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 (without ignoring the counter-evidence, it is important to add). In the debate between Arnold Toynbee (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.