First Person - January 27, 1999

Activist Scholar
Eric Goldman marshaled history in the cause of social justice

by Daniel J. Kevles '60 *64

Not long after his arrival at Princeton, in 1942, Eric F. Goldman began work on an ambitious history of modern American reform. Published 10 years later to critical acclaim, Rendezvous with Destiny -- the title derived from Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech, which had thrilled Eric when he heard it delivered in 1936 at Franklin Field, in Philadelphia -- analyzed the development of the grand tradition of liberalism in the United States. Yet Eric also hoped that the book would make a difference in the life of his country. For he held that what people believe about the past helps shape their attitudes toward the present and the future. To him, history was a weapon for social change, and he passionately wanted to help change the United States.

Eric was eager to change the world because he had learned early in life that much of the world was not very pleasant. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1915, he grew up in Baltimore, amid a grinding poverty that drove his mother into a mental sanitarium. His earliest memories were of a dilapidated one-ton Chevrolet truck from which he helped his father, Harry Goldman, a crusty but caring man, eke out a living selling fruits and vegetables -- until the Depression wiped out the business and his father turned to struggling as a taxi driver.

A prodigy, Eric graduated from high school at age 16, entered the Johns Hopkins University with sophomore standing, and eventually skipped his bachelor's degree to proceed directly into graduate work in history. During his years as a student and then an instructor at Hopkins, he came under the influence of the columnist and social critic H. L. Mencken, who befriended Eric when he moonlighted as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and the economic historian Charles Beard, who hired him as his assistant. Mencken helped Eric learn how to write, and Beard impressed on him the possibilities of writing books that, by exposing the contradictions of the past, might persuade people to think differently about the present and future.

By the time Rendezvous with Destiny was published Eric had started work on a new book. The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955 appeared in 1956, a year after Eric was promoted to full professor at Princeton, and it immediately jumped to the New York Times best-seller list. In both these books and in most of his other writings, Eric practiced analytic narrative history -- history that tells a story while weaving analysis into the tale. Although he drew on works in social science, including studies in anthropology, psychology, political science, and economics, he did not think of history as a social science expressing or testing laws of human behavior. To his mind, historical writing was fundamentally an art form, and most definitely not a search for a timeless, absolute Truth.

Eric -- the product of the Depression and the Baltimore streets -- enlisted history on behalf of the New Deal and the welfare state. While the power of economic interests shaped his understanding of modern America, he held that forces were at play in the United States that were not fundamentally economic. To Eric's mind, the most important non-economic force was status -- the drive to maintain it or achieve it, or both. The patrician reformer -- a theme he developed in Rendezvous, notably in his treatment of Franklin Roosevelt -- was a reformer partly because he had an interest in conserving social stability but also, in part, because his reforms would defend his position in society against plutocrats ambitious to replace him.

 

CHRONICLING AND CRITIQUING THE FIFTIES

Eric relished writing about the American people and their diverse ways. In The Crucial Decade, he analyzed McCarthyism, the acceptance by Eisenhower Republicans of the welfare state, and the country's ultimate embrace of internationalism; but he also recounted the dizzying social changes that accompanied the prosperity of the postwar years, including television, suburbia, the baby boom, TV dinners, frozen foods, installment buying, Mickey Spillane, religion, popular music, organized crime, and the Kinsey Report. He gave intellectual point to such trends, relating them to elections and public policies and to the stories of socioeconomic groups who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, including Catholics, Jews, and blacks. Status aspirations loomed larger in Eric's interpretive thinking during the Eisenhower years, when prosperity diminished the economic differences between old-stock Protestants and ethnic and religious minority groups. His books recounted the demands of such groups not only for access to the wonder of America but also for recognition and respect in it, and analyzed how they were, in greater or lesser degree, increasingly attaining it all through a combination of public and private action. He made Jackie Robinson's flashing cleats speak for an era of remarkable social change.

Eric loved the United States for its democratic credo. Yet while he celebrated the changes that the credo had brought about in the 20th century, he was unhappy with salient features of postwar America. He deplored the 1950s' indulgent materialism, as though the point of reform had been only to put a barbecue in every backyard; its discouragement, even after the repudiation of McCarthyism, of adventurous thinking; and its slowness to deal with the longstanding issue of race.

Eric's unblinking eye contributed to the wild popularity of History 307, his course for undergraduates on the history of modern America. It regularly enrolled some 300 to 450 students. Time and again seniors voted Eric "best lecturer." Like his writing, his lectures were textured with colorful vignettes, resourceful wit, and razor-sharp deflations of pomposity and cant. But the course also appealed because, in many ways, the undergraduates of the era increasingly represented the America that Eric was critically analyzing -- a get-ahead America, where white minority groups were flooding through the gates of opportunity, joining old-stock whites in the new prosperity. Eric's teaching also articulated inchoate questions that doubtless troubled many of his students: How to maintain intellectual independence in an era of conformity? How to maintain freedom against the power of big government, big labor, and big corporations? How to hold one's identity as a Catholic or a Jew while aspiring to acceptance in a predominantly Protestant country? How to make it in America without losing one's conscience or soul? How to be a responsible citizen in a world teetering on the edge of Armageddon?

 

REVISING THE CONSTITUTION

In 1958, he challenged a group of his students to revise the U.S. Constitution in lieu of a final examination, pointing out that the founding document, having been written in an agrarian society, might warrant recasting for an age of urban industrialism and intercontinental missiles. The project was derided by some in the national press -- the Indianapolis Star declared that when Professor Goldman's students finished disposing of the Constitution, he "might try his hand at the Bible, a document turned out by some ancient Jewish cattle men and farmers." The students in the course thought better of the project. The revision tended to strengthen federal power over state power, executive power over legislative power, and civil liberties and civil rights. History 307, assembled in convention, adopted the document by a vote of better than two to one.

Goldman with LBJIn 1964, the White House announced Eric's appointment as Special Consultant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Eric threw himself into the job (which allowed him to continue teaching at Princeton) in his passionate eagerness to serve his country. He responded to Johnson's genuine eagerness to ameliorate the bread-and-butter lives of the American people and to that Southerner's resolve, now that he was in the White House, to deal at long last with the issue of race. I remember vividly, when I arrived in Washington for a brief stint as an assistant to Eric, the glowing excitement he felt over being in a position where he could roll up his sleeves and help make America over.

The White House job was Eric's ultimate opportunity to recruit history to the cause of changing the United States. In the speeches he drafted and the memoranda he wrote, he often drew on the past to articulate strategies and directions for the development of Johnson's policies. Eric was exhilarated and effective during the tonic months in 1964, when Johnson drove to surpass FDR's record on domestic-reform legislation, and in early 1965, when his legislative successes achieved torrential proportions. But during the summer of that year, Eric's influence seemed impaired by the growing protests over the escalating war in Vietnam. He left the White House in the fall of 1966 because of his own distress about the war and his inability to do anything about it. Eric provided his own account of his White House years in The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, another best-seller, part memoir and part history.

 

"A TOUCH OF JOY IN LIVING"

During the 1970s, Eric spoke with increasing seriousness about retiring early from Princeton, possibly to a semirural area where he would write and fish and contemplate the world. He and his wife, Jo, were zeroing in on a place in North Carolina when, in March 1980, he suffered a serious stroke. In April, Jo, who had beaten cancer, died suddenly, a victim of the extraordinary stress of his illness. Eric eventually managed a partial recovery, but he had lost the ability to read easily and to use his right arm well enough to write. He might have found ways around those disabilities to continue as a writer and commentator, but Jo's death had broken him. After he retired from Princeton, in 1985, he became increasingly preoccupied with establishing a memorial to her.

Eric died in February 1989, before having hit upon a memorial he considered appropriate. However, he had willed almost his entire estate for the purpose and asked me to advise his executor on the fulfillment of his wishes. In 1992, as the principal remembrance of Jo, the estate established the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lecture in American Civilization and Government, to be delivered annually and expanded into a small book. The aim of the memorial is to invite writers and analysts of distinction to probe and provoke fresh thought about issues of contemporary importance in American life. That purpose seemed consistent with Eric's ferocious love of the United States, his bedrock belief in its credo -- "that ordinary men and women have a right to peace, material comfort, self-respect, and a touch of joy in living," as he wrote in the preface to The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson -- and his enduring eagerness to harness iconoclasm and intellect to achieving those ends.

 

Daniel J. Kevles '60 *64 is the Koepfli Professor of Humanities and head of the Program in Science, Ethics, and Public Policy at the California Institute of Technology. This memoir is an abridgment of a much longer essay that appears in Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered, edited by Patricia H. Marks *72, published in 1996 by the Princeton Graduate Alumni Association, and available from the Princeton University Store (1-800-624-4236).

paw@princeton.edu