Читать книгу The Politics of History - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 13
ОглавлениеLet us turn now from scholars in general to historians in particular. For a long time, the historian has been embarrassed by his own humanity. Touched by the sight of poverty, horrified by war, revolted by racism, indignant at the strangling of dissent, he has nevertheless tried his best to keep his tie straight, his voice unruffled, and his emotions to himself. True, he has often slyly attuned his research to his feelings, but so slyly, and with such scholarly skill, that only close friends and investigators for congressional committees might suspect him of compassion.
Historians worry that a deep concern with current affairs may lead to twisting the truth about the past. And indeed, it may, under conditions which I will discuss below. But nonconcern results in another kind of distortion, in which the ore of history is beaten neither into plowshare nor sword, but is melted down and sold. For the historian is a specialist who makes his living by writing and teaching, and his need to maintain his position in the profession tends to pull him away from controversy (except the polite controversy of academic disputation) and out of trouble.*
The tension between human drives and professional mores leads many to a schizophrenic separation of scholarly work from other activities; thus, research on Carolingian relations with the Papacy is interrupted momentarily to sign a petition on civil rights. Sometimes the separation is harder to maintain, and so the specialist on Asia scrupulously stays away from teach-ins on Vietnam, and seeks to keep his work unsullied by application to the current situation. One overall result is that common American phenomenon—the secret radical.
There is more than a fifty-fifty chance that the academic historian will lose what vital organs of social concern he has in the process of acquiring a doctorate, where the primary requirement of finding an untouched decade or person or topic almost assures that several years of intense labor will end in some monstrous irrelevancy. And after that, the considerations of rank, tenure, and salary, while not absolutely excluding either personal activism or socially pertinent scholarship, tend to discourage either.
We find, of course, oddities of academic behavior: Henry Steele Commager writing letters to the Times defending Communists; Martin Duberman putting the nation’s shame on stage; Staughton Lynd flying to Hanoi. And to the rule of scholarly caution, the exceptions have been glorious:
Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was muckraking history, not because it splattered mud on past heroes, but because it made several generations of readers worry about the working of economic interest in the politics of their own time. The senior Arthur Schlesinger, in an essay in New Viewpoints in American History, so flattened pretensions of “states’ rights” that no reader could hear that phrase again without smiling. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction was as close as a scholar could get to a demonstration, in the deepest sense of that term, puncturing a long and destructive innocence. Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons and Henry David’s History of the Haymarket Affair were unabashed in their sympathies. Walter Millis’ 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 opposed to capitalism must find such opposition to capitalism in the American past in order to make the study of history 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 Strange Career of Jim Crow he chose instances of equal treatment for Southern Negroes in public facilities, voting, transportation, in the 1880’s. These were certainly not “representative.” But he chose to emphasize them because he was writing in a time (1954) when much of the American nation, North and South, seemed to believe that segregation was so long and deeply entrenched in the South that it could not be changed. Woodward’s intent was to indicate that things have not always been the same in the South.**
Similarly, the “Freedom Primer,” used in the deep South by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, carefully selects from the mass of facts about the Negro in America those stories of heroism and rebellion which would give a Mississippi black child a sense of pride and worth, precisely because those are the feelings which everything around him tries to crush. (Yet one should not hesitate to point out, to a black child who developed the notion that blacks could do no wrong, that history also showed some unheroic Negroes.)
The examples I have given are not “neutral” or “representative,” but they are true to the ideal of man’s oneness and to the reality of his separateness. Truth only in relation to what is or was is one-dimensional. Historical writing is most true when it is appropriate simultaneously to what was in the past, to the condition of the present, and to what should be done in the future. Let me give a few examples.
How can a historian portray the twenties? It was a time of glittering “prosperity,” with several million unemployed. There were floods of new consumer goods in the stores, with poverty on the farm. There was a new class of millionaires, while people in city slums struggled to pay the rent and gas bills. The two hundred largest corporations were doubling their assets, but Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, representing a working-class district in East Harlem, wrote in 1928: 7
“It is true that Mr. Mellon, Mr. Ford, Mr. Rosenwald, Mr. Schwab, Mr. Morgan and a great many others not only manage to keep their enormous fortunes intact, but increase their fortunes every year.… But can any one of them improve on the financial genius of Mrs. Maria Esposito or Mrs. Rebecca Epstein or Mrs. Maggie Flynn who is keeping house in a New York tenement raising five or six children on a weekly envelope of thirty dollars … ?”
A “comprehensive” picture of the twenties, the kind most often found in American history textbooks, emphasizes the prosperity, along with amusing instances of governmental corruption, a summary of foreign policy, a dash of literature, and a bit on the K.K.K. and the Scopes Trial. This would seem to be “representative”; it leaves the reader with an unfocused mishmash, fogged over by a general aura of well-being. But wouldn’t a history of the twenties be most true to both past facts and future values if it stressed the plight of many millions of poor behind the facade of prosperity? Might not such an emphasis on the twenties, if widespread, have hastened the nation’s discovery (not made until the 1960’s) of poverty amidst plenty?
There is still another flaw in the exhortation to the historian to give a “representative” account of his subject: he is not writing in an empty field; thousands have preceded him and have weighted the story in certain directions. When the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker wrote American Negro Slave Revolts, he was giving heavy emphasis to a phenomenon in which only a small minority of slaves had participated. But he was writing in an atmosphere dominated by the writings on slavery of men like Ulrich Phillips, when textbooks spoke of the happy slave. Both southern and northern publics needed a sharp reminder of the inhumanity of the slave system. And perhaps the knowledge that such reminders are still necessary induced Kenneth Stampp to write The Peculiar institution.
The earth has for so long been so sharply tilted on behalf of the rich, the white-skinned, the male, the powerful, that it will take enormous effort to set it right. A biography of Eugene Debs (Ray Ginger’s The Bending Cross) is a deliberate focusing on the heroic qualities of a man who devoted his life to the idea that “while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” But how many biographies of the radical Debs are there, compared to biographies of John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt? The selection of the topic for study is the first step in the weighting of the social scales for one value or another.
Let me give one more illustration of my point that there is no such thing as any one true “representative” account of a complex phenomenon, and that the situation toward which the assessment is directed should determine the emphasis (without ignoring the counter-evidence, it is important to add). In the debate between Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History) and Pieter Geyl (Encounters in History), Geyl objects to Toynbee’s emphasis on the failures of Western civilization and suggests that the West’s successes should be more heavily stressed. Behind the debate, one can see the Cold War, with Geyl reacting sharply and sensitively to any account of the world which implies more condemnation of the Western countries than of the Communist nations. But what is crucial in assessing the Geyl-Toynbee debate is not one’s view of the past. All of us, Toynbee as well as Geyl, could readily agree on a list of the sins committed by the Communist nations and probably also agree on a list of the sins of the West. Where would that leave us, in view of the difficulty of quantifying this situation and declaring a “winner” as if in a baseball game? The crucial element is the present and the question of what we, the receivers of any assessment, will do in the present. And since Toynbee is addressing himself to the readers of the West primarily, he is implying that for Westerners to take a more critical view of their own culture will lead to more beneficial results (for those values esteemed by critics of both East and West) than to engage in self-congratulation. Since the argument about the past is insoluble, one does better directing his judgment toward the present and future.*
The usual distinction between “narrative” and “interpretive” history is not really pertinent to the criterion I have suggested for writing history in the public sector. It has often been assumed that narrative history, the simple description of an event or period, is “low level” history, while the interpretation of events, periods, individuals is “high level” and thus closer to the heart of a socially concerned historian. But the narration of the Haymarket Affair, or the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, to someone with a rosy picture of the American court system, has far more powerful effect on the present than an interpretation of the reasons for the War of 1812. A factual recounting of the addresses of Wendell Phillips constitutes (in a time when young people have begun to be captivated by the idea of joining social movements) a far more positive action on behalf of social reform than a sophisticated “interpretation” of the abolitionists which concludes that they were motivated by psychological feelings of insecurity. So much of the newer work on “concepts” in history gives up both the forest and the trees for the stratosphere.
If the historian is to approach the data of the past with a deliberate intent to further certain fundamental values in the present, then he can adopt several approaches. He may search at random in documents and publications to find material relevant to those values (this would rule out material of purely antiquarian or trivial interest). He can pursue the traditional lines of research (certain periods, people, topics: the Progressive Period, Lincoln, the Bank War, the Labor Movement) with an avowed “presentist” objective. Or, as the least wasteful method, he can use a problem-centered approach to the American past. This approach, used only occasionally in American historiography, deserves some discussion.
The starting point, it should be emphasized, is a present problem. Many so-called “problem approaches” in American history have been based on problems of the past. Some of these may be extended by analogy to a present problem (like Beard’s concern with economic motive behind political events of the eighteenth century), but many of them are quite dead (the tariff debates of the 1820’s; the character of the Southern Whigs; Turner’s frontier thesis, which has occupied an incredible amount of attention). Not that bits of relevant wisdom cannot be extracted from these old problems, but the reward is small for the attention paid.*
Teachers and writers of history almost always speak warmly (and vaguely) of how “studying history will help you understand our own time.” This usually means the teacher will make the point quickly in his opening lecture, or the textbook will dispose of this in an opening sentence, after which the student is treated to an encyclopedic, chronological recapitulation of the past. In effect, he is told: “The past is useful to the present. Now you figure out how.”
Barrington Moore, discussing the reluctance of the historian to draw upon his knowledge for suggestive explanations of the present, says: “Most frequently of all he will retreat from such pressures into literary snobbishness and pseudo cultivation. This takes the form of airy generalizations about the way history provides ‘wisdom’ or ‘real understanding.’ … Anyone who wants to know how this wisdom can be effectively used, amplified and corrected, will find that his questions usually elicit no more than irritation.” 8
To start historical enquiry with a present concern requires ignoring the customary chronological fracture of the American past: the Colonial Period; the Revolutionary Period; the Jacksonian Period; and so on, down to the New Deal, the War, and the Atomic Age.* Instead, a problem must be followed where it leads, back and forth across the centuries if necessary.
David Potter has pointed to the unconfessed theoretical assumptions of historians who claim they are not theorizing.9 I would carry his point further: all historians, by their writing, have some effect on the present social situation, whether they choose to be presentists or not. Therefore the real choice is not between shaping the world or not, but between doing it deliberately or unconsciously.*
Psychology has contributed several vital ideas to our understanding of the role of the historian. In the first place, the psychologist is not recording the events of the patient’s life simply to add to his files, or because they are “interesting,” or because they will enable the building of complex theories. He is a therapist, devoted to the aim of curing people’s problems, so that all the data he discovers are evaluated in accord with the single objective of therapy. This is the kind of commitment historians, as a group, have not yet made to society.
Second, there is Harry Stack Sullivan’s notion of the psychologist as “participant.” Whether the psychologist likes it or not, he is more than a listener. He has an effect on his patient. Similarly, the historian is a participant in history by his writing. Even when he claims neutrality he has an effect—if only, with his voluminous production of irrelevant data, to clog the social passages. So it is now a matter of consciously recognizing his participation, and deciding in which direction his energies will be expended.
An especially potent way of leading the historian toward a presentist, value-directed history is the binding power of social action itself. When a group of American historians in the Spring of 1965 joined the Negroes marching from Selma to Montgomery they were performing an unusual act. Social scientists sometimes speak and write on public policy; rarely do they bodily join in action to make contact with those whose motivation comes not from thought and empathy but from the direct pain of deprivation. Such contact, such engagement in action, generates an emotional attachment to the agents of social change which even long hours in the stacks can hardly injure.
Surely there is some relationship between the relative well-being of professors, their isolation in middle-class communities, their predictable patterns of sociality, and the tendency to remain distant, both personally and in scholarship, from the political battles of the day. The scholar does vaguely aim to serve some social purpose, but there is an undiscussed conflict between problem-solving and safety for a man earning fifteen thousand dollars a year. There is no deliberate avoidance of social issues, but some quiet gyroscopic mechanism of survival operates to steer the scholar toward research within the academic consensus.
When Arthur Mann writes that: “Neither dress, style, nor accent unifies the large and heterogeneous membership of the American Historical Association,” he adds immediately: “Yet most writers of American history belong to the liberal intelligentsia that voted for John F. Kennedy and, before him, for Adlai Stevenson, Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred E. Smith, Wood-row Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan.” 10 In other words, historians have almost all fitted neatly into that American consensus which Richard Hofstadter called “The American Political Tradition.” So when it is said (again, by Mann) that Richard Hofstadter is a “spectator” while Arthur Schlesinger (who wrote loving books about Jackson, FDR, Kennedy) “writes history as he votes” it is because this country only hands ballots to Republicans and Democrats, to conservatives and liberals, while yearning radicals like Richard Hofstadter are given no one to vote for in this political system. Hofstadter might well write a sequel, The American Historical Tradition describing among historians the same kind of liberal consensus he found in American politics—a consensus which veers toward mild liberalism in politics, and which therefore ensures that where the historian does go beyond irrelevancy to engagement, it is a limited engagement, for objectives limited by the liberal Democratic frame. Mann shows his own entrapment inside this frame by his comment that the progressives, lauded by almost all American historians, “transformed the social Darwinian jungle of some eighty years ago into the humane capitalistic society it is today.” Five years after this statement was published the urban ghettos in America were exploding in rebellion against this “humane capitalistic society.”
Engagement in social action is not indispensable for a scholar to direct his scholarship toward humane concerns; it is part of the wonder of people that they can transcend their immediate circumstances by leaps of emotion and imagination. But contact with the underground of society, in addition to spurring the historian to act out his value-system, might also open him to new data: the experiences, thoughts, feelings of the invisible folk all around us. This is the kind of data so often missed in official histories, manuscript collections of famous personalities, diaries of the literate, newspaper accounts, government documents.*
I don’t want to exaggerate the potency of the scholar as activist. But it may be that his role is especially important in a liberal society, where the force available for social change is small, and the paralysis of the middle class is an important factor in delaying change. Fact can only buttress passion, not create it, but where passion is strained through the Madisonian constitutional sieve, it badly needs support.
The black revolution has taught us that indignation stays alive in the secret crannies of even the most complacent society. Niebuhr was right in chiding Dewey that intellectual persuasion was not enough of a force to create a just America. He spoke (in Moral Man and Immoral Society) of his hope that reason would not destroy that “sublime madness” of social passion before its work was done. Perhaps reason may even help focus this passion.
Except for a scattered, eloquent, conscience-torn few, historians in America have enjoyed a long period of luxury, corresponding to that of a nation spared war, famine, and (beyond recent memory) imperial rule. But now, those peoples who were not so spared are rising, stirring, on all sides—and even, of late, in our midst. The rioting Negro poor, the student-teacher critics on Vietnam, the silent walls around state prisons and city jails—all are reminders in this, the most luxurious of nations, that here, as well as abroad, is an exclusiveness based on race, or class, or nationality, or ideology, or monopolies of power.
In this way, we are forced apart from one another, from other people in the world, and from our freedom. To study this exclusiveness critically, and with unashamed feeling, is to act in some small way against it. And to act against it helps us to study it, with more than sharpness of eye and brain, with all that we are as total human beings.
