Facts Are Not Enough
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing FACTS ARE NOT ENOUGH BY BARRY GEWEN Ask the average person to describe what historians do, and you are likely to be told they collect facts about the past. Historians know...
...Most unreliable of all are those occasions when the speakers attempt to move beyond their immediate experience...
...the first was his 1970 book, Hard Times: A n Oral History of the Great Depression...
...There was no witch-hunting...
...We saw it on film...
...The problem is that everything is presented uncritically, on its own terms...
...We cease to ask Terkel, "what is that to us...
...In a commentary, the writer Garson Kanin, who helped film the D-Day invasion for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), explains the limitations of eyewitness reports on war: "The curious thing we discovered was that men involved in the actual battle itself knew less about it than the people at headquarters who were seeing the film shots...
...I'd even hear reports of guys found secretively having sex with each other, and nobody turned them in...
...Neither is in any true sense history, but at least Hard Times had something of a point...
...Indeed, Terkel is at his best in presenting not the essence of the period but its odd particulars—the off-beat, the unique, the unseemly...
...it was opinions that Terkel was after...
...The son of a black-African father and German mother, he grew up in Hamburg during the '20s, eager to be an enthusiastic Nazi and a member of the Hitler Youth...
...He hints at a similar purpose in his Introduction to "The Good War": "It appears that the disremembrance of World War Two is as disturbingly profound as the f orgettery of the Great Depression...
...The real work of the historian, the selection and interpretation of facts, must be devoted to answering the question, "what is that to us...
...Smitherman reports that he and his crewmates drank the water from the area, swam and washed in it...
...Historians know better...
...Terkel's witnesses are relating events that occurred 40 or more years ago, and there is no way of knowing when they are exaggerating, embellishing, dramatizing, or simply lying...
...Both are hodgepodges, shapeless blobs, and "The Good War" is more of a blob than its predecessor...
...Both statements might be accurate, or neither...
...he even rooted for Max Schmeling to knock out Joe Louis...
...Terkel might have profited from looking at Carr's remarks on the deceptiveness of original sources: "No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought— what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought...
...And the flavor of the era is captured in elusive details, forgotten events like the zoot-suit riots of 1943, sometimes simply by a name: I suspect I will not be the only one who turns first to the section entitled "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" to read Maxene Andrews' description of how the War looked from the perspective of the Andrews Sisters...
...The book is relatively free of the kind of chest-pounding normally associated with fish or war stories, though one man says he escaped from seven different German prison camps...
...According to one man, the U.S...
...Even the title, with those ambiguous, distancing quotation marks, leaves a reader up in the air...
...In "The Good War," however, the truth is often crucial...
...I suspect he also feels that such a picture will be more accurate than the narratives of conventional historians because it is unmediated, free of interposed interpretations...
...Because of Spain, we knew ten times more than any of the other guys...
...Yet the lesson we are to take away from this new work is not at all clear—that war is bad...
...The stories of blacks facing repeated and humiliating discrimination, of Jews losing teeth in fights with anti-Semitic GIs, and of Leftists officially classified as "premature antifascists" will rattle readers whose basic notions of the good War come from John Wayne and John Garfield movies...
...A reader won't know from either account, or from anything else in the book—although if he looks carefully enough through these pages, he will learn why he won't...
...Despite more than 100 reminiscences from a wide range of speakers, men and women, Americans and foreigners, the famous and the anonymous, Presidential advisers and foot soldiers, there is nothing here to sink one's teeth into...
...We ignore the lack of connecting tissue that would give the book pace and direction...
...Such stories are the raisins in this porridge, and picking one's way through "The Good War" is probably the best approach to reading it...
...Were you ever physically attacked...
...When a veteran claims he remembers "every hour, every minute," Terkel apparently expects us to take this at face value...
...About a month later, he discovered burns on his feet and legs, and from then on experienced increasing trouble...
...Reading this book is like chewing water...
...Carr quoted Voltaire: "If you have nothing to tell us except that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to us...
...John Smitherman was a sailor stationed near two atomic bomb tests in 1946...
...that some wars are not so bad...
...He could not understand why he was always being turned down...
...Nevertheless, the Veterans Administration turned down his disability claim six times, saying that the radiation exposure was insufficient to have caused the illnesses...
...In one operation, an entire regiment was saved by the air cover, which suffered heavy casualties...
...An unsophisticated and ingenuously patriotic man, Smitherman was convinced that his problems were related to the bomb blasts...
...The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two (Pantheon, 589 pp., $19.95) is Terkel's second attempt to recreate our recent past through memories...
...All my friends had these black shorts and brown shirts and a swastika and a little dagger which said Blood and Honor...
...As the crippled Smitherman tells his tale, we are initially outraged at what appears to be either bureaucratic callousness or a government cover-up...
...Oh yeah, lots of times...
...In one of the best descriptions of their craft, the small, tightly argued volume What Is History?, the late E. H. Carr explained why the common-sense notion is wrong...
...There was a war on...
...pieceof cover in the whole battle.' He didn't see it in the spot he was...
...Reflecting on this bizarre comedy of errors, Massaquoi says the one thing that saved him from Auschwitz was the fact that the only racial inferiors the government was rounding up in Hamburg were Jews...
...By juxtaposing the painful recollections of those who lived through the slump with complacent comments from the post-'30s generation ("I never had a Depression, so it don't bother me really"), Terkel revealed the distressing lack of continuity in American life, raising the fear that we might have to suffer another economic calamity in this century because we had failed to learn from the first one...
...In the end, when Terkel tells us Smitherman died in 1983, all we can feel is frustration...
...But for sheer eccentricity, nothing can top the experience of Hans Massaquoi, an editor of Ebony Magazine...
...A gay activist discusses what it was like to be a homosexual in the Marine Corps...
...Then reason pulls us back because we realize we are not getting the total picture here, neither the VA's side nor data on the fate of the other crewmen...
...Anyone who does history has to select which facts to present, and that inevitably presupposes an aim other than simple accuracy, namely interpretation...
...To be sure , some of the interviews transcend questions of strict accuracy...
...A guy we interviewed was saying, 'Wedidn'thaveone...
...He obviously believes facts do speak for themselves, that if enough people are given the opportunity to talk openly about some Major Event, the bits and pieces of their personal experiences will add up to a coherent picture...
...The accounts of the Bataan death march and of hospital burn-wards are as gripping as we would expect them to be...
...I wanted it just like everybody else...
...In Terkel's A merican Dreams: Lost and Found and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the blur between what individuals thought was happening and what really was going on did not interfere...
...Facts by themselves tell us very little worth knowing, for everything that has ever happened is a "fact"— from the date Columbus discovered America to the time I caught the subway yesterday morning...
...A conscientious objector recalls his life in government work camps...
...Massaquoi could always fill out official forms honestly because they asked about religion, never race...
...At the time Terkel interviewed him, he had already had both legs amputated, was being urged to have a hideously swollen arm removed as well, and was suffering from terminal cancer...
...Studs Terkel, who over the last several years has published a number of remarkably successful collections of interviews built around common themes, possesses a layman's false notion of history...
...Following each explosion, he sailed to ground zero, in one case climbing aboard a target craft to put out fires and check test animals...
...military command in Europe tried to spare the lives of the infantry by relying on artillery and tanks as much as possible...
...A f ormer member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, presumably a Communist, recounts his guerrilla activities on behalf of the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA...
...One of the most affecting stories in the book is undermined because we aren't given all the facts...
...There are captivating tales collected here, some so remarkable that for a few diverting moments we do not demand the complete truth...
...Another declares that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were particularly savage in combat...
...that unintended benefits arise from wars, as well as unexpected evils...
...No one thought to look for blacks in Nazi Germany...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 20
