IS THERE AN IDEA IN THIS HARANGUE?
The Historian Glut
by Russell Baker, NY Times Op Ed, April 9, 1994
"History is constantly being revised these days. It's because there is
a glut of historians. Revising history is the only way to keep them busy.
The historian glut results from the Government's Vietnam War policy of
granting draft deferments for staying in college. Young men who would happily
have left the campus and gone into honest work were naturally tempted to stay
on, and on, and on.
This required them to study something. They studied history. What do
you study, after all, when you face a long sentence to college, but lack a
head for science or mathematics, go to sleep the instant somebody says
'economics,' aren't built for professional sports, were never any good at
Latin or French, and find out they aren't giving Ph.D.'s for daydreaming?
You study history.
Sure, first you think you'll study literature. It would be swell, you
think, to sit around sewing leather elbow patches on your tweeds and reading
Spenserian sonnets, metaphysical poets, Alexandrine couplets. It sounds
perfect. Imagine wowing the engineering students by casually tossing off
phrases from Milton. '... in Heaven yclept Euphrosyne ...' '... filled her
with thee, a goddess fair, so buxom, blithe and debonair ...'
Sounds perfect, but why do you fall into deep coma three minutes after
plunging into the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Because literature is not vital, that's why. Not vital for a turbulent
age like that age that is forcing you to stay in college forever when, given
your druthers, you'd like to be out in the great national hurly-burly, working
as an honest shoemaker, or driving a cab, and meeting such fascinating people,
or ...
Well, not vital in a violent age. History is to blame for your fate.
You are a victim of history. It's only natural that having got literature out
of your system you will, first, want to study history and then, take your
revenge on history.
Somebody has to pay for the mess history has made of life. Why not take
it out on the historians who wrote it, show they were all wrong about
practically everything and, if they hadn't been, the world wouldn't be in the
mess it's in today.
Ordinarily a country manages to get by with 10 or 12 historians per
generation. With the historian explosion created by Vietnam, however,
thousands were suddenly coming down the pipeline.
How could they be kept busy? Newspaper editors could print only a
limited number of letters correcting foolish reporters' errors about Benedict
Arnold and Mary, Queen of Scots. With the Vietnam War over, students no longer
needed to study history; college therefore no longer needed history professors
in boxcar lots. The obvious solution for excess historians: revising the
history they had been taught.
Now they are going at it with gusto. No reputation is safe anymore.
Not even Adolf Hitler's. Scarcely a day passes now without some re-
examination of the past announcing that Hitler wasn't such a bad chap after
all. That he probably didn't even know people were being exterminated, poor
misunderstood guy.
Mussolini's reputation is bound to be revised upward now that the
revival of Fascist politics in Italy invites the attention of historians
desperate for something to revise.
Thomas Jefferson has been revised so far down that I recently read a
newspaper columnist--a newspaper columnist!--asserting her own moral
superiority to him. Even the once-sainted Abraham Lincoln can no longer be
spoken of admiringly without issuance of the prefatory apology.
"I realize of course that he was racist."
The trend in history, they say, is to dwell on the social developments
of the past, a sort of how-they-lived story of humanity's miserable passage up
the geologic clock. This of course revises the old idea of what history is.
Historians like Macaulay, Trevelyan and Prescott made history an entertaining
romp down the years starring characters of the sort who fascinated people in
the movies.
History is always bound to be wrong, of course, including the revised
versions. This being so, who would give up Prescott's Hernando Cortez, that
Spanish Errol Flynn swashbuckler, for the modern historian's study of the diet
of roof thatchers in 1750?