LETTERS
TALK OF THE GOWN
E LINE
FROM THE FIELD
SPORTS
BOOKS
PREVIEWS
CLASSES
HUSKIANA
ADVERTISE
BACK ISSUES
N.U. HOME PAGE
USEFUL LINKS
WHO WE ARE
WRITE US
RAVE REVIEW
By Daniel Penrice
Bill Fowler, LA'67, remembers clearly the day when, having just been appointed to edit one of the oldest, most prestigious scholarly journals in America, the New England Quarterly, he had his first full-blown encounter with the tradition he was about to inherit. It was in 1980, when Fowler traveled with a colleague to Brunswick, Maine, to meet his predecessor at the Quarterly, the late professor Herbert Brown of Bowdoin College, then in his eighties.
"It was a Hollywood set," recalls Fowler, the former chair of the history department at Northeastern. "If someone had said to you, 'Create for me a New England college campus,' it would be Bowdoin. If they said, 'Create for me the office of an English professor,' it would have been Herbert's office in a building there called Hubbard Hall. We walked up these magnificent stairs and into a huge room cluttered with piles of books and papers, with framed documents and photographs of Emerson and Longfellow on the wall. And there amidst all of this academic rubble, sitting in the corner with his back to us, surrounded by cigarette smoke and working on a manual typewriter, was Herbert Brown."
Today, as the New England Quarterly (NEQ) prepares to observe the seventieth anniversary of its founding, much about it has changed. Instead of the picturesque surroundings of Herbert Brown's office at Bowdoin, the journal has its headquarters in the rather drab, smoke-free precincts of Meserve Hall, at the Ruggles Street end of the N.U. campus. Fowler (who leaves his post at Northeastern to become director of the Massachusetts Historical Society this month) and coeditor Linda Smith Rhoads don't work on manual typewriters. Each new issue of the Quarterly, once the editorial staff has sent it off on diskette, is typeset electronically, not in hot metal as of old, and printed by photo offset.
Technology is far from the only thing to have shifted in the traditionally rarefied but increasingly embattled world of academic publishing in the last seventy years. Over this period, entire disciplines, including American studies, New England studies, and academic literary criticism, have sprung up, matured, and in some cases radically reinvented themselves. The last half-century has seen an explosion of scholarly journals in the humanities (anoutgrowth of the whole postWorld War II boom in American higher education) followed by an ongoing contraction in which many such publications have either perished or had to struggle for survival.
In its own effort to endure, NEQ has undergone no change more conspicuous than its relocation. In 1928, when the Quarterly was established at Harvard, no one would have dreamed that what Fowler calls a "quintessentially New England academic journal" would ever move to, let alone flourish at, such an unpedigreed institution as Northeastern. "Even at the beginning of the 1980s," Linda Rhoads observes, "I can't imagine that the group of men"-she chooses the latter noun advisedly-"that decided that the New England Quarterly would come to Northeastern didn't have some doubts."
In putting such doubts to rest, Rhoads and Fowler have not only burnished the university's intellectual reputation but put Northeastern's stamp on one of America's great historical and literary institutions. The journal remains what it has been from the start: a "Historical Review of New England Life and Letters" (as it describes itself on its masthead) that is also one of the most authoritative, respected, widely read scholarly publications in the fields of American history and literature. Each half-inch-thick issue of NEQ, printed in elegant Caledonian typeface and bound in a matte cover stock of banker's green, still looks the same as it did on the Quarterly's first appearance seven decades ago. Yet Rhoads and Fowler have balanced tradition with innovation in a way that, while respecting the integrity of the past, recognizes the historian's responsibility to the present and to the world both inside and outside of the academy.
New England-despite its glorious past as leader of the American Revolution, the struggle against slavery, and other momentous political and social movements of America's first 150 years of indepen- dence-had a bad name among many American writers and intellectuals of the 1920s. Social and literary critics such as H. L. Mencken found in Puritanism the root of everything anemic, moralistic, bigoted, and otherwise defective in the American soul; Puritanism was the original sin of New England. In New England itself, meanwhile, many of the literary and scholarly descendants of the Puritans uncritically celebrated anything and everything connected with the region.
This intellectual climate formed a crucial part of the context in which, in 1928, Harvard historians Samuel Eliot Morison, Kenneth Murdock, and Arthur Schlesinger Sr., founded the New England Quarterly. "Generalizations, however palatable, become cloying unless they are seasoned with fact," the founding editors wrote in their first issue. "Something should be done for the reader who is weary of sweeping formulations of the New England spirit, denunciations of the mysteriously stifling effects of Puritan ancestry, and effusions dictated by faith in the ennobling virtue of a drop of Pilgrim blood."
True to the spirit of this declaration, the Harvard men who edited the Quarterly until 1944 left two major legacies. First, through the pioneering studies of NEQ authors-a group that included such intellectual giants in the fields of American history and literature as Morison, Perry Miller, and F. O. Matthiessen-the journal began replacing threadbare stereotypes of New England culture and tradition with a picture of the region's dense complexities and paradoxes, its distinctive and historically potent mix of successes and failures, vices and virtues. Second, through its high standards of scholarship and presentation, NEQ helped to carve out a respected place for the study of American history and American literature in the nation's colleges and universities.
It was a seaworthy publication, then, that Herbert Brown and Bowdoin inherited from Harvard in 1944, and Brown's steady hand on the tiller over the following thirty-six years would steer it through some stormy weather. For one thing, the expense of printing NEQ skyrocketed in the course of Brown's long tenure, and the journal-despite the financial support of both Bowdoin and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, which undergirded Brown's efforts to avoid passing too many cost increases on to his readers-lost a number of subscribers. For another, the radical politics and calls for "relevance" that emerged on American campuses in the 1960s made a traditional scholarly publication such as NEQ begin to appear, at best, a little dowdy.
By the time Brown was ready to retire as managing editor of the journal in 1980, friends and supporters of the Quarterly felt a need to ponder its long-term future. The last members of the founding group of editors had died. Funding and financial management were discovered to have been quite casual affairs in the first fifty-two years of NEQ. When the Colonial Society's editor of publications, Frederick Allis, looked into the formal status of the journal, he discovered that it didn't exist as any kind of official entity.
Allis organized a group of men long associated with NEQ who incorporated the journal as a nonprofit organization, then went looking for a new institutional partner, managing editor, and physical home. Shortly afterward, Allis had lunch with Bill Fowler, who was making a name for himself as a scholar of New England history, having just published a biography of John Hancock. The two hit it off, and Allis asked if Fowler and Northeastern would be interested in taking over the Quarterly. The university's character played a large role in the invitation, Fowler recalls. N.U. "was viewed as a young, energetic school, ambitious," he says, and its location in Boston, still the hub of New England intellectual life, was attractive.
Excited by the suggestion, Fowler went immediately to the then chairman of the history department, Raymond Robinson, who shared his enthusiasm and responded, "We need to go see Ken Ryder right away." Ryder, Northeastern's president at the time and himself a former member of the history department, understood at once what housing a publication such as NEQ could mean for the university. "Without question," Fowler says, "it was Ken Ryder's quick, decisive response to this overture from the New England Quarterly that carried the day. Other institutions had told Fritz Allis and his group, 'We'll think about it, we'll give it to a committee.' Ken Ryder said, 'Yes, we want it, and we want it now.' "
The good news for Fowler was that he had become the managing editor of one of the nation's most distinguished academic journals. The bad news was that, although he had written scholarly books and articles, he didn't know the first thing about editing and managing a publication. Fortunately for Fowler, when he advertised for an assistant editor he received an application from Linda Smith Rhoads. Rhoads, a Simmons College graduate who had recently moved back to Boston, had helped to establish, and served as managing editor of, the scholarly journal Critical Inquiry while a graduate student in English literature at the University of Chicago.
Rhoads and Fowler well recall the experience of physically moving NEQ from Bowdoin to Northeastern. "We must have brought down 5,000 back issues," Fowler says with amazement. "I just remember having a coughing fit because of the dust," says Rhoads. It took Rhoads and an editorial assistant a year to comb the subscription records (kept on three-by-five cards stored in petit-four boxes), sort out the living from the dead (or otherwise lapsed) subscribers, and computerize the remaining list. In the process, they watched the official tally of NEQ subscribers drop from 2,200 to 1,700.
Even with the sponsorship of the Colonial Society (which continues today) and the resources being provided by Northeastern, Rhoads and Fowler needed to boost NEQ's paid circulation. This was a task that would involve, among other things, responding to the expectations of readers and other constituents in a period of change not only in the broader intellectual world but also in NEQ's operating context. Rhoads explains: "Our board of directors were and are primarily businesspeople and historians. So when the journal came to Northeastern's history department from Bowdoin there was a collective sigh of relief, because there had been a perception that the journal, while being edited by an English professor, had become too literary."
As a literary scholar herself, Rhoads was determined to retain a significant place for literature in NEQ-yet academic literary study, by then, was awash in (mostly continental European) literary theory. The dizzying post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian speculations of French intellectual oracles and their American disciples seemed ill-suited to a New England historical review with a tradition of eschewing "sweeping formulations." If NEQ was to remain true to its origins and essential character while also attracting and engaging new readers, it would have to encourage the use of broadly traditional methods to approach old questions from fresh perspectives and to address new and emerging intellectual concerns.
Today, a walking tour through recent issues of NEQ reveals something of the range of ways in which Fowler and Rhoads (who became coeditors in 1996) and their fourteen-member editorial board-a group that includes such living giants among American historians and literary scholars as Daniel Aaron, Alfred Chandler, Alfred Kazin, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-have approached this central challenge.
Many NEQ articles still seem quite traditional. For example, one recent monograph in the March 1997 issue straightforwardly recounts the friendship between Robert Frost and Stewart Udall, the Arizona congressman who became John F. Kennedy's secretary of the interior. In so doing, it also provides new insight into the Kennedy administration's conservation policy and advocacy of the arts. In another recent essay, on Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener," the author makes what seems a very contemporary kind of argument: that Melville's tale exposes (or "deconstructs," if you will) the cultural legitimization of economic injustice in preCivil War America. Yet to make such a claim is not the same as "deconstructing" Melville himself, and the article builds its case by using impeccably traditional, even conservative, assumptions about authorial intention and textual and historical evidence.
Even while adhering to essentially traditional historical and critical methodologies, however, NEQ has become a champion of what Rhoads and Fowler both describe as the most significant and exciting intellectual revolution to unfold on their editorial watch. This has been the extraordinary boom over the last generation in feminist scholarship. "One of the things that intrigued me during our first couple of years at the journal," says Rhoads, "was that the essays that came in that seemed to fall most clearly within our rubric tended to be feminist. Their authors were going back and doing traditional scholarship on new materials, because there was all this archival work that had never been done."
Even when historians work with familiar materials, Fowler adds, they can open up whole new vistas with a simple shift of perspective. As an example of such a breakthrough, he cites a recent NEQ article that examined a series of letters between John Winthrop Jr., governor of Connecticut, and John Davenport, the town minister of New Haven, during an epidemic that struck New Haven Colony in 1659. By reading the letters for what they reveal about Elizabeth Davenport (John's wife), the essay's author, historian Rebecca Tannenbaum, uncovered the story of a seventeenth-century American woman who, although nearly invisible in the official historical record, was a learned healer with an extensive medical practice.
Tannenbaum, now an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, cites NEQ's conservative image among academic historians as one of her reasons for submitting her article there. "I think that it is time that feminist scholarship, or women's history, stop being so cutting-edge and new and scary and start being part of the mainstream," she says. Fowler and Rhoads, for their part, value articles such as Tannenbaum's because, besides clearing new ground for academics, they make vivid connections between the past and the present, enabling history to speak not just to the concerns of professional specialists but to the lives of ordinary people. As Fowler points out, "Someone working at Brigham and Women's Hospital today could read that article about Elizabeth Davenport and say, 'That's right, women are intimately involved and yet marginalized in the field of medicine.' "
And, indeed, readers who are not academics form a small but significant part of NEQ's audience, now at 2,300 subscribers. According to Bernard Bailyn, a professor emeritus of early American history at Harvard and a longtime member of NEQ's editorial board, "While the Quarterly is the work predominantly of scholars, nevertheless it's had a deep tradition-one that, I suppose, goes back to Morison-of keeping itself readable by a general audience. Part of its constituency are people who are not academic scholars, and the editors have maintained a tradition of trying to reach them." Rhoads concurs, saying, "We feel strongly that the journal is not just for scholars. So in the process of editing, I'm often trying to translate the author's language into a more widely available one." Fowler makes a similar point in different terms: "We publish stories about life. We're interested in the world around us, and in understanding how it got to be the way it is, whether it be the literary world, the material world, or what have you."
In reaching as it does beyond the often cloistered world of the academy and the scholarly journal, NEQ also seems to justify Bill Fowler's description of it as a publication that "in great measure reflects the values of this university and the nature of its intellectual life." At the same time, it exhibits what Fowler-a proud native and citizen of New England as well as a student of its past-cites as one of New Englanders' defining characteristics: the ability to make a change while being part of a tradition. Reading the Quarterly today, you can almost hear the ghosts of the ancestors, from Elizabeth Davenport to Herbert Brown, decorously but gratefully applauding.
Daniel Penrice is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Related links:
