Interview with James L. Roark
James L. Roark has since 1983 been the Department’s authority on the 18th and 19th century American South. After receiving his B.A. from the University of California, Davis, in 1963 he served with the Peace Corps in Nigeria for three years, which included two years teaching at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1973. His dissertation was awarded the Society of American Historians Allan Nevins Prize. After some years on the faculty of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, he came to Emory in 1983 where he has for many years been Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History. In 1993 he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2001-2002 was Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University. He is the author of Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1977). With Michael Johnson he wrote Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (1984) and edited No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War (1984). And he is co-author of The American Promise: A History of the United States which has been published in several editions. Jim has twice served as Chair of the Department and is recognized as an outstanding undergraduate teacher who has also trained many graduate students now engaged in productive academic work throughout the United States. He is interviewed here by Fraser Harbutt.
FJH: Jim, I think your journey began in Louisiana, and that you grew up in California?
JLR: Yes I was born in Eunice, Louisiana. My Dad was a roughneck working in the oilfields and we moved around from rig to rig. My mother decided that was no life for a child and told my Dad to find something else to do. So we moved to California and he became a pipe-fitter and we were able to establish a firm location in the Bay Area. I grew up there.
FJH: Can we trace your interest in history to any of these events?
JLR: My mother, good Southerner that she was, did have a deep sense of history and I think I may have simply imbibed it from her, though her interest was primarily in Southern novels. So there was an early glimmering but right out of high school I joined Pipefitters Local #342 in Oakland, intending to follow my Dad’s line of work. I eventually found myself at the local community college, then at the University of California, Davis, where I got interested in history. My real commitment came in graduate school at Stanford where I worked with two first-rate Southern historians: David Potter and Carl Degler.
FJH: What was the atmosphere like at Stanford in those turbulent days. You were there from the late 1960s through the early 1970s I think.
JLR: That’s right. I had just come back in 1967 from three years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. Quite literally the cities in the United States were burning. I remember the sense of dislocation I experienced upon returning after three years in Africa. There was a strange disjuncture too between the traditional quiet of graduate study and the wider context of violence and disruption. And of course between Berkeley and Stanford you really had the epicenter of resistance to the war in Vietnam. There was, on those campuses, a kind of war within a war. Buildings were being burned.
FJH: Yes. I was at Berkeley about the same time. The day after I arrived the library was bombed. It was quite common to see bodies in the street of people overcome by exposure to tear-gas after confrontations with the authorities.
JLR: That’s right. There was certainly plenty of action and we would listen to the campus radio to see where it was going to be on any given day.
FJH: Nevertheless, you were clearly able to get the necessary work done, and not only that but you wrote a brilliant dissertation for your Ph.D. that was awarded the very prestigious Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians. That must have been a thrill.
JLR: It was a thrill. I received a phone call from Kenneth Jackson, the distinguished Columbia University urban historian, asking me if I had made arrangements for the publication of the thesis, which I had hardly begun to think about. I said I hadn’t. He said, Good, because the Nevins Prize depended on its sponsors having the right to publish. W.W.Norton published it in 1977.
FJH: I’d like to ask you more about your published work. But let me bring you back for a moment, as people of our somewhat obsessed generation are embarrassingly prone to do, to the unforgettable Sixties. Do you feel that it was on the whole a positive period in American history, or was it retrograde in some fundamental way?
JLR: That is indeed the crucial question. How do you feel about the Sixties? My own assessment is predominantly positive. Along with the craziness and silliness profound questions were being raised and discussed. And I think that the challenges presented in the universities, in racial relations, and in foreign policy were on the whole justified, and that the outcomes were constructive and progressive.
FJH: Your joining the Peace Corps, before going on to Graduate study, was very much a representative act among idealistic students of the early 1960s, I think. Before we leave that era can you tell us something of your experiences in Africa?
JLR: Martha and I married in 1963 and joined the Peace Corps in the fall of 1964. It was really our response to John Kennedy’s challenge “What can you do?” It wasn’t all altruistic of course. I wanted to see the world, and to grow up and test myself, and this seemed a good way to do it.
FJH: I notice you taught in universities in West Africa during this time
JLR: We spent our first year in Nigeria teaching at a small junior high school for girls. It was typical Peace Corps experience. You put together a building and then taught in it. I was the only male among a hundred female students and staff. I then found that a new campus of the University of Nigeria needed someone to teach, of all things, American history. So we moved to the eastern part of the country, and I taught at the university in Nsukka for two years. Tensions were brewing all the time we were there. Finally, on May 31, 1967, Biafra seceded. We made it over the Onitsha bridge and out of Biafra the day before the bridge was blown up. The civil war caused years of dreadful suffering, but by then we had returned to the U.S.
FJH: When you left Stanford I think you took a faculty position at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. And then came to Emory in 1983. What were your first impressions when you came here?
JLR: I remember the beauty of the campus. Compared with the University of Missouri in St. Louis, which was a brand new school that opened in 1963, and was rather raw though pulsing with the energy of an enthusiastic young faculty, Emory seemed to me to be old, rather genteel, and wealthy. But because of the $105 million Woodruff gift, Emory was about to begin the most dynamic growth in its existence.
FJH: Jim, you are widely recognized as an outstanding teacher. In 1993 you received the University’s Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award. Your undergraduate courses on the Old South are very popular. And you have trained more graduate Ph.D. students than any other member of the Department. I know many people, including your colleagues and your former students now teaching in different parts of the United States, would be very interested to have your reflections on that experience.
JLR: I’ve greatly enjoyed both undergraduate and graduate teaching at Emory. But as I’ve grown older, graduate students have become a special delight. In my years at Emory I’ve been associated with more that 50 dissertations and directed about 20 or so. Each dissertation is a kind of postgraduate seminar for me - I’ve learned enormously from each experience. Many of my graduate students have become dear friends, and it is a great pleasure to watch their careers develop. Almost all of the dissertations I have directed have become (or are becoming) books. I can’t take credit for that, of course, but it does make me proud.
FJH: To get back to scholarship for a moment. After Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction, you published Black Masters: A Free Family of Color on the Eve of the Civil War with a co-author, Michael Johnson, in 1984. The subject - the little known reality of black slaveholders - created a stir.
JLR: Yes. A lot of people, even American historians, didn’t know that blacks in the South could own slaves. But free black people had property rights and in the southern states slave property was legal property. Over 3,000 blacks owned slaves. Many of them owned family members, whom they could not legally free.
FJH: You have also written about free and enslaved blacks in Charleston. Was the situation similar there?
JLR: Yes. Black Masters focused on the experiences of the Ellison family in upcountry South Carolina which, in moving from slavery to freedom, developed links through marriage with the free black community in Charleston. The free black experience in the urban setting of Charleston looked quite different than Ellison’s story in the countryside. Where Ellison lived a rather lonely and isolated existence surrounded by whites, in Charleston hundreds of free blacks created a supportive community of their own.
FJH: One of the interesting features of your career has been your collaboration with Michael Johnson in several publications. You have also led a strong team of professional historians in creating the widely acclaimed textbook The America Promise: A History of the United States, which has been through several editions. Those of us in the monastic trap of solo work, and lacking perhaps the social skills and/or the psychological resilience to bare our souls to an intimate collaborator (I’ll leave it at that!) are bound to find this kind of collegiality both enviable and intriguing. How have you managed it?
JLR: Its true historians are not really trained very well to play with the other children. The assumed standard is one historian wrestling with the material and any time you have more that one you have a committee. And committees tend to produce work at the lowest common denominator. Collaboration is unusual in history and Mike and I were always worried that at some point there would be a division of opinion on interpretation. But, much to our relief, that never happened. There are a number of reasons. We studied at Stanford together and with the same people. We graduated the same year. We were friends. And in general we saw history and especially American history in much the same way. We were both Southerners, Michael being from Oklahoma. His Dad worked in the oil business as mine did. And we talked incessantly about what we were finding and what it meant. So there were firm foundations for our work together. But collaboration is risky and relationships can easily come apart.
FJH: And I imagine this is even more likely when you have a larger group such as the one you assembled for The American Promise? I think six were involved there?
JLR: Well, the more links in the chain the more precarious it is. But we found first-rate historians who recognized the importance of working well together, finding common ground. We all fully agreed upon the basic shape and concepts of the project
FJH: You have been a leader in Southern history at Emory and this field has been our most enduring success as a departmental specialty, indeed the strongest feature of our program. How has the field changed, as a taught discipline, over the years you have been here?
JLR: Because of Emory’s location in Atlanta, southern history has always had a deep root here. Eminent southern historians - C. Vann Woodward, David M. Potter, Dumas Malone, Louis Harlan - were Emory undergraduates. Distinguished Southern historians have taught here - Bell Wiley for instance, and then Dan Carter, who was here when I arrived. There is great strength today with young historians like Joe Crespino, and there are many other people at Emory who do outstanding work in Southern studies like Allen Tullos in the Institute of Liberal Arts, Merle Black in Political Science and Len Carlson in Economics. Consequently Southern history is robust at Emory. I think that as our departmental scope has grown to include the entire world, the relative influence of Southern history has declined a tad. Although Southern history does not have the same high visibility it once did, many people across the university continue to do great work in the field.
FJH: I’d like to ask you too about Southern history generally. To the outside observer it would seem that the two great dominating subjects are still race relations and the Civil War. I wonder if other aspects of the subject such as religion, cultural issues and economic change are becoming more interesting to scholars to the point that one can talk of a more wide-ranging Southern history?
JLR: I think that is a very fair question. There’s no getting around race and slavery as centerpieces of the 19th century South, culminating in the Civil War , the central experience of the American nation. And these issues continue with great strength. But since the 1960s scholars have moved in the direction you indicate, with growing interest in broad questions about society and culture. Southern history has kept pace with national preoccupations and, rather than challenging the field, these new emphases have really enlivened it, and have made it more pertinent to historians whose work had not hitherto intersected very much with issues of race and Civil War.
FJH: You are a specialist, of course, in the Old South. Do you ever wish you had concentrated on the New South?
JLR: Well I do stand in the New as well as the Old South. I am interested in the meaning of the Civil War and that large question: Whether 19th century Southern history is characterized by rupture or continuity. That is a classic issue. Joe Crespino teaches the New South at Emory. That century and a half after the Civil War is in good hands. So I have enough to keep me busy in the Old South and the Civil War.
FJH: Finally, about our own department. You have been Chair of the Department twice and you have played such an active leadership role in so many of our activities that I’m sure our readers would like to get your impression of our current situation. Are we on the right track?
JLR: In recent years we have been able both to make very good appointments at the Assistant Professor level and to build new strength at the most senior rank with David Eltis and Gyan Pandey. There has been some concern in the Department over the last couple of years about the central role of history in the College curriculum, notably in the General Education Requirements. Even more troubling was the precipitous decline last year in the Graduate School’s support of our doctoral program. This year, under Kristin Mann’s leadership, the Department is dedicating itself to rebuilding its strength at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
FJH: Jim, thank you very much.