Communication

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Articles

To the Editors:

Daniel Wickberg's excellent article, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New" (AHR June 2007, 661–684), slips when it claims that "the problem with the history of emotions is its tendency to separate emotion from cognition, to treat emotions as if they were a discrete realm rather than seeing them as linked to larger characterological patterns involving modes of perception and thinking as well as feeling" (682). Recent historians of emotion, all heavily influenced by cognitive psychology, do precisely what he says they do not. In American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style, Peter N. Stearns looks at an "emotional culture" that he links to explicit standards of comportment, changing family structures, "culturally logical goals" (14), and "deeply held popular beliefs" (2). William M. Reddy, in The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, defines emotions as "goal-relevant activations of thought material that exceed the translating capacity of attention within a short time horizon" (128), thus recognizing that emotions are a form of thought. My own Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages points out that emotions "are `upheavals of thoughts'—as Nussbaum has put it—that involve judgments about whether something is good or bad for us. These assessments depend, in turn, upon our values, goals, and presuppositions—products of our society, community, and individual experience" (191). I argue that people live (and lived) in "emotional communities." The historian of these communities "seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others' emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore" ("Worrying about Emotions in History," AHR, June 2002, 842). This seems very close to seeking "patterns involving modes of perception and thinking as well as feeling."
Indeed, in my view the chief difference between the study of "sensibilities" and the study of "emotions" in history is that the methodology for the latter is more transparent and replicable than it is for the former. As Wickberg says, every sort of source is useful for the enterprise. But it is much easier to say (and prove) that a source expresses, say, anger (which—in the way it is expressed, its valuation, its context—must then be connected to values, ideals, goals, expectations, and other "characterological patterns") than to point to its "sensibility." We have a whole vocabulary for the emotions—anger, grief, joy, and so on—in addition to the term "emotional," which indicates expressions replete with emotions. Applying this vocabulary wholesale to the past is anachronistic, but, at least in Western cultures, there is a long history of emotionally valent terms. Cicero, for example, listed the perturbationes, his word for the Greek pathê, and thus we have a relevant vocabulary for the late Roman Republic. Thomas Aquinas did the same for the thirteenth century, Descartes for the seventeenth. Historians of emotions are on fairly solid ground, then, when they look for these and related terms within documents from the relevant periods, even if the documents are not explicitly concerned with emotions. Wickberg speaks of finding "the terms of representation" (662). Historians of emotions have them to hand. Like historians of sensibilities, they then see how these terms both express and work with "the generalized values and modes of perception and feeling" in the documents. Thus Stearns, for example, shows how the meanings and experiences of guilt, grief, and love in the Victorian period were transformed in the decades around 1920 to produce a very different culture that involved thoughts, feelings, and actions. Reddy notes how the "sentimentalism" of the salons and theaters (a complex blend of emotional expectations and modes of expression) was replicated in the political life of the early French Revolution, becoming an ideology as well as a way of feeling. My own work shows how the various emotional configurations of different emotional communities were connected to particular religious beliefs, political goals, and familial concerns.
In the end, it is Wickberg who tends to separate emotion from cognition and to privilege the latter. He seems to be more interested in the "underlying epistemological, moral, and aesthetic framework for comprehending reality" (662) implied by modes of feeling than he is in the feelings themselves. I hope Wickberg will agree that it should be the historian's goal, however elusive, to capture both emotions and cognition, contextualize them in a way that gives them purchase even for traditional historians of power, and show how they both reflect and motivate historical change.

Barbara H. Rosenwein
Loyola University
Chicago

Daniel Wickberg responds:

I thank Barbara Rosenwein for her useful corrective to my brief comments on the history of emotions. I am happy to defer to her expertise in this area. Historians of emotions are indeed, as she points out, concerned with cognition. My own pointing to the significance of Stearns's "emotionology" and Reddy's use of psychology would indicate that I was not unaware of this. That said, I think what I was trying to get at, if somewhat clumsily, was that the isolation of emotion as a distinct object of historical analysis has the consequence of narrowing the range of mental and intellectual phenomena to those immediately relevant to the emotions and emotional life. This is true in two senses. First, the subject matter of intellectual history—philosophies, ideologies, conceptual schemes—becomes relevant to the historian of emotions when philosophers, polemicists, and thinkers take emotions themselves as their object of concern, but not otherwise. Undoubtedly, historians of emotions—and Rosenwein foremost among them—have looked to the various categories and terminology of emotions found in the writings of philosophers, psychologists, religious and social thinkers, among others. The result is that we get Plato on the passions separated from Platonic metaphysics; Descartes on the emotions undisturbed by Cartesian foundationalism; Adam Smith on sympathy divorced from Smith on market society. My point in trying to define a history of sensibilities was to suggest that metaphysical outlooks, epistemological commitments, modes of perception, and ways of feeling are bound up with one another. The history of emotions foregrounds thinking about emotion—its norms, its categories, its place in human nature—at the expense of other kinds of thought. And while I use canonical thinkers as a matter of easy reference here, I want to suggest that this is more generally true of the treatment of thought: the historian of emotions rifles through texts looking for specific and explicit references to emotion, rather than to the underlying sensibility of the text. Second, historians of emotions are concerned with cognition as a psychological process in which emotions are expressed or restrained. Here we should distinguish between thought as process and thought as product. I have no doubt that Reddy and others are concerned with the specifically psychological processes by which emotions are expressed in particular situations with particular constraints, with emotions as part of the thought process, and bound up with ideas in that sense. I am less convinced that the culturally specific ideas and forms of thought—the product of thinking, if we may put it that way—beyond those focused on emotions themselves, have been integrated into the history of emotions. Certainly Reddy's focus on sentimentalism points in this direction; I would be more convinced if sentimentalism and rationalism were both understood as emotional systems.
My intent was not to pit the history of emotions against the history of sensibilities, but to show the ways in which they partake of similar concerns; my own work on the history of humor and of sympathy might very well be seen as part of the history of emotions. But Rosenwein wants to argue that the history of emotions is epistemologically superior to what I call the history of sensibilities, that the history of emotions has a "transparent and replicable" methodology lacking in the history of sensibilities. I must disagree. Rosenwein argues that "it is much easier to say (and prove) that a source expresses, say, anger ... than to point to its `sensibility.'" The presence of a vocabulary of emotions that find particular instantiation within texts is hardly the same thing as the "expression" of those emotions. The text or source, read carefully in conjunction with other texts and sources, can tell us about the representation of emotion, the way it figures in a discourse, the values attached to it, its role in a way of thinking. But it requires the same sophistication in looking for the ways in which emotion is discussed as the historian of sensibilities requires in looking for underlying forms of perception, feeling, and value. I am sure that Rosenwein would concur that the discussion of heated emotions in the most clinical and dispassionate way, for instance, indicates a sensibility quite different from that of a fiery polemic full of fury and bitterness that never mentions the term "anger." In other words, just looking to the vocabulary of emotions is inadequate in the interpretation of sources, whether we are writing a history of emotions or a history of sensibilities. In any case, an "easier" method is not necessarily a better one. The fact that sensibilities are not the explicit subject matter of sources does not mean that we should regard them as unknowable.
I hope that my essay will be read, among other things, as a brief for bringing intellectual and emotional history together, and not the privileging of one over the other. I thought I was being more critical of intellectual history for its separation of formal thought from the terms of perception and feeling than I was of the history of emotions. Rosenwein, however, finds a lurking intellectual historian in my text, busy separating emotion from cognition and privileging the latter, because I am not interested in "the feelings themselves," but only the sensibilities of which they are a part. I would be the last to say that I am in full control of the meanings in my essay, and I find it interesting that she has found this orientation where I thought I was doing the opposite. I will leave it to readers to decide whether Rosenwein is correct about my predispositions. At the very least, I appreciate the opportunity she has given me to clarify my ideas (if not my feelings!).

Daniel Wickberg
University of Texas,
Dallas

Reviews

To the Editors:

Stephen G. Rabe recently reviewed my book Gunboat Democracy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama (AHR, June 2007, 823–824). Rabe is known for the well-researched books on U.S. foreign relations with Latin America that he has penned over the past twenty-five years. Rabe advocates the conventional scholarly interpretation of the motives behind U.S. interventions in Latin America during the Cold War. He may include himself as one of those historians who have "concluded that the U.S. interventions degraded the political, military, and socioeconomic structures of these Western Hemisphere societies and that, especially in the Cold War period, the interventions undermined constitutional procedures and democratic processes."
Unfortunately, the conventional interpretation fails to fully answer the question posed to me by one of my Davidson students several years ago, "If the U.S. invasion of Grenada was so bad, why is Grenada now one of the world's most stable democracies?" My inability to adequately answer the student sparked my research, and I eventually focused on the only three episodes of large-scale armed U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War.
Any serious challenge to an orthodox historical interpretation must be thoroughly researched and documented. For Gunboat Democracy, I reviewed over 1,000 recently declassified U.S. government documents on the invasions that were previously unavailable to scholars. I consulted over 200 books and secondary articles, over 100 primary public sources such as U.S. congressional testimony and government reports, and conducted oral interviews. The conventional position asserts that during the Cold War the United States decided to intervene in Latin America and the Caribbean even though policymakers saw no serious security threat; instead, they manufactured reasons in order to justify more nefarious motives such as race and economic imperialism.
Yet the evidence makes it clear that in these three episodes, the decision to intervene was "predicated on a strongly held view that a serious security threat existed" (Gunboat Democracy, 1). I also contend that the perception of a security threat is only part of the story of what motivated these policymakers to intervene. Successive U.S. policymakers also decided to put "boots on the ground" in these cases because the costs of doing so were relatively low; Central America and the Caribbean was an area of the world where Washington was quite comfortable exercising military force; and forceful action in America's "backyard" would send a clear domestic and international message of U.S. resolve regarding communism (Dominican Republic and Grenada) or the War on Drugs (Panama).
The evidence is also quite clear that after each intervention the countries in question eventually emerged more democratic than before—and democracy is appropriately defined as including free elections, civil society, a professional military, and more. In these three cases, the conventional interpretation ignores what happened next.
To reach conclusions on the need, morality, and lasting impact of these interventions, it is important to also consider the post-intervention element as part of the story—whether things went well (these three countries) or not. For example, the violent and highly unstable aftermath in Iraq will play a significant role in how history will judge the U.S. decision to invade the country. Given that U.S. vice president Richard Cheney, former secretary of state Colin Powell, and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz were all key officials in both the Panama and Iraq invasions, the relative ease of regime change and democracy by force in the Panama case might have led these same policymakers to mistakenly conclude that the same thing would be likely in Iraq.
The conventional interpretation holds that "U.S. military invasions and occupations rarely produce salubrious results." As evidence, Rabe states that the Dominican Republic "usually ranks on the lists of `failed states' compiled by foreign policy analysts." It does not. In 2007, the annual Failed States Index from Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace ranked 177 countries from failed (#1) to best (#177). The Dominican Republic scored #69, between China and Israel; Grenada, #105, between Mexico and India; and Panama, #131, near Costa Rica.
All told, these countries enjoy relatively good, if imperfect, constitutional procedures and democratic processes. Further, unlike the intervention in the Dominican Republic, the stronger democracies of Panama and Grenada are the two that experienced full-scale military invasion and regime change. They also happen to be two of the few countries in the world that have permanently dismantled their armed forces.
The conventional interpretation can be right: the U.S.-hatched overthrow of Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz was cynical and unquestionably deleterious to Guatemala's future development. But the Guatemala case does "not automatically make the Dominican Republic, Grenada, or Panama interventions equally wrong or immoral" (Gunboat Democracy, 228).

Russell Crandall
Davidson College

Stephen G. Rabe responds:

I stand by my review (AHR, June 2007, 823–824) of Gunboat Democracy by Russell Crandall.
Gunboat Democracy is a "neo-conservative" advocacy piece posing as scholarship. The author did not conduct archival research in the United States, Latin America, or the Caribbean; and relied on published U.S. government documents, which are readily available, and interviews with U.S. government officials who played a role in the invasions of sovereign nations. Scholars examining Crandall's bibliography will come to similar conclusions.
When I began composing the review in 2006, I relied on the 2005 "Failed States Index" developed by the Fund for Peace and published in Foreign Policy (July/August 2005, 56–65). It listed the Dominican Republic as a "failed state." The Dominican Republic is happily making political and socioeconomic progress. But recent developments can hardly be ascribed to the 1965 U.S. military invasion, as Professor Crandall would have it. The 1965 invasion blocked the restoration of constitutional rule and the return of the popularly elected Dominican leader Juan Bosch. Lyndon Johnson thereafter ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spare no effort to ensure the election of a U.S.-backed candidate. The CIA, through lavish campaign spending, succeeded in "electing" in 1966 the authoritarian, arch-conservative Joaquífin Balaguer as president of the Dominican Republic. Balaguer, who was a protégé of the notorious dictator Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), dominated Dominican political life for the next three decades. How the events of 1965–1966 promoted democracy, constitutionalism, and respect for human rights, as Crandall claims, is beyond me and other scholars who work in the field of inter-American relations.
Perhaps Professor Crandall would benefit if he secured something like a Fulbright Fellowship and taught for a time in Latin America and the Caribbean. He would probably find that his international students would be far more skeptical than his Davidson College students about his thesis that U.S. interventionism and imperialism makes for human progress. Indeed, Latin Americans reacted strongly to Woodrow Wilson's rationalization that "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men," when he ordered the military invasion of Mexico in 1916. Gunboat Democracy is a reiteration of President Wilson's hoary policy dressed up in the contemporary language of neo-conservativism.

Stephen G. Rabe
University of Texas,
Dallas

To the Editors:

I recently came across James C. Schneider's reply to my reply to his AHR review of my book Hitler Attacks Pearl Harbor: Why the U.S. Declared War on Germany (AHR, October 2004, 1367). I write you now to reply to his last reply. Please let me respond to his criticisms point by point.
Professor Schneider asserts that I lacked support for my argument that the U.S. public essentially accepted Hitler's denial/retraction of his declaration of war. The fact is that I did provide some documentary support for that part of the story in my book, in that I cited a few pertinent examples from the U.S. press. However, Professor Schneider is correct if he is arguing that what I cited was not nearly enough evidence to support my contention. However, and as I explained repeatedly throughout my book, the evidence to support my contention is abundant and overwhelming, but it was not the major thesis of my book. As I explained throughout my book, my book's purpose was to explain why the United States did go to war against Germany—that is, Pearl Harbor—and not to explain why the United States did not go to war—that is, Hitler's declaration of war.
As I explained repeatedly throughout my book, the reason why the United States did not go to war would be the subject of an entirely different book, or at least a tremendously expanded version of my book which was not possible. My book's purpose, therefore, was to stimulate more and honest research by objective historians. But I suppose that was a naïfive intention on my part, considering the partisan nature of my book's subject. I do applaud Professor Schneider's admission that to simply focus on the one-day news story from December 11, 1941, would be to take this momentous history out of its true context. Professor Schneider has done just that in his reply, however, and he seems satisfied with the result.
If Professor Schneider would like to discover for himself just exactly why the United States did or did not go to war against Hitler in the month of December 1941, all he needs to do is read the president's speeches, the Congressional Record, or any press reports—the essential sources of my book. If this business of Hitler's declaration of war was so important, I would ask Professor Schneider again to explain why no historian has ever written a book on what exactly Hitler's supposedly all-important declaration meant to Americans. The fact that no such book has ever been written, and the fact that Professor Schneider has himself again avoided addressing that central question, should speak volumes to the objective and impartial observer.

Richard Hill
Palm Beach Atlantic University

James C. Schneider responds:

I am happy to have "objective" historians review the record surrounding the formal inauguration of war between Germany and the United States. They will find, as I did again today in a quick review of some key documents, that from Congress to Keokuk, Americans understood that Germany had declared war on the United States. Speculation and confusion certainly were rampant in December 1941. As Richard Hill has shown, many people indeed posited links between Berlin and the Pearl Harbor attack. The nature of those links, however, varied widely according to the observer. That Franklin Roosevelt overestimated the level of strategic coordination between Germany and Japan has long been observed by historians (e.g., David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance) whose work Professor Hill is quick to dismiss. Many contemporary accounts—including those by Times military affairs writer Hanson Baldwin and columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick, to name only two—recognized that Japan was quite capable of planning and conducting an operation like Pearl Harbor. The central point remains that overwhelming majorities in America had come to see the Axis nations as a common threat to the security and well being of the United States.
Professor Hill makes much of the lack of a book exploring what the German declaration meant to Americans. There is, however, a rich literature, of which my own Should America Go to War? is a modest component, exploring what Naziism and German expansionism had come to mean to Americans by December 1941. The significance of the German declaration was that it removed the last vestiges of ambiguity about the seriousness of that menace.

James C. Schneider
University of Texas,
San Antonio

To the Editors:

In response to Erik Kulavig's review of Ideology and Challenges of Political Liberalisation in the USSR, 1957–1961 (AHR, June 2007, 961), I cannot see what Kulavig's black-and-white position contributes to the field of Soviet studies. Surely there have always been people (some of whom were Marxists) in Russia who held a more sober view of Bolshevik power than did the communists themselves—even before the October coup. This does not, however, mean that they were completely detached from reality, or always shared a common or unchanging mindset. Above all, the party leadership's thinking had a vast impact on the country and the world, whether we like it or not. We now know rather well what happened in Soviet history, but our understanding of how and why something did or did not take place demands much further study.
Contrary to what Kulavig's review implies, my dissertation does not play down the apparent contradictions and simplicities in Kuusinen's political thinking. In fact, these have been analyzed in detail, and their impact on the success and failure of his "reform programme" pondered. But neither have I chosen—to the irritation of my critic—to belittle the boldness of Kuusinen's ideas in the context of post–Stalin era politics. True, his and Khrushchev's understanding of, for example, democracy and the use of political compulsion is quite different from ours, but it differed from that of Stalin as well, which must serve here as the main comparison point—not Western politico-economic models that do not fit even a modern Russian context. Under Khrushchev mass terror was permanently abolished, and the ideological seeds of perestroika planted.
Kulavig seems to ignore that Kuusinen, as a leading politician, did not function in a vacuum. If he wanted his ideas to succeed, they had to be presented in a form both understandable and acceptable to the majority of party leadership. His political priorities also led to difficult compromises: bold domestic policy proposals were balanced by a more hawkish international orientation, and the emphasis on people's political unity—a vital justification for the abolition of terror—easily undermined the case for any attempt at socialist democratization. Thus, the bold private citizens demanding the restoration of capitalism and the multi-party system—to whom Kulavig refers with admiration—were the ones "surrounded by fog" as far as Soviet political realities are concerned.
My critic further fails to mention that in Kuusinen's opinion the Soviet system had not yet sufficiently distanced itself from "Stalinist" thinking and practices. He held this view as late as the early 1960s, after having failed to achieve some of the central goals he had pursued, such as the introduction of limitations to the party's practical power and functions. The role of the CPSU was just one issue on which his and Khrushchev's thinking clashed heavily.
Kulavig's review contains a few inaccuracies, the most significant of which is his claim that the work does not add to our knowledge of the period beyond Kuusinen's role in it. I humbly believe that the book reveals something of the writing process of the CPSU program; Kuusinen's direct participation in the project ended in the summer of 1958—that is, three years before the publication of the document—and the role the state concept played in the hands of Kremlin conservatives, which had not been widely known until recently. Nor have I argued that Kuusinen drew much of his liberal inspiration from Hungary and Yugoslavia. Instead I speculate that he might have, for example, borrowed a few tricks from Imre Nagy on how to "sell" liberal thinking to Khrushchev. Most of Kuusinen's reform ideas resulted from an independent search for an answer to the Soviet Union's problems.
I readily accept, however, Kulavig's final point of criticism. Alas, as a Ph.D. student I could not afford to publish one edition for my doctoral committee and another for outside experts, or to hire an editor. If my primary focus had been on language, structure, composition, and narrative, I would have written the book in my native language, Finnish.

Jukka Renkama
University of Tampere

Erik Kulavig does not wish to respond.

To the Editors:

In response to Lee Mitchell's review of my book Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (AHR, June 2007, 872–873), I wish to address a key point that he overlooks in his otherwise thoughtful reading of my book. As I see it, Mitchell oversimplifies the historical connection between my discussion in chapter one, which studies actor Edwin Forrest and the Astor Place Riot (1849), and its relation to the first film I consider in chapter two, The Battle Cry of Peace (1915). I go to great lengths in chapter one not to make a historical "leap," as Mitchell characterizes it, between these two events. I disagree with his categorization particularly since chapter one deals extensively with the resonance of Forrest's body and concepts of American art as it unfolded following the Riot during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. These cultural developments were complex and forcefully shaped—particularly through discourses of (American) Nature and the "primitive" (i.e., the American Indian)—the long-standing terms of not merely the artist and masculinity; moreover, the discourse of "Edwin Forrest," as my book shows, fed the nationalist ideals of aesthetic form that American art assumed as white and androcentric. This, I argue, especially holds true as the cinematic arts took hold of the public's imagination in the early part of the twentieth century.
If Manly Arts moves through figures as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, Max Nordau, Oscar Micheaux, George Balanchine, and Marsden Hartley, it is precisely because their "diversity" shares and expands upon the repetition of tropes that Forrest ultimately established for the American male artist and the arts in general. This is why Manly Arts does not seek to identify, as Mitchell suggests, "alternatives to white, heterosexual, masculine figures" as much as it seeks to establish the relational—not oppositional—effects on male artists that were facilitated under the terms of Forrestesque masculinist creativity. My book is quite careful to link the range of artist-figures as they respond to one another and/or to the prevalent rhetoric of American masculinity and aesthetics. The bridge between chapters is succinctly marked to indicate these connections. Indeed, Forrest's virile corporeality and aesthetic concepts that were dramatically introduced at the moment of the Astor Place Riot are traced in detail and referred to throughout Manly Arts. The opening of the final chapter, in which Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky is discussed, summarizes this book-long connection. And though Mitchell concludes that "in the end the Astor Place Riot seems to share little with obscure [?] films like Cabin in the Sky or Manhatta," I respectfully disagree: the Astor Place Riot and the actor who personified this event as a turning point in the gendering and racializing of national aesthetics have everything to do with the concept of masculinity and the American cinema of the twentieth and, certainly, twenty-first centuries.

David A. Gerstner
CUNY,
Graduate Center and College of Staten Island

Lee Mitchell does not wish to respond.

Erratum

On p. 930 of the June 2007 issue, in the first line of the second column of Geoffrey Parker's review of Markus Reinbold's Jenseits der Konfession: Die frühe Frankreichpolitik Philipps II. von Spanien 1559–1571 and Valentín Vázquez de Prada's Felipe II y Francia (1559–1598): Política, Religión y Razón de Estado, "more than twenty pages" should read "more than 120 pages." The editors regret the error.

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