Appreciate this list of important conservative intellectuals from the 90s. I remember reading Bloom in 1990 and finding it hilariously out of touch with the reality I experienced. This review from '87 captures how I remember interpreting the book. rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…
Bloom, to my mind at the time, just seemed like an old codger in a bow tie yelling "get off my lawn" & "turn that damn rock n roll music down!" It was hard for me to see past the culturally reactionary posturing to perceive a compelling political message. But maybe I missed it?
As for William Bennett, I remember him teaming up w/ Lynne Cheney in the early 90s to fight to keep American History textbooks as white and male as possible. In hindsight, it's hard to see anything intellectually defensible about this project of theirs. archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…
Worth noting that Rush Limbaugh was a big fan of Cheney and Bennett's, he did a ton of work to rile up the populist base against those "revisionist" historians with their books about women and black people and unions and other such irrelevant stuff.
One of my earliest memories as a budding historian involves a tense conversation with a white male seatmate on an airplane who, upon learning I was a history grad student, asked if I was "one of those *revisionist* [said with a sneer] historians." This was 1995.
It's this sort of jingoistic, nationalistic, anti-intellectualism that folks like Bennett and Cheney succeeded in drumming up, and to which they lent intellectual credibility. So sure, one notch above D'Souza and Gingrich, but the bar was pretty low.
The sorts of historians in the 80s and 90s who sided with Bloom were the sorts of historians who delighted in making fun of their colleagues who studied gay history (a very new field then), women's history (more developed), or the history of race.
To be a conservative in the field of history in the 90s usually meant one considered the history of non-white & non-male people to be lesser, to be marginal to "the real story" of America. The last 3 decades of scholarship has shown just how misguided that assumption was.
We could fill a bookstore with the now essential, award-winning books that would have never been written if conservatives like Bloom or Himmelfarb or D'Souza won the war within the academy.
I think it's also worth noting that the conservatively-inclined professors I knew in the 90's gloried in their victimhood, in their sense that their "serious" scholarship on "serious" topics was not as valued as the "faddish crap" their younger, often female colleagues produced.
Needless to say, the "faddish crap" of the 90s has stood the test of time far better than many of those "serious" books. Some of those more conservative profs were fine scholars, but the times had passed them by and they responded with bitterness, not grace.
Let me end this thread with one of my favorite stories about an elderly white male historian behaving wonderfully. Merle Curti was one of the great Progressive historians of the 20th century. The Org of American Historians has a prize named after him. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Cur…
The Curti Prize, in 1996, was given to George Chauncey for his book Gay New York. It was one of the first major monographs in the relatively new field of gay history. Exactly the sort of "revisionism" Bloom, Himmelfarb, or Bennett wld have likely reviled. amazon.com/Gay-New-York-C…
But in 1996, at the age of 99, Merle Curti wrote George Chauncey a letter to tell him how much he had enjoyed reading his book, & how pleased he was that it had won the Curti Prize. As an aspiring historian, it seemed clear that history was on the side of Curti, not Bloom.
If Twitter had a footnote function, I'd point out that I have this Curti/Chauncey story second hand from a trusted source, but I have not been able to confirm it independently.
