Library of Congress
Kluge Prize Ceremony
>> Dignified, bold, 
compassionate.  Dedicated.  
Rounded, open, engaged.
>>  Elegant.
Visionary, strong, thoughtful 
and diplomatic.
The Kluge Prize awards 
accessible scholarship and 
strong public leadership.
And Drew Gilpin Faust embodies 
all the 
traits we were seeking as a 
prize recipient.
DREW GILPIN FAUST: I see myself 
fundamentally as a historian.
I grew up in Shenandoah Valley 
crk Virginia, when time was 
changing, but 
when history was very present in
the 
1950s and 60s we lived in the 
midst of civil war battlefields,
but the emerging time of Civil 
Rights Movement, brown v.
Board, the effort to close 
schools in 
jirnlings through mass -- in 
Virginia through mass 
resistance, all of that when I 
was a small child.  The 
questions for past and present 
intersected for me vividly as 
the 
American traditions of 
governance and race and justice 
and equality all played out 
before my eyes, but also were 
part 
of what I was hearing about the 
places in which I lived and 
their history.
SPEAKER: I think a great choice 
for the Kluge Prize for 
Achievement in the Study of 
Humanity.  She's a humanist and 
historian.  Life has been a 
study of who we are and how we 
deal with crises, but then 
her life also has been an 
exemplary leader through the 
turbulent times that we all live
in.  So she not only has 
researched and 
studied this as a scholar for 
all of us, she also exemplified 
leadership and 
humanity, and I think it's a 
wonderful choice.
SPEAKER: Drew Faust is a 
historian.  It's not just 
science and technology, as 
important as they are, it's the 
values that are infused into 
those technologies.
And that's where her background 
helped to ensure that we were 
constantly lifting our gaze to 
the constellation of 
possibilities.
SPEAKER: She has been a 
historian of the 
American south, of American 
women, and of the American civil
war and the 
intellectual history of the 
South in particular, as 
distinguished and as 
important as anyone in the past 
40 years.
Her work will always stand as 
some of the most important 
contributions to civil war 
history, the history of the 
South and the history of 
American women.
SPEAKER: You have made a real 
difference throughout your 
entire professional career, and 
I know that you will 
continue to do so as you put it,
to help us build a more 
enlightened world.
So congratulations and best 
wishes on your future endeavors.
Drew, I want to congratulate you
on your service as a historian 
and as an integrator in higher 
education.
Thanks to you, both the general 
public and our leaders have a 
greater understanding of our 
shared history, and the 
experiences that have shaped our
nation.
SPEAKER: Dr. Hayden, members of 
Congress, members of the 
diplomatic corps and members of 
the library's James Madison 
council, scholars and 
distinguished guests, I am 
John has kill, director of the 
Kluge center on behalf of the 
Library of Congress, it is my 
pleasure to welcome you to the 
7th conferral of the John W. 
Kluge Prize for the study of 
humanity.
Incidentally, this event is 
being recorded for placement on 
the library's website and it is 
being livestreamed, so I also 
welcome our viewers from around 
the world.
The John W. Kluge Prize for 
achievement in the study of 
humanity is unique among 
international awards.
The prize covers fields, 
virtually all the humanities and
social sciences and other areas.
It honors scholars who over a 
sustained period have distilled 
wisdom from the cumulative 
record of human experience and 
have had a major impact on 
public life.
The selection progress is 
Democratic and broad.  The 
library solicits nominations 
from a wide range of national 
and international individuals 
and institutions and uses a 
rigorous selection process 
involving curators, specialists 
and a distinguished panel of 
outside scholars and, of course,
the Librarian of Congress.
We are deeply grateful to the 
late John W. Kluge for his 
generosity in creating the 
endowment that funds this prize,
as well as the wide-ranging 
research of the many visiting 
scholars that the Kluge center 
here within the Thomas Jefferson
Building.
Now, here in this institutional 
symbol 
of the importance of knowledge 
to our democracy, we especially 
want to thank the Congress of 
the United States for creating 
and sustaining the library for 
over two centuries, beginning 
with Thomas Jefferson's amazing 
collection, which has grown to 
over 160 million items.  The 
U.S. Congress has been the 
greatest single patron of the 
library in the history of the 
world.  We thank the 
distinguished members who are in
the audience and with us 
tonight.
And now I have the honor to 
introduce to 
you the 14th Librarian of 
Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden.
[Applause]
CARLA HAYDEN: Thank you.
I am so honored and pleased to 
welcome all of the distinguished
guests tonight and thank you so 
much for being here with us on 
this very special evening.  John
has already told you a little 
about the history of the Kluge 
Prize, 
but before we go any further, 
I'd like to recognize one very 
special person in our audience.
My pred sees ser, the 13th 
Librarian of Congress, Dr. James
buildington.
[Applause]
CARLA HAYDEN: Dr. Billington had
the vision to create this prize,
as well as the Kluge center, 
and he worked alongside the late
John W. Kluge to turn this dream
into reality.  We thank you for 
your vision and for your many 
years of service and leadership 
to our nation.
It is now my great pleasure and 
privilege to confer the 7th 
Kluge Prize 
for achievement in the study of 
humanity.
Drew Gilpin Faust stands among 
the most distinguished 
historians of our generation.
Throughout her career she has 
demonstrated clear vision and 
intellectual courage, spending 
countless 
hours in the archives and among 
primary resources, some right 
here at the 
Library of Congress, uncovering 
the vital research and threads 
of our country's social history.
Her work has added to our 
understanding of the civil war, 
the history of the South, and 
the history of women in the 
United States.
My granting us a greater 
understanding 
of our heritage and some of the 
decisive 
ideas and conflicts that shaped 
it, her work continues to 
provide context to the many 
challenges we face in public 
life today.
In addition to her skilled craft
as a historian and educator, she
has been a leader in the public 
sphere.
In 2007, following her very 
successful 
tenure as dean of the Radcliffe 
institute, she took office as 
Harvard's 28th president.
And for over a decade at the 
helm of one of the world's most 
distinguished centers of higher 
research and learning, she 
guided the institution through a
time of national financial 
crisis and during her leadership
she expanded financial aid for 
undergraduates, working to make 
the Harvard community more 
diverse and accessible, and she 
ably promoted the university's 
mission in the arts, sciences 
and humanities.
She also led in the creation of 
innovative learning and 
interdisciplinary programs and 
strengthened the university's 
international impact.
Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, will you 
please come forward to receive 
the Kluge Prize for achievement 
in the study of humanity?
Please join me in welcoming Dr. 
Faust.
[Applause]
CARLA HAYDEN: And now we will 
hear from our laureate.
DREW GILPIN FAUST: Thank you to 
all of you for being here.  I 
know how many things there are 
to do in this city and that you 
would choose to be here tonight 
means the world to me.
And I wanted to especially thank
Carla Hayden for awarding me 
this prize and for taking on the
Library of Congress.  It's just 
about to be her second 
anniversary as librarian, 
September 14th.  So I think we 
should have a round of applause 
and congratulations to her.
[Applause]
DREW GILPIN FAUST: Dr.
Billingt on, secretary Chow, so 
many distinguished friends in 
this room.
I am so grateful for this award.
It's hard for me to find the 
words to 
convey that, and also to convey 
how 
humble I feel to be in the 
pantheon of its recipients.
I'm delighted to be awarded this
recognition by the Library of 
Congress, an institution that 
has meant so much to me 
throughout my scholarly career.
From the papers of 19th century 
South Carolina congressman and 
senator James Henry Hammond, a 
key figure in my first two 
books, to the diaries and 
letters of 
Clara Barton and the searing 
Matthew Brady photographs so 
central to my last.
The library's collections have 
been essential to my 
explorations of the 
history of the American South 
and the nation's experience of 
civil war.
That this award comes from the 
Library 
of Congress is a signal honor.
That it is awarded for 
Achievement in 
the Study of Humanity is a 
recognition I could scarcely 
have dreamed of.
It affirms what I have seen as a
vocation, a calling, a life 
purpose.
Both in my own dedication to 
such 
study, but also in my efforts on
behalf 
of the institution's, especially
universities, that have enabled 
and encouraged this pursuit.
The path I have chosen into the 
study of humanity has been 
history.
From my earliest years, which I 
guess 
I discussed already a little bit
on the video, growing up in 
Virginia, 
Shenandoah Valley in the 1950s 
and '60s, I felt the presence of
the past all around me.
I lived on a farm on the Leeiac 
son 
High -- Lee Jackson highway 
where confederates and Yankees 
had skirmished and played civil 
war with my brothers in the 
woods near our house.
But I also knew, even as a young
child, 
that my owner ra was a historic 
time in its own right.
One of controversy and challenge
to 
the entrenched order of 
segregation that had replaced 
slavery after the civil war.
History seemed to surround me, 
even as a new history was being 
created before my eyes.
The path of slavery, war and 
racial injustice so present in 
my childhood 
would later become the focus of 
my scholarly work.
But the questions I would ask of
the 
19th century had implications 
for my own world as well.
I sought through research and 
writing to 
understand how human beings had 
come to 
create the slave society of the 
Old 
South, and how slavery's 
oppressions had 
become, for millions of white 
southerners, not just an 
accepted way of 
life but what they justified as 
a positive good and what 
ultimately, in 
the hundreds of thousands, they 
died to defend.
A century later I had grown up 
amongst 
adults who supported 
segregation, a system that had 
seemed to me, even as a young 
child, at odds with the 
Democratic 
and Christian values those same 
adults taught me to esspouse.
If I could understand the 
southern 
past, perhaps I could better 
understand the southern present.
My Ph.D.
dissertation and my first book 
were about the pro-slavery 
argument.
You might say I wanted to 
understand inhumanty.
How men and women throughout 
history 
have persuaded themselves to 
defend 
ideas, practices, societies, 
governments, that we of a 
different era see as 
indefensible.
I wanted to know how humans can 
become blind to evil.
Perhaps if we could understand 
their 
processes of denial and 
rationalization, 
we might gain insight into our 
own failures of vision.
Those shortcomings of our own 
time.
History, in other words, can 
expand our awareness of 
ourselves.
It releases us from the confines
of our own individual lives.
It offers us other ways of 
seeing that cast our assumptions
into relief.
It reminds us of choices people 
have 
made or not made, and thus it 
eliminates realms of 
possibility.
It shows us that things have 
been otherwise, and it reminds 
us that things can be different 
once again.
By documenting contingency and 
agency, 
history undermines any 
acceptance of 
crippling inevitablety, and 
contingency means opportunity.
It means we can change things, 
and that what we do matters.
To my mind, this is history's 
most important lesson.
Although I at first focused my 
attention on the society and 
culture of 
the Old South, the implications 
of the questions I was exploring
in my writing 
and teaching led me inexorabley 
toward the civil war.  It seemed
I had been steeped in that war 
since my earliest days.
As I began my deeper scholarly 
explorations into its history, I
soon 
came to understand Ernest 
Hemingway's observations to F. 
Scott Fitzgerald.
"War," he said, "is the best 
subject.
"  For me it proved irresistible
to study humanity when under 
maximum 
pressure, when decisions and 
choices are literally matters of
life and death.
When the possibility for the 
best of 
humanity, courage, sacrifice, 
and the 
worst of humanity, cruelly, 
cruelty, brutality, when they 
collide.
And I found myself drawn to 
explore with my students other 
wars as well.
Vietnam, the two world wars, 
what was different?  And what 
unchanging about the human 
response to combat about 
conflagration?
What was the product of time and
circumstance?
And what was the result of an 
essential enduring humanity?
How did the inhumanty of war 
compel its 
participants to reaffirm and 
reassert 
what humanity truly meant?  And 
how did war extend beyond the 
battlefield to engulf the lives 
of civilians, of women and of 
children?
What, as we might put it, was 
the human face of war?
It was in war's foregrounding of
death 
that I encountered an 
unparalleled line 
of sight into the human 
condition, and the subject for 
my most recent book.
Mortality is a defining feature 
of 
humanity, and our recognition 
and 
anticipation of our inevitable 
end is a key element 
differentiating us from animals.
All of life and all of 
philosophy once observed is 
about learning to die.
Yet we do so in different ways, 
in different eras and different 
places.
Facing the unprecedented 
slaughter of civil war, more 
than 2% of the population died 
in the course of the war, the 
equivalent of about 7 million 
people today.
Americans confronted death in a 
manner both old and new.
The widely shared Christian 
ideology of the good death 
provided lessons in how 
to die that shaped the response 
to 
unimaginable and unfathomable 
industrialized slaughter.
The insistence of our forebears 
on adapting the rituals and 
practices that preserve their 
humanity, even in the 
face of catastrophe, seemed to 
me an affirmation of the power 
and resilience of the human 
spirit.
Even in almost impossible 
circumstances, 
soldiers and civilians alike 
struggle to bury, name and honor
the dead in ways that affirm the
value of each human life.
The National Cemetery System 
that emerged from the war 
represents the expression of 
this impulse on a national 
level.
For me, the research and writing
for 
this book served as an excursion
into the past with powerful 
resonance for a future that 
awaits us all.
I have been deeply moved and 
gratified 
to learn that readers ranging 
from 
hospice workers to clergy to 
active and veteran military have
found this book has spoken to 
them and to their experience.
That is just a brief glimpse 
into what 
the study of humanity and 
inhumanty has 
meant for me, and the kinds of 
questions that collections like 
the ones here at the Library of 
Congress have enabled me to ask.
Other institutions have, of 
course, also 
supported this work.  Which 
would never have been 
accomplished without the rich 
intellectual environment of 
teaching and research nurtured 
by American higher education.
Universities have served as the 
locus for humanistic inquiry 
from the time of their founding 
in the 11th century.
Society has assigned primarily 
responsibility for this 
stewardship to them.
It has been the unique role of 
the university, both to serve 
the immediate and urgent 
present, and at the same time 
to look beyond it, to pose 
larger questions of meaning.
Not just to propel us towards 
our 
goals but to ask what those 
goals should 
be, to understand who we are, 
where we came from and where we 
are going and why.
Yet we find ourselves in a time 
when the value and legitimacy of
these questions, and of the 
fields that embody them, are 
being criticized, weakened, 
marginalized.
Increasingly education is seen 
as instrumental.
We expect it to provide a direct
path to a specific job.
We fail to ask how it will 
produce a 
thoughtful citizen or a person 
who can imagine beyond the 
moment in which we 
find ourselves to see and build 
the changing world ahead.
Or how a leader can begin to 
address 
the profound impact of our 
extraordinary technological 
advances on our culture, our 
society, and our very 
understanding of what it is to 
be human.
We see the results of this 
neglect all around us.
We have invented the marvels of 
social 
media, but not figured out the 
ethics of the profound 
challenges it poses.
We have made torrents of 
information 
available to almost everyone, 
but not equipped them with the 
skills of analysis and habits of
discernment to separate truth 
from falsehood, or 
perhaps most alarmingly, to 
believe that this distinction 
matters.
We are a society enthralled by 
the notion of innovation.
But how can we imagine a new 
future 
without grasping how things were
once different and can be 
different again?
We are witnessing sharp declines
in the fields designed to ask 
such questions and nurture such 
skills.
I speak, of course, of the 
humanities, and what are known 
as the qualitative, 
not mathematical, social 
sciences.
Languages, literatures, history,
philosophy, religion, 
anthropology, parts of 
sociology, and political science
are at the core of this 
endeavor.
And their departments, majors, 
jobs and enrollments are 
plummeting.
At Penn State, for example, the 
five 
years from 2010 to 2015 saw a 
40% decline in humanities 
majors.
At the University of Illinois at
Champaign urbana, there were 414
majors in 2005 and 155 in 2015.
Nationwide numbers of history 
majors are 
down 45% since 2007.  Since 
1990s English majors have 
declined by half.
The University of Wisconsin at 
Stevens Point announced it would
abolish 13 departments, French, 
German, Spanish, philosophy and 
political science.
One state governor listed the 
specific 
fields to be favored with state 
support 
explicitly tying educational 
resources to job outcomes.
He said, "I want to spend our 
dollars 
giving people sciences, 
technology, engineering, math 
degrees, so that when 
they get out of school, they can
get a job."  He observed his 
state did not need any more 
anthropologists.
In fact, humanists do get jobs, 
and over a lifetime earn only 
slightly less than their peers 
in the social and natural 
sciences.
Jobs are, of course, important.
But they are not enough to serve
as the exclusive purpose of 
higher education.
When we define the role of 
learning solely to drive 
economic development, we 
risk losing sight of the broader
and 
deeper questions of the kinds of
inquiry 
that enable the critical insight
that 
build the humane perspective 
that foster the restless 
skepticism and unbounded 
curiosity from which our 
profoundest understandings so 
emerge.
We shouldn't for get Einstein's 
words... "Not everything that 
counts can be 
counted and not everything that 
can be counted counts."
It seems to me telling that one 
set of higher education 
institutions has not shared in 
this recent decline in the 
importance of the humanities.  
These are our military 
academies.
Take the example of West Point, 
from 
its origins as an engineering 
school, the United States 
Military Academy has 
evolved over two centuries to be
a very special sort of liberal 
arts college.
One that recognizes that many of
the 
most significant lessons it can 
impart 
for leadership must emerge from 
the study of humanity.
The academy describes it this 
way:  
"the expansion of a person's 
capacity to know one's self and 
view the world through multiple 
lenses."
The distinguished academy 
graduate general George Patton, 
whose papers are here at the 
Library of Congress insisted 
that a successful soldier must 
know history.
To win battles, he observed, you
do not beat weapons.  You beat 
the soul of man.
Alexander the great slept with 
two things under his pillow.
A dagger and a copy of Homer's 
Illiad.  To understand the human
soul.  No small aspiration.
But one that has propelled my 
work for decades and the work of
the humanities for millennia.
In identifying what is 
distinctively human, we 
necessarily commit ourselves 
to its preservation and 
enhancement, to the appreciation
of what unites us rather than 
the distraction of what divides 
us.
To the advancement of the humane
in a world that often seems bent
on destroying it.
We must support universities in 
their dedication to these 
efforts.
And we must adopt a discourse 
that honors rather than 
disparaging these fields of 
inquiry.
But to make this possible and 
sustainable within universities,
we must also build broader 
understanding of the 
importance of the study of 
humanity outside and beyond 
them.
And so let me return to where I 
began, to where we find 
ourselves tonight.
In serving as the Library of 
Congress, 
this institution must also serve
all the people that Congress 
represents.
Not just scholars but the 
curious citizens of an entire 
nation.
All of us are in this room 
because we 
are in some way connected to 
that work, 
because we are somehow invested 
in that endeavor.
The extraordinary advances of 
science 
and technology that lie before 
us must 
be shaped by human and humane 
purposes 
if those values and perhaps even
humankind are not to be 
destroyed.
Let me invoke the historian's 
sense of contingency that I 
earlier described.
It is up to us to define the 
nature and quality of human 
possibility.
The contents of this library can
help 
inspire us to inspire others to 
understand what those 
possibilities might be.
Let me make this point by 
closing with a treasure from the
library.
I spoke earlier of the face of 
war.
The Library of Congress 
possesses a remarkable 
collection of I understand 
now more than 3500 civil war 
pieces that 
has been assembled and donated 
by Tom lind qis, who is here in 
the audience, and his three 
young sons.
Inspired by newspaper 
photographs of U.S.
servicemen and women killed in 
Iraq and 
Afghanistan, the Lindquist 
regard their collection as a 
memorial to the soldiers of the 
civil war.
This gives you a general 
portrait, but 
here is one of the amber types 
from the collection.
It's been tentatively identified
as Sergeant Samuel Smith.
His wife Molly and daughters, 
Mary and Maggie.
The image was found in Cecil 
County, Maryland, so it's likely
this soldier 
was in one of seven regiments of
United 
States Colored Troops raised  in
that state.
Like all of the portraits in 
this collection, it speaks 
eloquently to us across the 
century and a half that 
separates us.
For this soldier and his family,
the 
message is one of pride, an 
affirmation 
of the new freedom's warhead 
enabled him to claim.
Slavery would have denied him 
the right 
to legally marry or to protect 
his wife and children from sale.
This portrait is of a free man.
It proclaims a new day for black
families, a new respectability 
of fine clothing, and of 
daughters in matching coats and 
bonnets.
And it portrays a soldier, an 
African American who under 
slavery would have been 
prohibited 
from bearing arms, and who, 
until 1863 could not have 
enlisted in the Army.
Now he is joined what would be 
nearly 
200,000 other black Americans to
fight 
for freedom, to risk enslavement
if captured, and to establish a 
claim to 
full citizenship and humanity as
the republic's old defenders.
In this photograph, Sergeant 
Smith, or 
whoever this might be, makes a 
statement about a new order of 
things.
It is his own Declaration of 
Independence, his personal 
affirmation 
that all men, that he has been 
created 
equal, that he is fighting for a
new birth of freedom.
But these 3500 portraits and 
thousands 
more like them are intended to 
send us another message as well.
One that speaks directly to the 
meaning of the study of humanity
across time and space.
These soldiers staring into the 
photographer's lens are 
self-consciously reaching 
through history.
They have documented their faces
and uniforms partly because they
know they may be killed in the 
battles ahead.
But they also know they are 
making history in this war.
And they want to capture that 
for us.
Attention must be paid, they are
saying.
Don't forget who we were and 
what we did.
Let us give you the means to see
us, to understand us, long after
we are gone.
Our present is delivered to us 
at a price paid by those who 
came before.
History helps us remember our 
accountability to them, as well 
as our obligations to more than 
just ourselves 
and more than just our own time.
It is a way of knowing and 
valuing that has never mattered 
more.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
SPEAKER: Thank you for those 
aspiring words, Dr. Faust, and 
all of us at the library look 
forward to working with you in 
the future.  I know I can speak 
for all of us on that.
And I now invite everybody to 
make your 
way upstairs for dinner, and 
thank you again.
[Applause]
