from the Center for the study and teaching of writing at the Ohio State University this is Ryder
stock I'm Doug dangler today in conjunction with the OSU Department of History and it's magazine
origins OSU student Patrick Papillon Dee talks with historian Sarah SIF about her article on
class warfare published in origins this is writers talk history a partnership between
origins an online magazine from the Ohio State history department covering current events and
historical perspective and the Center for the Study and teaching of writing also at the Ohio
State University all origins articles and podcasts can be accessed for free at go to su edu backslash
origins today we're speaking with Sarah SIF an American historian at the Ohio State history
department about her recent origins article from Karl Marx to Karl Rove class warfare and American
politics thanks for being on the show Sarah and welcome my pleasure thanks so how about you start
by telling us a little bit about what you wrote for origins the reason it's from Karl Marx to Karl
Rove as I wanted to talk about this idea of class warfare as being sort of a rhetorical device that
presidents use to gain electoral power and in the beginning in the late 1800s Karl Marx talked about
class warfare and capitalist had a lot of money and they had to hold on to people working for
them and occasionally those people would decide they had had enough of their crappy working
conditions and low wages and they would actually start overturning boxcars and setting warehouses
on fire and so class warfare was an actual thing that happened these days what it is a slander that
often conservatives use when they want to talk about someone as redistributed or what they would
call socialist economic policies so the story of how class warfare was used in presidential
rhetoric over time as it's kind of interesting because in the two Roosevelt administration's
for example it was okay to talk about the fact that some people had all of the wealth and a
big mass of people had very little and presidents would make this case that they were on the side of
the masses and they would talk about how they were going to change the tax law to redistribute wealth
to people who had less and this was a very common thing to talk about after World War two it am sort
of a problem for new dealers when FDR was elected for the last time people started saying he's using
all this class warfare rhetoric and he is pitting the masses against property owners conservatives
in the early conservative movement really picked up on this idea so people like William F Buckley
and Robert Taft started using this language to describe pro-labor policies changes in tax law
those types of things and by the time the reagan administration came around something really
interesting happened no longer was the enemy big business as it had been talked about for
so long but it was now big government so the enemy sort of got switched from big business versus the
people and now it was big government versus the people and this idea had a lot of traction people
still talk about class warfare it doesn't always necessarily apply to policies that people think
are socialist but the liberal side will say that policies that benefit the wealthy are also a form
of class warfare because they are class warfare on behalf of millionaires do you find that Americans
have a hard time talking about quote-unquote class when the Occupy Wall Street movement all these
things to public attention people started thinking about them and suddenly if you're engaging in
class warfare it's not necessarily that you're the bad guy anymore you could be the good guy like
Teddy Roosevelt when he said I'm in this fight to the end I think the malleability of the term over
time indicates that it really is hard for people to make any sense of policies when it was okay to
say I'm on the side of the working class and I'm going to go after the wealthiest people that was
kind of clear-cut and maybe that time is coming back around again your article was in some ways a
kind of digital media piece I'm kind of wondering what the writing process was like for you this
might be a little bit controversial in terms of historical method well first I researched the
topic online just by googling it and I read wall street journal articles and York Times articles
whatever I could find basically on there was a really helpful piece on NPR about how the term
class warfare was used recently my primary sources that I used were newspaper articles that I text
searched so it's probably not too cool in the history profession to say I did my research by
searching newspaper archives that's how I did that and that's how I found the trends in how the term
had been used how is it writing for digital media different from doing a traditional paper and I
think the answer is that you can point people to sources that are better than what you have to say
about it just by linking to them right a little hyperlink fashion yeah so that's why it's unique
about it and then you can provide as much to look at as you want and you can't do that on paper and
I know you have a background in journalism and I'm wondering how that might have prepared you
for writing a piece like this journalistic style is a little bit different from academic style of
course because when you're preparing an academic piece you can structure your argument to build to
your main point and in journalistic writing you want to put the most important information up
front because you know that as the piece gets longer you're going to lose readers one after
another so there's kind of a inverted pyramid idea in journalism where you put the big idea top and
then less important less important less important stuff so I think in that sense this piece is more
along the lines of creating an argument but it's also important to say things that people
will understand if they are not historians it's an interesting way to kind of think about the
process of writing through that and have your Graduate Studies your your PhD student in the
history department here at OSU and wonder if your graduate studies in history prepared you for only
specific types of writing or if they've developed you as a writer overall history as a discipline
has the most variety in the style of writing of just about any discipline I've done any
significant amount of reading in in some cases you get people who present all of their theory
upfront and they'll talk in the first person on the other hand you get a lot of really exciting
writers who are almost philosophical from the very beginning and are you know talking about
really deep things it's there's a there's a huge variety history sort of classically told in a
narrative format in chronological order and you know that's another completely different style so
one of the things that drew me to the discipline in the beginning was that the writing was really
good and I remember I took as an undergraduate a class in the history of Vietnam and it was
the first time I had read journal articles from history and they were so they were so good and
I just immediately I became I wanted to read more of them and I was interested in the publications
and the sort of intricacy and density of some of the writing really appealed to me so do you think
historians have have almost an advantage in terms of of their writings they work more at it or is it
perhaps just more important to their discipline to me writing is important in any discipline but
particularly in history you have to sell your idea your version of how things happen and to
do that you have to keep all these things in mind as you're writing you have to be six inked because
you don't want to lose people's attention you have to be truthful you have to present sources
and making sometimes you have to make a case that your sources are important you have to make a case
that your sources are credible it's just a lot of different threats they have to hold on to
at once it's challenging definitely do you find it's hard to get people outside of academia you
find it hard to kind of explain what you do to them what I find hard is when they say that my
research sounds interesting whether they mean that or not right yes how genuine is that interesting
but my research is not esoteric I am interested in how people thought about evolutionary theory
during the civil rights era so when I described the three main things for example that I have
so far found out about that topic people seem to understand what I'm talking about and they
usually say it's interesting but what does that means right definitely I think I can relate too to
that difficulty there and has has your origins article from Karl Marx to Karl Rove has your
origins article helped you to convey what you do in that regard I posted it on Facebook and
so a few of my a handful of my friends probably will have read it I hope that people find it
accessible the goal of origins is to make research accessible and I think it succeeds at doing that
well thanks Sarah thank you for joining us today on writers talk history thank you
you're listening to rider sauce from the Center for the study and teaching
of writing at the Ohio State University with my guest Patrick Ghandi talking with
historian Sarah sip more information about any of our guests can be found at wwr Eider Saco