The Politics of History. Howard Boone's Zinn
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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 and liberals, while yearning radicals like Richard Hofstadter are given no one to vote for in this political system. Hofstadter might well write a sequel, The American Historical Tradition describing among historians the same kind of liberal consensus he found in American politics—a consensus which veers toward mild liberalism in politics, and which therefore ensures that where the historian does go beyond irrelevancy to engagement, it is a limited engagement, for objectives limited by the liberal Democratic frame. Mann shows his own entrapment inside this frame by his comment that the progressives, lauded by almost all American historians, “transformed the social Darwinian jungle of some eighty years ago into the humane capitalistic society it is today.” Five years after this statement was published the urban ghettos in America were exploding in rebellion against this “humane capitalistic society.”
Engagement in social action is not indispensable for a scholar to direct his scholarship toward humane concerns; it is part of the wonder of people that they can transcend their immediate circumstances by leaps of emotion and imagination. But contact with the underground of society, in addition to spurring the historian to act out his value-system, might also open him to new data: the experiences, thoughts, feelings of the invisible folk all around us. This is the kind of data so often missed in official histories, manuscript collections of famous personalities, diaries of the literate, newspaper accounts, government documents.*
I don’t want to exaggerate the potency of the scholar as activist. But it may be that his role is especially important in a liberal society, where the force available for social change is small, and the paralysis of the middle class is an important factor in delaying change. Fact can only buttress passion, not create it, but where passion is strained through the Madisonian constitutional sieve, it badly needs support.
The black revolution has taught us that indignation stays alive in the secret crannies of even the most complacent society. Niebuhr was right in chiding Dewey that intellectual persuasion was not enough of a force to create a just America. He spoke (in Moral Man and Immoral Society) of his hope that reason would not destroy that “sublime madness” of social passion before its work was done. Perhaps reason may even help focus this passion.
Except for a scattered, eloquent, conscience-torn few, historians in America have enjoyed a long period of luxury, corresponding to that of a nation spared war, famine, and (beyond recent memory) imperial rule. But now, those peoples who were not so spared are rising, stirring, on all sides—and even, of late, in our midst. The rioting Negro poor, the student-teacher critics on Vietnam, the silent walls around state prisons and city jails—all are reminders in this, the most luxurious of nations, that here, as well as abroad, is an exclusiveness based on race, or class, or nationality, or ideology, or monopolies of power.
In this way, we are forced apart from one another, from other people in the world, and from our freedom. To study this exclusiveness critically, and with unashamed feeling, is to act in some small way against it. And to act against it helps us to study it, with more than sharpness of eye and brain, with all that we are as total human beings.
Historical writing always has some effect on us. It may reinforce our passivity; it may activate us. In any case, the historian cannot choose to be neutral; he writes on a moving train.
Sometimes, what he tells may change a person’s life. In May 1968 I heard a Catholic priest, on trial in Milwaukee for burning the records of a draft board, tell (I am paraphrasing) how he came to that act:
I was trained in Rome. I was quite conservative, never broke a rule in seminary. Then I read a book by Gordon Zahn, called German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars. It told how the Catholic Church carried on its normal activities while Hitler carried on his. It told how SS men went to mass, then went out to round up Jews. That book changed my