For Writers Only: Joseph Ellis on Being a Historian

When I met with Joseph Ellis at Mt. Holyoke, part of my interest was the art of historical writing. Ellis' work is elegant; it sparkles. But he has also attracted a broad audience -- and a Pulitzer -- because he breaks new ground. Ellis clearly has a knife out for critics who say he is a mere popularizer; he also seemed to have slight regard for colleagues who are happy in the weeds. (To be fair, Ellis has his own skeleton -- the matter of his vivid imagination regarding Viet Nam). Here is an edited version of this part of our chat:

O&G – You think that a pure historian would not engage in the exercise of comparing one president with his predecessors?

Ellis – A pure historian would resist the notion that you can compare now and then without a very, very large translation. They speak a different language back there. The context in which the problems were being perceived were not the same as now. So the straight-forward literal comparison without some kind of recognition of the context is different. The L.A. Times calls me and asks me to write something on what George Washington would do about Iraq. I said, ‘Well first of all he wouldn’t know what the hell Iraq was. Nobody would. It didn’t exist then. It didn’t get created until 1920 by the British. But secondly he wouldn’t know about Osama bin Laden, the weapons of mass destruction, CNN, the 24-hour news cycle. He’s in a different world, brother.’ Now, having said that, if you want to write the op-ed piece, then you say, ‘If you read Washington’s correspondence and life, the conclusion I would reach is …’ – not to say that Washington himself would. You can’t bring Washington into the present – ‘… is that the United States in Iraq is mired down in the same kind of military situation that the British were in North America during the American Revolution. They don’t have enough troops. They cannot subjugate the entire population, and eventually they are going to do what the British did. The British didn’t lose. They just decided it’s not worth it. And get out.’ So my take is that there is something to be learned from that, but it’s more of a historian having written about Washington, but it’s also reading about Iraq on a day by day basis. That’s what I’ve learned based on my knowledge of Washington. But to say that Washington would know that is ridiculous.

Q – Full disclosure – did you vote for Obama?

A – Yes.

Q – And did you vote against Bush?

A – Yes.

Q – Would you wish you were writing about someone whom you could watch in the flesh?

A – We know more about Abigail and John Adams’s relationship than we will know about any relationship of any 21^st century president. Because they wrote letters.

Q – This is the new book you are writing.

A – Yes. But what I’m saying is that the telephone and the cellphone and the Internet eliminate evidence for a historian. And I think the way it really works in my case. I’m pretty much a news junkie. Not a blog junkie though. I think when I go back tonight to try to write a paragraph about Abigail’s relationship to her daughter, Nabby, what I’ve seen today in the paper will affect me somehow. Or to put it more pointedly, watching the way Obama moves physically matches with people’s statements about Washington. He was an athlete, he was a dancer. He was the best rider. He is physically overwhelming. Now, Obama is not overwhelming, but watch the way he gets to a podium. He’s almost running. It’s like a stride. It flows, too. The guy is together. So there’s a back and forth to me as a historian so instead of the past helping me understand the present, which sometimes it does, the present sometimes helps me reinterpret the past. I live more of my time in the late 18^th century than I do now. I appreciate the opportunity to watch things on CNN, but my mind is always using that to try to explain a specific research problem I am facing at that very time. I’m not very smart. It takes me a lot to do that. It’s 99% perspiration. Just hanging in.

Q – But you teach and you write.

A – I’ve really made a conscious effort to be writing to people like you – serious American readers of history who read the New York Times, etc., not to other historians. Some other historians like what I have to say, you know a serious contribution to scholarship, but that’s not my audience. Some of them, it’s clear, would like a larger audience – who wouldn’t? But they don’t know how to do it. There is a socialization process that has occurred in many instances that has prevented them, created a new vocabulary, of references that nobody else cares about. And they are not only writing for other historians, but the framing of the problems they address are themselves done by other academics. ‘We should develop the theory of public space that so-and-so has … you know, study the constitutional convention using [Jurgen] Habermas’ theory of public space.’ Okay! If that’s what you want to do. For me it’s the primary sources, all the stuff that they actually said and wrote or were said and written about them in their time. I’ve read Charles Beard, I’ve read hundreds of books about the Constitution to be sure. But my job is to come to the primary material, read it with as much intelligence and imagination as possible, and write about it with as much clarity and cogency and at times lyricism as I can muster. That’s it.