Eva Dale  0:00  
From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley  0:31  
I am pleased to be joined today by David Steigerwald, Professor of History at The Ohio State University, College of the Arts and Sciences. He teaches courses in 20th century American history, ranging from the First World War through the 1960s. He has twice been honored by OSU chapter of Phi Alpha Theta with the Clio Award for Outstanding Teaching and History, and is a recipient of the University's highest recognition for teaching excellence, the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He was also awarded the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award for the year 2016-2017. He serves as Director of the History Department's World War II study abroad program, which we're going to be learning more about today. Dr. Steigerwald, welcome to Voices.

David Steigerwald  1:16  
Thank you, David. I really appreciate the invitation, and should be fun to talk.

David Staley  1:21  
I have no doubt about that. You are currently working on a book that traces the history of alienation from World War II to the Unabomber, and the working title of the book is "Lost in the Land of Plenty: Affluence and Alienation in Post-War America." I want to learn more about this book, but maybe first of all, start by telling us what is alienation, or how are you defining alienation in this book?

David Steigerwald  1:46  
Alienation is what philosophers and social scientists have called an umbrella concept. In and of itself, it's pretty mushy, but beneath its umbrella, gather, or have been gathered, a number of more or less discernible behavioral trends, social psychological trends, such as loneliness, anxiety, estrangement, self estrangement, normlessness, a few others. It's a composite concept that has sort of evolved out of mid century and had gathered a number of different threads; most important one is from Émile Durkheim, and more largely, turn of the century - that is the 20th century - continental sociology: Max Weber, Georg Simmel. But, Durkheim and his concept of "anomie" was really central to the way that the concept of alienation evolved in the 20th century, particularly after the war, and in fact, it is a post war thing. It's not a disease, it's not a designated illness, it's never been entered into the clinical psychological professional standards of mental illness, but certainly a lot of the things that are gathered under it. Anxiety, suicidal ideation, are discernible mental health problems, so it remains a little mushy, it's more a sociological and a social psychological concept, than it is a particular medical or, for that matter, even historical concept.

David Staley  3:27  
So, what's your argument in the book? What are you saying about alienation in 20th century America?

David Steigerwald  3:32  
It's a diffuse and low simmering crisis of the individual in a world that moves very quickly without much attention to individuals, such that it creates the sense among a lot of different people that they're not really in control of their everyday lives; they're not in control of their work lives, they're not in control of their institutional lives. The power structures that came to make up Post War America, post war modernity really were pretty indifferent to the individual's fate, and I mean, we're talking about the moment when a kind of hyper organization of the world set in, partly due to the war itself, but it was really a function, like Weber said, of modern capitalism, which generated large scale enterprise, large scale organization, that had, you know, spin off effects, the increasing size of universities, the increasing size of corporations, increasing strength and breadth of the state. All these things created a society after World War Two that was widely bureaucratized, intensely organized and organized in large batches, right, rather than in family farms, or small businesses and so forth. So, to me, in the way I'm arguing about this is that the structures of power that emerged after World War Two pushed toward this hyper organization, and this was a society, after all, that had always prided itself on its individualism, right. And this is Durkheim right, the gap between values and social structure created a period of great uncertainty, of challenges to norms and values, to a sense that what we had believed 20 years ago no longer has any purchase on the realities that we live. And it's that gap that I think created a period, maybe 30 years long or so, of widespread alienation. The other part of the argument is that, because the late 60s, particularly, issued in a really serious, not just political crisis, but more important, a deep social and cultural crisis in the Western world, but particularly the United States, those institutions of power were more or less forced, in order to maintain stability, were encouraged, let's say, to reformulate values, reformulate the way they appeared to people, in order to alleviate that problem of loneliness, of lost individual autonomy and so forth. So there's a pivot that I think came with late 20th century capitalism. It created a at least momentarily, and by that I mean about 20 years worth, of cultural themes that were designed to convince all of us that we are indeed the masters of our fate.

David Staley  6:42  
I had introduced this book by saying that you're looking at this history from World War Two to the Unabomber, and I know that as part of the research for this book, you had the opportunity to read or to examine the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski's, jailhouse mail. You have to tell us about that experience.

David Steigerwald  6:59  
Well, it is a little odd. I think it's the only manuscript collection I've ever worked in that gets replenished, or at least it had been. I don't know what his mental state is right now, he has been moved from the supermax in Colorado to a sort of a old, dangerous guy's penitentiary somewhere in Maryland, I think, is where he's at. So this was probably 2014 or 2015 when I was at the University of Michigan. They have a wonderful archive of american anarchism, and the archivist up there basically talked Kaczynski into archiving his materials with them, so there it is. And at least at the time I was working there, she told me, the archivist told me that, you know, every month or so, or every other month, they get a package from him that contains the stuff he'd been writing, to which I couldn't help but ask, well, who actually opens that mail?

David Staley  7:56  
That's an excellent question.

David Steigerwald  7:57  
I kind of assume that that's what the undergraduate workers are for. 

David Staley  8:03  
Oh dear.

David Steigerwald  8:06  
But it was interesting to see into the guy's mind. 

David Staley  8:10  
What did you discover? Or is that even fathomable? 

David Steigerwald  8:14  
Of course I'm not a professional therapist or psychiatrist, so you got to take what I say with that in mind, he clearly seems to be someone, and I'll put it this way, who has a great deal of difficulty with human relationships, and he seemed comfortable only with a couple of relationships, one in particular with a street artist, a street theater artist from Boston. Who not sexualized, but nonetheless intimate ways to which he responded with uncharacteristic warmth. I don't know what the state of that relationship is at this point, as I say, I haven't been back in the archives since that initial trip. I think the mental key to him is he may have had associative disorder. That's what they call it. Now, we used to call it sociopathy or psychopathy, and there's some evidence that as a young boy he was he had that kind of numbness that goes along, that lack of empathy that goes along with that diagnosis. So I think you see that especially in his relationship with his brother, and so some of the information that's in that collection tells me that much. 

David Staley  9:29  
So your book is studying alienation, loneliness, anxiety, suicidal ideation. These are feelings, emotions. How do you go about, as an historian, how do you go about studying an emotion or a feeling?

David Steigerwald  9:44  
Well, that's a really great question, one that I wrestled with a lot, and it's one of the reasons why it's taken 10 years to get this far with this book. I had it almost written about four years ago, and I just decided I was really unhappy with my understanding of how the sociologists were thinking about this, so I took a couple of years off writing to read through basically everything that Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons and their students wrote, which is akin to sadomasochism.

David Staley  10:18  
Now, these are contemporary sociologists you're reading, these are sociologists they were writing in the 50s, yes? 

David Steigerwald  10:24  
Yeah, yeah, Merton and Parsons were the absolute deans of American sociology in the 50s. They put sociology on the social science map, really, and they did it through the broad paradigm of structural functionalism, or functional structuralism. People say it both ways, sometimes just structuralism, sometimes just functionalism. It's all the same thing. It goes back to Durkheim and Weber and through Merton and Parsons into the United States. So I got to the point where I'm really confident that I've mastered what their contributions were, and so I've been able to regenerate the writing from that redrafting earlier essays and so forth, but what I'm saying here is that that allows me at least some kind of social science sense of where the ideas came to define the emotions, if you follow me there. The other way to do it is simply to listen to people and to read broadly enough in contemporary literature or movies. I'm a huge consumer of contemporary newspapers, and I follow trends. For example, right now I'm looking at car thiefs in the 1950s and 1960s who knew that the majority of car thiefs were, first of all juveniles, and second of all suburban juveniles, and so they're almost the personification of James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause." So there you've got life imitating art, and I think you can chalk that up, or I am chalking it up as part of the suburban dislocation of the affluent society, and young people, basically, indirectly, perhaps, but nonetheless rebelling against the environment that they were stultified in. So that's a way to do it, the, the, word alienation, the self description or the comments about loneliness, emptiness, estrangement, powerlessness was another one. It's very common to hear people talking about themselves that way, and if someone tells me that they are depressed and they feel alienated, then I take them at their word,

David Staley  12:41  
And then this sense of alienation, what, does it end or is this something that you could continue to trace, presumably, up to the present?

David Steigerwald  12:50  
This, too, is a good question. The very nature of the contemporary capitalist society is such that there's always going to be some alienation. But the question is, and the issue is, how broadly spread is that sensibility, and it does seem to dissipate, beginning in the 80s and then into the 90s. Suddenly, people were finding themselves with technologies that allowed them to, oh, create their own communities, right, in which they felt empowered. The technophilism that emerged in the 1990s I believe, was a direct reaction to the alienation of the 1970s, and you can actually trace the cultural, political, ideological threads through many of the early technological geniuses, the people who were inventing the computers and the internet saw themselves as empowering people. All you need to do is go back and remember what the 1984 Apple ad was. It was the destruction of big brother, right? I mean, they were laying claim to being a liberating force. The liberation wasn't about groups, it was about individuals, right? And here's the pivot, right? Here's a political economy that came pretty close to really collapsing inward in the late 60s, reconstituting a value system that aligned better with the technological and economic structures that emerge by the end of the century.

Janet Box-Steffensmeier  14:24  
Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than 10 of them in the top 10. That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college@artsandsciences.osu.edu

David Staley  14:44  
Do you consider yourself an intellectual historian or a cultural historian, or both?

David Steigerwald  14:55  
Both.

David Staley  14:56  
So draw us the distinction, then. What constitutes intellectual history? What's cultural history?

David Steigerwald  15:01  
You know why I like both of them? It's because you don't need to define them. 

David Staley  15:06  
Ah, okay. 

David Steigerwald  15:07  
And I don't feel as though I've ever been forced, because of some field, to limit what I think, what I read, what I write. Everybody has an idea, right? So if I'm interested in ideas, then I can be interested in everybody. Simply put, if I'm a cultural historian, everybody lives within cultures, right? They're the human environments that we inhabit. So that gives me free reign to look at wherever and whomever and whatever I want. There is some integrity for the fields, of course, and basically, I'm interested in the way that ideas rise and fall and have purchase at particular times and places among particular peoples. That's essentially the recipe for the alienation work. And you have to ask yourself, well, what is it about this human environment that made that idea attractive or persuasive in explaining to people what their lives were like. And so that's where the historical magic comes in, right? You've got to try to figure out what it was or what it is about a particular place in a particular time that finds a particular concept helpful. This is really, just to put it simply, it's an exercise in the sociology of knowledge. And so, that's sort of how I think about my work.

David Staley  16:25  
Well, I introduced you as an award winning teacher, and I wanted to draw attention to one of your classes in particular, because my students always talk with admiration about your class on the 1960s and I wonder if you just give us, I don't know, a very short syllabus about what you do in the course of the 1960s.

David Steigerwald  16:43  
Well, it's a rich moment, you know? It's also a pretty collapsed one for we historians, our medievalists and our ancient historians think it's absolutely ridiculous that I can do a class on 10 years, right? And they're right. 60s isn't about the decade. It's about a moment when a great many through lines of modern history came together and and clashed. But obviously the key through lines are the Black liberation struggle in the Vietnam War. So race and the Cold War are predominant parts of the class. But in the last couple of years, I've been arguing to students that the 60s were not about those or they were not about the 60s. They happened to run their course in the 60s and be influential in the 60s, but they weren't of the 60s. And this is bewildering, which is kind of my point. And you know, I want to play around with that idea. Obviously, we deal with the cultural effer essence of the period. I'm interested in some of the more formal elements of culture, literature and music, for example. And by that, I don't mean pop music or rock music. I think more of Philip Glass or John Cage and their connections to pop art and the formal visual arts and performing arts as well. But I mean, obviously you have to run into a hippie or two in that class. And so we do that. You have to deal with the vast transformation of American values. And as you've heard me talking about how that was going on in terms of the alienation concept. I mean, all of this is folded into it, but it's very clear that there was a pretty vast sea change in how mainstream middle class white Americans understood their value system. And it was part of that. I mean, that was really the fulcrum around a great deal of social conflict. I mean, Richard Nixon liked to think of himself as the great advocate of the old fashioned work ethic, but everybody knew the work ethic was basically dried up and desiccated by the time Nixon was around, and so we go through all of that stuff.

David Staley  19:02  
Well, I also introduced you as director of the history Department's World War Two study abroad program, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about the program. Maybe begin by telling us where the idea for it came from.

David Steigerwald  19:15  
The idea for it came from a former colleague, Bill Childs, who knew of a similar program at the University of Texas, and Bill had the foresight to understand that when we moved from quarters to semesters in 2012 I think is what it was that it would open up a May term that students would have available to them, and This would be a wonderful moment for study abroad, but the program never was just about travel. It's a study program that requires students to take several prerequisite classes on the war, and I think about the war broadly. We have a military history class that they have to take, but they also have to take a. Broader classes with me, and they're encouraged to take still others, such as Professor Judd's Holocaust class. In fact, that's kind of a feeder class to the program. So by the time we take them to Europe, starting in London in May, they have a really good, broad foundation in the history of the war, and we don't have to do elementary stuff when we're there. We can really hone in on what happened at a particular place, why we're at a particular site, and it's been at a place like Omaha Beach or Auschwitz, that just kind of crystallizes much of the work they'd already done, and that creates a really special educational moment. 

David Staley  20:46  
You mentioned some of these places. Where do you take the students on this study abroad trip?

David Steigerwald  20:51  
We start out in London. We're there for five days or so. We look at the war related museums, including the Churchill war rooms, of course, usually our first stop. We take the train up to Bletchley Park, which is an interesting place, and it's also kind of nice to show them that England is not all one furiously paced community like London is, because the little village is up in sort of the Midlands, central Midlands.

David Staley  21:17  
And Bletchley Park is where they develop the enigma. 

David Steigerwald  21:20  
That's correct. Yeah, that's the touring site, and it's become a really robust historical site. It helps that a princess's grandmother worked there, it turns out. And so they've managed to raise a great deal of money in the last 10 years that they've really sunk effectively into the site. We then go to Normandy, and we spend almost a week in Normandy, going to the beaches, going to some of the French museums. We stop by Paris for a couple of days before we go to Krakow, where we take them to Auschwitz, and then we go back to end in Berlin for 456 days. So it's a whirlwind trip. It's exhausting, and I've discovered that it's not something that you can build stamina for. It's exhausting every year, but it's special, and I really so miss it. This will be the third year in a row when we haven't been able to go because of the pandemic, and here's hoping knocking wood 2023 will get us back on the road.

David Staley  22:28  
Tell us what's next for your research.

David Steigerwald  22:30  
I hope to have the alienation book. I expect to have it done next summer. It's in pretty good shape in the front end, I've got to deal with some of the last chapters. I'd mentioned my immersion in the Merton Parsons material. You know, I said I took time off writing. What I did was draft a lot of writing on those guys, and so I might have enough to turn into a pretty quick book on structural functionalism and its decline, because it became a victim of the 60s as well. It was too establishment for a lot of new and radicalizing sociologists. So there's a story there that I'd like to tell in a pretty straightforward intellectual history, a history of the ideas and the history of the discipline of sociology in the 50s and 60s. But then I want to long had in mind a kind of smallish book, a modest book on Robert Kennedy's funeral, if you know the story, after the assassination and remember he died in Los Angeles, the body was taken back to New York, and they held the funeral at St Pat's. They held the viewing at St Pat's. 50, 60,000 people trundled by the casket in the church before the funeral, and then they put the casket on a funeral train, a morning train, and took it to Washington, DC for burial at Arlington. But the train, the morning train, really intrigues me. This was hardly the first time. They're pretty rare, but this was not the first time a public figure was transported in death by train. Lincoln was, I believe, right. Lincoln was famously McKinley was from Buffalo to Niles after his assassination, and Franklin Roosevelt, most recently, was taken from Warm Springs, Georgia up to Washington, DC. And the Roosevelt trip was lined much of the way by admirers and people who just wanted a last look and, you know, people who were gawking. I suppose there's always that. But one of the things that always struck me about the pictures I've seen from the Roosevelt journey was how interracial they were, even in the south. And it was as though there was a moment when the great gulf of race was, you know, just for a second or two, eclipsed or bridged. And. And I think that the Kennedy people had Roosevelt in mind when they did this, when they arranged to have the body move that way. And the same thing happened. The tracks were lined all the way down to Washington by onlookers, by mourners. They got so coagulated in some places in along the jersey line. People were pushed in front. There were a couple of people killed because of the crowds on the tracks. But if you look at pictures of that journey, it gives the impression that Kennedy was one person at that most chaotic and tumultuous moment who was capable of bringing working class people together with middle class people and even wealthy people, and who could cross the racial barrier. And so I'm really fascinated by that public resonance of that thing, the train, the morning train. So I'm as interested in the train itself as a kind of metaphor, maybe for America at that moment, as I am in Kennedy himself, I don't envision a Kennedy book, right? I'm thinking more of a sort of speculative political history, if that makes any sense.

David Staley  26:19  
And you're also thinking through a book on the 1924 Democratic Convention.

David Steigerwald  26:24  
Yeah, so no one has ever accused me of having good timing. And you know, if I had any sense, I would have done the Kennedy book for the 50 year anniversary of the assassination. I'm going to aim for it to be done in 2028 however, so it aligns with the 68 and the same goes for the 1924 Democratic Convention book. If I had any sense, it'd be at press right now, getting ready to go through copy edit to come out in 2024 that convention. Let's face it, the Democrats have had the craziest conventions in American political history. 1968 is the obvious one. A lot of people know about that. Fewer people know about 1924 but 1924 was just a really remarkable moment in which the cultural strains of America were clarified with vivid form. The clan showed up and dominated the streets around Madison Square Garden, the old garden in New York City. And it was great that it was held in Gotham, right, the very place that all those rural teetotaling prohibitionist Klansmen just reviled. It was just a great moment the Democrats fought over the anti clan plank that the northern liberals wanted to impose. And it was a real knock down, drag out convention battle. It was the longest convention in American political history that went over 100 I think, 103 ballots before they finally settled on a compromise candidate, John W Davis, who pleased no one, and, not surprisingly, got thrashed when he ran against Cal Coolidge. And if Cal Coolidge beats you by a large margin, you know you're a lackluster candidate. But What's lovely about it is that it was just terrific culture clash. Will Rogers, somebody in the New York Times had the extraordinary insight to have Will Rogers cover it for the newspaper? And so... 

David Staley  28:21  
Humorist, the American humorist.

David Steigerwald  28:22  
Oh yeah, and he's hilarious. Day after day, he was lampooning the Democrats. Will you people? Please go home. You're using all our water. And he got funnier and more cynical as the week went on. It went on about 10 days. And you know, what's crazy about all this is that his day job was actually being the MC up at the Rockettes. And so here he is among all these late version Puritans, right? And he was most un puritanical. There's a lot there, and it should be a fun book to write.

David Staley  28:56  
David Steigerwald, thank you.

David Steigerwald  28:58  
Thank you, David. I appreciate the time. I hope I didn't go too long. 

Eva Dale  29:02  
Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Technology Services studio, sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai