The Politics of History
By Howard Zinn
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Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and social activist. In addition to A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies, he is the author of numerous books including The People Speak, Passionate Declarations, and the autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
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The Politics of History - Howard Zinn
The Politics of History
SECOND EDITION With a New Introduction
HOWARD ZINN
© 1970, 1990 by Howard Zinn. Reprinted by arrangement with The Howard Zinn Revocable Trust
.
A Note on the Contents:
The essay Knowledge as a Form of Power
has appeared in the Saturday Review, History as Private Enterprise
appears in the Festschrift for Herbert Marcuse, The Critical Spirit, edited by Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., published by Beacon Press. LaGuardia in the Jazz Age
is drawn from various material in my book LaGuardia in Congress, published by Cornell University Press and the American Historical Association, © 1958 by Howard Zinn, © 1959 by the American Historical Association, used here by permission of Cornell University Press. The Limits of the New Deal
is the introductory essay in my book New Deal Thought, copyright © 1966 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., published by Bobbs-Merrill. Abolitionists and the Tactics of Agitation
appeared in the Columbia University Forum. The part of Psychoanalyzing the Dissenter: Two Cases" that deals with Lewis Feuer was a review in The New Republic. Vietnam: The Moral Equation
and The Prisoners: A Bit of Contemporary History
appeared as articles in The Nation. The Hiroshima part of Hiroshima and Royan
is an adaptation of an article in the Columbia University Forum. Freedom and Responsibility
is an adaptation of an essay that appeared on page two of The New York Times Book Review.
Titles in Print by Howard Zinn
ARTISTS IN TIMES OF WAR (Open Media/Seven Stories Press, 2003)
THE BOMB: Essays (Open Media/City Lights Publishers, 2010)
DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY: Nine Fallacies of Law and Order (Vintage 1968, reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
EMMA (South End Press, 2002)
FAILURE TO QUIT: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (Common Courage Press, 1993; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
THE FUTURE OF HISTORY: Interviews with David Barsamian (Common Courage Press, 1999)
HOWARD ZINN ON DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION, with Donald Macedo, (Paradigm, 2008)
HOWARD ZINN ON HISTORY (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
HOWARD ZINN ON WAR (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
JUSTICE IN EVERYDAY LIFE: Eyewitness Accounts (Beacon Press, 1977; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
A JUST WAR, with Moises Saman & Gino Strada (Charta Press, 2006)
LAGUARDIA IN CONGRESS, (Cornell UP, 1959; reprint 2010)
LA OTRA HISTORIA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
MARX IN SOHO: A Play on History (South End Press, 1999)
NEW DEAL THOUGHT, Ed. By Howard Zinn (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, reprint edition Hackett Publishing Co., 2003)
ORIGINAL ZINN: CONVERSATIONS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS, with David Barsamian (HarperCollins/Perennial, 2006)
PASSIONATE DECLARATIONS: ESSAYS ON WAR AND JUSTICE, formerly DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE (HarperCollins/Perennial, 1990, 2003)
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF EMPIRE; written with Paul Buhle & illustrated by Mike Konopack,(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008, graphic edition)
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., updated edition 2003 (HarperCollins/Perennial)
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., Abridged Teaching Edition, (New Press, 1997)
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., the wall charts (New Press, 1995)
THE PEOPLE SPEAK: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known (HarperCollins/Perennial, 2004)
THE POLITICS OF HISTORY, second edition (University of Illinois, 1990)
POSTWAR AMERICA: 1945-1971 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
A POWER GOVERNMENTS CANNOT SUPPRESS (City Lights Publishers, 2007)
SNCC: THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS (Beacon Press, 1964; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
THE SOUTHERN MYSTIQUE, (Knopf, 1964; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
TERRORISM AND WAR, with Anthony Arnove (Open Media/Seven Stories Press, 2002)
THREE PLAYS: THE POLITICAL THEATER OF HOWARD ZINN – EMMA, MARX IN SOHO, DAUGHTERS OF VENUS (Beacon Press, 2010)
THREE STRIKES, with Dana Frank and Robin D.G. Kelley (Beacon Press, 2001)
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A PEOPLES HISTOR, updated. 2003 (HarperCollins/Perennial)
UNCOMMON SENSE: FROM THE WRITINGS OF HOWARD ZINN (Paradigm Press, 2009)
UNRAVELING OF THE BUSH PRESIDENCY (Seven Stories Press, 2009)
VIETNAM: THE LOGIC OF WITHDRAWAL (Beacon Press; 1967; Reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
VOICES OF A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., with Anthony Arnove (Seven Stories Press, 2004; second edition 2010)
YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF OUR TIMES, second edition (Beacon Press, 2002)
A YOUNG PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S.: Adapted by Rebecca Stefoff (Seven Stories Press, 2007)
THE ZINN READER: WRITINGS ON DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY (Seven Stories Press 1997, second edition 2010)
To, for, with
Roslyn
Other historians relate facts to inform us of facts. You relate them to excite in our hearts an intense hatred of lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, tyranny; and the anger remains even after the memory of the facts has disappeared.
—DIDEROT, WRITING OF VOLTAIRE
Contents
Introduction to the Second Edition
Introduction to the First Edition
PART ONE ∙ APPROACHES
1 Knowledge as a Form of Power
2 History as Private Enterprise
3 What Is Radical History?
PART TWO ∙ ESSAYS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
CLASS:
4 Inequality
5 The Ludlow Massacre
6 LaGuardia in the Jazz Age
7 The Limits of the New Deal
RACE:
8 Abolitionists and the Tactics of Agitation
9 Psychoanalyzing the Dissenter: Two Cases
10 Liberalism and Racism
11 Albany, Georgia, and the New Frontier
NATIONALISM:
12 Aggressive Liberalism
13 Vietnam: The Moral Equation
14 The Prisoners: A Bit of Contemporary History
15 Violence: The Double Standard
16 Hiroshima and Royan
PART THREE ∙ THEORY AND PRAXIS
17 Freedom and Responsibility
18 The Historians
19 The Philosophers
20 Philosophers, Historians, and Causation
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
To the American Philosophical Society, the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation, and the Graduate School of Boston University for support during the various stages of writing this book. To Ernest Young, Marilyn Young, and Hilda Hein for critical readings of certain sections of the book. To all the Magraws for the peaceful beauty of the Cobbles, where I could finish my writing. To the librarians of Royan for their kindness. To Joan Agri, Marion Lee, and Judith Mandelbaum for invaluable assistance. To Jim Miller, for constant help and encouragement. To anonymous friends for anonymous spiritual support. To Myla and Jeff, for being themselves.
Introduction to the Second Edition
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, we find this brief exchange:
"‘The horror of that moment,’ the King went on, ‘I shall never, never forget!’
‘You will though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don’t make a memorandum of it.’
¹
Yes, we will forget if we don’t make memoranda. But there is disagreement on exactly which moments in history we should make memoranda of, since we can’t recapture all of the past, and profound conflict on how we should treat those moments we decide to remember.
Two decades have passed since The Politics of History was written, but its concerns remain alive: What are the uses of history? Can historians, should they, be objective,
disinterested
? What is the point of teaching or writing history?
In this book I argue against history as private enterprise
and for the idea that it is the social responsibility of the historian to do work that will be useful in solving the critical human problems of our time. That kind of statement arouses the ire of some professional historians. (Christopher Lasch, for instance, worried about the drastic simplification of issues… strident partisanship.
² So it might be useful for me to illustrate what I mean, though from a vantage point of twenty years after the publication of this book, and to illuminate some historical issues.
The eighties were a Republican party decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose affinity for the rich went even beyond the normal friendliness of our government toward corporate wealth. His administration seemed to feel no shame in proposing budgets that spent two to three hundred billion dollars for what was already the most swollen military machine in human history, while cutting allocations for health care, children’s lunches, food stamps for the poor, housing for the homeless, and weekly payments to the unemployed.
One of Reagan’s early budgets (for fiscal year 1983) was analyzed by New York Times reporter Robert Pear: The President’s budget … proposed that military spending alone should rise by $33.6 billion. Under Mr. Reagan’s budget, the absolute level of Federal spending would be lower in 1983 than in 1982 for three major programs that help poor people: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and food and nutrition assistance, including food stamps. The same is true for social services, job training, low-income energy assistance and compensatory education.
³
The human consequences were devastating. In 1982 over three million children had been ruled ineligible for school lunch programs by new requirements. By the spring of 1983 two million children joined the ten million already classified as poor.
By mid-1984 the Boston Globe was reporting: Infant mortality, which had been declining steadily in Boston and other cities in the 1970s, shot up suddenly after the Reagan Administration reduced grants for health care for mothers and children.
⁴ Not long after the Reagan budget cuts it was disclosed that in parts of Detroit one-third of the children were dying before their first birthday.
The rich, however, were doing better. One of Reagan’s first acts in office was to decontrol oil prices; the oil industry benefited by two billion dollars. Shortly after that, twenty-three oil industry executives and investors contributed $270,000 to redecorate the White House living quarters. This was explained by Jack Hodges of Oklahoma City, owner of Core Oil and Gas Company: The top man of this country ought to live in one of the top places. Mr. Reagan has helped the energy business.
⁵
Taxes went down for the rich, up for the poor. The Congressional Budget Office reported in late 1987 that for that year the poorest tenth of American families would pay 20 percent more of their earnings in taxes than they did in 1977, and the richest tenth would pay 20 percent less.⁶ A report for the House Ways and Means Committee showed that from 1979 to 1987 the average family income for the poorest fifth of the population declined by 6 percent, and the richest fifth family income rose 11 percent.⁷ The figures were worse for black and Hispanic people. The Reagan administration justified its economic policies by the orthodox philosophy of conservatism: government should do less for the people, the poor should do more for themselves; if the rich are given tax benefits they will have an incentive to produce more and the poor will benefit.
This is where history can be useful. For over a hundred years the national government followed conservative policies, beginning in the 1790s, when Alexander Hamilton’s economic program went into effect in the first Washington administration, and lasting until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to interfere in the economy on behalf of the poor by instituting job programs, subsidized housing, social security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wages. During that long period the country was industrialized, fortunes were made by a small number of rich people, but the human cost was atrocious. Hunger, sickness, and poverty were the normal state of large numbers of people in the city and in the country. In the periodic depressions of those years of free enterprise,
conditions were even worse.
The year 1877 is a case in point. It was the heyday of conservative philosophy (let people fend for themselves), and that summer in the hot cities, where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, their children got sick. The New York Times reported: already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard.…Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city.
⁸
That depression was barely over when another one came in 1893. This was still the period of government indifference to the poor, glorifications of the capitalist system, the growth of huge fortunes for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Mellons. That year, after several decades of wild industrial growth, financial manipulation, and uncontrolled speculation and profiteering, the economy collapsed. The worst hit, of course, were the poor: Of a labor force of fifteen million, three million were unemployed. Neither the federal government nor any state government voted relief to the hungry, but mass demonstrations all over the country forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on street or park crews.
The conservative philosophy of government noninterference had always been hypocritical. From the time of the suppression of the Pennsylvania farmers’ insurrection in 1794, it was clear that the government, disdaining to help the poor, would act decisively against the poor if they dared to rebel against their condition.
Thus, in 1877 when the railroad workers went on strike to protest a pay cut, the government called out the army against them and a hundred people were killed.⁹ When another railroad strike took place in 1894 (because two thousand railroad workers were dying every year in industrial accidents) the federal government moved in with court injunctions and troops to break the strike.
The Reagan administration’s praise of the free enterprise
system (it had never been free, but controlled by private wealth with the collaboration of government) counted on a general historical amnesia. It was easy to forget how that system (never working well for the poor even in prosperity
) collapsed in 1929 and brought hunger and homelessness to a large part of the American people in the 1930s.
When Reagan’s successor, George Bush, ran for office in 1988 he told an audience in Ohio: In my view, there is no place in American public life for philosophies that divide Americans one from another on class lines and that excite conflict among them.
¹⁰ The premise of this statement was that the excitation of class conflict in this country came from philosophies
and not from the reality of class division, the existence of very rich and very poor. Here too a historical corrective would have been useful. But it was not to be expected that Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, would supply it, given the history of the Democratic party for blurring the reality of class difference in America.
On the eve of Reagan’s accession to the presidency, a popular revolution in Nicaragua overthrew the military dictatorship of Anastasia Somoza, whose family had been kept in power by the support of the United States over a period of forty years. The attitude of the U.S. government to the new regime in Nicaragua (the Sandinistas) became a critical issue.
Almost immediately the Reagan administration began to take steps to overthrow the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. The Central Intelligence Agency secretly organized and trained a small army, led by former members of Somoza’s National Guard, based in Honduras, for this purpose. This counterrevolutionary army—the contras,
as they came to be known—was financed by congressional appropriations. In 1984, after it was becoming clear that the contras had virtually no support inside Nicaragua and were desperately trying to destabilize the Sandinistas by military raids from outside to terrorize the countryside, Congress cut off funds. The Reagan administration then set up a secret and illegal team, headed by Marine Colonel Oliver North but involving CIA head William Casey and several of Reagan’s closest advisers, to divert funds from other countries to the contras.
The Reagan-Bush administration defended these acts—though they involved serious violations of domestic law and international law (indeed, the World Court found the United States guilty of legal violations in the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors)—by several arguments. The administration primarily argued that Nicaragua (which had been getting Soviet aid since the 1979 revolution) was a Soviet base and a threat to the security of the United States. Another justification was that a Marxist dictatorship
now existed in Nicaragua, but the United States wanted democracy there.
Surely this was an appropriate time for a bit of historical perspective to help judge the soundness of these arguments. A number of books began to appear that recounted some of the history of United States relations with Central America. (I would point now to only one of them by Cornell University historian Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions.)¹¹ To anyone concerned with throwing light on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua—indeed, toward all of the Caribbean since the arguments for intervention were the same for El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—it seemed evident that an important question should be answered: What was U.S. policy in these areas before there was a possibility of a Soviet threat, that is, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917?
The historical evidence must then be startling to any citizen who easily accepted the U.S. government’s rationale for military intervention. It is clear that the United States was intervening in the Caribbean and Latin America long before the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1846 our government provoked a war with Mexico and took almost half of that country’s land, which now comprises California and our whole Southwest. In 1854 warships were sent to destroy the Nicaraguan town of Greytown on the Atlantic coast because a U.S. diplomat suffered a bloody nose.
Intervention intensified after 1898. That year we expelled Spain from Cuba, established U.S. control over that island with military bases and corporate plundering, and at the same time took Puerto Rico. A few years later we engineered the establishment of the new Republic of Panama so that we could set our own terms for the canal rights. And in the decade and a half before World War I, U.S. marines made many forays into Central America, as well as shelling a Mexican town and occupying Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
All that adds up to a lot of military interventions before 1917. It doesn’t conclusively disprove the claim of a Soviet threat as rationale for the support of counterrevolution in Nicaragua—there are limits to the uses of history for solving current problems—but it does make us very skeptical about that claim, causes us to scrutinize the situation more closely than if we simply accepted our government’s statements at face value. It therefore makes us more competent, watchful citizens.
We can also make use of history to check on the other justification for military intervention in the Caribbean—that our aim is to promote democracy. In fact, the history of U.S. activity in Latin America in this century does not show any deep commitment to democracy. On the contrary, we see a pattern of U.S. support of military dictatorships—the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and more. Indeed, in two recent situations where democratic elections put into power governments not dictatorial but mildly socialist—Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973—the Central Intelligence Agency went to work to overthrow the elected presidents. In both places the result was the opposite of democracy—brutally murderous military regimes that killed tens of thousands of people.
Are such uses of history as I have here described examples of the partisanship
deplored by Christopher Lasch? Are they departures from a desired objectivity
? Certainly they show partisanship; I am partisan on behalf of certain values—a more egalitarian distribution of the national wealth, opposition to military intervention whose purpose seems to be the aggrandizement of governmental power and corporate profits at the expense of poorer peoples of the world. I don’t believe that these values interfere with an honest recounting of the past. As I suggest in this book, holding certain fundamental values does not require that historians find certain desirable answers in exploring the past, it just turns their attention to certain useful questions. It precludes rummaging in the past for any data that are vaguely interesting
—it focuses our research on matters that have critical value for human affairs.
Scientists do not simply collect data at random. Charles Darwin put it this way in a letter he wrote in 1861: About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
¹²
The myth of objectivity
among historians has been more exhaustively investigated since I discussed the issue in this book, especially in the volume by Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question
and the American Historical Profession. Novick punctures again and again the pretenses of historians to objectivity,
the claim that they have no purpose beyond recapturing the past as it really was.
(That famous phrase of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, wie es eigentlich gewesen
has been misinterpreted, Novick says, and points out that von Ranke was far from objective,
as in his statement: God dwells, lives, and can be known in all of history.
)
For instance, the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in The Faith of a Historian,
published around 1940, said he did not aim to instruct the present but to simply explain the event exactly as it happened.
Yet, in the same essay, he criticizes the post-World War I historians for creating disillusionment with war, saying they rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity around 1940 spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight.… Historians… are the ones who should have pointed out that war does accomplish something, that war is better than servitude.
¹³
Peter Novick, after years of intensive exploration of the issue, concludes: "it seems to me to say of a work of history that it is or isn’t objective is to make an empty observation; to say something neither interesting nor useful."¹⁴ I trust that my comments on the writing of history and my historical essays themselves in the pages to follow, while remaining indifferent to the question of objectivity,
will be both interesting and useful.
Notes
1. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 11.
2. New York Review of Books, March 8, 1973. Lasch mistakenly read my emphasis on conflict in history as a criticism of Richard Hofstadter’s consensus
approach (in his book The American Political Tradition) to the American past. In fact, I agreed totally with the existence of a consensus between the competing dominant groups in our society, but insisted that outside that consensus there was an opposition not given proper attention by historians.
3. New York Times, April 2, 1982.
4. Boston Globe, May 24, 1984.
5. New York Times, March 26, 1981.
6. New York Times, November 12, 1987.
7. New York Times, March 22, 1989.
8. See Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (New York: Quadrangle, 1970).
9. Ibid.
10. Washington Post, October 30, 1988.
11. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions (New York: Norton, 1983).
12. F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds., More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (London, 1903), vol. 1, p. 195; quoted in M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 65.
13. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 315–16.
14. Novick, p. 6.
Introduction to the First Edition
Sometime in 1968, newspapers recorded the death of America’s leading entrepreneur of political buttons. He had always worn his own button which said: I don’t care who wins. My business is buttons.
The historian, by habit, is a passive reporter, studying the combatants of yesterday, while those of today clash outside his window. His preferences are usually private. His business is history.
He may ask philosophical questions about the past: do we find certain sequential patterns in history? or are historical events unique, disorderly? But he rarely sees himself as helpful in changing the pattern or affecting the disorder. He may believe that people through history have been caught in the grip of extrahuman forces. Or he may see them as free agents shaping the world. But whether they are free or not, he himself is bound—by professional commitment—to tally but not to vote, to touch but not to feel. Or to feel, but not to act. At most, to act after hours, but not through his writing, in his job as a historian.
Out of this sense of the situation comes the question which underlies this book: in a world where children are still not safe from starvation or bombs, should not the historian thrust himself and his writing into history, on behalf of goals in which he deeply believes? Are we historians not humans first, and scholars because of that?
Recall Rousseau’s accusation: We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and painters in plenty, but we have no longer a citizen among us.
Since the eighteenth century, that list of specialists has grown, to include sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians. The scholars multiply diligently, but with little passion. The passion I speak of is the urgent desire for a better world. I will contend that it should overcome those professional rules which call, impossibly and callously, for neutrality.
My argument can be easily exaggerated (by me as well as by others), so let me say now what this book does and does not intend:
1. It does not aim to disengage history from the classical effort to be scientific, but rather to reaffirm the ancient humanist aims of the scientists (before military needs began to command so much of their talent), and to catch up with the new understanding in science about what scientific
means. The physicist Werner Heisenberg put it this way: "Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature.*
2. It does not argue for a uniform approach—mine or anyone’s—to the writing of history, and certainly not for the banning of any kind of historical work, bland or controversial, pernicious or humane, whether written for pleasure or profit or social objectives. Its aim is, by encouragement and example, to stimulate a higher proportion of socially relevant, value-motivated, action-inducing historical work.
3. It certainly does not call for tampering with the facts—by distortion or concealment or invention. My point is not to approach historical data with preconceived answers, but with preconceived questions.** I assume accuracy is a prerequisite, but that history is not praiseworthy for having merely achieved that. Freud once said some people are always polishing their spectacles and never putting them on.
The Politics of History has two kinds of essays. The essays in the first and third sections are about the writing of history. They proceed from a discussion of the uses of knowledge in general to historical consciousness in particular. In them, I try to argue for the notion of the historian as an actor, and this requires discussing many of the problems which fall, professionally speaking, within the philosophy of history.
Is history determined
or are we free to make our own? Can the historian justifiably write as a participant-observer in the social struggles of our time? Does history as an act
lead to distorting the truth? What is the role of causality in history, of explanation? Should we be present-minded
or past-minded
? Analytical or speculative? And what of straight narrative as opposed to theoretical history? What is history for, anyway, and what is the responsibility of the historian? One of these essays suggests some criteria for a radical history.
The middle part of the book—the essays in history—represents an attempt to begin to meet those criteria for a radical history. These essays do not have the usual connective tissue of standard historical works; they do not deal with a specific period, or with all periods, or with one problem of the American past. What ties each to the others is a common purpose—to participate a bit in the social combat of our time. Whether or not the essays actually fulfill this aim, I leave to the reader to judge. I have my own doubts. My chief hope is to provoke more historical writing which is consciously activist on behalf of the kind of world which history has not yet disclosed, but perhaps hinted at.
PART ONE
APPROACHES
1
Knowledge as a form of power
Is it not time that we scholars began to earn our keep in this world? Thanks to a gullible public, we have been honored, flattered, even paid, for producing the largest number of inconsequential studies in the history of civilization: tens of thousands of articles, books, monographs; millions of term papers; enough lectures to deafen the gods. Like politicians, we have thrived on public innocence.
Occasionally, we emerge from the library stacks to sign a petition or deliver a speech, then return to produce even more of inconsequence. We are accustomed to keeping our social commitment extracurricular and our scholarly work safely neutral. We were quick to understand that awe and honor greet those who have flown off into space while people suffer on earth.
If this accusation seems harsh, read the titles of doctoral dissertations published in the past twenty years, and the pages of the leading scholarly journals for the same period, alongside the lists of war dead, the figures on per capita income in Latin America, the autobiography of Malcolm X. We publish while others perish.
The gap between the products of scholarly activity and the needs of a troubled world could be borne with some equanimity so long as the nation seemed to be solving its problems. And for most of our history, this seemed to be the case. We had a race question, but we solved
it: by a war to end slavery, and by papering over the continued degradation of the black population with laws and rhetoric. Wealth was not distributed equitably; but the New Deal, and then war orders, kept that problem under control—or at least, out of sight. There was turmoil in the world, but we were always at the periphery; the European imperial powers did the nasty work while we nibbled at the edges of their empires (except in Latin America where our firm control was disguised by a fatherly sounding Monroe Doctrine, and the pose of a Good Neighbor).
None of those solutions
is working anymore. The Black Power revolt, the festering of the cities beyond our control, the rebellion of students against the Vietnam war and the draft—all indicate that the United States has run out of time, space, and rhetoric. The liberal artifacts which represented our farthest reaches toward reform—the Fourteenth Amendment, New Deal welfare legislation, and the U.N. Charter—are not enough. Revolutionary changes are required in social policy.
The trouble is, we don’t know how to make such a revolution. There is no precedent for it in an advanced industrial society where power and wealth are highly concentrated in government, corporations, and the military, while the rest of us have pieces of that fragmented power which political scientists are pleased to call pluralism.
We have voices, and even votes, but not the means—more crassly, the power—to turn either domestic or foreign policy in completely new directions.
That is why the knowledge industry (the universities, colleges, schools, representing directly fifty billions of the national spending each year) is so important. Knowledge is a form of power. True, force is the most direct form of power, and government has a monopoly of that (as Max Weber once pointed out). But in modern times, when social control rests on the consent of the governed,
force is kept in abeyance for emergencies, and everyday control is exercised by a set of rules, a fabric of values passed on from one generation to another by the priests and the teachers of the society. What we call the rise of democracy in the world means that force is replaced by deception (a blunt way of saying education
) as the chief method for keeping society as it is.
This makes knowledge important, because although it cannot confront force directly, it can counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate. And the knowledge industry, which directly reaches seven million young people in colleges and universities, thus becomes a vital and sensitive locus of power. That power can be used, as traditionally, to maintain the status quo, or (as is being demanded by the student rebels) to change it.
Those who command more obvious forms of power (political control and wealth) try also to commandeer knowledge. Industry entices some of the most agile minds for executive posts in business. Government lures others for more glamorous special jobs: physicists to work on H-bombs; biologists to work on what we might call for want of a better name, the field of communicable disease; chemists to work on nerve gas (like that which killed those six thousand sheep in Utah); political scientists to work on counter-insurgency warfare; historians to sit in a room in the White House and wait for a phone call to let them know when history is being made so they can record it. And sometimes one’s field doesn’t matter. War is interdisciplinary.
Most knowledge is not directly bought, however. It can also serve the purpose of social stability in another way—by being squandered on trivia. Thus, the university becomes a playpen in which the society invites its favored children to play—and gives them toys and prizes, to keep them out of trouble. For instance, we might note an article in the leading journal in political science not long ago, dealing with the effects of Hurricane Betsy on the mayoralty election in New Orleans. Or, a team of social psychologists (armed with a fat government grant) may move right into the ghetto (surely the scholar is getting relevant here) and discover two important facts from its extensive, sophisticated research: that black people in the ghetto are poor; and that they have family difficulties.
I am touching a sensitive nerve in the academy now: Am I trying to obliterate all scholarship except the immediately relevant? No—it is a matter of proportion. The erection of new skyscraper office buildings is not offensive in itself, but it becomes lamentable alongside the continued existence of ghetto slums. It was not wrong for the Association of Asian Studies at its 1969 meeting to discuss some problems of the Ming dynasty and a battery of similar remote topics, but no session of the dozens at the meeting dealt with Vietnam.
Aside from trivial or esoteric inquiry, knowledge is also dissipated on pretentious conceptualizing in the social sciences. A catch-phrase can become a stimulus for endless academic discussion, and for the proliferation of debates which go nowhere into the real world, only round and round in ever smaller circles of scholarly discourse. Schemes and models and systems are invented which have the air of profundity and which advance careers, but hardly anything else.
We should not be surprised then at the volatile demonstrations for black studies programs which began around 1967–68, or for the creation of new student-run courses based on radical critiques of American society. Students demanding relevance in scholarship began to be joined in 1968–69 by professors dissenting at the annual ceremonials called Scholarly Meetings: at the American Philosophical Association a resolution denouncing U. S. policy in Vietnam; at the American Political Science Association a new caucus making radical changes in the program; at the American Historical Association, a successful campaign removing the 1968 meeting from Chicago to protest Mayor Daley’s hooliganism; at the Modern Language Association the election of a young radical English teacher to the presidential succession.
Still we remain troubled, because the new urgency to use our heads for good purposes gets tangled in a cluster of beliefs which are so stuck, fungus-like, to the scholar, that even the most activist of us cannot cleanly extricate ourselves. These beliefs are roughly expressed by the phrases disinterested scholarship … dispassionate learning … objective study … scientific method
—all adding up to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper. And so we mostly remain subservient to the beliefs of the profession although they violate our deepest feelings as human beings, although we suspect that the traditional neutrality of the scholar is a disservice to the very ideals we teach about as history, and a betrayal of the victims of an unneutral world.
It may, therefore, be worthwhile to examine the arguments for disinterested, neutral, scientific, objective
scholarship. If there is to be a revolution in the uses of knowledge to correspond to the revolution in society, it will have to begin by challenging the rules which sustain the wasting of knowledge. Let me cite a number of them, and argue briefly for new approaches.
Rule 1. Carry on disinterested scholarship.
(In one hour’s reading I came across three such exhortations, using just that phrase: in a New Republic essay by Walter Lippmann; in the 1968 Columbia University commencement address of Richard Hofstadter; in an article by Daniel Bell, appearing, ironically, in a magazine called The Public Interest.) The call is naive, because there are powerful interests already at work in the academy, with varying degrees of self-consciousness.
There is the Establishment of political power and corporate wealth, whose interest is that the universities produce people who will fit into existing niches in the social structure rather than try to change the structure. We always knew our educational system socialized
people, but we never worried about this because we assumed our social norms were worth perpetuating. Now, and rightly, we are beginning to doubt this. There is the interest of the educational bureaucracy in maintaining itself: its endowment, its buildings, its positions (both honorific and material), its steady growth along orthodox lines. These larger interests are internalized in the motivations of the scholar: promotion, tenure, higher salaries, prestige—all of which are best secured by innovating in prescribed directions.
All of these interests operate, not through any conspiratorial decision but through the mechanism of a well-oiled system, just as the irrationality of the economic system operates not through any devilish plot but through the mechanism of the profit motive and the market, and as the same kinds of political decisions reproduce themselves in Congress year after year.
No one intends exactly what happens. They just follow the normal rules of the game. Similarly with education; hence the need to challenge these rules which quietly lead the scholar toward trivia, pretentiousness, orotundity, and the production of objects: books, degrees, buildings, research projects, dead knowledge. (Emerson is still right: "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.")
There is no question, then, of a disinterested
community of scholars, only a question about what kinds of interests the scholars will serve. There are fundamental humanistic interests—above any particular class, party, nation, ideology—which I believe we should consciously serve. I assume this is what we mean when we speak (however we act) of fostering certain values
in education.
The university and its scholars (teachers, students, researchers) should unashamedly declare that their interest is in eliminating war, poverty, race and national hatred, governmental restrictions on individual freedom, and in fostering a spirit of cooperation and concern in the generation growing up. They should not serve the interests of particular nations or parties or religions or political dogmas. Ironically, scholars have often served narrow governmental, military, or business interests, and yet withheld support from larger, transcendental values, on the ground that they needed to maintain neutrality.
Rule 2. Be objective. The myth of objectivity
in teaching and scholarship is based on a common confusion. If to be objective is to be scrupulously careful about reporting accurately what one sees, then of course this is laudable. But accuracy is only a prerequisite. That a metalsmith uses reliable measuring instruments is a condition for doing good work, but does not answer the crucial question: will he now forge a sword or a plowshare with his instruments? That the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a plowshare does not require him to distort his measurements. That the scholar has decided he prefers peace to war does not require him to distort his facts.
Too many scholars abjure a starting set of values because they fail to make the proper distinction between an ultimate set of values and the instruments needed to obtain them. The values may well be subjective (derived from human needs); but the instruments must be objective (accurate). Our values should determine the questions we ask in scholarly inquiry, but not the answers.
To be objective
in writing history, for example, is as pointless as trying to draw a map which shows everything—or even samples of everything—on a piece of terrain. No map can show all the elements in that terrain, nor should it, if it is to serve efficiently a present purpose, to take us toward some goal. Therefore, different maps are constructed, depending on the aim of the mapmaker. Each map, including what is essential to its purpose, excluding the irrelevant, can be accused of partiality.
But it is exactly in being partial that it is most true to its particular present job.
A map fails us, not when it is untrue to the abstract universal of total inclusiveness, but when it is untrue to the only realm in which truth has meaning—some present human need, and what we must do to attain it. And so with a historical account. As Kierkegaard put it: Truth exists only as the individual produces it in action.
Rule 3: Stick to your discipline. Specialization has become as absurdly extreme in the educational world as in the medical world. One no longer is a specialist in American Government, but in Congress, or the Presidency, or Pressure Groups: a historian is a colonialist
or an early national period
man. This is natural when education is divorced from the promotion of values. To work on a real problem (like how to eliminate poverty in a nation producing eight hundred billion dollars’ worth of wealth each year), one would have to follow that problem across many disciplinary lines without qualm, dealing with historical materials, economic theories, political obstacles. Specialization ensures that one cannot follow a problem through from start to finish. It ensures the functioning in the academy of the system’s dictum: divide and rule.
Another kind of scholarly segregation serves to keep those in the university from dealing with urgent social problems: that which divorces fact from theory. We learn the ideas of the great philosophers and poets in one part of our educational experience. In the other part, we prepare to take our place in the real occupational world. In political science, for instance, a political theorist discusses transcendental visions of the good society; someone else presents factual descriptions of present governments. But no one deals with both the is and the ought; if they did they would have to deal with how to get from here to there, from the present reality to the poetic vision. Note how little work is done in political science on the tactics of social change. Both student and teacher deal with theory and reality in separate courses; the compartmen-talization safely neutralizes them.
Rule 4. To be scientific
requires neutrality. This is a misconception of how science works, both in fact, and in purpose. Scientists do have values, but they decided on these so long ago that we have forgotten it; they aim to save human life, to extend human control over the environment for the happiness