Author Archives: Stan Deaton

Worth Reading: Spencer Tracy: A Biography

Spencer Tracy: A Biography. By James Curtis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 1,001 pp. $39.95

He’s the kind of actor who makes it look so easy and you think to yourself, I can do that. Go ahead and try it. It’s not easy and you can’t do it.

Spencer Tracy is widely considered to be the greatest film actor of the 20^th century. Perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. Clark Gable considered him untouchable. “The guy`s good,” Gable famously said. “There`s nobody in the business who can touch him, and you`re a fool to try. And the bastard knows it, so don`t fall for that humble stuff!”

Having recently plowed through mammoth biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite, two of the seminal figures in the second half of the twentieth century, I decided to complete the triumvirate by reading James Curtis’s recent biography of my favorite actor. At almost exactly 1,000 pages, it’s not a fast read, but it’s a wonderful journey.

I first encountered Spencer Tracy as a college senior at the University of Georgia in 1986. As a journalism major focusing on radio-TV-film production, I took the late great Barry Sherman’s class on journalism and broadcast history, and he challenged us to become familiar with the great movies and actors of the past, in the same way one reads “classic” books and authors to become more “well rounded.”

To help us along on that quest, he screened Citizen Kane in class, and before long I was haunting the student center theater for any classic movies that showed up. It was there that I first saw Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, both on the big screen. I was hooked.

Pretty soon I was wearing out my VCR, recording old movies on TBS and AMC (back when they showed old movies on either of those stations), anything that featured Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Arsenic and Old Lace led me to Cary Grant, other movies to Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn. I watched Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and other directors. I bought a copy of Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and read it to tatters, all 1,200 pages.

James Cagney died that spring and I became interested in his work, watching and studying everything of his that I could find. Nobody then or now could dance like him, and when he was on screen, you couldn’t watch anybody else. As one critic wrote about Cagney, “He can’t even put a telephone receiver back on the hook without giving the action some special spark of life.”

About that time, PBS aired a documentary on Spencer Tracy. He was in a class all by himself. I had heard of him, of course, and was familiar with the names of some of his movies like Bad Day at Black Rock, but I’d never seen him on the screen. He was so good that he didn’t seem to be acting; as his fellow actors say, you never saw the mechanism at work. One reviewer watching him on stage in 1929, before he ever set foot in front of a camera, captured his style perfectly:

“No makeup—none to speak of—no tricks whatever; just an unassuming, easy manner that gets him about the stage without your quite knowing how he does it. He belongs to that school of acting—if it is a school—which doesn’t want you to think it is acting. It is acting, though, of a very high order, forceful, reserved, artistic.”

Tracy was born in Milwaukee in 1900, served in the Navy in World War I, and made his stage debut as a student at Ripon College in 1921. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (where he learned, he said, “the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized”) and mastered his trade for 10 years in the daily grind of a stock company. The legendary George M. Cohan called him “the best goddamned actor I’ve ever seen.”

He hit it big on Broadway in 1930’s The Last Mile, and Fox Studios in Hollywood signed him to a contract that same year. He made his big screen debut in Up the River, directed by John Ford. Unlike most actors trained on the stage, Tracy was subdued, letting the camera come to him. It was inauspicious debut to the 75 films he would eventually make and that would establish him as the best screen actor in history, with nine Academy Award nominations and two Oscars for best actor.

For all his acting talent, Tracy was the stereotypical “tortured” artist. He was as well known for his long-standing relationship with Katharine Hepburn, his moodiness, and his alcoholism as he was for his acting. After his first-born child, John, was born deaf, Tracy for the rest of his life blamed himself and his sins for his son’s affliction and it ate at him like a cancer. He suffered from chronic insomnia and took mouthfuls of pills just to catch an hour’s sleep. Tracy had multiple affairs with other actresses long before he met Hepburn—most notably Loretta Young and Ingrid Bergman–and his marriage to actress Louise Treadwell had settled into an awkward, platonic partnership by 1940.

Tracy and Hepburn first met filming Woman of the Year in 1942 and were together until his death 25 years later. I had always assumed it was an open secret, but Curtis tells us that was not the case. They were finally outed in several high-profile national magazines in the mid 1950s. Tracy had been married to Louise Treadwell since 1923, and they never divorced. After discovering their son John was deaf, Louise founded the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles and used her celebrity status to ensure its eventual success. Tracy’s staunch Catholicism and Louise’s insistence on remaining Mrs. Spencer Tracy until her death combined to keep them in a relationship that was unusual even in Hollywood. Despite their estrangement, they were still married at Spencer’s death in 1967, still respected each other, valued the other’s advice, and maintained a semblance of family with their two children. Curtis deftly details the finer points of their shared and singular history.

Hepburn’s attraction to Tracy was immediate and intense. But what did Tracy see in Hepburn? We’re never quite sure, and Curtis lets the reader fill in the blanks on this particular subject. According to Hepburn, she never knew exactly how he felt about her. That he loved her is beyond doubt, but he apparently never told her, which is hard to believe. They appear to have been intellectually suited and admired each other’s acting ability enormously. They were undoubtedly lovers, though one wonders how much that ever entered into the equation, as Tracy was 42 when he met Hepburn and looked and acted 10 years older. She helped him through his insomnia and alcoholism, though the evidence points to the inescapable fact that he physically abused her on more than one occasion. They didn’t share a home until the last 5 years of his life; “I love him but I can’t live with him and he won’t live with Louise,” Hepburn said. In the end, it’s clear they were best friends, in the truest sense of those words, and enjoyed each other’s company and companionship. They made each other contented and happy.

At least as happy as anyone like Tracy could ever be. Alcoholism nearly ruined him. Several times in his career he would go on 10-day benders and wind up in hospital detox centers, bringing to a screeching halt whatever picture he might be working on or about to start, holding up production and costing the studio millions. His father and grandfather were alcoholics, and his working-class Irish Catholic upbringing in Milwaukee did nothing to dissuade him from seeking solace in a bottle. He went through long periods of sobriety, most notably after meeting Hepburn, but never really sought professional help. Alcoholism was more often seen as a moral failing than a disease during his life, a view to which both Hepburn and Tracy partially subscribed. He eventually brought it under control himself, though he never fully mastered it. He would go on and fall off the wagon with excruciating regularity all of his life.

Curtis chronicles all of this in wonderful detail, but the heart of the story—as in Tracy’s life—was his work before the camera. Tracy labored in obscurity at Fox Studios through 5 years and 19 films before moving over to MGM and stardom in 1935. If you’ve never seen him on screen, go on Netflix right now and queue up any one of a dozen of his best pictures: Inherit the Wind (widely acclaimed as his best work), Judgment at Nuremburg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Father of the Bride, Boy’s Town, Fury (his 1936 break-out role), Captains Courageous, San Francisco, The Old Man and the Sea, Bad Day at Black Rock.

In my opinion all nine of his movies with Katharine Hepburn are good but especially watch Woman of the Year, Keeper of the Flame, State of the Union, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike, and Desk Set. The latter movie is little regarded among movie critics, but two scenes in it are worth studying in some detail: when Tracy quizzes Hepburn about her memory over lunch on the rooftop of their office building, and later when Tracy gets caught in the rain on the way home and Hepburn invites him in for dinner. Both scenes feature two movie legends at the top of their game, with a natural affinity for their work and for each other that comes through brilliantly on screen. I particularly like him in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because he’s as superb a comedian as anyone else in that picture. Bottom line: if he’s in it, watch it. You will never be disappointed.

There are many actors, then and now, who never convince you they’ve done anything more than memorize lines and pretend to be someone else. For all their matinee idol appeal, I’ve always felt this way about Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise; you can tell they’re performing. Even some of Hollywood’s greatest legends, like Clark Gable, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn, were always accused of just playing themselves, that they weren’t really actors. As John Wayne famously said, “I don’t act, I react.” (Tracy once told the Duke, “It’s a good thing you’re so good looking, because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” Of Gable, whom he loved, he said, “Can’t act, doesn’t care, and everybody loves him better than any actor that was ever born.”)

Tracy, as one critic wrote, did not act, he was. It never seemed as if he was trying to perform. He belonged to a school of acting “which believed in selection—not how much the actor could do in any given scene, but how little he had to do to make the point, using the minimum to make the maximum.” Tracy understood the power of silence, of scarcely moving; it was all in his eyes and face, and the way he held himself. As Curtis writes, he demanded the audience’s attention in a natural and subdued way, dared them not to feel what he was feeling, not to think what he was thinking. To my mind, Tom Hanks is the living embodiment of Spencer Tracy: they both underplay to enormous effect what others would turn into farce.

How did he do it? What was his technique? No one really knows, because he never really shared his secret, a legacy, perhaps of his days working as a magician as a boy. Gene Kelly, who starred with Fredric March and Tracy in Inherit the Wind, described it thus: “I could understand and see what March was doing. He was like Olivier. A wonderful technician. You could see the characterization taking shape—the cogs and wheels beginning to turn. If you studied his methods closely, it was all there, like an open book. But with Spence it was just the reverse. He’d play a scene with you, and you’d think nothing much was happening. Then, when you saw the rushes, there it all was—pouring out of his face. He was quite amazing. The embodiment of the art that conceals art. It was impossible to learn anything from Spence, because everything he did came from some inner part of himself, which to an outsider anxious to learn, was totally inaccessible. All you could do was watch the magic and be amazed.”

Part of it, of course, was his natural talent and ability. When other actors asked him for advice, he would invariably reply, “There’s nothing I can teach you. Your either are an actor, or you’re not. And you are.” But though he made it seem effortless, it wasn’t. He did have a photographic memory, a gift for any actor, but he worked hard at making it seem as though he wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent long hours alone in his room at night preparing himself for the next day’s work.

Watch him read the verdict in Judgment at Nuremburg (over 10 minutes, done in one take): “Before the people of the world . . . let it now be noted . . . that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: Justice, truth, and the value of a single human being”; watch him cross examine Fredric March in Inherit the Wind, or give the final speech in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: “Old? Yes, Burnt out? Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there—clear, intact, in destructible. And they’ll still be there if I live to be a hundred and ten.” A cough here, a lowering of his voice mid-sentence there, a catch in his throat as he described his love for Christina (Hepburn): Small, subtle things, that make his performances seem wholly natural, but nearly impossible to replicate. As Stanley Kramer, who directed all three movies, said: “Tracy reduced everything to a fine powder of simplicity, and that takes hard work, it takes a lot of hard work. ‘Improvisation,’ Tracy always said, ‘is perspiration.’”

It wasn’t unusual for his fellow cast and crew to burst into applause after one of his scenes. Fellow actors on the set or movie lot would stand offstage just to watch him work. The three movies cited above contain his best work, superb, flawless performances. If I ever aspired to act, I would study them until my eyes blurred. Burt Lancaster, following the verdict scene in Judgment at Nuremburg, asked Tracy, “How did you do that so easily?” Tracy quietly replied, “You practice for 35 years.” The art that conceals art, using the minimum to make the maximum. There was nobody better.

Historic Selfies and Presidential Poo Poo: History in the News

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In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of some interesting stories related to history that have been in the news recently. The freshest advices, foreign and domestic. Enjoy.

Selfies before Selfies: Here’s a story about a cache of photographs that were found of a man who took almost 450 pictures of himself in a photo booth over a number of years. Who is he, and why did he take these pictures? Was he documenting his appearance over time? Was he, as some have suggested, a photo-booth repairman who was simply testing the equipment? Or was he simply taking selfies before the invention of cellphone cameras? This is an exhibit worth seeing.

You Never Write Anymore: An interesting story about a recently-translated letter written by a Greek soldier to his family, complaining that he’s written six letters home with no response. Have they forgotten about him? The letter was written nearly 2,000 years ago.

Tippecanoe Poo: Historians have long thought that President William Henry Harrison literally talked himself to death. He died a month after his 1841 inauguration, where he talked for over an hour in the wet and cold and caught pneumonia. New research shows that perhaps something else got him: Washington’s bad sewage that flowed too close to the White House.

Quiet on the Set: Mickey Rooney celebrated his 93^rd birthday last September and film buffs now have another reason to celebrate: A copy of the silent film that featured his very first starring role, 1927’s Mickey’s Circus, was recently discovered in the Netherlands, along with dozens of other long-lost silent films, and they are all now slated for restoration. Film fans rejoice.

I Got You, Babe: Recently discovered footage of Babe Ruth standing in the New York Yankees dugout was shot on an historic day: June 1, 1925, the day that Lou Gehrig began his streak of 2,130 consecutive games. Baseball fans rejoice, and not just because the season started this week.

Not so fast, my friend: The Brits halted the sale and export of two manuscripts that they deemed irreplaceable cultural treasures, and they’re now housed at the British Museum. It doesn’t say who the buyer was, but probably some wealthy American. Good for them. That’s how they lost the papers of James Boswell (the great biographer of Samuel Johnson) nearly a century ago that are now housed at Yale. But isn’t it ironic that the Brits have had the Rosetta Stone, an Egyptian cultural treasure, safely housed at the British Museum since 1802, and have resisted all calls by the Egyptians to return the stone to them?

Read it and Weep: The National September 11 Memorial Museum opens next month in Manhattan, and some folks are questioning the use of a line from Virgil’s Aeneid that will be on prominent display at the Memorial: “No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time.” But who, exactly, is the “you” referring to in this quote? Read the article to find out. No matter where you stand on this issue, I’m in favor of seeing classical authors like Virgil in the news. If this controversy prompts one person to actually read the Aeneid, that’s a good thing.

Dumb, dumb, dumb: Finally, there’s this little gem, which just confirms that dodo birds are not, in fact, extinct. My mother taught me that if you take something that doesn’t belong to you, it’s stealing. When you spend the $31,000 the bank erroneously deposits into your account, you better hope you look good in orange.

Have a nice day.

The Long Walk Home

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Poet Pam Brown wrote that the difference between “coming home to an empty house” and “coming home” is one small cat. You wouldn’t think that an 8-pound ball of fur that mainly played, ate, and slept could do that to your heart. But she did. And it didn’t take long.

I first met the cat who became Bunny on a Sunday afternoon, October 7, 1990, when I was 25 years old. I had been enrolled in the history Ph.D. program at the University of Florida for a little over a month, and my wife and I were back home in Atlanta visiting her parents. That Sunday afternoon we went to Perimeter Mall, and as we were leaving we stopped in the mall’s pet store.

We had talked about getting a cat in the year that we’d been married but hadn’t to that point. What made us do so on that day I cannot remember, but we found a small black kitty that was really friendly and I wanted it.

My wife pointed out another cat—a small black and white tuxedo—that was really shy and timid. I wasn’t particularly interested in her but we made the impulse decision right then and there to get two kittens, thinking they’d be good company for each other when we weren’t home.

The one I picked out, Twinkletoes, lived about 6 weeks, dead from feline infectious peritonitis (FIP). We had to put her to sleep and it nearly killed me. The other one—the black and white tuxedo—would live almost 24 years, and entwined herself into our lives and around our hearts in a way I would not have thought possible.

She became “Bunny” in a round-about way. She had a way of sitting that looked as if she’d squeezed herself into a bun, a tight little kitty doorstop, and we jokingly referred to her as the Kitty Bun. That eventually morphed into a host of other nicknames, but she was usually referred to as either Bun Bun or just The Bunny, as in “Where’s the Bunny?”

Being in grad school with a working wife meant that I spent countless hours at home alone, studying, reading, and writing. The Bunny, meowing, playing, crawling all over me, seeking my attention, sleeping in my lap, was a constant companion. Plus I was the one who fed her, and cats are fast learners. In no time, though I hadn’t chosen her at the pet store, she became my cat. And in essence she became our first child.

She possessed the sweetest, most gentle disposition I’ve ever known in an animal. When she was home alone, she slept in a prominent place in a basket in a front window in the sunshine. When you came home, she greeted you at the door, was always glad to see you, and couldn’t wait for you to sit down so she could get in your lap. When I wrote at my desk, she laid on the desk. When I read a book or a newspaper, she tried to lay on the book or the newspaper, and most of the time I let her and just did something else. When I watched TV, she stretched out in my lap. If I was home, she was with me or very nearby. She always wanted my attention and she usually got it. I would let her eat food off my plate and even sit on the dining room table. (She loved grilled chicken above all else.) As long as she didn’t actually try to sit on my plate, I was okay with it.

The amount of attention and love I showered upon Bunny was ridiculous. It was for good reason that my friend April once said that she wanted to be reincarnated as my cat. “Spoiled” doesn’t adequately describe it.

Bunny lived through the 8 years that we lived in Gainesville, Florida, through classes, qualifying exams, and the grind and gruel of dissertation research and writing. She then made the move to Savannah with us and took possession of the first house we bought, kindly agreeing to let us live there with her for the next 15 years.

In 2000 she passed the 10-year mark, and as I built my career at the Georgia Historical Society, she took up residence in the customary front window at home, where people could see her every day sleeping on a red blanket. We bought a Persian rug once and when the salesman asked where we lived, he said, “I know that house. You have a black and white cat that sleeps in the window.”

Milestones came and went and Bunny was always there. Every night when I went to bed she found her way to my side and stayed there till morning. When I started getting up before dawn to read, she got up with me and sat in my lap as I turned the pages, becoming a part of every book I’ve read for the last dozen years. When my family purchased a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 2003, she went there with us and loved it like a second home. When we visited family in Atlanta for Christmas, she always came with us.

In 2005 she turned 15, still with nary a physical ailment. We had her for almost 16 years before our daughter Ellie was born in 2006, and we thought Bunny wouldn’t be around long enough for Ellie to really ever get to know her. We were wrong of course. After an initial “getting to know you” period, they bonded together too. Bunny turned 20 in 2010 with hardly any sign of slowing down.

By that time she had become legendary at the vet. They marveled over how healthy she was, how good she looked, and always raved at her overall condition. With each birthday, she reached uncharted territory.

Aging came slowly, but it eventually came, as it does to all of us. First, her hearing went, which actually made her less jumpy and more mellow—and consequently a better traveler. Her aim, shall we say, at the litter box, got worse and so we had to spread out towels around it. But otherwise she still got around great, still jumped on our bed at night, still had the same loving, sweet personality she’d always had. I began to think she’d just go on forever.

Then in the fall of 2012, at age 22, we noticed one day that her back legs didn’t work exactly as they once had. She had had a stroke. The day before Thanksgiving that fall she began having seizures. Medication could control them but not eliminate the cause, and her doctor said it would be a miracle if she lived another 6 months. She lived those 6 months and kept on going, celebrating her 23^rd birthday in July 2013. Walking was difficult, and she seemed confused, but when Christmas arrived, she was there too. It was our 24^th Christmas together.

Her body, finally and inevitably, just gave out, though her indomitable and loving spirit never did. In a matter of a few days, she stopped eating and grew weak, and though we had always hoped she would go on her own, she didn’t. We had to make the painful but necessary decision to have her put to sleep on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, and she died with her head in my hands. In human years she was 114 years old.

Coming home that day two weeks ago to an empty house, in which we had hardly spent a day without her, was the hardest of all.

Bunny lived a long and unusually healthy life almost up to the end. There is no cause for complaint here; who can ever expect that a 12-week-old kitten that you pick up in a pet store on an autumn Sunday afternoon would live for nearly a quarter of a century? I was 25 when I got her and now stand on the threshold of 50. I know that there will be many more losses to come. Her death marks the end of an era that stretches back almost half of my life, a passing of time and youth and something else that is irreplaceable. I know that there will never be another quite like her.

Many people have said to me how blessed we were to have had such a loving pet for so long, which is of course true. But it’s a blessing and a curse. You want them to live a long time, but after nearly a quarter of a century, they aren’t just your pet anymore. You’ve lived with them every day, woke up to their touch, fed them, nursed them when they grew old. They have been through many sad and happy days with you, been there almost as no one else has, and remained loving and loyal as others came into and went out of your life. They become your friend, your source of love and affection, your companion in ways you could not ever believe when you first get them. They are more a part of your family than some family members are. The loss when they die is real and it is painful, and their passing leaves a void that cannot be filled. As Jean Cocteau wrote, cats become the visible soul of the home.

Only those who have walked this dark and lonely path themselves understand the depth of grief that comes with losing something so dear. My friend Pamela, who lives in Alaska, has known deep loss herself, and she sent me a note after Bunny’s death. I can do no better than to quote her:

“Losing someone who has been a close companion for 23 years would be indescribably difficult. She clearly was incredibly attached to you to have stayed this long. You did her a kindness, a ‘severe mercy.’ But I personally believe in my heart of hearts that she’s running free right now, beyond age and wear, keeping an eye out for you so that when that time comes, she’ll be there to walk you home too.”

The Path Not Taken

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Nicholas Kristoff’s column in the February 16 edition of The New York Times about the irrelevancy of academic scholars in the national discussion has set off quite a conversation among my academic friends on social media. His point is that the academy contains some of the greatest minds in the world today, but too many of them have voluntarily removed themselves from taking part in a larger discussion in the national arena and marginalized or even punished their colleagues who do.

He quotes Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution: “academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research. This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”

Even worse, the International Studies Association executive council proposed that its publication editors be barred from writing personal blogs like the one you’re reading now. As Kristoff writes, “The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be less influential!”

As someone who works for a public history educational institution, I have a large stake in this conversation. The Georgia Historical Society bridges the gap between the academy and the public, taking the sometimes-esoteric findings of the profession and making them accessible, understandable, and relevant to a larger public. As Senior Historian, it’s my job to make sure that happens, and it’s a role I’ve come to relish. We try to incorporate the latest in cutting-edge historical research in everything we do, from public programs, to K-12 and college and university teacher training, historical markers, and the Today in Georgia History program. It’s one of the reasons that I write this blog. (That and it’s just so much fun.)

I spoke to the Rotary Club of Savannah last week about the controversy over removing statu es and monuments and was introduced as, among other things, a “public intellectual.” Far be it from me to claim such a distinction, but I’m glad if others see me that way. It tells me that they do in fact see me playing a public role and contributing in a meaningful way in the discussion of issues and debates of our time. I have worked hard over the last 15+ years to build a respectable public history resume that demonstrates engagement with my peers in public history and in the academy, and with the public at large.

And I am unashamedly a public historian. When strangers ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I’m a historian, specifically a public historian. Not a professor, not a teacher, not an academic, but a public historian (though public historians are of course teachers). What does that mean? In the simplest of terms it means I get paid to think, talk, read, write, and talk about history in the public arena on behalf of an educational institution that has for its mission teaching the public about the past in order to create a better future.

I say “unashamedly” because when I finished my Ph.D. in history the University of Florida (pictured above) I was expected to get a job in the academy and teach and publish. When I didn’t, there was a palpable sense of disappointment among some of my professors, past and present. Not, I should say, among my UF peers—the men and women I went to grad school with there are among the finest minds and best people in the world.

Chris Olsen, Dan Kilbride, Mark Greenberg, me, Glenn Crothers (with son Colin), and Andy Chancey, November 2002

In fact, let me take a moment to give a shout-out to the Band of Brothers that I entered UF with in the fall of 1990, all gainfully employed in various jobs in history and the humanities: Andy Chancey, Glenn Crothers, Mark Greenberg, Dan Kilbride, and Chris Olsen. Andrew Frank and Lisa Tendrich Frank followed a couple of years later, and collectively they are some of the best historians I know—and seven of the best friends I am ever likely to have. They have all gone on to distinguish themselves in the profession and I’m proud to say that we always supported and encouraged each other in a way that I knew even then was unusual in the cut-throat world of academia.

From many others former colleagues and professors and from new acquaintances I’d meet at professional meetings, I kept getting the same questions in the years after graduation: when are you going to get a real (aka academic) history job? When are you going to come back to doing “real” history? It didn’t seem to matter that I had a job working in Savannah, one of the most beautiful places in the world, in a job that made me very happy. I wasn’t in the academy, doing “real” research, writing monographs, teaching undergrads, and there was a sense that I was wasting the training I had received. I was often treated by other professional historians in the academy condescendingly as the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

That isn’t the case anymore, I’m happy to say. Public history jobs are as desirable as academic ones in the ever-shrinking humanities job market, though there will always be those who turn their nose up at anyone working outside the academy or at those who seek to reach a wider audience beyond specialized journals and monographs.

For me personally, the rewards of the job after almost 16 years have far surpassed anything I could have imagined when I first started working at the Georgia Historical Society. I was hired to direct programs and publications, which at first meant planning and implementing our lectures and meetings and assisting with the editing and production of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. The job has happily grown far beyond that.

With GHS colleagues Laura Garcia-Culler and Todd Groce, 2009

Through the years I’ve been fortunate to be able to shape the job in ways that have made it uniquely my own. I’ve dropped many of the duties that I first had while picking up others along the way. As Senior Historian, I serve as the chief academic officer of the institution, responsible for ensuring the scholarly quality and integrity of our brand through all of our educational initiatives, including public programs, publications, historical markers, teacher training initiatives, and public outreach.

If that sounds like the boiler plate off my job description, it is. But here’s what it means, directly relevant to the topic under discussion here: Above all else, it’s my job to make sure we’re connecting with a larger public in three important ways: 1) educating the public about the importance of history and the role it plays in our contemporary culture and society, 2) the role that GHS plays in serving as a bridge between the academy and the public and 3) how GHS serves as a national research center that facilitates the ongoing study of the past in order to ensure a better future.

With Bob Schieffer of CBS News, 2006

None of this is what I thought I’d be doing when I was interviewing for academic jobs as I finished my dissertation. I thought I’d be teaching a heavy load of classes, grading blue books, and serving on various committees. Not that I would have minded any of that. I enjoyed doing all of it as a grad student and got great teaching evaluations from my students. But as a public historian, I’ve been able to do things and meet people in this job–writers, journalists, broadcasters, politicians, sports figures, entrepreneurs, Supreme Court justices, musicians, actors—that would have seemed impossible when I began. And very improbable if I’d followed the traditional path. I’ve been able to grow professionally in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

From the beginning of my tenure here at GHS in 1998, I’ve been fortunate to work for a boss, Todd Groce—himself a published, professional historian—who never minded when I got the spotlight and the publicity as long as I was making the Georgia Historical Society look good. And he understood that the more we were all out there, talking to and engaging with a larger public, the better history and GHS were being served.

Consequently, from the moment I arrived here I started doing public speaking and haven’t ever stopped, becoming along the way the public face of a public history educational institution. I’ve spoken to every group imaginable at meetings, dinners, and luncheons, hosted televised round-table discussions, directed a half-dozen National Endowment for the Humanities summer workshops that trained hundreds of college and university professors from all over the country, written dozens of historical markers, helped with fundraising and donor cultivation, assisted with manuscript recruitment for our research center, conducted oral histories, and written editorials and book reviews for newspapers and other publications, including here in this blog.

And it was my supreme good fortune to serve as writer and host for Today in Georgia History when that opportunity came along, which garnered two Emmys. All of it has been enormously rewarding professionally and I’ve had a blast doing it.

I think Kristoff has missed the mark about my colleagues in the academy, too. They are almost all engaged in the larger community outside the walls of academe, and they use social and broadcast media to do it.

Karen Cox

Some examples among people I know, all interested in different subjects: my friend Karen Cox at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, on her blog PopSouth: The South in Popular Culture, recently highlighted eight different blogs (including this one) being written by professional historians, and hers is one not to be missed.

Stacey Robertson

Stacey Robertson serves as Oglesby Endowed Professor of American Heritage and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Bradley University in Illinois. She writes about her work on women abolitionists and their meaning in contemporary culture, among many other things, at www.staceymrobertson.com.

Dan Kilbride

My former grad-school mate Dan Kilbride, now at John Carroll University in Cleveland, is host of the webcast New Books in American Studies, a consortium of podcasts that introduces new scholarly books to a larger audience. Check out Dan’s latest interview with Michael O’Brien, editor of The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (which I reviewed here) and his own webpage for other interviews.

Heather Thompson

No scholar I know is more heavily engaged with the public than Heather Thompson at Temple University, whose findings about the historical and cultural implications of mass incarce ration have landed her on nearly every media outlet in the country. She’ll be even more widely seen and heard when Pantheon Books publishes her new account of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and how it still reverberates in American society.

Doug Egerton

Finally, Doug Egerton, who teaches history at Le Moyne College in New York and serves on the editorial board of the Georgia Historical Quarterly, has spent his career speaking and writing for a broad audience. His recent editorial in the New York Times on the controversial Denmark Vesey statue in Charleston is a model for what all of us should be doing in both local and national media when we can.

All of these scholars, and many others too numerous to list here, are also on Facebook and Twitter.

The truth is, all professionally trained historians have a responsibility to talk to a larger audience, no matter where we work—on college campuses, libraries, in museums, national parks, or historical societies. There is a great hunger for history out there, and it is readily available now on the internet, but so much of it is just plain bad. Indifference about engaging a larger public isn’t just ignorant, it’s dangerous. All of us, in and out of the academy, have a responsibility to be engaged with a larger public because we cannot afford to cede the ground to others who would willfully distort the past for partisan ends.

Americans revere their history, but they need to get that history right, and they need trained, credentialed professionals to help them understand not history as some wish it had been, but as it actually was, based upon sound research in credible primary sources. It’s one thing to examine the evidence and come to disagreement over what it means. That’s the very essence of education. It’s another thing entirely to fabricate history out of whole cloth, like the myth of black Confederates. No one will ever be served by a pejorative, factually inaccurate distortion of the American past.

And the internet, as we all know, is full of self-anointed authorities. As writer Alexander Chee said in a recent New York Times editorial about everyone and anyone “contributing” to on-line encyclopedia articles, the belief that we all have a right to our own opinions has given way to a larger cultural problem, the belief that we also have a right to base those opinions on misinformation. As he put it, “I believe all information should be as democratically available as possible, but I’m averse to it being democratically produced.”

If we can ground our history in good, modern, sound and credible scholarship, that is the best foundation of all. And the best answer of all. All of us in the academy and in public history have a responsibility to engage with the wider world. No more turning our collective noses up or looking down on each other. Let’s join together and make our voices heard.

Everybody Complains About the Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It

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As I write, Atlanta is bracing for the second fall of snow in the last two weeks, and after the debacle last time, the nation is watching to see if city and state leaders are any better prepared for the latest few inches/avalanche/ice storm. Most Atlantans seem to have made it easier on them by simply staying at home and off the roads before the first snowflake even falls.

It’s very easy to poke fun at Southerners and what happens when it snows on them. I myself, born and raised in metro Atlanta, have been doing it all my life. Unlike most Southerners I know, I actually like cold weather. It’s so hot down here for most of the year —particularly in Savannah, where I live now—that when it does get cold, I enjoy it.

And it never lasts very long. Winter here in Savannah would pass as a mild autumn everywhere else. I absolutely detest—detest—hearing a meteorologist say in winter that “It’s going to warm up nicely!” We get enough of that during the other 9 months of the year, and we’re not going to get any correspondingly cold days in August to make up for warm January days. Let it stay cool for a day or two. Give us a chance to break out those sweaters or LL Bean fleece jackets we never get a chance to wear.

True, we very rarely get really, really cold weather—like single digits—but everything is relative. When you’re used to 90 degrees, 50 is chilly. 30 is really cold. The teens are frigid. All of it—cold temperatures, snow, ice—happens so rarely even in the coldest months that when it does, our bodies, our roads, and our psyches just aren’t prepared for it.

Few Southerners I know have the proper clothes for really cold weather, and many times in the winter you have to bundle up even indoors. I live in a house that is over 60 years old, and believe me when I tell you that no builders in the early 1950s in Savannah were spending any money on insulation for the walls and floors. When outside temps dip into the 30s, the house turns into an icebox very quickly and the heater struggles to keep it in the 60s inside.

Even most Southerners who don’t like cold weather, however, still get excited at the prospect of snow. It happens so rarely in our lives that it’s like Christmas for small children. The best snowfalls are those that come in after midnight but before morning: everyone’s home from work and school, off the roads, snug in bed and warm (if the power doesn’t go out) and you awake to a winter wonderland.

It means missing school or work for a few days, maybe playing outside in it if enough snow falls, and because it warms up so quickly, we never have to shovel it, salt it, scrape it, or plow it. Hold your breath and it will be gone in 48 hours. During some weeks in February in some towns in the South you can play in the snow on Monday and go to the beach on Friday during the same week.

Part of the fun—and terror—of snow in Georgia is that Atlanta TV stations now cover the “storm” as if it was the D-Day invasion. It’s non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage that can only be possible in the age of the 24-hour news cycle:

“Channel 2 Action News reporter Sandra Slushy reporting live from Cobb County, where businesses and stores remain closed and nothing is happening. Now out to Dolph Dutlinger in Gwinnett. Dolph?”

“Thanks Sandra. As you can see from the streets behind me, nothing is happening. Residents here have been indoors since the last storm ended two weeks ago just in case such a terrible thing ever happened again. And we at Channel 2 Action News have been reporting live 24-hours a day since the last storm ended, ramping up anxiety and fear about the 2 inches of snow that might, indeed, one day fall again here in Georgia, and the chaos that would ensue if such a thing ever did happen. Now on to Dekalb County, where reporter Lotta B. Essen has confirmed reports of nothing happening there either.”

And on and on and on for hours. At that point you wish the power would, indeed, go out.

There have been three major winter storms of historic proportions in Georgia in the last 40 years (before the most recent, which I would argue wasn’t a bad storm, just bad timing and planning): the ice storm of 1973, SnowJam ’82, and the Storm of the Century in 1993.

The storm of 1982 was virtually unprecedented for the Deep South because the temperature had been in the 20s for days before the snow arrived on Tuesday, January 12. Every snowflake, as we say, stuck. The ground was frozen solid long before over 6 inches of snow fell that afternoon beginning at 2 p.m. without much warning at all—no internet, no Weather Channel—and the commute home that day was, for many Atlantans, the worst of their lives–until January 28 of this year.

I say that the storm arrived without much warning, but here’s the other thing about Southerners and snow—it doesn’t matter how much warning you get, you never actually believe it’s going to happen. If you grow up in the South, you are tantalized too many times by the threat—or promise, if you’re young—of snow, only to have it turn to rain or, worse, sunshine when the big moment comes. So a Southerner’s first instinct is just to ignore winter storm warnings because they usually turn out to be nothing.

In 1982, I was a senior in high school and got sent home early that afternoon from my after-school job delivering office supplies. Most other commuters didn’t, and by the time they all ran out of their offices at the same time to start driving home on the already-frozen roads, disaster struck. Snowjam 82 had begun.

My brother Jeff picked that afternoon to go shopping at Lenox Mall, and when he walked outside to come home—a drive that might normally take an hour in bad traffic–there were already several inches on the ground. It took him over 8 hours to get home that night, and the only reason he made it was due in large part to the front-wheel-drive Honda he owned. He managed to creep along, driving through ditches and around abandoned cars and never stopped. With no cell phones then, we didn’t know where he was until he drove up the driveway and into the arms of my frantic mother shortly before midnight. He was one of the lucky ones. Most drivers had to abandon their cars or sleep in them.

Temps that night dropped into the teens and stayed there for days, followed by more snow, and it was a week before life returned to normal. Typical up North, of course, but very unusual for Georgia.

On Saturday, March 13, 1993, the “Storm of the Century” dumped up to 17 inches of snow on some parts of metro Atlanta, which was, needless to say, record-breaking. It was all gone in two days, however, and unlike the storm of ’82, this one arrived late on a Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday morning and didn’t disrupt life very much.

Not like the ice storm of 1973. On Sunday, January 7, a cold rain started falling and quickly turned to ice. First limbs and then pine trees and power lines started falling all over Atlanta, turning roads into an icy mess and leaving hundreds of thousands without power and heat. Out in Snellville, my family huddled in the darkness without power, listening to limbs crack and trees fall, waiting for one to hit our house. My parents lost almost 20 pine trees on less than one acre, leaving a mess of epic proportions for us to clean up. But miraculously, not one of them landed on our house.

One other thing I remember about that ice storm: dragging pine limbs out of your yard is hard, heavy work; dragging pine limbs out of your yard that are covered with frozen pine needles is very hard, heavy work.

So Southerners don’t deal with bad winter weather very well. No surprise. We simply don’t get it very much.

I mentioned that un-insulated houses can get cold in the winter. The same is true in reverse in the summer of course: with no insulation, even the best air-conditioners can barely cool the inside air to more than 20 degrees less than outside. That can get uncomfortable in a hurry.

Which leads me to observe that while Southerners may go off our collective coconuts when it snows, we are used to heat, and lots of it. Not so in other parts of the country.

It’s always amused me that in the summer, when the mercury hits 90 degrees for two consecutive days in Chicago or New York, it makes the national news. People actually start dying from the “heat.” Residents are urged to use caution when moving around outside, told to drink lots of fluids and not to over-exert themselves, and should check on elderly neighbors who may be shut-in.

Hot weather is worse on our Northern friends, they tell us, because they aren’t “used to it,” and don’t deal with it well because often their homes and businesses don’t have air-conditioners because most of the time “they don’t need it” and it’s not worth the financial investment.

Does that sound familiar? That’s what we say about snow: we don’t get it much or aren’t used to it when we do, and we don’t spend money—our own or taxpayer funds–on snow plows or snow shovels because we don’t need them.

Needless to say, it doesn’t make the national news when the thermometer hits 90 degrees in Savannah. It can do that in mid-February and stay there till you’re singing Olde Lang Syne.

Stay inside? Even as the heat index on some days soars past 110, roofers continue working on dark-shingled roofs, street pavers continue laying down black asphalt, and everyone routinely endures temperatures for 6 months that would blow the power-grid of the entire northeast if it had to endure it for more than two days. It’s not uncommon to go to bed at midnight with the temperature still past 90. And it never makes the national news.

Then there’s the bonus: oppressive heat usually leads to torrential, monsoon-like afternoon rains here that can drop 5 inches of rain on the city in 15 minutes during the afternoon commute. Schools are not cancelled and businesses don’t get out early. We drive through it and around it.

If that happened in some places farther North during rush hour it would bring the city to a standstill and would be known forever after as “The Great Rainstorm of ’14.” It happens here 3 times a week for months on end without comment.

The other thing that won’t make the news: the stultifying humidity and the ever-present gnats and mosquitoes that can turn lowcountry summer evenings outside into a tortuous exercise in survival.

Working out in your yard on a July evening, for instance, when the temperature has finally dipped to oh, say, 93, is an experience that cannot be adequately described. It simply has to be felt. Why gnats are drawn to your ears I don’t know (moisture?) but trying to keep both hands on the lawn mower while they cover your ears, mosquitoes devour your extremities, and sweat drips into your eyes can be a level of hell that even Dante never imagined.

As a historian I’ve read a lot about the “hardy New Englanders” who endured the harsh winters to settle in the Northern climes, but I can only imagine the fortitude it took to endure the 18^th-century lowcountry summers without air-conditioning, fans, or screened windows. Simply drawing your next breath would have earned you a Purple Heart.

So while the snow falls, flake by flake, on our friends in Atlanta now, it’s easy to giggle about their over-reaction and the media’s hyper-ventilating over a little inclement weather. Some might gloat over the fact that our northern neighbors will still be working their snow-shovel muscles in April while we’re all working on our tans, but I’m not one of those. Remember, I like cooler weather, and I dread the coming of heat and humidity the way some folks dread a thermometer below 50.

It’s 36 degrees outside, cold, and rainy right now in Savannah, and I love it. Pardon me while I run outside to enjoy this beautiful weather. If I don’t dash out now, by the time I finish this post it may be 85 and sunny. Who needs that?