I’m wondering whether it is possible to assess excellence’s career prospects. You might think, especially if you flip on the TV during prime time, that excellence is in trouble right now. And you might even adopt an increasingly popular explanation for the occlusion of excellence: the rise of the mass market, in other words of democratization. But I want to try to look at those two concepts in a different way and in fact to argue that even in the midst of an all-too-apparent degradation of culture and of civic life, we are also witnessing a democratization of excellence.

At least that is how it looks from my vantage point as a history teacher. Look at the demography of the professoriate. During my lifetime, academia has ceased to be the preserve of blue-blooded men. The GI Bill was the most potent catalyst, of course, but we should also mention other student financial aid programs as well as the civil rights and women’s movements and the expansion and growing affluence of the middle class. In academia as in other fields, racial and especially gender discrimination have given ground at a pace that seems maddeningly slow to those of us living through it but that will appear lightening fast from the perspective of a century or two—assuming it continues.

Fittingly, as the history profession has democratized, so has its curiosity. To be sure, the tables at Barnes and Noble are still groan under the weight of titles like Joseph Ellis’s His Excellency, the thirty millionth biography of George Washington. But my graduate school mentor became a National Book Award finalist for a book about the slaves who labored in the rice swamps of colonial South Carolina—and who in fact helped introduce the colony’s number one crop. And Laurel Ulrich, while she was teaching at the University of New Hampshire, won a Pulitzer prize and a professorship at Harvard for a biography of Martha Ballard, a Founding-era midwife in present-day Maine who not only was not famous but never met a famous person. What Ballard did accomplish was to deliver nearly a thousand babies without losing a single mother (and very few of the babies) in childbirth. Ulrich observes that for nearly half of her deliveries, Ballard had to cross the Kennebeck River—in a canoe during the summer, on the ice in winter, and during those long intervals when the river was only partly frozen, on faith.

In the same way that the generation of historians now approaching retirement showed that even the lowliest Americans could sometimes make themselves masters of their own destiny, many of us in the middle of our careers are making the case that those same people at the base of society were occasionally able to affect their masters’ destinies as well. In my first book I argued that Founding Fathers like Washington and Thomas Jefferson decided to rebel against the British empire partly because they were feeling pressure from below—for instance from rebellious Indians and slaves. In Unruly Americans I make a similar argument about the origins of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights: that ordinary people have exerted an epochal if often overlooked influence on a long line of His Excellencies.

The great pioneer at detecting Everyman’s potential for excellence was W.E.B. DuBois, Harvard’s first black Ph.D. Du Bois even challenged what many people would consider a truism of the Civil War—that Lincoln achieved excellence by freeing the slaves. DuBois pointed out that initially, both sides fought for slavery—the South to take slavery out of the Union and the North to keep it in. But half a million slaves transferred their labor from the Confederate to the Union side. They kept coming in the face of repeated betrayals—many Union generals returned fugitive slaves to their former owners, and when others issued emancipation proclamations, Lincoln countermanded them—and Lincoln’s proclamation and the thirteenth amendment only finished off an institution that had been laid prostrate by the efforts of the slaves themselves.

And then there is technology. Technological progress helped make the last century our most genocidal hundred-year span since the destruction of the Indians. Yet it is also allowing ordinary people to achieve greatness. The March 27, 2008 edition of the New York Times brought the startling discovery that a Frenchman named de Martinville had invented a machine that recorded sound in 1860—nearly twenty years before Edison. But Edison’s machine had one advantage over de Martinville’s: you could play the recordings back. I will leave to others the metaphysics of a machine that creates art that can never be consumed. What interested me about the story was that scientists at Berkeley have taken what de Martinville’s machine did produce—graphic representations of the speaker or singer’s sound waves—and turned them into actual sound files that you can play back. And now we call all listen to an 1860 recording of “Au Clair de la Lune” on the Internet.

In my field, the payoff has been almost as extraordinary: a seemingly-infinite explosion in the availability of primary sources. When I began teaching full-time barely a decade ago, I could not imagine any of my students writing a seminar paper that could stack up with what kids in the Ivy Leagues were producing; they just did not have the sources. Now Early American History students can go on-line and access nearly every newspaper, and literally every book, pamphlet, and sermon published during the colonial and revolutionary eras. Granted, those sites tend to be subscription-only, but Google Books has already given us access to the full text of hundreds of thousands of titles published in the nineteenth century. Can the eighteenth and earlier centuries be far behind?

The last thing I want to do—to try to explain why so many more people seem to have a shot at excellence than even half a century ago—will require me to paint in even broader strokes than I already have. Surely this democratization was partly the result of earlier ones—for instance of religion (recall that the vast majority of Puritans were actually never permitted to become members of their church) and of politics (there are emeriti at Concordia and the University of Richmond who were born when a substantial majority of the adults in this democracy were not allowed to vote).

But I am struck by the extent to which the democratization of excellence grew out of the democratization of our least attractive and most distinctively human endeavor, warfare. Whether we celebrate the Internet as expanding access to information, as I have, or lament its spread of degradation and mediocrity, we do well to recall where it was incubated: at the Pentagon. World War II was not only a precondition for the GI Bill but also of the civil rights movement, the incubator in turn of second-wave feminism. The “Good War” also produced a generation of politicians who might otherwise have remained obscure. The Korean and Vietnam Wars did not do that, but early indications (look at the 2006 elections) are that the Iraq War will.

Whether or not it does, and no matter how you feel about it, the war seems like a fitting place to conclude. I say that because it reminds us that for foot soldiers, the democratization of excellence is actually an expansion not in the achievements of ordinary men and women but in eggheads’ ability to notice the excellence—most brilliantly displayed as grace under fire—that was already there.

Information For:

current students
faculty and staff		 parents
alumni		 high school students
admitted students