enterprise
Let us turn now from scholars in general to historians in particular. For a long time, the historian has been embarrassed by his own humanity. Touched by the sight of poverty, horrified by war, revolted by racism, indignant at the strangling of dissent, he has nevertheless tried his best to keep his tie straight, his voice unruffled, and his emotions to himself. True, he has often slyly attuned his research to his feelings, but so slyly, and with such scholarly skill, that only close friends and investigators for congressional committees might suspect him of compassion.
Historians worry that a deep concern with current affairs may lead to twisting the truth about the past. And indeed, it may, under conditions which I will discuss below. But nonconcern results in another kind of distortion, in which the ore of history is beaten neither into plowshare nor sword, but is melted down and sold. For the historian is a specialist who makes his living by writing and teaching, and his need to maintain his position in the profession tends to pull him away from controversy (except the polite controversy of academic disputation) and out of trouble.*
The tension between human drives and professional mores leads many to a schizophrenic separation of scholarly work from other activities; thus, research on Carolingian relations with the Papacy is interrupted momentarily to sign a petition on civil rights. Sometimes the separation is harder to maintain, and so the specialist on Asia scrupulously stays away from teach-ins on Vietnam, and seeks to keep his work unsullied by application to the current situation. One overall result is that common American phenomenon—the secret radical.
There is more than a fifty-fifty chance that the academic historian will lose what vital organs of social concern he has in the process of acquiring a doctorate, where the primary requirement of finding an untouched decade or person or topic almost assures that several years of intense labor will end in some monstrous irrelevancy. And after that, the considerations of rank, tenure, and salary, while not absolutely excluding either personal activism or socially pertinent scholarship, tend to discourage either.
We find, of course, oddities of academic behavior: Henry Steele Commager writing letters to the Times defending Communists; Martin Duberman putting the nation’s shame on stage; Staughton Lynd flying to Hanoi. And to the rule of scholarly caution, the exceptions have been glorious:
Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was muckraking history, not because it splattered mud on past heroes, but because it made several generations of readers worry about the working of economic interest in the politics of their own time. The senior Arthur Schlesinger, in an essay in New Viewpoints in American History, so flattened pretensions of “states’ rights” that no reader could hear that phrase again without smiling. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction was as close as a scholar could get to a demonstration, in the deepest sense of that term, puncturing a long and destructive innocence. Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons and Henry David’s History of the Haymarket Affair were unabashed in their sympathies. Walter Millis’ The Road to War was a deliberate and effective counter to romantic nonsense about the First World War. Arthur Weinberg’s Manifest Destiny quietly exposed the hypocrisy of both conservatives and liberals in the idealization of American expansion. Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition made us wonder about now by brilliantly deflating the liberal heroes—Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, the two Roosevelts. And C. Vann Woodward gently reminded the nation in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, that racism might be deeply embedded, yet it could change its ways in remarkably short time. There are many others.
But with all this, the dominant mood in historical writing in the United States (look at the pages of the historical reviews) avoids direct confrontation of contemporary problems, apologizes for any sign of departure from “objectivity,” spurns a liaison with social action. Introducing a recent collection of theoretical essays on American history,1 historian Edward N. Saveth asserts that the social science approach to history “was confused” by “the teleology of presentism.” (In the space of three pages, Saveth uses three variations of the word “confusion” to discuss the effect of presentism.)
What is presentism? It was defined by Carl Becker in 1912 as “the imperative command that knowledge shall serve purpose, and learning be applied to the solution of the problem of human life.” Saveth, speaking for so many of his colleagues, shakes his head: “The fires surrounding the issues of reform and relativism had to be banked before the relationship between history and social science could come under objective scrutiny.”2
They were not really fires, but only devilishly persistent sparks, struck by Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker.* There was no need to “bank” them, only to smother them under thousands of volumes of “objective” trivia, which became the trade mark of academic history, revealed to fellow members of the profession in papers delivered at meetings, doctoral dissertations, and articles in professional journals.
In Knowledge for What?, Robert S. Lynd questioned the relevance of a detailed analysis of “The Shield Signal at Marathon” which appeared in the American Historical Review in 1937. He wondered if it was a “warranted expenditure of scientific energy.” Twenty-six years later (in the issue of July 1965), the lead article in the American Historical Review is “William of Malmesbury’s Robert of Gloucester: a Reevaluation of the Historia Novella.” In 1959, we find historians at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association (the same meeting which tabled a resolution asking an immediate end to the practice of holding sessions at hotels that barred Negroes) presenting long papers on “British Men of War in Southern Waters, 1793–1802,” “Textiles: A Period of Sturm und Drang,” and “Bampson of Bampson’s Raiders.”
As Professor Lynd put it long ago: “History, thus voyaging forth with no pole star except the objective recovery of the past, becomes a vast, wandering enterprise.” And in its essence, I would add, it is private enterprise.
This is not to deny that there are many excellent historical studies only one or two degrees removed from immediate applicability to crucial social problems. The problem is in the proportion. There is immense intellectual energy in the United States devoted to inspecting the past, but only a tiny amount of this is deliberately directed to the solution of vital problems: racism, poverty, war, repression, loneliness, alienation, imprisonment. Where historical research has been useful, it has often been by chance rather than by design, in accord with a kind of trickle-down theory which holds that if only you fill the libraries to bursting with enough processed pulpwood, something useful will eventually reach a society desperate for understanding.
While scholars do have a vague, general desire to serve a social purpose, the production of historical works is largely motivated by profit (promotion, prestige, and even a bit of money) rather than by use. This does not mean that useful knowledge is not produced (or that what is produced is not of excellent quality in its own terms, as our society constructs excellent office buildings while people live in rattraps). It does mean that this production is incidental, more often than not. In a rich economy, not in some significant degree directed toward social reform, waste is bound to be huge, measured in lost opportunities and misdirected effort.
True, the writing of history is really a mixed economy, but an inspection of the mixture shows that the social sector is only a small proportion of the mass.* What I am suggesting is not a totalistic direction of scholarship but (leaving complete freedom and best wishes to all who want to analyze “The Shield Signal at Marathon” or “Bampson of Bampson’s Raiders”) an enlargement of the social sector by encouragement, persuasion, and demonstration.
I am not directing my criticism against those few histories which are works of art, which make no claim to illuminate a social problem, but instead capture the mood, the color, the reality of an age, an incident, or an individual, conveying pleasure and the warmth of genuine emotion. This needs no justification,
