The event had been announced in an advertisement in the Washington Post. I had seen Schama's essay "Visualizing History" listed on Arts and Letters Daily, and was interested to hear the author in person. The event was part of a series called the "Dean's Colloquium" featuring prominent historians.
Schama had just completed two years of filming a history of Britain for the BBC. His observations on the antagonism between academic history and popular history were trenchant and intriguing. After all, he had taught in England and at Harvard as well as at Columbia University. He wrote for the New Yorker when Tina Brown was editor, and has published several historical studies, including CITIZENS and LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY.
But even more striking than Schama's historical talk, entitled "History Beyond the Academy," was what happened before and afterward.
Schama's introduction was by one Professor Schwartz, a recently tenured feminist professor who seemed to speak in the very jargon that Schama was urging the profession to reject. Professor Schwartz looked rather like the Stalinist figures seen in movies critical of the Worker's Paradise, comedies from the former Yugoslavia by directors like Dusan Makavejev. Dressed in a mannish suit, with close cropped hair, she spoke in a stern monotone for what seemed to be an hour (and probably was twenty minutes) prior to Schama's address. So dull were her remarks that the precis of Schama's work conveyed an impression entirely at odds with what Schama himself actually said as soon as she finished. Instead of remaining on stage, Professor Schwartz went into the audience and seemed to this observer to be watching everything Schama said for signs of ideological deviationism.
The only explanation I could come up with for Professor Schwartz's presence on the program was that she was some kind of enforcer. Her name had not appeared in the newspaper advertisment, nor on the brochure accompanying his talk. And she seemed to represent the very kind of dull academic history to which Schama was urging alternatives.
Despite her off-putting introduction, the audience which endured Professor Schwartz's lecture heard a witty and irreverent Schama talk in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner (though from a prepared text) about the importance of historical truth.
Although he needed an editor, and rambled on too long, taking perhaps too many side roads, his talk was in the British historical tradition of A.J.P. Taylor or even Macaulay. Clear, compelling, and easy to understand. He wants us to know that history is for everyone. And that there are links between the past and now.
Even as Schama made his BBC series on British history, the expulsion of the Jews in 1280 still upset him. He told a story of Jewish refugees stripped of all their worldly goods and then drowned on a riverbank. When historians said that the expulsion went fairly smoothly, Schama wanted us to know that this is what it meant, that only some Jews were killed, that most escaped to Holland or elsewhere. And as he told a West Indian Britisher working on the BBC staff, Schama wanted to be sure that the history of Britain was his as well.
But in the question and answer session, Schama shared his dilemma. After writing CITIZENS, he was accused of a Thatcherite view of the French Revolution by Le Monde, among others. Apparently, his thesis, that the excesses of the Terror could be found in the early stages of the rebellion, was offensive to the left, which read it as a critique of socialist revolutions to follow. Schama was praised by Le Figaro, which made matters worse, he said. Indeed, although he considers himself a wet leftist, he found that his friends did not speak to him for years aftter publication.
It must have wounded Schama gravely to be thought a conservative. For he made special efforts in responding to questions -- under the watchful gaze of Professor Schwartz -- to say that he liked Howard Zinn's Marxist people's history, although he found it "misguided," while he "hated" Paul Johnson, especially because of his book critical of intellectuals.
The difference in tone was remarkable, for after all, Johnson is a popular historian whose bestsellers, while flawed, fan the flames of historical inquiry. And Howard Zinn, although a readable historian, is an apologist for regimes which have murdered millions and deprived millions more of their basic freedoms.
Such genuflection to the left became more apparent in one of the final questions. Schama was asked: Given his commitment to empirical truth, what if your historical research were to reveal that policies of Ronald Reagan had been right?
Schama paused, replied that he hoped it would not turn out that, for example, Reagan had been right about Iran-Contra, and paused again. But, he said, if it turned out that Ronald Reagan were right, "I would say so."
There was a pause.
"And then I would kill myself."
Although the remark was greeted by approving chuckles from the assembled historians, the joke revealed the sad state of academic history in America today. That is Simon Schama's Dilemma:Where the glittering prizes are controlled by the academy, to admit that Ronald Reagan might have been right in any historical sense would be professional suicide.
So much for academic freedom, the clash of ideas, the disinterested pursuit of truth, and the light which intellectual friction might generate. As and end to the evening, it was both fascinating and sad.
Alistair Cooke's Letter From America (BBC)