Historians in an Age of Acquiescence

...The Saturday Review, Feb...

...The • Perhaps I should say that in this article I am concerned not primarily with those serious historians who have been revising certain "progressive" ideas about American history: these revisions, whether one agrees with them or not, merit separate consideration...

...The techniques of the assembly line have been found, to be adaptable to text production...

...From a commercial point of view the text expresses the most successful techniques of packaging reading matter...

...Mention of the interests of American investors in our Mexican policy in Hick's 1941 edition disappears in the postwar revisions...

...ly, but what were considered sound criticisms in earlier decades are being toned down or deleted...

...Secretary Knox's proposal for the commercial neutralization of Manchuria which was called a blunder from 1936 through 1950 became in 1955 only "an unsuccessful demarche...

...1941 criticized Woodrow Wilson's Mexican policy and refusal to recognize President Huerta as "an act of intervention in the internal affairs of Mexico," in 1955 found that Wilson's policy "probably saved the Mexicans from another reactionary regime...

...By contrast the nineteen-twenties saw a great many analysis of the blunders of the military leaders...

...In his address as president of the American Historical Association in 1950 Morison complained that war-hating historians like Charles Beard had left the younger generation "spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight...

...Perhaps the historian should also be security-cleared before he goes about his business of affirmation, of cultured chauvinism, and his huckstering of optimism and the military virtues...

...It now would be an improvident and rare teacher who failed to push his own text...

...By contrast the professional historians who were once sympathetic to that point of view have come to accept both the first and second World Wars as necessary if not inevitable...

...Any suggestion that there is a relationship between economics and foreign policy seems to have become passe along with the concept of economic imperialism...

...Similarly John Hicks who in • John F. Gerstung, "Louis M. Hacker's Reappraisal of Recent American History," History, XII (Spring 1950) , 140-166...

...Revised in 1939 it retained its pungent criticisms, directed at that time at the New Deal * "Faith of a Historian," American Historical Review, LVI (Jan...

...The present and potential consumers for attractively packaged synopses of the American story mount up into the millions, and historians are rushing to meet the demand...

...Deficiencies in originality and quality are countered by an emphasis on the more saleable characteristics...

...The attitude of acquiescence is most marked in the treatment of the military elite and the blunders of the professional soldier...

...The historian is no freer from his obligation than the physicist...

...The traditional goal of detachment, "dispassionate behaviorism" and the "liberal neutral attitude" were all castigated as irresponsible...

...America went to war in 1917, he explained, because she was attacked and the decision for war was really made in Germany rather than in the United States...

...Bailey's first edition (1940) said of C. C. Tansill's America Goes to War, a book attacking American entry in 1917, that it was "the most important work on the subject...

...But the greatest future is promised by the bullish market for textbooks...

...NATO, SEATO and the rearmament of Germary are treated without qualification as major American contributions to peace and security...

...Few texts have required as fundamental reworking as Hacker's, but the same lines have been followed by others...

...If this has an Orwellian 1984 ring to it, it may be because it is already 1956...

...One of the most striking examples of radical revisionism is furnished by the rewrites of another Columbia historian, Louis Hacker...

...As one review of Hacker's writings concluded, he had "jettisoned most of his Marxist assumptions—and perhaps substituted a few from Hayek...

...The idea that the historian is responsible for preparing young minds for war and must himself plunge into nationalist polemics is relatively new to American historiography...

...variety of capitalism...

...Bemis wrote in his 1936 edition that the first World War accomplished only the overthrow of the German empire for a generation and concluded that the price of this achievement was "excessive...

...The historian works at a "project," usually financed by a foundation grant after its merit and respectability have been approved by boards of recognized scholars...

...In 1932 Hacker and another colleague produced a text which became popular for its emphasis on economic history and its iconoclastic treatment of American capitalism...

...j "Should American History Be Rewritten...

...Three major wars within a half century have razed the ivory tower...

...M rapid rises in high school and college enrollments are expected to continue for at least a decade...

...A college student who learns about his country's foreign policy from his history text will find little or nothing to suggest that recent American diplomacy has been anything but a smashing success...

...The economic historian can profitably turn to the compilation of the official chronicles of major businesses and industries...

...In its third edition in 1955 its sober format was discarded for a two column page in which the illustrations rival the reading matter in allotment of space...

...Often there is a publisher in the background to give encouragement after a careful survey of the marketability of the future product...

...In the 1955 revision Tansill's volume ceased to be "penetrating" and was instead "isolationist...

...Any readable rehash of the military history of that conflict is assured of profitable sales...

...A survey in 1950 found twice as manycolleges and universities requiring a course in the history of the United States as before World War II...

...Communist success, if mentioned at all, is analyzed in terms of subversion and without regard for its utopian appeal to underdeveloped areas...

...Even the im plications of thermonuclear warfare are frequently met with a bluff optimism...

...But Morison's approach was given even blunter approval by his predecessor in the presidential chair, Conyers Read of the University of Pennsylvania...

...Treatment of American diplomacy in the Roosevelt years and after now frequently sounds as if it were a rework of the State Department Bulletin with rhetorical flourishes added from the speeches of the Secretaries of State...

...These new sources of wealth and the general atmosphere of prosperity have turned many historians away from the limitations of capitalist society in their reviews of the past...

...An able scholar who has made major contributions to American historical writing, Nevins has become in the last decade one of the most prolific writers in disseminating the new orthodoxy...

...Alas poor Clio...

...This paucity of scholarship is in part due to the coming of the Korean War which not only diverted energies but also made criticism of military leadership "partisan" if not unpatriotic...

...Hanson Baldwin's Great Mistakes of the War is the work of an able journalist on World War II rather than of a professional historian and is too brief to treat of such important setbacks as the Battle of the Bulge...

...In an address given in 1953 entitled, "New Lamps for Old History," he predicted that "the architects of our material wealth...

...The specialist in the middle period of American history is presented with a lucrative field by the Civil War cult...

...Bemis's Diplomatic History of the United States, since 1936 a standard text, was noted for its assault on the four great blunders of American diplomacy beginning with the annexation of the Philippines...

...But in arguing his own position Nevins has pleaded "the need for every generation for a reinterpretation to suit its own preconceptions, ideas and outlook...

...When the London Times Literary Supplement reviewed American historical writing in 1954, it complained that the American historian was "called on, too often and too loudly, to perform specific patriotic tasks...

...The typical historian's working place is likely to be a glass-walled carrell in a busy library with a telephone only a few steps down the corridor...

...One recent text of some merit carries the names of twenty authors from seventeen colleges and universities...

...In his Gateway to History (1938) , Nevins went so far as to claim that Beard's doctrines were the same as those used in the distorted historical writing of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy...

...Doors to the life of abundance have opened for the historian with nimble typewriter fingers and a ready flow of words...

...There are now approximately fifty American history college texts on the market, and since many of them are by historians who have done little or no research outside their narrow area of specialization, the majority are little more than rewrites of the older texts with new chapters added to bring the story up to date...

...will yet stand forth in their true stature as builders of strength which civilization found indispensable...

...Men have been turned to Communism, Morison claimed, by such deviations from uncritical acceptance of capitalistic folklore...

...In subtle ways his views about even the most remote ages are shaped by the impact of modern times...

...In the 1950 edition Bemis began to soften his judgements: "at least it can be argued the Open Door may have been a second blunder of American diplomacy in the Far East...

...One individualistic text, that of Leland Baldwin of the University of Pittsburgh, actually devotes some pages to an exploration of Durkheim's concept of anomie as it applies to the American scene, but such a concern is unique...

...This muse was never meant for profit or propaganda...

...NOT ONLY IS RECENT American foreign policy treated benign...

...With the assistance of teams of graduate students Nevins has turned out a number of company histories including one on Ford Motor and the Rockefeller empire...

...Textbooks written in the climate of the depression or in the days of New Deal attacks on "economic royalists" require drastic revision if they are to sell today...

...Not only has he put in practice the heroic approach to the builders of our industrial might, but Nevins has called upon other historians to follow...

...My topic is a large-scale trend in recent popular and text-book histories, which in turn reflects something of the general temper of post-World War II American life...

...A few texts comment on the dangers of McCarthyism, but the continuing threat of federal and industrial security programs remains unmentioned...

...Although the experience of serving in World War II might have been expected to have led historians to scepticism about the infallibility of the military mind, no flood of historical criticism followed the war...

...an increasing number of volumes are the work of two or more authors...

...Bemis' position has been widely accepted...

...High school and even some college texts now aim at the stylistic banalities of the Reader's Digest along with the photographic appeal of Life...

...PROSPERITY AND THE SMUGNESS of self-righteous nationalism have led the American history text writer to skip over the disturbing aspects of the national scene...

...When Thomas Bailey of Stanford wrote in 1940 his Diplomatic History of the American People —until recently Bemis' major competitor—he pointed to the pressure on Congress from "interested financial and industrial groups" to vote for war...

...detailed and penetrating...

...1951) , 261-275...

...The mood of affirmation rather than criticism is also strongly reflected in the treatment of American foreign policy...

...When a revision of the third section of this text appeared in 1955 as United States as a World Power, the world "blunders" disappeared completely...

...In 1946 the same book became "the most critical work," but it was still "penetrating...

...A distinguished scholar in the field of Tudor England, Read's address in 1949 was entitled "The Social Responsibilities of the Historian...

...Here is a wide field for the re-writing of American history, and the re-education of the American people...

...One of the deans of American diplomatic history, Yale's Samuel F. Bemis, explained at a recent historical meeting that when American foreign policy is under sustained attack from abroad the American scholar should not contribute to the work of the nation's enemies...

...Total war," said Professor Read, "whether it be hot or cold, enlists every one and calls upon everyone to assume his part...

...In 1938 Soviet historiography was apparently not in the same category...

...t The preconceptions and outlook of the Truman-Eisenhower years obviously call for a description of American business which meets the standards set by the glowing elegies of Fortune magazine, and the Nevins school of business historians is meeting this need...

...historical works produced by long years of work in undusted and secluded rooms are a rarity...

...6, 1954...

...The creation of a mass-circulation culture with its implications for American education and intellectual development is not a phenomenon to be pondered in the concluding chapters on American society...

...One historian, Harvard's Samuel E. Morison, in reviewing the critical treatment once given the rich, charged these writings with "robbing the people of their heroes" and "insulting their folk-memory of great figures whom they admired...

...American historical writing is now in the main stream of American life...

...While it offers school boards, college trustees and teachers what must be an approvable version of the national past, it also represents the latest judgements of scholarship, tailored down to a student level...

...Samuel Morison, who has combined the scholar's robes with the uniform of an admiral as the official naval historian of World War II, believes that American historians have in the past sinned in their lack of the warrior's spirit...

...When the second revision appeared in 1949 a new era had begun...

...This speeds the completion of manuscript, and since the authors usually come from different colleges and universities the guaranteed number of adoptions is increased...

...The common assumptions of the time are all-pervasive...

...The ideal at least has always been to struggle for detachment and objectivity...

...the rugged individualists of the 19th century were given full measure of respect...

...George Kennan, an outsider, entered diplomatic history with his American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 in which he suggests that American entry into World War I was a mistake...

...In a 1946 revision Bailey dropped these lines and added a paragraph which denied any economic explanations...

...The role of war-bred prosperity in contributing to American departure from neutrality in 1917, a factor which always received a few lines in the texts written after the Nye Committee investigations, now bears the odium of a Marxist interpretation...

...it embodies the prosperity, the conventionality and the nationalist emphasis of the Truman-Eisenhower years...

...As the Times Literary Supplement discerned, Americans assume that the study of their history "must breed hope and faith, if not charity...

...for the scholar to filter all of them out of his work is impossible...

...ONE OF THE MOST VIGOROUS leaders of the campaign for an amiable treatment of the capitalist's excesses is Allen Nevins of Columbia...

...Older texts have had to be modernized to conform to these standards...

...Time's recent discovery that among American intellectuals "The Man of Protest has to some extent given way to the Man of Affirmation," applies to many historians...

...Instead the Franklin Roosevelt administration was charged with carrying intervention too far and hampering the vitality of the economy...

...More effective has been the aura of untouchability which surrounds General Marshall, particularly after McCarthy's attacks, and extends to the military career of President Eisenhower...

...The more sordid details of American economic growth are deleted, and the nineteenth century empire builders, once crudely labeled as "robber barons," have become the paragons associated with the tales of Horatio Alger...

...Biographies of Civil War generals, resurrected eye-witness accounts, and any grubbings associated with the magic name of Lincoln offer opportunities for royalties...

...History as written is in part a reflection of the present.* Today's American historian probably reflects his age more completely than in any previous generation...

...The comparison of professions is a suggestive one in view of the problems of America's leading physicists...

...The modern historian generally recognizes that his writings are to some degree tied to the contemporary climate of opinion, zeitgebunden as the Germans say...

...the teaching of American history has been given new emphasis as a neutralizer of alien intellectual influences...

...Gone was the attack on "Capitalism in Crisis" of the 1932 edition and the strictures against New Deal patchwork of the 1939 edition...

...THE AMERICAN HISTORY TEXT is a significant sample of the contemporary temper...

...The American Nation, written by John D. Hicks of the University of California, has been a best seller nationally since its first appearance as a college text in 1937...

...After World War II the wording of the same sentence was altered slightly to change the meaning completely so that the price of the first World War "while high, was hardly excessive...

...an attractive cover, a profusion of pictures, cartoons and charts, and a chatty style of writing...

...Some historians, to be sure, did go to extremes in muckraking the capitalist and his system in the years when the economy appeared to be crumbling, but now the scholar is asked to go to the opposite extreme...

...Nevins has been a bitter critic of Charles Beard and Beardian relativism...

...More recently Nevins has claimed that Beard found in the past only what he thought would be socially desirable for the present...