Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 2

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Welcome back to my discussion on what history is and what it is not.  I suppose I ought to once again define my terms.  History is everything that came before now; it is the sum of all the moments that came before this one.  The study of history, which unless I specify otherwise is what I mean in this article, is something a bit more specific. 

The study of history is the attempt to create a narrative which approximates as closely as possible the experience of living those moments.  Experience is a loose term, but it requires that someone be around to live those moments.  It's also really helpful (though not always necessary) for them to write down their experience.

But it's impossible to fully recreate the experience of whole peoples, eras, civilizations, societies, et cetera.  It's impossible to even adequately summarize a single life -- even if you were to fill a library with dense volumes. 

Winston as a boy

Think about William Manchester's remarkable biography of the life of Winston Churchill.  At three volumes, each spanning nearly a thousand pages (or more), the biography seems incontrovertible.  A life read about in (let's assume) twenty hours, however, is hardly an adequate approximation of a life which spanned 90 years.  Sufficient, perhaps, but still inadequate. 

Volumes of this size also hide the vast repository of material from which each volume is gleaned.  Personal letters, official correspondence, personal recollections, government papers, diaries, journals, ledgers, tax reports, a myriad of sources are concealed by the authoritative presentation of those three volumes.

And that brings me around to a few short remarks about what a historian actually does.  When I tell people about the research I'm helping my professor do, I usually explain that the historian crafts a narrative from sources.  The comment I get back is, "So you make stuff up."

No, because a historian is beholden to the sources.  Let's look at something I'm researching as an example.  A public figure like President Eisenhower has his day minutely scheduled and it seems easy to trace this historical narrative.  On January 7, 1954, he delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress, in which he explained for the first time the New Look of the American military.  It emphasized a reliance on nuclear weapons to offset the austerity-level defense budget he advocated.  Notably (though not many people took much note) it articulated "massive retaliation" for the first time. 

The Library of Congress

Though he advocated that the United States was stronger with allies than standing alone, President Eisenhower admitted that "while determined to use atomic power to serve the usages of peace, we take into full account our great and growing number of nuclear weapons and the most effective means of using them against an aggressor if they are needed to preserve our freedom."  Importantly, though the United States would refrain from aggression, "we and our allies have and will maintain a massive capability to strike back" [emphasis my own].  (Take a look at the whole thing here.)

Historically, however, we attribute massive retaliation to John Foster Dulles, who was much more belligerent in a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954.  You could (and historians have) make the argument that Dulles's belligerence informed President Eisenhower's later statements; that it was a case of the Secretary of State's tail wagging the President's foreign policy dog.  (Wow, that was a tortured metaphor.)

You can figure this one out.

This debate is entirely academic.  Who articulated massive retaliation first (and I've seen it attributed to others in the Republican Party as far back as 1951) matters if we want to understand where it originate, how it changed, and how the idea influenced Americans -- from the general public to policy makers.  More broadly, it helps vindicate Eisenhower, who was criticized for seeming to golf the presidency away; instead, it reinforces a picture of a man deftly manipulating the levers of state.

When historians are not true to their sources, however, the picture shifts and the events as they occurred are misrepresented.  Misrepresentation leads to being misunderstood, and the value of historical research is cheapened.

A historian must be true to his sources. 

With that said, tomorrow we'll finally get around to talking about plagiarism and the "Imbroglio Ambrose."*

*How the Ambrose Story Developed