Bill Buckley once described writing as “playing with words.” He was good at it. One of the words we play with is “conservative.” Another is “liberal.” Today, I begin a piece by saying,
Few words are more confusing, or potentially confusing, than “liberal” and “conservative.” People mean different things by them. It’s helpful to find out what your interlocutor means, before proceeding in conversation with him.
You remember the U.S. presidential election of 1932. (Don’t you?) FDR and his men were calling themselves “liberals.” Hoover and his men were aghast: “No, we are!”
Conservative intellectuals such as Harvey Mansfield say that the purpose of the American conservative is to preserve the liberal tradition — i.e., the principles and ideals of the Founding. Other conservatives (self-described) consider the Founding a colossal mistake.
And so on and so forth. In this piece, I review the new book of Michael Walzer — a slim volume that provides years of food for thought: The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective. Give it a go, if so inclined. (Again, here.)
A couple of days ago, I received a letter from a reader who spoke of “slaves” versus “enslaved persons.” Many prefer to speak of the “enslaved” rather than “slaves,” because “enslaved persons” and similar phrases put the onus on the slaveowner, rather than the victim.
Our reader quoted a distinguished person who said, “Calling someone a ‘slave’ defines him by a crime he did not commit. Better to use ‘enslaved’ because that tells a lot more truth with one syllable.”
I of course wanted to consult Barbara Fields. I say “of course” because I greatly esteem this U.S. historian, who is a professor at Columbia University. She is a leading scholar of the American South. I wrote about her in a tribute to two teachers — two teachers dear to me — in an article two years ago: here.
This week, I said to her, “Do you have a strong view on this business of ‘slaves’ versus ‘enslaved persons’?” She answered, “You’re darn tootin’ I have a strong view.” She went on to say (I quote with permission, naturally),
Here’s how I put it to my students. The most famous of all abolitionist speeches is probably the one that Frederick Douglass delivered in Rochester, New York, in 1852. (My grandmother told me that her teachers required pupils to memorize it.) Douglass called the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He did not call it “What to the Enslaved Person Is the Fourth of July?” If it was good enough for Douglass, I tell my students, it’s good enough for me.
It is misguided to believe that “enslaved” tells more truth than “slave” because “slave” defines the victim by the perpetrator’s crime. This makes as much sense as rejecting the word “hostage” because it defines the hostage by the crime of the hostage-taker.
When I was a graduate student, it was Herbert Gutman from whom I learned an important distinction. When he spoke about slaves doing work, being punished, choosing spouses, having children, taking care of families, mourning the dead, worshiping God, and so on — in short, acting as human beings — he referred to them as “men and women.” What a powerful statement he made by that simple choice of concrete nouns. I pity the person who imagines herself achieving the same result by substituting “enslaved person” for “slave.”
You pressed my button, so you got it.
That’s Barbara Fields. Inimitable.