On May 9, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Hardwick, Kevin - hardwikr wrote:
> This is a tad off topic, but hopefully does not do too much violence to Lyle's stimulating and interesting thread:
>
> Stanley Elkins, in his classic work SLAVERY: A PROBLEM IN AMERICAN INSTITUTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE (the third edition was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1976; the first edition was published in the late 1950s, presumably by the same press), advanced the thesis that the experience of slavery was psychologically debilitating to those who lived through it. ("Classic," of course, can mean in practice "an old book that no one reads anymore.") Elkins' thesis drew considerable attention, and I don't think anyone now believes it holds, at least in the form that he initially advanced it. He famously relied on psychological studies of survivors of Nazi concentration camps, for example, to sustain his analysis of the psychological deformations of character inflicted on the personalities of slaves. Most people now would argue that the analogy is flawed--that the psychological situations were not comparable.
Bursting apart monoliths, slaves who were literally worked to death, such as those on the sugarcane plantations, would have been, in my view, an appropriate analogy to the Nazi concentration camp survivors. Otherwise, I can't see how it would be equivalent in scale. Slaves who were not on sugarcane plantations had a very constricted life, but were not in the main subject to death at a whim, nor subject to an institutionalized killing mechanism. But undoubtedly there were also broad similarities with reaction to authority, conformity of action to arouse least notice and other items of that sort that Elkins would have noted.
>
> On the other hand, there is ample evidence from contemporaries in the 1860s and 1870s that many people believed at the time that slavery did in fact disrupt the character of slaves. Much of the force of Booker T. Washington's arguments, for example, derived from such an analysis of the effects of slavery. Belief and reality are two different things, and we should not minimize the importance of ideology in construction of contemporary beliefs. But there is often a connection of some sort, as Gordon Wood has so eloquently argued for a very different historiographic context.
I would suggest PTST studies of combat soldiers to see how those high stress environments affect people. From what I can understand, very few people were unaffected by combat, versus FOBBITS or REMFS who were in-country but largely out of the danger zones. I would also have to say that corruption took place on both sides of the slavery issue. Also, there are undoubtedly case studies of the effects that incarceration had on people as in the before and after with prisons now viewed as institutions of higher crime learning. I fully understand the different paradigm that prison was/is to slavery, but in broadbrush comparisons, it can be shown that there is an effect upon folks.
Lyle Browning
>
> I am unaware of any recent scholarship that has tried to develop Elkins' insights, or to modify the analogies from which he reasoned. I am quite sure I will benefit from comments on this, should anyone have them. Is there recent work along these lines with which I should be familiar?
>
> Many thanks!
>
> All best wishes,
> Kevin
>
>
> ___________________________
> Kevin R. Hardwick
> Associate Professor
> Department of History, MSC 8001
> James Madison University
> Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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