America Seen Through the Eyes of Two Very Different Americans – Ronald Reagan and Eugene O'Neill
Professor Jack Diggins writes “intellectual portraits” that get people talking.

2007 was a year of accomplishment for John Patrick (Jack) Diggins, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Center’s History Program. It brought the publication of his latest books, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, and Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy. The timing, however, is entirely coincidental. According to the author, the two works were developed in very different ways, though, oddly enough, his intense interest in both Reagan and O’Neill began in theatres.

“The first time I saw a play, I was 16 or 17,” says Diggins. “It was O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. I was overwhelmed, and he always stayed on my mind.” Diggins, who grew up in an Irish neighborhood in San Francisco, recognized the play’s Irish immigrant characters–their obsession with status and mobility, and their ambivalence about buying into the American success story. “O’Neill captured a romantic part of the Irish character which tends toward poetry, dreaminess, and illusions, and then the harsh reality of what life is really like. That resonated with me,” he says.

Decades later, well into a distinguished academic career and living in New York City, Diggins went to see a play about the Hollywood blacklist. Shortly after the curtain went up, a TV screen projected an image of Ronald Reagan in his days as President of the Screen Actors Guild. The audience, as one, began booing. “I should look into this,” Diggins said to himself.

Living in Berkeley in the 1960s, he had shared the prevailing negative view of Reagan, but the vehemence of this response took him by surprise. His curiosity only grew with the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that Diggins didn’t expect to see in his lifetime and which, he believes, at least in part, can be credited to the late President.

Both these experiences ultimately resulted in books that Diggins does not call biographies, but rather “intellectual portraits.” He explains, “With most of the people I write about, the biography has already been done and there’s nothing more I can say about the person’s daily life. I do a profile of what this person was concerned about – his or her theories and perspectives on America.” He also has little interest in the popular style of biography in which the author’s primary purpose is to expose the subject’s personal frailties and dirty linen. In light of the fact that projects like this usually take years to complete, Diggins says that he must like his subject.

While tackling the Reagan project over the course of five years, Diggins asked himself, “How do you take a president who’s been badly treated and get people to take him seriously?” The book presents Reagan as one of three great American liberators, along with Abraham Lincoln, who helped emancipate the slaves, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who helped save Western Europe from fascism. Reagan, he contends, helped liberate Eastern Europe from communism, and began a process to free the world from the threat of nuclear weapons. And while Lincoln and Roosevelt went to war to attain their goals, Reagan attained his by an entirely different
means – conversation and negotiation. These are, the historian says, serious achievements.

Diggins has taken some heat over the book. “It’s not conservative enough for the conservatives, and my liberal/radical friends just don’t like Reagan.” Interestingly, given the project’s genesis, one of his favorite chapters delves into the communist controversy in Hollywood, which he considers a very rich episode in American history.

The O’Neill book was a longer haul and, in many ways, more difficult. For twenty years, Diggins kept telling friends that he intended to write something about the great dramatist. “I would start it, then something else would come along. Then I didn’t know how it should be formed; I didn’t want to do it chronologically, and I had to create my own model. Later, theatre people looked at some of the early chapters and said, ‘This isn’t theatre!’ – and they were right. This was about O’Neill as a political philosopher, and theatre people didn’t know what to do with it.” Often referencing the plays, he presents the playwright’s picture of America – a sunny, optimistic surface with desire, resentment, and rage simmering beneath or, in some cases, a place where desire is completely dead.

The Iceman Cometh – a play with characters who seem bereft of desire – is Diggins’ favorite O’Neill drama. “It’s about being down and out, hanging out in a bar,” he says. “I saw that growing up in San Francisco. We were teenagers but we snuck into bars with false IDs. We saw guys, 21 years old, drunk every night, who didn’t like the work they were doing, didn’t want to go home. It was a sad sight to behold. Some of us said, ‘we’re not going to go that route.’ We went off to college to avoid that, but I still have a great affection for the maladjusted.”

Diggins’ path took him to the University of California at Berkeley where, as an undergraduate, he took a course in American intellectual history with a man he calls “a superb teacher,” Henry May. “It had a profound influence on me,” he says. We read people I identified with, like Thorstein Veblen and Henry Adams. They were all alienated, of course, as I was. I said, ‘This is what I want to study.’” In subsequent years, he wrote about Veblen and John Adams, and books such as The Rise and Fall of the American Left, The Promise of Pragmatism, and On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History. He also edited a collection of essays on the work of the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the esteemed historian and public intellectual who served on the Graduate Center’s faculty.

Diggins says, “In my field, you can’t be at a better place than both the Graduate Center and New York City because that’s where intellectual life is if you want to study political philosophy, or the theatre, or the relationship between public intellectuals and government policy. There’s all kinds of think tanks in New York like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The Sage Foundation is here, as well as the Graduate Center’s own Center for the Humanities. New York is the greatest place to be for an academic. A lot of them teach in New York, then take a job elsewhere, then can’t wait to get back.”

—Gail Goldberg