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.

My memories of Dr. Bailey come from taking classes with him, seeing him in meetings and job talks, and his generous participation in mock interviews and research presentations. It is striking to me that the same characteristics I associate with Dr. Bailey are elucidated by Ronen Steinberg upthread. He had a sense of adventure, mischief, a _joie de vivre_.

Dr. Bailey volunteered to be on the “search committee” the year the department offered mock interviews for those of going on the job market. He asked one of the best questions I ever got, mock and real interviews. What was my THIRD research project going to be? He wanted to make sure that I would not be a two-trick pony and that I would have ongoing intellectual contributions to make. He asked it much better (and with significantly more panache) than I have recounted here. My second best memory comes from a research presentation given to the department. I was nervously waiting at the head of the room while professors and students entered the room and found seats. I had slides (cusp of Powerpoint days, long before Prezi) with a projector set up on a precarious-looking tripod. Dr. Bailey tried to go under the tripod as I watched the tower begin to tilt. Disaster was averted as several people reached out and steadied the tripod and Dr. Bailey found his seat. Given that my presentation was on a human-made disaster (Love Canal), I’ve never been been sure if he wasn’t setting the scene for my talk with a small-scale disaster to warm up the audience. Whatever the reason, I was grateful for his support. I and many others benefited from his generous heart, his intellect, and his love of history and for MSU.

My husband and I met while on a study abroad in Oxford, UK with Professor Bailey in 2009. When we heard he was sick, we wrote the email that follows. Unfortunately, Professor Bailey never got the chance to read it, a paramount reminder to both of us to express love and gratitude with urgency, before you lose the chance. We publish it here to honor and remember a man who changed both our lives and brightened the lives of students for decades.

Dear Professor Bailey,
This is Kelly Harro and Kyle Druding from your Study Abroad to Oxford (Summer 2009). We heard that you are sick and wanted to reach out to wish you well, and to let you know you are in our thoughts and prayers.

We are incredibly fortunate to have been able to get to learn from you; your speech about the history of Michigan State athletics during the civil-rights era at the Honors College Colloquium was one of the most illuminating and engaging lectures that either of us has ever attended. Having spent some time now in the South during football season, your account of that time makes us extremely proud to be Spartans. In addition to your far-reaching historical insight and command of intellectual history, we consider ourselves profoundly lucky to have gotten to spend the time we did with you, professionally and on a personal level.

In so many ways our time in Oxford forever changed our lives. For me (Kelly) the one on one meetings and feedback I received from working with you researching the link between literature & the British Abolition movement refocused my goals and, ultimately, my academic trajectory. Upon returning to MSU that fall, I declared history as a second major and have even had the privilege of teaching British Literature for the past 4 years. Working with you changed my perspective on historical research and study, and expanded my understanding of what it meant to be a scholar.

An even more profound result of our time in Oxford, we are recently married, which may never have happened except for both of our planes arriving late so that we were the last two stragglers to get our access cards to the Bodleian. We began dating that summer, and celebrated our wedding (fittingly) in the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island in North Carolina almost exactly 6 years later. After leaving East Lansing we spent three years in Durham, NC, and are currently doing a one-year stint in Jacksonville, FL. Kelly has been teaching high-school English and is planning to enroll in a graduate program in Museum Studies next fall while Kyle just graduated from Duke Law School and is clerking for a judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Again, our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family right now. You have made a great and lasting impact on both of our lives, in so many respects. You have undoubtedly touched the lives of anyone fortunate enough to have had you for a teacher. We are glad and grateful to be in that lucky few.

Thank you very much and all the best,
Kelly Harro and Kyle Druding

By Pero G. Dagbovie

November 2015

I first met Dr. Bailey in the spring quarter of 1992 when I was an undergraduate student enrolled in his History 201 course. In this required seminar for history majors, Dr. Bailey decided to have us learn about the historian’s craft by reading the historical scholarship of Lawrence Levine—beginning with his classic Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1978) to his what seemed to me at that time ungraspable Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). Dr. Bailey clearly admired this skilled historian who he worked with during his days as a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley. I was simply happy to be fulfilling a requirement and to be reading at least one book about African American history in a non-black history centered course, something that I had not yet encountered. I would soon discover that Bailey was fascinated with African American history and culture and was well read in the field, especially the dynamic revisionist “community-and-culture” scholarship on slavery. This, I would later discover, was not surprising, given his research interests and relationship with the longtime renowned University of California at Berkeley slavery historian Kenneth M. Stampp. (It is also worth noting that Bailey’s last major publication was fittingly in the field of African American history, an illuminating essay on sociologist Horace Cayton in which he convincingly untangled this “forgotten” black intellectual’s mind and tragic life). Using Levine’s scholarship as a point of reference and case study for History 201, Bailey challenged us to grapple with what it meant to be historians and how historians could frame their historical arguments. He allowed us to write our final research paper on any historian, charging us with identifying his/her style, argumentative techniques, approach to the past, use of archival sources, and influence on his/her field. I did my paper on Walter Rodney and Bailey pushed me to analyze the intimate connections between politics and the writing of history. Bailey was among those professors who encouraged me to go to graduate school in the field of history, stressing to me that I could contribute to and diversify the U.S. historical profession. He conveyed to me that historians had the responsibility to help reform higher education. He made me feel that I could succeed. He made me feel that I was smart. His motivation was truly empowering. After this class, I knew that Dr. Bailey would continue to play an important role in my intellectual development.

As a MA student during the fall 1994 semester, I took History 803 (Seminar in Methodology of Historical Research) with Dr. Bailey. The class was intimidating, yet very stimulating, creatively designed, and rewarding. I remember that it was a large and diverse class (about fifteen students from various historical subspecialties and disciplines) and that we read books like the Lynd’s Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929), Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1982), Carol F. Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987), Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob’s Telling the Truth About History (1994), and Winthrop D. Jordan’s Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (1993) among others. In addition to Kuhn’s opus, my favorite book assigned for the class was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1985) by Oliver Sacks. Before reading the book, I wondered why we were reading a collection of essays by a British neurologist in a history methods class. While reading the book, I better understood Bailey’s genius. Simply put, with this book, Bailey demonstrated the importance of psycho-history, the value of historicism, and the necessity of considering the human condition in history. In essence, he highlighted the truism that who people are can essentially be traced back to their early years, their past tragic experiences, and their mental and psychological conditions. He also required us to interview a member of the Department who we did not know. While he allowed us some leeway in formulating our own questions, he insisted that we all ask our interviewees one question underlying question: “What is history?” In a class period, we shared our findings with each other and Bailey proved his point. There was/is no one interpretation of history, the study of the past, and/or the historian’s craft. For the final paper, he surprised us all. He required us to research some component of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a topic that no one in the class had any knowledge of. In fact, Bailey himself confessed that he himself knew very little about this important event in world history. (He was a voracious reader and was unafraid to read widely outside of his field). Before the class, he had identified a collection of primary documents on this event in the MSU library that he urged us to explore. With his blessings, I did my paper on Indian authored histories of the rebellion. I learned a lot about how history was constructed by historians and how certain interpretations had been marginalized.

During my graduate career, I took several other classes taught by Bailey, such as his History 811 seminar on 19^th century U.S. history that focused on reform movements. We read many “old school” classics like David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975), Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972), and Ronald G. Walters’ American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978). Every week, he challenged us to think about what motivated reformers to do what they did and, in many cases, make monumental sacrifices for others. I remember feeling frustrated when he would respond to my and others’ comments by retorting, “Okay, but why?” as he poured himself another cup of tea from his green, durable and weathered working-class Stanley thermos. Though he was not entirely dismissive, he never did seem totally satisfied with our often pretentious observations. Looking back, I appreciate what he was doing, as I find myself mimicking him in my graduate seminars. At the same time, he was patient with us. He listened attentively to our attempts to make sense of the past, routinely pushing us to make sense of the unknown. He seemed to enjoy witnessing our learning processes.

Dr. Bailey was a member of my MA and PhD guidance committees. He always encouraged me to—pardon the cliché—think “outside of the box.” My graduate work focused on African American reformers during the nadir and era of Jim Crow segregation. Whether I was unpacking the thought of Booker T. Washington or Carter G. Woodson, he consistently challenged me to probe deeply into what was going on in their minds based upon what they wrote, said, and did. This approach was reflected in one of the comprehensive examination questions that he posed to me. “Reform is in many ways the key to understanding democracy in America. Define reform . . . Consider some of the following issues: why did each reform movement develop; who were the reformers and what were their motivations; what limits and constraints were there on the reform impulse (race, gender, religion, region); why did the reform movements end?,” Bailey asked. He was a hardcore intellectual historian who never seemed satisfied with the rational or conventional analysis. He thought long and hard about people, events, and ideas and expected his students to do the same.  He also helped me with my writing mechanics. Bailey “officially” signed off on my dissertation as adviser because my adviser was out of town when I needed to submit the final copy to The Graduate School. In December 1999, he came over to my house for about three hours and with John Coltrane playing in the background he closely read my introduction and conclusion (line-by-line), marking it up, and making it sound much better. At different intervals in an attempt to decipher his assessment of my work, I peeked in at him as he read at my kitchen table. In particular, he challenged me to revise how I framed my study as a dual biography and to more deeply contemplate the genealogy of the black scholar-activist that I had construed.

I feel blessed to have had Dave as a colleague. In Morrill Hall, my first office, a cozy broom closet, was next to his. I always loved his office, especially the custom bookshelf that he built along the wall to the right as you entered his office, a space that was decorated with a maze of books that, as John Waller points out, were surprisingly organized into distinct categories. When I was told that tenure-stream faculty must have offices with windows (my office did not have a window in 2003), I told the then chair that I would wait until Dave moved out of his office and then move into 345 Morrill Hall. (Dave had told me that he planned to move to a smaller office in Morrill because he was going to get another one in the Honors College). I was excited to move into his office, hoping that the knowledge accumulated over the years was still in the air and would transfer to me. I also hoped that he would leave behind a few of his books, which he did. I vowed to fill the meticulously constructed shelves that Dave built. I will cherish and continue to reflect upon the countless conversations that we had over the years in his office, between faculty meetings, after DAC meetings, speaker series events, and job talks, in route to his class, and in the halls of, and outside of, Morrill Hall and Old Horticulture. He was a master storyteller, epitomized by his going to class without notes or prewritten, rehearsed lectures. He was a straight-shooter and iconoclast with a savvy sense of humor.

Dave was the ultimate citizen of the Department of History at Michigan State University. He attended nearly every event that the Department sponsored, even the pedagogy sessions for potential hires.   He is among the very few members of the Department who routinely taught on the dreaded Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. His students appreciated him and his willingness—often through the medium of music—to connect with them.   He had an open-door policy that students and faculty alike took advantage of. Though I know that I interrupted him when he was engaged in deep thought at his desk in front of his computer on more than a few occasions, he always listened to me go off on rants, critique recent publications, and think out loud about historical concepts that I was working through. He was an advocate for junior faculty in the Department and took the lead on putting more than a few packages together for our recipients of The Teacher Scholar Award. He advised many graduate students and served on numerous guidance committees. He loved the Department and Michigan State University.