Clio among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities

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CLIO AMONG THE MUSES

Clio among the Muses

Essays on History and the Humanities

Peter Charles Hoffer

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2014 Peter Charles Hoffer

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoffer, Peter Charles, 1944–

Clio among the muses: essays on history and the humanities / Peter Charles Hoffer.

pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-3283-5 (hardback)

1. History —Methodology. 2. Historiography. 3. History —Philosophy.

4. Humanities. I. Title.

D16.H686 2013

907.2 —dc23 2013027458

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: The Problem with History

1. History and Religion

2. History and Philosophy

3. History and the Social Sciences

4. History and Literature

5. History and Biography

6. History and Policy Studies

7. History and the Law

Conclusion: An Answer?

Notes

A Very Short Bibliography (with Annotations)

Index

About the Author

PREFACE

In beginning our history proper, it might perhaps be wise to forget all that we have said before and start fresh, as a lot of new things have come up.

ROBERT BENCHLEY, 1944

The humorist, essayist, and pseudo-documentary movie maker Robert Benchley had a rare gift for parody. One of his targets was the academic know-it-all who learns everything from books. For example, in order to write about snake-charming, one has to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find out about history but to a book. Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on snake-charming. Nobody could point the finger of scorn at me if I went over to those books for the avowed purpose of research work.

Benchley put his finger on exactly what historians do when they write about other historians (a subject inelegantly called historiography). They go over to that pile of books, sort and read, compile genealogies of ideas and methods, and make judgments, and another book goes on top of the pile. Historians (if not, alas, their readers) find the study of the discipline of history endlessly fascinating. For at the center of the study of the past is a compelling paradox: We demand to know about the past but can never be sure we have gotten our account right. We would love to go back in time (all historians are secret re-enactors), but we cannot go back, and even if we could, how could we see all the events from all the perspectives that the past offers? History is Odysseus’ Sirens calling us to a place that we cannot reach, yet we persist in listening. The Sirens’ call is so enchanting—writing history is an act of such artistry—who can blame historians for spending a lifetime of research and writing at their command?

In a 1998 essay for the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, the historian Peter N. Stearns listed the benefits of studying history: History helps us understand change, provides clues to our own identity, and hones our moral sense. But history is not a standalone discipline. Indeed, it stands on the shoulders of its companions in the humanities and social sciences. In the following pages’ brief span, I assay history’s complicated partnership with its coordinate disciplines of religion, philosophy, social science, literature, biography, policy studies, and law. These are Clio’s modern sister disciplines, comparable to the eight other muses who accompanied Clio in the ancient world. That companionship, sometimes immensely rewarding, sometimes testy and rancorous, adds to the authority and humanity of chronicle, but history is not just the accumulation of other disciplines’ knowledge. More than the sum of these collaborations, the study of history is something unique, ennobling, and necessary. One can live without religion, philosophy, and the rest. One cannot exist without history. But I do not want to give away here what should be earned by reading the following pages.

I wish to acknowledge those kind people who have assisted me in this Herculean task (which I liken to wrestling Antaeus): Clive Priddle and Michael McGandy for their help in my attempts to grapple with the meaning and method of history; Peter Onuf and Claire Potter, whose readings of an earlier essay taught me how to get a hold on key themes; and Richard Bernstein, William Cronon, Paul Finkelman, Michael Gagnon, John T. Juricek, Stanley Katz, Allan Kulikoff, Maureen Nutting, Thomas Whigham, and Michael Winship, whose combined intellectual weight added to my own effort enabled me to pin down the subject. Michael Zuckerman’s refereeing of the manuscript was overly kind, his pages of admonitions and emendations invariably fair. My wife and scholarly partner, N. E. H. Hull, and my older son, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, have read bits and pieces of this project over a course of years and cheered me on. At New York University Press, editor Debbie Gershenowitz urged me to submit the manuscript; and her successor editor, Clara Platter, guided it through the Press Board approval process and then offered a remarkably kind pre-edit. No wrestling match with an opponent as experienced and wily as history will ever result in a complete victory, but to all of the kind people who shared this contest with me, my heartfelt thank you.

Introduction

The Problem with History

It is said that Clio cannot be taken by storm, but requires much patient and skillful Wooing. Moreover, Clio likes a certain degree of self-effacement in her suitors.

CHARLES DOWNER HAZEN,

This Country as Mr. Chesterton Sees It,

New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1919

Clio, paramount among the nine ancient Greek muses, was gifted by her mother with memory and shared lyric skills with her eight sisters. She inspired those who assayed to sing, tell, and write stories of the past. Ancient audiences held the followers of Clio in high regard, for they captured the imagination of the listener and reader. For Hellenes gathered around the fire pit to hear Homer sing about Troy, or Hellenized Romans who delighted in reading their copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, or the monks in the English abbeys who squinted in the candlelight as they re-read older chronicles of the lives of Saxon saints and kings, or the thousands of nineteenth-century middle-class families that gathered in gaslit parlors to devour the tales of heroism in Francis Parkman’s volumes, history enchanted and instructed, just as Clio wished. The Greeks defeated the Trojans; Caesar failed where Alexander the Great succeeded; Alfred the Great unified Anglo-Saxon England; and the British chased the French and their Indian allies from North America for reasons that historians’ listeners and readers thought worth knowing. In the nineteenth century, no educated person in the West doubted that history was assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages.¹

The university-trained historians of the late nineteenth century echoed this creed as they lobbied for required history courses in the schools alongside the sciences.

If it is desirable that the high-school pupil should know the physical world, that he should know the habits of ants and bees, the laws of floral growth, the simple reactions in the chemical retort, it is certainly even more desirable that he should be led to see the steps in the development of the human race, and should have some dim perception of his own place, and of his country’s place, in the great movements of men. … All our institutions, our habits of thought and modes of action, are inheritances from preceding ages: no conscious advance, no worthy reform, can be secured without both a knowledge of the present and an appreciation of how forces have worked in the social and political organization of former times.

Historians and teachers of history wanted everyone to be able to judge history and assumed the value of such judgment. In a best practices piece for the American Historical Association (AHA), Peter Stearns warned, In the past[,] history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept, but taught well, history still had the power to delight, instruct, and empower.²

Sadly, Clio’s enticements faded as war and genocide in the twentieth century turned history into a horror story. The ease with which cynical and maniacal political leaders and their ideological abetters used history to justify their policies of conquest and annihilation drove Clio from her pedestal. In the bloodbath of European fighting in the First World War and the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the present threat to environmental resources, who could trust the old ideas of beauty, progress, reason, and education the histories once proclaimed? There was too much history for us to bear. For as long as we can discern, the past has loomed ominously above the lives of men, threatening, demanding, and hinting at cataclysm. … Its dark firmament has glittered with examples, a few benevolent, most doom laden. Embedded in this mass of belief, which fulfilled, as we shall see, diverse and necessary social purposes, were bits and pieces of truth. Historians were shaken; their faith that they could understand by a simple process of induction the forces that shaped the past now seemed dangerously naïve.³

Weary and wary academics now warn that the student of history will suffer bitter disappointment if he or she seeks guidance from history. A bestselling textbook in philosophy of history issued the following warning: Historians are not the guardians of universal values, nor can they deliver ‘the verdict of history.’ A popular history of historical writing summed up this judgment: [A]lways handle history with care. Even defenses of the historical profession today begin with a mea culpa: We professors, as American Historical Association President Anthony Grafton ruefully recounted the barrage of charges against history, are imprisoned within sclerotic disciplines, obsessed with highly specialized research. We can’t write except in meaningless jargon, and we address only esoteric students, thus insuring that we have no audience. Not surprising, then, that Keith Jenkins, the enfant terrible of philosophy of history, found the search for the truth in history an unachievable goal, misleading at best, for the truths of the past elude us. … [H]istory is intersubjective and ideologically positioned, objectivity and being unbiased are chimeras. This much is certain—truths that once seemed within our reach are now beyond our grasp.⁴

The pervasive disenchantment of the academics echoed popular perceptions of the futility of historical study. Entertaining though it might be, it was still the bunk, lie, and one damn thing after another. What the popular mind especially rejected was the uniqueness and authority of historical study. A popular essay on the meaning of the past at the end of the twentieth century by a nonhistorian, Francis Fukuyama, reduced history to a Swiss Army knife whose many attachments one can manipulate to fit any need, useful because they are so conveniently manipulated. Forget the claims of the professional historian to objectivity. Just as a modern economist does not try to define a product’s ‘utility’ or ‘value’ in itself, but rather accepts the marketplace’s valuation of it as expressed in a price, so one would accept the judgment of the marketplace of world history. In that process, we can think of human history as a dialogue or competition between different regimes or forms of social organization. In other words, we could buy and sell histories—the perfect fit for a consumer-driven intellectual market-place—with the result that some academic historians have morphed into consulting editors and staff writers for mass-market magazines.⁵

The distrust of the academic historians and their work product exploded in the last years of the twentieth century, when the National Endowment for the Humanities underwrote a study of history lesson plans for secondary schools. At the head of the project was a professor of history at UCLA, and other academics sat on various drafting committees. Finished and published in 1994, the National History Standards draft curriculum for K–12 seemed to be a little short on heroes and far too long on slavery, violence, and other blemishes in American history. Conservative critics of the suggested student achievement examples were appalled. Lynne Cheney, who as chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities during President George H.W. Bush’s administration had sponsored the project, later recalled that the National History Standards reflected the gloomy, politically driven revisionism that had become all too familiar on college campuses. George Washington, U. S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee were gone, replaced by women of color, labor radicals, and other minor figures. Enduring values were gone too; only oppression remained. On October 20, 1994, Cheney’s op-ed piece The End of History graced the back pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, she ridiculed the project for elevating the National Organization for Women, the Sierra Club, and Harriet Tubman in importance above the Constitution, the U.S. Congress, and the Civil War. The result was a grim and gloomy account of America that could give comfort to only the politically correct (as if the Revolution and the Civil War did not have some grim and gloomy moments).⁶

Repeating Henry Ford’s infamous dismissal of all history, then-Congressman Newt Gingrich aimed his fire at the professional historians: [T]he fiasco over the American and Western history standards is a reflection of what has happened to the world of academic history. The profession and the American Historical Association are now dominated by younger historians with a familiar agenda: Take the west down a peg, romanticize ‘the Other’ (non-whites), treat all cultures as equal, refrain from criticizing non-white cultures. The National History Standards was condemned in a 99–1 U.S. Senate vote.⁷

The chair of the drafting committee, UCLA history professor Gary Nash, defended the document and the process by which it had been created. He later recalled, Those who were at first reluctant about the wisdom of this enterprise soon decided that they might compromise their own best interests if they failed to join in. If the cards were being dealt, why would historians or social studies educators not want seats around the big table? The process was long and arduous but uplifting. Never in the long history of public education, reaching back more than three hundred years, had such an attempt been made to raise the level of history education. Never before had such a broad-based group of history educators from all parts of the country gathered to work collaboratively on such an enterprise. The History Standards Project represented the building of bridges between two groups of largely separated educators. These bridges may even outlast the standards themselves. But the controversy was not really about the standards. It was about the uses of history. The history standards controversy laid bare competing meanings of patriotism and the question of how to inculcate the ideal of citizenship in young students. For the Cheney-led cohort, children who learn about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism will not learn to love their country. It will embarrass and make cynics of them. For historians, the approach favored by critics is sugar-coated history that will make cynics of children because they will grow up to find that the bland or celebratory history books have excluded or misrepresented the realities of past life.⁸

Nash was waging an uphill battle, not only against those who disputed his expertise and the cachet that expertise supposedly brought but also against those who saw in history proof of our inability to know the past with certainty. We yearn for the comforting past, for as the celebrated literary critic Frank Kermode wrote shortly before he passed away, [W] e project our existential anxieties on to history. It was for this very reason that during the bitter partisan contests of the 1820s, the surviving founding fathers feared that Americans would forget the sacrifices of previous generations. Shortly before he died, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his longtime friend James Madison, It has also been a great solace to me to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued. … [T]ake care of me when [I am] dead. Our political leaders still want to get right with history, particularly when the verdict of history is uncertain. At his farewell press conference on January 11, 2009, outgoing President George W. Bush expressed the hope that History will be the judge. … History will look back and determine whether he had failed in his trust or left the world a better, safer place than he had found it. President Bush compared himself to Lincoln, two wartime presidents burdened with history. So the problem facing the student of history is how to woo Clio, how to sustain an arguable case that the historians’ methods for knowing about the past are as valid as any other way of knowing about the past. As my first history teacher, Hayden White, wrote in 1966, [T]he burden of the historian in our time is to reestablish the dignity of historical studies.⁹

As this very brief tour of the problem with history reveals, history has a history, a changing cast of chroniclers working in a varied collection of institutions, sharing a vital concern about the meaning of the past. Along the way, the doing of history has evolved in a convoluted fashion from storytelling and soothsaying to its recognizable modern form. Although popular historians and academic historians may not always use the same methods, they share a place in the history of history with religious writers, philosophers, social scientists, men and women of letters, biographers, policy makers, and lawgivers who use history. It is this story—the story of history and its related disciplines—that I want to tell here.

It may seem, as one reads the following pages, that my project resembles Stephen Leacock’s impetuous nobleman who flings himself upon his horse and rides madly off in all directions, but there is a method to the organization of this book. While the outer frame—the seven chapters—is topical, the order of the topics reflects the chronological order of history’s encounter with each chapter’s subject matter. History and religion were born together. Philosophy made its claim on history in the classical period of Western civilization. In the seventeenth century, the introduction of the social sciences added another member to Clio’s modern family. The eighteenth century imposed literary canons on the historian. The next century’s celebration of the great man drew biography and history together. The twentieth century’s near-fatal fascination with war gave rise to historically infused policy studies. In the closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first century, the explosion of historical consulting and expert witnessing in law cases made history and law close collaborators.¹⁰

Not only are the chapters arrayed in chronological order, within each chapter my account is roughly chronological. Each chapter thus stands on its own, a story of collaboration and rivalry, of cross-fertilization and competition, like the story of any family. Though they sometimes squabble, Clio and her companions are inseparable. On the foundation of this comparative approach, we can see the particular strengths of the historical way of knowing and determine if, in the final analysis, the entire enterprise of historical scholarship is