The Politics of History - Howard Boone's Zinn

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worthwhile for him; the implication is that if he does not find such opposition he may invent it, or exaggerate what he finds. But the factual data need not contain any premonition of the future for the historian to advocate such a future. The world has been continually at war for as long as we can remember; yet the historian who seeks peace, and indeed who would like his research to have an effect on society in behalf of peace, need not distort the martial realities of the past. Indeed, his recording of that past and its effects may itself be a very effective way of reminding the reader that the future needs kinds of human relationships which have not been very evident in the past.

      (Unger continues to make the same mistake in this essay when, discussing William A. Williams’ The Contours of American History, he notes that it shows general American acceptance of private property and says “The Contours proves a constant embarrassment to the younger radical scholars.”)

      For an American historian with an ultimate commitment to racial equality there is no compulsion to ignore the facts that many slaveholders did not use whips on their slaves, that most slaves did not revolt, that some Negro officeholders in the Reconstruction period were corrupt, or that the homicide rate has been higher among Negroes than whites. But with such a commitment, and more concerned to shape the future than to recount the past for its own sake, the historian would be driven to point out what slavery meant for the “well-treated” slave; to explain how corruption was biracial in the 1870’s as in all periods; to discuss Uncle Tomism along with the passivity of Jews in the concentration camps and the inertia of thirty million poor in an affluent America; to discuss the relationship between poverty and certain sorts of crime.*

      Unyielding dedication to certain instrumental values, on the other hand—to specific nations, organizations, leaders, social systems, religions, or techniques, all of which claim their own efficacy in advancing the ultimate values—creates powerful pressures for hiding or distorting historical events. A relentless commitment to his own country may cause an American to glide over the elements of brutality in American “diplomatic history” (the term itself manufactures a certain aura of gentility). Compare, for instance, James Reston’s pious column for Easter Sunday, 1965, on the loftiness of American behavior toward other countries, with Edmund Wilson’s harsh, accurate summary of American expansionism in his introduction to Patriotic Gore.

      It was rigid devotion to Stalin, rather than to the ultimate concerns of a humane Marxism, that led to fabrication of history in the Soviet Union about the purges and other things. After 1956, a shift in instrumental gods led to counter-fabrication. With the advent of the cold war, the United States began to outdo the Soviet Union in the large-scale development of government-supported social science research which assumed that an instrumental value—the nation’s foreign policy—was identical with peace and freedom.

      Thus, teams of social scientists under contract to the armed forces took without question the United States government’s premise that the Soviet Union planned to invade Western Europe, and from this worked out all sorts of deductions for policy. Now it turns out (and we are told this by the same analysts) that premise was incorrect. This is replaced not by the overthrow of dogma itself, but by substituting a new assumption—that Communist China intends to take over all of Asia and eventually the world—and so the computers have begun to click out policy again. The absolutization of an instrumental value—in this case, current U. S. foreign policy (in other cases, Soviet policy or Ghanaian policy or whatever) distorts the results of research from the beginning.*

      Knowing that commitments to instrumental values distort the facts often leads scholars to avoid commitment of any kind. Boyd Schafer, reporting for the American Historical Association on the international congress of historians held in Vienna in the summer of 1965, notes an attempt at one session to introduce the question of Vietnam. The executive body of the Congress “firmly opposed the introduction of any current political question,” saying the organization “had been and could only be devoted to scientific historical studies.” Here were twenty-four hundred historians from forty nations, presumably an enormous assembly of data and insights from all branches of history; if this body could not throw any light on the problem of Vietnam, what claim can anyone make that history is studied to help us understand the present?

      It testifies to the professionalization, and therefore the dehumanization of the scholar, that while tens of thousands of them gather annually in the United States alone, to hear hundreds of papers on scattered topics of varying significance, there has been no move to select a problem—poverty, race prejudice, the war in Vietnam, alternative methods of social change—for concentrated attention by some one conference.

      But if a set of “ultimate values”—peace, racial equality, economic security, freedom of expression—is to guide our questioning, without distorting our answers, what is the source of these values? Can we prove their validity?

      It is only when “proof” is identified with academic research that we are at a loss to justify our values. The experiences of millions of lives over centuries of time, relived by each of us in those aspects common to all men, prove to us that love is preferable to hate, peace to war, brotherhood to enmity, joy to sorrow, health to sickness, nourishment to hunger, life to death. And enough people recognize these values (in all countries, and inside all social systems) so that further academic disputation is only a stumbling block to action. What we see and feel (should we not view human emotion as crystallized, ineffable rationality?) is more formally stated as a fact of social psychology in Freud’s broadest definition of Eros and in Erik Erikson’s idea of “the more inclusive identity.”*

      How should all this affect the actual work of the historian? For one thing, it calls for an emphasis on those historical facts which have hitherto been obscured, and whose recall would serve to enhance justice and brotherhood. It is by now a truism that all historical writing involves a selection of facts out of those which are available. But what standards should govern this selection?

      Harvard philosopher Morton White, anxious to defend “historical objectivity” against “the hurried flight to relativism,” says that the “ideal purpose of history” is “to tell the whole truth.” 6 But since it is impossible to have historical accounts list all that has taken place, White says the historian’s job is to give a shorter, “representative” list. White values “impersonal standards” and “a neutral standpoint.” The crux of this argument is based on the notion that the fundamental aim of the historian is to tell as much of the story of the past as he can.

      Even if it were possible to list all the events of a given historical period, would this really capture the human reality of this period? Can starvation, war, suffering, joy, be given their due, even in the most complete historical recounting? Is not the quality of events more important than their quantity? Is there not something inherent in setting the past on paper which robs human encounter of its meaning? Does not the attention to either completeness or representativeness of “the facts” only guarantee that the cool jelly of neutrality will spread over it all, and that the reader will be left in the mood of the writer—that is, the mood of detached scholarship? And if this is so, does not the historian, concerned with the quality of his own time, need to work on the list in such a way as to try to restore its human content?

      In a world where justice is maldistributed, historically and now, there is no such thing as a “neutral” or “representative” recapitulation of the facts, any more than one is dealing “equally” with a starving beggar and a millionaire by giving each a piece of bread. The condition of the recipient is crucial in determining whether the distribution is just.

      Our best historians, whether or not they acknowledge it, take this into account. Beard’s study of the making of the Constitution was hardly a representative list of the events connected with the Philadelphia Convention. He singled out the economic and political backgrounds of the Founding Fathers to illustrate the force of economic interest in political affairs, and he did it because (as he put it later) “this realistic view of the Constitution had been largely submerged in abstract discussion of states’ rights and national sovereignty and in formal, logical, and discriminative analyses of judicial opinions.”*

      When C. Vann Woodward wrote The

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