David Maraniss's Chaotic Theory of History

One of the coolest, most interesting theories I’ve read recently is David Maraniss’s statement of his approach to history writing. In his new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, Maraniss says:

My perspective in researching and writing this book, and my broader philosophy, is shaped by a contradiction that I cannot and never intend to resolve. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies – and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama.

I share Maraniss’s belief. Chance does play a part in the way our lives unfold. I’ll never forget the line Ian Frazier uses in his great Family (1994) to describe the beginning of the attack at Chancellorville that killed several of his Ohio ancestors: “In the next instant, History, that force which always seems to choose people who are richer or poorer or in a different place, caught my relatives and the rest of the 55^th square on the point of the chin.” That’s the way history works. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – look out!

However, at least two reviewers have criticized Maraniss’s theory. Jill Lepore, in her “Obama, The Prequel” (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), says:

There is something quite searching and wonderful about seeing much of history as a chaos of chance. It has a few pitfalls, however. One is that it renders brutality, as a driver of the course of human events, hard to see and even harder to gauge. Politics and economics appear in Maraniss’s account, in carefully researched detail: slavery and abolition, Jim Crow and civil rights in the United States, and colonialism in Kenya and Indonesia. But they can seem like richly painted stage cloth. Another difficulty is that telling the story of the President’s ancestors to explain how the President became the President is a teleological project, and a teleologist who embraces randomness is in some danger of finding himself unable to decide which details to include and which to leave out.

Darryl Pinckney, in his “Young Barry Wins” (The New York Review of Books, August 16, 2012), has a different complaint: “But if Dreams from My Father is Obama’s declaration of selfhood, it is his self-definition that Maraniss tries to take away from him by recasting him not as self-invented, but as the sum of inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances.”

But I don’t think Maraniss is saying that “inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances” are the only causes in Obama’s history. He treats them as among the multiplicity of causes in play at all times, in all humans. As Lepore points out, “By no means does Maraniss believe only in chaos. He has a passion for chance, but also a belief in order and a commitment to evidence.”

Is brutality “hard to see” in Maraniss’s account? It mightn’t be emphasized to the degree that it is in, say, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, but it’s implicit, I submit, in Maraniss’s coverage of slavery, civil rights, colonialism, etc.

What I like about Maraniss’s theory is that it treats chance, accident and mistake the way, say, Carlyle treats heroes, and Marx treats relations of production, that is, as bright threads in history’s causal tapestry. 

Malcolm X: Pinckney v. Powers v. Remnick

Malcolm X (Photo by Eve Arnold)

It’s interesting to compare three reviews of Manning Marable’s recent Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: David Remnick’s “This American Life” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011); Thomas Powers’ “Too Fast” (London Review of Books, August 25, 2011); and Darryl Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” (The New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011). Remnick, in his piece, calls Malcolm “a vivid but secondary figure in his own time.” He says, “Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.” This contrasts with Pinckney and Powers’ view. Pinckney says, “Most civil rights histories cast him [Malcolm] as the pivotal voice in a drama of mass transformation, the shift in general black opinion away from believing in the effectiveness of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence to conceding the justice in the militancy of the disaffected blacks in the Northern cities.” Powers writes that Malcolm “gave voice to black anger with a furious clarity rivaled in American history only by Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831.” He says that Malcolm’s face “was soon among the most famous faces in the country.” Reading Pinckney and Powers, it’s hard to accept Remnick’s “secondary figure in his own time” assessment.

Powers, in his review, praises Marable’s FBI research. He says, “It is here that Marable’s meticulous book makes its most significant contribution, quoting liberally from FBI files and the once secret files of New York City’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, beginning in June 1950 when Malcolm wrote a letter to Truman on the outbreak of the Korean War.” Neither Pinckney, nor Remnick, mentions this aspect of Marable’s biography. In fact, Pinckney says, “Maybe Marable hasn’t come up with as much that is really as new as he claimed, but his biography gives the satisfying feeling that he has consulted most everything out there about Malcolm X.” At one point, Remnick quotes an FBI informant, but not for the purpose of extolling Marable’s research skills.

Remnick sees Alex Haley as the key figure in Malcolm’s story. He says, “Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley.” He again emphasizes this point in the conclusion of his piece: “By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm ensured himself a lasting place in American culture.” Whereas, in Powers’ view, the Autobiography was a team effort. He says, “Rarely have two writers contributed so equally to a book. Malcolm provided the edge of social anger, unflinching and unapologetic, while Haley coaxed the personal details from him that Malcolm in his pride thought beside the point.” Pinckney has little to say about Haley. He reviews without comment Marable’s various contentions that Haley meddled with Malcolm’s conception of the book, saying only, “Yet Malcolm’s voice is undeniable and Haley deserves credit for preserving it in this form.”

Regarding Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem, Powers points out that Marable “thinks the investigation of the murder was botched and that some of those who participated in the killing went free.” Pinckney is even more detailed on this point, describing what happened in the ballroom and quoting Marable’s opinion that, “Although in 1966 three NOI members were convicted of the murder, extensive evidence suggests that two of those men were completely innocent of the crime, that both the FBI and the NYPD had advance knowledge of it, and that the New York County District Attorney’s office may have cared more about protecting the identities of undercover police officers and informants than arresting the real killers.” Clearly, Marable’s conclusion on the murder investigation, based, as he says, on “extensive evidence,” is major news. Curiously, Remnick, in his review, fails to mention it. He briefly describes the murder, then cuts to Haley writing to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters … I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The Marable contention that Remnick seizes on, and repeatedly mentions in his review, is the allegation that parts of the Autobiography are exaggerated. Remnick says:

One of his [Marable’s] goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits – “the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

In Malcolm’s alleged exaggeration and embellishment, Remnick finds a theme. He says, “The literary urge outran the knowledgeable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood.” The “crucial episode” that Remnick refers to is the gruesome death of Malcolm’s father. Remnick says,

The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

Perhaps he had been … nobody knew for sure. That would seem to be sufficient grounds for withholding allegations of exaggeration and embellishment. But not for Remnick. Pinckney, in his review, gives the Autobiography’s version of the father’s death the benefit of the doubt. Pinckney says, “In 1931, his father was killed in a gruesome accident. Black people whispered that the Legion had attacked him and laid his body across the tracks where he was nearly cut in half by a streetcar.”

Powers, in his “Too Fast,” mentions Marable’s allegation of exaggeration, but only in passing. He says,

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention adds much useful detail to the story as Haley told it, especially to Malcolm’s last years, while suggesting only a single modest revision. Perhaps, Marable offers, Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s sordid life of sin and crime to highlight, as St. Augustine did, the luminous transformation eventually worked by God, or Allah. “An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little,” Marable writes, “failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.” Perhaps this only means that Malcolm was one jump ahead of the law. In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.

Note that last sentence: “In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.” This contrasts sharply with Remnick’s view that “he [Marable] makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of facts.”

Remnick’s review reads like an overzealous prosecutor’s brief. It minimizes Malcolm’s historical role, sources his iconic status in the Autobiography, and then tries to knock that down by shooting holes in its credibility.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Pinckney and Powers make clear in their excellent pieces. There’s a sentence in Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” that, in just fourteen direct, well-chosen words, captures the essence of Malcolm’s greatness: “Malcolm X embodied a blackness that could stand up to the white man’s rules.”