How a Culture of Patronage Shaped Turn of the Century Academia
This short note between John Franklin Jameson, founder of the national archives and Ruth Anna Fisher’s supervisor at the Library of Congress, and Waldo G. Leland, an associate of Jameson and cofounder of the national archives, is a short introduction of Fisher to Leland. At this time, Fisher was working as an assistant for Jameson, completing small projects and contacting people in the collection of materials for the American National Archives. She began working with Jameson after the funds for her time at the London School of Economics ran out, when she received his address from an associate and wrote him a letter. After meeting Jameson at the British Public Record Office, Fisher was hired at once.[i] By her own description, her interest in history was only initially inspired by her “earning her living by it,” but, despite that initial lack of personal interest, Jameson made an extreme effort to induct her into the competitive and elite world of historical academia.[ii] This is particularly illustrated by his insistence on her attendance of the Fifth International Congress of History and his writing of letters of introduction to his colleague Professor Pirenne, President of the Congress of History, to the Bollandist Society, and, appropriately, to Waldo G. Leland. She was granted by Jameson a “rare opportunity” into the world of history and deeply benefited from this working relationship through his patronage and connections within the historical community.[iii]. Jameson was, by standards of the time and possibly even today, a kindly employer and a man deeply invested in Ruth Anna Fisher’s journey as a historian. His descriptions of Ruth Anna Fisher as a woman of “extraordinary cleverness, abilities, and scholarship,” who was doing “so much valuable work for [him] in London” is language familiar to all who have written or received a letter of reference.[iv] However, between the lines of Jameson’s praise for Ruth Anna Fisher lays the reality of the world of a historian in the early twentieth century.
To understand the world within which Ruth Anna Fisher worked requires an understanding of patronage culture. Marked by intolerance for gender, race, class, and cultural difference in all forms, the professional world was run through a system of professional respectability, both synonymous with and parallel to the forms of respectability politics described by Higginbotham, which developed in Black Baptist Congregations as a form of both subversive protest and a reclamation of individual agency among African-American women.[v] However, unlike the respectability of the Black Baptist organizations that formed during the turn of the century, professional respectability was dependent not only on your reputation but on that of your benefactors and patrons.
Thus, Jameson’s letters not only serve as references as would be required of anyone in the workforce today, but also server as Ruth Anna’s entrance to a world not her own and littered with racial and gendered bias. While Jameson did explicitly state that Fisher is a woman of “extraordinary cleverness, abilities, and scholarship,” he preceded it with the note of warning to Leland that, though a “negress,” she is of good character and appreciated by their mutual colleague “Mrs. Davenport,” who thinks her a “fine character.”[vi] Tinged with racial condescension, Jameson’s preface that Ruth Anna is a woman of color is a reminder of the attributes associated with her race. False characterizations of people of African descent as unintelligent, lazy, or seemingly less than human were and remain the norm of Anglo-American society and serve as a metalanguage, overlaying the lives of people of color and shaping their perception in society.[vii] By preluding his description of Fisher with an assurance of her moral quality, Jameson is assuring Leland that she is a person who is capable of standing and providing her, with the deep condescension of one from a place of privilege, space which she may be allowed to enter the field as a human being, not as a stereotype.
However, even as a human being, Fisher still must be lent academic legitimacy by Jameson in order to be considered capable of working as a historian. In academia, then and arguably now, people of color are assumed to be overly biased and emotional in order to be appropriately able to analyze the work of the historical field. Thus, his insistence that she possesses “common sense” and “proper delicacy about the color line” is his final insistence that she possesses the appropriate characteristics of historian worthy of merit and one that “will not consume [Leland’s] time” with the needless and pedantic work of an incapable “negress.”[viii]
Considering the circumstances of her unfolding career as a female historian of color, it is hardly surprising that her reaction to the letters of introduction was less than enthusiastic. Her lack of agency in her own advancement on her own merits would be thoroughly squashed without the patronage of Jameson, but she herself says that she “seldom, if ever,” uses letters of introduction and had done nothing with the provided letters.[ix] Clearly, though she may not by her own admission have understood the opportunity at the moment, Ruth Anna Fisher understood the value of self-determination and self-reliance and desired to maintain her agency in her own career and rejected the form of patronage culture which she viewed as “imposing on other people’s time just to indulge in polity conversation.” Nonetheless, Jameson took matters into his own hands and had written to Pirenne, the Bollandists, and, eventually, Leland. What her reaction may have been and whether she did ultimately reach out to Leland is unknown, but she did attend the International Congress of History and was received by Dr. Pirenne and the Bollandists, as well as being granted the privilege of private tours to libraries and the historical treasures of Brussels.[x]
It is clear that, despite her reluctance, Ruth Anna Fisher was the benefactor of Jameson’s patronage, which allowed her entrance into a world otherwise disallowed to people of her race and gender. In this time of her life, she did not appreciate that privilege, but over the course of her career, she would make hard-fought use of her voice and the space she was provided to work for the advancement of not only her own work but for the historiography of her whole race. Jameson may have been her patron, her employer, and her door into the academic world, but she would make sure to retain her agency through her by creating the foundations for generations of future historians of black history.
[i] Ruth Anna Fisher, “A Tribute” in J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute, ed. Ruth Anna Fisher. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 3.
[ii] Ibid, 6.
[iii] Ibid, 6.
[iv] Correspondence from J. Franklin Jameson to Waldo G. Leland, 20 March 1923, Jameson, J. Franklin, March 1923 Folder, Box 20, Waldo G. Leland Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
[v] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of
Race." Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251-74.
[viii] Jameson, Correspondence.
[ix] Fisher, 6.
[x] Ibid.