The Politics of History - Howard Boone's Zinn

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The Road to War was a deliberate and effective counter to romantic nonsense about the First World War. Arthur Weinberg’s Manifest Destiny quietly exposed the hypocrisy of both conservatives and liberals in the idealization of American expansion. Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition made us wonder about now by brilliantly deflating the liberal heroes—Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, the two Roosevelts. And C. Vann Woodward gently reminded the nation in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, that racism might be deeply embedded, yet it could change its ways in remarkably short time. There are many others.

      But with all this, the dominant mood in historical writing in the United States (look at the pages of the historical reviews) avoids direct confrontation of contemporary problems, apologizes for any sign of departure from “objectivity,” spurns a liaison with social action. Introducing a recent collection of theoretical essays on American history,1 historian Edward N. Saveth asserts that the social science approach to history “was confused” by “the teleology of presentism.” (In the space of three pages, Saveth uses three variations of the word “confusion” to discuss the effect of presentism.)

      What is presentism? It was defined by Carl Becker in 1912 as “the imperative command that knowledge shall serve purpose, and learning be applied to the solution of the problem of human life.” Saveth, speaking for so many of his colleagues, shakes his head: “The fires surrounding the issues of reform and relativism had to be banked before the relationship between history and social science could come under objective scrutiny.”2

      They were not really fires, but only devilishly persistent sparks, struck by Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker.* There was no need to “bank” them, only to smother them under thousands of volumes of “objective” trivia, which became the trade mark of academic history, revealed to fellow members of the profession in papers delivered at meetings, doctoral dissertations, and articles in professional journals.

      In Knowledge for What?, Robert S. Lynd questioned the relevance of a detailed analysis of “The Shield Signal at Marathon” which appeared in the American Historical Review in 1937. He wondered if it was a “warranted expenditure of scientific energy.” Twenty-six years later (in the issue of July 1965), the lead article in the American Historical Review is “William of Malmesbury’s Robert of Gloucester: a Reevaluation of the Historia Novella.” In 1959, we find historians at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association (the same meeting which tabled a resolution asking an immediate end to the practice of holding sessions at hotels that barred Negroes) presenting long papers on “British Men of War in Southern Waters, 1793–1802,” “Textiles: A Period of Sturm und Drang,” and “Bampson of Bampson’s Raiders.”

      As Professor Lynd put it long ago: “History, thus voyaging forth with no pole star except the objective recovery of the past, becomes a vast, wandering enterprise.” And in its essence, I would add, it is private enterprise.

      This is not to deny that there are many excellent historical studies only one or two degrees removed from immediate applicability to crucial social problems. The problem is in the proportion. There is immense intellectual energy in the United States devoted to inspecting the past, but only a tiny amount of this is deliberately directed to the solution of vital problems: racism, poverty, war, repression, loneliness, alienation, imprisonment. Where historical research has been useful, it has often been by chance rather than by design, in accord with a kind of trickle-down theory which holds that if only you fill the libraries to bursting with enough processed pulpwood, something useful will eventually reach a society desperate for understanding.

      While scholars do have a vague, general desire to serve a social purpose, the production of historical works is largely motivated by profit (promotion, prestige, and even a bit of money) rather than by use. This does not mean that useful knowledge is not produced (or that what is produced is not of excellent quality in its own terms, as our society constructs excellent office buildings while people live in rattraps). It does mean that this production is incidental, more often than not. In a rich economy, not in some significant degree directed toward social reform, waste is bound to be huge, measured in lost opportunities and misdirected effort.

      True, the writing of history is really a mixed economy, but an inspection of the mixture shows that the social sector is only a small proportion of the mass.* What I am suggesting is not a totalistic direction of scholarship but (leaving complete freedom and best wishes to all who want to analyze “The Shield Signal at Marathon” or “Bampson of Bampson’s Raiders”) an enlargement of the social sector by encouragement, persuasion, and demonstration.

      I am not directing my criticism against those few histories which are works of art, which make no claim to illuminate a social problem, but instead capture the mood, the color, the reality of an age, an incident, or an individual, conveying pleasure and the warmth of genuine emotion. This needs no justification, for it is, after all, the ultimate purpose of social change to enlarge human happiness.

      However, too much work in history is neither art nor science. It is sometimes defended as “pure research” like that of the mathematician, whose formulas have no knowable immediate use. But the pure scientist is working on data which open toward infinity in their possible future uses. This is not true of the historian working on a dead battle or an obscure figure. Also, the proportion of scientists working on “pure research” is quite small. The historian’s situation is the reverse; the proportion working on applicable data is tiny. Only when the pendulum swings the other way will the historian be able justly to complain that pure research is being crowded out.

      Enlarging the social sector of historiography requires, as a start, removing the shame from “subjectivity.” Benedetto Croce undertook this, as far back as 1920, reacting against the strict claims of “scientific history”: what von Ranke called history “as it actually was,” and what Bury called “simply a science, no less and no more.” Croce openly avowed that what he chose to investigate in the past was determined by “an interest in the life of the present” and that past facts must answer “to a present interest.” 3 In America, James Harvey Robinson said: “The present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the past and exploit it in the interest of advance.” 4

      But this confession of concern for current problems made other scholars uneasy. Philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, for instance, said the aims of the historian must not be confused with those of the “social reformer,” and that the more a historian based his research on problems of “the period in which he writes” then “the worse historian he is likely to be.” The job of the historian, he declared (this was in the era of the Memorial Day Massacre, Guernica, and the Nuremberg Laws) is “to know whether … certain events, or sequences of events, happened at certain past times, and what … the characters of those events were.” When philosophers suggest this is not the first business of a historian, Lovejoy said, “they merely tend to undermine his morals as a historian.”

      At the bottom of the fear of engagement, it seems to me, is a confusion between ultimate values and instrumental ones. To start historical enquiry with frank adherence to a small set of ultimate values—that war, poverty, race hatred, prisons, should be abolished; that mankind constitutes a single species; that affection and cooperation should replace violence and hostility—such a set of commitments places no pressure on its advocates to tamper with the truth. The claim of Hume and his successors among the logical positivists, that no should can be proved by what is, has its useful side, for neither can the moral absolute be disproved by any factual discovery.*

      Confusion on this point is shown by Irwin Unger, in his article “The ‘New Left’ and American History,” 5 where he says:

      If there has been no true dissent in America; if a general consensus over capitalism, race relations, and expansionism has prevailed in the United States; if such dissent as has existed has been crankish and sour, the product not of a maladjusted society but of maladjusted men—then American history may well be monumentally irrelevant for contemporary radicalism.

      Unger seems to believe that a radical historian who is

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