Nicholas BuccolaCritiques

On the strength of this book, I can say with confidence that if I were an undergraduate English, history, philosophy or political science major, I would hasten myself to one of Professor Nicholas Buccola's seminars and thence take every one he offered.

Along with its timeliness, this book is a masterful synthesis of several complicated strands of United States intellectual history. Mr. Buccola's analysis not only provides context for the contemporaneous discourse in the period of U.S. history it covers but also cogently uses that context to expose how this nation's racist past--and the ideology that supported it--now circumscribes its racist present.

Very highly recommended.

Much of the book is the lead up to the debate. Describing the parallel but highly distinguished tracks of their two lives progresses to the underpinnings of their writings. The author insures the reader is sufficiently familiar with the philosophy and perspectives of each. He draws upon the writings, particularly Baldwin’s, and the contemporary published reviews of notable and respected thinkers. The author takes his now well-schooled readers into the debate.
The debate was 65 years ago, but is currently applicable. The reader only needs to use the current expression “other” for “Negro”.

The Fire Is Upon Us is a solid comparison of the career and thought of James Baldwin—one of the leading literary figures of the 20th-century U.S. and a prominent Black intellectual—and William F. Buckley Jr.—a smug, elitist snob and an unrepentant racist—which uses as its fulcrum the famous televised debate which took place between the two men at the University of Cambridge in 1965.

Nicholas Buccola does a good job of eschewing simple conclusions about the significance of the debate itself, and instead showing how it fits within the overall intellectual development of the two men. His editorialising on the whole is minimal, in fact, although it's easy for the reader draw connections between many of the debates and attitudes of the 1960s and those of the present day. While I'm sure the patrician Buckley would be horrified at being compared to many of the prominent figures of the U.S. Republican Party in the 2020s, it's clear how he is their ancestor: skilled at political strategy, perhaps, but no true intellectual heft; willing to make "a deal with the devil of white supremacy", as Buccola puts it, in return for power.

A worthwhile read, particularly if you have an interested in the history of Civil Rights or of American conservatism.

1. On Page 402 (in an endnote to Page 7), Buccola says: "The median income of white families is ten times that of black families." This is utterly implausible, something only the innumerate would accept. The URL Buccola provides as a reference does not support his claim; in fact, the phrase "median income" does not appear at that URL. What it does say is that median *wealth* of white to black families is in a 10:1 ratio. That Buccola apparently does not understand the difference between income and wealth does not bode well for the rest of the book. The Census Department says that in 2017 non-Hispanic whites had a real median household income of $68,145, while the figure for blacks was $40,258. (For what it's worth, the figure for Asians was $81,331. Maybe America is systemically prejudiced in favor of them!)

2. On Page 8, Buccola talks about Buckley growing up in a house with over 100 rooms. But a May 24, 1981, New York Times article on an estate auction at Buckley's boyhood home says that the house had 30 rooms.

great book. the author does a good job of deducing that buckley is a racist and he uses all his writings to show this. i had not dreamed of reading god and man at yale, but now i dont have to. he also does a great job on baldwin,

This is a scholarly book, concerned with the scholarly/political question of WWFDD (what would Frederick Douglass do?) in regard to specific policies disputed between classical and reform liberalism. In other words, there's a somewhat limited audience for the book.

But, for those people who are concerned with how FD is used to legitimate wildly different positions on policies (e.g., for or against race factoring in admissions decisions), this is an excellent book. It has cogent definitions of the major kinds of liberal political theory, smart analyses of Douglass's writings, useful summaries of Douglass's disagreements with Garrison, even-handed summaries and discussions of the work of other scholars. I intend to use it next time I teach a graduate seminar on 19th century American rhetoric.