The Ironic Professor

...had he done so, the book might have proved more illuminating...

...He was content to "average a page a day of completed ms...

...I usually write and throw away 10 pages to get one that will pass...

...When a Civil War general datelined a dispatch with a flashy "headquarters in the saddle," Lincoln complained that "his headquarters are where his hindquarters ought to be"-a mistake that Becker, endowed with philosophical temperament if not training, never made...

...And I am 51 years old and have been practicing the damnable art for 30 years...

...The scope of his research excited little awe-certainly none from Becker himself, who doubted that Sitzfleisch was a substitute for intellection...

...I could never understand, however, how a Communist, on his own principles, can claim the right of free speech, or expect to be granted it willingly...

...Indeed, many ama-teurs, from politicians to prisoners, from journalists to generals, have outclassed professionals in the craft...

...His place in the scholarly pantheon is secure, but Becker was by no means the compleat historian...

...He wrote no magnum opus...

...The disenchantment of the interwar years, if not its philosophical fruits in relativism, is poignantly conveyed: "I have always been susceptible to the impression of the futility of life, and always easily persuaded to regard history as no more than the meaningless resolution of blind forces which struggling men-good men and bad-do not understand and cannot control, although they amuse themselves with the pleasing illusion that they do...

...It need not hasten, as do the social sciences, a retreat from the vernacular...

...But to a Communist he once penned a pithy note "as a liberal who believes that free speech is desirable, even for those who do not believe in it...

...Though he taught modern European history and was most at home in the French Enlightenment, Becker wrote more about America...

...Becker's native modesty led him to the relativism to which his name, along with Charles A. Beard's, became affixed in the 1930s...

...No wonder Becker's spirit still haunts those who share his vocation, who try to teach and write in a manner commensurate with the complexity of experience, who can imagine his eyes twinkling in anticipation of folly and his brow wrinkled by the riddle of the human predicament...

...His reputation is far more extensive than his shelf of books...

...and before his death in 1945, Becker became a rhetorician of democracy who might have said with Arthur Koestler that he was fighting a lie for the sake of half-truths...

...In a time when many scholars were beginning to seek safety in numbers, he remained a man of letters who happened to be unusually curious about the meaning of the past...

...The most tolerant editorial standards do not justify the inclusion of trivia like the jingles to Lerner's young daughter, unless it is to show that professors are human too...

...Still, no one was craftier than a long-time professor at Cornell named Carl L. Becker, who was born 100 years ago...

...I don't take a great shine to many people," he once admitted...

...An inquiry that began in skepticism ended with a sense of responsibility, not absolutes...

...Himself a liberal who voted for Socialist candidates for President, he seemed to have gained a salty wisdom at the expense of his idealism...

...Kammen, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner whose own work has stressed the biformity of America as a "contrapuntal civilization," did not locate Becker within a frame of dialogue with others...

...Unfortunately, the salience of Becker's correspondence cannot be prop-erly evaluated without reading what others wrote to him...

...It exacted anguish and effort to appear effortless and to pursue the historical enterprise with such beguiling grace...

...Cornell colleagues registered the fear to editor Michael Kammen that the letters he was assembling might prove disappointing...

...Because he was aware of class cleavage, Becker has often been labeled a Progressive, yet his sly treatment of these crusaders against infamy indicates that he was something besides their champion...

...Little introspective brilliance is revealed, nor are portraits of friends, with the exception of Max Lerner and his teacher Frederick Jackson Turner, finely drawn...

...Yet it scarcely as many are worthy of publication as Kammen believes, the fact remains that no historian's reputation was ever diminished by the disclosure of his correspondence...

...The refinement of Becker's mind was perhaps facilitated by his uneventful life, reflected in the 317 letters published in this collection...

...Consequently, the "self-portraii" he designed presents Becker through the glass of a temperature-controlled booth...

...Nonetheless, his skepticism almost never curdled into cynicism...

...The sentence about atheism further suggests that Becker was an intellectual historian who appreciated the limited role even the most serious ideas play in life, and he sought answers to the problem of motivation in "a more subtle psychology...

...Kammen's claims notwithstanding, anyone who would mutter in 1935, "Damn the situation in Europe, and I don't know anything about it anyway," is hardly contributing to our understanding of the period's "climate of opinion...

...Both men emphasized the tentative authority of facts and the limited sanction of values, but unlike Beard, who was also a supporter of World War I, Becker did not duck the totalitarian challenge...

...Oddly enough, only eight letters addressed to Becker have been included...

...Becker wrote little about the Depression, or about the New Deal, or about totalitarianism...

...Instead, he focused his energies on his writing, for him a solitary struggle...

...Becker appears not to have kept an eye cocked at readers of such an anthology...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis History is a supremely liberal art because, in rendering the past more comprehensible, it makes freedom from routine and repetition more possible...

...I can understand why you should resist oppression, but not why you should resent it...

...nor does it exclude, as do the arts, those untouched by creative fire...

...nor does it require, as does philosophy, a talent for speculation...

...From his favorite book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, one pungent sentence about the philosophes might be deemed essence of Becker: "They courageously discussed atheism, but not before the servants...

...If Becker treated anyone unjustly, or bore grudges, or nursed unseemly pride, those traits do not show up in the letters...

...The one politician to engage Becker's attention was Woodrow Wilson, who had admittedly duped him...

...Lacking moral or scientific certainty-despite the unified posture and tone of his writing-Becker brought a waggish detachment to the historical profession that risked reducing it to a spectator sport...

...his readers' dividend was an irony that could tease the incontrovertible into the insightful...

...he inspired no school, provoking more admiration than imitation...

...Given Becker's eminence and intelligence, his comments on contemporary events, as on his friends, are surprisingly sparse...