Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (5 page)

Words are cheap—although they can lead to expensive demands— and politicians like to appear caring and sensitive. Moreover, apologies about the past can be used as an excuse for not doing very much in the present. Australia has been trying to deal with the grim conditions in which much of its Aboriginal population lives (and Aboriginal life expectancy is seventeen years shorter than that of the rest of the population). Part of that attempt rightly involves looking at the past. In 1997 the country’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission issued a report condemning the long-standing practice, which lasted from World War I into the 1970s, of taking Aboriginal children away from their parents to be brought up as “white.” Liberal Australians were horrified, and all the state and territory governments expressed apologies for the “Stolen Generations.” In 1998 a citizens’ committee held the first annual National Sorry Day, and thousands of Australians signed Sorry Books, which were presented to Aboriginal communities. The Commonwealth government, however, remained silent. John Howard, Australia’s prime minister until his defeat in 2007, resisted any suggestion that Australia had anything to apologize for. His successor, Kevin Rudd, brought a motion to the Commonwealth parliament that was unanimously approved. On February 13, 2008, as Aboriginal leaders and other special guests sat in the gallery and Australians all over the country watched on their televisions, Rudd uttered the historic words: “We apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” Yet he carefully avoided the question of compensation and provided few specifics about how the government intends to tackle such problems as illiteracy, drunkenness, child abuse, and unemployment among so many Aboriginal communities. One Aboriginal leader was cynical about the possible impact of Rudd’s
apology: “Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas keep the money.”

In the United States, a particularly contentious issue has been whether or not the government should apologize for slavery. Blacks and whites divide sharply: while most whites do not feel an apology for what was done generations ago is necessary, an overwhelming majority of blacks think there should be an apology, and a slightly smaller majority think the government should pay compensation to the descendants of slaves. Ninety-six percent of whites do not think there should be reparations. In his 2000 book,
The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks
, Randall Robinson, a black activist lawyer, argued that much of the prosperity of white America is built on the proceeds of slavery, and he singles out particular institutions such as Brown University whose founders made their fortune by building slave ships. The putative bill is enormous. Richard America, an economist from Georgetown University, has asserted that black Americans are owed somewhere between $5 trillion and $10 trillion. A number of lawsuits seeking compensation for blacks have been filed against American governments and companies, so far without success.

If we look back too much and tinker with history through apologies, the danger is that we do not pay enough attention to the difficult problems of the present. There is also the danger, as a number of minority leaders have pointed out, that focusing on past grievances can be a trap, as governments and groups avoid dealing with issues facing them now. American blacks can demand apologies for slavery and American governments can offer them, but how does that help the black children who are going to poor schools or the black men who cannot find jobs and dignity? Aboriginal Canadians have been preoccupied for decades by their parallel to the “Stolen Generations,” the practice of putting native children into boarding schools where they were to learn
English or French and become assimilated into “white” society. According to their many critics, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, the residential schools, as they are known in Canada, abused the children in their care, sometimes sexually, and stripped them of their culture. Aboriginal leaders have talked of “cultural genocide,” and a former United Church clergyman has claimed, so far with little solid proof, to have uncovered evidence of murders, illegal medical experiments, and pedophile rings. The Canadian government has offered compensation to each former student and has set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will spend five years gathering information and writing its report. Already the chair of the commission is talking of possible criminal charges. Of course, Canadian society must deal with the charges, but it sadly shows little willingness to expend the same resources on dealing with the ghastly conditions on many reserves today. Leon Wieseltier, the distinguished Jewish-American man of letters, warns that the message minority groups too often get from such a focus on the past is: “Don’t be fooled … there is only repression.” Dwelling on past horrors such as the Holocaust or slavery can leave people without the resources to deal with problems in the here and now.

It is particularly unfortunate that just as history is becoming more important in our public discussions, professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs. The historical profession has turned inward in the last couple of decades, with the result that much historical study today is self-referential. It asks questions about how we, the professional historians, create the past. Which theories do we use or misuse? I remember, while reading applications for graduate school a few years ago, coming across one from what sounded like a bright student who said she wanted to go into a particular field in history because it was “undertheorized.”

Perhaps because historians long to sound like their peers in the sciences or the social sciences, they have increasingly gone in for specialized language and long and complex sentences. Much of the writing is difficult, often needlessly so. Andrew Colin Gow, a historian at the University of Alberta, offers a curious defense of obscurantism. We should not, he said severely, expect historians to be entertaining or to tell interesting stories: “Do we need professional history that entertains us—especially
when public money pays for so much of what we historians do? Do we need physics that entertains us?”

Historians, however, are not scientists, and if they do not make what they are doing intelligible to the public, then others will rush in to fill the void. Political and other leaders too often get away with misusing or abusing history for their own ends because the rest of us do not know enough to challenge them. Already much of the history that the public reads and enjoys is written by amateur historians. Some of it is very good, but much is not. Bad history tells only part of complex stories. It claims knowledge that it could not possibly have, as when, for example, it purports to give the unspoken thoughts of its characters. Sigmund Freud did his own reputation no good when he teamed up with the American diplomat William Bullitt to write a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Freud never met Wilson, never read his intimate diaries, because Wilson did not keep them, yet he talked confidently of Wilson’s obsession with his father and his feelings of failure. Bad history can demand too much of its protagonists, as when it expects them to have had insights or made decisions that they could not possibly have done. Should Europe’s statesmen in 1914 have foreseen the stalemate of the western front when virtually all their generals assured them that the war would be over quickly?

Bad history also makes sweeping generalizations for which there is not adequate evidence and ignores awkward facts that do not fit. It used to be thought, for example, that the Treaty of Versailles, made between the Allies and Germany at the end of World War I, was so foolish and vindictive that it led inevitably to World War II. It was a compelling story, bolstered by the polemics of men such as John Maynard Keynes, but it overlooked a few considerations. Germany
had
lost the war, and its treatment was never as severe as many Germans claimed and many British
and Americans came to believe. Reparations were a burden but never as great as they seemed. Germany paid a fraction of the bill, and when Hitler came to power, he canceled it outright. If Germany in the 1920s had financial problems, it was largely due to the fiscal policies of the German government, which wanted to neither raise taxes nor default on the war bonds that so many of its own middle class held. What is more, things were getting better in the 1920s, not worse. Europe and the world were recovering economically, and Germany and even Soviet Russia were being brought into the international system. Without the Great Depression, which put fearful strains on even the strongest democracies, and without a whole series of bad decisions, including those by respectable German statesmen and generals who thought they could use Hitler once they got him into power, the slide into aggression and then war might not have occurred. Bad history ignores such nuances in favor of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help us to consider the past in all its complexity. The lessons such history teaches are too simple or simply wrong. That is why we need to learn how to evaluate it properly and to treat the claims made in its name with skepticism.

Professional historians ought not to surrender their territory so easily. We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity. We must contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies. Furthermore, historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies. Like it or not, politics matters to our societies and to our lives. We need only ask ourselves how different the world would have been if Hitler and the Nazis had not seized control of one of Europe’s most powerful
states. Or what could have happened to American capitalism and the American people if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not been able, as president, to implement the New Deal.

While it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects as the carnivals in the French Revolution, the image of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, the role of the doughnut in the Canadian psyche (Canadians apparently eat more per capita than anyone else in the world), or the hamburger in American life, we ought not to forget the aspect of history that the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”

Every generation has its own preoccupations and concerns and therefore looks for new things in the past and asks different questions. When I was an undergraduate, our standard texts dealt with political and economic history. There was little social history and certainly no gender history. The first wave of feminism in the late 1960s produced an interest in women’s history. The growth of the gay rights movement brought a corresponding growth in gay and lesbian history. The preoccupations of the baby boom generation with, for example, remaining young and attractive have given rise to such specialized subjects as the history of the body. The disappearance of the European empires and the rise of Asia in economic and political power have produced global history less centered on Europe and North America. That process of researching and writing about the new questions we ask of the past is what makes history change and develop.

Nevertheless, there is an irreducible core to the story of the past, and that is, what happened and in what order? Causality and sequence are crucial to understanding the past. We cannot argue that Napoleon actually won the Battle of Waterloo or that the battle took place before his invasions of Russia or Spain, although we can certainly disagree about why he lost at Waterloo and how
much those earlier decisions of his contributed to his defeat. If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

Historians, especially in the past, have done their share of creating bad and tendentious histories. In the Middle Ages, Christian historians saw the past in terms of the triumph of the universal Catholic Church. When a Renaissance scholar showed that the document which purported to hand on the power of the Roman emperors to the pope was a fake, his work helped to stimulate a fresh look at that assumption. Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”