The Historian as Defense Lawyer, or What PhDs are Good For

There has been a request from subscribers for less memoir and more history. I find I am completely unable to stop compulsively writing memoir, but I did try and throw in some history as well.

Heloise, my sixth-grader, has just started taking her first real history class. My daughter doesn’t mind the class, but it is far from her favorite.

Mousie remembers vaguely that in an old life, one that ended when she was very small, her papa taught the subject, and the other day, she asked me why I had devoted so much of my life to being an historian.

I gave her my standard answer about history being a source of comfort: when we see what our ancestors endured, we realize that we too have the capacity to survive and thrive.  We see that our trials are not as unique, and therefore not as terrifying, as we imagine.

I thought it was rather a good little speech, but my daughter was unimpressed.  “Why else, abba?”

I thought for a minute, and then I said a name: “Antony Bek.”

Twenty-four years ago this month, in February 1997, I told my dissertation adviser at UCLA, Scott Waugh, that I was planning to give up on the PhD.  I’d completed my oral and written qualifying exams in 1993, and though I’d made a lot of initial progress in writing my dissertation, I was now stuck.  A second divorce and a series of hospitalizations had thrown me off track.  It had been four long years since I’d started researching and writing the damn thing, and I was ready to throw in the towel.

Professor Waugh and I had had a bit of strained relationship in recent years, too.  In April 1994, I had had interviews for two tenure-track jobs: one at Pasadena City College, and one at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.  The Tennessee job was at a four-year research institution, and Scott had contacts there, pulling a string or two to get me the interview. (I had never been to Tennessee, and was stunned at how beautiful Chattanooga was in the spring.)

To my wonder, both Chattanooga and Pasadena offered me jobs.  I chose Pasadena, at my then-fiancée’s insistence.  She wasn’t going to leave California for anything.  When I told Professor Waugh of my decision, he was stunned and annoyed – why any scholar would choose a teaching institution over a research university bewildered him. He had invested a lot in me, and because his duties as university provost meant he had very few graduate students, he considered me a protégé. Scott was gentlemanly about my decision, but distant and frustrated.

“I’m afraid you’ll regret this the rest of your life,” he told me when I turned down Chattanooga.

Our relationship was never quite the same.

By 1997, I knew I was staying at PCC forever.  I was a teacher, not a researcher.  I already had a master’s degree; I didn’t need a PhD to lecture at the community college. I had already disappointed Scott by not going to Tennessee, so I figured dropping out of the PhD program wouldn’t be much of a blow.

When I told him of my decision, face to face in his huge office, Scott smiled ruefully.  He said nothing for a moment, and then, gently, “Hugo, Antony Bek still needs you.”

Antony Bek was Bishop of Durham, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and a towering figure in late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century English life.  Since the 19th century, historians had been hard on Bek for his apparent profligacy, his worldliness, and his willingness to use the immensely wealthy and important bishopric of Durham as a weapon to advance the interests of the crown.  Among medievalists who specialized in the English church, Bek was regarded as an example of corruption and craven self-interest.

I had a different view.  My dissertation was partly a series of biographies of late medieval northern bishops, men who used their ecclesiastical and military power to protect the English border region from Scottish depredations.   Bek was a pivotal figure, and, I argued in what I had written so far, a misunderstood one.  He was not only a military genius, he was something of a proto-renaissance prince, far more enlightened, urbane, and humane than previously imagined.  One critical chapter of my dissertation was about rehabilitating this one prelate’s image.

“If you don’t finish,” Scott said, “Bek will have to wait a lot longer to be understood.”

My advisor knew just the right heartstring to pluck.  The role of the historian, as I had always understood it, was in large part that of defense lawyer.  Go back into the past, find the most despised and maligned characters you can, and discover how they have been misrepresented.  Where there is black and white, explain the gray.  Where there is dismissal and contempt, show the redeeming qualities that others have missed.  Most popular history picks villains and victims, heroes and scoundrels; the job of the professional historian, or at least my job, was to do the hard work of proving that the reviled deserve redemption.

As any historian knows, it is much simpler to take a revered figure and point out his flaws than it is to take a despised one and make the case for his reevaluation.  In the current era, the more comfortable path is to take a George Washington, or a Robert E. Lee, or a Woodrow Wilson, and explain why these men deserve to have their statues toppled.  You find a few choice quotations, share a few nasty anecdotes, and the young wonder in outrage how their forebears ever managed to elevate these monsters.  I’m not arguing for the redemption of Confederate Generals – I’m just pointing out that takedowns are ever so much easier to write.; they’re mostly lazy appeals to the preconceptions of the mob.  As in any criminal case, the prosecution holds all the cards, and it is the defense lawyer who must work some not inconsiderable magic to convince a jury predisposed to convict that they should think again.

I walked out of Scott Waugh’s office 24 years ago committed to finishing my dissertation.  It would take me another two years, and one more expensive research trip to northern England, but I finished the damn thing, and was formally awarded the degree in the summer of 1999. 

The PhD itself is of no use to me now; I schlep groceries and scrub toilets for a living, and with apologies to the First Lady, I don’t think anyone is ever going to be allowed to call me doctor ever again – but somewhere in the archives, somewhere accessed by an average of one person every other year, somewhere that dissertation survives in multiple formats.   If you’re searching for the truth about Antony Bek, and you want a contrarian perspective, one that casts him in a better light, perhaps you’ll find something useful in what I wrote so long ago.

What do historians do? Heloise asked.  They tell stories which are mostly true, I told her.  They give us hope, and sometimes, they offer warnings.  But mostly, as far as I’m concerned, they tell us that things were never as simple as we imagine.  They take the despised and the dismissed, be they great or small, and ask us to look closer, and closer still, until all that is left is compassion.