(A Study of History) and Pieter Geyl (Encounters in History), Geyl objects to Toynbee’s emphasis on the failures of Western civilization and suggests that the West’s successes should be more heavily stressed. Behind the debate, one can see the Cold War, with Geyl reacting sharply and sensitively to any account of the world which implies more condemnation of the Western countries than of the Communist nations. But what is crucial in assessing the Geyl-Toynbee debate is not one’s view of the past. All of us, Toynbee as well as Geyl, could readily agree on a list of the sins committed by the Communist nations and probably also agree on a list of the sins of the West. Where would that leave us, in view of the difficulty of quantifying this situation and declaring a “winner” as if in a baseball game? The crucial element is the present and the question of what we, the receivers of any assessment, will do in the present. And since Toynbee is addressing himself to the readers of the West primarily, he is implying that for Westerners to take a more critical view of their own culture will lead to more beneficial results (for those values esteemed by critics of both East and West) than to engage in self-congratulation. Since the argument about the past is insoluble, one does better directing his judgment toward the present and future.*
The usual distinction between “narrative” and “interpretive” history is not really pertinent to the criterion I have suggested for writing history in the public sector. It has often been assumed that narrative history, the simple description of an event or period, is “low level” history, while the interpretation of events, periods, individuals is “high level” and thus closer to the heart of a socially concerned historian. But the narration of the Haymarket Affair, or the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, to someone with a rosy picture of the American court system, has far more powerful effect on the present than an interpretation of the reasons for the War of 1812. A factual recounting of the addresses of Wendell Phillips constitutes (in a time when young people have begun to be captivated by the idea of joining social movements) a far more positive action on behalf of social reform than a sophisticated “interpretation” of the abolitionists which concludes that they were motivated by psychological feelings of insecurity. So much of the newer work on “concepts” in history gives up both the forest and the trees for the stratosphere.
If the historian is to approach the data of the past with a deliberate intent to further certain fundamental values in the present, then he can adopt several approaches. He may search at random in documents and publications to find material relevant to those values (this would rule out material of purely antiquarian or trivial interest). He can pursue the traditional lines of research (certain periods, people, topics: the Progressive Period, Lincoln, the Bank War, the Labor Movement) with an avowed “presentist” objective. Or, as the least wasteful method, he can use a problem-centered approach to the American past. This approach, used only occasionally in American historiography, deserves some discussion.
The starting point, it should be emphasized, is a present problem. Many so-called “problem approaches” in American history have been based on problems of the past. Some of these may be extended by analogy to a present problem (like Beard’s concern with economic motive behind political events of the eighteenth century), but many of them are quite dead (the tariff debates of the 1820’s; the character of the Southern Whigs; Turner’s frontier thesis, which has occupied an incredible amount of attention). Not that bits of relevant wisdom cannot be extracted from these old problems, but the reward is small for the attention paid.*
Teachers and writers of history almost always speak warmly (and vaguely) of how “studying history will help you understand our own time.” This usually means the teacher will make the point quickly in his opening lecture, or the textbook will dispose of this in an opening sentence, after which the student is treated to an encyclopedic, chronological recapitulation of the past. In effect, he is told: “The past is useful to the present. Now you figure out how.”
Barrington Moore, discussing the reluctance of the historian to draw upon his knowledge for suggestive explanations of the present, says: “Most frequently of all he will retreat from such pressures into literary snobbishness and pseudo cultivation. This takes the form of airy generalizations about the way history provides ‘wisdom’ or ‘real understanding.’ … Anyone who wants to know how this wisdom can be effectively used, amplified and corrected, will find that his questions usually elicit no more than irritation.” 8
To start historical enquiry with a present concern requires ignoring the customary chronological fracture of the American past: the Colonial Period; the Revolutionary Period; the Jacksonian Period; and so on, down to the New Deal, the War, and the Atomic Age.* Instead, a problem must be followed where it leads, back and forth across the centuries if necessary.
David Potter has pointed to the unconfessed theoretical assumptions of historians who claim they are not theorizing.9 I would carry his point further: all historians, by their writing, have some effect on the present social situation, whether they choose to be presentists or not. Therefore the real choice is not between shaping the world or not, but between doing it deliberately or unconsciously.*
Psychology has contributed several vital ideas to our understanding of the role of the historian. In the first place, the psychologist is not recording the events of the patient’s life simply to add to his files, or because they are “interesting,” or because they will enable the building of complex theories. He is a therapist, devoted to the aim of curing people’s problems, so that all the data he discovers are evaluated in accord with the single objective of therapy. This is the kind of commitment historians, as a group, have not yet made to society.
Second, there is Harry Stack Sullivan’s notion of the psychologist as “participant.” Whether the psychologist likes it or not, he is more than a listener. He has an effect on his patient. Similarly, the historian is a participant in history by his writing. Even when he claims neutrality he has an effect—if only, with his voluminous production of irrelevant data, to clog the social passages. So it is now a matter of consciously recognizing his participation, and deciding in which direction his energies will be expended.
An especially potent way of leading the historian toward a presentist, value-directed history is the binding power of social action itself. When a group of American historians in the Spring of 1965 joined the Negroes marching from Selma to Montgomery they were performing an unusual act. Social scientists sometimes speak and write on public policy; rarely do they bodily join in action to make contact with those whose motivation comes not from thought and empathy but from the direct pain of deprivation. Such contact, such engagement in action, generates an emotional attachment to the agents of social change which even long hours in the stacks can hardly injure.
Surely there is some relationship between the relative well-being of professors, their isolation in middle-class communities, their predictable patterns of sociality, and the tendency to remain distant, both personally and in scholarship, from the political battles of the day. The scholar does vaguely aim to serve some social purpose, but there is an undiscussed conflict between problem-solving and safety for a man earning fifteen thousand dollars a year. There is no deliberate avoidance of social issues, but some quiet gyroscopic mechanism of survival operates to steer the scholar toward research within the academic consensus.
When Arthur Mann writes that: “Neither dress, style, nor accent unifies the large and heterogeneous membership of the American Historical Association,” he adds immediately: “Yet most writers of American history belong to the liberal intelligentsia that voted for John F. Kennedy and, before him, for Adlai Stevenson, Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alfred E. Smith, Wood-row Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan.” 10 In other words, historians have almost all fitted neatly into that American consensus which Richard Hofstadter called “The American Political Tradition.” So when it is said (again, by Mann) that Richard Hofstadter is a “spectator” while Arthur Schlesinger (who wrote loving books about Jackson, FDR, Kennedy) “writes history as he votes” it is because this country only hands ballots to Republicans and Democrats, to conservatives
