On the Internet site “Crime and
Consequences” Bill Otis posted “Harpoon Political Correctness” (29 July 2012), a
comment on a column in the Washington POST by George Will. Will’s column, Otis says, shows “what happens
when political correctness and its entourage of slogans . . . take over
criminal law.” Will’s column reminded Otis of “the Duke lacrosse prosecution,
another episode in which political correctness (there, fruitcake feminism
combined with racial pandering) brought about the indictment of three Duke
lacrosse players (all white and -- even more sinfully -- from well-off
families) for a non-existent rape peddled by a drunken stripper.” What Otis’s indictment reminds me of is that
one of the leaders of the Gang of 88, the inflamers of rage against Duke
lacrosse players, was Cathy Davidson, who as editor of AMERICAN LITERATURE in
1994 devoted a special issue of the journal to the NEW MELVILLE in which one of
her contributors denounced my years of work in the Melville archives with this
CEASE AND DESIST pronouncement: “WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF
MELVILLE.” Other contributors irresponsibly
belittled and shamed Melville. Was it any surprise to anyone that within months
a feminist critic in a new book announced that after reading this issue of
AMERICAN LITERATURE she hated Melville? This Melville hater was Nancy Fredricks
in MELVILLE’S ART OF DEMOCRACY (1995). As Philip Weiss said in the NEW YORK
TIMES MAGAZINE (15 December 1996), “The scholar Nancy Fredricks” (Weiss should
have said “critic”) was so alarmed by the NEW MELVILLE issue “that she ended
her own book on Melville with a shattering epiphany. ‘The image of a drunken
Melville beating and pushing his wife Elizabeth down a flight of stairs has
imprinted itself on my mind's eye and caused me to hate him for abusing her,’
Fred ricks wrote. ‘Whether it happened or not, I know it is possible.’ Two contributors to Ishmail, the electronic
bulletin board, reported that teachers had purged Melville from courses. In one
instance, a teacher of 19th-century literature at Georgetown kept Melville off
a seminar reading list because ‘the possibility that he may have beaten his
wife made her uncomfortable,’ a Georgetown graduate named Alex Morse reported.”
Weiss continued: “Hershel Parker sees a threat in these developments. ‘We
don't teach great literature anymore,’ he said, sitting in his study. ‘We teach
representative literature, because greatness puts people down.’”
Melville survived, even in American
Literature classes, but scholarship continued to decline even more
precipitously than in the previous decades, and rather than learning a lesson
about irresponsibility Cathy Davidson in the next decade rejoiced about the
publicity THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE had given her Politically Correct NEW
MELVILLE issue of what had been a generally responsible if staid journal. Davidson was
gleeful at the "ruckus" the "New Melville" issue triggered.
When reprinting one of the NEW MELVILLE essays in No More Separate Spheres (2003), which she co-edited
with Jessamyn Hatcher, Davidson gloated over "the brushfire of
attention," the "reaction that went all the way to the New York
Times Magazine.” As late as 2004 Davidson was unrepentant about the
shoddiness of evidence in the "New Melville" issue. Was it any
surprise to anyone that someone who had turned AMERICAN LITERATURE into a
ferocious attack on a forthcoming documentary biography on an overpraised dead
white man could turn on the Duke lacrosse team in 2006 by signing the notorious
“Listening Statement”?
What did Otis say?—“fruitcake feminism
combined with racial pandering”! As a blue-eyed old man with Choctaw and
Cherokee ancestors, I know something about the evils of racial pandering in the
hands of Politically Correct forces, and I may know more than anyone about the
horrors of Political Correctness when focused against archival scholarship.
Melville survived very well, thank you. As for me, at least I can blog, and in
1994 I was silent against the thunder of AMERICAN LITERATURE.
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