Warren I. Susman papers

Warren I. Susman was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York (Targum, Nov. 12, 1968). After brief military service, he received his A.B. in history from Cornell University, where his advisor was Paul Gates. As an undergraduate he showed what would become a well-known independent streak, initially refusing an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa and skirting pre-requisites for his often-heavy course loads. In 1958, he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Merle Curti, with a dissertation on American expatriates in France during the 1920s. While a graduate student, he taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He joined the history faculty at Rutgers in 1960, after teaching briefly at Cornell University and Northwestern University (Rutgers news service; N207-OM-g-6/1/72). During his career at Rutgers, Susman was a Visiting Professor at Yale from 1972-1973, and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington in 1983-1984.

Susman was a popular teacher at Rutgers, in part for his engaging style, his intense commitment to historical studies and his unstinting support for his students. For his teaching he won the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award in 1972, which cited the professor for his role in pioneering new teaching methods. Susman also authored a widely studied report on educational reform at Rutgers. The “Susman Report” (formally titled “The Reconstruction of an American College”) was completed at the request of Dean Arnold B. Grobman in 1968 and critically examined the aims of higher education and the structure of the university curriculum. Among the major recommendations of the report was establishing four schools within Rutgers College, establishing a “think tank” on campus for individual study, research or creative work, and introducing a grading system of “distinction,” “pass” and “fail” instead of traditional grades. As Susman said of the report: “what I’ve aimed for…is the creation of a set of conditions whereby the college will be continually renewing itself.” (The Rutgers Newsletter, Friday, Nov. 22, 1968). The more radical suggestions were not implemented, but the report was influential and became a touchstone of debate among students, faculty and the administration.

Susman was not a prolific scholar, but what he did publish won acclaim for new approaches to American cultural and intellectual history, in which Susman became an undisputed authority. His 1964 article, “History and the American Intellectual: Uses of the Usable Past,” published in the American Quarterly, outlined the features and imperatives of American intellectual history in broad and bold terms. Susman won the 1964 American Quarterly Award for the article. Throughout his career, Susman remained interested in linking developments in American culture, from music to poetry to architecture, to intellectual traditions. He also had an interest in the development of political culture, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, and was himself one of an important new breed of revisionist cultural and social critics that emerged in the 1960s. While he often referred to his writings as his “pieces” and never published a book-length study, some of his writings were collected and published in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the 20th Century (1984).

Susman was also an activist and described himself politically as a leftist and socialist. Richard McCormick has noted that it is difficult to pin down his politics exactly, though Susman was involved in founding Studies on the Left, a socialist journal published between 1959 and 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin, and in founding the Socialist Scholars Conference (Gates, In memoriam, p. 11). Susman participated in the teach-ins held at Rutgers to debate and criticize American involvement in Vietnam in 1965, but, as usual, Susman communicated his arguments against US involvement without overtly socialist critiques, preferring to engage with a spectrum of political ideas and arguments. He was a correspondent and sometime friend of leading American socialist academics, like Eugene Genovese and William Appleman Williams, and social and cultural critics like Christopher Lasch, but maintained a wide correspondence with associates of all political stripes. Susman’s engagement with history naturally went beyond leftist politics, and he was deeply committed to traditional academic organizations even if he hoped for reform within them. He acted as vice-president of the American Historical Association in 1976-1979 and chaired committees in the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association. He remained a compassionate, critical and broad thinker, and deeply devoted teacher, until his early death of a heart attack, at the age of 58. Susman was a long-time resident of Highland Park, New Jersey, where he lived with his wife, Bea Susman.