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