Tue Sep 27 14:42:05 EDT 2005
This set of recommendations and ruminations by Stephen T. Ziliak,
Roosevelt University, inaugurates a new series on EH.Teach. If you are
interested in participating, contact me at whaples at wfu.edu. (Your
thoughts need not be as extended as Steve's.)
Recommendations for Reading (and Re-Reading): Ziliak on Autobiography
Autobiography is one approach to teaching, not _the_ or even _my_ only
approach, but what I do now. Autobiography in three acts, bibliotherapy
in two. That’s pretty much it. As metonymy, you see, not in lieu of
____________.
I teach at Roosevelt University, a private,
not-exactly-but-pretty-close-to-open enrollment institution in downtown
Chicago. Roosevelt began as a College in 1945 when the faculty of the
Central YMCA walked out in protest. Ninety-nine percent walked out,
anyway, historians who seem to know will claim. The trustees were
trying to cap the number of blacks and Jews admitted to Central Y.
Northwestern University and the University of Chicago had enforced such
quotas but the Y was supposed to be different, open, better. Roosevelt
University would fulfill the original mission of the Y: it would admit
any student, barring prejudice of any kind, so long as the student met
what was (and still is) a rudimentary level of literacy and numeracy.
In early Roosevelt yearbooks you ought to see the black and white
pictures of school dances. Jack Johnson thought his Club Deluxe in
Harlem was progressive.
It's not much like teaching at Emory University, or the Georgia
Institute of Technology, two places I taught before coming to Roosevelt.
It’s closer to CUNY; in other words, much harder work. It’s also a
lot of fun. The average age of a student is 29. That's in Econ 101,
and says nothing about the second standard deviation or the average age
of an MA student. The students are African American, Hispanic, Jewish,
and variously immigrant majority (increasingly from African and Eastern
European nations). Traditional age students are increasing in share --
especially downtown, in the Honors Program, and out at the suburban
campus -- but still they fill one corner of the room. Some live in a
dorm. It’s still a commuter campus. Most have children, jobs,
grandchildren, second jobs. Homework is to them a contested term. At
home they do childcare, elder care, hair care, rehab care, and other
feats of strength not strictly related to their assignment on the
marginal rate of substitution.
I strive to build with my students a historically conscious teaching
community. I learned it from Paulo Freire. Mainly I want them to talk
and to write. To me. To each other. To the books. I want them to
learn how to, as the economist Neil Browne puts it, “ask the right
questions.” And I want them to claim personal responsibility for, as
bell hooks puts it, “education as the practice of freedom.” But I was
speaking here about autobiography, and bibliotherapy, and how they
converge in my teaching of economics and history.
I’ve been asked to name some books that affect my teaching. Here are four.
1. _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ (Houghton Mifflin, 1941 [1988]), by
James Agee and Walker Evans.
A good book is to talking what a good hunger is to bread: seemingly
infinitely large. _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ is, to me, one of
those books. I want, like I said, to hear my students talk at a higher
critical level. So I’ll assign portions of _Praise_ to them. Or I’ll
simply tell them about it.
Agee was writing for _Fortune_ magazine during the Great Depression, and
wanted to kill himself (the thought of his own suicide was for years his
daily nemesis, though his life did not end that way). At _Fortune_ in
the mid-thirties his pay was low and his assignments were lower. (“Why
don’t you do this piece on the cat who couldn’t meow?” Why don’t you
bite me? and heavy usage of alcohol, were typical replies.) Agee had no
time to think or to write the way he had begun to while a student at
Exeter and Harvard, beautifully recorded now in a book of poems, _Permit
Me Voyage_ (Yale Younger Poets Series).
Sun came. A trip to Alabama. Getting to travel on _Fortune's_ dime to
the State of Alabama sounded like a good break. Seriously. The
assignment was to travel with a photographer of his choosing -- he chose
his friend, the distinguished Walker Evans -- to live with and to report
on the economic lives of three tenant farming families. They did,
staying with several families for several weeks. _Fortune_ rejected his
first draft -- Agee had returned to New York with a book proposal and a
giant pile of black and white photographs, not a publishable report for
a business magazine. But that's, you see, _our_ fortune.
The break became a book, and the book became a passion. It’s now a
classic of American literature. To the student of economic history _Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men_ completes a dialectic with familiar
neoclassical stories. To Agee, farmers were "caught" in a system
"larger than themselves." They were literally trapped socially and
immobilized economically, he suggested, and were, by virtue of not being
owners of their fixed factors, bound to be screwed. You probably don't
believe it, which is one good reason to teach the book. Try "A Country
Letter" followed by "Colon: Curtain Speech" when teaching Alston or
Lindert or Ransom and Sutch. You'll like what happens to the class
participation index. And the critical thinking, too.
Even if you reject Agee's "model" (_choice_ is not one of his
principles) you should not reject the book. It’s a masterpiece of
economic historical description and photography. _Praise_ contains, for
example, a section on the economics and biology of "Cotton" (in the
Chapter called "Work") that is a model of what Geertz calls "thick
description" and _Explorations_ calls “redundant:”
"[A]nd this is what the cotton is doing with its time: Each square
points up. That is to say: on twig-ends, certain of the fringed leaves
point themselves into the sharp form of an infant prepuce; each square
points up: and opens a flat white flower which turns pink next day,
purple the next, and the next day shrivels and falls, forced off by the
growth, at the base of the bloom, of the boll. The development from
square to boll consumes three weeks in the early summer, ten days in the
later, longer and more intense heat. . . The development of each boll
from the size of a pea to that point where, at the size of a big walnut,
it darkens and dries and its white contents silently explode it, takes
five to eight weeks and is by no means ended when the picking season has
begun" Agee 1941 (1988), p. 334.
As a teacher, _Praise_ will make you sit up in other ways: consider “the
cruel radiance of what is" in any photograph by Walker Evans; the smells
of a hot summer night “in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong” (p. 45).
A description of a supple soft and sultry body Agee should not dare to
touch. If you want to perk up a sleepy class ask your students to
distinguish the definition of "tenant farmer" from that of
"sharecropper" by reading out loud with them "A Definition" (pp.
454-58). It’s like Buster Keaton with sound.
I tell my students about Agee's childhood and other artistic
achievements, and that's where books and autobiography converge.
I tell them about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, _A Death in the
Family_ (this gorgeous book is partly autobiographical: Agee's father
died in a car crash when Agee was 6 ½ years old; the nostalgic prologue,
"Knoxville: Summer of 1915," is itself so perfectly complete it inspired
a now famous score by the composer Samuel Barber). I tell them about
_The Morning Watch_, a novella about an annual ritual performed at
Agee’s grammar school, St. Andrew's School-Sewanee, in Sewanee,
Tennessee, of keeping Christ company on the cross by staying up all
night Good Friday. I tell them about the film reviews in _The Nation_,
the late nights with Charlie Chaplin, and screenplays such as _The
African Queen_ and my favorite, _Night of the Hunter_. And I tell them,
sometimes endlessly, about Agee's _Letters to Father Flye_.
Agee was living with his family in Knoxville when his father died.
Shortly after the death his mother took him and his sister south to
Sewanee, a university town on the Cumberland Plateau, so that James
(whom they called “Rufus" at that time) could attend the Episcopal
boarding school there, run by the Order of the Holy Cross. Father Flye,
bookish and kind, was its Headmaster. By the time Agee’s mother had
moved away, Flye had become a parent, a mentor, and a life-long friend
to Agee, and many of their letters survive.
My children attend St. Andrew's School. At this point the rest of my
students, mostly Chicago born, sit up and listen more carefully. My
children have met some of Agee's family. And until recently they lived
with their mother on campus, in Father Flye's old house. When I’m there
we’ll sometimes walk through the old cemetery, to visit Father and Mrs.
Flye’s grave. Sewanee being a writers’ town, it gets more visitors than
you’d imagine. There’s another connection. Like Agee and Agee's
sister, my father and his brothers were also orphaned. This was decades
later, around 1947. Four of the five boys, including my father,
eventually solved their problem the way Agee and other orphaned
Catholics at that time did: they took up residence at St. Meinrad
Seminary, a Roman Catholic Seminary in southern Indiana. Three of the
brothers stayed (my father being, it may be clear, not one of them).
When we speak of the economics of _Praise_ I can’t help but speak of the
history of the _Letters_. Agee's _Letters_ speak of family, and
loneliness, and economics, and history, and art, and literature, and
race, and spirituality. (They also prove Agee's command of pure
English.) Agee wrote often to Father Flye about St. Andrew's, as here in
_Praise_:
"I used as a child in the innocence of faith to bring myself out of bed
through the cold lucid water of the Cumberland morning and to serve at
the altar of the earliest lonely Mass, whose words were thrilling brooks
of music and whose motions, a grave dance: and there between spread
hands the body and the blood of Christ was created among words and
lifted before God in a threshing of triplicate bells" (ix).
Nice. But why do I teach _Praise_?
It’s beautiful and faulty and simple and dense.
It’s counterpoint to neoclassical narratives.
It gets me talking about me and economics and history, and _that_ gets
my students talking about them and economics and history.
It was in the 1960s a passport to the South for northern Jews, blacks,
and others who went to register blacks for the vote, reading it on the
bus. (It may be time for such again.) Former President Jimmy Carter
calls it his favorite book in the world.
Fine. But for me and my students _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ is a
passport to history and to a style of critical thinking worthy of the
name. In this rich and freedom-forgetful nation of ours it’s a better
cure for hunger than most bread is.
2. _Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City_ (The
University of Chicago Press, 1945 [1993]), by St. Clair Drake and Horace
R. Cayton.
Under the self-imposed rule of freedom and social justice, Roosevelt
University prospered. Its mission -- dedicated officially in 1945 by
Eleanor Roosevelt -- instantly attracted unusual people. Saul Bellow
and Martin Bronfenbrenner taught at the Central Y. And Don Patinkin was
a student there. Abba Lerner and Walter Weisskopf were professors of
economics at Roosevelt, and Mayor Harold Washington and the Bayesian
statistician Morris DeGroot were students. The History Department was
also distinguished and colorful from the get-go. Christopher Lasch cut
his teeth in it. And the tenured historians kept as long as they could
a line open for assistant professor of history, Staughton Lynd, though
he once flirted with treason by traveling to North Vietnam.
St. Clair Drake is another outstanding example of Roosevelt's mission.
Drake, an African American, was a professor of sociology who earned his
Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He worked with W. Lloyd Warner and
Robert Park, two leading figures in what used to be called "urban
anthropology" and what I would now call, essentially, "the new social
history." Drake faced in 1946 the same occupational hurdle W.E.B. Du
Bois had faced decades earlier, with one difference: Drake wrote the
better book (in time Stanford hired him away from Roosevelt).
Everyone’s heard of Du Bois' _The Philadelphia Negro_ (1899). This is
the ground-breaking empirical-ethnographic study he conducted by
invitation of the Wharton family, showing nearly comprehensively the
microeconometric and legal and sociological realities of northern urban
racism (Du Bois was the first African American to study for the Ph.D. in
Economics. He began at Harvard before he went overseas (harmlessly, he
thought) to the University of Berlin, where he studied with Max Weber
and Gustav Schmoller, his advisor. Three terms later, despite a strong
letter of support from Schmoller, Harvard would not advance Du Bois to
the final stages of the Ph.D. in Economics -- not enough time in
residence, they said. So Harvard’s History Department took him in and
published his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade
as Volume 1, Number 1 in the Harvard Historical Series. The rest is,
you might say, “history.”)
Few today have heard of Drake and Cayton's _Black Metropolis_. But in
1945, the year it was published, the right people had. Financed by the
Works Progress Administration, and introduced by Richard Wright, _Black
Metropolis_ is an astonishing portrait of "Negro life" on the South Side
of Chicago. Properly speaking its subject is the production,
consumption, distribution, and redistribution of wealth and poverty
between 12th and 71st Streets, Cottage Grove and Wentworth: its subject,
in other words, is the economic history of Bronzeville, "the Black
Belt," before and after the Great Migration (379).
"Black Metropolis is the second largest Negro city in the world, only
New York's Harlem exceeding it in size. It is a city within a city -- a
narrow tongue of land, seven miles in length and one and one-half miles
in width, where more than 300,000 Negroes are packed solidly . . .
Peripheral to this Black Belt are five smaller Negro concentrations
which are, in a fundamental sense, parts of Black Metropolis. Of
Chicago's 337,000 Negroes a bare 10 per cent are scattered among the
white population" (p. 12).
Drake and Cayton do not employ techniques of formal mathematical
modeling. They do not estimate any regression coefficients and they are
not in any way bamboozled by tests of statistical significance: they
don't do them. But the book is empirical and historical, through the
through. It's more comprehensive than _The Philadelphia Negro_ (Du Bois,
feeling chaffed by the ubiquitous evangelical element at his black Ohio
college, chose to ignore the role of the church in black life). And with
better and varied evidence, conveyed in elegant, urban, philosophical
poetry, _Black Metropolis_ is high on my list.
"Swoop low at evening over a forest of water tanks feeding factories set
upon the flatness of a prairie, and you will see Chicago's Three Million
-- her working men and women streaming toward their houses in the inner
city, and her white-collar and professional people outward-bound to
their homes on the periphery or in the suburbs. The night shift surges
through the gates and the city turns into 133 square miles of lighted
pin-points clustered about the lake beneath you" (p. 5).
My students -- descendents of the second wave of migrants, the farmers
and croppers of the Deep South -- live in the Black Belt. With Suzette,
a black Jamaican, I live close by, on the edge of it, where "Midwest
Metropolis seems uneasy about the Negro city growing up in its midst"
(p. 12). Still. We shop in the Black Belt. We go (with Deirdre M) for
jazz and jerk and late night bar-b-q in the Black Belt. We cheer for
the White Sox in the Black Belt. We worship in the Black Belt. And I
greet my students in the Black Belt.
For my purposes, then, _Black Metropolis_ is a great book for students.
But I think it is great for a lot of people’s purposes. If I'd have
had the chance, I'd have tried to get it on Gerschenkron's short list.
Well?
3. _Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action_
(Princeton University Press, 1981), by Albert O. Hirschman.
An important theme and fact of twentieth century economic history is the
enormous swelling of the size and shape of government in GDP. Many
observers have devoted their energies to answering why -- "Why," that
is, "the large swelling?" A familiar but less common approach is to ask
a counterfactual question, "What would economic (or social or
ecological) history be like _without_ the growth of government?" This
is the kind of question Coase used to ply his life-long friend Abba
Lerner with (Coase recently told me at Roosevelt); Lerner was, of
course, a life-long socialist, open minded and open, David Colander has
shown, to market-type thinking.
In _Shifting Involvements_ Hirschman plants as usual an original
perspective in these margins.
Essentially, he asks:
“Why do people sometimes devote a great deal of time and energy to the
consumption of private goods and then suddenly, even instantaneously,
switch gears altogether, _away from_ the consumption of private goods
and _toward_ the production of a public good?”
Using anecdotal evidence from important episodes in history (such as the
American civil rights movement), and drawing on the philosopher Harry G.
Frankfurt's theory of metapreferences, Hirschman strives to elicit more
than prove. That’s the virtue of the book, and why I’m recommending it.
Speaking as an economist I admit I’m both attracted and repelled by
_Shifting Involvements_. Economic historical "proof" is a many-headed
snake. And Hirschman can sink his teeth into you. But colleagues in
economics desire deductive systems built on solid axioms, from ‘more is
better’ to ‘completeness.’ They’ve got a point. One of the voices in
my head, sometimes two or three, is similarly biased. Yet colleagues in
history feel understandably choked off by the utilitarian and mock-solid
basis, finding in history multiple causal structures for public and
private behavior (if they haven't given up completely on cause and
structure or public and private, as many have). I hear that, too.
I guess it’s the rhetorician in me that is attracted to Hirschman's
_elicitations_ of argument. Students, in my view, do not learn often
enough the forms of economic historical reasoning that are not directly
translatable into cliometrics. _Shifting Involvements_ is a good
example of why they should.
Maybe, Hirschman suggests, maybe a March on Washington is possible
because the person doing the walking wants to be the kind of person who
Marches on Washington. The opportunity cost of the March is in personal
terms enormous -- prohibitive, we can say, monetarily speaking; and the
very idea of the March as a thing-in-itself is improbable, even
impossible, for anyone with ordinary "preferences." Still.
Black Montgomery
stopped the bus with a boycott
increasing demand.
Likewise, it may be that the nineteenth century rise of social work and
welfare is importantly connected to a widespread boredom with private
life and excessive consumption following the end of war work. And so
forth. Maybe.
The autobiography? It’s in the haiku.
4. _The Rhetoric of Economics_ (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985,
1998), by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Like her teacher Alexander Gerschenkron, McCloskey could be neither the
Friedman-groupie nor the maverick at the margin. In the late 1970s,
while still at the University of Chicago, this leading economic
historian discovered her interest in the rhetoric of economics. It
wasn’t going to solve her problem at Chicago. But it has since done a
lot of good for the rhetoric of economics and other human sciences.
I for one am glad for it. It pulled me away from an increasingly
routine job at the Indiana Department of Employment and Training
Services, in Indianapolis. And took me to Eastern Iowa! But seriously,
best of all, it brought me to Deirdre.
What’s the history of her _Rhetoric_, and what can you do with it?
In the late seventies Friedman was at the Hoover Institution, Fogel had
moved to Harvard, and George Stigler, though retired, was still setting
the tone of departmental discussion. McCloskey was reading philosophy
of science again (an interest she developed in graduate school but only
casually and up to Popper's _Logic_). She was now reading Michael
Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin, and Paul Feyerabend. She noticed that
Stigler's rhetoric was couched in a 1920s positivism applied with a
1950s, McCarthy-like intolerance of disagreement. I know it sounds
harsh. But intellectual life can, like the farming life, or the
meatpacking life, be that way. Wayne Booth, the eminent rhetorician,
invited her to give a talk in the English Department concerning "The
Rhetoric of Economics." A little shaky still but she liked it;
something important was brewing there. But she couldn’t get Stigler or
Becker or Lucas to engage in a rational exploration of their own
rhetoric of belief (Tobin complained to me once of a similar problem he
had with them. I think he told a lot of people about that). In 1980
she resigned and moved to the University of Iowa.
Iowa named McCloskey the John F. Murray Professor of Economics and
Professor of History. Her project was in truth to grow in her
understanding of the rhetoric of economics, the art of economic
persuasion. She talked less and less about Victorian failure and open
fields and daily and excitedly about Aristotle, metonymy, Kenneth Burke,
and the tragic tropes of the t-test. Her colleagues in economics --
your teachers, perhaps -- grew anxious. But by 1982 this leading
historian had lectured around the world on her new paper, "The Rhetoric
of Economics," and published it in 1983 in the _Journal of Economic
Literature_. An instant cause celebre, the paper was a prelude to her
now-classic book of that name and to five additional books on the
subject, with sixty or so papers.
_The Rhetoric of Economics_ is a strange contribution to Chicago School
Economics. It shows that best practice economics is neither positivist
nor monist; that Milton Friedman is not the high priest or tiny demon of
positivism, and was not in 1953 when he published the "Essay;" it tries
to show that poets and economists, with their leaves and coconuts, do
not differ in methodology; that Marxist professors of English and
Chicago professors of economics can learn from each other; and that an
improved and pluralistic rhetoric of economics will follow the examples
of Fogel, Coase, and Friedman.
You don’t have to see eye-to-eye with Deirdre’s economics to get a lot
out of this book. My students don’t. _I_ certainly don’t; often enough,
I don’t, anyway (though I’ve noticed that the more time Deirdre and I
spend together in Bronzeville, the closer our economic ideas become!).
Chapters 1 through 3 teach students to read rhetorically. Chapters 4
through 6 give detailed examples of ways to do it, pulling the sheets
back (gasp!) from Fogel and Coase. Chapters 8 and 9 show students the
big payoff of a rhetorical reading (and I do apologize in advance,
though only a little, for this transparent profile of my own work):
statistical significance, the master trope of empirical economics, is
neither necessary nor sufficient for the demonstration of economic or
historical significance. Never has been. Never will be. But I know,
you think that’s more elicitation of personal probability than it is
proof of incontrovertible axiom. Maybe so. But the ball’s in your
court. If you’re right, you and your best students will after reading
and thinking about our papers (and new book) be able to prove it!
Meantime, three cheers for a great semester.
Steve Ziliak is Associate Professor of Economics at Roosevelt
University. His book (with McCloskey), _Size Matters: How Some Sciences
Lost Interest in Magnitude, and What to Do About It_, is forthcoming
Spring 2006 with MIT Press. He is currently at work on a biography of
William Sealy Gosset. Ziliak is an award-winning teacher, including
Faculty Member of the Year, 2002, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.