Lacaria’s Column Lacked Both Logic and Politeness

To the editors:



Christopher Lacaria’s column, “The Apotheosis of Dr. Faust,” (Feb. 14) is no small feat: it lacks as much in sound argument and logic as it does in politeness.

Let us start with Lacaria’s disregard for facts. Not one to spare pejorative words, he asks of the Radcliffe Institute, what do “these women” actually do for a living? He says that Drew Faust only writes about “gender” and “ritual.” Had he bothered to scroll down to the end of whatever Web site he was on, he might have found things more to his liking. For instance, he would have learned that one of Prof. Faust’s main works is on James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina planter and senator, a real “man’s man,” one of those who fought the battles while the women stayed at home. Incidentally, he was also a main advocate behind the movement to reopen the slave trade, and was involved in breaking up the Democratic party on the eve of the Civil War.

He gives as a example of the “idle” pursuits of “these women” a project titled “The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic.” This is actually the latest book project by John Demos, a preeminent scholar of early America and winner of the Bancroft Prize. He mocks also that one of the fellows, an art critic of ancient times, is studying woven representations of Christ. Now, what else would an art historian of ancient times be doing? Finally, he neglects to mention that about one-fourth of the fellows are male, only six of 50 are pursuing “irrelevant” “gendered” topics, and a fair share of them are studying such “fruitless” unscientific things as “The p-adic and mod p Local Langlands Correspondence,” “Microelectronic circuitry,” “string relations,” base DNA lesions, “Hadron colliders,” and “the physics of granular materials.” What feminist nonsense!

Now, let us address his disregard for logic. Lacaria argues that because there was no radical feminism in the 19th century South, there could not have been problems of gender. This argument only needs to be written explicitly to expose its incoherence. More importantly, however, gender was a crucial part of how people, especially Southern male politicians, understood the political climate of antebellum America.

Consider only this brief passage by H.W. Bellows, one of the most important advocates of James K. Polk’s invasion of Mexico. The passage summarizes a common pro-war argument of the time: “Mexico will ultimately fall a political prey, not to force, but to a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-loving, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood.” Who can read this passage and remain oblivious to the intersection of gender, politics, and territorial expansion? I hope that I won’t need to point out the sexual innuendo in the passage for Mr. Lacaria to grasp its meaning.

I might be a lone idiot, insulated from reality like all those delirious academics that Lacaria loves to demonize, but I’d much prefer deciphering evidence like the above to his favorite mode of historical writing: namely, “if Homer said it, it must have been true of the nineteenth century, and it must be true now.”

If these central historical issues are lost on Mr. Lacaria’s blunt rhetoric, there is nothing that our new president, our old one, myself, or a Harvard history degree, for that matter, can do for him. Perhaps good old Mephistopheles can help him, for a small fee.

ISAIAS CHAVES ‘08
February 17, 2007
Cambridge, Mass.