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Introduction to the Second Edition

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, we find this brief exchange:

“‘The horror of that moment,’ the King went on, ‘I shall never, never forget!’

“‘You will though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don’t make a memorandum of it.’”¹

Yes, we will forget if we don’t make memoranda. But there is disagreement on exactly which moments in history we should make memoranda of, since we can’t recapture all of the past, and profound conflict on how we should treat those moments we decide to remember.

Two decades have passed since The Politics of History was written, but its concerns remain alive: What are the uses of history? Can historians, should they, be “objective,” “disinterested”? What is the point of teaching or writing history?

In this book I argue against “history as private enterprise” and for the idea that it is the social responsibility of the historian to do work that will be useful in solving the critical human problems of our time. That kind of statement arouses the ire of some professional historians. (Christopher Lasch, for instance, worried about the “drastic simplification of issues… strident partisanship.”² So it might be useful for me to illustrate what I mean, though from a vantage point of twenty years after the publication of this book, and to illuminate some historical issues.

The eighties were a Republican party decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose affinity for the rich went even beyond the normal friendliness of our government toward corporate wealth. His administration seemed to feel no shame in proposing budgets that spent two to three hundred billion dollars for what was already the most swollen military machine in human history, while cutting allocations for health care, children’s lunches, food stamps for the poor, housing for the homeless, and weekly payments to the unemployed.

One of Reagan’s early budgets (for fiscal year 1983) was analyzed by New York Times reporter Robert Pear: “The President’s budget … proposed that military spending alone should rise by $33.6 billion. Under Mr. Reagan’s budget, the absolute level of Federal spending would be lower in 1983 than in 1982 for three major programs that help poor people: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and food and nutrition assistance, including food stamps. The same is true for social services, job training, low-income energy assistance and compensatory education.”³

The human consequences were devastating. In 1982 over three million children had been ruled ineligible for school lunch programs by new requirements. By the spring of 1983 two million children joined the ten million already classified as “poor.” By mid-1984 the Boston Globe was reporting: “Infant mortality, which had been declining steadily in Boston and other cities in the 1970s, shot up suddenly after the Reagan Administration reduced grants for health care for mothers and children.”⁴ Not long after the Reagan budget cuts it was disclosed that in parts of Detroit one-third of the children were dying before their first birthday.

The rich, however, were doing better. One of Reagan’s first acts in office was to decontrol oil prices; the oil industry benefited by two billion dollars. Shortly after that, twenty-three oil industry executives and investors contributed $270,000 to redecorate the White House living quarters. This was explained by Jack Hodges of Oklahoma City, owner of Core Oil and Gas Company: “The top man of this country ought to live in one of the top places. Mr. Reagan has helped the energy business.”⁵

Taxes went down for the rich, up for the poor. The Congressional Budget Office reported in late 1987 that for that year the poorest tenth of American families would pay 20 percent more of their earnings in taxes than they did in 1977, and the richest tenth would pay 20 percent less.⁶ A report for the House Ways and Means Committee showed that from 1979 to 1987 the average family income for the poorest fifth of the population declined by 6 percent, and the richest fifth family income rose 11 percent.⁷ The figures were worse for black and Hispanic people. The Reagan administration justified its economic policies by the orthodox philosophy of conservatism: government should do less for the people, the poor should do more for themselves; if the rich are given tax benefits they will have an incentive to produce more and the poor will benefit.

This is where history can be useful. For over a hundred years the national government followed conservative policies, beginning in the 1790s, when Alexander Hamilton’s economic program went into effect in the first Washington administration, and lasting until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to interfere in the economy on behalf of the poor by instituting job programs, subsidized housing, social security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wages. During that long period the country was industrialized, fortunes were made by a small number of rich people, but the human cost was atrocious. Hunger, sickness, and poverty were the normal state of large numbers of people in the city and in the country. In the periodic depressions of those years of “free enterprise,” conditions were even worse.

The year 1877 is a case in point. It was the heyday of conservative philosophy (let people fend for themselves), and that summer in the hot cities, where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, their children got sick. The New York Times reported: “already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard.…Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city.”⁸

That depression was barely over when another one came in 1893. This was still the period of government indifference to the poor, glorifications of the capitalist system, the growth of huge fortunes for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons. That year, after several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, and uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, the economy collapsed. The worst hit, of course, were the poor: Of a labor force of fifteen million, three million were unemployed. Neither the federal government nor any state government voted relief to the hungry, but mass demonstrations all over the country forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on street or park crews.

The conservative philosophy of government noninterference had always been hypocritical. From the time of the suppression of the Pennsylvania farmers’ insurrection in 1794, it was clear that the government, disdaining to help the poor, would act decisively against the poor if they dared to rebel against their condition.

Thus, in 1877 when the railroad workers went on strike to protest a pay cut, the government called out the army against them and a hundred people were killed.⁹ When another railroad strike took place in 1894 (because two thousand railroad workers were dying every year in industrial accidents) the federal government moved in with court injunctions and troops to break the strike.

The Reagan administration’s praise of the “free enterprise” system (it had never been free, but controlled by private wealth with the collaboration of government) counted on a general historical amnesia. It was easy to forget how that system (never working well for the poor even in “prosperity”) collapsed in 1929 and brought hunger and homelessness to a large part of the American people in the 1930s.

When Reagan’s successor, George Bush, ran for office in 1988 he told an audience in Ohio: “In my view, there is no place in American public life for philosophies that divide Americans one from another on class lines and that excite conflict among them.”¹⁰ The premise of this statement was that the excitation of class conflict in this country came from “philosophies” and not from the reality of class division, the existence of very rich and very poor. Here too a historical corrective would have been useful. But it was not to be expected that Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, would supply it, given the history of the Democratic party for blurring the reality of class difference in America.

On the eve of Reagan’s accession to the presidency, a popular revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the military dictatorship of Anastasia Somoza, whose family had been kept in power by the support of the United States over a period of forty years. The attitude of the U.S. government to the new regime in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas) became a critical issue.

Almost immediately the Reagan administration began to take steps to overthrow the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The Central Intelligence Agency secretly organized and trained a small army, led by former members of Somoza’s National Guard, based in Honduras, for this purpose. This counterrevolutionary army—the “contras,” as they came to be known—was financed by congressional appropriations. In 1984, after it was becoming clear that the contras had virtually no support inside Nicaragua and were desperately trying to destabilize the Sandinistas by military raids from outside to terrorize the countryside, Congress cut off funds. The Reagan administration then set up a secret and illegal team, headed by Marine Colonel Oliver North but involving CIA head William Casey and several of Reagan’s closest advisers, to divert funds from other countries to the contras.

The Reagan-Bush administration defended these acts—though they involved serious violations of domestic law and international law (indeed, the World Court found the United States guilty of legal violations in the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors)—by several arguments. The administration primarily argued that Nicaragua (which had been getting Soviet aid since the 1979 revolution) was a Soviet base and a threat to the security of the United States. Another justification was that a “Marxist dictatorship” now existed in Nicaragua, but the United States wanted democracy there.

Surely this was an appropriate time for a bit of historical perspective to help judge the soundness of these arguments. A number of books began to appear that recounted some of the history of United States relations with Central America. (I would point now to only one of them by Cornell University historian Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions.)¹¹ To anyone concerned with throwing light on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua—indeed, toward all of the Caribbean since the arguments for intervention were the same for El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—it seemed evident that an important question should be answered: What was U.S. policy in these areas before there was a possibility of a Soviet threat, that is, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?

The historical evidence must then be startling to any citizen who easily accepted the U.S. government’s rationale for military intervention. It is clear that the United States was intervening in the Caribbean and Latin America long before the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1846 our government provoked a war with Mexico and took almost half of that country’s land, which now comprises California and our whole Southwest. In 1854 warships were sent to destroy the Nicaraguan town of Greytown on the Atlantic coast because a U.S. diplomat suffered a bloody nose.

Intervention intensified after 1898. That year we expelled Spain from Cuba, established U.S. control over that island with military bases and corporate plundering, and at the same time took Puerto Rico. A few years later we engineered the establishment of the new Republic of Panama so that we could set our own terms for the canal rights. And in the decade and a half before World War I, U.S. marines made many forays into Central America, as well as shelling a Mexican town and occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

All that adds up to a lot of military interventions before 1917. It doesn’t conclusively disprove the claim of a Soviet threat as rationale for the support of counterrevolution in Nicaragua—there are limits to the uses of history for solving current problems—but it does make us very skeptical about that claim, causes us to scrutinize the situation more closely than if we simply accepted our government’s statements at face value. It therefore makes us more competent, watchful citizens.

We can also make use of history to check on the other justification for military intervention in the Caribbean—that our aim is to promote democracy. In fact, the history of U.S. activity in Latin America in this century does not show any deep commitment to democracy. On the contrary, we see a pattern of U.S. support of military dictatorships—the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and more. Indeed, in two recent situations where democratic elections put into power governments not dictatorial but mildly socialist—Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973—the Central Intelligence Agency went to work to overthrow the elected presidents. In both places the result was the opposite of democracy—brutally murderous military regimes that killed tens of thousands of people.

Are such uses of history as I have here described examples of the “partisanship” deplored by Christopher Lasch? Are they departures from a desired “objectivity”? Certainly they show partisanship; I am partisan on behalf of certain values—a more egalitarian distribution of the national wealth, opposition to military intervention whose purpose seems to be the aggrandizement of governmental power and corporate profits at the expense of poorer peoples of the world. I don’t believe that these values interfere with an honest recounting of the past. As I suggest in this book, holding certain fundamental values does not require that historians find certain desirable answers in exploring the past, it just turns their attention to certain useful questions. It precludes rummaging in the past for any data that are vaguely “interesting”—it focuses our research on matters that have critical value for human affairs.

Scientists do not simply collect data at random. Charles Darwin put it this way in a letter he wrote in 1861: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”¹²

The myth of “objectivity” among historians has been more exhaustively investigated since I discussed the issue in this book, especially in the volume by Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Novick punctures again and again the pretenses of historians to “objectivity,” the claim that they have no purpose beyond recapturing the past “as it really was.” (That famous phrase of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, “wie es eigentlich gewesen” has been misinterpreted, Novick says, and points out that von Ranke was far from “objective,” as in his statement: “God dwells, lives, and can be known in all of history.”)

For instance, the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in “The Faith of a Historian,” published around 1940, said he did not aim to instruct the present but “to simply explain the event exactly as it happened.” Yet, in the same essay, he criticizes the post-World War I historians for creating disillusionment with war, saying they “rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity around 1940 spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight.… Historians… are the ones who should have pointed out that war does accomplish something, that war is better than servitude.”¹³

Peter Novick, after years of intensive exploration of the issue, concludes: “it seems to me to say of a work of history that it is or isn’t objective is to make an empty observation; to say something neither interesting nor useful.”¹⁴ I trust that my comments on the writing of history and my historical essays themselves in the pages to follow, while remaining indifferent to the question of “objectivity,” will be both interesting and useful.