Writing, and Rewriting, History
JR, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER
Thinking Aloud WRITING AND REWRITING HISTORY BY ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR. Documentation is not the end of history, but it is the beginning. The great American historiansof the 19th...
...We decipher them as we best can with purblind eyes, and endeavor to learn their mystery as we float along to the abyss...
...The current upsurge of 'multiculturalism' in its militant forms has placed the idea of a common culture in jeopardy...
...never can be written...
...from context on the other...
...To deny the European origins of American civilization is to falsify history...
...His views being federalist and conservative, Adams said, "have as good a right to expression in the collegeas mine, which tend to democracy and radicalism...
...is Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York...
...has come to depend on acceptance by the practitioners...
...from text on the one hand...
...In retrospect, I think, the great 1930s debate between Charles A. Beard and Theodore Clarke Smith drew the issue in too drastic terms...
...Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true...
...Let us deal appropriately with text and the context...
...In the meantime, argument has never done history any harm...
...is nowhere to be found...
...Perhaps this is the moment to reaffirm our faith in the possibility of history, in the robustness of the historical enterprise and in the unending excitement of the historical adventure...
...It is well that our children try to imagine the arrival of Columbus from the viewpoint of those who met him as well as from those who sent him...
...Whatever the crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source...
...it is by doing this that we can approach, but never reach, that ideal of objectivity which the Ranke school claimed to have attained...
...When multicultural education means telling our children about other races, other cultures, other continents, it is a salutary development...
...Despite his moment of doubt, he kept on turning out his volumes on the history of the Netherlands...
...Certainly Europe, likeevery other culture, has committed its share of crimes...
...Was Adams, with his premonitions of chaos, perhaps kidding...
...The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything...
...When it means the assumption that ethnicity is the defining experience for every American, that the point of education is to make children feel good about their ancestors, that we must discard the idea of a common culture and celebrate, reinforce and perpetuate separate ethnie and racial communities, then multiculturalism not only betrays history but undermines the theory of America as one people...
...there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white...
...Purely objective truth," said William James...
...In time doubts of a sort began to creep in...
...the result Democracy...
...As the challenge to American society is to encourage assimilation and integration, so the challenge to American historians is to show how ethnic and racial minorities have reshaped and reconfigured the common culture...
...Everyman becomes his own historian in a sense never imagined by Carl Becker...
...The great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl summed it up when he called history "an argument without end...
...not least against other Europeans...
...Motley's was an early, curious and possibly fleeting expression of pessimism about the knowability of history...
...There is no such thing as human history," John Lothrop Motley told the NewYork Historical Society in a rare confessional moment in 1868...
...History is never a closed book...
...Since history springs in great part from documents, the historian's assumption is that documents mean something and that history written on the basis of documents means something too...
...In the words of C. S. Peirce, "The opinion that is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth...
...of those liberating ideals of individual liberty, political democracy, the impartial rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom to which most of the world aspires, ideals that empower people of every race, color and creed...
...James Baldwin once said, "To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task...
...Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts midst which it grew...
...Interpretation is nearly always provisional...
...As I have noted, contemporary historians readily recognize the power of context to shape their views of the past...
...a great generalization that would reduce all history under a law as clear as the laws which govern the material world...
...Butin America that context, wifhmanymodulations and qualifications, has until recently implied a common culture...
...As he subsequently put it in a less polemical mood, "It is by looking calmly at ourselves as well as others...
...When entering the murky waters of technical epistemology historians quickly find themselves beyond their depth, and, to borrow from Stevie Smith, not waving but drowning...
...That history is thus relative to the times does not free the historian from the quest for objectivity...
...We can revise Carl Becker...
...In this sense all history, as Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history...
...It is precisely our addiction to the concrete and the empirical that makes us historians...
...History may sometimes be as pernicious as Paul Val?©ry claims, but only when historians forsake the quest for knowledge, however tricky and problematic that quest may be, in the interests of an ideology, a nation, a race, a sex, or a cause...
...nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written...
...a dubious word in the historical trade, for which "knowledge" may be profitably substituted...
...They wrote with style, and they wrote with conviction...
...Knowledge is rarely final...
...The clash of opinions can hardly fail to stimulate inquiry among the students...
...History and fiction are not only brothers under the skin, they are twin brothers...
...The historian's job is to keep on trying to transcend untranscendable limitations...
...Militant muticulturalism, portraying Europe as the root of all evil, goes on to denounce the alleged iniquities of the "Eurocentric" curriculum...
...A year later he reverted to serene Victorian confidence, postulating a cosmic law that governed "all bodies political as inexorably as Kepler's law controls of the motion of planets...
...New views of text and context present challenges to the foundations of history less negotiable than the mock battles between the objectivists and the relativists...
...Militant multiculturalism glorifies ethnic and racial communities at the expense of the common culture...
...Certainly by the 20th century chaos was triumphing over order, and one consequence was to increase doubts about the knowability of history...
...The great American historiansof the 19th century pursued documents indefatigably at home and abroad in order to establish a solid foundation for their formidable works...
...But it is not an illusion or a fiction or a myth...
...They believed that they could attain a truthful grip on the vanished past...
...But it is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost...
...Who can tell...
...A better rule was proposed by Henry Adams of the Harvard history department when he recommended to President Charles William Eliot that Henry Cabot Lodge teach a course covering the same period as Adams' own course...
...The word today, to borrow Peter Novick's phrase, is: Every group its own historian...
...This argument has spread from linguistic theorists and literary critics in France, where it has now been largely abandoned, to departments of literature in Great Britain and the United States, and from departments of literature it has won bridgeheads in departments of history...
...Objectivity is ultimately unattainable...
...The law is Progress...
...Truth...
...I agree that the curse of racism has been the great failure of the American experiment, the glaring contradiction of American ideals, and the crippling disease of American life...
...It engenders dreams, it intoxicates the people, it begets false memories, it exaggerates their reactions, keeps their old wounds open, disturbs their sleep, leads them to delusions of grandeur or of persecution, and makes nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vain...
...Most historians today accept the truth spoken so long ago by Emerson: "No man can quite emancipate himself from his own age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts of his time shall have no share...
...Instead of a shared history, we see a congeries of separate ethnic and racial histories, each intended to promote group self-esteem, each subject to the veto of the group involved...
...The unbridgeable gap between aim and grasp leaves history in a condition of perennial crisis...
...As the travail of today redirects the flickering spotlight of scholarly research into the darkness of yesterday, it illuminates things that were always there but that we had not troubled to notice...
...Thepresent incessantly re-creates the past: Hence the contemporary triumph of chaos over order...
...even as we understand that we are doomed to fail...
...ArthurM.Schlesinger Jr...
...the unique source...
...Beard argued not that historians should renounce the goal, only that they need to understand they cannot escape their own prepossessions and must therefore be conscious of their own frames of reference...
...Plenty of things in the past are fully as knowable as things we think we know in the present...
...Context becomes another...
...The terms of this negotiated peace are plain enough...
...But recent intellectual vogues question the whole idea of determinate meaning...
...Yet, unlike other cultures, it has conceived and acted upon ideals that expose and combat its own crimes...
...Let me be clear about this sensitive subject...
...Yet in a few more years that incorrigible skeptic, Henry Adams, was exhorting his fellow historians to produce a science of history...
...for the new challenges undermine the whole traditional conception of historical knowability...
...Most members of my profession have a limited capacity for sustained abstract thought...
...The one duty we owe to history," said Oscar Wilde, "is to rewrite it...
...all the more dangerous at a time when ethnic conflict is tearing apart one nation after another...
...So text becomes one enemy of history as we have known it...
...We should teach American history warts and all, with full accounting of the fact that America has been through most of its existence a racist nation...
...And of course history should be taught from a variety of perspectives...
...We have a leaf ortwotorn from the great book of human fate as it flutters in the storm-winds ever sweeping across the earth...
...The hieroglyphics have no key...
...Deconstruction exposes hidden contradictions and ambiguities, opens up texts to a multiplicity of subjective readings and denies any stability of meaning...
...His reference to "purblind eyes," however, suggests a lurking apprehension that frail mortals were inherently incapable of penetrating the reality of the past...
...We can readily see how urgencies of the present compel us to revise conceptions of the past...
...No other culture has made self-criticism so organic a part of its being...
...We negotiate a roughand-ready peace with epistemology and go about our work as best we can...
...We acknowledge that we are all prisoners of our own experience, that we are all entrapped in what Ralph Barton Perry called "the egocentric predicament," that we bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age, that we cannot shuffle off the mortal coil and seize on ultimate and absolute truths...
...I appreciate Motley's despair over the possibility of grasping history as a whole and ever getting it right...
...I would add, though, that this is the way American history has been taught for at least the last 40 years, despite the claims of multicultural zealots that until they came along our children never learned anything about, say, the horrors of slavery...
...The annals of mankind have never been written...
...We happily leave the philosophy of history to philosophers, whose analyses we imperfectly follow and whose theories of knowledge we habitually dismiss as irrelevant to historical practice...
...One has only to note how the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement have reformulated and renewed American history...
...Smith argued not that perfect objectivity was attainable, only that it should remain the historian's goal...
...by recognizing frankly and with good humor that we stand somewhere...
...Documents, it is pointed out, are nothing more than texts, and the nature of language makes it impossible ever to knowthe meaning of texts...
...It is always in the making...
...Its manipulation and corruption of history justify Paul Val?©ry's gloomy verdict that "history is the most dangerous product that the chemistry of the intellect has invented...
...It is being whipsawed from two sides...
...This essay is adapted from an address he gave to the Massachusetts Historical Society on the occasion of its 200th anniversary...
...Let us not be overimpressed by the deconstructionists, the poststructuralists, the militant multiculturalists...
...It glorifies ethnic and racial myths at the expense of honest history...
...Still, collective judgments are always subject to change...
...Multicultural history in its militant vein promotes fragmentation, segregation, ghettoization...
...History seems in particular crisis now, perhaps in deeper crisis than when Beard jousted with Smith 60 years ago...
...After all, we say, philosophers write about history without knowing what it is to write history...
...True as the present is," said William James, "the past was also...
...We should surely teach black history, women's history, Hispanic history, African history, Asian history...
...But when multicultural education means, as the zealots insist, that our public schools should teach subjects like history and literature as emotional therapies, not as intellectual disciplines, that is a different matter...
...There was a time, Novicktells us, when theruleof the Massachusetts Historical Society was to forbid critical comment on the work of living members: not a good rule, and one that has happily lapsed...
...Historians now claim objectivity not as individuals but as a community...
...History is more unknowable than ever...
...At the same time we may, like Motley, continue writing history if for no other reason than the joy of the game...
...Poststructuralism sees all interpretation as ideology aimed at one form or another of domination and oppression...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
