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
