name was corroborative.
———
16 For his friends, it was mystifying. For these reasons, Shen’s involvement
0.0pt Pg
17 with the Western Hills group from November 1925 to April 1926 had ———
18 “drastic and permanent implications for his image and his future. . . . It Normal Pag
19 was a stigma that Shen could not in the end overcome.” 21 How strong PgEnds: TE
20 the connection of Shen was with the Western Hills group is shown by the
21 popular name of the Hangzhou house of Shen’s relative in which Shen
[44], (18)
22 met with fellow Guomindang members in late 1927: the “Western Hills
23 Zhejiang Garrison.”
24 On 28 August 1928, after more than six months working at his rural
25 reconstruction experiment, Shen was assassinated in Yaqian on return-
26 ing from Moganshan, a resort north of Hangzhou. On the spur of the
27 moment, he had gone to meet several leaders of the Guomindang, one
28 of them being Dai Jitao, whom he had not seen since their joint Western
29 Hills conference attendance almost three years earlier. He did not know
30 how long he would stay in Moganshan or when he would return. Three
31 days later, on his return trip, after he took a ferry across the Qiantang River
32 from Hangzhou, he boarded a bus for the forty-five-minute ride from the
33 river depot to Yaqian, and his killers boarded the bus with him. They killed
34 him after he got off the bus in Yaqian.
35 As Shen’s assassination had never been solved, I set out to solve it,
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 45

1 writing the biography as a murder mystery. Indeed, attempting to solve

2 the case uses the skills of a detective, but the solution comes straight
3 out of Chinese cultural dynamics at this moment in history connections
4 and networks, questions of social identity and social fluidity and also
5 from the joker in any historical deck, contingency. The case does not
6 lack suspects. Shen had made many enemies during his career: local
7 landlords, provincial assembly opponents, Communist party members,
8 Guomindang leftists. Even on the private, personal level Shen’s arrogance
9 and brashness had created enemies. In an account of his death, the Shang-
10 hai newspaper Shenbao asserted that “Shen’s natural disposition was that
11 he made arbitrary decisions on his own and that he was continually in
12 disagreement with people.” 22 [45], (19)
13 There were five major suspects, two of whom could be dispensed with
14 rather quickly. One was a Buddhist monk, outraged at Shen because his Lines: 137 to 1
15 temple had been seized during the rent-resistance movement in 1921 and
———
16 had been made the headquarters for the Alliance of Farmers’ Associations.
0.0pt PgVa
17 Over the years he had repeatedly made threats and reportedly accumulated ———
18 “hit” money to do Shen in. But the key to the killers’ identities was that the Normal Page
19 actual perpetrators of the murder had boarded the same bus as Shen: That PgEnds: TEX
20 development underscores the fact that whoever masterminded the assas-
21 sination knew of Shen’s travel plans and schedule and had at their disposal
[45], (19)
22 some substantial organizational abilities. The Buddhist monk would have
23 had no way of knowing about Shen’s return, since, as I have said, Shen
24 had not planned it. The same can be said of silkworm merchants, often
25 mentioned as suspects because their livelihood was threatened by the
26 sericulture reform sponsored by Shen in his rural reconstruction effort.
27 They may have had a motive but not the means or resources to pull the
28 killing off. Stronger suspects were local landlords, who remained bitter
29 about Shen’s masterminding of the rent-resistance movement in 1921
30 and about his strident support for the 25-percent-rent-reduction effort.
31 They were very suspicious about his rural reconstruction effort, which
32 was rumored to include some scheme for land redistribution. They had
33 the wherewithal to arrange the killing, but the timing is problematic:
34 Unless they had links to someone at Moganshan who was aware of Shen’s
35 decision to leave and who knew what time he had left, they would not
 46 schoppa

1 have been able to coordinate the plan. Since one man arrested in the case
2 confessed that a landlord had hired him to kill Shen, the possibility exists
3 that a landlord had served as middleman and hired the killer. However, we
4 will never know because the confessor ended up mysteriously murdered
5 in his prison cell.
6 Communists obviously had motives to do away with Shen. His lead-
7 ership of the anti-Communist purge the year before gave them a strong
8 grievance. But their involvement was not logical. At this point they were
9 demoralized, bankrupt, and, for all practical purposes, defunct. Why
10 would they have expended precious resources on a man who no longer
11 had any provincial power and had antagonized so many people that he
12 would likely never be brought back into the power elite? The timing is [46], (20)
13 also a problem. Why would they have used this plan, the timing of which
14 was tricky at best, when they could have chosen any number of public Lines: 139
15 meetings at which Shen appeared?
———
16 Men in Shen’s own party, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang, had the
0.0pt Pg
17 motives and the wherewithal to carry out Shen’s murder. We are led to ———
18 them by those elements of Chinese culture that have been the focus of Normal Pag
19 this paper: networks, the power of names, and the fluidity of identity in PgEnds: TE
20 the revolutionary context. Two questions need to be addressed: Who was
21 behind the assassination; and why now, when Shen’s political power was
[46], (20)
22 weaker than it had been earlier in the decade? The answer to the first
23 question is based on circumstantial but compelling evidence. The “who”
24 question goes back to the bus ride of Shen and his killers: How did the
25 killers know Shen would be on that bus? Since Shen himself did not know
26 until the morning of 28 August that he was returning to Yaqian, one of
27 the four Guomindang officials staying at the Moganshan resort had to
28 have sent messages to set the assassination plot in motion. No one else
29 would have known Shen’s departure time. There are other circumstantial
30 clues. In the weeks prior to the assassination, Shen had received two
31 warnings about his rural reconstruction self-government project from
32 a former Zhejiang official and from the current head of the provincial
33 Guomindang, Zhang Jingjiang, a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek.
34 Chiang, who also hailed from Zhejiang Province, had disliked Shen from
35 the beginning of their acquaintance, had never accepted him in any of
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 47

1 his networks, and had treated him indifferently and kept him at arm’s
2 length. The party’s warnings cautioned Shen to curb his radicalism and
3 outspokenness.
4 Further, the post-assassination coldness of the Guomindang suggests
5 that the party was glad to be rid of Shen. Chiang refused requests for a state
6 funeral and for the appointment of a special court to hear the case. The
7 provincial government said that the East Township rural reconstruction
8 project could remain as a permanent memorial to Shen; but it shut it down
9 in little more than a year. At a large exposition in Hangzhou in 1929, party
10 leaders rejected out of hand the request that Shen should be included as a
11 martyr in the Memorial Hall of the Revolution.
12 The question of “why now” brings us to issues of Chinese culture. [47], (21)
13 We know there was concern in the party about Shen’s “radical” self-
14 government experiment. At a time when Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror Lines: 143 to 1
15 was unabated and when the party’s revolutionary goals had not yet been
———
16 accomplished, Shen’s alternative strategy of rural reconstruction likely
0.0pt PgVa
17 seemed threatening in its dissent. Many people wondered whether Shen ———
18 was simply trying to build a base for himself from which he might plan Normal Page
19 military action. Rumors about Shen’s plans spread rapidly. A photograph PgEnds: TEX
20 of a rack for fire-fighting equipment was taken to be a gun rack for a ru-
21 mored township militia said to be twenty-thousand-strong. Quarriers on
[47], (21)
22 Phoenix Mountain at Yaqian were said to be building a military garrison.
23 In a premodern culture, such as China’s was at this time and earlier, rumor
24 was “the news” and almost always played a major role in determining what
25 people thought about their world.
26 Part of Shen’s difficulty was that he had allowed connections to party
27 leaders and participation in national and even provincial networks to
28 lapse; this stemmed from his focus from 1925 to 1927 on his battle with
29 the leftists for control of the province, a struggle waged mostly in local
30 county bureaus. Thus, he had no strong guanxi to ensure his own safety and
31 standing. Dai Jitao was one of those lapsed connections, and a tragic lapse
32 it was. Then Shen compounded his difficulties by making the mistake of
33 being boldly frank with Dai at Moganshan. He had reportedly told his
34 erstwhile friend, “The revolution that originally rose in people’s hearts has
35 not been satisfied. Because the situation was [originally] unsatisfactory,
 48 schoppa

1 we had to have a revolution. But the present unsatisfied nature of people’s

2 hearts means that there must be another revolution.” 23 Such blunt talk
3 must have signaled imminent danger to Dai, at that time a key member
4 of the Guomindang’s leadership group; sources tell us that Dai abruptly
5 cut the conversation short. Thus it is possible that part of the motive for
6 the murder was to eliminate this radical before he could make serious
7 trouble.
8 But the “why now” question seems to rise out of culture and context;
9 the reason was likely Shen’s very trip to Moganshan. Of the four party of-
10 ficials at the resort, one was a Western Hills faction leader named Zhang
11 who had been in the core network at the Western Hills meeting, and
12 another was a military man named Li from a faction called the Guangxi [48], (22)
13 clique. In the fall of 1927 the Western Hills faction had been aligned with
14 the Guangxi clique. Both faction and clique were opponents of Chiang Lines: 149
15 Kai-shek. In the summer of 1928 rumors had begun to spread that anti-
———
16 Chiang ferment was brewing among members of the Guangxi clique. The
0.0pt Pg
17 coincidence of Li’s and Zhang’s visits at such a time may have raised some ———
18 suspicion, but to have Shen also of the Western Hills group come to Normal Pag
19 Moganshan (even though ostensibly to see Dai) was troubling. Two Chi- PgEnds: TE
20 nese analyses (both from the “historical materials” sources and studded
21 with factual errors) suggest that Shen’s trip to Moganshan at that partic-
[48], (22)
22 ular moment was the critical act leading to his assassination because “it
23 stirred up the Western Hills-related suspicions of Chiang Kai-shek, who
24 would likely have been notified of Shen’s visit by Dai Jitao.” 24 Dai may
25 have interpreted Shen’s call for another revolution as one that would be
26 led by a Guangxi and Western Hills alliance.
27 An account by a Communist labor organizer at the time alleges that the
28 killer was hired on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders to one of his main generals.
29 This is also the story that Shen’s family gave me in interviews in 1993.
30 If true, “the sad and ironic fact is that Shen seems to have been killed
31 because he was perceived as too radical and as too reactionary at the
32 same time by the same party.” 25 The continuing perception of Shen as a
33 Western Hills partisan was in all likelihood the proximate cause of his
34 murder: Once a member of the Western Hills networks, always a member
35 of the Western Hills networks. The family did not understand why Shen
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 49

1 attended the Western Hills meeting, but the cultural hegemony of name
2 persisted. About this judgment by the party, Shen’s son wrote, “They put
3 the hat of the extreme rightist counterrevolutionary Guomindang on his
4 head, and there was no scientific analysis of the specific situation.” 26
5 I have argued in this chapter that culture and context are crucial per-
6 spectives that must be taken into account by the biographer; put briefly,
7 they inform and alert the researcher to elements that might be substan-
8 tially different or unrecognizable or missing in a different culture and/or
9 in a different context. Not to consider the cultural perspective is to commit
10 the “culture-bound” error of considering one’s own culture and worldview
11 as the norm. Not to consider the contextual perspective prevents us from
12 fully understanding the changes over time in our subject’s life some [49], (23)
13 large, but most incremental and, above all, the importance of contin-
14 gency in the course of a life. Lines: 153 to 1
15 Yet it is important to stress that culture and context are not every-
———
16 thing: They do not necessarily determine the decisions and actions of a
1.22403pt
17 person. The biographer must study his subject as an individual person ———
18 within a particular culture and context, who in the end, under particular Normal Page
19 circumstances or in certain situations, may or may not play a role in PgEnds: TEX
20 helping shape or confine or direct his actions. In many ways, Shen Dingyi
21 seems culturally quite “atypical” of Chinese a brash knight-errant, will-
[49], (23)
22 ing (sometimes, it seems, almost eager) to make enemies, relishing the
23 flaunting of tradition, almost reveling in his individuality. Yet, however
24 atypical he seemed, what I continue to find striking about Shen’s life
25 and death his individuality is how they were shaped by and within
26 the confines of his culture and the contexts in which he acted. We must
27 understand culture and context to know what questions we should ask
28 about him and to interpret appropriately the meaning of his actions and
29 the trajectory of his life.
30
31
32 Notes
33 1. Robert Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on
34 the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93
35 (December 1988): 1185.
 50 schoppa

1 2. John K. Fairbank, “Assignment for the ’70s,” American Historical Review 64

2 (February 1969): 867.
3 3. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton,
4 1996), 366–68.
5 4. Miles F. Shore, “Biography in the 1980s: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,”
6 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (summer 1981): 102.
7 5. Thomas A. Kohut, “Psychohistory as History,” American Historical Review 91
8 (April 1986): 352.
9 6. Robert Darnton, “Looking the Devil in the Face,” New York Review of Books, 10

10 February 2000.
7. “Biographies New Literary Trend in China,” Beijing Review 38 (13–19 No-
11
12
vember 1995): 35. [50], (24)
8. Painter, Sojourner Truth, 113.
13
9. Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in a Bitter Sea (New York: Times Books, 1982), 74–
14 Lines: 163
75, cited in Ambrose Yeo-chi King, “Kuan-hsi and Network Building,” Daedalus
15
120 (spring 1991): 64. ———
16
10. Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Berkeley and Los * 24.5002
17 ———
Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 78–79.
18 Normal Pag
11. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New
19 * PgEnds: Ej
York: Vintage Books, 1962); on adolescence, see Joseph F. Kett, “Adolescence and
20
Youth in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn
21 1971): 283–98. [50], (24)
22 12. Kenneth Keniston, “Psychological Development and Historical Change,”
23 Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 342–43.
24 13. Quotes from Tu Wei-ming, “The Confucian Perception of Adulthood,”
25 Daedalus 105 (spring 1976): 113, 115.
26 14. Quoted in Theodore DeBary et al., eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York:
27 Columbia University Press, 1960), 1:24.
28 15. Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China (Hong Kong and New York: Oxford
29 University Press, 1991), 196.
30 16. “Mingyi zhong? Shishi zhong?” Xingqi pinglun [“Is the name or the deed
31 more important?” Weekly Review], 24 August 1919.
32 17. “Du Dabaide ‘Duijing,’ ” Juewu [“On Reading Liu Dabai’s ‘Facing the Mir-
33 ror,’ ” Awakenings], 20 September 1920.
34 18. Liz Bondi, “Locating Identity Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed.
35 Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993), 97.
 Culture and Context in Biographical Studies 51

1 19. R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road. The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China
2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 253.
3 20. R. Keith Schoppa, “Shen Dingyi and the Western Hills Group: ‘What’s a
4 Man Like You Doing in a Group Like This?’ ” Republican China 16 (November 1990):
35–50.
5
21. Schoppa, Blood Road, 166, 209.
6
22. Shenbao, 3 September 1928.
7
23. “Shen Dingyi beici jingguo” [“The Assassination of Mr. Shen Dingyi”],
8 (n.d.), unpaginated, Zhehiang Provincial Library, Hangzhou.
9 24. Schoppa, Blood Road, 247.
10 25. Schoppa, Blood Road, 250.
11 26. Shen Jianyun, letter to author, 30 June 1993.
12 [51], (25)
13
14 Lines: 196 to 2
Selected Bibliography
15
“Biographies New Literary Trend in China.” Beijing Review 38 (13–19 November ———
16
1995): 35. 5.3002pt P
17 ———
Bondi, Liz. “Locating Identity Politics.” In Place and the Politics of Identity, ed.
18 Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. Normal Page
19 Darnton, Robert. “Looking the Devil in the Face.” New York Review of Books (10 PgEnds: TEX
20 February 2000): 14–16.
21 Fei, Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley and Los [51], (25)
22 Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
23 Keniston, Kenneth. “Psychological Development and Historical Change.” Journal
24 of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 329–45.
25 Kett, Joseph F. “Adolescence and Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal
26 of Interdisciplinary History 2 (autumn 1971): 283–98.
Kohut, Thomas A. “Psychohistory as History.” American Historical Review 91 (April
27
1986): 336–54.
28
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
29
Rosenstone, Robert. “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the
30 Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” American Historical Review 93
31 (December 1988): 1173–85.
32 Schoppa, R. Keith. Blood Road. The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China.
33 Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
34 . “Shen Dingyi and the Western Hills Group: ‘What’s a Man Like You
35 Doing in a Group Like This?’ ” Republican China 16 (November 1990): 35–50.
 52 schoppa

1 Shore, Miles F. “Biography in the 1980s: A Psychoanalytic Perspective.” Journal of

2 Interdisciplinary History 12 (summer 1981): 89–113.
3 Tu, Wei-ming. “The Confucian Perception of Adulthood.” Daedalus 105 (spring
4 1976): 109–24.

5
6
7
8
9
10 [Last Page]
11
12 [52], (26)
13
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15
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16
435.257
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
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[52], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 3. Reshaping Tudor Biography: Anne Boleyn
2
3 and Anne of Cleves
4
5
6 Retha M. Warnicke
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [53], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 16
15 Recapturing the history of Englishwomen is difficult, for the great ma-
———
16 jority of them can only be glimpsed briefly in court records; other official
0.0pt PgVa
17 documents, such as wills; parish registers; or the letters of their male rel- ———
18 atives. It is only from the late sixteenth century that some women’s diaries Normal Page
19 and journals have survived. Despite this limited and inadequate evidence, PgEnds: TEX
20 a great interest emerged among professional historians in the 1970s in
21 researching the lives of medieval as well as modern Englishwomen. It
[53], (1)
22 took another decade before historians turned seriously to studying the
23 lives of early modern Englishwomen, essentially those who lived from the
24 sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In their 1998 study of early modern
25 Englishwomen, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford referred to the
26 neglect of this period as the “Dark Ages of women’s history.” 1
27 The findings of Mendelson and Crawford have contributed signifi-
28 cantly to the history of elite women and even to that of poor women,
29 although there is far less direct evidence for the latter, most of whom
30 were illiterate. All women, regardless of their social rank in this hi-
31 erarchical society, shared common life experiences, partly because the
32 fundamental structure of society politically, socially, economically, and
33 culturally was based on a clear division between the sexes. Women were
34 considered the inferior sex, were deemed more lecherous than men, and
35 were expected to accept subordination to a patriarchal authority: a father,
 54 warnicke

1 a husband, a brother, or another male guardian. Even the rule of Queen

2 Elizabeth I, as A. N. McLaren has recently pointed out, was accepted and
3 justified by her councillors and many members of Parliament only insofar
4 as she could be seen to be receptive to the counsel of her male advisers. 2
5 Because the field of early modern women’s history is relatively new,
6 the need to review and restructure previous studies that make reference to
7 women is great. Sometimes the women’s voices are all but muted; at other
8 times the text is either biased or filled with an inaccurate understanding
9 of their shared social experiences. More specifically, the reshaping of the
10 biographies of Tudor women, which, because of the extant evidence, nec-
11 essarily involves only the elite women of the sixteenth century, falls within
12 this larger historical context. Even for them, archival collections are gen- [54], (2)
13 erally disappointing because they not only contain relatively few personal
14 manuscripts but they also house a variety of public documents that are rid-
Lines: 16 to
15 dled with fabrications. In contrast to the scarcity and unreliability of these
———
16 contemporary records, the number of secondary sources is overwhelm-
0.0pt Pg
17 ing, since for more than four hundred years authors have been publishing ———
18 books about the people of this pivotal century that encompassed both Normal Pag
19 the English Renaissance and the Reformation. After exploring the prob- PgEnds: TE
20 lems in interpreting these original and secondary sources, this essay will
21 address the often-repeated truism that composing Tudor biographies is
[54], (2)
22 problematic because not enough personal evidence has survived to create
23 a portrait of the subject’s character. Ultimately, of course, the processing
24 of this data requires the adoption of the careful research methods that are
25 commonly used for larger historical surveys.
26 Many of the existing life stories of Tudor women serve mainly to au-
27 thenticate manifold layers of negative gender bias. This bias, given the
28 actuality of Tudor gender relationships, is understandably present in the
29 archives, but it is also rife in early modern secondary sources and even in
30 more recent histories. This modern threefold bias exists partly because
31 of the way in which historical studies developed in the late nineteenth
32 century. As the field of English history became professionalized, it re-
33 treated from the amateur’s part-time venture to a male-dominated, scien-
34 tifically oriented academic exercise that almost exclusively valued archival
35 evidence for recovering the past within legal, diplomatic, and economic
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 55

1 narratives. Under the “illusion” that “facts speak for themselves,” 3 these
2 Victorians purposely limited their analyses of the documents’ origins and
3 contents, sometimes quoting “lengthy” and “undigested” 4 excerpts from
4 them. 5 In tune with their culture’s marginalization of women, they not
5 only rarely allowed for a gender bias in the archives and in the early
6 modern secondary sources but also underestimated the importance of
7 women’s lives, 6 often ignoring their contributions entirely.
8 Except in the cases of some major political figures, such as Henry VIII
9 or Elizabeth I, these historians, as well as their early twentieth-century
10 successors, mostly eschewed biographies. They based their careers and
11 built their scholarly reputations upon grander surveys. 7 Valuing the “great
12 scene,” they denigrated as a “trivial” exercise the “study of a single individ- [55], (3)
13 ual and the slight thread of happenings” that formed her or his life. They
14 regarded biography as being at most a minor subfield within historical
Lines: 20 to 2
15 studies; some even characterized it as a “province of literature.” 8 Sir John
———
16 Neale, for example, who earned a knighthood for his only biography,
0.0pt PgVa
17 the 1934 study of Queen Elizabeth I, is best known in academia for his ———
18 numerous parliamentary investigations. 9 Normal Page
19 At least one modern historian has even denied that a biography of PgEnds: TEX
20 a key Tudor figure should or even could be composed. Throughout his
21 career, G. R. Elton, the dean of early Tudor studies, declined to write a full
[55], (3)
22 biography of Thomas Cromwell, the principal secretary and Lord Privy
23 Seal of Henry VIII who was executed in 1540, because so little informa-
24 tion has survived about his childhood and adolescence. 10 These gaps in
25 Cromwell’s life led Elton to believe that an analysis of Cromwell’s career
26 from a close reading of the public documents was as much as we could
27 understand of the man whom he identified as the architect of the English
28 Reformation.
29 As late-twentieth-century Tudor historians have increasingly turned
30 to writing biographies, which, for the reading public, is the most pop-
31 ular nonfiction genre, 11 they have often failed to take advantage of the
32 advances made in women’s history, the history of sexuality, or family
33 history. For example, in 1986, when the established scholar E. W. Ives
34 decided to publish a biography of Anne Boleyn, he chose to frame her life
35 using a version of C. S. Lewis’s outdated theory of courtly love that was
 56 warnicke

1 derived from medieval romances. Almost no other scholar today argues,

2 as Ives has done, that it was an actual, accepted practice at court for older,
3 married women, like Anne Boleyn, to have intimate, potentially sexual
4 relationships with younger men. A reading of women’s history and of
5 up-to-date literary criticism would have alerted him to the inaccuracies of
6 this conceptualization. 12
7 In his positive reassessment in 1959 of the naval career of the duke of
8 Medina Sidonia, commander of the unsuccessful Armada in 1588, Garrett
9 Mattingly said: “Nor does it matter at all to the dead whether they receive
10 justice at the hands of the succeeding generations. But to the living, to
11 do justice, however belatedly, should matter.” 13 Mattingly’s belief that it
12 should “matter” to “do justice” to the “dead” stands as an inspiration [56], (4)
13 for expunging the long-term and deeply ingrained biases from women’s
14 life stories. This reshaping will result in replacing stereotypical images of Lines: 26 t
15 Tudor women as manipulators of men’s passions or as mere victims of
———
16 their society with more rational and complex biographical portraits. Until
0.0pt Pg
17 this task is accomplished, women’s cultural contributions will remain ———
18 hidden; as Robin Winks has said, “Someone ought to be interested in Normal Pag
19 finding out the truth about things, for the truth ought to matter.” 14 Surely, PgEnds: TE
20 searching for the “truth” about half of the population “ought to matter.”
21 Another reason for this reshaping is that, as long as the gender bias
[56], (4)
22 dominates women’s life stories, an analysis of men’s actions must remain
23 incomplete and inadequate. For example, if the events of Anne Boleyn’s
24 life continue to hinge on this centuries-old bias, a valid interpretation of
25 her career at court and her relationship to Henry VIII will be impossible.
26 The present scholarly opinion offers two scenarios for the execution of
27 Anne, his apparently flirtatious second wife, and her accused lovers. Either
28 he sought to facilitate his courting of Jane Seymour, soon to become his
29 third consort, knowing full well that Anne and the men were innocent of
30 the charges, or he actually believed that the alleged adulterous behavior,
31 viewed through the lenses of witchcraft, was the reason for Anne’s January
32 miscarriage and perhaps the deformity of her aborted fetus.
33 A definitive answer to the mystery of her death, as John Foxe character-
34 ized it, 15 cannot be found in the archives; the royal family, as J. H. Plumb
35 has remarked, inhabited an “enclosed, narrow world” and maintained
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 57

1 “zones of silence” about personal matters. 16 That the court’s secrets re-
2 mained impenetrable to outside observation is unfortunate because the
3 difference in the analysis of Henry’s and Anne’s characters that these two
4 theories evoke are enormous and far-reaching. On the one hand, either
5 Anne was a flirtatious woman who refused to take her position as the
6 crowned queen of England seriously, or she failed in her primary task of
7 presenting the king with a healthy male heir. On the other hand, either
8 he knowingly had six innocent people executed to sate his lust for Jane
9 Seymour, or he acted out of ignorance of the natural laws of human
10 reproduction. The more probable explanation, given the cultural attitudes
11 of early modern Christendom, is that he assented to Anne’s death be-
12 cause he believed her immoral activities had led to the miscarriage of her [57], (5)
13 fetus. 17
14 Another reason for reshaping Tudor biography is that until recently Lines: 33 to 3
15 historians of Protestantism, who interpreted the reformed movement as a
———
16 progressive event in accordance with the Whig view of history, dominated
0.0pt PgVa
17 historical writing. John Foxe’s providential tales of the Protestant martyrs ———
18 of Queen Mary’s reign have influenced analyses of the Reformation to Normal Page
19 the current period. 18 A. G. Dickens’s study of English Protestantism in PgEnds: TEX
20 1964, for example, offered his readers the deterministic view that it was
21 an inevitable and intrinsically superior religious movement. In his deeply
[57], (5)
22 felt argument, Dickens remarked: “Even if Henry VIII had remained a
23 model of matrimonial respectability, even if the ministers of Edward VI
24 had been converted by a stray Jesuit, even if Queen Mary had survived
25 for another decade, it still requires a vivid imagination to envisage the
26 English as dutiful children of the Holy See at the end of the century.” 19
27 Using oceanic imagery, he characterized English Catholicism as “an old
28 unseaworthy and ill-commanded galleon.” 20
29 This historical view of Protestantism as an inevitable or providential
30 movement has shaped the depictions of the Tudors. Both Anne Boleyn and
31 Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s second and fourth wives, for example, loom
32 inaccurately in some accounts as facilitators of Protestant doctrine. 21 This
33 approach has also marred studies of Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary and
34 Elizabeth. The Victorian scholar James A. Froude viewed Elizabeth as a
35 great stumbling block to the advancement of reform: “With malicious
 58 warnicke

1 enjoyment,” he reported, she frustrated “good honest men” who differed

2 with her. Although historians have recently been revising or refuting this
3 deterministic view, it still pervades many studies of the period, and Queen
4 Mary is best known by the negative Protestant epithet of “bloody.” 22
5 A final reason for reshaping Tudor biographies, particularly that of
6 Anne of Cleves, is the failure of earlier historians to use German sources
7 that discuss events at the Henrician court. Other evidence, mostly English
8 and French, seems to identify Cromwell as an ally of the Cleves duke-
9 dom. A study of the dispatches of its ad hoc ambassador to England in
10 1540, however, reveals a strained relationship between Cromwell and the
11 agents of Cleves. 23 The German understanding of court politics has failed
12 to receive the attention it merits because the fragmented country was [58], (6)
13 still divided into many principalities, none of which exchanged resident
14 ambassadors with England, as did France and Spain. In addition, the Lines: 37 t
15 German archives concerning English diplomacy, unlike those of France
———
16 and Spain, are less extensive and remain largely untranslated.
0.0pt Pg
17 In the remainder of this essay, I shall first examine three specific kinds ———
18 of evidence that need to be reevaluated in reshaping Tudor biographies: Normal Pag
19 fiction in the archives, 24 deliberate distortions in early modern secondary PgEnds: TE
20 accounts, and the misrepresentation of rituals in modern histories. Then
21 I shall explain some of my biographical methods, with specific references
[58], (6)
22 to Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, including how I chose my subjects
23 and how I conceptualized and structured their life stories.
24 Inevitably, Tudor historians must rely upon inadequate archives for
25 their research projects. Compared with those of most other European
26 countries, England’s archives are plentiful and indexed, but unfortunately,
27 they contain few documents with personal data beyond some information
28 about the individuals’ public careers, their activities in courts of law, and
29 their interaction with other governmental agencies. While it is true that
30 vital statistics are normally available for reigning monarchs, that data
31 is often not readily accessible for other members of the royal family or
32 members of the aristocracy. The major reason for this lack of information
33 is that it was not until 1538 that parishes began to maintain registers of
34 births, deaths, and marriages. Until recently, for example, the birth year
35 of Henry VIII’s sister, Mary, who was born in 1496 and wed Louis XII
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 59

1 of France in 1514, remained a mystery. Finally, it was found entered,

2 almost as an afterthought, in a Book of Hours. 25 Historians speculate
3 that the birth year of Anne Boleyn ranges from 1500 to 1507. The age
4 attributed to Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard, relies in part
5 on the supposition that in 1540, when the king was forty-nine, he surely
6 would not have wed a woman younger than eighteen. This argument has
7 gained credibility despite the fact that in late 1537 and during most of
8 1538, he seriously considered marrying Emperor Charles V’s young niece,
9 Christina, duchess of Milan, who was born in February 1522. 26
10 Some of the archival records are actually misleading about the personal
11 lives of the royal family. Too many of the references to them in resident
12 ambassadors’ correspondence, for example, have gained an unmerited [59], (7)
13 credibility in historical accounts. By the early sixteenth century, England
14 regularly exchanged resident ambassadors with Paris and Madrid; their Lines: 43 to 4
15 task was to report back to their principals all the information they could
———
16 gather, much of it from bribed sources. Usually ignorant of the English
0.0pt PgVa
17 language, foreign ambassadors in London had to communicate with both ———
18 the Tudor family and Crown officials in French and Latin. The diplo- Normal Page
19 mats’ ability to validate the facts they gathered was thus greatly limited, PgEnds: TEX
20 and they seemed not to have been overly concerned about corroborating
21 the many conjectures and rumors that they faithfully recorded. 27 That
[59], (7)
22 their news mostly represented what royal officials wanted them to know
23 should always be considered when relying upon them for evidence. It is
24 somewhat problematic, for example, to believe, as some do, that Thomas
25 Cromwell was actually leaking valid confidential information to Eustace
26 Chapuys, the Spanish/Imperial resident ambassador when, as England’s
27 principal secretary, Cromwell was supporting Henry’s decision to obtain
28 an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, an aunt of Emperor
29 Charles V. The information in Chapuys’s correspondence, sometimes even
30 within the same dispatch, is contradictory and almost always derogatory
31 when referring to members of the royal family, except Catherine and her
32 daughter Mary. Naturally, the news that Chapuys wanted to learn, and did
33 learn from his bribed sources, was that Anne Boleyn was a she-wolf and an
34 Agrippina. If this bewitching woman could be expelled from court, Cha-
35 puys speculated wistfully, then certainly Henry would return to Catherine.
 60 warnicke

1 Later, after the king had wed Anne, the hostile ambassador referred to her
2 as the royal concubine. 28
3 Because Chapuys’s dispatches are so full of news, which, however,
4 is mostly misinformation, historians have relied on them extensively.
5 His records formed the major primary source for Paul Friedmann’s full-
6 length, two-volume biography of Anne Boleyn in 1884. Friedmann, who
7 claimed that the diplomats “spoke the truth or what they believed to be
8 the truth,” accepted whole cloth every scurrilous story about Anne that
9 Chapuys reported to his correspondents. These biased documents, which
10 Friedmann considered “of the greatest value,” still shape how some mod-
11 ern historians approach her life. 29
12 Other important, but equally biased, evidence can be found in judi- [60], (8)
13 cial records. In his important studies of criminal trials in early modern
14 England, Malcolm Gaskill has pointed out that deponents who believed Lines: 45 t
15 that a particular event had occurred chose to explain their beliefs through
———
16 fabricated or invented narratives, which the justices accepted as valid even
0.0pt Pg
17 when the testimony contained supernatural allegations. Gaskill charac- ———
18 terized this as sincere behavior that arose from a different “ordering of Normal Pag
19 reality in the early modern period . . . a lost social context of communi- PgEnds: TE
20 cation” that slowly disappeared after 1700. 30 His findings are reminders
21 of how important it is for researchers to determine which data in the ju-
[60], (8)
22 dicial records are false; the evidence requires careful analysis to discover,
23 whenever possible, where facts end and fiction begins. Two famous cases
24 in which fabricated evidence is an important issue involve the failed royal
25 marriages of Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves. In 1536 the Crown charged
26 Anne Boleyn with enticing five men, each on two separate occasions, to
27 have sexual relations with her at specific places between October 1533
28 and December 1535. The ten dates are problematic for, even with the
29 paucity of extant evidence, it can be proved with certainty that at some of
30 those times she was not at the places specified. For example, her brother,
31 George, Lord Rochford, stood accused of having committed incest with
32 her at Westminster on 5 November 1535, but irrefutable evidence places
33 her with Henry at Windsor on that day. 31
34 The king’s annulment from Anne of Cleves in July 1540 greatly relied on
35 depositions with fictional information. Especially significant to Anne of
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 61

1 Cleves’s life story is the one signed by three of her ladies-in-waiting. The
2 critical evidence Crown attorneys needed to support the king’s case was
3 Anne’s confirmation of his failure to consummate their marriage. Asking
4 Anne, who still mainly spoke German, about her evenings with the king to
5 get legal evidence to end the union that she hoped to preserve would have
6 proved awkward at best. Instead, three of Anne’s ladies signed a depo-
7 sition detailing some conversations with her that supposedly took place
8 but without an interpreter present. Her allegedly innocent responses to
9 their questions about whether or not she was pregnant provided evidence
10 of her complete misunderstanding of how conception occurs. Writers
11 who have validated the details of this deposition have not only ignored
12 the problem of language barriers that would have prevented these con- [61], (9)
13 versations from occurring at least as they were reported but also other
14 references that indicate that Anne was quite well aware of what a woman’s Lines: 51 to 55
15 “bodily integrity” was. In fact, in January 1540, shortly after her marriage
———
16 to Henry, she had attempted on several occasions to converse privately
0.0pt PgVa
17 with Cromwell about her marital problems, but he had refused her re- ———
18 quests. Since knowledge of Henry’s incapacity is largely based on letters Normal Page
19 Cromwell later addressed to him, it would certainly have been interesting PgEnds: TEX
20 to the details of Anne of Cleves’s life if Cromwell had discussed with her
21 those trying times with the king. 32
[61], (9)
22 Forged documents, especially letters, offer another kind of archival
23 fiction. Three letters that Anne Boleyn allegedly wrote, for example, are
24 almost certainly forgeries. It is entirely likely that the seventeenth-century
25 Catholic writer Gregorio Leti either created or mistranslated two of them
26 to prove her guilty, in the Chapuys tradition, of lasciviously destroying
27 Henry’s union with Catherine of Aragon. These two documents reveal
28 her as aggressively seeking to wed Henry and as contemplating avenging
29 the perceived wrongs of his minister, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, who did
30 not favor her marriage. Most scholars now recognize them as forgeries
31 primarily because Leti’s transcripts are the earliest version of them. 33
32 A third alleged letter of Anne’s can be traced somewhat further back in
33 time but only to an Elizabethan transcript. She supposedly sent this mes-
34 sage to Henry after he had ordered her imprisoned in the Tower of London
35 for adultery with five men. The document has inaccurate information and
 62 warnicke

1 alludes to his “fancy” for other women, a charge that she was unlikely to
2 make in a message pleading for justice and clemency. Furthermore, at the
3 Tower the king’s officials monitored her activities closely and prevented
4 her from sending communications abroad. 34
5 Like the Leti documents, this Elizabethan letter is probably a forgery,
6 but it is possible that the intent of its author was not so malicious as Leti’s
7 seems to have been. The Elizabethan transcript could have been a product
8 of educational practice in the premodern world. It was the custom, as
9 can be seen from Lady Grace Mildmay’s youthful experience, for tutors
10 to require their pupils to compose letters to improve their writing skills.
11 It was also one of three usual domestic activities, the other two being
12 needlework and Scripture reading, that their guardians assigned to girls [62], (10)
13 to prevent them from falling into the idleness that bred wicked thoughts
14 and deeds. 35 Some students could have composed letters that they believed Lines: 55 t
15 famous people, such as Anne Boleyn, might have written. B. A. Lees has
———
16 determined, for example, that the letters allegedly written by Eleanor of
0.0pt Pg
17 Aquitaine to Pope Celestine III were instead created in a schoolroom. 36 ———
18 Besides fictitious archival statements, misinformation in numerous Normal Pag
19 secondary early modern accounts has entered the infrastructure of Tudor PgEnds: TE
20 biographies. Thomas More’s portrait of Richard III with a misshapen
21 back and Nicholas Sander’s depiction of Anne Boleyn with six fingers and
[62], (10)
22 a wen have come to frame their lives. Except in the case of Richard III,
23 these accounts have usually implanted a more negative attitude toward
24 female than male subjects. Sander, a Catholic priest who wrote several
25 decades after Anne’s death, almost certainly reversed the neo-Platonic
26 ideal in drawing up his now famous description of her, since no extant
27 contemporary record describes her with irregular features. To disparage
28 her and her daughter, Elizabeth, the Protestant queen of England, he
29 created Anne’s fictitious body, which outwardly represented the evil that
30 he believed permeated the core of her inner self. In this example, his
31 gender bias reinforced and intersected with a religious bias that resulted
32 in the creation of a monstrous, witchlike woman. 37
33 Another example of a religious bias informing a gender bias can
34 be found in the work of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, the late
35 seventeenth-century Protestant historian of the English Reformation.
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 63

1 Burnet had valid reasons for favoring the marriage of Henry and Anne of
2 Cleves in 1540 since her brother-in-law, Frederick, duke elector of Saxony,
3 was a principal leader of the German Lutherans. The king’s successful
4 union with Anne could have greatly solidified English contacts with Ger-
5 man reformers and, from Burnet’s point of view, could have led to the
6 Protestant conversion of England at an earlier date than that at which
7 it actually occurred. In his disappointment at the marriage’s failure, the
8 bishop chose to ridicule and demean Anne’s looks. Having noted that,
9 upon viewing her for the first time, Henry questioned whether she was
10 as “fair” as others had claimed, Burnet labeled her a “Flander’s Mare”
11 and charged the great artist, Hans Holbein the Younger, with having
12 painted a flattering portrait of her to deceive the king. No contemporary [63], (11)
13 evidence supports these assertions. Several eyewitnesses referred to her
14 as beautiful, and Nicholas Wotton, an English ambassador who in 1539 Lines: 62 to 6
15 viewed both Holbein’s portrait and Anne’s visage, judged that it was a
———
16 realistic image of her. Just as important to the refutation of the bishop’s
0.0pt PgVa
17 accusations, which were not written until well more than one hundred ———
18 years after the marriage ended, is the career of Holbein, whom Henry Normal Page
19 continued to employ as an artist until Holbein died from natural causes. 38 PgEnds: TEX
20 Modern biographers of Tudor women have, with few exceptions, in-
21 discriminately blended gender bias in the archives with gender bias in the
[63], (11)
22 secondary sources. Most writers quote Burnet’s statements about Anne
23 of Cleves verbatim, as though he were one of her contemporaries. On
24 the other hand, since Sander’s description of Anne Boleyn’s body was
25 truly excessive, scholars have often reduced her sixth finger to an extra
26 fingernail and her wen to a mole. 39 In these works, the woman’s looks,
27 motivations, goals, and significance lie buried under centuries of fictions.
28 Freeing Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, among others, from this bias in
29 which they are judged largely by their appearance is a serious and ongoing
30 enterprise, and much work has yet to be done.
31 In addition to authenticating the fiction in the archives and validating
32 the erroneous claims of early modern accounts, some biographers, in pro-
33 cessing evidence from Tudor rites of passage, have committed the error
34 that Robin Winks warned against when he said, “It is profoundly unhistor-
35 ical to read back our habits and behavior into an age many hundred years
 64 warnicke

1 past.” 40 Part of the confusion arises from the assumption that Christian
2 practices have remained constant over time, but just the opposite is true.
3 For example, today’s parents, as well as godparents, when it is relevant,
4 attend the christenings of infants, and widowed spouses routinely par-
5 ticipate in public funeral services. Early modern protocol was different,
6 especially with reference to the royal family.
7 First, as to christenings, since new mothers remained secluded in their
8 lying-in chambers until up to forty days after childbirth, they were un-
9 able to attend the first rites of their infants, who were usually christened
10 when they were a few days old. Moreover, since the children, especially
11 in royal christenings, held the premier place in the ritual, monarchs, who
12 would necessarily upstage them by their presence, had to be absent. Thus, [64], (12)
13 although historians have claimed that Henry was disappointed with Eliza-
14 beth’s sex, his dismay was not the reason he did not attend her christening; Lines: 67 t
15 custom required his absence. To prove this assertion it is necessary to note
———
16 only that in 1537 he did not participate in the christening of his son, the
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17 future Edward VI. 41 ———
18 Although the next example of the misinterpretation of a religious cer- Normal Pag
19 emony does not apply to either Anne of Cleves or Anne Boleyn, it is PgEnds: TE
20 important in further documenting recent modern confusion about early
21 modern practices. Monarchs did not usually attend the last rites of passage
[64], (12)
22 for individuals of lesser social rank. Unaware of this custom, historians
23 have speculated erroneously as to why James I was absent in 1619 from the
24 funeral of his somewhat estranged wife, Anne of Denmark. He may well
25 have been ill, and he seems to have harbored a “horror of death,” as they
26 suggest, but even had he been perfectly healthy and with no particular
27 revulsion for mournful scenes, he still would not have been present at
28 his wife’s public services. Since heralds were in charge of conducting the
29 death rituals of the reigning monarch, if custom had dictated James’s
30 attendance at the last public rites of his wife, the mother of his children
31 and a representative of Denmark in England, he would have complied
32 unless, of course, he had actually lain bedridden. Otherwise, his breach
33 of protocol would have greatly offended members of the Danish royal
34 family. 42
35 To support this conclusion, it is possible to point to the absence of
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 65

1 two Tudor monarchs from their wives’ burial services, for which they have
2 received no negative criticism in modern writings. Elizabeth of York’s hus-
3 band, Henry VII, who has often been characterized as financially shrewd,
4 funded a lavish funeral for her. Despite this great expenditure, he was
5 not present at her public rites in 1503 because, according to Michael
6 van Cleave Alexander, who quoted a Tudor writer, the inconsolable king
7 “Privily departed to a solitary place, and would no man should resort unto
8 him.” 43 In 1537 his namesake son, Henry VIII, deeply upset about the
9 death of his wife Jane Seymour in childbirth, ordered Thomas Howard,
10 third duke of Norfolk, and Sir William Paulet to arrange her burial, and
11 then retired to a solitary place. 44
12 Another death custom perplexing to modern historians is the con- [65], (13)
13 demned persons’ expressions of their feelings in their final speeches.
14 Many, such as the alleged lovers of Anne Boleyn, who were probably Lines: 73 to 7
15 innocent of the specific crimes for which they were to suffer execution,
———
16 nevertheless admitted their guilt, although mostly in a general sense. 45
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17 They confessed for at least three reasons: the wish to protect their families ———
18 from further punishment, the desire to obtain more merciful or quicker Normal Page
19 deaths, and the hope to facilitate their passage through purgatory. Since PgEnds: TEX
20 early modern Christians identified themselves as the heirs of Adam, whom
21 God had expelled from paradise, they believed that they had inherited his
[65], (13)
22 sinful nature and were deserving of death. Even as they admitted their
23 general guilt as human beings, they begged the king’s forgiveness and
24 remarked kindly about his character. This was the expected procedure.
25 Whether the condemned actually felt that much remorse is another mat-
26 ter, but in the ars moriendi tradition, they were preparing for death in the
27 hope of eternal bliss: One’s final speech was not a time to settle earthly
28 scores. 46
29 Two other rituals concerning Henry VIII’s family are also interesting.
30 Henry absented himself, as expected, from the public celebration of Anne
31 Boleyn’s coronation in 1533 because of hierarchical considerations, but
32 he actually performed a customary greeting ceremony for Anne of Cleves
33 in 1540. While his expected absence from Anne Boleyn’s coronation has
34 caused little comment, since he was clearly still hoping his pregnant
35 wife would be delivered of a live male child, 47 his incognito greeting of
 66 warnicke

1 Anne of Cleves has elicited many erroneous interpretations. To perform

2 the ritual he and some members of his privy chamber had to travel in
3 disguise from Greenwich to Rochester where Anne had only recently
4 arrived on her journey from Cleves to Greenwich. When he first saw her at
5 Rochester, he was disappointed with her appearance and later confessed
6 to his attendants that she was not as “fair” as he had expected. 48
7 Many writers subsequently interpreted this meeting as idiosyncratic,
8 as something the old, lustful, and somewhat out-of-control king decided
9 to do in his impatience to view his new, young wife. This is an entirely
10 problematic analysis, for it was, in fact, a form of the greeting ritual that
11 monarchs performed all across Christendom when they married foreign-
12 born wives whom they had never met. Derived from the chivalric tradition [66], (14)
13 of love at first sight, the ritual dictated the unannounced appearance of
14 the groom in disguise, thus offering the bride an opportunity to fall in Lines: 77 t
15 love with him as a man rather than as a powerful and rich king. Henry
———
16 was not the first monarch to meet his new wife in disguise and he was not
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17 to be the last. In 1660 Louis XIV was probably the final performer of the ———
18 ritual, for by the late seventeenth century much of the remaining chivalric Normal Pag
19 culture of early modern society was disappearing, as it had increasingly PgEnds: TE
20 become characterized as dated and old-fashioned. 49
21 Before turning to the methodology used in my studies of Anne Boleyn
[66], (14)
22 and Anne of Cleves, I shall explain why they became the objects of my
23 research. Although G. R. Elton was best known for favoring political
24 history and for opposing biographical studies, cultural history, and social
25 history, including family and gender studies, he actually recommended,
26 when I first met him in the summer of 1984, that I compose a biography
27 of Anne Boleyn. As he had recently read my book, Women of the English
28 Renaissance and Reformation, published by Greenwood Press in 1983, he
29 was aware, when he invited me to research the 1530s the important
30 Reformation decade he had dominated for more than thirty years that
31 my point of view differed from his. My analysis would necessarily integrate
32 the political history of the court with other types of history. Embarking
33 upon a study of Anne Boleyn was not on my agenda in 1984; I had planned
34 to do a collaborative study of Jacobean funeral sermons for women with
35 my colleague, Professor Bettie Anne Doebler of the English department
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 67

1 at Arizona State University. Elton’s suggestion, which I nevertheless ac-

2 cepted, changed the shape and scope of my future research. It ultimately
3 became clear to me that by the time of our conversation in 1984, Elton had
4 concluded that the interpretations of politics at Henry VIII’s court were
5 sterile and unhistorical, for he readily accepted my thesis about sexual
6 heresy, which linked the charges against Anne Boleyn with witchcraft,
7 and approved my suggestion that the mysterious events surrounding her
8 death could best be explained by her probable miscarriage of a deformed
9 fetus. While undertaking and completing the research on Anne Boleyn, I
10 became interested in the erroneous use of rituals as evidence for the private
11 beliefs of the Tudors. It was logical that when I finished her biography I
12 should turn to Henry’s greeting of Anne of Cleves at Rochester and then [67], (15)
13 to a larger study of her life. 50
14 Freeing the life stories of these two royal consorts from centuries-old Lines: 81 to 85
15 tiers of bias and misinformation formed a significant part of my research.
———
16 As I was gathering, questioning, and validating the evidence, I began
0.0pt PgVa
17 to consider how I should conceptualize their lives. Since, as Ira Bruce ———
18 Nadel has maintained, “how the biographer expresses the life becomes Normal Page
19 the real subject of the biography,” this decision is an extremely important PgEnds: TEX
20 but often difficult one for authors to reach. 51 I searched for a framework
21 that would at once highlight the women’s significance and provide a
[67], (15)
22 structure for describing the facts of their lives. One major obstacle to
23 an understanding of their characters was that neither Anne Boleyn nor
24 Anne of Cleves left much information, at least that is extant, that might
25 be called introspective. They kept no diaries or journals and only a few of
26 their letters have survived. Unlike Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves did leave
27 a will. I worried whether the evidence would be sufficient to enable me
28 to conceptualize their lives and provide my audience with at least a hint
29 of their personalities. Who were these women, I wondered, whom Henry
30 had married and then so abruptly rejected?
31 I found the answer to this question in examining the evidence con-
32 cerning their participation in the rites of passage, especially marriage and
33 childbirth, and in their kinship and family relationships. To other scholars
34 this choice might have appeared self-evident, since my subjects were born
35 into a patriarchal society that socialized them to marry and have children.
 68 warnicke

1 From their early years, while they did not anticipate marrying a monarch,
2 they expected to wed the heir of a noble house. The problem with this
3 conceptualization was that it seemed to reduce their lives to their sexual
4 and biological functions. Kathleen Berry later articulated this dilemma
5 in an essay on the life of Susan B. Anthony when she said, “To define
6 women by their sexuality and reproductivity is to remove them from the
7 progression of history.” 52 It is also true, however, as Carolyn Heilbrun
8 has affirmed, that until the eighteenth century the two topics on which
9 women could speak with some authority were those concerning family
10 and religion. 53
11 Earlier biographers viewed Anne Boleyn as a religious reformer, as a
12 home wrecker, as a witch, and even as a courtly lover, but the bulk of the [68], (16)
13 extant evidence did not seem to support those roles. As the title of my
14 book indicates, I chose to place her life within the larger framework of Lines: 85 t
15 her family ties and patronage relationships at court. So much information
———
16 in the study processed the evidence of her networking with relatives and
0.0pt Pg
17 clients that I felt it necessary to deny in the preface that my work could ———
18 be defined as a traditional biography. 54 In so doing, I accepted, without Normal Pag
19 knowing it, the spirit of Richard Wortman’s earlier statement in 1985 PgEnds: TE
20 about Russian intelligentsia: “The experiences of the individual become
21 historically meaningful to me only when they are set in the context of
[68], (16)
22 the experiences of others with similar concerns.” He went on to explain,
23 “I have approached biography as a way to comprehend history, to un-
24 derstand movements and currents of thought by examining the lives of
25 individuals who contributed to them.” 55 In other words, interpreting Anne
26 Boleyn’s life within her family and kinship network not only leads us to a
27 fuller understanding of her as a person but also to a fuller understanding
28 of the workings of politics at the Tudor court.
29 Far from viewing Anne Boleyn as a flirtatious, manipulative woman
30 who single-handedly wrecked the king’s first marriage, I saw her as an
31 important player in family and kinship strategies. That the king eagerly
32 courted her is irrefutable, for he expressed his love in seventeen extant
33 letters to her. It seemed to me that once they were wed, she operated on the
34 assumption that the political future of herself and her ambitious relatives
35 depended on her ability to bear a healthy male heir. In that sense, her
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 69

1 goal was to fulfill the traditional biological expectations of the crowned

2 queen of England. No extant contemporary record dated before the events
3 culminating in her death in May 1536 indicated that as queen she had
4 acted promiscuously or flirtatiously. Not a hint or rumor of this behavior
5 appeared in Chapuys’s dispatches. Even the letters her jailer at the Tower
6 wrote detailing her confessions indicated that she admitted only to having
7 rejected the unsolicited flattery of two of the alleged lovers. That denial
8 has ironically surfaced as the prime evidence for claiming she was too
9 flirtatious for her own good, for her own self-preservation. 56
10 My biography of Anne of Cleves, in contrast with other modern ac-
11 counts, focuses not so much on her ties to her relatives, although they
12 played an important role in the arranging of her marriage, as on the [69], (17)
13 marital process itself. In an important sense, her life is a microcosm of
14 the history of early modern brides who were expected to travel to foreign, Lines: 89 to 9
15 sometimes hostile, countries, where they often did not understand the
———
16 language of their new husbands, as Anne of Cleves did not, and where
0.0pt PgVa
17 they were expected to become accustomed to unfamiliar daily practices ———
18 and mores, from dining habits to religious observances. Because the life Normal Page
19 of Anne of Cleves, like that of Anne Boleyn, takes into account the larger PgEnds: TEX
20 picture, I indicated in the introduction that my study of her was not a
21 traditional biography either. 57
[69], (17)
22 When the king ordered her removal from court as the first step in
23 achieving an annulment of their union, she compared her plight to that of
24 the rusticated Catherine of Aragon, his first wife, and during the remain-
25 ing seven years of the king’s life, she yearned to return to her position
26 as his consort. She could realistically hope for a reconciliation because
27 Church tradition blamed another person’s witchcraft, rather than Anne’s
28 appearance, for the king’s incapacity, which is defined as relative impo-
29 tency when it is directed toward one specific woman, as his was toward
30 her. Far from living contentedly as his rich sister, she suffered from deep
31 humiliation and fell into great despair. A letter she wrote to her brother
32 William, duke of Cleves, during the reign of her stepson, Edward VI,
33 makes it clear that she was homesick. In the letter she complained that
34 England was not her country and that she was a stranger there. Financial
35 difficulties plagued her last years partly because of inflation and partly
 70 warnicke

1 because of the decisions of Edward’s privy council to confiscate some of

2 her property. 58
3 Biographers have traditionally relied on three basic types of struc-
4 tures for presenting the events of a person’s life: chronological; topical;
5 and “mixed media,” 59 Milton Lomask’s term for a method that involves
6 adopting a topical approach that moves forward by starts and stops in
7 an overall chronological fashion. Because the entries I have submitted to
8 encyclopedias, including several for the New Dictionary of Biography, have
9 necessarily been limited in length and have usually had to fit predeter-
10 mined editorial designs, I sometimes adopted a chronological structure
11 in writing them. Yet I became concerned that using this method for a more
12 detailed, book-length study could confuse readers. Basically, I support Lo- [70], (18)
13 mask’s conclusion that the “mixed media” approach seems to work best
14 for these biographies because it provides space for contextual analysis Lines: 93 t
15 but also shows a respect for the reading audience who expect a narrative
———
16 that ultimately moves forward through time. Since I planned to center the
0.0pt Pg
17 lives of Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves within a larger family and marital ———
18 context, the “mixed media” method seemed to offer me a valid and reliable Normal Pag
19 means of presenting my material. It is an approach that is more clearly PgEnds: TE
20 evident in the Anne of Cleves work than in the Anne Boleyn study; both,
21 however, refer to all the biographical information that is known about
[70], (18)
22 them. I have never attempted the third method, that of recounting the
23 subject’s life using only topical chapters. 60
24 As I explained in the discussion of why I embarked on a study of
25 Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, my point of view differs from that of
26 their earlier biographers. 61 My method was to push aside the historical
27 fictions on which their stories have been constructed to arrive, as much
28 as possible, at the “truth” to which Robin Winks referred. Then I sought
29 to provide the “justice” about which Garrett Mattingly wrote. My ultimate
30 objective was to restore the women, to the extent it was possible given the
31 nature of the evidence, to the place that they actually held in the political
32 hierarchy of the court and their society. 62
33 The decision to connect their lives to their family networks and their
34 culture’s marrying practices has played a large role in preventing one
35 of the biographer’s frequent pitfalls, that of having identified so closely
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 71

1 with the subject as to lose objectivity. 63 While family considerations are

2 important to modern professional women, our education, energy, drive,
3 and intellectual and spiritual aspirations include so much more. Many of
4 us have juggled careers and family responsibilities. Thus, while I learned
5 to respect my two subjects, I can unhesitatingly state that I did not and do
6 not now identify with them, nor do I yearn for a return of their society. 64
7 Although I do also respect Tudor culture, as a modern woman I feel some-
8 what estranged from the prescientific world in which churchmen, who
9 reigned as experts on the laws of human reproduction, blamed witches
10 for the birth of deformed infants and for the infliction of some forms of
11 male impotency.
12 It is perhaps this very estrangement or aloofness from their culture, [71], (19)
13 however, that has led me to feel great sympathy for them as women.
14 Ironically, at the beginning of my studies of them, I did not expect this Lines: 99 to 10
15 sympathy to develop, at least to the degree that it has. The reason for
———
16 this skepticism is simply that, like earlier writers, I had absorbed the lore
0.0pt PgVa
17 that Anne Boleyn was a somewhat disfigured but attractive woman who ———
18 suffered death because of her flirtatious ways and that Anne of Cleves was a Normal Page
19 somewhat plain woman who welcomed forced retirement from a powerful PgEnds: TEX
20 and splendid Renaissance court. Instead, I learned from my research
21 that these views had more in common with their earlier biographers’
[71], (19)
22 fantasies than with the facts of their existence. Both women had failed
23 as Henry’s consorts because of premodern ignorance concerning human
24 sexuality and marriage. Their real histories were poignant and tragic, and
25 the “truth” of them needs to replace the ubiquitous fictional accounts. In
26 fact, this reshaping makes for a more interesting, believable story than
27 the received tradition.
28 The precarious nature of Tudor history in academia, especially in the
29 United States, also compels us to seek to provide “justice” in our studies of
30 women. For the most part, established scholars who are teaching doctoral
31 students about Tudor history are not in the United States but in England;
32 the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is one of only a handful of major
33 American universities with a Tudor specialist. The decrease in faculty
34 teaching early modern English, not just Tudor, history here is a problem
35 that Robert Tittler addressed in a recent article in Albion. In it, he also
 72 warnicke

1 reported on the “highly specialized” and distinctive subfields of history

2 in England where, for example, social history (including women’s and
3 gender) forms a distinct subfield from that of political history or religious
4 history. Faculty in subfields attend their own conferences. According to
5 Tittler, “at least figuratively speaking, there is certainly a tendency for
6 members of each group to adjourn” to different “pubs” when their ses-
7 sions are over. The university history departments in England reflect this
8 specialization, which, as Tittler claimed, does not “preclude integration”
9 but does not “facilitate” it either. 65
10 What I am calling for, and what I hope others will undertake, is the
11 integration of social and cultural history with political history, especially
12 in Tudor biographies. Without making reference to advances in women’s [72], (20)
13 history, the history of sexuality, or family history, some biographers have
14 ironically still attempted to write about individuals who lived in a society in Lines: 103
15 which a personal monarch and his quest to sire male heirs were at the core
———
16 of domestic and even international events. David Potter has even recently
0.0pt Pg
17 pointed out that in sixteenth-century Europe, “The game of marriage ———
18 negotiations and alliances seemed to make the international system a vast Normal Pag
19 family concern.” 66 PgEnds: TE
20 To persuade others of the urgency of this integration is a necessary
21 but difficult task, given the fractionalized history departments in England
[72], (20)
22 and the decayed state of Tudor academic history here. 67 Another impor-
23 tant hindrance to change is the staying power of traditional views. After
24 the more than four hundred years that have elapsed since these legends
25 about Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves began to take root, the accepted
26 interpretations of their lives so depend upon the fictions that some aca-
27 demic historians resist being deprived of them. Lomask pointed out in
28 1986, for example, that scholars have long known that Patrick Henry did
29 not say, “If this be treason, make the most of it.” Although the patriot’s
30 first biographer actually invented this speech, it has remained a part of the
31 received wisdom of American history, 68 just as Anne Boleyn as a disfigured
32 but flirtatious woman and Anne of Cleves as the unattractive but contented
33 ex-wife have remained a part of the received wisdom of English history.
34 Reshaping the lives of Tudor women, despite the troublesome nature
35 of the evidence about them in both primary and secondary works and the
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 73

1 existence of other obstacles, is an important part of the ongoing process

2 of recovering the history of Englishwomen through a sensitive evalua-
3 tion of the issues that most directly affected them. A knowledge of new
4 research on the history of sexuality and family history will, furthermore,
5 enable scholars who wish to undertake a study of Englishwomen’s lives to
6 eliminate the negative gendered attitudes that still prevail in some modern
7 studies. A greater sensitivity to the limitations that past hierarchical and
8 patriarchal societies imposed upon Englishwomen will further enhance
9 our appreciation of their experiences. Ultimately, if we are to achieve a
10 fuller understanding of the history of society as a whole, of both men and
11 women, this is a necessary endeavor, a challenge that we must and should
12 accept. [73], (21)
13
14 Lines: 109 to 1
15 Notes ———
16
1. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550– 7.02414pt
17 ———
1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.
18 2. A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Common- Normal Page
19 wealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). PgEnds: TEX
20 3. Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper
21 & Row, 1968), 229. [73], (21)
22 4. Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (London: Macmillan,
23 1984), 6.
24 5. Christopher Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh: John
25 Donald, 1990), 88–91.
26 6. Anne-Katherine Broch-Due, “Reflections on Subjectivism in Biographical
Interviewing: A Process of Change,” in All Sides of the Subject: Women and Biography,
27
ed. Teresa Iles (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 93.
28
7. For a brief overview of biographical writing, see Catherine N. Parke, Biogra-
29
phy: Writing Lives (New York: Twayne, 1996), 1–34; and, for example, A. F. Pollard,
30 Henry VIII (New York: Longman, Greens, 1902).
31 8. Paul M. Kendall, The Art of Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 3–4.
32 9. Sir John Neale, Queen Elizabeth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934).
33 10. He said this so often in public settings that it does not need a citation.
34 11. Samuel H. Baron, “Psychological Dimensions of the Biographical Process,”
35 in Introspection in Biography: The Biographer’s Quest for Self-Awareness, ed. Baron and
 74 warnicke

1 Carl Pletsch (Hillsdale nj: Analytic Press, 1985), 1; Parke, Biography, xv, reports that
2 in public libraries biography stacks are located next to fiction, a placement that
3 signals the libraries’ recognition of their popularity; Stephen B. Oates, ed., “In-
4 troduction,” in Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on Their Art (Amherst:
5 University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), ix, reports that biographical titles have
6 doubled since the 1960s.
7 12. Retha M. Warnicke, “The Conventions of Courtly Love and Anne Boleyn,”
8 in State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England, ed. Charles Carlton (Thrupp,
9 England: Sutton, 1998), 103–18.

10 13. Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 375.
14. Winks, Historian as Detective, xiv.
11
12
15. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (1837–41; [74], (22)
reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1965), 5:136.
13
16. J. H. Plumb, “The Private Grief of Public Figures,” Biography and Truth, ed.
14 Lines: 133
Stanley Wientraub (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967), 12–14.
15
17. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry ———
16
VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191–233. For a survey of * 24.5002
17 ———
the historical caricatures of Henry VIII, see Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Truth in
18 Normal Pag
Masquerade: A Study of Fashions in Fact (New York: Roy Publisher, 1951), 100–118.
19 * PgEnds: Ej
18. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, vol. 8.
20
19. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964),
21 108. [74], (22)
22 20. Dickens, English Reformation, 108.
23 21. Both resided at schismatic courts and were probably antipapal, but no
24 evidence exists that they otherwise doubted the validity of the seven sacraments of
25 the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 151–62; Warnicke, The
26 Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge
27 University Press, 2000), 63–93.
28 22. James A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of
29 Elizabeth (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1870), 8:67, 74, 134–147.
30 23. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 216.
31 24. See also Natalie Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Other Tellers in
32 Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
33 25. W. C. Richardson, Mary Tudor: The White Queen (London: Peter Owen,
34 1970), 3.
35 26. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 8–10; Lacey B. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 75

1 Times of Catherine Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 209–11. For Christina, see
2 Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 40–43.
3 27. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 12–35.
4 28. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 1–3, 104, 114.
5 29. Paul Friedmann, Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History, 1527–1536 (Lon-
6 don: Macmillan, 1884), 1:viii. For a modern history that relies on Chapuys, see E.
7 W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
8 30. Malcolm Gaskill, “Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Mod-
9 ern England,” Social History 22 (1998): 1–30. See also Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities

10 in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

31. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 215.
11
12
32. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 155–86. [75], (23)
33. Retha M. Warnicke, “Three Forged Letters of Anne Boleyn: Their Implica-
13
tions for Reformation Politics and Women’s Studies,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain
14 Lines: 165 to 2
Medieval and Renaissance Association 11(1990): 33–48.
15
34. Warnicke, “Three Forged Letters of Anne Boleyn,” 33–48; Froude, History ———
16
of England, 2:463–66. * 24.50021p
17 ———
35. Retha M. Warnicke, “Lady Mildmay’s Journal: A Study in Autobiogra-
18 Normal Page
phy and Meditation in Reformation England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989):
19 * PgEnds: Eject
55–68.
20
36. B. A. Lees, “The Letters of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Celestine III,” English
21 Historical Review 21 (1906): 78–93. [75], (23)
22 37. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 243–47; Warnicke, “More’s Richard III and the
23 Mystery Plays,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 761–78; Warnicke, “The Physical Defor-
24 mities of Anne Boleyn and Richard III: Myth and Reality,” Paragon, n.s., 4 (1986):
25 135–53; Warnicke, “Conflicting Rhetoric about Tudor Women: The Example of
26 Queen Anne Boleyn,” The Rhetoric of Politics and Renaissance Women, ed. Carole Levin
27 and Patricia Sullivan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 39–56.
28 38. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 86–93, 256, 265.
29 39. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 259; Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (New
30 York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 396; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 4–52; Warnicke, Anne Boleyn,
31 243–47.
32 40. Winks, Historian as Detective, 229.
33 41. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 169–70.
34 42. For example, David Willson, King James VI and I (New York: Oxford Univer-
35 sity Press, 1967), 403–4.
 76 warnicke

1 43. Michael van Cleave Alexander, The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VII and
2 His Reign (Totowa nj: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 185.
3 44. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S.
4 Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office,
5 1862–1932), 8:ii, #1060.
45. Froude, History of England, 2:482–87.
6
46. K. Jankofsky, “Public Executions in England in the Late Middle Ages: The
7
Indignity and Dignity of Death,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 10 (1979): 43–4;
8
Lacey B. Smith, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,”
9
Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 482; Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 232, 303, n. 57.
10
47. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, 124–30.
11 48. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 127–35; idem, “Henry VIII’s greeting of Anne of
12 [76], (24)
Cleves, and Early Modern Protocol,” Albion 28 (1996): 565–86.
13 49. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 135–36.
14 50. For a discussions of how biographers choose their topics see Baron, “In- Lines: 202
15 troduction,” Introspection in Biography, 3.
———
16 51. Craig Kridel, ed., “Introduction,” Writing Educational Biography: Explorations
11.60022
17 in Qualitative Research (New York: Garland, 1998), 94; Nadel, Biography, 154. ———
18 52. Kathleen Berry, “Toward a Theory of Women’s Biography: From the Life of Normal Pag
19 Susan B. Anthony,” Women and Biography, 28. PgEnds: TE
20 53. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton,
21 1988), 25.
54. Warnicke, Anne Boleyn, ix.
[76], (24)
22
55. Richard Wortman, “Biography and the Russian Intelligentsia,” in Introspec-
23
tion in Biography, 157.
24
56. Ives, Anne Boleyn, 374.
25
57. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 11.
26
58. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves, 184–86, 229–57. Actually, one of the official
27
grounds for divorce was that she was already married to the heir of Lorraine.
28 Documentation that Henry VIII did not possess proves that she was not. She and
29 her Cleves contemporaries were all in agreement on this point.
30 59. Milton Lomask, The Biographer’s Craft (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 41.
31 60. Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (London:
32 MacMillan, 1999), 4–6, has not entirely successfully used this method. She tried to
33 compensate for the difficulty with her presentation by giving her readers a short
34 synopsis of his life in the Introduction.
35 61. Nadel, Biography, 7, 103, discusses a point of view.
 Reshaping Tudor Biography 77

1 62. Winks, Historian as Detective, xiv; Mattingly, Armada, 375.

2 63. John A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
3 1957), 28.
4 64. Liz Stanley, “Process in Feminist Biography and Feminist Epistemology,”
Women and Biography, 109.
5
65. Robert Tittler, “Early Modern British History, Here and There, Now and
6
Again,” Albion 32 (1999): 190–206.
7
66. David Potter, A History of France. 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation State
8 (London: Macmillan, 1995), 257.
9 67. John Guy, editor of the Early Modern Series at Cambridge University Press
10 and professor at St. Andrew’s, has been extremely helpful and supportive of this
11 integrative process.
12 68. Lomask, Biographer’s Craft, 35.
[77], (25)
13
14 Lines: 244 to
15
Selected Bibliography ———
16
Baron, Samuel H., and Carol Pletsch, eds. Introspection in Biography: The Biographer’s 5.3002pt P
17 ———
Quest for Self-Awareness. Hillsdale nj: Analytic Press, 1985.
18 Davis, Natalie Z. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Other Tellers in Sixteenth-Century Normal Page
19 France. Stanford ca: Stanford University Press, 1987. PgEnds: TEX
20 Friedmann, Paul. Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History, 1527–1536. 2 vols. Lon-
21 don: Macmillan, 1884. [77], (25)
22 Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
23 Iles, Teresa, ed. All Sides of the Subject: Women and Biography. New York: Teachers
24 College Press, 1992.
25 Ives, E. W. Anne Boleyn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
26 Kridel, Craig, ed. Writing Educational Biography: Explorations in Qualitative Research.
New York: Garland, 1998.
27
McClaren, A. N. Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth,
28
1558–1585. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
29
Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England: 1550–
30 1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
31 Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form. London: Macmillan, 1984.
32 Neale, John. Queen Elizabeth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
33 Oates, Stephen B. ed. Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on Their Art.
34 Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
35 Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Twayne, 1996.
 78 warnicke

1 Pollard, A. F. Henry VIII. New York: Longman, Greens, 1902.

2 Richardson, W. C. Mary Tudor: The White Queen. London: Peter Owen, 1970.
3 Van Cleve Alexander, Michael. The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VIII and His
4 Reign. Totowa nj: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980.
Warnicke, Retha M. The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Tudor England.
5
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
6
. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII.
7
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
8 . “Conflicting Rhetoric about Tudor Women: The Example of Queen Anne
9 Boleyn.” The Rhetoric of Politics and Renaissance Women, 39–56. Edited by Carole
10 Levin and Patricia Sullivan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. [Last Page]
11 . “The Conventions of Courtly Love and Anne Boleyn.” State, Sovereigns
12 and Society in Early Modern England, 103–18. Edited by Charles Carlton. Thrupp,
[78], (26)
13 England: Sutton, 1998.
14 . “The Physical Deformities of Anne Boleyn and Richard III: Myth and
Lines: 288
15 Reality.” Paragon n.s., 5 (1986): 135–53.
. “Three Forged Letters of Anne Boleyn: Their Implications for Reforma- ———
16
tion Politics and Women’s Studies.” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and 203.1111
17 ———
Renaissance Association 11 (1990): 33–48.
18 Normal Pag
Weintraub, Stanley, ed. Biography and Truth. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.
19 PgEnds: TE
Winks, Robin. The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence. New York: Harper & Row,
20 1968.
21
[78], (26)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 4. Conception, Conversation, and Comparison:
2
3 My Experiences as a Biographer
4
5
6 John Milton Cooper Jr.
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [79], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 18
15 My experience as a biographer has taught me one big lesson: There’s no
———
16 substitute for experience. I think that biography is like sports or music 14.0pt PgV
17 or drama. You can enjoy it a lot from a seat in the stadium or the theater. ———
18 You can also learn a lot about it by reading and hearing the reflections of Normal Page
19 biographers. But if you really want to be a biographer, you should skip this * PgEnds: Eject
20 chapter and get back to your research and writing. If you choose to stick
21 around, I shall try to compensate you for being away from your real work [79], (1)
22
by passing along some other lessons that I have learned in my limited
23
experiences at the biographer’s trade.
24
Before I get to those lessons, let me give you a quick account of
25
what I have done in the way of biography. My experience really started
26
in college. Princeton required a senior thesis, and I had to come up
27
with a topic. I chose the Illinois senator and political associate of Abra-
28
29 ham Lincoln Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull was one of the fabled “Seven
30 Martyrs” the Republicans who voted against Andrew Johnson’s convic-
31 tion in 1868 and supplied the one-third plus one needed to save him from
32 removal from office. I wasn’t foolish enough to try to tackle Trumbull’s
33 whole life or career. I restricted myself to his participation in Reconstruc-
34 tion. This was a great experience for me. My adviser was a leading Civil
35 War historian; I learned a lot from him and even more from my own
 80 cooper

1 efforts. Undertaking this study helped push me down the road toward
2 becoming a professional historian.
3 My next experience was similar. In graduate school I had to write a
4 master’s thesis. I was already interested in foreign policy, and I wanted to
5 knock off this thesis with dispatch. Therefore, I used what I had learned
6 about the era of Reconstruction to write about Charles Sumner’s role in
7 blocking the Grant administration’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo.
8 This was also a good experience, but, as I said, I regarded this as a means
9 to an end.
10 The end was to get on to twentieth-century political history, especially
11 as it affected foreign policy. Since there have been many persons who have
12 played great roles in that arena, I could have stuck with biography. As a [80], (2)
13 matter of fact, my first published article was a speculative biographical
14 essay about a great isolationist, Senator William E. Borah of Idaho. But Lines: 18 to
15 for my dissertation I forsook biography to study isolationism itself. That
———
16 dissertation became my first book. 1
0.0pt Pg
17 For my second book, it was back to biography. My subject was Walter ———
18 Hines Page. I shall say more about him and about this book when I get Normal Pag
19 into the three aspects of writing biography. All I want to say about Page PgEnds: TE
20 now is that he was good company over the several years that I spent with
21 him, and he confirmed me in my taste for biography. 2
[80], (2)
22 My next book and thus far only other published biography was differ-
23 ent. It belongs to a rare genre: comparative biography. In this case, the
24 subjects I was comparing were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
25 This was also a most enjoyable and stimulating experience. 3
26 Those reflect nearly all of my experiences as a biographer. I have not
27 done a book-length biography since the comparative one on Roosevelt
28 and Wilson, but I do plan to get back into the trenches quite soon.
29 Now, let me turn to the three “c” words that make up the title of this
30 chapter conception, conversation, and comparison. I want to discuss
31 each one in light of what people in the eighteenth century called “the
32 lamp of experience.”
33 By conception, I do not mean the formation of interpretative concepts,
34 although that is an important aspect of biography. What I mean here is
35 how biographers choose their subjects. From my reading of biographers
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 81

1 on biography, this is something that they tend to pass over quickly as if it

2 holds little interest.
3 The one great exception to this omission whom I have encountered
4 is Catherine Drinker Bowen. In some of her essays on biography, Bowen
5 talks quite a bit about how she selected her subjects. One thing that I
6 particularly remember from those essays is that Bowen says she did not
7 want to write about someone who died comparatively young. She wanted
8 to write about people who lived to an old age. She does not discuss why
9 she never chose a woman as her subject, but, to be fair to Bowen, she does
10 compensate for that neglect of her own gender in her extensive treatment
11 of Abigail Adams in her biography of John Adams. She also gives more
12 than equal time to the female members of her family in her magnificent [81], (3)
13 memoir, Family Portrait. 4
14 Otherwise, biographers tend to say little about how they choose their Lines: 35 to 4
15 subjects. Let me try to compensate for their silence with a few reflections
———
16 from my own experience. Let me also say at the outset that I am talking
0.0pt PgVa
17 from the viewpoint of a professional, academic historian. There are many ———
18 reasons that people choose their subjects and write their biographies. For Normal Page
19 me and my academic ilk, however, there is always the requirement that our PgEnds: TEX
20 subjects have historical significance and that they illuminate important
21 things about the times in which they lived and the events in which they
[81], (3)
22 participated. This is the historian’s equivalent of the literary biographer’s
23 need to choose a subject who meets standards of aesthetic and cultural
24 significance.
25 For historians who are biographers, there is also the requirement that
26 sufficient material exist for an examination of their subjects’ lives. Such
27 materials usually mean manuscript sources preferably a substantial body
28 of the subject’s diaries, letters, and other private writings. This is not
29 always the case. From my own field, I can think of four examples in
30 which historian-biographers had to overcome the handicap of lacking
31 their subjects’ personal papers. The first example is Stanley Coben, who
32 wrote about the attorney general who mounted the Red Scare in 1919
33 and 1920 A. Mitchell Palmer. As Coben pointed out, Palmer was an
34 unlikely candidate for the role of red-baiter-in-chief at the end of World
35 War I. He had previously been a progressive reformer with strong ties
 82 cooper

1 to organized labor and social justice groups. What is more, he was by

2 birth and upbringing a Quaker. In Palmer, Coben found what is a rare and
3 interesting phenomenon, what he called a “liberal demagogue.” 5
4 The second example is William Holmes, who wrote a biography of
5 another demagogue. His subject was the flamboyant Mississippi governor
6 and senator who combined advanced reformist stands on the leading
7 economic and social issues of the day with virulent white racism James
8 K. Vardaman. Better than anyone else, I think, Vardaman personified what
9 C. Vann Woodward once called “progressivism for whites only.” Indeed,
10 in Vardaman’s case this went further to embody progressivism for whites
11 at the expense of the active and self-conscious degradation of African
12 Americans. Vardaman was not just a demagogue who used racist appeals [82], (4)
13 to get himself elected. In office he delivered on his campaign promises
14 to make life even more restricted and miserable than it already was for Lines: 41 to
15 African Americans. 6
———
16 The third example is David Levy, who wrote a biography of someone
0.0pt Pg
17 who ranks as one of the greatest, even perhaps the greatest, political ———
18 intellectuals of twentieth-century America Herbert Croly. Croly wrote Normal Pag
19 a book, The Promise of American Life, that ranks alongside Alexis de Toc- PgEnds: TE
20 queville’s Democracy in America and W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk in its
21 brilliant and deep insights into the life of this nation. Croly was also the
[82], (4)
22 founding editor of the New Republic, which, under his editorship, George
23 Kennan has called the greatest magazine ever published in America. Croly
24 assembled a veritable galaxy of intellectual and literary stars, including his
25 fellow editor Walter Lippmann and such regular contributors as Charles
26 Beard, Randolph Bourne, Robert Frost, and Rebecca West, to name a few. 7
27 My final example is T. Harry Williams, who wrote on the magisterial life
28 of Huey Long. Does this subject need any introduction from me? I don’t
29 think so, except to say that probably no politician in twentieth-century
30 America dominated his state as thoroughly as Long did Louisiana, or cast
31 so long and deep a shadow over politics there after his death. Furthermore,
32 Huey Long ranks alongside Eugene Debs and Robert La Follette as one of
33 the most effective radical leaders in twentieth-century America. 8
34 How did these three historian-biographers overcome their subjects’
35 lack of personal papers? They did it in three ways. First, they combed other
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 83

1 manuscript collections of these men’s contemporaries to find material

2 from and about them. Second, they combed the public record for material
3 by and about them. In the cases of Palmer, Vardaman, and Long, the
4 subjects were in public life, gave a lot of speeches, and were written
5 about widely in the press. In Vardaman’s case, the Congressional Record was
6 especially valuable. In Croly’s case, there were his own fairly extensive
7 published writings. Using such public records may seem obvious, but
8 you would be surprised how historian-biographers, with their fetish for
9 manuscript research, tend to neglect these records.
10 The third way in which these biographers overcame the lack of personal
11 papers was through seeking out living people who knew and remembered
12 their subjects. This is usually called “oral history.” Each of these biogra- [83], (5)
13 phers was able to get in just ahead of the grim reaper and talk to their
14 subjects’ surviving associates and family members. Lines: 49 to 5
15 Most historian-biographers would not dare to approach a subject who
———
16 lacked personal papers. These four persons did because their subjects
0.0pt PgVa
17 were so significant and so central to their times. Most historians shy ———
18 away from such persons, and rightly so. Even with subjects like Palmer, Normal Page
19 Vardaman, Croly, and Long there is still that sense of something missing, PgEnds: TEX
20 something that you wish you could see and know.
21 Now, let me get personal and tell you how I came to choose my subjects.
[83], (5)
22 On the matter of historical significance and illumination of one’s times, I
23 acted like a good academic plugged in to the current concerns within the
24 profession. That was even true when I was a college senior. The time was
25 the early 1960s. I don’t think the term “second reconstruction” had come
26 into use yet, but the idea of gaining knowledge of the present from the past
27 was in the air. My subject, Trumbull, attracted me because he represented
28 what seemed to be a forgotten middle ground. He was sometimes called
29 a radical Republican, yet he balked at tossing Johnson out of office. My
30 master’s thesis reflected the same sort of concerns. Sumner ranked with
31 Thaddeus Stevens as the quintessential radical, and his interest in foreign
32 policy was unusual at that time.
33 By the time I came to select subjects for my two biographical books I
34 was much better initiated into academic concerns, and I could justify Page
35 and Roosevelt and Wilson on sound scholarly grounds. Page promised
 84 cooper

1 to illuminate a number of major themes of the time. He was a reform-

2 minded white Southerner of the progressive era but a far more appealing
3 figure than Vardaman. He was not a paragon of racial enlightenment
4 by any stretch of the imagination, but he did embody what passed then
5 for moderation and a sympathetic attitude toward African Americans.
6 As a magazine editor, he published articles by Du Bois, and as a book
7 publisher he encouraged and published both Charles W. Chesnut and
8 Booker T. Washington. He became a friend of the Wizard of Tuskegee
9 through his efforts to promote educational, economic, and public health
10 progress in the South. For the sake of full disclosure, however, I have to
11 point out that Page was also a friend and publisher of Thomas Dixon. He
12 came to regret his role in fostering Dixon’s literary career after he saw the [84], (6)
13 motion picture Birth of a Nation, which was based on one of Dixon’s novels
14 that Page had published. Lines: 57 t
15 Of equally great scholarly concern to me was Page’s association with
———
16 Woodrow Wilson. The two men had known each other since they were
0.0pt Pg
17 in their twenties, when neither one had yet embarked on his main career. ———
18 Page was one of the first people to tout Wilson for president after his Normal Pag
19 election as governor of New Jersey. He was such an intimate of Wilson’s PgEnds: TE
20 that he barely missed appointment to two cabinet spots, and he happily
21 settled for the consolation prize of ambassador to Great Britain. That
[84], (6)
22 appointment put him in the thick of American foreign policy during World
23 War I. Insofar as Page is remembered today, it is mainly for that brief,
24 intense, final diplomatic phase of his career. When people asked me who
25 he was, my shorthand answer was “Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to
26 Britain.”
27 Likewise, in selecting him as a subject, I carefully weighed the ques-
28 tions of private materials and their accessibility. This was what we today
29 call a no-brainer. I was teaching at Wellesley when I started to weigh my
30 first post-dissertation project. The two major figures of the Wilson circle
31 who had not had biographies done since the 1930s were Page and Edward
32 M. House. The Texas colonel would have been a good subject. He was
33 indisputably significant for his closeness to Wilson, and his voluminous,
34 revealing diaries and papers were nearby, at Yale. I decided against House
35 when I learned that a very good historian of about my age had already
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 85

1 embarked on a biography of him. There were no competitors for Page,

2 however, and his papers were even closer to hand, at the Houghton Library
3 at Harvard, only a subway ride away. I must admit that another attraction
4 was that working on Page’s diplomatic phase would supply a professional
5 excuse for spending time in England.
6 After I finished the Page biography, the book on Roosevelt and Wilson
7 seemed like a natural progression. I had just finished writing about an
8 important secondary figure of this era. Why not now tackle the two giants
9 of the time? Believe me, it is hard to work in the political and diplomatic
10 history of the first two decades of the twentieth century and not be drawn
11 to those two men. They are the twin flames that lure historian-moths
12 like me. [85], (7)
13 Significance presented no problem. Unquestionably, Roosevelt and
14 Wilson dominated those decades like twin colossi. These two engaged in Lines: 61 to 69
15 fierce rivalry and debate in a way that engaged the major domestic and
———
16 foreign policy issues of their time. First, they had run against each other
0.0pt PgVa
17 for president in 1912, each with a great slogan and argument, Roosevelt’s ———
18 “New Nationalism” versus Wilson’s “New Freedom.” Their arguments Normal Page
19 had delved into the major strains of American politics for most of the suc- PgEnds: TEX
20 ceeding century. Moreover, their conflict over America’s posture toward
21 World War I had come at a critical, formative moment in both this nation’s
[85], (7)
22 foreign policy and in world politics. In all, the richness, depth, and timing
23 of their conflict and debate made them look to me like twentieth-century
24 analogues to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
25 Most historian-biographers would probably stop with those consider-
26 ations. Such concerns about significance and illumination do constitute
27 the main reasons that most of my breed choose the subjects they do. But I
28 would be misleading you if I stopped here. These considerations weighed
29 heavily on me, but they are not the only reasons that I chose these subjects.
30 For me, there has also always been an irrational attraction that played a
31 role in three of my choices. In the case of my college thesis and the two
32 books, there was an experience that planted the seed that later grew into
33 the biography.
34 Each experience was a moment of sheer, cussed interest in the person
35 and persons for no particular reason. With Lyman Trumbull, it started
 86 cooper

1 with his name. It stuck in my head when I read Allan Nevins’s Ordeal of the
2 Union in a class on the Civil War era. Then I repeatedly encountered him,
3 first as one of the maverick Republicans in the Johnson trial, next as an
4 1872 Liberal Republican, and finally, near the end of his life, as a Populist
5 and legal mentor to Clarence Darrow.
6 With Page, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of him.
7 As a college senior, while I was waiting for a class section to begin in
8 the office of my favorite professor (an English, not a history, professor)
9 I picked a book off his shelf. It was The Training of an American: The Earlier
10 Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page by Burton J. Hendrick. Later, in grad-
11 uate school, I encountered Page as a full-throated imperialist in 1898,
12 and then, when I worked with the Wilson papers for my dissertation, [86], (8)
13 I kept encountering his letters as ambassador. These epistles stood out
14 for several reasons. They were much longer than almost anything that Lines: 69 t
15 passed across the president’s desk. Moreover, although most people’s
———
16 correspondence was typewritten, these letters were written in a clear,
0.0pt Pg
17 beautiful handwriting that even then usually came from the pens of only ———
18 professional calligraphers. Finally, also unlike most of the letters Wilson Normal Pag
19 received, these were not restrained, balanced statements of pros and cons PgEnds: TE
20 of policy. They were unabashed pleas for the United States to back the
21 Allies, especially Britain, in the war. The only element of restraint in these
[86], (8)
22 letters was the muted criticism of Wilson’s policies, which Page vented in
23 his sporadically kept diaries. I kept wondering, who was this guy? Where
24 did he get off writing to the president like that? 9
25 Likewise, with Roosevelt and Wilson, I can remember exactly when the
26 thought of comparing them first crossed my mind. It was when I first
27 read these two sentences in Robert Osgood’s great book Ideals and Self-
28 Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: “In some respects, Roosevelt comes
29 into sharpest focus when he is placed opposite Wilson, for there was
30 something elemental in his antipathy for that good gentleman. One is
31 reminded of Nietzsche’s distinction between the Warrior and the Priest.”
32 Those sentences fascinated me in part because of the time and place at
33 which I read them. It was 1964 and I was a graduate student at Columbia,
34 just starting my dissertation. For more than a decade before, questions
35 about the relationship of intellectuals to power had been rife, especially
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 87

1 among New York’s literati and scholars. Frankly, the way those folks
2 asked and answered questions bothered me. They argued over intellectu-
3 als’ “alienation” from power, and, despite their being smitten with Adlai
4 Stevenson and John Kennedy, they usually came down on the side of
5 exalting such alienation as the only proper stance toward power. 10
6 Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson struck me as outstanding
7 counterexamples to those views. Here were two persons who were intel-
8 lectuals as well as seekers after and wielders of power. Moreover, they be-
9 lieved that they could pursue both callings with little or no friction, much
10 less contradiction. The invocation of Nietzsche’s figures seemed to me
11 to differentiate them perfectly. That loose term “intellectual,” I thought,
12 covered two distinct types the artist on one side and the scholar or [87], (9)
13 scientist on the other. Roosevelt appeared to me an artist whose medium
14 was political power, someone who used ideas and concepts to inform Lines: 73 to 7
15 and refine the practice of his art. Wilson struck me as the scholar whose
———
16 medium was also political power, someone who used power to implement
0.0pt PgVa
17 his ideas and ideals. ———
18 Why, you may ask, do I mention that interpretation now, as part of the Normal Page
19 personal fascination? Doesn’t this fit the category of scholarly inspiration PgEnds: TEX
20 that often animates historian-biographers when they choose subjects?
21 Isn’t this an example of conception in the other sense, that is, the intel-
[87], (9)
22 lectual concepts that a scholar brings to the subject? In one way, it is,
23 but it fits into my experience differently. Perhaps if I had run with those
24 concepts right away and done a scholarly article or book rather quickly
25 I would have stuck with those concepts. Fortunately for me, well over a
26 decade and two books intervened before I began work on the book on
27 Roosevelt and Wilson.
28 I say fortunately because the kind of conception for a biographer that
29 I am talking about saved me from the hazards of the other kind of
30 conception namely, having preconceived notions and thereby making
31 a biography, or any other work of history, a self-fulfilling prophecy. One
32 of the things that neither historians nor biographers talk much about is
33 the need to surrender themselves in some measure to their subjects. We
34 need to retain the capacity for surprise and the willingness to follow our
35 subjects down paths that we did not foresee or even down paths that take
 88 cooper

1 us in the opposite direction from the one in which we originally intended

2 to go.
3 Let me illustrate what I mean with examples from my work on Page,
4 Roosevelt, and Wilson. With Page, my first salutary surprise was that he
5 had had a life before he became ambassador a rich and varied life that
6 came to interest me at least as much as his wartime diplomatic stint.
7 Thanks to abundant sources about his earlier years, I found myself ex-
8 posed to subjects that had seldom crossed my mind before. One was
9 the history of magazines and book publishing, especially the managerial
10 and business sides of those fields. Another was the phenomenon of the
11 white Southern expatriate after the Civil War. Such expatriates as Page
12 and Wilson, too, retained strong ties to their native region. Both this [88], (10)
13 phenomenon and Page’s embodiment of it struck personal chords with
14 me because my parents came from his native state, North Carolina, and Lines: 79 t
15 were themselves expatriates.
———
16 For me, the greatest surprise with Page came in an entirely unexpected
0.0pt Pg
17 area, that of gender history. In those days, the term “gender” was rarely ———
18 used in historical writing, and women’s history was still in its infancy. Normal Pag
19 Looking back on my experience, I realize how much I was stumbling in PgEnds: TE
20 the dark. What I found in Page was a gendered domestic drama that was
21 not supposed to happen in a place like rural North Carolina at the time
[88], (10)
22 of the Civil War. This was the experience of the young male of literary
23 bent who was torn between a cultivated, gentle mother who fostered and
24 encouraged that bent and a hard-bitten businessman father who wanted
25 his eldest son to get out into the world and make money. The meaning
26 of masculinity was central to this. I also found that for Page the con-
27 flict divided him not in two ways but three. A yearning to have political
28 and social influence complicated the split between aesthetic leanings and
29 moneymaking. Far from choosing one over the others, he spent his life
30 trying to combine all three. Some of what I am describing later became
31 the subject of Anne Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture. As soon
32 as I read that book, I wrote her a fan letter that said, “Where were you
33 when I needed you?” 11
34 With Roosevelt and Wilson, this interest in them apart from precon-
35 ceived concepts was even more exciting. I adopted an unusual but, for me,
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 89

1 useful plan of attack for my research. Thanks to the uncanny parallels in

2 their lives and the wealth of published and microfilmed sources on them,
3 I plunged right into their papers for comparable chunks of their lives and
4 afterward read secondary sources about those periods. I know this sounds
5 like the dictum of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence
6 first! Verdict afterward.” But this approach had precedent. Walter Prescott
7 Webb once confessed that when he was working on The Great Plains he
8 deliberately refrained from reading Frederick Jackson Turner because he
9 wanted to come up with his own ideas, even if it meant repeating Turner.
10 That was what I wanted to do too. 12
11 What this approach allowed me to do was to modify and partly abandon
12 the categorization of Roosevelt and Wilson as Nietzsche’s warrior and [89], (11)
13 priest. It is true that Theodore Roosevelt fitted the Nietzschean warrior
14 as well as any statesman in history, but getting to know him on his own Lines: 85 to 9
15 terms made me see him much better than relying too heavily on that
———
16 categorization would have allowed. Roosevelt was capable of salutary
0.0pt PgVa
17 restraint in the exercise of power. He was also capable of renouncing ———
18 power, which spoke well for him but also had unfortunate results for his Normal Page
19 career. PgEnds: TEX
20 It was with Wilson that this approach really failed. It did not take me
21 long to discover that this man did not fit Nietzsche’s priest model at all.
[89], (11)
22 He was not an idealist or ideologue who wanted power for the sake of
23 making real the things in his mind. Rather, Wilson was just as much a
24 believer in the primacy of power and affairs as was Roosevelt. In fact, I
25 discovered that he was an anti-ideologue. The real significance of Wilson’s
26 attraction to Edmund Burke was not that it made him a conservative in
27 current affairs. It was that he grasped the living, organic nature of human
28 affairs and the perniciousness of trying to make people fit and submit to
29 the prescriptions of ideologies. I still remember the afternoon that I was
30 reading one of Wilson’s Burkean essays when I said to myself, “This is
31 The End of Ideology.” By that, I meant the title of Daniel Bell’s 1960 book
32 and his and other liberals’ eschewal of grand intellectual designs at that
33 time. 13
34 Avoiding your predecessors’ writings has its risks and drawbacks. The
35 risk is what Webb recognized when he avoided Turner: He might be
 90 cooper

1 repeating what had gone before him. There is, therefore, an inescapable
2 obligation to read your predecessors carefully in order to discover where
3 you are original and where you are not. In the case of Roosevelt, I found
4 that I was following in the footsteps of George Mowry and John Morton
5 Blum. When I read their works, I was continually struck by how right they
6 had gotten it with Roosevelt. What I was doing, I hoped, was traveling
7 further down the trail that they had begun to blaze. 14
8 With Wilson, however, I found myself largely on my own. Of my pre-
9 decessors, I found that only Arthur Link had begun to see Wilson the
10 way I did, and Link had done that only in the later volumes of his Wilson
11 biography. In those volumes, he had quietly overturned his central inter-
12 pretation of Wilson in the earlier volumes and in his widely read book, [90], (12)
13 Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. I was doing more openly what Link
14 had done quietly. I was rejecting the Nietzschean priest view of Wilson as Lines: 91 to
15 an uptight, rigid, self-righteous, sometimes messianic idealist who could
———
16 not bend to the needs of the real world. I also overturned the view that
0.0pt Pg
17 Link, Richard Hofstadter, and many others had propounded of Wilson as ———
18 a conservative who became a progressive slowly, reluctantly, and strictly Normal Pag
19 opportunistically. Instead, I recognized that Wilson was always a worldly PgEnds: TE
20 thinker, a person who loved power almost as much as Roosevelt did, and
21 someone whose political evolution had really gone from disengagement
[90], (12)
22 to engagement and from the general to the particular. 15
23 Those are perhaps the most important advantages that I gained from
24 picking subjects who interested me in and of themselves, apart from any
25 views and ideas that I brought to them. Frankly, I distrust any biographer
26 who does not have a similar interest. This is what allows her or him to
27 question and change preconceived ideas and to appreciate the subject in a
28 richer and truer way.
29 Now let me turn to my second “c” topic conversation. In one way, all
30 biographies are conversations with their subjects. By reading their written
31 words or, with many subjects since the 1930s, listening to their recorded
32 voices or watching their actions on film or videotape, biographers engage
33 in conversations with their subjects. Most of those conversations but
34 not all consist of listening to the subjects, then questioning and talking
35 back to them by examining their actions, motives, and thoughts. That
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 91

1 conversation can sometimes take bizarre forms. I have never had a dream
2 in which I talked to one of my subjects, but I have seen and heard them in
3 dreams. Once, in the case of Page, I awoke in a cold sweat, worried about
4 whether I was being fair to him and maybe wrongfully imposing my view
5 of him. Such experiences do count as conversations.
6 What interests me most, however, about biographers’ conversations is
7 something less common: when biographers can actually talk to and mine
8 the memories of their subjects and people who knew them. In some cases,
9 the subject is still living and the biographer can talk directly to her or him.
10 Two of my favorite recent examples are Randall Woods’s biography of
11 William Fulbright and Robert Goldberg’s biography of Barry Goldwater. 16
12 Both of them have told me that they gained a lot from meeting and talking [91], (13)
13 with their subjects, but they have also told me that what they gained was
14 a feeling for those men rather than specific information. They have said Lines: 97 to 10
15 that friends, family, and associates were more helpful for specifics and
———
16 perspectives.
0.0pt PgVa
17 My subjects were long dead by the time I came to study them. In fact, ———
18 they had been gone so long that I had few opportunities to talk with anyone Normal Page
19 who had known them. Personal encounters came in my work on Page. An PgEnds: TEX
20 aged nephew of his gave me some valuable personal impressions, as did
21 the economic historian Broadus Mitchell, who, when a boy, had met Page.
[91], (13)
22 Most of my conversations with people who knew my subjects have been
23 secondhand, that is, reminiscences about them, and others’ interviews
24 of their contemporaries. This is called “oral history.” That term has long
25 amused me. It is a fancy name for something that people have been doing
26 since time immemorial. Even the ancients talked to their subjects when
27 they could, and picked the brains of their friends and foes.
28 In its twentieth-century usage, “oral history,” the systematic search for
29 and recording of memories of a subject, antedates the coining of the term.
30 It really began with the biographers of two of my subjects. Both Page’s
31 and Wilson’s first, authorized biographers were journalists Burton J.
32 Hendrick and Ray Stannard Baker. This pair did what came naturally
33 to them. They interviewed people who had known their subjects. They
34 sought out reminiscences. They targeted their inquiries to shed light on
35 particular aspects of their subjects’ lives and events in their careers. Finally,
 92 cooper

1 they preserved transcripts of their interviews and copies of the letters they
2 received for use by others. They were practicing oral history two decades
3 before the term was coined because they were doing things that it had
4 never occurred to them not to do. 17
5 Hendrick’s and Baker’s records of their interviews and the reminiscing
6 correspondence that they solicited constitute vital records about their sub-
7 jects, second in importance only to the actual correspondence and diaries
8 by and about the men. In addition, Baker had Wilson’s brother-in-law,
9 Stockton Axson, read and criticize the manuscript of the biography. Ax-
10 son’s observations give a kind of blow-by-blow commentary on Wilson’s
11 life. At about the same time, in the 1920s, Axson also wrote a memoir of
12 [92], (14)
his acquaintance with Wilson, although it was not published until 1993.
13 That book ranks alongside Owen Wister’s Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
14 as the most intimate and insightful account of its subject by a contempo- Lines: 103
15
rary. Comparing what Axson wrote in that memoir with his comments on ———
16
Baker’s manuscript adds to the insights about Wilson. 18 14.0pt P
17 ———
With the Wilson oral histories there is an additional advantage. In
18 Normal Pag
the late 1930s Henry W. Bragdon reinterviewed many of the people whom
19 * PgEnds: Ej
Baker had talked to a decade earlier. Bragdon was also able to talk to some
20
people who had either refused to talk to Baker or had spoken with him only
21
guardedly. This second round of interviews provides both more informa- [92], (14)
22
tion and a second set of perspectives on Wilson’s earlier years. Another
23
of Wilson’s journalist-biographers, William Allen White, interviewed a
24
number of people, including some of Wilson’s enemies. Unfortunately,
25
26 White does not seem to have saved his notes from those interviews. If he
27 had, it would be possible to use those notes along with the work done by
28 Baker and Bragdon to triangulate Wilson in people’s memories. 19
29 That kind of triangulation or multiple perspective is even more im-
30 portant in oral history than in traditional document-based work. There
31 is an old Chinese saying, “Palest ink is stronger than brightest memory.”
32 Fresh ink isn’t always completely reliable, however. The clearest examples
33 of this come from diaries. My first subject, Page, kept sporadic diaries,
34 and it is sometimes possible to compare what he says there with what it
35 says in other contemporary documents. Page was pretty reliable, but the
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 93

1 way things looked to him did not always square with how they looked to
2 others.
3 With Wilson, the problem is more acute. The greatest diary about him
4 was kept by his close friend and adviser, Edward M. House. Everyone who
5 works on Wilson and his politics and foreign policy between 1913 and 1920
6 has to rely on Colonel House’s diary. This indispensable source provides
7 information about Wilson’s thought and actions that often cannot be
8 found anywhere else. But the great problem with House’s diary is that it
9 stands alone for most of the time that he knew Wilson. 20
10 As others have noted, people who keep diaries and write memoirs rarely
11 portray themselves in a bad light, and they almost never minimize their
12 own importance. This is especially so with Colonel House. Furthermore, [93], (15)
13 he was a devious, manipulative person. His diary has to be used with
14 great caution, not so much because he tells lies although he sometimes Lines: 111 to 1
15 does but more because he makes himself look more important, and
———
16 Wilson less important, than he was. House also attributes motives and
0.0pt PgVa
17 attitudes to Wilson that are questionable, especially in cases in which ———
18 Wilson was not following House’s advice as much as the colonel wanted Normal Page
19 him to. PgEnds: TEX
20 Fortunately, there are two possible ways of checking on the reliability of
21 the House diary. One way is to consult one of the few recorded comments
[93], (15)
22 that Wilson made about House to a third party. In August 1915, Wilson
23 was in hot pursuit of Edith Bolling Galt and wrote intimate letters to her.
24 The widow Galt had taken an instant dislike to House and may have been
25 jealous of his intimacy with her suitor. Though he defended House to her,
26 Wilson did admit that “you are right in thinking that intellectually he is
27 not a great man. His mind is not of the first class. He is a counselor, not
28 a statesman. And he has the faults of his qualities.” That comment alone
29 casts House in a different light from his self-portrait in his diaries. 21
30 The other check on those diaries comes from 1919, when House and
31 Wilson were at the peace conference in Paris. At the president’s side were
32 several other people who kept diaries. Particularly notable were Wilson’s
33 physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, and the chief press officer of the del-
34 egation and future Wilson biographer, Ray Stannard Baker. Frequently,
35 Wilson would tell one of them, most often Grayson, about the same
 94 cooper

1 incidents and discussions that House described in his diary. Therefore, it

2 is possible to have one or sometimes two sets of testimony to place along-
3 side the House diary. What those checks show is chiefly that Wilson often
4 had thoughts and motives other than the ones that the colonel attributed
5 to him. For those months it really is possible to have a conversation among
6 as well as with the sources. 22
7 Thus far, I have not been talking about anything unusual among biog-
8 raphers. I have simply been recounting experiences that all biographers
9 have. All of us have ways of choosing our subjects, and all of us have
10 conversations with our subjects, one way or another. Let me turn now
11 to something that is unusual, though not unique, among biographers:
12 comparison. [94], (16)
13 Let me make something clear at the outset of this discussion on com-
14 parison. In one way, I am still treading the same ground that I have already Lines: 123
15 trod. I am describing something that all biographers do. Every biographer
———
16 makes comparisons between her or his subject and other people. Com-
0.0pt Pg
17 parison is to biographers what the question of “what if ?” or, more ———
18 pretentiously put, “counterfactualism” is to historians. It is something Normal Pag
19 that they cannot help doing, whether they admit it or not. Also, to keep PgEnds: TE
20 the record straight, non-biographer historians do plenty of comparing,
21 while biographers do plenty of asking “what if ?” My favorite example of
[94], (16)
22 that comes from Mark Schorer’s biography of Sinclair Lewis, in which he
23 asks what Lewis’s later life and literary career might have been like if he
24 had gone to college somewhere besides Yale. 23
25 The unusual element in my experience with comparison is the scale
26 on which I undertook it. My book on Roosevelt and Wilson is not just a
27 comparative study of the two men. That would be a fine thing to do. Plenty
28 of historians and other writers have implicitly and explicitly compared
29 their personalities, ideas, policies, actions, and accomplishments. Those
30 kinds of comparisons originated, in fact, with the men themselves and
31 their contemporaries. Such comparisons have tended to create the almost
32 Kantian categories that have separated Rooseveltians from Wilsonians for
33 generations since.
34 I once ducked a question about which man I liked more by repeating
35 what a Texan supposedly said about his preferences in music: “There
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 95

1 are two kinds of music country and western and I like them both.” I
2 spoke sincerely because there is a lot I do like in both men, and there is
3 also plenty that I dislike in both of them. But I was ducking the question
4 because the world really is divided into two sects, each worshipping one
5 and despising the other. I tried my best to avoid taking sides, but in the
6 eyes of some people I did not succeed.
7 The book I wrote is not a comparative study of these men. Rather, it is
8 a comparative biography. I followed them in parallel through their lives.
9 I told each man’s story with an eye on the other. At first they led widely
10 separated lives that truly did run parallel. But at a critical point in both of
11 their lives, the parallel lines bent into intertwining ones and never again
12 separated. [95], (17)
13 I do not pretend to be a unique practitioner of this form of biography.
14 Coincidentally, my book appeared at roughly the same time as two other Lines: 131 to 1
15 comparative biographies. One was Alan Brinkley’s book on Huey Long
———
16 and his fellow radical demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin. The other
0.0pt PgVa
17 was John Thomas’s biography of Edward Bellamy, Henry George, and ———
18 Henry Demarest Lloyd. They did the same thing that I did. They examined Normal Page
19 and recounted their subjects’ lives and careers in parallel and in conjunc- PgEnds: TEX
20 tion, always with an eye on the other or others. More recently, Charles
21 Royster has done a comparative biography of those two overweening Civil
[95], (17)
22 War generals, Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman. 24
23 I think all these books succeeded in exploring dimensions of their
24 subjects that could not be captured, or at least not captured so well, in
25 single-life, freestanding biographies. If I may be immodest, I think I did
26 fairly well at this job too.
27 Let me give some examples of what I believe I contributed by writing a
28 comparative biography of Roosevelt and Wilson. Comparison is a matter
29 of judging both similarities and differences. The similarities between
30 these two men too often got lost, even in comparative studies of them.
31 Nietzsche’s warrior and priest seemed to explain them to most of the
32 people who studied them, even when those students were not aware that
33 they were using those categories. For me, there was a real danger that I
34 might have remained enthralled by those categories if I had not ventured
35 beyond a comparative study into a comparative biography.
 96 cooper

1 Examining both men’s early lives and first attractions to politics made
2 the profound similarity, often identity, of their views unmistakable. I have
3 already recounted how I came to reject the Nietzschean priest category
4 for Wilson. Let me give another example of their profound similarity.
5 One of the biggest surprises for anyone who looks at Wilson between
6 1898 and 1900 is discovering what an enthusiastic imperialist he was.
7 Only a keen ear for the differences in the two men’s styles enables one
8 to tell Roosevelt’s utterances about the Spanish-American War and its
9 imperialist consequences from Wilson’s. They were making the same two
10 basic points. First, they argued that the acquisition of an overseas empire
11 signified America’s ascent into the ranks of the world’s great powers a
12 development that they both welcomed. Second, they saw this event as a [96], (18)
13 good thing in itself and perhaps more important to them they believed
14 that this newfound involvement in world politics would supply a new, Lines: 141 t
15 nobler, more elevating agenda for politics at home.
———
16 Let me dwell on this particular similarity just a bit longer. This was not
0.0pt Pg
17 just a case of Wilson’s being an armchair Rooseveltian, somebody who ———
18 cheered the troops and the fleet from the sidelines. According to Stockton Normal Pag
19 Axson, Wilson was going through what was perhaps a mild midlife crisis PgEnds: TE
20 at this time and told him, “I get so tired of a talking profession.” There is
21 no evidence that the forty-one-year-old Wilson thought of joining up and
[96], (18)
22 going to war, but it may well have crossed his mind. His deep discontent
23 with the content of current politics led to an abortive collaboration with
24 Roosevelt, whom he had met several years earlier. During his brief service
25 as vice-president, Roosevelt hatched a plan to interest young men from
26 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in public affairs, and he invited Wilson to
27 visit him at Sagamore Hill to discuss the idea in the summer of 1901. Roo-
28 sevelt’s sudden succession to the presidency soon afterward sidetracked
29 that scheme, but when Wilson became president of Princeton the next
30 year, Roosevelt applauded and exclaimed, “Woodrow Wilson is a perfect
31 trump.” 25
32 This particular similarity also serves to illustrate the other advantage of
33 comparative biography exposing and delving into differences between
34 the subjects. Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt did go off to fight, and he became
35 a war hero and a rapidly rising political star. Why is there this difference?
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 97

1 I think it comes down to one thing the disparity in their economic and
2 social backgrounds and circumstances. Both men had young children,
3 but Roosevelt was moderately wealthy and did not have to support his
4 family through his earnings, as Wilson did.
5 F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The rich are different from you and me.”
6 Ernest Hemingway retorted, “Yes, they have more money.” But there is
7 more to the difference than the comparative weights of Wilson’s and
8 Roosevelt’s pocketbooks. I would amplify Fitzgerald’s comment to note
9 that it makes a huge difference by what means and how long ago the rich
10 people in question acquired their money and the social standing that went
11 with it.
12 The most striking difference between Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s back- [97], (19)
13 grounds even more striking than their families’ being on opposite sides
14 in the Civil War was that Roosevelt belonged to an aristocracy. He came Lines: 145 to 1
15 from a family that had enjoyed wealth and social position for so long
———
16 that it could and did disdain newcomers to the ranks of the wealthy, and
0.0pt PgVa
17 the moneygrubbing practices that had gotten them there. An individual’s ———
18 pursuits were to be valued more than his wealth. Such pursuits might Normal Page
19 include art, science, literature, learning, public service, and, in Roosevelt’s PgEnds: TEX
20 view, military service. Roosevelt defied his social peers’ disdain for politics
21 by becoming a quasi-professional politician, but aristocratic assumptions
[97], (19)
22 and values always guided him, even when he believed he was most radical
23 in his policies and programs. Much about Roosevelt really did come down
24 to an effort to preserve aristocratic values in a democratic and materialistic
25 time and place.
26 Contrast Roosevelt and Wilson. As a youth, Wilson was equally at-
27 tracted to politics and public service. He would have loved to take the
28 route that Roosevelt took. But he had neither the wealth nor the social
29 status of the other man. I am not trying to make Wilson seem a com-
30 moner. He came from a social and intellectual elite within his region and
31 culture the ministry, specifically, the Presbyterian ministry. But such a
32 background made him what is now called a “meritocrat” an exemplar
33 and exponent of the triumph of talent, particularly intellectual talent.
34 Moreover, unlike Roosevelt, he did not come from the richest and most
35 powerful part of the country. Rather, he hailed from an impoverished and
 98 cooper

1 defeated hinterland. Of course Wilson had advantages, but those paled

2 in comparison with those that Roosevelt’s position afforded him. Wilson
3 coined the term “man on the make,” and much of his educational and
4 political career did come down to an effort to promote the continuing
5 rise of those with talent who came from below and outside the dominant
6 circles of wealth and power.
7 One advantage that I derived from appreciating this profound dif-
8 ference in social background and conditioning between Roosevelt and
9 Wilson was the ability to grasp how truly great an intellectual and ide-
10 ological divide separated them and their political visions when they ran
11 against each other in the 1912 election Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and
12 Wilson’s New Freedom. The dominant view of their campaigns was, and [98], (20)
13 for many probably still is, summed up in William Allen White’s celebrated
14 quip: “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fan- Lines: 151 t
15 tastic imaginary gulf that has always existed between tweedle-dum and
———
16 tweedle-dee.” It is easy to support that view by noting how similar their
0.0pt Pg
17 stands were on specific issues and how little either man was able to appeal ———
18 beyond traditional party followings. That view also meshes nicely with Normal Pag
19 Roosevelt’s charges that Wilson was an insincere, Johnny-come-lately PgEnds: TE
20 progressive the view that Arthur Link espoused in his earlier works on
21 Wilson. 26
[98], (20)
22 I think that view is totally wrong. I think that the differences in the ideas
23 expressed under the rubrics of the New Nationalism and the New Free-
24 dom were so deep and interesting that the de facto debate between their
25 exponents verged on political philosophy. They differed fundamentally in
26 their prescriptions for achieving the good society and in their conceptions
27 of human nature that underlay those prescriptions. For all his sincerely
28 professed “radicalism,” Roosevelt embodied a classic conservative’s dim
29 view of human nature, which required that people somehow rise above
30 themselves and their self-interests in this instance, to be evangelized by
31 the transcendent vision of the “New Nationalism.” For all his Calvinist
32 background, Wilson embodied a classic liberal’s bright view of human
33 nature, which exhorted people to be themselves and pursue their self-
34 interests in this instance, to be energized by efforts to reopen unfairly
35 closed channels of opportunity and thereby attain a “New Freedom.” I
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 99

1 have said it before, and I will say it again: I think this was the greatest
2 campaign in American history bar none. Of course, doing a compara-
3 tive biography was not the only way to come to an appreciation of the
4 profundity of their differences, but it certainly helped. Knowing what
5 brought the two men to where they stood in that campaign serves better
6 than anything else to make one recognize what was at stake.
7 Finally, on this point, let me turn away from my own experience to
8 make a comment on this type of biography. There are some other com-
9 parative biographies around. I have named four that have appeared in
10 the last twenty years. Comparison is a rich and fascinating approach. But
11 I also think it is a severely limited approach. I believe that comparative
12 biography has limited application because there are relatively few his- [99], (21)
13 torical figures who are truly comparable. In order for this approach to
14 work for the historian-biographer, the subjects need to be at least roughly Lines: 155 to 1
15 contemporary and to have interacted with each other. It can be argued
———
16 that in other fields, such as literature or science, it would be possible to
0.0pt PgVa
17 do comparative biographies of people who were widely separated in time ———
18 or unknown to each other. I think, however, that subjects such as these Normal Page
19 push the work back into comparative study. For comparative biography in PgEnds: TEX
20 other fields, I think you need subjects to have been contemporaries and
21 at least known of each other. Bach and Handel might be good candidates
[99], (21)
22 for a comparative biography, if one does not already exist.
23 Comparative biography is a powerful method. From my own experi-
24 ence I believe that this approach can supply perspectives that yield rich
25 results that may not be attainable otherwise. But that experience also led
26 me to believe that this approach is extremely limited. There are lots of
27 subjects who can lend themselves to dual biographies with some compar-
28 ative features. Three examples that come to mind are Abraham Lincoln
29 and Stephen Douglas, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur,
30 and John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. 27 But I do not think that in
31 the end truly comparative biographies of these subjects can be written.
32 I wish this method had a wider applicability, but I do not think it has.
33 For myself, despite my delight and respect for this approach, I have no
34 plans to write another comparative biography. My most recent work, a
35 study of the debate and conflict over American membership in the League
 100 cooper

1 of Nations better known as the “League fight” featured Wilson as the

2 leading actor and further fired my fascination with him. As a result, I am
3 about to embark on a one-volume biography of him. 28
4 For now, those three c’s conception, conversation, and comparison
5 encompass nearly all of what I would like to pass on from my experience
6 as a biographer. I have no grand synthesis to offer. Nor do I have a grand
7 vision for the bold new ventures in biography. These lacks may indicate
8 only a failure of imagination on my part. But, at the risk of immodesty,
9 let me assert that there is something else behind my limitations. I think
10 it is the nature of biography itself. As I observed at the beginning of this
11 chapter, the only way anyone really learns to be a biographer is by doing
12 it: There is no substitute for experience. [100], (22)
13
14 Lines: 159
15 Notes ———
16
1. Those were “William E. Borah, Political Thespian,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 7.02414p
17 ———
56 (October 1965): 145–53, and The Vanity of Power. American Isolationism and the First
18 World War, 1914–1917 (Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1969). Normal Pag
19 2. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855–1918 (Chapel Hill: University PgEnds: TE
20 of North Carolina Press, 1977).
21 3. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge: [100], (22)
22 Harvard University Press, 1983).
23 4. Catherine Drinker Bowen discusses this matter in The Writing of Biography
24 (Boston: The Writing, 1951) and Adventures of a Biographer (Boston: Little, Brown,
25 1959). The other books of hers to which I referred are John Adams and the American
26 Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950) and Family Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown,
1970).
27
5. Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, Politician (New York: Columbia University
28
Press, 1963).
29
6. William Holmes, The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman (Baton Rouge:
30 Louisiana State University Press, 1970).
31 7. David Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic (Princeton nj: Princeton University
32 Press, 1985).
33 8. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).
34 9. Burton J. Hendrick, The Training of an American (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928).
35 10. Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great
 Conception, Conversation, and Comparison 101

1 Twentieth Century Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),

2 144–45.
3 11. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
4 1977).
5 12. Walter Prescott Webb, “History as High Adventure,” in An Honest Preface and
Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 214.
6
13. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier, 1960).
7
14. John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge: Harvard University
8
Press, 1954); George Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (Madi-
9
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1946).
10
15. Arthur S. Link, Wilson, 5 vols. (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press,
11 1947–1965); Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York:
12 [101], (23)
Harper, 1954).
13 16. Robert Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven ct: Yale University Press,
14 1995) and Randall Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Lines: 188 to 2
15 Press, 1995).
———
16 17. Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page, 3 vols. (Garden
11.60022pt
17 City ny: Doubleday, Page, 1922–1925), and Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: ———
18 Life and Letters, 8 vols. (Garden City ny: Doubleday, Page, 1927–1939). Normal Page
19 18. Stockton Axson, “Brother Woodrow”: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton PgEnds: TEX
20 nj: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a
21 Friendship (New York: Macmillan, 1930).
19. Henry W. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge: Harvard
[101], (23)
22
University Press, 1967), and William Allen White, Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His
23
Times, and His Task (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924).
24
20. The House Diary is in the Yale University Library. Much of it was published,
25
under House’s sponsorship, in a sometimes-bowdlerized version as Charles Sey-
26
mour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
27
1926–1928).
28 21. Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt, 28 August 1915, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
29 ed. Arthur S. Link, 34 (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1980), 352.
30 22. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Link, vols. 53–61.
31 23. See Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill,
32 1961).
33 24. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depres-
34 sion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Edward
35 Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge:
 102 cooper

1 Harvard University Press, 1983), and Charles Royster, Destructive War: William Tecum-
2 seh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
3 25. Ray Stannard Baker interview with Stockton Axson, 12 March 1925, Ray
4 Stannard Baker Papers, Library of Congress, box 99; Roosevelt to Cleveland H.
Dodge, 16 June 1902, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cam-
5
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 3:275.
6
26. White, Wilson, 264.
7
27. I am indebted to Professor Kenneth Winkle of the University of Nebraska–
8 Lincoln for suggesting Lincoln and Douglas as subjects for comparative biogra-
9 phy.
10 28. The book on the League fight is Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow [Last Page]
11 Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press,
12 2001).
[102], (24)
13
14 Lines: 216
15 Selected Bibliography
———
16 Bowen, Catherine Drinker. Adventures of a Biographer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. 16.21121
17 . Family Portrait. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. ———
18 . The Writing of Biography. Boston: The Writer, 1951. Normal Pag
19 Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression. PgEnds: TE
20 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
21 Coben, Stanley. A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician. New York: Columbia University Press,
1963. [102], (24)
22
Cooper, John Milton, Jr. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American. Chapel Hill:
23
University of North Carolina Press, 1977.
24
. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cam-
25 bridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
26 Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
27 Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
28 Royster, Charles. Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson and the
29 Americans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
30 Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest
31 Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
32 Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
33 Woods, Randall B. Fulbright: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1995.
34
35
1 5. Ut Pictura Poesis; or, The Sisterhood of
2
3 the Verbal and Visual Arts
4
5
6 Nell Irvin Painter
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [103], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 18
15 As a biographer, I propose to bring together two ordinarily separate fields,
———
16 black studies and art history. I urge biographers particularly of subal-
0.0pt PgVa
17 tern subjects to break their methodological habits and make full use of ———
18 pictures. “Subaltern subjects” refers to individuals who are oppressed on Normal Page
19 account of their group identity, for instance, white women and members PgEnds: TEX
20 of stigmatized minorities. In recognition of the possibility of subaltern
21 subjects’ exercising power over others, the term “subaltern” conveys the
[103], (1)
22 complexity of subordinate identities. Images contain a wealth of meaning
23 about biographical subjects and about the cultural and historical conven-
24 tions that mold subaltern identities.
25 African American studies understandably regards European cultural
26 history with a certain distrust, for Western civilization has denigrated peo-
27 ple of African descent since the institutionalization of the Atlantic slave
28 trade and the building of American culture around the political economy
29 of African slavery. Scholarship and popular culture express their negro-
30 phobia differently; whereas much scholarship pretends black people do
31 not exist, popular culture has offered an abundance of stereotypes. Before
32 the late twentieth century, black people all too often appeared in words or
33 pictures as objects of insult. The combination of blindness and indignity
34 still dismays Africana scholars and discourages us from burrowing too
35 deeply into Western thought.
 104 painter

1 Wary though we may be of the negrophobia and stereotypes of Euro-

2 centric thought, we use its tools and adopt its postures, unwittingly, and
3 practically by default. Like our Eurocentric counterparts, we are attracted
4 to images and subjected to their power at the same time that we neglect
5 them as sources of knowledge. We are no more likely than our counter-
6 parts to realize that our automatic downgrading of images comes from
7 the Western intellectual history of which we are inadvertent heirs. If we
8 can see, historicize, and resist this prejudice against images as sources of
9 knowledge, we may draw on the pictorial as well as the written record of
10 our subjects’ lives.
11 We need to separate the insight from scholarship’s bias against images
12 [104], (2)
and in favor of words. We need to recognize what can be learned from
13 images in historical space. We need to rejoin images that scholarship
14 segregates but that biographical subjects experienced. Scholars of liter- Lines: 18 to
15
ature and art history have already recognized the influence of stereotype ———
16
in subaltern self-fashioning and autobiography. Like critics, biographers 14.0pt P
17 ———
can also use images to explore their subjects and their subjects’ cultural
18 Normal Pag
milieux. Biographers, who enjoy enormous appeal among readers and
19 * PgEnds: Ej
publishers, need to exploit the relationship of writing and images.
20
My title comes from a phrase in the Ars Poetica of Horace (65–8 bce)
21
that literally means “as in painting, so in poetry” and is also translated as [104], (2)
22
“the sisterhood of the arts.” Despite its classical roots and wording, the
23
phrase ut pictura poesis is most closely associated with two other historical
24
eras: the Western European Renaissance and the post-1960s. Earlier, the
25
26 sisterhood of the arts appeared in discussions of mimesis: imitations of
27 nature. Today the sisterhood of the arts is far more likely to appear in
28 semiotics: the analysis of signs whose meanings depend on the cultural
29 contexts in which they appear.
30 In both the Renaissance and the post-1960s, ut pictura poesis refers to the
31 sisterhood of the arts, a sisterhood that holds whether “arts” are defined
32 narrowly as painting and poetry or broadly as images and texts. 1 Ut
33 pictura poesis differs from paragone, which pits poetica against pictura and
34 argues for the supremacy of pictura as a means of reflecting nature. 2 Un-
35 like paragone, ut pictura poesis stresses complementarity. Complementarity
 Ut Pictura Poesis 105

1 conveys the consensus of current analysts of the image, including W. J. T.

2 Mitchell, Martine Joly, Ernst Gombrich, and Nelson Goodman. 3
3 The critic W. J. T. Mitchell cited the ancient Greek poet Simonides
4 of Ceos (c. 556–468 bce) as the inventor of the ut pictura poesis tradi-
5 tion. 4 However, the theme of the relationship between pictures and words
6 appeared in Plato and Aristotle as well as in Horace’s Ars Poetica, from
7 which the phrase comes. Simonides, Plato, Aristotle, and the Renais-
8 sance thinkers who used them drew parallels between painting and poetry
9 based on one aim: They all assumed mimesis the capture or imitation
10 of nature to be the role of both pictures and writing. Post-structuralism
11 and semiotics revived ut pictura poesis in the 1960s, as art historians like
12 W. J. T. Mitchell built upon the thought of French structuralists and post- [105], (3)
13 structuralists such as Roland Barthes. 5 In the 1950s and 1960s, Barthes
14 showed how images, seemingly natural representations of reality, are ac- Lines: 26 to 3
15 tually highly stylized symbols full of cultural meaning. Barthes coined the
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16 oft-repeated phrase “rhetoric of the image” in a 1964 essay of the same
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17 name in the journal Communications. 6 ———
18 Just as I join these art historians in stressing complementarity, I rec- Normal Page
19 ognize with them other scholars’ dependence on words and neglect of PgEnds: TEX
20 images as sources of meaning. For more than 250 years, scholars of all
21 sorts have turned to written documents for source material. Biographers
[105], (3)
22 habitually mine texts, which they subject to careful analysis; however, they
23 use visual source material uncritically, as mere illustration.
24 The neglect or thoughtless use of images cheats biographers and their
25 audiences of the valuable information images contain. For an abundance
26 of meaning emerges more clearly from images than from words. Biog-
27 raphers of even the most privileged subjects in the world tap new veins
28 of meaning by reading images critically. In the case of subaltern biogra-
29 phy, the neglect of images limits the field of biographers’ critical thought.
30 When the biographers’ subjects have limited access to the written word, as
31 is the case in much subaltern biography, the analysis of images becomes
32 critical. Even when subjects are able to read, write, and convey written
33 information to biographers, visual material reveals new dimensions in
34 subjects’ ambivalent relationship to their culture.
35 In this essay I consider themes of ut pictura poesis that both link and
 106 painter

1 separate images and words. I then illustrate my discussion with three

2 biographical examples: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Duke
3 Ellington. This undertaking is interdisciplinary, as I draw from schol-
4 arship on biography, art history, and popular culture. Such an interdis-
5 ciplinary approach captures the role of popular culture’s stereotypes of
6 black Americans, which the black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins
7 called “controlling images.” 7 For Collins, “controlling images” are nega-
8 tive stereotypes circulating in American popular culture about stigmatized
9 groups. As powerful negative references, controlling images affect black
10 behavior, and, by influencing behavior, controlling images transform bi-
11 ography. I apply her term to subaltern subjects generally, in this instance,
12 to black men as well as women. [106], (4)
13 Using the phrase “controlling images” to convey the ideological di-
14 mension of black women’s oppression, Collins evoked signs and their Lines: 37 t
15 cultural meaning, i.e., semiotics. 8 She employed the word “images”
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16 metaphorically, for her “images” are mostly verbal. My use of her phrase is
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17 literal: I contrast visual controlling images with African Americans’ visual ———
18 self-fashioning to indicate two ways in which the analysis of images en- Normal Pag
19 riches biography: mimetically by helping biographers more thoroughly PgEnds: TE
20 portray nature and semiotically by helping them unpack the cultural
21 meanings that images contain and convey. By relying on the sisterhood of
[106], (4)
22 the arts, biographers may gain more information, more truth, and a fuller
23 understanding of conventions and their meaning.
24 In the early 1990s I belonged to the ranks of logocentric historian-
25 biographers. Graduate school had trained me to pursue truth only as
26 expressed in words. In subsequent years I mined new fields but still only
27 through the medium of text and without questioning my attachment to
28 words and my neglect of images. I only turned to the latter in the absence
29 of the former. My biographical subject, Sojourner Truth, did not read or
30 write. As a consequence, all relevant written source material is highly
31 mediated. I learned much about Truth through her dictated writings and
32 articles about her, but at a long remove, because her amanuenses and the
33 authors of prose portraits of Truth used her as a device for scoring their
34 own points, sometimes against each other.
35 Given the paucity and lack of reliability of written sources from Truth,
 Ut Pictura Poesis 107

1 ordinary historical documents served as indirect sources at best, as highly

2 misleading fictions at worst. However, Truth did sit for photographic
3 portraits, small cartes-de-visite, which she sold to support herself. I had
4 to consider these portraits as a means of discovering how Truth pre-
5 sented herself. I had to learn to interpret to read what Barthes called the
6 “rhetoric of the image” the photographic portraits she commissioned
7 and distributed. My initial approach to Truth’s images served the interests
8 of mimesis. I wanted to discover more about the nature of Sojourner
9 Truth. That is not where I ended.
10 Truth’s photographs fed my early interest in this project: the inter-
11 rogation of her cultural meanings, which exceed what she did during
12 her lifetime. I stress the symbolic dimension of Truth’s meaning because [107], (5)
13 Truth, like many prominent African American figures, carries meanings
14 tied to her race and gender, meanings that her behavior alone does not Lines: 43 to 5
15 capture. Her significance as an American icon overshadows her life as
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16 an individual of a given historical period and specific accomplishments.
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17 Truth was a black woman in a racist, sexist culture; thus her persona ac- ———
18 quired an added, semiotic dimension, which I address in my title, Sojourner Normal Page
19 Truth, A Life, A Symbol. 9 PgEnds: TEX
20 The cover image of my biography of Truth (figure 1) characterizes her
21 portraits, in which she never appears as enslaved, subservient, pitiable,
[107], (5)
22 comic, or exotic. Truth is alone in her photographs. Well and respectably
23 clothed, she poses as an American bourgeoise, complete with book, knit-
24 ting, glasses, and vase of flowers at her side. Conforming to conventions
25 of celebrity portraiture, she looks a little past the camera in self-assured
26 seriousness. Her posture is relaxed but upright, communicating an im-
27 pression of easy composure. Truth’s cartes-de-visite show a mature and
28 intelligent bourgeoise who would not speak in dialect. With only the face
29 and hands uncovered, hers is the opposite of a naked body. 10 Considered
30 separate from contemporary depictions of black women or the complete
31 absence of depictions this image appears totally unremarkable. But it
32 did not exist outside such contexts.
33 Douglass and Truth sat for their portraits at a time when the trian-
34 gle of invisibility, anthropological “types,” and minstrelsy bounded the
35 representation of black men and women. In 1850, the year Sojourner
 108 painter

1 Truth published her Narrative of Sojourner Truth and presented her life
2 story to feminists and abolitionists, the Harvard naturalist Louis Agas-
3 siz commissioned a South Carolinian daguerreotypist to take “specimen”
4 photographs of enslaved plantation workers (figure 2).
5 Agassiz’s photos show black adults naked to the waist, facing the
6 camera, captured as “types,” such as became common throughout the
7 colonized world for more than a century. The unnamed people who appear
8 in these specimen photos are always foreign and nearly always of color.
9 They do not represent themselves as individuals but as “types” of people,
10 like exhibits in museums of natural history precisely their instigators’
11 intention. Today students of cultural studies see such photographs as
12 prime examples of Othering, of establishing hierarchies of race and “civ- [108], (6)
13 ilization.” This is not the way Sojourner Truth chose to present herself.
14 Truth also avoided the other typical representation of black women, Lines: 51 to
15 the happy darky of minstrelsy and the cook-mammy of the illustrators
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16 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling 1851–52 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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17 Stowe’s Aunt Chloe drew upon and phenomenally reinforced the stereo- ———
18 type of the dark-skinned, female plantation slave cook, invariably a fat, Normal Pag
19 bossy mammy. Subsequent mammy figures are legion the most famous PgEnds: TE
20 comes from the twentieth-century descendant of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in popu-
21 lar culture. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and the 1939
[108], (6)
22 movie it inspired brought Hattie McDaniel an Oscar for best supporting
23 actress. (She was the first black actor to receive an Oscar, which remains
24 a rare honor for black actors to this day.) This famous black woman of
25 Gone with the Wind has no name beyond “Mammy.” Her predecessors, too,
26 existed only as satellites of white characters. By contrast, no other people
27 appear in Sojourner Truth’s photographs. She alone occupies the entire
28 frame.
29 Minstrelsy, although predominantly a male medium, occasionally fea-
30 tured the odd blacked-up woman or men dressed as women. This un-
31 dated image literally a stereotype circulated for some forty years in the
32 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dressed in work clothes,
33 this figure expresses unrestrained motion. Her dance takes her off her
34 feet and thrusts her backward. Her big-lipped white mouth gapes open,
35 her big feet and hands are spread wide apart. The very embodiment of
1
2
1. Cover, Nell Irvin Painter,
3 Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol
4 (New York: W. W. Norton,
5 1996). The photo was taken in
1864 by an unidentified pho-
6
tographer. National Portrait
7 Gallery, Smithsonian Institu-
8 tion, Washington dc.
9 2. Daguerreotype by Louis
10 Agassiz. Joseph T. Zealy, 1850.
Courtesy of the Peabody Mu-
11
seum of Archaeology and Eth- [109], (7)
12 nology, Harvard University.
13 Photographs by Hillel Burger.
14 Lines: 95 to 9
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 110 painter

1 exuberance, she is the antithesis of respectability, dignity, poise (literally),

2 and gravitas (literally). She manifests movement, not thought; silliness,
3 not seriousness.
4 The female figure (figure 3) appears beside a male figure also a
5 clown and cannot serve as the focal point in the image. Because he
6 is upright and she practically falls down, her image is subordinate to his.
7 Sitting for her portraits afforded Sojourner Truth a means of document-
8 ing her presence as a citizen. Her portraits offer her biographers firsthand
9 source material that her illiteracy otherwise denies. As rare images of a
10 black woman, Truth’s photographs testified to the fact of her existence.
11 Many more images exist of Truth’s more famous, male colleague Fred-
12 erick Douglass, which, in their abundance, convey additional meanings. [110], (8)
13 The subject of numerous biographies and portraits in a variety of me-
14 dia, Douglass began to be painted and photographed in the mid-1840s, Lines: 95 t
15 nearly twenty years before Truth first sat before a photographer. Whereas
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16 Truth’s portraits appear in a vacuum, Douglass’s images reflect his self-
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17 fashioning and his supporters’ notions of appropriate schema. ———
18 An abundance of words and images makes Frederick Douglass (1817– Normal Pag
19 1895) fugitive slave, abolitionist, and America’s leading nineteenth- PgEnds: TE
20 century black statesman an ideal example of the ways in which the use
21 of visual material can buttress biography. Douglass is one of the few
[110], (8)
22 African American subjects of more than two full-length, adult biogra-
23 phies. 11 (W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Duke Ellington
24 join Douglass in having multiple biographies.) Two generations’ worth of
25 thoughtful biographies based on written sources trace Douglass’s trajec-
26 tory, capture his words and ideas, and weigh his influence on American
27 politics, but none scrutinizes his self-concept and persona as expressed
28 through images. Thanks to the existence of Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial
29 Life of Frederick Douglass, a 1995 exhibition and catalogue from the Smith-
30 sonian American Portrait Gallery, a biographical exploration of Douglass
31 through portraiture is now possible. 12 By adding valuable information to
32 what we already know about him, Douglass’s portraits contribute to the
33 work of mimesis.
34 Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838 with the help of his
35 fiancée Anna Murry, whom he married in New York City before moving
1
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3
4
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9
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12 [111], (9)
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 112 painter

1 to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Douglass began speaking at antislavery

2 meetings in the early 1840s, and by the mid-1840s he had become well
3 known by dint of his persuasiveness as a speaker and the publication of
4 the first of his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
5 an American Slave, in 1845. Three portraits exist from the antebellum era: a
6 painting, a daguerreotype, and an engraving.
7 According to the commentary in Majestic in His Wrath, this portrait
8 (figure 4) represents “a visual testament to Douglass’s enormous value
9 to the antislavery cause. As an observer at one of Douglass’s abolitionist
10 appearances in 1842 put it, this ‘fine specimen of an orator,’ who invited
11 favorable comparisons with no less than Daniel Webster, was ‘a living,
12 speaking, startling proof of the folly, absurdity and inconsistency . . . of [112], (10)
13 slavery.’ ” 13
14 In this portrait, Douglass’s image largely conforms to the conventions Lines: 118 t
15 of great portraiture. He appears alone, centered and filling the frame. The
———
16 face turns slightly away from the viewer; the large, clear eyes look back at
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17 the viewer confidently, but with an air of preoccupation, probably with the ———
18 great issue of the day, slavery. The hair waves but does not kink; the skin Normal Pag
19 is colored, but not too dark. 14 A clean, white linen collar frames the hand- PgEnds: TE
20 some, pleasant face. Douglass’s manly shoulders are extremely broad,
21 but clothed in a beautifully tailored, fine black suit and brown waist-
[112], (10)
22 coat. The abstract background complements his skin color, and clothing
23 strengthens the impression of transcendental beauty. The impression of
24 refinement and subdued power corroborates the caption’s quote from the
25 “observer” who saw proof, in Douglass, “of [slavery’s] folly, absurdity
26 and inconsistency.” Such a beautiful, sensitive image refuted the logic of
27 slavery but, perhaps, to the point of provoking disbelief.
28 A few years after the painting of the portrait above, Douglass sat for a
29 daguerreotype (figure 5).
30 In this, Douglass fills the frame as completely as in his painted image,
31 but the impression here is more of contained power than sensitive beauty.
32 Douglass’s color is darker; his eyes are not so large and open; his brow
33 is more deeply furrowed, almost into a scowl; and his lips have not quite
34 found the smile that hints of composed self-assurance. He still wears
35 white linen with a cravat (this time light in color rather than dark, and
1
2 4. Frederick Douglass
3 painting. Unidentified art-
ist. Oil on canvas, 69.9 x
4 57.2 cm (27 1/2 x 22 1/2
5 in.), circa 1845. National
6 Portrait Gallery, Smith-
sonian Institution, Wash-
7
ington dc.
8
5. Frederick Douglass da-
9 guerreotype. “Frederick
10 Douglass in His Thirties,”
11 unidentified photographer,
12 daguerreotype, 8.3 x 7 cm [113], (11)
(3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.), circa
13 1850–1855.
14 Lines: 156 to 1
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 114 painter

1 more completely framing a dark face), a black suit, and a waistcoat. But
2 the shoulders are less wide and the clothing less perfectly tailored. Most
3 striking to this viewer is the hair, here visibly African, despite careful
4 combing. This Douglass, betraying hints of anger or distrust, is conceiv-
5 able as a former slave, for his demeanor conveys less complacency and his
6 complexion appears less smoothly flawless than in the painted portrait.
7 This Douglass has known fear and rage.
8 A detour from this daguerreotype of Douglass leads to a daguerreotype
9 portrait of Douglass’s colleague on the antislavery circuit, Charles Lenox
10 Remond (figure 6).
11 A few years older than Douglass, Remond (1810–1873) had been born
12 free in Salem, Massachusetts. He and Douglass toured together in the [114], (12)
13 1840s. Although Douglass quickly began to outshine Remond as a public
14 figure, they remained colleagues, not only against slavery, but also in favor Lines: 156
15 of women’s suffrage. Remond belongs to the legion of distinguished
———
16 black Americans without full-length, scholarly biographies. When his
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17 appears, I hope it will follow Remond’s visual clues of self-fashioning. ———
18 Historiography invariably describes him merely as African American. But Normal Pag
19 this daguerreotype presents an additional dimension of his identity, his PgEnds: TE
20 Native American lineage and culture.
21 Today brown-skinned Massachusetts Indians appear regularly in
[114], (12)
22 courts of law to protect their tribal rights. In the 1850s Remond was
23 telling everyone looking at his portrait that he was Indian as well as
24 African. Frederick Douglass’s daguerreotype contains no Indian iconog-
25 raphy, such as Remond’s hairdo. But regarded in light of Remond’s hair,
26 Douglass’s facial features raise questions about his ethnic background
27 that biographers have so far ignored. 15
28 The 1845 engraved frontispiece of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick
29 Douglass (figure 7) falls between the painted and daguerreotype portraits.
30 Here Douglass appears less romantic than in the painting, less coiled than
31 in the daguerreotype. The floppy cravat reinforces the literary appearance
32 of the gentleman above the signature and corroborates the subtitle of his
33 narrative: Written by Himself.
34 These three portraits of Frederick Douglass present a schema he con-
35 trolled, in terms of the media (paint, photograph, engraving) and the
1
2
6. Charles Remond daguerreo-
3
type. Samuel Broadbent (1810–
4 1880). Daguerreotype, 10.8 x 8
5 cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.), circa 1850.
6 Boston Public Library/Rare
Books Department Courtesy of
7 the Trustees.
8
7. Narrative frontispiece and title
9 page, Frederick S. Voss, Majestic
10 in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of
11 Frederick Douglass (Washington
dc: National Portrait Gallery and [115], (13)
12 the National Park Service, United
13 States Department of the Interior
14 by the Smithsonian Institution
Lines: 199 to 1
Press, 1995). Courtesy of the Li-
15
brary Company of Philadelphia, ———
16 Pennsylvania. 0.0pt PgVa
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 116 painter

1 way he presented himself in dress and pose. None of these three por-
2 traits includes the kind of background that usually appears in the studio
3 images of the 1860s. Nonetheless it is clear from his posture and his
4 dress that Douglass is a man of the indoors. He looks more or less
5 refined, more or less authentic, more or less literary in each represen-
6 tation. The differences among them shrink further in comparison with
7 another contemporary image of Douglass, which appears on the cover
8 of sheet music by the Hutchinson singers, the musical stalwarts of the
9 antislavery movement. Douglass’s self-fashioning effaces visual traces of
10 his slave origins and emphasizes his mastery of the codes of gentlemanly
11 autonomy. The Hutchinson music’s image, however, connects him to his
12 degraded past (figure 8). [116], (14)
13 In both its iconography and its caption, this image reinforces Dou-
14 glass’s connection to slavery. Barefooted and in work clothes (a loose, Lines: 199
15 open-necked, patterned shirt, no tie, light-colored trousers), Douglass
———
16 carries his meager belongings in a pillowcase and holds a cudgel. The
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17 slave catchers in the background to the left (barely visible in this repro- ———
18 duction, unfortunately) remind viewers that he is in peril and that he Normal Pag
19 is owned. The trees and bushes put him out of doors and in proximity PgEnds: TE
20 to nature. The words surrounding the image also reinforce Douglass’s
21 usefulness as an antislavery icon: “The Fugitive’s Song,” “A Graduate from
[116], (14)
22 the Peculiar Institution,” “His Brothers in Bonds,” “Fugitives from Slavery.”
23 This was emphatically not Douglass’s own self-fashioning, not as a young
24 man, not as an elder statesman.
25 Throughout his life Douglass continued to protest racial injustice, even
26 though the success of his greatest cause propelled him out of the role of
27 radical and into the rank of éminence grise. Times changed as well, so that
28 the Great Man of the Gilded Age, the stalwart of the reigning Republican
29 party dressed and expressed himself differently from the younger, ante-
30 bellum abolitionist. Two post–Civil War portraits one photographic, the
31 other sculptural materialize his mature greatness in conventional terms.
32 In about 1865 Douglass sat for Marcus Aurelius Root, the most skilled
33 portrait photographer of the era and author of the 1864 photographic
34 textbook The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic Art. 16 A master of
35 the semiotics of every facet of photographic portrait making, Root set
1
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6
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33 8. The Fugitive’s Song. Cour-
tesy of the Library Company of
34
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
35
 118 painter

1 up his gallery with the intention of inspiring elevated thoughts in his

2 esteemed sitters. Through the use of flattering lighting, focal lengths,
3 poses, gazes, props, and clothing, Root aimed to reflect the greatness in
4 each of his subjects. His portrait of Douglass (figure 9) combines gravitas
5 with mellow beauty. Gone is the abundant white linen of the romantic
6 era, replaced by an outfit almost clerical in its soberness. But Douglass
7 now carries a gold-tipped cane, an emblem of royalty. The key light gently
8 highlights the gray in his hair, now completely combed back from a regal
9 forehead. Although Douglass no longer sports the part of his younger
10 years, he still wears his hair long, a style suited to his moderately kinky
11 (but not tightly coiled) hair. The professional polish of the photograph,
12 combined with the elegance of Douglass, endow this image with colossal [118], (16)
13 self-assurance.
14 The very fact of Root’s having made his portrait confirms Douglass’s Lines: 218
15 elevation into elite ranks. 17 In Root’s case, the artist’s name bestows a
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16 certain standing upon the portrait. The Douglass bust (figure 10), by a
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17 less famous artist, expresses stateliness through the smooth, cool, and ———
18 expensive medium of white marble. In the 1870s, when this bust was Normal Pag
19 made, white marble, of itself, evoked Greco-Roman antiquity in all its PgEnds: TE
20 civilized grandeur. The toga over Douglass’s right shoulder alludes to
21 imperial stature without obscuring the weight and drape of his splendid,
[118], (16)
22 late nineteenth-century clothing. This bearded Douglass combs his lightly
23 waved hair back from a noble brow. Photographed by Root and captured
24 in white marble, Douglass’s postwar portraiture announced his accession
25 into high public rank. None of his own portraits, whether before or after
26 the Civil War and emancipation, linked him to slavery or hinted that his
27 previous condition of servitude made him less a person, less a man, less a
28 citizen of the Republic.
29 Writing Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol in the 1990s and finding myself
30 confronted with a problem of mimesis, I turned to her photographs as a
31 means of completing her historical record. As I studied her images, how-
32 ever, I came to see that they testified in semiotic as well as mimetic terms;
33 I could learn more about her, and I could make sense of her relation to
34 her times. Both the visual conventions she avoided and those she adopted
35 conveyed meaning. The schema of her culture omitted images of black
1
2
9. Frederick Douglass carte-de-
3 visite by Samuel Root, circa 1865.
4 10. Frederick Douglass bust. Voss
5 explains that Rochester, New
6 York, citizens commissioned a
marble portrait of Douglass by
7
Johnson Mundy, a local sculptor,
8 when he was leaving Rochester
9 for Washington dc. Mundy com-
10 pleted the bust in 1873. The im-
age reproduced here is actually a
11 plaster replica made by C. Hess in
12 [119], (17)
about 1875. National Park Ser-
13 vice, Frederick Douglass National
Historic Site, Washington dc.
14 Lines: 254 to
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 120 painter

1 women. The few such images that existed were likely to be highly stereo-
2 typed and/or degrading images of the black woman, not of a particular
3 person, and certainly not having biographical intent.
4 Douglass’s and Truth’s portraits declare black Americans’ continuing
5 preoccupation with the documentation of their existence as people worthy
6 of respect. Douglass’s and Truth’s imagery supplied information that, in
7 its absence, was assumed not to exist. Douglass was cognizant of ne-
8 grophobic stereotypes, but Duke Ellington’s photographs from the 1920s
9 and 1930s appeared in a popular culture full of degrading depictions and
10 much closer in time to our own era. Ellington’s image of elegant sophis-
11 tication simultaneously contradicts and interrogates the racial caricature
12 surrounding him caricature that has faded from the historical record. [120], (18)
13 Absence was one fact of nineteenth-century black iconography; stereo-
14 type was another. Frederick Douglass railed against the latter in 1849, well Lines: 254
15 before the full elaboration of antiblack imagery of the following century:
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16 “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists.
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17 It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black ———
18 men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And Normal Pag
19 the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have developed PgEnds: TE
20 a theory dissecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.” 18
21 In the nineteenth century (as in the twentieth and twenty-first), stereo-
[120], (18)
22 typical depictions of black people appeared far more frequently than
23 those black people themselves projected. The increasing prevalence of
24 all kinds of images in the twentieth century lent increased prominence
25 to the antiblack, controlling images against which black self-fashioning
26 contended. By the time Duke Ellington became well known, black bod-
27 ies appeared often in American popular culture. Symbols of ridiculous
28 fun, uproarious entertainment, or criminal menace, they remained ab-
29 sent from depictions of respectability except as servant-accoutrements.
30 Duke Ellington, the subject of both conventional, text-based biography
31 and abundant visual documentation, provides an ideal case study of the
32 role of controlling images in black visual autobiography.
33 Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899–1974) was called “Duke” early on
34 in tribute to his elegance. Ellington was born into a working-class fam-
35 ily with ambitious style, and he credited his father, a butler, for having
 Ut Pictura Poesis 121

1 instilled in him the elegance that became his hallmark. Ellington is

2 remembered as the composer of over one thousand pieces of music,
3 large and small, including “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Don’t
4 Get around Much Anymore,” “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me,” and
5 the longer “Black, Brown, and Beige.” Today Ellington is recognized as
6 a major American composer, but during his lifetime he performed in-
7 defatigably. Ellington became famous in the 1920s as the leader of the
8 house band of the renowned Cotton Club of Harlem. Between 1927 and
9 1932 at the Cotton Club and through regular radio broadcasts, he laid the
10 foundation of an eminence that has outlived him.
11 Ellington’s image received national recognition in 1986, when he ap-
12 peared on a U.S. postage stamp. 19 Here I depart from biographical tradi- [121], (19)
13 tion, which stresses Ellington’s astonishingly original musical creativity,
14 to concentrate on his iconography or, more expressly, on his elegance. 20 Lines: 264 to
15 Two Ellington photographs (figure 11) from his 1933 tour of England
———
16 express his characteristic polish. From the very beginning of his career,
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18 box appearance, which in his own case included carefully straightened Normal Page
19 (“conked”) hair. PgEnds: TEX
20 Both photos were taken from slightly below, so that much more of
21 Ellington’s body is visible than in ordinary portraits. The effect of push-
[121], (19)
22 ing the head so far toward the top of the frame, putting the clothing in the
23 middle, and effacing any background showcases Ellington’s fashionable
24 costume. The lighting in both photos sets off the texture of his clothing.
25 With his hands in his trousers or jacket pockets, he appears jauntily at
26 ease. The photo on the right (at least) has been retouched to outline
27 the lapels of Ellington’s long, double-breasted suit jacket. In both pho-
28 tos, Ellington wears just enough eye makeup to accentuate his personal
29 glamour.
30 Virtually all of Ellington’s photographs contain hallmarks of sophis-
31 tication: conked hair; elegant, fashionable or formal clothing; a pose
32 of relaxed self-assurance. Ellington smiles coolly, but his mouth never
33 gapes open. He never grins or curries favor. He never tips his hat or
34 cedes the image to white people. Polished and contained, he never, ever,
35 wears blackface. In the 1920s the Ellington band lent sophistication to
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 [122], (20)
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[122], (20)
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23
24
25
26 11. Top: Two Ellington photographs,
1933.
27
28 12. Center left: The Famous Cotton
Club. This image dates from 1930,
29 when Cab Calloway’s band had re-
30 placed Duke Ellington’s. The photo-
31 graph’s caption makes no comment
on the iconography of the Cotton Club
32
program. Courtesy of James Gardiner.
33
13. Center Right: Duke Ellington Band.
34
14. Bottom: Minstrel Band.
35
 Ut Pictura Poesis 123

1 the mystique of the Cotton Club of Harlem. Famous internationally, the

2 Cotton Club (figure 12) advertised itself as a popular spot “reservations
3 advisable” to a wealthy, sophisticated, nonblack clientele.
4 The doorman here wears the familiar big, red lips and ingratiating
5 smile of American popular culture’s black iconography. Smaller in size
6 than the central white figures, he stands off to the side of the image and
7 faces them. Although more of his face than theirs is visible, he attends
8 to them, his arms spread apart in welcome. The incongruity of the broad
9 stereotype of the black doorman’s caricatured image and the relatively
10 naturalistic depiction of the three white figures makes this a particularly
11 unsettling image.
12 Ellington’s own skin was a light medium brown, and most of his mu- [123], (21)
13 sicians’ coloring ordinarily fell within the range from light to medium.
14 While they did not all follow him into hair straightening, none of Elling- Lines: 310 to 3
15 ton’s musicians wore the obviously naturally kinky hair so prominent in
———
16 stereotypes of black men. Even in work clothes, the Duke Ellington Band
0.0pt PgVa
17 projected gentlemanly composure. In this photograph from 1935 (figure ———
18 13), Ellington and his band, all in formal attire, pose motionless with Normal Page
19 their instruments at their sides. They stand erect and handsome, wearing PgEnds: TEX
20 smiles, not grins. Everything speaks of self-control, of urbane manliness.
21 Compare the Ellington band’s composure with this minstrel image
[123], (21)
22 (figure 14), which appears in books published in 1928 and 1936, when the
23 Ellington band was playing at the Cotton Club. The minstrel band com-
24 posed of black men, not white men in blackface, to judge from the de-
25 piction of the lips and nappy hair embodies the stereotypical blackness
26 of controlling images. In a spirit of wild abandon, the musicians grin
27 exuberantly. Knees spread wide, arms flung out from bodies, they are all
28 in motion as they make what looks like cacophony. The central figure in
29 the forefront of this band has his mouth wide open and his arms and
30 legs spread wide. Everyone here wears outlandish clothing, as befits so
31 bumbling a company. They are laughable, nay, downright ridiculous.
32 Self-fashioning such as Duke Ellington’s occurred against a solid back-
33 drop of controlling images on stage and screen mainly derived from min-
34 strelsy. Although commonly identified with the crude white supremacy of
35 the nineteenth century, minstrelsy flourished in American popular culture
 124 painter

1 through the first half of the twentieth century. uso entertainment dur-
2 ing World War II included blackface minstrelsy. “Amos ‘n’ Andy” lasted
3 nearly forty years and more than ten thousand broadcasts on radio
4 and television. 21
5 Minstrelsy so dominated modernist New York theater that even the
6 great breakthrough black shows and performers of the 1920s could not
7 escape its reach. In Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s 1921 Broadway hit
8 Shuffle Along, the most influential black comedy team of the era, Flournoy
9 Miller and Aubrey Lyles, appeared in blackface (figure 15). Even leading
10 performers in this Harlem Renaissance showcase of black talent by black
11 writers had to repeat the minstrel-darky tropes of open mouths, rolling
12 eyes, white lips, and utter mystification. [124], (22)
13 Josephine Baker came out of the same milieu (figure 16). She began
14 her rise to stardom in the New York entertainment world of Blake, Sissle, Lines: 325
15 and Ellington, figuring in the chorus line of Shuffle Along and appearing in
———
16 Sissle and Blake’s second Broadway show, The Chocolate Dandies, in 1924.
0.0pt Pg
17 The crossed eyes and little-girl outfit could be seen on other contemporary ———
18 female performers like Fannie Brice, but the white lips, spread legs, and Normal Pag
19 gigantic feet come straight from minstrelsy and reproduce its Sambo- PgEnds: TE
20 esque motifs.
21 Biographies of Ellington and histories of American popular culture
[124], (22)
22 seldom mention the plethora of stereotypical images that filled the en-
23 tertainment media of his time. The silence from the black side of a long-
24 standing color bar relates to the preservation of dignity: Not wishing to
25 diminish their own humanity, black people refrained from commenting
26 on these all-too-familiar but degrading images. In an article on Duke
27 Ellington, the critic and essayist Albert Murray complained of this kind
28 of self-censorship. Murray grumbled that black biographies and auto-
29 biographies read like “case histories” and “sociopolitical abstractions”
30 intended to illustrate theories of blackness rather than evocations of real,
31 fully rounded lives. 22
32 Coming to terms with stereotype has been no easier on the other side of
33 the color line. Nonblack observers and scholars also find minstrel images
34 embarrassing and generally forego mention of everyday manifestations
35 of the humiliation of Negroes. Unless an author’s subject is antiblack
1
2
15. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey
3 Lyles, Shuffle Along. Billy Rose
4 Theater Collection, The New
5 York Public Library for the Per-
forming Arts, Astor, Lenox and
6
Tilden Foundations.
7
16. Josephine Baker, 1924. Billy
8 Rose Theater Collection, The
9 New York Public Library for the
10 Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations.
11
12 [125], (23)
13
14 Lines: 366 to
15
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16
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19 PgEnds: TEX
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21
[125], (23)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
 126 painter

1 stereotype, the presence of these images ordinarily goes unremarked. 23

2 Students of black identity, usually critics of literature and art rather
3 than biographers, often note the role of stereotype in black people’s self-
4 fashioning. Herman Gray, for instance, notes that “self-representations
5 of black masculinity in the United States are historically structured by
6 and against dominant (and dominating) discourses of masculinity and
7 race.” 24 Scholars like Gray discuss cultural phenomena persuasively. But
8 without biography’s concentration on one life at a time and its revelation
9 of the meaning of culture in a life examined at length, critics’ work lacks
10 the vividness we expect of biography. Readers turn to biography for the
11 embodiment of abstraction, and biographers can apply critics’ readings
12 of cultural meaning at the level of individual life. By analyzing images as [126], (24)
13 well as text, subaltern biographers can better bring their subjects to life
14 within those subjects’ cultural contexts. Lines: 366
15 Ut pictura poesis, the sisterhood of the arts, alerts biographers to the
———
16 differences of medium that struck Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the mid-
6.72406
17 eighteenth century and reminds them to exploit images’ occupation of ———
18 space. Subaltern biographers can come closer to nature to truth by Normal Pag
19 reading the rhetoric of portraits. Attending to the dialectic of conventional PgEnds: TE
20 and biographical imagery, subaltern biographers also enter the symbolic
21 webs of meaning within which their subjects lived and fashioned them-
[126], (24)
22 selves. Words tell only part of the story; the schema emerges from images
23 as well. Ut pictura poesis reminds biographers to scrutinize images as well
24 as texts and realize the full promise of the sisterhood of the arts.
25
26
27 Notes
28
1. Strictly speaking, any discussion of the sister arts ought to include music.
29
But I limit myself here to the terms of the centuries-old tradition of ut pictura poesis:
30 pictures and words.
31 2. During the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci advanced paragone’s most
32 eloquent arguments. Today the historian of images Barbara Maria Stafford makes
33 such a case emphatically, but not, to my mind, entirely convincingly. See Barbara
34 Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: mit Press,
35 1996), 4–8.
 Ut Pictura Poesis 127

1 3. See Martine Joly, Introduction à l’analyse de l’image (Paris: Editions Nathan,

2 1993), 101–6. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago:
3 University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8, 43–48, 61–77, 80–81, and Mitchell, “Ut
4 Pictura Theorea,” in Picture Theory, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of
5 Chicago Press, 1994), 209–39.
4. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory,”
6
The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago
7
Press, 1980), 289, and Mitchell, Iconology, 48, 116. In 520 bce Simonides de-
8
livered the earliest recorded encomium (Greek laudatory song) in honor of vic-
9
tors in the Olympic Games. See Encyclopædia Britannica Online: “Simonides
10
of Ceos” http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=69622&sctn=1&pm=1 and “encomium”
11 http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=137492&sctn=1&pm=1.
12 [127], (25)
5. My using “semiotics” and “post-structuralism” interchangeably relies on
13 their common genealogy and their stress on the importance of culture’s influence
14 on individual behavior and thought. Just as there exist several currents within Lines: 377 to
15 semiotics, there also exist different sorts of post-structuralism, according to the
———
16 period under review, the thinkers in question, and the methodology in use. Many
11.60022pt
17 of the leading 1960s French structuralists, such as Michel Foucault and Roland ———
18 Barthes, are also considered leading post-structuralists. What I wish to emphasize Normal Page
19 in contrasting semiotics and post-structuralism, on the one hand, and pursuing PgEnds: TEX
20 the past as it really was, on the other, is the formers’ emphasis on meaning, as
21 opposed to the latter’s faith in the transparency of fact. On the role of semiotics
in ut pictura poesis, see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of
[127], (25)
22
Chicago Press, 1982).
23
6. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image/Music/Text, trans.
24
Stephen Heath (1964; reprint, New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 32–35. See also
25
Barthes’s essays in Mythologies (Paris: Collection Pierres Vives, 1957), and La cham-
26
bre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma Gallimard Seuil, 1980).
27
Although Barthes’s work is crucial in the development of semiology, he did not
28 discuss ut pictura poesis by name.
29 7. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
30 Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (1990; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2000), 5, 69–
31 88. See also Deborah Willis, ed., Picturing US: African-American Identity in Photography
32 (New York: New Press, 1994), xi–xii, 3–26, and bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and
33 Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
34 8. Semiotics (or semiology) refers to the study of signs, which one of the
35 field’s founders, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, Charles Sanders
 128 painter

1 Peirce, defined as “something which stands to somebody for something.” The

2 other founder, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, described language as a
3 system of signs, within which he distinguished words from concepts. Saussure’s
4 work in linguistics laid the groundwork for structuralism and post-structuralism,
5 both of which stress the importance of social structure, or culture, in patterning
6 individual human behavior and constructing meaning.
7 9. Robert F. Reid-Pharr discusses the cultural dimensions of African American
8 life and identity in Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (New
9 York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–12, 129–31.

10 10. For a fuller discussion of Truth’s portraits, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner
Truth, A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 185–99.
11
12
11. Important biographies of Frederick Douglass include the following: Philip [128], (26)
S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, A Biography (New York: Citadel Press, 1964); Benjamin
13
Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Waldo E.
14 Lines: 387
Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
15
Press, 1984); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, ———
16
1990). * 24.5002
17 ———
12. Frederick Voss, Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Wash-
18 Normal Pag
ington dc: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery and the
19 * PgEnds: Ej
National Park Service, 1995).
20
13. Voss, Majestic in His Wrath, 22. Emphasis in original.
21 14. On nineteenth-century depictions of black men, see Richard Powell, [128], (26)
22 “Cinqué,” American Art 11 (fall 1997): 48–73, and Richard Yarborough, “Race,
23 Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic
24 Slave,’ ” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist
25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 166–88.
26 15. The Douglass daguerreotype also contains hints that Douglass might have
27 shared an ethnic background with a Southerner from a later century, Elvis Presley.
28 16. Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic Art (Phil-
29 adelphia, 1864; reprint, Pawlet vt: Helios, 1971). Regarding Root, see Trachten-
30 berg, Reading American Photographs, 28–32, 41–42.
31 17. The Douglass carte-de-visite from the Root studio was by Samuel Root. See
32 Voss, Majestic in His Wrath, 71.
33 18. Quoted in Deborah Willis, Reflections in “Black”: A History of Black Photogra-
34 phers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), xvii.
35 19. Ellington received the Presidential Medal of Honor on his seventieth birth-
 Ut Pictura Poesis 129

1 day in 1970. See United States Postal Service, I Have a Dream: A Collection of Black
2 Americans on U.S. Postage Stamps (n.p., n.d.), 17.
3 20. My analysis builds on Hazel Carby’s perceptive discussion of Paul Robe-
4 son’s images in Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45–83.
But whereas Carby contrasts the way Nickolas Muray photographed Robeson
5
with how Robeson presented himself (64–66), I contrast the controlling images
6
surrounding Ellington with his own self-fashioning.
7
21. Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York:
8 Oxford University Press, 1986), 86–89, 167–173.
9 22. Albert Murray, “Duke Ellington Vamps ‘Til Ready,’ ” in Chant of Saints: A
10 Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and
11 Robert B. Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 441. See also Albert
12 Murray, “Ellington Hits 100,” The Nation, 22 February 1999, 23–29.
[129], (27)
13 23. Several recent studies focus on blackface minstrelsy and stereotype, e.g.,
14 Boskin, Sambo; Thomas Laurence Riis, More Than Just Minstrel Shows: The Rise of
Lines: 410 to 4
15 Black Musical Theatre at the Turn of the Century (Brooklyn ny: Institute for Studies in
American Music, 1992); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American ———
16
Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Annemarie Bean, James V. * 61.1572pt
17 ———
Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-
18 Normal Page
Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover nh: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Dale
19 * PgEnds: PageB
Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge:
20 Cambridge University Press, 1997); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Per-
21 formance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1997); [129], (27)
22 William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and AnteBellum
23 American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and an insight-
24 ful novel by Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters. (Cane Hill Press, 1994; Amherst:
25 University of Massachusetts, 2000).
26 24. Quoted from Herman Gray, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” Black:
27 Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 175. See also Henry Louis Gates
28
Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,”
29
Representations 24 (fall 1988): 129–55, and Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel,
30
eds., Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
31
32
33
34
35
 130 painter

1 Selected Bibliography
2 Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford
3 University Press, 1986.
4 Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
5 Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics
6 of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.
7 Foner, Philip S. Frederick Douglass, A Biography. New York: Citadel Press, 1964.
8 Gardiner, James. Who’s a Pretty Boy Then? One Hundred and Fifty Years of Gay Life in
Pictures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1996.
9
Golden, Thelma. Black: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.
10
New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.
11
Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro- [130], (28)
12
American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
13
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
14 Martin, Waldo E. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: University of North Lines: 426
15 Carolina Press, 1984. ———
16 McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. 8.60022
17 Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago ———
18 Press, 1986. Normal Pag
19 , ed. The Language of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. PgEnds: TE
20 , ed. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
21 Quarles, Benjamin. Frederick Douglass. Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
[130], (28)
22 Reid-Pharr, Robert F. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New
23 York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
24 Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: mit
25
Press, 1996.
26
Stecopoulos, Harry, and Michael Uebel, eds. Race and the Subject of Masculinities.
27
Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
28
Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
29 Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Cam-
30 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
31 Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
32 Walker Evans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.
33 Voss, Frederick. Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass. Washington
34 dc: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery and the
35 National Park Service, 1995.
 Ut Pictura Poesis 131

1 Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying The Underground
2 Tradition of African American Humor that Transformed American Culture, Slavery to
3 Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
4 Willis, Deborah, ed. Picturing US: African-American Identity in Photography. New York:
New Press, 1994.
5
Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.
6
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
7
8
9
10
11
12 [131], (29)
13
14 Lines: 476 to
15
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17 ———
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19 * PgEnds: PageB
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[131], (29)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 6. Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer
2
3 and Does It Matter? The Necessity of Biography
4 in the History of Philosophy
5
6
7 Robert J. Richards
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [133], (1)
13
14
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15 On 10 August 1802, an anonymous review appeared in the influential
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16 journal Die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, a journal that was a bit like the
0.8pt PgVa
17 New York Review of Books for Germany. The reviewer gave an account of ———
18 a rather obscure pamphlet, “Lob der allerneusten Philosophie” “Praise Normal Page
19 of the newest Philosophy.” It was a title ironically meant. 1 The broad- PgEnds: TEX
20 side reported that a medical candidate, Joseph Reubein, had produced
21 a thesis very much like that of Friedrich Schelling, the young ideal-
[133], (1)
22 istic philosopher at Jena that showed how death could be overcome.
23 To the sardonic description of Reubein’s views, the author added and
24 this sentence was prominently quoted in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung:
25 “Heaven protect Reubein that he does not meet a patient whom he idealis-
26 tically cures but really kills a misfortune that befell Schelling at Bocklet
27 in the case of M. B. as some malicious people say.” On reading this,
28 Friedrich Schelling became benumbed with fury and, I suspect, rather
29 depressed with not a little guilt. His first thoughts were to seek judicial
30 action against the alz or to go directly to the ducal court for redress. The
31 death to which the review referred was that of Mademoiselle Böhmer
32 M. B. Auguste Böhmer. Auguste’s death a year and a half earlier had
33 had a cataclysmic effect on Schelling’s life, and he obviously still had
34 not gotten over it. 2 Auguste Böhmer was thought by some to have been
35 Schelling’s fiancée probably not, I think. She was, though, the daughter
 134 richards

1 of Schelling’s lover, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel, who at the time of her

2 daughter’s death was married to August Wilhelm Schlegel, the great liter-
3 ary critic and one of the founders of the Romantic circle in Jena, of which
4 Schelling himself was a member.
5 Now, everything that I’ve mentioned and I’ll try to give a more detailed
6 account in a moment is typically looked upon by historians of philosophy
7 as overripe gossip that is, if they themselves even know anything about
8 it, and almost no one does. Bare mention of the incident something
9 like, for instance, “Schelling is alleged to have killed his fiancée” might
10 appear in the opening pages of a treatment of Schelling’s philosophy,
11 where a description of the philosopher’s life is usually potted and planted
12 in a corner, so that the details of the life won’t mingle with an exposition of [134], (2)
13 the philosophy. Indeed, almost universally, a discussion of the thought of
14 a philosopher either in a monograph or as a chapter or two in a general
Lines: 16 to
15 history of philosophy is conducted in the sanitized space devoted to the
———
16 philosopher’s ideas, ideas not enmeshed in a life but untimely ripped
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17 from the life. ———
18 A couple of years ago, while I was working on William James, I saw Normal Pag
19 this practice given poignant expression in an essay in which the author PgEnds: TE
20 urged: “To provide a proper perspective for the study of James . . . atten-
21 tion must be diverted from his life, however interesting, to his published
[134], (2)
22 philosophy.” 3 Now, just what perspective on an individual could be gained
23 by neglecting the life? James himself, I knew, would have rejected that
24 proposition utterly. It was James, after all, who contended: “The recesses
25 of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character are the only places in
26 the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive
27 how events happen, and how work is actually done.” 4 In trying to explain
28 a major shift in James’s thought, I found I certainly had to reject the
29 proposition that only the highly polished surface of his ideas needed to be
30 considered. It is this proposition that I would like to argue against even
31 more adamantly today. Put more positively, mine will be basically Fichte’s
32 thesis that the kind of philosophy one practices is determined by the
33 kind of person one is. 5 I believe that the intellectual historian whether
34 of philosophy or of science must reinsert the ideas, the theories, the
35 intellectual development of an individual into what we think of as a full-
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 135

1 bodied life that is, an existence caught up in the tangle of personal

2 relationships, subject to emotional turmoil, and expressive of hopes and
3 desires a life that will also be invested in certain approaches to nature
4 and in patterns of logical analysis. But in respect to the latter, the key term
5 will be “invested.”
6 My argument will be local; but, it has, I think, general applicability. I
7 will give an account of a major shift in the thought of Friedrich Schelling,
8 though in terms other than the usual ones. Schelling presents a difficult
9 challenge, yet one, I think, in which a hard case produces good law. He’s
10 difficult, since his philosophical ideas are exceedingly abstract and tied
11 together with the sheerest gossamer. It would seem that the mundane
12 [135], (3)
events of life could hardly explain alteration in such ethereal speculations.
13 I should say at the beginning that I take it to be the task of the intellectual
14 historian not simply to display what individuals thought, not simply to Lines: 20 to 2
15
describe what principles or laws they discovered, but to explain why they ———
16
thought what they did, and why they altered their views, at least as regards 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
major changes, in their intellectual outlook. Put another way, I think it is
18 Normal Page
the job of the historian not merely to show the development of a series
19 * PgEnds: Eject
of ideas but to explain them causally, to render those ideas, as best one
20
can, as the absolutely determined outcome of their psychological, social,
21
logical, and natural environments. [135], (3)
22
There is another task of the intellectual historian, not usually discrim-
23
inated. The historian, I believe, has to make the reader feel the urgency
24
of certain moments in the life of his or her subject, to raise the pitch of
25
26 understanding through the energy of the reader’s own emotions. So in
27 constructing an explanation of the alterations in the thought of a philoso-
28 pher or scientist, the historian, deploying all the arts of history, needs to
29 recreate in the reader feelings similar to those that galvanized the subject
30 during the course of that individual’s development. It’s one thing to say
31 that a person was motivated in action or thought by a burning love or a
32 cold hate; it’s quite another to get the reader to feel a little of the sting of
33 those emotions in order to comprehend their power. The historian must
34 construct a narrative to which the reader will give, in Newman’s terms, not
35 simply notional assent but real assent. The medium of historical expression
 136 richards

1 is also the message that, I believe, provides real understanding at a level

2 beyond the notional.
3 In a short essay, however, much has to be abbreviated, and I fear I’m
4 not quite going to live up to the ideal I’ve just described. 6 Let me first
5 sketch the problem that I’ve tried to solve in the history of Schelling’s
6 thought, and then use this as a test case. The problem, simply put, is
7 this: Schelling began his philosophical career as an avid and committed
8 disciple of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But around 1801, he explicitly rejected
9 Fichte’s “subjective idealism,” as Schelling termed it, for his own “objec-
10 tive idealism,” or “ideal-realism.” I’m not going to be able, in a short time,
11 I suspect, to make clear all that’s at stake in this transition. The philo-
12 sophical conceptions are notoriously difficult and complex, and Schelling [136], (4)
13 himself was ever attempting to find the right language in which to express
14 these ideas he often had them more as presentiments, I think, than fully Lines: 26 t
15 articulated conceptions. In 1799, for instance, he undertook a study of
———
16 Dante’s poetry, since he thought terza rima might be just the vehicle to
0.0pt Pg
17 capture his philosophical vision, so elusive was it. But let me begin at the ———
18 beginning and sketch quite inadequately both the life and the thought. Normal Pag
19 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born in 1775 in a small town PgEnds: TE
20 outside of Stuttgart, where his father was assistant pastor at the Lutheran
21 church. The father became a professor of religion at the higher semi-
[136], (4)
22 nary in Bebenhausen near Tübingen. There the young Schelling was en-
23 rolled as a special student, since he was about five years younger than the
24 other pupils. He was a frighteningly swift learner. Next, at the Tübinger
25 Stift, he began his study of theology, again with students some five years
26 his senior. Schelling had to share a room at the theologate with two
27 other young men whose critical intensity would soon turn brightly stellar,
28 Friedrich Hölderlin, whose poetic talent would soon bloom for all to see,
29 and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who became Germany’s greatest
30 philosopher in the early nineteenth century. Though the patron of the
31 school, Duke Karl Eugen of Baden-Würtemberg, tried to seal his wards
32 off from corrupting influences, two powerful waves broke over the walls
33 of the seminary the French Revolution and the Kantian revolution. In
34 the Germanies, it was a politically exhilarating time, not unlike, I think,
35 the late 1960s in the United States. For Schelling, reading Immanuel Kant
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 137

1 and Johann Gottfried Herder began to undermine the standard theology

2 he was fed at the seminary. His dyspepsia is indicated in his first published
3 article, on the nature of myth, with particular examples drawn from the
4 Book of Genesis. 7 This essay appeared when he was eighteen years old. As
5 he lumbered toward the end of his seminary career, he chanced to hear a
6 lecture in June of 1793 by an intellectual firebrand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
7 Schelling fell under the spell of this bewitching thinker.
8 Fichte had argued, in the various versions of his Wissenschaftslehre, for
9 what he thought the ineluctable implications of a strict Kantianism so
10 strict, in fact, that Kant himself would thoroughly reject Fichte’s version.
11 Kant, Fichte argued, was correct in reducing the formal structures of ex-
12 perienced reality to the subjective structures of the ego. But had Kant the [137], (5)
13 courage of Fichte’s convictions, he would have gone further and shown
14 that no theoretical ground existed for confirming anything beyond the Lines: 34 to 3
15 self, certainly no thing-in-itself that might restrict the freedom of the
———
16 ego. According to Fichte, with the elimination of the thing-in-itself we
0.0pt PgVa
17 would have to conclude that all experience resulted from the ego. Even ———
18 the ego itself, he maintained, was the product of its own self-positing. Normal Page
19 He argued that all individuals, as soon as they became conscious of the PgEnds: TEX
20 world around them, implicitly had to be conscious of themselves as well,
21 conscious that their representations were connected in a continuous and
[137], (5)
22 identical activity of thought. By taking itself up at each moment through
23 self-recognition what Fichte called “self-positing” the ego reproduced
24 itself as an identical flow of consciousness. The ego was simply this self-
25 reflective, flowing activity, nothing more no underlying Cartesian sub-
26 stance that thinks, only the activity itself. 8 Thus the ego was author of itself
27 and its world. As Fichte wrote the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi: “You are a
28 well known realist, and I a transcendental idealist, more uncompromising
29 than Kant was; for he still had as a given a manifold of experience but
30 God knows how and where it came from. I rather maintain these are
31 hard words that the manifold of sense has been produced by us out of
32 our own creative faculty.” 9 Well, this was the second phase of the Kantian
33 revolution that ignited Schelling’s imagination.
34 Late in the summer of 1795, Schelling completed his theological stud-
35 ies and then finished with orthodoxy as well. He had no inclination or
 138 richards

1 intention to follow in his father’s footsteps. The marker of this resolution

2 appeared in print under the title Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und
3 Kritizismus, published when he was only twenty years old. I stress his age,
4 since it makes clear that Schelling was a philosophical Wunderkind, and
5 his reputation as a kind of conceptual Mozart was beginning to take
6 wing. In these Philosophische Briefe, he waged a polemic against those
7 pseudo-Kantians some of his own theology professors who used the
8 master’s moral arguments in an attempt to prove God’s existence as a
9 thing-in-itself. 10 With the righteous indignation of the newly converted,
10 he insisted upon the inconceivability and the contradictions involved in
11 any reference to a thing-in-itself. Schelling’s rejection of the route for
12 [138], (6)
which his seminary days had prepared him meant only one real possibility
13 for his immediate future academic servitude.
14 Schelling became a tutor to the family of the very wealthy Baron von Lines: 38 t
15
Riedesel in Stuttgart. He followed his two young wards to the University of ———
16
Leipzig to help them in their study of law, which meant that Schelling him- 14.0pt P
17 ———
self had to learn the law first. While at Leipzig he also attended lectures in a
18 Normal Pag
variety of natural sciences, including medicine, which he thought he could
19 * PgEnds: Ej
completely master in a few years at least that’s what he told his parents. 11
20
During the two years that he was occupied as tutor, he completed several
21
large philosophical tracts, which made his reputation incandescent. The [138], (6)
22
most durable of these tracts was his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, pub-
23
lished in 1797. 12 In this book, Schelling attempted to carry out the second
24
phase of the Fichtean project. The first phase, with which Schelling would
25
26 continue to occupy himself, was the effort to derive from the structures
27 of the ego the basic features of experience, including its material content.
28 The second phase, one that Fichte himself never bothered about, was
29 Naturphilosophie. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie had the task of beginning
30 with a refined understanding of nature, that is, a nature articulated with
31 the help of the latest empirical, scientific theories those, for instance, of
32 Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier in chemistry and Alexander von Humboldt
33 in electrophysiology and then of showing how these scientifically con-
34 strued natural phenomena and their relationships could be regressively
35 chased back into the ego as their only possible source. Schelling’s Ideen
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 139

1 became the fundamental document for romantische Naturphilosophie during

2 the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
3 The signal idea to which the other Romantics resonated was the pro-
4 posal that the absolute ego created both the empirical ego and nature
5 in reciprocal relation. Under this conception, to explore nature, to un-
6 derstand nature, was simply to understand the self. This relationship
7 between nature and the self, however, could be comprehended not only
8 by scientific investigation of nature but also by aesthetic appreciation of
9 mind in nature. As Schelling put it a few years later: “The objective world
10 is simply the original, though unconscious, poetry of the mind [Geist].” 13
11 These ideas, which would become the core of the Romantic legacy, had a
12 tremendous effect on Schelling’s contemporaries philosophical, scien- [139], (7)
13 tific, and literary in both Germany and England. Alexander von Hum-
14 boldt, for instance, endorsed Schelling’s metaphysics, for he realized that Lines: 42 to 5
15 when he went into the jungles of South America, to which he traveled in
———
16 1799, he had discovered in those exotic climes the self that he truly was.
11.5pt PgV
17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great English Romantic poet, simply palmed ———
18 off large parts of Schelling’s Ideen as his own in his Biographia literaria. Normal Page
19 Because of Schelling’s several astounding publications, certain individ- PgEnds: TEX
20 uals at Jena, Fichte principal among them, wanted to get him a position at
21 the university. The main obstacle to his appointment, and initially a barrier [139], (7)
22 the size of the Harz Mountains, was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, as
23 privy counselor to the duke of Saxe-Weimar, could promote or thwart such
24 an appointment. Goethe read Schelling’s Ideen, and he balked. Goethe
25 wrote to Friedrich Schiller, the great poet who was teaching at Jena:
26
27 On reading Schelling’s book [Ideen], I’ve had other thoughts, which we
28 must more thoroughly pursue. I gladly grant that it is not nature that
29 we know, but that she is taken up by us according to certain forms and
30 abilities of our mind. . . . [Yet] you know how closely I hold to the idea
31 of the internal purposiveness [Zweckmässigkeit] of organic nature. . . .
32 Let the idealist attack things-in-themselves as he wishes, he will yet
33 stumble on things outside himself before he anticipates them; and, as
34 it seems to me, they always cross him up at the first meeting, just as the
35 Chinese is nonplussed by the chaffing dish. 14
 140 richards

1 Goethe thoroughly disliked the suggestion that nature was nonobjective,

2 not thoroughly real, lacking her own peculiar ways. He was not going
3 to help in the appointment. Schiller, however, engineered a wine soiree
4 to which both Goethe and Schelling were invited. The great poet was
5 unexpectedly charmed by the young philosopher. The Schelling he met
6 had, as Goethe wrote to a friend, “a very clear, energetic, and, according
7 to the latest fashion, a well-organized head on his shoulders.” And below
8 the shoulders, as he assured his friend, the minister Voigt, the young
9 man gave “no hint of being a sansculotte” unlike Fichte, presumably,
10 whom many at Jena thought a Jacobin. 15 Goethe was surprised at his
11 new friend’s knowledge of optics, and the two spoke for hours on the
12 topic, undoubtedly boring the other guests. Schelling likely let slip a [140], (8)
13 few knowing references to Goethe’s recently published Beiträge zur Optik,
14 which he had lately been reading. Goethe became a convert, and quickly Lines: 57 t
15 interceded on Schelling’s behalf. As a result, on 30 June 1798, the twenty-
———
16 three-year-old tutor received a call to Jena as extraodinarius professor of
0.0pt Pg
17 philosophy. ———
18 During his first year at Jena, Schelling mostly associated with Fichte, Normal Pag
19 Schiller, and Goethe. But during the next year, Fichte’s very spiny rela- PgEnds: TE
20 tionships beyond this circle drew their final blood. Fichte had irritated
21 his colleagues at the university by holding lectures on Sunday mornings,
[140], (8)
22 during the time of church services. He had also irritated the Burschen-
23 schaften the student fraternities by complaining about their drinking
24 and rowdiness; they retaliated by breaking his windows. Goethe wryly ob-
25 served in his diary that having a stone thrown through your window was
26 “the most unpleasant way to become convinced of the existence of the not-
27 I.” 16 Finally, Fichte irritated Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, at whose
28 pleasure he served in the university. Fichte’s views on God were highly
29 unorthodox, amounting in the minds of many to atheism, which the duke
30 would not tolerate. In 1799 Fichte was dismissed from the university.
31 With Fichte’s departure, Schelling began to associate more and more
32 with those in the circle around Wilhelm Schlegel the literary critic,
33 translator, and a cofounder of the group that became known as the Early
34 Romantics, or Jena Romantics. This group included the poet Friedrich
35 von Hardenberg (who wrote under the pen name of Novalis); Friedrich
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 141

1 Schlegel, the younger brother of Wilhelm he was a philosopher, poet,

2 and critic, and the real force behind the Romantic circle; Dorothea Veit
3 (daughter of Moses Mendelssohn), a married woman who had just come
4 to live with Friedrich Schlegel at Jena; Ludwig Tieck, the novelist acerbi-
5 cally funny, and the light spirit of the circle; and finally, the very beautiful,
6 charming, intriguing Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel, who was married to Wil-
7 helm Schlegel. I have to say a few words about Caroline.
8 Caroline Michaelis was born in Göttingen in 1763, the daughter of Jo-
9 hann David Michaelis, the famous biblical scholar and orientalist. When
10 she was twenty, she was married off to a country doctor, Georg Böhmer,
11 who took her to a little mountain village, where she bore him three chil-
12 dren; only her daughter Auguste survived infancy. In the small village, [141], (9)
13 she had been excruciatingly bored. Mercifully, after three years in this
14 stultifying town, her husband died. She gratefully returned with Auguste
Lines: 62 to 6
15 to Göttingen, where she met and toyed with the affections of Wilhelm
———
16 Schlegel, who was a student at Göttingen toyed because, though fond
0.0pt PgVa
17 of him, she had fallen deeply in love with another man. After receiving ———
18 his degree, Schlegel had to leave Germany for Amsterdam to take up a Normal Page
19 tutorial post; but he kept in correspondence with this woman, with whom PgEnds: TEX
20 he had fallen utterly in love. Caroline, in 1792, moved with her daughter
21 Auguste to Mainz to be near her childhood friend Therese Heyme. Therese
[141], (9)
22 lived there with her husband Georg Forster. Forster was heavily engaged
23 in republican politics and became a leader of the revolutionary group
24 at Mainz. He inducted Caroline into political work, having her translate
25 letters of Mirabeau and Condorcet. Her feelings for Forster spanned a
26 wide range. She later wrote a friend during the difficult time of the French
27 occupation of Mainz: “He is the most wonderful man; there is no one I
28 have so loved or admired, or, again, thought so little of.” 17
29 During the spring of 1792, Austria and Prussia planned a nice little
30 war with the new French Republic, since that government seemed to be
31 in chaos in wake of the Revolution. Well, not so chaotic that the French
32 Assembly couldn’t anticipate the Germans and strike first. In April the
33 French declared war against the Germanies. Initially, the troops of Austria,
34 Prussia, and the many dukedoms of the German lands captured several
35 French cities on the way to Paris. However, unaccountably, the French
 142 richards

1 didn’t collapse and return to the ancient order. The initial wave of German
2 successes finally crashed against debilitating dysentery, shortage of food,
3 and a regrouped French force, which now began moving the enemy armies
4 out of France and back into Germany. Indeed, the French troops began
5 taking German cities in the Rhineland, and finally Mainz fell. Forster’s
6 wife, Therese, with their two children, abandoned the city; but Forster
7 remained to help establish a new democratic government. He thus dared
8 treason, braced only with an enlightened faith in democracy and Caroline
9 Böhmer by his side. Caroline moved into his house to help secure the
10 new dispensation, and thus herself became, in the eyes of the opposing
11 German authorities, a dangerous and degenerate traitor.
12 During the French occupation of Mainz, Caroline had a brief liaison [142], (10)
13 with a French lieutenant, Jean Baptiste Dubois Crancé. It lasted only about
14 a month and a half. He had to depart in advance of the counterattacking Lines: 66 t
15 German armies. The city was put under siege, but Caroline escaped with
———
16 Auguste. However, on the way back to Braunschweig, where her mother
0.0pt Pg
17 now lived, they were captured. Caroline was thought to be the mistress ———
18 of Forster she was called the whore of the Revolution. She was thrown Normal Pag
19 into prison with her daughter. In these wretched conditions, with many PgEnds: TE
20 of the Mainz revolutionaries going to the gallows just outside her cell, she
21 discovered that she was pregnant with the French lieutenant’s child. In
[142], (10)
22 this pitiable state, she wrote to all her friends and those of her father. Wil-
23 helm von Humboldt and her brother Philip bargained with the Prussian
24 king for her release. Meanwhile, the faithful Wilhelm Schlegel rushed to
25 her side with the poison she had requested, to end her misery and her
26 disgrace. Before she could take the fatal draught, she was released on her
27 brother’s bond and promise. Schlegel brought her to Leipzig, and there
28 arranged for his brother, Friedrich, to care for her during her pregnancy,
29 while he returned to Amsterdam to earn the money necessary to keep
30 them all going.
31 Friedrich Schlegel, who would be the instigator of the Romantic move-
32 ment in Jena, was a man of remarkable intellectual gifts, with a genius
33 for love, and, as it turned out, hate. Friedrich fell deeply in love with this
34 pregnant radical, the woman he thought destined for his own brother. He
35 stayed with Caroline through her pregnancy and the baptism of the infant,
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 143

1 whom Friedrich referred to as the little Citizen Wilhelm Julius Cranz; the
2 child died shortly after baptism.
3 Caroline returned with her daughter to her mother’s house in Braun-
4 schweig, and in July 1795 Wilhelm Schlegel came from Amsterdam to be
5 with them. Caroline wrote Friedrich Schlegel that his brother now pre-
6 ferred to speak and write in French and that he “thinks differently of my
7 friends, the republicans, and is certainly no longer an aristocrat. . . . And
8 I will soon teach him passion then will my instruction be complete.” 18
9 The next year the instruction seemed to have taken, for they married,
10 and then immediately moved to Jena, where Schlegel had been called to
11 the university. Caroline helped in her husband’s literary ventures, com-
12 [143], (11)
menting on his translations of Shakespeare into German and even writing
13 some essays under his name. Their home became a favorite meeting place
14 for friends sharing their temperament, which did not include the misogy- Lines: 70 to 7
15
nistic Friedrich Schiller. He still regarded Caroline as a dangerous radical, ———
16
and later referred to her as Madam Lucifer. When Friedrich Schlegel came 14.0pt PgV
17 ———
from Berlin with his new love, Dorothea, along with Ludwig Tieck, and
18 Normal Page
with Novalis living close by, the salon of the Schlegels was the place to be.
19 * PgEnds: Eject
And Schelling was there. They would gather in the evenings with some
20
good wine and cold beef, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, “to sympoetize
21
and symphilosophize, and yes to symlaze-about.” 19 This group of friends [143], (11)
22
constituted the Jena Romantics, and their interactions gave rise to the
23
literary, philosophical, and scientific movement of that name.
24
From the beginning, Caroline found the young philosopher Schelling
25
26 he was twelve years her junior to be a fascinating intellect, and more.
27 Initially they waged the typical sexual-intellectual wars that bespoke an
28 underlying deeper attraction. She gave an account of their preliminary
29 skirmishes to Novalis in a letter in the fall of 1799: “Concerning Schelling,
30 no one ever dropped so impenetrable a veil. And though I cannot be to-
31 gether with him more than six minutes without a fight breaking out, he is
32 far and away the most interesting person I know. I wish we would see him
33 more often and more intimately. Then there really would be a wrangle.
34 He is constantly wary of me and the irony of the Schlegel family. He is
35 always rather tense, and I have not yet found the secret to loosen him up.
 144 richards

1 Recently we celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. He has time to become

2 more relaxed.” 20
3 The bantering battles between Caroline and Schelling gradually faded
4 into a deep love. She would later pour out her feelings: “I am yours,
5 I love you, I revere you, no hour passes that I do not think of you.” 21
6 As the relationship between Caroline and Schelling gradually took form,
7 that between Caroline and Dorothea quickly came undone. Caroline was
8 obviously the star of their little society beautiful, vivacious, demanding,
9 creative, smart a mélange of the traits that make intellectual men pli-
10 able and careful women distrustful. The tensions within the community
11 reached a breaking point when Schelling consented to follow Caroline
12 to Bamberg, where she was to consult the doctors about a minor but [144], (12)
13 lingering illness. Neither Friedrich Schlegel, nor Dorothea, nor certainly
14 her husband Wilhelm regarded Schelling’s offer to accompany Caroline Lines: 78 t
15 as an example of pure altruism. By this time, Friedrich Schlegel had turned
———
16 against Caroline, undoubtedly because of his own dying love and for the
6.0pt Pg
17 sake of his brother. Dorothea became reserved, cool, and proper, as she ———
18 explained in a letter to her friend Friedrich Schleiermacher, back in Berlin: Normal Pag
19 PgEnds: TE
My entire manner with Caroline lies right on the border of common
20
civility. Each day I make one or two short visits, but turn aside any
21
closer relationship, since she is Friedrich’s enemy, so why should I be [144], (12)
22
concerned? She takes daily walks with Auguste and Schelling, but
23
that does little good, she says, so that a complete change of place will
24
be necessary for her fully to recover. She will, therefore, travel this week
25
with Schelling to Bamberg and there take the required baths. . . . They
26
will leave shortly, and we’ll be able to breath again. I doubt that she’ll
27 quickly return, perhaps never! But she indicated to Wilhelm that she
28 would soon come back just so that she wouldn’t completely leave
29 him, or he her. 22
30
31 Caroline consulted with the doctors at Bamberg and traveled with Au-
32 guste, who had just turned fifteen, to Bocklet, close by, to take the baths.
33 Schelling, in the meantime, had left for a quick visit with his parents.
34 When he returned to Bocklet, he found Caroline better, but Auguste now
35 ill, apparently with typhus. The local doctor promised an easy recovery
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 145

1 in a few days. But on 12 July 1800, Auguste, Caroline’s most beloved

2 daughter, a young woman of infinite grace, refined education, and lively
3 charm, suddenly died. Caroline was devastated. When he heard the news,
4 Wilhelm, Auguste’s stepfather, wrote to Tieck that “it was as if I had
5 stored all my tears for this, and at times I have the feeling that I should
6 completely dissolve into tears.” 23 Henrik Steffens, a disciple of Schelling
7 who had fallen for Auguste, wrote an anguished letter to his mentor.
8 He mentioned that he was sending his letter without stopping to correct
9 anything. He wrote:
10
I cannot bear to say what for me, yes, for me, what Auguste’s loss means.
11
That beautiful I cannot grasp her death. So full of life, so much [145], (13)
12
promise and now dead. I can’t speak about it Oh! She was more
13
dear to me than anyone knows, more than I want to confess. . . . When
14 Lines: 92 to 9
I am able to work in peace, when healthy and in a good frame of mind, I
15
consider everything that Jena has meant to me, the source of my higher ———
16
life, that child stands before me like a bright angel. When I was last in 6.00717pt
17 ———
Jena, she became even closer to me and now. Never never, after so
18 many years, has death come so close to me I’ve seen accidents and Normal Page
19 people die, but saw only change. I didn’t see death and now well, I PgEnds: TEX
20 shouldn’t renew the pain. Greet the unhappy mother for me. 24
21
[145], (13)
22 Dorothea’s response didn’t touch quite the same emotional depths.
23 She characterized Auguste’s death as a “sacrificial offering for sin.” 25
24 Schelling, however, went into collapse. He reached such depths that Car-
25 oline wrote Goethe from her mother’s home in Braunschweig to plead
26 with him to care for the young philosopher, who, she said, had “suffered
27 so much in body and soul.” 26 She was afraid, it seems, that he would com-
28 mit suicide. Goethe quickly acquiesced and invited Schelling to spend
29 the Christmas holidays with him. It is hard to believe that Schelling was
30 not in love with Auguste as much as with Caroline. The conclusion is
31 easy to draw, since everyone seemed to be in love with her, including her
32 uncle Friedrich. The pitch of Schelling’s response, however, had a sharper
33 curve, since he was blamed for her death and he did suffer despairing
34 guilt. Immediately Dorothea gossiped that Caroline and her lover had not
35 called in a proper doctor when Auguste became ill and that Schelling
 146 richards

1 had meddled (pfuschet) in the treatment. 27 And, indeed, he did alter the
2 treatment prescribed by the doctor.
3 When Schelling returned from visiting his parents at the beginning
4 of July, he found Auguste ill. He called in a local doctor, who followed
5 the Brownian medical practice. The doctor prescribed opium mixed with
6 gum arabic and tincture of rhubarb. The rhubarb was presumably to
7 moderate the constipation that opium would induce. Schelling removed
8 the gum and rhubarb from the prescription he thought them too much
9 an emetic for her condition and saw to it that the opium was in a smaller
10 dose than originally recommended. Actually, all of this was probably a
11 wise move, since typhus kills through dehydration. But Schelling did
12 confess to Wilhelm Schlegel that he felt terribly guilty because he had [146], (14)
13 trusted the local physician. 28 These circumstances were sufficient and
14 the moral offense at his relations with Caroline so heated that rumors Lines: 99 t
15 of his culpability took wing, eventually bringing the charge that appeared
———
16 in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, quoted at the beginning of this essay.
0.0pt Pg
17 During the time that Schelling bore the considerable weight of his ———
18 affair with Caroline and it eventuated in her divorce from her husband Normal Pag
19 Wilhelm Schlegel and her marriage to Schelling in 1803 during this PgEnds: TE
20 time, when he also felt the crushing guilt, however unwarranted, for the
21 death of Auguste, he was moving toward a break with his mentor Fichte.
[146], (14)
22 Though Schelling initially endorsed Fichte’s epistemological and meta-
23 physical conception that everything exists for and in the ego, his scientific
24 work and his developing ideas about the independence of natural phe-
25 nomena moved him slowly away from that starting point. Nevertheless,
26 as late as March 1800 he proclaimed, in his System des transzendentalen
27 Idealismus, that his position was essentially the same as that of the author
28 of the Wissenschaftslehre.
29 But during this time of reconsideration of his philosophical stance,
30 from the beginning of 1801, Schelling interpreted Fichte’s absolute ego
31 as an individual subject one of many such subjects; and as such it, too,
32 needed to be explained, not simply assumed. Schelling now believed that
33 the explanation had to invoke an absolute, a state that was neither subject
34 nor object, but both indifferently something akin to Spinoza’s Deus sive
35 Natura whence individual egos and their world would emanate. Method-
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 147

1 ologically, this meant that Fichte’s subjective idealism had to be subor-

2 dinated to the one-time disciple’s new objective idealism. As Schelling
3 expressed it in January 1801, casting a mirror image of his earlier position:
4 “There is an idealism of nature and an idealism of the ego. The former is
5 for me the original, the latter derived.” 29
6 The precipitating causes of the split between Schelling and Fichte, I
7 believe, were manifold. They ranged from bitter feelings over intellectual
8 politics to the solace of reconciling love, from a desire for professional
9 independence to the recognition of subtle intellectual differences, and
10 from the experience of the autonomy of science to the remorse over the
11 death of a beloved.
12 The growing intellectual differences felt by Schelling, and his appreci- [147], (15)
13 ation of the logic separating his theory from Fichte’s are typically noted by
14 historians of philosophy. I do not think, however, that these intellectual Lines: 105 to 1
15 factors would have had purchase on the mind of the young philosopher
———
16 had he and Fichte not been caught in the matrix of the other causes. What
0.0pt PgVa
17 might seem trivially mundane and personal to a more purified ideal of ———
18 philosophical comportment, I nonetheless believe, had epistemological Normal Page
19 and metaphysical consequences. PgEnds: TEX
20 Fichte’s subjectivism made occurrences in the natural world includ-
21 ing the unreasonable demands of love and the more unreasonable death
[147], (15)
22 of a young girl of splendid promise somehow the ultimate responsibility
23 of the ego. And from the emotional perspective despite the logic of the
24 situation the responsible ego had to be Schelling’s. A subjective idealism
25 made other individuals solipsistically the productive responsibility of the
26 self. A young philosopher, closed off in his study and communicating to
27 his students only from the high chair of the German professorate, might
28 imagine a world only of his own making and with an imperious gesture
29 take responsibility for it. But that same philosopher, now pulled down
30 by the grappling hooks of love and then dashed against the rocks of his
31 own conscience by the death of a beautiful spirit, must, I think, have his
32 isolated self torn asunder. Only the abandonment of Fichtean egoism and
33 the adoption of an austere and deterministic absolutism might mitigate
34 the responsibility for love and for death or so, I believe, the emotional
35 dialectic would have proceeded.
 148 richards

1 And wouldn’t that emotional fuel be required to alter the path that one
2 might take through a logical maze of ideas? That is, seen from the jejune
3 perspective usually attained by scholars writing the history of philosophy
4 or science, bare ideas have, I think, no power to urge one this way or
5 that. From this perspective, ideas, as David Hume, for instance, portrayed
6 them, are completely effete, impotent. Schelling, simply from the logical
7 point of view, could have stayed on the path originally cut by Fichte, a path
8 he seemed content with as late as March 1800. Nothing in the antecedent
9 ideas per se required him to move as he had. Certainly the logical thicket
10 became no less dense along the path he finally took; rather, it was fraught
11 with more difficulties. Schelling needed emotional fuel and direction to
12 propel him one way rather than another. His love of Caroline certainly [148], (16)
13 the arrow that pierced the solipsistic Fichtean ego to convince him of a
14 reality beyond the self and the death of Auguste a burden impossible Lines: 113 t
15 for a lonely ego to bear provided, I think, both the impetus and the
———
16 direction for his change of philosophical position.
7.0pt Pg
17 The final push came from Caroline. She wrote Schelling in March ———
18 1801, as their desperate love hardened into an impervious shield against Normal Pag
19 the world: PgEnds: TE
20
21 It occurs to me that for all Fichte’s incomparable power of thought, his
powerful mode of drawing conclusions, his clarity, exactness, his direct [148], (16)
22
intuition of the ego and the inspiration of the discoverer, that he is yet
23
limited. . . . When you have broken through a barrier that he has not
24
yet overcome, then I have to believe that you have accomplished this,
25
not so much as a philosopher if I’m using this term incorrectly, don’t
26
scold me but rather because you have poetry and he has none. It leads
27
you directly to production, while the sharpness of his perception leads
28
him to consciousness. He has light in its most bright brightness, but
29 you also have warmth; the former can only enlighten, while the latter
30 is productive. . . . In my opinion, Spinoza must have had far more po-
31 etry than Fichte if thought isn’t tinctured with it, doesn’t something
32 lifeless remain therein? 30
33
34 I believe Caroline was correct. Without the poetical and affective configu-
35 ration of ideas, which give direction and power to those ideas, something
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 149

1 lifeless does remain therein. Schelling’s own ideas could hardly have
2 found a more loving efflation to lift them from the reflective plane of pos-
3 sibility and send them on the trajectory they actually took. Three months
4 after receiving that letter, Schelling quickly published his Darstellung meines
5 Systems der Philosophie, which explicitly signaled his break with Fichte.
6 What I’ve tried to show in this essay is the general proposal concerning
7 the nature of intellectual history, namely that ideas must be pulled along
8 by more than merely logical cords. After all, from a set of premises, an
9 infinite number of conclusions can be drawn, but only a finite trail can
10 be taken. What, then, will force the decision to take one permissible path
11 rather than another? I think it will be the usual springs of action the
12 interests, passions, and desires that can be comprehended only by unrav- [149], (17)
13 eling the fabric of a life, rather than merely by dissecting abstract ideas.
14 The historian has to unknot the skein, so that all the strands can be Lines: 123 to 1
15 appreciated. But to be convincing, the good historian will also reweave
———
16 the threads to touch the emotions of readers, so that they might feel
8.92407pt
17 something of the forces that drove the actors to take one path rather than ———
18 another. I think that’s the only way to produce real conviction, rather than Normal Page
19 simply notional assent. PgEnds: TEX
20 To answer, then, the question of my title: Yes, Auguste’s death, and all
21 that it represented, mattered a great deal to Schelling’s life and to his
[149], (17)
22 philosophy, as well as to my general thesis.
23
24
25
Notes
26
1. Anonymous review of “Lob der allerneusten Philosophie,” Allgemeine Literatur-
27
Zeitung, no. 225, 10 August 1802, 329.
28
2. The screed against Schelling was more than a veiled protest against the
29
untimely death of a young girl. Franz Berg, author of the Lob der allerneusten Philoso-
30 phie, was a religiously conservative theologian who connected Schelling’s ideas
31 with those of the atheist Fichte. And Berg and Schütz, editor of the alz, also
32 reacted against the Brownian medical theories and the Romantic attitudes that
33 supported those views.
34 3. William Earle, “William James,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Ed-
35 wards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 4:241.
 150 richards

1 4. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et

2 al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 395.
3 5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre” (1797),
4 Fichtes Werke, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, 11 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
5 [1834–1846] 1971), 1:432–34: “There is no principle of decision possible for rea-
6 son: for it is not a question of adding an item in a series according to the rational
7 principles governing the series; rather it is a question of the beginning of the whole
8 series which, as an absolute first act, depends only on freedom of thought. . . .
9 What kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends on what kind of man one is:

10 for a philosophical system is not a dead stick of furniture that one can lay aside or
select; rather it animates the very soul of the man who has it.”
11
12
6. I treat Schelling’s difficulties more extensively in my Romantic Conception of [150], (18)
Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
13
2002).
14 Lines: 138
7. Friedrich Schelling, Über Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosopheme der Altesten
15
Welt, in Schellings Werke (Münchner Jubilaumsdruck), ed. Manfred Schroter, 12 vols. ———
16
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927–1959), 1:1–44. * 24.5002
17 ———
8. Fichte works out these ideas in a treatise he composed between 1794 and
18 Normal Pag
1795. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, in Fichtes
19 * PgEnds: Ej
Werke, 1:83–328.
20
9. Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Friedrich Jacobi, 30 August 1795, Johann Gottlieb
21 Fichte, Briefe, ed. Manfred Buhr, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag Philip Reclam, 1986), [150], (18)
22 183–84.
23 10. Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus,
24 in Schellings Werke, ed. Schroter, 1:205–66.
25 11. Friedrich Schelling to his parents, 4 September 1797, F. W. J. Schelling. Briefe
26 und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, 3 vols. to date (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1962-),
27 2:122.
28 12. Friedrich Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das
29 Studium dieser Wissenschaft (1797), in Schellings Werke, ed. Schroter, 1:77–350.
30 13. Friedrich Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Schellings Werke,
31 ed. Schroter, 2:349.
32 14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Friedrich Schiller, 6 January 1798, Der
33 Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Emil Staiger (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag,
34 1966), 537–38.
35 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Christian Gottlieb Voigt, 29 May 1798,
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 151

1 Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe (Hamberger Ausgabe), ed. Karl Mandelkow, 6 vols.
2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 2:349.
3 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tag- und Jahres-Hefte (1796), in Samtliche Werke
4 nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münchner Ausgabe), ed. Karl Richter et al., 21 vols.
5 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–1998), 14:41.
17. Caroline Böhmer to Friedrich Meyer, 17 December 1792, Caroline: Briefe aus
6
der Frühromantik, 2 vols., ed. Georg Waiz and expanded by Erich Schmidt (Leipzig:
7
Insel Verlag, 1913), 1:279.
8
18. Caroline Böhmer to Friedrich Schlegel, August 1795, in Caroline: Briefe aus
9
der Frühromantik, 1:36–67.
10
19. See the Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel, 1794–1802: Seine prosaischen Jugenschriften,
11 ed. J. Minor, 2 vols. (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1882), v.
12 [151], (19)
20. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Hardenberg, 4 February 1799, Car-
13 oline: Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 1:497.
14 21. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Schelling, February 1801, Caroline: Lines: 160 to 1
15 Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:42.
———
16 22. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 28 April 1800, Friedrich Daniel
11.60022pt
17 Ernst Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Han-Joachim Birkner et al., 11 vols. ———
18 to date (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980-), 5.4:9. Normal Page
19 23. August Wilhelm Schlegel to Ludwig Tieck, 14 September 1800, quoted PgEnds: TEX
20 in Gisela Dischner, Caroline und der Jenaer Kreis (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach,
21 1979), 154.
24. Henrik Steffens to Friedrich Schelling, 20 August 1800, in Gustav Plitt, Aus
[151], (19)
22
Schellings Leben. In Briefen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869–1870), 1:305. Steffens’s
23
reaction to Auguste’s death, as his letter to Schelling indicates, was obviously
24
profound. His deep affection for Auguste can also be gleaned from Caroline’s
25
characterization of his behavior with her daughter, which she communicated to
26
Johann Diederich Gries, a Privatdozent in Philosophy at Jena and a friend of
27
several in the circle. See Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Johann Diederich Gries, 27
28 December 1799, Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 1:592–94.
29 25. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 28 July 1800, Schleiermacher,
30 Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5.4:175.
31 26. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Wolfgang von Goethe, 26 November 1800,
32 Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:19.
33 27. Dorothea Veit to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 22 August 1800, in Schleierma-
34 cher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5.4:222. Dorothea maintained that Caroline treated
35 Auguste as an adult much too soon, which, along with Caroline’s affair with
 152 richards

1 Schelling, had a debilitating effect. She went on to say: “The Brownian technique,
2 in this case, is not to blame. They had no physician with her other than a completely
3 unknown man from the region of Bocklet, who was no less than a Brownian. To
4 top the whole thing off, Schelling meddled in it [hinein gepfuscht]. They sent for
a physician from Bamberg only as she grew cold from the waist up. Röschlaub
5
came and found her already dead. He maintained that her sickness was lethal
6
right from the beginning; all the more unforgivable, then, is the confidence they
7
showed in not sending for a doctor right from the beginning. Shortly And now
8 the ostentation of the sorrow! We are going to remain completely silent about
9 all those people. I won’t write you anything more on this, since I am simply too
10 indignant.”
11 28. Friedrich Schelling to Wilhelm Schlegel, 3 September 1802, in F. W. J.
12 Schelling, Briefe und Dokumente, 2:432.
[152], (20)
13 29. Friedrich Schelling, Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige
14 Art, ihre Probleme aufzulösen, in Schellings Werke, 2:718.
Lines: 187
15 30. Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel to Friedrich Schelling, 1 March 1801, Caroline,
Briefe aus der Frühromantik, 2:58. ———
16
5.3002p
17 ———
18 Normal Pag
19 Selected Bibliography PgEnds: TE
20 Berg, Franz. Lob der allerneusten Philosophie. Halle: Unbekannt, 1802.
21 Dischner, Gisela. Caroline und der Jenaer Kreis. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenback, [152], (20)
22 1979.
23 Earle, William. “William James.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. vol. 4. Edited by
24 Paul Edwards. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
25 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Fichtes Werke. Edited by Immanuel Hermann Fichte. 11
26 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971 [1834–1846].
. Briefe. Edited by Manfred Buhr. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Reclam, 1986.
27
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Stimtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Münch-
28
ner Ausgabe). Edited by Karl Richter et al. 21 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag,
29
1985–1998.
30 . Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe (Hamburger Ausgabe). Edited Karl Man-
31 delkow. 6 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988.
32 . Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe. Edited by Emil Staiger. Frank-
33 furt: Insel Verlag, 1966.
34 James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et
35 al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
 Did Friedrich Schelling Kill Auguste Böhmer? 153

1 Plitt, Gustav. Aus Schellings Leben. 3 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1869–1870.

2 “Review of ‘Lob der allerneusten Philosophie.’ ” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. no.
3 225 (10 August 1802): 329.
4 Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of
Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
5
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Briefe und Dokumente. Edited by Horst Fuhr-
6
mans. 3 vols. to date. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1962–1975.
7
. Schellings Werke. Edited by Manfred Schröter. 3rd ed. 14 vols. Munich:
8 Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1979.
9 Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegel, 1794–1802: Seine prosaischen Jugendschriften.
10 Edited by Jacob Minor. 2 vols. Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1882.
11 Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtaus-
12 gabe. Edited by Hans-Joachim Birkner et al. 11 vols. to date. Berlin: Walter de
[153], (21)
13 Gruyter, 1980-.
14 Waitz, Georg, and Erich Schmidt, eds. Caroline: Briefe aus der Frühromantik. 2 vols.
Lines: 218 to 2
15 Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1913.
———
16
* 280.51111p
17 ———
18 Normal Page
19 * PgEnds: PageB
20
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[153], (21)
22
23
24
25
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28
29
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1 Contributors
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
[First Page]
11
12 [155], (1)
13
14
Lines: 0 to 22
15 lloyd e. ambrosius is professor of history at the University of Ne-
———
16 braska–Lincoln. He is the author of Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplo-
matic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge University Press,
0.5pt PgVa
17 ———
18 1987), Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during Custom Page (
19 World War I (Scholarly Resources, 1991), and Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson PgEnds: TEX
20 and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). He
21 is editor of The Crisis of Republicanism: American Politics in the Civil War Era
(University of Nebraska Press, 1990). He was the Mary Ball Washington [155], (1)
22
23 Professor of American History at University College, Dublin, Ireland, and
twice a Fulbright Professor at the Universities of Cologne and Heidelberg,
24
Germany.
25
john milton cooper jr. is the E. Gorton Fox Professor of Amer-
26
ican Institutions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A native of
27
Washington dc, and a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Universities,
28
he previously taught at Wellesley College. He is the author of The Vanity
29
of Power: American Isolationism and the First World War (Greenwood Press,
30
1969), Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855–1918 (University
31
of North Carolina Press, 1977), The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson
32 and Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1983), Pivotal Decades: The
33 United States, 1900–1920 (W. W. Norton, 1990), and Breaking the Heart of
34 the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge
35 University Press, 2001).
 156 Contributors

1 shirley a. leckie is professor of history at the University of Central

2 Florida, where she teaches Women in American History and History of
3 the Trans-Mississippi West among other courses. She is the author of
4 Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) and
5 Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (University of Oklahoma
6 Press, 1993). She edited The Colonel’s Lady on the Western Frontier: The Cor-
7 respondence of Alice Kirk Grierson as a volume in the University of Nebraska
8 Press Women in the West Series in 1989. She is also coauthor of Unlikely
9 Warriors: General Benjamin Grierson and His Family (University of Oklahoma
10 Press, 1984).
11 nell irvin painter is the Edward Professor of American History at
12
Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. at Harvard University after [156], (2)
undergraduate and graduate study at the University of California, Berke-
13
ley, the University of Bordeaux, the University of Ghana, and the University
14 Lines: 22 t
of California, Los Angeles. Before moving to Princeton, she taught at the
15
University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, Chapel ———
16
Hill. The author of five books, including Standing at Armageddon: The United 3.5pt Pg
17 ———
States, 1877–1919 (W. W. Norton, 1987) and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Sym-
18 Normal Pag
bol (W. W. Norton, 1996), she is also the editor of two Penguin Classic
19 PgEnds: TE
women’s ex-slave narratives. Her most recent book is Southern History
20
Across the Color Line (University of North Carolina, 2002).
21 robert j. richards is professor of history, philosophy, and psychol- [156], (2)
22 ogy at the University of Chicago, where he is director of the Fishbein
23 Center for the History of Science. He is the author of Darwin and the
24 Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (University of Chicago
25 Press, 1987), The Meaning of Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 1992),
26 and The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
27 (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
28 r. keith schoppa is the Edward and Catherine Doehler Chair in Asian
29 History at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of six books on
30 China, one of which, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary
31 China (University of California Press, 1995), was awarded the 1997 Asso-
32 ciation for Asian Studies Levenson Prize for the best book on twentieth-
33 century China. He has been a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim
34 Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American
35 Council of Learned Societies, and the East-West Center.
 Contributors 157

1 retha m. warnicke, who earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University,

2 is professor of history at Arizona State University. She is the author of
3 Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Greenwood Press, 1983),
4 The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII
5 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), and The Marrying of Anne of Cleves:
6 Royal Protocol in Tudor England (Cambridge University Press, 2000). With
7 Bettie Anne Doebler, she has written introductions to five volumes of
8 Englishwomen’s funeral sermons, published by Scholars’ Facsimilies &
9 Reprints, 1993–2001.
10
11
12 [157], (3)
13
14 Lines: 30 to 3
15
———
16
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17 ———
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19 * PgEnds: PageB
20
21
[157], (3)
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
1 Index
2
3
4
5
6 Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
7 Abel, Annie Heloise, 19 as in painting, so in poetry. See ut pictura
8 Adams, Abigail, 81 poesis
Adams, John, 81 August, Karl, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 140
9 adolescence, 34, 35 autobiographies, 1–2, 120–21, 124–26
10 adulthood, 34–35 Axson, Stockton, 92, 96 [First Page]
11 African Americans, 10, 103–4, 106–8,

12
118–20, 124–26. See also Douglass, Bach, Johann Sebastian, 99 [159], (1)
Frederick; Ellington, Edward Kennedy Baker, Josephine, 124, 125
13 “Duke”; Truth, Sojourner Baker, Ray Stannard, 91–94
14 Agassiz, Louis, 108, 109 Barthes, Roland, 105, 107, 127n5, 127n6
Lines: 0 to 137
Albion, 71 Barzun, Jacques, 19
15
Die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 133, 146 Battle of Little Big Horn (1876), 8 ———
16 Alliance of Farmers’ Associations, 37, 45 Beard, Charles, 82 0.0pt PgVa
17 American Historical Review, 28–29 Bei Dao, 31
———
American History, teaching of, 23n53 Beijing Review, 29–30
18 Normal Page
American Indians, 11 Beiträge zur Optik (Goethe), 140
19 American West, 14–19, 24n53, 24n54 Bell, Daniel, 89 PgEnds: TEX
20 “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” 124 Bellamy, Edward, 95
Analects, 35 Berry, Kathleen, 68
21
Anne of Cleves: appearance of, 63; Betzinez, Jason, 16 [159], (1)
22 endurance of legends about, 72; biographers: approaches of, 70–71;
23 framework for biography of, 69–70; comparisons by, 94–100; conversations
and German sources, 58; greeting with subjects, 90–94; empathy of, x–xi;
24
ceremony for, 65–66; importance of and neglect of images, 105; selection of
25 family relationships to, x; judicial records subjects, 80–90; subaltern, 126
26 of, 60–61; and official grounds for Biographia literaria (Coleridge), 139
27 divorce, 76n58; and Protestantism, 57; biography: opinions about field, 55;
Warnicke’s reasons for studying, 66, 67, popularity of, ix–x, 74n11; self-
28 70–71 censorship in black, 124–26; value of,
29 Anne of Denmark, 64 13
30 annulments, 59–61, 69 Birth of a Nation, 84
Anthony, Susan B., 68 black studies, 103
31 archives, Tudor, 58–63 Blake, Eubie, 124
32 Aristotle, 105 Blum, John Morton, 90
33 Ars Poetica (Horace), 104, 105 Bogue, Allan, 18–19
art historians, 105 Böhmer, Auguste, xii–xiii, 133–34, 141,
34 art history, 103, 104 144–46, 148
35 arts, definition of, 104 Böhmer, Georg, 141
 160 Index

1 Böhmer-Schlegel, Caroline: and Auguste’s Charles Scribner & Sons, 22n28

death, 145; illness of, 144; imprisonment Chávez, César, 17–18
2
and pregnancy of, 142–43; marriage to Cherokees, 11
3 Schelling, 146; relationship with Georg Chesnut, Charles W., 84
4 Forster, 141; relationship with Schelling, Chiang Kai-shek, 39, 44, 46–48
5 xii, 134, 143–44, 148–49 Chickasaws, 11
Boleyn, Anne: confessions of alleged lovers, China, ix–x, 30–32, 34, 40–42
6 65; coronation of, 65; date of birth, Chinese biographical sources, 35
7 59; endurance of legends about, 72; The Chocolate Dandies, 124
8 framework for biography of, 68–69; Choctaws, 11
importance of family relationships to, christenings, 64
9 x; Ives’s biography of, 55–56; judicial Christina, duchess of Milan, 59
10 records of, 60; letters of, 61–62; portrait chronological structure, 70
11 of, 62, 63; and Protestantism, 57; reasons Civil Rights movement, 7

12
for execution of, 56–57; Warnicke’s class, 14, 16–19 [160], (2)
reasons for studying, 66–67, 70–71 Coben, Stanley, 81–82
13 Book of Genesis, 137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 139
14 Book of Hours, 59 Collins, Patricia Hill, 106
Boots and Saddles (Custer), 8, 22n28 Communist party, 37–39, 42–48
Lines: 137
15 Borah, William E., 80 comparative biography, xi, 80, 94–100 ———
16 Borodin, Michael, 38, 43 complementarity, 104–5
Bourne, Randolph, 82 conception, explanation of, 80–90
0.0pt Pg
17 ———
Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 81 Confucius, 34–35, 39–40
18 The Boy General (Custer), 22n28 Congressional Record, 83 Normal Pag
19 Bragdon, Henry W., 92 Conrad, Joseph, 20 PgEnds: TE
20 Braunschweig, 143 context, ix–x, 27–28, 30, 34, 39–42, 48, 49
Brice, Fannie, 124 controlling images, 106, 120, 123, 126. See
21 Brinkley, Alan, 95 also images [160], (2)
22 Brodie, Fawn, 3–5, 8 conversation, xi–xii, 90–94
23 buffalo soldiers, 5–6 Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa
Burke, Edmund, 89 Whitman (Jeffrey), 17
24
Burnet, Gilbert, 62–63 Cooper, John Milton, Jr., vii; approach to
25 biography of Roosevelt and Wilson,
26 The Camera and the Pencil, or, the Heliographic 88–90; early experiences as biographer,
Art (Root), 116 79–80; on empathy of biographer, x–xi;
27
Carby, Hazel, 129n20 selection of subjects, 83–87
28 Carroll R. Pauley Memorial Endowment Cotton Club of Harlem, 121–23, 122
29 Symposium, vii Coughlin, Father Charles, 95
cartes-de-visite. See portraiture Crancé, Jean Baptiste Dubois, 142
30
Castillo, Richard Griswold del, 17–18 Crawford, Patricia, 53
31 Catherine of Aragon, 59, 61, 69 Creeks, 11
32 Cayuse Indians, 17 Croly, Herbert, 82, 83
Celestine III, Pope, 62 Cromwell, Thomas, 55, 58, 59, 61
33
César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (Castillo and cultural revolution, Chinese, 37, 40–41
34 Garcia), 17–18, 24n60 culture: and biography of Shen Dingyi,
35 Chapuys, Eustace, 59–60 39–42, 46–48; and challenges of writing
 Index 161

1 biography, 30–35, 49; contrast between
Eastern and Western, 29–36; and
2
controlling images, 106; and history,
3 ix–x, 14, 27–28; and Sojourner Truth’s
4 portraits, 107
5 Custer, Elizabeth Bacon, 7–8, 22n28
Custer, George Armstrong, 7, 8
6 Erickson, Erik, 3
7 Dai Jitao, 42–44, 47–48
8 Dante, 136
Darnton, Robert, 29–30
9 Darrow, Clarence, 86
10 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie
11 (Schelling), 149
England: and cultural biases, x; gender
biases in, 53–56, 67–68, 70–71;
inadequacy of archives on, 58–62;
judicial records of, 60–61; rites and
customs in, 63–67; teaching history of,
71–72
Englishwomen, 53–54, 67–68, 73
ethics, 33
ethnicity, 14, 16–19
ethnohistory, 11–12
Eugen, Karl, Duke of Baden-Würtemberg,
136
Eurocentric thought, 103–4

12
death customs, Tudor, 64–65 [161], (3)
Debo, Angie, ix, 11–12, 16, 19 Fairbank, John K., 27
13 Debo, Edward, 11 family, x, 70–73
14 Debs, Eugene, 82 Family Portrait (Bowen), 81
demagogues, 82 “farmers’ associations,” 37, 45
Lines: 271 to 4
15 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 82 Fei Xiaotong, 33, 35–36 ———
16 diaries, 92–94. See also personal papers The Feminization of American Culture (Douglas),
Dickens, A. G., 57 88
0.0pt PgVa
17 ———
Dixon, Thomas, 84 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xii–xiii, 134, 136,
18 Doebler, Bettie Anne, 66 137, 139–40, 146–49, 150n5 Normal Page
19 Douglas, Anne, 88 Fish, Stanley, 1–2 PgEnds: TEX
20 Douglas, Stephen, 99 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 97
Douglass, Frederick, xii, 106, 107, 110–20, Five Tribes of Oklahoma, 11
21 113, 128n15 Following the Guidon (Custer), 8 [161], (3)
22 DuBois, W. E. B., 82, 84, 110 foreign ambassadors, 59–60
23 Forster, Georg, 141–42
Early Romantics. See Jena Romantics Foucault, Michel, 127n5
24
East Township, Yaqian, 39, 40, 47 Foxe, John, 56, 57
25 Edel, Leon, ix, xi, 8–9, 11, 12, 19–20 Frederick, duke elector of Saxony, 63
26 Edward VI, King of England, 64, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going
69–70 Down (Bogue), 18–19
27
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 99 Friedmann, Paul, 60
28 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 62 friendships, Chinese, 32
29 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 53–55, Frost, Robert, 82
57–58, 62, 64 Froude, James A., 57–58
30
Elizabeth of York, 65 The Fugitive’s Song, 116, 117
31 Ellington, Edward Kennedy “Duke,” xii, Fulbright, William, 91
32 106, 110, 120–24, 122, 128n19 funerals, 64–65
Elton, G. R., 55, 66–67
33
Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 2–3 Galt, Edith Bolling, 93
34 empathy, x–xi, 9 Garcia, Richard A., 17–18
35 The End of Ideology (Bell), 89 Gaskill, Malcolm, 60
 162 Index

1 gender, 14, 16–19, 53–56, 62–63, 67–68, christenings, 64; on death of Jane
70–71, 73, 88 Seymour, 65; and marriage to Anne of
2
General Custer in Kansas and Texas (Custer), 8 Cleves, 60–61, 63, 65–66; and marriage
3 George, Henry, 95 to Catherine of Aragon, 61; relationship
4 George, Lord Rochford, 60 with Anne Boleyn, 56–57, 68
5 German sources, 58 Henry VII, King of England, 65
Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place Herder, Johann Gottfried, 137
6 (Debo), ix, 16 Heyme, Therese, 141–42
7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 139–40, historians: art, 105; challenges to, as
8 145 biographers, 81–83; comparisons by,
Goldberg, Robert, 91 94; need for biographies of, 18; of
9 Goldwater, Barry, 91 philosophy, 134–35, 147–49; relationship
10 Gombrich, Ernst, 105 with past, 27–29; tasks of intellectual,
11 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 108 135–36

12
Goodman, Nelson, 105 historical analysis, viii–xiii, 27–28 [162], (4)
Göttingen, 141 historical materials (wenshi ziliao), 36, 48
13 Graff, Henry F., 19 history: creation of, 27; and cultural biases,
14 Grant, Ulysses S., 5, 9–11 x; and gender, 14, 88; of ideas, xii–xiii;
Grant: A Biography (McFeely), 9–11 importance of placing subject in, 12–14;
Lines: 420
15 Gray, Herman, 126 interpretation through individuals, 68; ———
16 Grayson, Cary T., 93–94 oral, xi, 83, 91–94; political, 66–67, 72,
The Great Plains (Webb), 89 80; revitalization through biography, 19–
0.0pt Pg
17 ———
Grierson, Alice Kirk, 5–6 20; teaching English, 71–72; Tuchman
18 Grierson, Benjamin, 5–6 on biography as tool of, 2; women’s, Normal Pag
19 Gries, Johann Diederich, 151n24 3–4 PgEnds: TE
20 groups, cultural, 31–32 Hofstadter, Richard, 90
guanxi, 32, 34, 40, 47 Holbein, Hans the Younger, 63
21 Guanxi clique, 48 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 136 [162], (4)
22 The Guns of August (Tuchman), 2 Holmes, William, 82
23 Guomindang (Nationalist party), 38–40, Horace, 104, 105
42–49 Houghton Library, 85
24
House, Edward M., xi, 84–85, 93–94
25 Handel, George Frideric, 99 Howard, Catherine, 59
26 Hangzhou, 44, 47 Howard, Thomas, 65
Hangzhou’s First Normal School, 40 Humboldt, Alexander von, 138, 139, 142
27
Hardenberg, Friedrich von, 140, 143 Hutchinson singers’ sheet music, 116, 117
28 Harlan, Louis, 6–8
29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 136 idealism, 136, 147
Heilbrun, Carolyn, 68 Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign
30
Hemings, Madison, 5 Relations (Osgood), 86
31 Hemings, Sally, 4–5 ideas, history of, xii–xiii
32 Hemingway, Ernest, 9, 97 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Schelling),
Hendrick, Burton J., 86, 91–92 138–39
33
Henry, Patrick, 72 identities, ix, x, 32–33, 40–42, 44–46
34 Henry VIII, King of England: attitudes images, xi–xii, 103–8, 110, 120, 123–26. See
35 toward biographies of, 55; and also portraiture
 Index 163

1 individualism, ix–x, 2–3, 28–32, 36–37, 49 Limerick, Patricia, 15

individuals, interpretation of history Lincoln, Abraham, 99
2
through, 68 Link, Arthur, 90, 98
3 Innocents at Home: Reagan’s America, 23n49 Li (of Guangxi clique), 48
4 Ives, E. W., 55–56 Lippmann, Walter, 82
5 literature. See writing
Jackson, Stonewall, 95 Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (Plutarch),
6 Jacobi, Friedrich, 137 2
7 James I, King of Great Britain, 64 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 95
8 James, William, 134 “Lob der allerneusten Philosophie” (“Praise
Jefferson, Martha, 4 of the newest Philosophy”), 133
9 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, 16–17 Lomask, Milton, 70, 72
10 Jena Romantics, xii, 134, 140–41, 143 Long, Huey, 82, 83, 95
11 Johnson, Andrew, 79, 83, 86 Louis XII, King of France, 58–59

12
Joly, Martine, 105 Louis XIV, King of France, 66 [163], (5)
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 Lyles, Aubrey, 124, 125
13 judicial records, English, 60–61
14 justice, 56, 70, 71 MacArthur, Douglas, 99
Mainz, 141–42
Lines: 555 to
15 Kant, Immanuel, 136–38 Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick ———
16 Kellogg, Louise, 18–19 Douglass, 110, 112
Keniston, Kenneth, 34 Mao Tse-tung, 40–41
0.0pt PgVa
17 ———
Kennan, George, 82 marriage, 70–73
18 Kennedy, John, 87, 99 Mary I, Queen of England, 57–58 Normal Page
19 Kohut, Thomas, 28–29 Mary (sister of Henry VIII), 58–59 PgEnds: TEX
20 Ku Klux Klan, 10 Mattingly, Garrett, 56, 70
May Fourth Movement, 37
21 La Follette, Robert, 82 McDaniel, Hattie, 108 [163], (5)
22 “lamp of experience,” 80 McFeely, William, 2, 9–11
23 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent de, 138 McLaren, A. N., 54
League of Nations, 99–100 Memorial Hall of the Revolution, 47
24 Leckie, Shirley A., vii; on barriers between Mendelson, Sara, 53
25 personal and public, xiii; on empathy Mendelssohn, Moses, 141
26 for subjects, x–xi; on historical analysis, Mexican Americans, 18, 24n60
viii–ix; work on Griersons’ biography, 5 Michaelis, Caroline. See Böhmer-Schlegel,
27
Lees, B. A., 62 Caroline
28 Leonardo da Vinci, 126n2 Michaelis, Johann David, 141
29 Lerner, Gerda, 13–14, 23n53 Michaelis, Philip, 142
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 126 Mildmay, Lady Grace, 62
30
Leti, Gregorio, 61 Miller, Flournoy, 124, 125
31 letters, 61–62, 86. See also personal papers mimesis, 105, 110, 118
32 Levy, David, 82 minstrelsy, 107–10, 111, 122, 123–26
Lewis, C. S., 55–56 Mitchell, Broadus, 91
33
Lewis, Sinclair, 94 Mitchell, Margaret, 108
34 Life in Dakota Territory with General Custer Mitchell, W. J. T., 105
35 (Custer), 8 “mixed media” structure, 70
 164 Index

1 Moganshan, 44, 48 personal papers, 81–83, 86. See also diaries;

More, Thomas, 62 letters
2
Mowry, George, 90 philosophers, 134–35, 147–49
3 Mundy, Johnson, 118, 119 Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und
4 Muray, Nickolas, 129n20 Kritizismus (Schelling), 138
Murray, Albert, 124 Phoenix Mountain, 47
5
Murry, Anna, 110 pictura, 104
6 Plato, 105
7 Nadel, Ira Bruce, 3, 67 Plumb, J. H., 56–57
Plutarch, 2
8 names, 39–41, 44, 46, 49
poetica, 104
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
9 political history, 66–67, 72, 80
American Slave (Douglass), 112, 114, 115
10 political lives, 3–7. See also public lives
Naturphilosophie, 138–39
popular culture, 103, 106, 120, 123–24
11 Neale, Sir John, 55
portraiture: of Anne Boleyn, 62, 63; of
12 networks, 43, 45–49. See also relationships [164], (6)
Frederick Douglass, 107, 110–20, 113;
Nevins, Allan, 86 and racism and sexism, xii; of Sojourner
13
New Dictionary of Biography, 70 Truth, 107–10, 109
14 New Freedom, 98–99 post-structuralism, 105, 127n5, 128n8 Lines: 721
15 Newman, 135 Potter, David, 72
New Nationalism, 98 Presley, Elvis, 128n15
———
16
New Republic, 82 primary sources, 81–83 0.0pt Pg
17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 86, 87, 89, 90 private lives, xiii, 3–8, 29. See also ———
18 1960s, post-, 104 self-concept Long Page
19 Nixon, Richard M., 99 The Promise of American Life (Croly), 82 PgEnds: TE
Northern Expedition, 38–39, 44 Protestantism, 57, 63
20 psychobiography, 3
“Notes from the City of the Sun” (Bei), 31
21 Novalis. See Hardenberg, Friedrich von psychology, 28–30
[164], (6)
22 public lives, xiii, 5–8
objective idealism, 136, 147 public records, 83
23
“Oklahoma spirit,” 11
24 Old West, 15 Queen Victoria (Strachey), 2–3
25 Opler, Morris, 16
race, 14
26 oral history, xi, 83, 91–94
Reagan, Ronald, 12–13, 23n49
Ordeal of the Union (Nevins), 86
27 Reagan’s America (Wills), 12–13, 23n49
Osgood, Robert, 86
28 relationships, 32–36, 40. See also networks
religion, 62–64, 68
29 Page, Walter Hines, x, 80, 83–88, 91,
Remond, Charles Lenox, 114, 115
92–93
30 Renaissance, Western European, 104,
Painter, Nell Irvin, vii; biography of 105
31 Sojourner Truth, 28; on Sojourner rent-resistance movement, 37, 45
32 Truth’s individualism, 31–32; on use of Reubein, Joseph, 133
33 images, xi–xii “rhetoric of the image,” 105, 107
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 81–82, 83 Richard III, King of England, 62
34
paragone, 104, 126n2 Richards, Robert J., vii; approach to
35 Paulet, Sir William, 65 Schelling biography, 135–36; on
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 127n8 philosophy and biography, xii–xiii
 Index 165

1 Riedesel, Baron von, 138 and Western Hills faction, 40, 42–44,
Robeson, Paul, 129n20 48–49
2
romantische Naturphilosophie, 139 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 95
3 Roosevelt, Theodore, x, xi, 80, 83, 85–90, Shore, Miles, 28–29
4 94–100 Shuffle Along, 124, 125
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (Wister), 92 Sidonia, Medina, 56
5
Root, Marcus Aurelius, 116–18, 119 “The Significance of the Frontier in
6 Rosenstone, Robert, 27–29 American History” (Turner), 14–15
7 Royster, Charles, 95 Simonides of Ceos, 105, 127n4
rural reconstruction, 39, 44–47 Simpson, Brooks, 10
8
“sincerity,” 29
9 Sander, Nicholas, 62, 63 Sissle, Noble, 124
10 Sandoz, Mari, 19 Smith, Jean Edward, 10
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 128n8 sociology, 29
11
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph: and Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol (Painter),
12 [165], (7)
Auguste’s death, 145–46, 148; break with 107, 118
13 Fichte, 146–49; education of, 136–38; Souls of Black Folk (DuBois), 82
life-altering experiences of, xii; marriage sources, 35. See also primary sources;
14 to Caroline, 146; philosophy of, 133, secondary sources Lines: 885 to
15 134; relationship with Caroline, xii, 134, Spalding, Eliza, 17
143–44, 148–49; Richards’s approach to Spanish-American War, 96
———
16
biography about, 135–36; at University of Stafford, Barbara Maria, 126n2 0.0pt PgVa
17 Jena, 139–40, 143 Steffens, Henrik, 145, 151n24 ———
18 Schiller, Friedrich, 139–40, 143 stereotypes, 103, 106–8, 120, 123–26 Long Page
19 Schlegel, Friedrich, 140–45 Stevens, Thaddeus, 83 PgEnds: TEX
Schlegel, Wilhelm, 140–46 Stevenson, Adlai, 87
20 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 144, 151n27 Stilwell and the American Experience in China
21 scholarship, 103–5 (Tuchman), 2
[165], (7)
22 Schoppa, R. Keith, vii, ix–x Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 108
Schorer, Mark, 94 Strachey, Lytton, 2–3
23 secondary sources, 62, 63 structuralism, 128n8
24 self-censorship, 124–26 subaltern biographers, 126
25 self-concept, 9–12. See also private lives subaltern subjects, 103, 105, 106
self-fashioning, 123, 126 subjective idealism, xii–xiii, 136, 147
26 self-positing, 137 subjects: avoidance of preconceived
27 self-recognition, 137 notions about, 87–90; conversations
28 Seminoles, 11 with, xi–xii, 90–94; empathy for,
semiotics, 104–7, 118, 127n5, 127n8 x–xi; placement in history, 12–14;
29 sexuality, 72, 73 selection of, 80–90; subaltern, 103, 105,
30 Seymour, Jane, 56, 57, 65 106
31 Shanghai, 38, 40 Sumner, Charles, 80, 83
Shanghai Marxist cell, 37 Sun Yat-sen, 37–38
32 Shenbao, 45 System des transzendentalen Idealismus
33 Shen Dingyi: assassination of, 39, 42, (Schelling), 146–49
44–49; focus of biographer of, 33–34;
34
identities of, ix, x, 40–42, 44–46; Tenting on the Plains (Custer), 8
35 individuality of, 36–37, 49; networks of, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, 61
43, 45–49; political activities of, 37–38; Thomas, John, 95
 166 Index

1 Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (Brodie), Weekly Review, 37

3–5 wenshi ziliao (historical materials), 36, 48
2
Tieck, Ludwig, 141, 143, 145 Western Hills faction, 38–40, 42–44, 48–49
3 Tittler, Robert, 71–72 Western Hills Zhejiang Garrison, 44
4 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 82 Western Historical Quarterly, 15
topical structure, 70 West, Rebecca, 82
5
The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and West Texas State Teachers College, 11
6 Letters of Walter Hines Page (Hendrick), 86 “What’s a Man Like You Doing in a Group
7 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 16 Like This?” (Schoppa), 42
True West, 15 Where’s the Rest of Me? (Reagan), 12
8
Trumbull, Lyman, 79, 83, 85–87 White Terror, 39, 44, 47
9 truth, 56, 70, 71, 106, 126 White, William Allen, 92, 98
10 Truth, Sojourner, xi–xii, 28, 106–10, 109, Whitman, Marcus, 17
118–20 Whitman, Narcissa, 17 [Last Page]
11 Tübinger Stift, 136 Wild West, 15
12 [166], (8)
Tuchman, Barbara, 2 William, duke of Cleves, 69
13 Tudor biographies, 53–62, 72–73 Williams, T. Harry, 82
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 14–15, 18–19, Wills, Garry, 12–14
14 89–90 Wilson, Woodrow: approach to biography Lines: 1027
15 Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, of, x, xi; association with Walter Hines
6, 7 Page, 84; comparative biography about, ———
16
80, 94–100; Cooper’s reasons for 0.0pt Pg
17 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 108 selecting as subject, 83, 85, 86–87; ———
18 University of Jena, 139–40, 143 and “League fight,” 100; preconceived Normal Pag
19 University of Leipzig, 138 notions about, 88–90; use of oral history
* PgEnds: Pa
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 71 in biographies of, 91–94
20 University of Oklahoma Press, 16 Winks, Robin, 56, 63–64, 70
21 ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry), Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 137
[166], (8)
22 xii, 104–6, 126 Wister, Owen, 92
Women of the English Renaissance and
23 van Cleave Alexander, Michael, 65 Reformation (Warnicke), 66
24 Vandiver, Frank E., 3 women’s history, x, 3–4
25 Vardaman, James K., 82, 83 Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (Link),
Veit, Dorothea, 141, 144–46, 151n27 90
26 Woods, Randall, 91
27 Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Woodward, C. Vann, 82
Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity Wortman, Richard, 68
28
(Gutiérrez), 24n60 Wotton, Nicholas, 63
29 Wang Jingwei, 43 writing, 104–7, 110, 134–35
30 Warnicke, Retha M., vii; on barriers Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (Edel), 8
between personal and public, xiii; on
31
history and cultural biases, x; reasons Yaqian, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47
32 for studying Anne of Cleves and Anne
33 Boleyn, 66–67, 70–71 Zhang Jingjiang, 46
Washington, Booker T., 6–7, 84, 110 Zhang (Western Hills faction leader), 48
34
Webb, Walter Prescott, 89–90 Zhejiang, 43, 44, 46–47
35