UNDELIVERED REMARKS FOR THE MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR DAVID BAILEY, DECEMBER 5, 2015

These remarks represent my attempt at an intellectual portrait of David Bailey, based on conversations over a period of more than thirty years. David was a genuinely friendly person; but beneath his affable exterior and his impressive political skills I found a man of deep moral convictions, strong opinions, fierce loyalties to the institutions in which he worked, and severe judgments on those he considered pretentious or inauthentic.

Let me move from these generalities to specifics by talking about some of the men he admired and the light such admiration casts on his views. The first is Kenneth Stampp, who, second to Henry May, supervised David’s dissertation. Those of you familiar with the relationships between these three, already know that David was far closer to May than he was to Stampp: the deep friendship between David Bailey and Henry May has few counterparts in academic life. And yet, in our conversations , David talked far more about Stampp as a historian than about May. The question I am asking here is, why? Why, for example, did David, who was not “a Stampp student,” deliver a eulogy at Stampp’s memorial service? What was the attraction?
For those of you not familiar with his work, Stampp was one of the first historians to suggest the moral necessity — not its “historical inevitability,” which tied up so many earlier historians — but the moral necessity of the American Civil War. In an often-cited exchange, one which David witnessed first-hand as a graduate student, another historian, David Potter, remarked that, as a result of the War, “slavery was dead…and 600,000 men were dead.” In other words, one soldier died for every six slaves freed. “A person is entitled to ask,” he continued, “whether the slaves could not have been freed at a smaller per capita cost.” To that Stampp replied, “A person is also entitled to ask how many more generations of black people should have been forced to endure life in bondage in order to avoid its costly and violent end.” It is easy for me to imagine David, sitting there, with a quiet smile on his face after Stampp’s rejoinder.

Stampp came to this conclusion partly because of his earlier book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution, a book which we now— and perhaps only now— can see as marking the major turning-point in the discussion of the subject. Others would explore in greater detail the black transition from slavery to freedom and the development of an autonomous African-American culture. But for David Bailey Stampp’s depiction of slavery as a system — brutal but functional, even profitable — remained the best book on the subject ever written. Not only that, but David believed that Stampp remained underappreciated and compared his achievement as a historian favorably to that of C. Vann Woodward, even though Woodward was the recipient of more awards, the contributor to more literary/political weeklies and quarterlies, and the subject of a longer obituary in the New York Times.

I conclude from all this that David’s admiration for Stampp represented more than a personal relationship, more even than the respect a younger historian shows towards an established one, but shared moral convictions. After it appeared one historian called The Peculiar Institution a “neo-abolitionist” interpretation. There is no doubt in my mind, that David himself had the soul of an abolitionist.

An abolitionist but not a purist. One more thing to say about Bailey and Stampp, a minor point perhaps but one that reflects for me not only David’s acuity as a historian but opens a window on his broader political outlook. There is a passage in the introduction to The Peculiar Institution in which Stampp writes that, in this book, “I have assumed that the slaves were ordinary human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.” In the sixty years since the book was written, self-styled advocates of multiculturalism have picked apart that statement. But the careful reader will note that, a few pages later, Stampp refers specifically to the conclusion of one scientist that human races differ as much as breeds of dogs, and that the Negroes’ “inborn temperament” may have fitted them for slavery. It was against that conclusion that Stampp made his statement, a point which many seem to have missed. But not David Bailey. “We know what he meant,” he said triumphantly.
For me, this reveals David’s close reading of texts, as a historian, and his appreciation of the environment in which they were written. It also reveals David’s broad political outlook: no one could be less sectarian. He supported all “popular fronts.” To those “fighting the good fight: he would have said — he did say — to keep on the main road, to not be distracted by side-issues, and even on occasion to dissemble — or in the term associated with David’s favorite President, Abraham Lincoln, to move “crab-wise.”

Mentioning Lincoln bring me to my next main point. Hard as he was on some of his fellow-historians, he was even harder on public figures. In these cases he was never “trendy:” like Lillian Hellman he did not cut his conscience to fit this year’s fashion. He disliked the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby most of all — as far as I could figure out, his favored candidate in 1968 was the unfashionable Hubert Humphrey — and he had little good to say about either Clinton. That was surely one reason (there were others) why David was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and remained so. But there was also one other President during his lifetime he admired: Jimmy Carter. At first glance that may seem surprising, as David took a generally dim view of white folks who lived below the Mason-Dixon line: the term “crackers” came up repeatedly in his conversations. And among historians in general, Carter’s place remains problematic: the emerging consensus seems to be that, as in the case of John Quincy Adams, his presidency was the low point in his public career.

But when we recognize that David’s moral commitments came from his religious commitment, his affinity with Carter is easier to understand. They were both Christians. I say this with some trepidation, since our political landscape is full of tub-thumpers and Bible-bangers who claim Christianity for themselves — and only for themselves. (For a fuller exploration of what I am getting at, I commend to you all the remarkable series in the New York Review of Books on the writer Marilynne Robinson: first, her essay “Fear;” then the two-part colloquy with President Obama, who sought her out; and finally the laudatory essay by Garry Wills.)
When asked by the President how her faith shaped her politics she replied simply that “I believe people — all people — are images of God.” That is what the abolitionists believed; that is what Jimmy Carter believed; and that is what David Bailey believed.

But there is more to the affinity between David Bailey and Jimmy Carter. If the journalist Jonathan Alter is correct when he says that, in his career, the only committed Christians in the White House were George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, perhaps we need another word to differentiate Carter. The word “thoughtful” comes to mind. Though attacked at the time for wearing his religion on his sleeve, it would never have occurred to Carter to name Jesus Christ his favorite philosopher. Rather, he was specifically attracted to, and influenced by, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. So too was David Bailey, another “thoughtful Christian.” What struck me about David was his admiration not only for Niebuhr’s political writings (which are widely quoted but often mistakenly so) but his theology. Not since my own undergraduate explorations in religions had I conversed with a lay person for whom concepts like “sin” and “grace” had much meaning. Until I talked with David Bailey.

This background seems to me important in understanding the focus of David’s scholarship. It is of course a commonplace among historians that interest in a particular religious subject does not correlate with a particular religious preference: indeed the two most influential students of New England Puritanism in my lifetime were both admitted atheists. It is also true that David’s mentor, Henry May, in his career persistently argued for the importance of American religious history. But when one sees someone like David Bailey, who was privately (though not always publicly) observant — he carried a copy of the New Testament with him — and who then went on to investigate the spiritual dilemmas of evangelicals in a slave society, and the “moral” dilemmas of political activists in the era of depression and war, it is hard not to make a connection. His scholarship, like his life, was rounded by his faith.