History prof. combines love of teaching with research on faith in America

Stanford has its fair share of people who go by “Professor,” but for Jonathan Herzog, it’s more than just a title.

“My nickname growing up was ‘The Professor,’” said Herzog Ph.D. ‘08. “My classmates in elementary school called me that. It’s sort of an insult, but I took it to be a compliment.”

Herzog, a visiting assistant professor of history and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution, has never strayed from his nickname. Scholarship for Herzog has always meant teaching.

“I didn’t know what it entailed to be a professor,” he said. “I assumed you basically just taught. I didn’t know about this giant research component — a research component that at Stanford is the name of the game.”

A native of Omaha, Neb., Herzog’s sense of purpose and focus on teaching did not prove an obstacle in adjusting to the demands of research — in fact, they’ve already set him off the beaten path for studying American history.

Early in his doctoral study, Herzog led a seminar on sources and methods for history undergraduates, designed to give students practice in making sense of primary documents. Addressing his students about conservatism in California, he presented them a pamphlet from the 1960s called “Why a Christian can’t be a communist.”

Finding that his class “couldn’t wrap their head around” the underlying conceptions of the pamphlet — and their explicitly religious characterization of communism — provided the first clue to a change in American self-conceptions that had been buried under decades of political change.

“The top 100 responses to the question, ‘what is the opposite of communism?’ you’re going to get things like capitalism, and freedom, and democracy and stuff like this,” Herzog said. “The idea you would get religion today — religion is not going to be a top choice. You’re going to get one of those buzzing Xs if you answer that on Family Feud. And students treated it this way.”

Anxious to learn more about a religious understanding of communism that appeared to have been downplayed over time, Herzog uncovered more and more evidence that to write about the Cold War without religion was to miss the whole story.

“What I learned is that this was relatively unexplored,” Herzog said. “That we all had this idea that there were atheistic communists out there and that we needed to do something about them, but that nobody had really brought these pieces together into a narrative of the early Cold War, a narrative of the importance of religion to early Cold War America.”

That classroom discovery led him to hit the archives, from which he emerged with a strong argument that American leaders and politicians reached much of their understanding of the Cold War through a religious lens and felt a corresponding need to forcefully assert a religious American identity. The end result is “The Hammer and the Cross,” set for publication later this fall by Oxford University Press.

Emeritus history Prof. David Kennedy ‘63, Herzog’s adviser when he was a graduate student at Stanford, said one crucial contribution of Herzog’s research has been to help tie together religion, politics and foreign policy into a unified analysis.

“Those subjects don’t usually get called into the same conversation together,” Kennedy said. “So it’s the first mark of his creativity and originality that he was even capable of concocting a dissertation at that particular site.”

Perhaps of equal value, however, is the way that Herzog’s contribution to rethinking American history in the middle of the twentieth century has implications for the start of the twenty first. Central to his analysis is the political momentum produced by the reassertion of religion for modern social conservatism and the debate it propelled about American identity.

“It’s really in the 1950s, it’s right after World War II, that these two movements, one political, one religious, get a footing within American society. And I don’t think it’s an accident that they get this crucial foothold at this exact time when Americans are occupied with, first of all, the perils of communism, but more specifically occupied with the importance of embedding religious conceptions into our notions of what it is — what it means — to be an American.”

Herzog’s successful research into the shaping of American identity, however, has not led him to forget his own sense of himself as a teacher. After completing his doctorate in 2008, he continued to teach undergraduates in history while he served for two years as fellow at the Hoover Institution, which he said he was “lucky” to be able to do.

“I love to teach,” Herzog said. “And, that’s the reason I got into this years ago. And it’s the reason that basically still keeps me going. I love research, but I really, really love students. And I’ve kept relationships with so many students over the years that I still talk to.”

Herzog has since brought to the classroom the maturity of an accomplished scholar and the enthusiasm and humility of someone only short years removed from being a student.

“What was sort of amazing to me is, he was just a couple of years older than me, but he seemed a very strong presence,” said Andrew Robichaud, a doctoral student in history and a teaching assistant for one of Herzog’s courses.

“He had a natural ability to feel comfortable in the classroom and make you feel comfortable in the classroom,” Robichaud added.

James Hohmann ‘09, a former student of Herzog’s and a former Daily editor, also noted the young professor’s attention to the members of his classes.

“His reaction to your reaction paper would be longer than your reaction,” he said. “He’s one of those guys who wants everyone in that classroom to grow and learn.”

And Herzog includes himself in that. He has not wavered from the belief that finding the answers about identity, and what you can contribute, starts with questions — and that those are best found in the conversation of the classroom.

“Teaching students is probably the best way to find out A, what interests people, and B, to find out where the information isn’t, because that’s really the name of research,” he said.

Two years after earning his doctorate, Herzog has made a name for himself on the campus as a kind and empathetic teacher. After seven years in total on the Farm, he will now take his sense of scholarship rooted in teaching north to the University of Oregon, where he will take up a position this summer in its history department.

After his two “lucky” years teaching, Herzog understands that it’s time to move on from the Farm.

“Many of the friends that I have made here over time have sort of scattered to the four winds and moved all over the academic world,” he said.

“It’s going to be sad to leave,” he added.