“Revising Postrevisionism” Revisited

BRUCE CUMINGS

After Diplomatic History published my essay, “‘Revising Postrevisionism,’” I got the impression that John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn P. Leffler, and others I had criticized had trouble working up enthusiasm for what I had said. Perhaps they felt like the German composer Max Reger who, upon reading a critical review, wrote to the critic as follows: “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.” Or perhaps they would agree with Samuel Johnson when he said, “I found your essay to be good and original. However the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.”

In the time that has since passed, Gaddis's distaste has grown not just for my essay but for the journal and the editor who published it: Now (not before, but only now) he thinks that sound editorial policy at DH has given way to incivility, unbalanced judgment, and unfair procedure. It is a pity, because my essay was not so much a critique of John Gaddis or Mel Leffler as of the discipline of diplomatic history, and especially the keepers of the field. Those I singled out included my acquaintances, my friends, and people I do not know, as well as Gaddis and Leffler. It was in a sense an old, anachronistic critique, one I could have imagined myself writing in the 1970s or early 1980s.