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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/01
History and How We Use It
Raymond W. Smock *
May 4, 1999
I come to you tonight as an out-of-work historian who was recently fired by the first person with a Ph.D. in history ever to hold the position of Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. My subject is History and How We Use It, and believe me it is a subject that is foremost in my mind as I contemplate how I am going to use it in the months and years ahead.
The history profession, and history itself, are both under considerable scrutiny these days on a number of fronts. There is a major controversy surrounding the development of history standards for schools. The Smithsonian Institution is under fire from veterans groups and others over the proposed exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. The debate over the war in Vietnam has re-ignited in light of the public confession of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the war was a colossal mistake.
Time has not healed the wounds of that war. Many of you here this evening were not yet born or were youngsters when that war ended. But you have inherited the consequences of it. It continues to tear at the fabric of this country in numerous ways. The war in Vietnam contributed mightily to a general disrespect for government. And it has affected the way we write history and the subjects we chose to study.
History is under scrutiny in other quarters too. We seem to have a hard time deciding if it is worth studying, and if it is, what kind of history is most relevant. Is it United States History, Western Civilization, or World History? Or should we instead emphasize various specialized subfields of history such as African American history, the history of women, the history of gays? Some historians, including me, have argued that we need to bring more political history back into a curriculum that has gone heavily toward social history in the past three decades.
If I were a college student in 1995 trying to decide if I wanted to be a history major, or trying to decide what kind of history I wanted to study, I would be confused to say the least. Compound this dilemma with the fact that jobs for historians seem rare and even your lecturer tonight is out of work, and one might wonder why anyone would want to be a history major or pursue a career in history in the first place.
But lest you conclude from these remarks about history or about my particular fate that there is cause for doom and gloom for history and historians, or that somehow I have second thoughts about having become a historian, let me say straight out that nothing could be farther from the truth. The history profession is alive and well. It is needed more now than ever. It is an essential academic discipline. It is a pillar of the humanities. And personally, it is a vital dimension of my life that I couldn’t imagine being without.
All of the topics of history I have mentioned are worthy of pursuit. Don’t be sidetracked by arguments about the worth of one field of inquiry over another. Study history, any kind of history to learn about the past and to learn about our own times. Get a good grounding in historical method and the discovery and use of evidence, the careful weighing of that evidence, the in-depth study that can lead toward wisdom and in the process you will find the magic and the joy that comes from discovering things for yourself rather than accepting blindly what you have been told. This is the mark of an educated person in any field of endeavor.
Thirty years ago my junior college history teacher said the best reason to study history is so you can make sense of the daily newspaper or weekly news magazine. At the time that did not seem like much of a reason to study history. But I have come to see the wisdom of that remark. Every day you are bombarded with historical facts, historical analogies, shorthand phrases and bumper stickers that are designed to shape the way you think about things. These slogans are sometimes ingredients in the public debate over the nature of American culture, characterized as the Culture Wars.
Contemporary politics and religion have formed a volatile mixture that uses a mythical understanding of history in search of the supposedly lost soul of America, which some see residing in an idealized past that never really existed. When people talk of "family values" it is not always clear whose family they are talking about and just when these family values were the mainstream. To determine if this expression has any real meaning other than as a political code word conveying fuzzy assumptions, one must be willing to look into history and face what we see about the nature of the American family or the varieties of American families that existed in the past and that exist today.
In the wake of the tragic bombing in Oklahoma, one member of a secretive private militia unit when interviewed on television said their goal was to "return America to the greatness it once had." There is a phrase pregnant with unexplored history and underdeveloped historical assumptions. What was it that once made America great? How was that greatness lost? Inquiring minds like mine want to know.
In this past Sunday’s Washington Post [April 30, 1995, C1], political writer Thomas B. Edsell linked the Oklahoma bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh’s 27-year life to a time period "in which Americans saw the end of the traditional culture of manhood." When I see such incredible leaps of history and historical assumption, an alarm goes off in my brain. Historical training has taught me to seek out these broad generalizations and overstatements, to scrutinize them, and to try to separate journalistic excess from the small grain of truth that might reside somewhere in the linking of a very contemporary, very unexplored, hitherto unknown life that is cast as a dramatic new symbol of white male protest against some imagined decline in power or some fear that the United Nations is about to take over America.
All too often we get our history lessons not from historians but from politicians, corporate executives, religious leaders, journalists, and professional pundits who use history to gain an advantage, to win an argument, to enlist a following, to make a profit, and for other reasons that have little to do with the sharing of knowledge. Whom we chose to believe among this cacophony of voices determines to some extent how we think and act in our own lives. History is not an abstraction, not just words and pictures in textbooks or in musty old documents, it is not something merely old and irrelevant. It is us and what has happened to us. We cannot afford to allow those with axes to grind, or those who use history that never happened, to be the keepers or purveyors of our national memory.
I have been a historian most of my life, although I only became a "professional" historian when I began my graduate career in history at the University of Maryland in 1966. I was a teaching assistant then, actually earning a small stipend for teaching history while I conducted my graduate studies. Before that I didn’t consciously realize I was a historian, but I was. As a youngster I searched for fossils and arrowheads and saved them in a cigar box. It was my first attempt at historical research. I still have that little stash of artifacts from times long past. Some of those objects I keep on display in my study. They are among my prized possessions. I draw inspiration from them. I have a Clovis point, a large spearhead, perhaps 12,000 years old, that I pick up and hold once in a while to remind me of how brief a time there has been a country called the United States. I have a trilobite fossil from the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana that is perhaps 300 to 400 million years old. I can hold it in my hand, rub my fingers over it, and imagine a time when the place we call Indiana was nothing but a shallow ocean teaming with strange life forms eons before my species set foot on this earth. I was born in Indiana not far from the place where this fossilized life form once lived.
I collected stamps and coins as a kid and arranged them in albums by date, an early lesson in chronology, the organizing principle of history. I knew at a very young age the year when Indian head pennies ceased to be minted and Lincoln cents began even though I was not consciously trying to memorize dates. Astronomy is one of my hobbies and has been since I was eleven years old. What is looking into a starry night if it is not staring into the distant past, collecting light with our eyes and our telescopes that left a galaxy millions or even billions of years ago. Much of what we see in the night sky does not exist any longer except as light rays gathered in a distant time on a distant planet. Who says we are incapable of time travel? Hell, I do it all the time.
I like David McCullough’s observation about the ways we can be parochial. If we stay in one location our whole life and never explore our world we can be parochial in space. We can also be parochial in time, we can limit ourselves to what is immediately in front of us in the present, but if we do, we miss so much. We should not be parochial in time any more than we should in space. There is no excuse for failing to broaden our horizons. The old expression that travel is broadening applies to time as well. I urge you not to be afraid to travel in time, and equally important, don’t be afraid of what you find in history. The only history that can hurt you is the history you don’t know. What you do know about history will make you stronger. Too often we are afraid of our own history and want to wish it away or pretend it never happened, or pretend it happened differently. "To be ignorant of history," Cicero said more than 2,000 years ago, "is to remain always a child."
Much of my professional career was spent as a documentary editor. I worked for fifteen years on the paper of the African American educator and race leader Booker T. Washington. He left a very large collection of documents behind, in excess of a million items, which are housed at the Library of Congress. It took me and my colleagues on the project more than nine years just to read the material. We published a small fraction of the best of those historical records in a 14-volume series. This was total immersion in history. I got to know the people in Booker T. Washington’s world better than I knew most of my own friends and relatives. I was at home in the 1880's and 90's as much as I was in the century I was living in. The first time I visited the cemetery at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, I felt like I knew personally everyone buried there. It was an incredible feeling.
While at work on the Booker T. Washington Papers, I took another of my hobbies, photography, and turned it to history, and also to business. One of my assignments on the Booker T. Washington Project was to do photographic research. I copied photographs, political cartoons, artifacts, and other illustrative material to help flesh out the documentary records we were examining. I processed the images in my own darkroom. This research led to the discovery of a hitherto unpublished collection of photographs at the Library of Congress by one of the first women to take up photojournalism in the United States, Frances Benjamin Johnston. Along with a friend and fellow historian Pete Daniel, I published a book of her photographs.
This habit of copying historical images eventually led to the creation of a business, which I started in 1976. I thought if there were people like me who loved historical images and what they could tell us from history, then maybe there was a market for them among school teachers and college professors who would like to have handy access to well-researched images without the time-consuming work of doing their own photo research. My company produced large scale slide resources in American History, Western Civilization, and World History. Combining some of my hobbies with my interest in history proved to be not only intellectually rewarding but monetarily so. I began to realize that there were more ways to make a living as a historian than I had first imagined.
In 1982, as my work on Booker T. Washington came to a close, and as my historical slide business was running smoothly and profitably, the House of Representatives decided to create a historical office to plan for the 200th anniversary of Congress. Along with about a hundred others I applied for the position of Historian of the United States House of Representatives. This was a new position. The House, despite being a place where history was made every day, had no official historian, no one trained in history to oversee the proper disposition of records, no one to help guide other historians or the public and the press in gaining historical information about this great seat of democracy. The prospect of directing this new enterprise was incredibly exciting.
After a year on the job, I realized how much was happening in my own life and in my own development as a historian that was going unrecorded. I decided to keep a journal. In the evenings, when I wasn’t exhausted from the day’s events, and on weekends, I would force myself to sit down and write something, either some specific thing that was going on at the House of Representatives, or some general observation of what was in the newspapers or in a book I had read. I had no rules in my journal about what I would write about. Often when I sat down to write I did not know until I turned on my computer exactly where my musings would take me. I had no deadlines to meet and no one to please but myself. Before long I was addicted to journal writing. I have kept the journal now for more than eleven years and produced thousands of pages. I see no reason to ever stop writing in it as long as I am able. It has become a regular and necessary part of what I do and how I define myself as a person.
Over the course of keeping this journal I found that I kept coming back to certain themes that intrigued me. It was only upon reflection of my own writings that I realized how much I was impacted by history every day. I found myself fascinated by a growing concept of history that went beyond my profession and beyond my specific academic training. I came to realize how narrowly I had been defining what history really was and how it affected me, my friends, my country, and the world.
I am a lover of books, a person who is in a discipline that demands that I read constantly. I think about this discipline of reading a lot these days because all of us in this room are in the midst of a revolution that may see the demise of the printed book, if not in your lifetime, perhaps in your children’s lifetime. This particular collision with history and culture will change us all, and I worry that not enough of us are thinking about what this means for our civilization, and for the way we think about history. When we start calling printed books "information delivery systems" and assume they are inefficient tools when compared with computers that can hold hundreds or thousands of pages of text in memory, the pressure of the marketplace and the dazzle of the new electronic technology will drive us to get "information" from other sources besides books.
There are going to be great opportunities for you to take up the challenge of what computers can do for the humanities in general and for history in particular. There are vast unanswered questions about what we will give up and what we will gain as we inevitably move from the printed word to electronic communications. People caught up in revolutions seldom can see the contours of change, even while they themselves are making the changes. The computer revolution is just now beginning to impact the humanities.
In his brilliant book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts warns us that computers and the so-called information ages are depriving us of depth in our understanding of things. This is particularly troublesome for a historian or any other seeker after truth and wisdom, who depends on depth of study. Birkerts says we are losing our sense of the "deep and natural connectedness of things" to an electronic world of hypertext, where nothing is connected and yet everything seems to be connected. The search for the natural connectedness of things had as its ultimate goal something called wisdom. Wisdom, Birkerts says, is "the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall of the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms." Birkerts says today Awe don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding. Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-freighted terms C truth, meaning, soul, destiny...We suppose people who use such words are being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken seriously; we inhale the atmosphere of irony."
Go to any computer bulletin board, turn on any talk radio show, listen to any nightly newscast, and see if you receive real depth and understanding from the information you receive. Are you getting enough solid information to qualify you as a seeker after truth and wisdom? See instead if these media are not filled with what Sven Birkerts called the "deflating one-liners" and the sense that "nothing need be taken seriously." See if it isn't the case far too often that you are merely titillated or entertained. The challenge to anyone who claims to be a historian, or anyone who will be a historian in the 21st century, is to see to it that history and the quest for wisdom and truth are not lost completely to the purveyors of trivia or propaganda.
The print media and especially the electronic media of radio, television, and to a growing extent computers, use history to either sell us a product or an idea. The use of history in these cases is much as Sven Birkerts described it, lacking in depth and based on a superficial impression of history. The products sold via history are obvious. Just look at the ads. Car dealers use George Washington’s birthday or Abraham Lincoln’s birthday to give us "Honest" deals that I presume they are not giving us the rest of the year. They apply historical myths about the honesty of these two presidents to sell us things. Other businesses say "Serving the community since 1895," as if time and history make for better, wiser business practices.
Far more important than the use of history in the advertising of products is the use of history to sell us ideas. Politicians use historical fact or historical myth to sell us on a party, a particular candidate, or a particular issue. It is not unlike product advertising but the stakes are higher. Newt Gingrich had a Contract with America, a legislative agenda dreamed up by Republican pollsters that he promised to complete in 100 days. Once he completed it he touted the effort as the greatest achievement since Franklin D. Roosevelts’s famous 100 days at the beginning of his presidency in 1933. Two years ago President Clinton and his advisors also planned a 100 day agenda in an attempt to quickly launch his presidency. Once Clinton had been in office for the required 100 days the pundits and the editorial writers judged the President as if his term of office was over already. Clinton and his advisors had bitten off more than they could chew in 100 days. Today both Clinton and Gingrich are claiming to be the heirs of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most successful and dominant American political figure of the twentieth century. Both the President and the Speaker have staked their claim to the mantle of FDR on a similarity of time, not content or context. We are supposed to judge both these leaders on how quickly they can deliver, and if they achieve goals in 100 days, then they must be Rooseveltian.
It is incredibly superficial for politicians and journalists to take seriously this half baked historical analogy and try to pass it on to the rest of us as if it was real news. There is no depth to it, no context, and no wisdom. In a recent issue of Newsweek [April 10, 1995, 26-30] Thomas Rosenstiel compared Newt Gingrich favorably with Charles DeGaulle and Winston Churchill in an incredible example of ignorance of history, or just plain ignoring history, or writing history before it happens. Any citizen who knows enough history to be able to tell Newt Gingrich from Winston Churchill, or Bill Clinton from Franklin D. Roosevelt, is going to be a better informed citizen and is going to be less likely to fall for political propaganda whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.
In the debates over the Constitution in 1787, the Founders of this nation showed they were fully aware of human nature and how easy it is to fool the public. Some were afraid of allowing too much democracy because the public could easily be duped by "pretended patriots." The answer to this fear, however, came from James Madison and others who concluded that some trust must be placed in the collective wisdom of the people and the only way to prevent people from being fooled was to make sure they had the necessary information to make reasonable decisions about public affairs. As Madison later said: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
Madison was not thinking of newsmagazines, television, or talk radio, but the lesson of what he said applies with great force to our current situation, where we are bombarded with an incredible mixture of truth, fiction, half-truth, lies, fact, misinformation, and myth, all designed to enlist us in a particular way of thinking. Some people throw up their hands at this complexity, run off into the woods, and arm themselves with ignorance and AK-47 assault rifles while feeding on propaganda, hatred, and fear. But most of us, I hope, will choose to arm ourselves with knowledge, as Madison suggested, and train ourselves in compassion and tolerance rather than military tactics. One of the history lessons of the Bible is that we reap what we sow. If we sow ignorance, hatred, and violence, we will reap it. If we sow knowledge, understanding and compassion, we will reap that. Which world do you want? If I were Ross Perot, I would say "Listen up folks, it’s that simple." But I am not Ross Perot. It is not that simple and never has been. But the question is: Which road shall we travel?
History is used by policy makers too, whether they are advised by historians or not. Policy makers are busy people. They do not have time for reflection or for the depth of study and the contemplative life of a professional historian. They hastily read memos in limousines on the way to the White House to advise the President. They haven’t got time to run over to the Library of Congress and do a little research. It would be foolish for me to suggest that the President, his cabinet, and the leaders of the House and Senate all go to Harvard to take the course there pioneered by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt on the uses of history for those who make important decisions that affect our lives. It would be nice however, to think some of these leaders would have time to read Neustadt and May’s book Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision Makers.
Too often real history is condensed and converted into simple slogans that are supposed to convey the weight and meaning of history. In 1938 the Prime Minister of Great Britain Neville Chamberlain, in a diplomatic attempt to appease the German dictator Adolf Hitler, signed the Munich Pact, which gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Chamberlain hailed the agreement as "peace in our time," but six months later German troops took all of Czechoslovakia. Every military planner and top decision maker in this country since has turned that historical event into shorthand for not appeasing dictators. The single word "Munich" is enough to cause decision makers to act to avoid any appearance of appeasing an enemy.
Sometimes these historical analogies work, and sometimes they lead us to disaster. Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense, reveals in his book that he had operated on a couple of historical assumptions and analogies that led us down the path to war in Vietnam. He believed in President Eisenhower’s domino theory of history. Eisenhower had said that to lose Southeast Asia to the communists would lead to the falling dominos that would cause the rest of the region to end up under communist rule. McNamara believed the Munich analogy, that it would be disastrous to appease enemies. He also failed to understand the historical role of North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, whom McNamara assumed to be nothing but a puppet of the Chinese communists instead of a genuine leader of his own nation who had many disagreements with the Chinese. After more than a decade of war and the loss of more than 58,000 American lives and the lives of millions of Vietnamese, we finally pulled the plug on Vietnam. More than twenty years after our withdrawal, the former Secretary of Defense is now willing to say it was a tragic mistake and a complete misreading of history. As journalist Robert Scheer said recently on the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour "we blundered into another people’s history."
The use of history I prefer is to try to derive wisdom and understanding of what happened from historical documents and other evidence. We do this for many reasons, not the least of which is good old fashioned curiosity to know what happened and how it happened. But we use history also to act as responsible citizens. We study history and use its lessons in the hope that we won’t be duped by "pretended patriots" as the Founders called them. Who will be able to separate the truly useful and valuable information from the trivia, the misinformation, the lies and distortions, the false analogies? These will all be a part of our future and a part of the information superhighway, just as they have been a part of earlier times and earlier modes of communication.
History is a tool for finding wisdom in a world that sorely needs more wise people and less ignorant ones. In a recent article in the New York Times [March 1, 1995, A19], Bob Herbert reported that a new poll shows that 60 percent of Americans were unable to name the President who ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, and 35 percent did not know that the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Herbert concluded that, "In an era in which the ability to acquire and properly process information has become profoundly important, America insists on being, to a large extent, a nation of nitwits." He said he talked to a woman who "just made the astonishing discovery that Gerald R. Ford was once President of the United States."
These polls are useful and they can reveal important trends, even though I take most of them with a grain of salt. But here is an indisputable actuarial fact that is far more significant and has far greater urgency than the latest poll on American historical ignorance. One hundred years from now every person in this room and every person on this planet will be dead and gone, and with all of us will go an entire planetary memory and history which will have to be replaced and learned all over again by our successors. History is not permanent, it is ever changing. It is fragile. It is easily lost. It is too easily forgotten. It needs constant attention. There is much to be done.
If you think all the interesting subjects have been explored and that we know all the answers, then you are mistaken. We must constantly revisit history. Even things we think we already know, we don’t really know. This is the beauty of history. It is, after all, an art form and not a science. It can always be made fresh in the hands of a good story teller. For example, all Americans know the story of Paul Revere and his famous ride through Boston shouting, "The British are coming! The British are coming!" Well, stop for a minute and think about that. What could be more ludicrous than shouting to British citizens that the British were coming! What he really said was "The Regulars are coming out! The Regulars are coming out!" You can read the real story of Paul Revere’s contributions to American history in a marvelous new book by David Hackett Fisher, Paul Revere’s Ride. The author was drawn to this topic because for "two centuries no scholar has published a full-scale history of Paul Revere’s ride." It has been the stuff of legend. Fischer puts Revere back into historical context, makes him a three-dimensional person rather than a cardboard hero, and in the process tells a good story and imparts a lot of understanding about an event we all thought we already knew about. The shouts of "the British are coming" are words put into his mouth by subsequent generations of Americans who had to change what he said to have it make sense to a generation who saw themselves as Americans, not as British colonists.
More important for us tonight, the example of Paul Revere says volumes about how we use or do not use history. David Fischer wrote in his introduction that the reasons for the neglect of such a familiar character as Paul Revere are complex but part of it is the "mutual antipathy that has long existed between professional history and popular memory." In the past twenty years or so, Fischer says, the reasons for neglecting someone like Revere rests in the Abroad prejudice in American universities against patriotic events of every kind, especially since the troubled years of Vietnam and Watergate." And finally he blames multiculturalism and political correctness for part of the problem when he wrote "the only creature less fashionable in academe than the ‘dead white male,’ is a dead white male on horseback." I am not suggesting you all run out and study dead white males, but like David Fischer, I would argue that they can be a neglected part of history too.
In conclusion, my advice to you this evening on the merits of studying history and the uses to which history is put boils down to a general observation rather than a specific formula for success. History’s range is incredibly broad and diverse. It is the original interdisciplinary field of inquiry, encompassing politics, philosophy, religion, archaeology, sociology, journalism, biography, and, when it is well done, it is good literature.
Whether you are preparing for a career in academic history (any field, any time period you choose), whether you imagine yourself as a teacher, a public historian working for the government or for a business, a librarian, an archivist, an understanding of history is going to serve you well. It offers the ability to judge and weigh evidence. It provides a context which helps us decide on the importance of things. It helps separate fact from legend, myth or propaganda. It frees us from the parochialism of our own time. And, finally, in a rapidly changing world, history can be a gyroscope that helps us keep our balance so we can best explore our planet, our culture, our politics, the lives of those who have preceded us, and, of course, our very own lives.
Endnotes
Note *: Raymond W. Smock, Historian of the United States House of Representatives until 1995, is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago and holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. He was appointed to the position of House Historian in 1983 by the Speaker of the House on recommendation of a bipartisan committee of House members which conducted a national search for the first historian in the history of the House. In his capacity as House Historian he helped plan national commemorations of the United States Constitution, the bicentennial of Congress, and the 50th anniversary of World War II. He served on the editorial board and was a contributor to the 4-volume "Encyclopedia of the United States Congress", published in 1995 by Simon and Shuster. He was co-editor of the 14-volume documentary series "The Booker T. Washington Papers", co-author of "A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston", 1899-1910 (1974), co-editor of "A Guide to Manuscripts in the Presidential Libraries" (1985), and editor of "Booker T. Washington In Perspective, The Essays of Louis R. Harlan" (1989). He is author of "Landmark Documents on the U.S. Congress" (1998). Mr. Smock was a lecturer and research associate at the University of Maryland for more than ten years. In 1976 he founded an audio-visual company, Instructional Resources Corporation, which marketed large-scale historical slide collections in American history, Western civilization, and world history. He served as president of that company from 1976 to 1983. Dr. Smock delivered the following address as the John C. Pflaum Lecturer on May 4, 1995 at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Back.
