Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Unless it absolutely has to, no country likes to pay much attention to painful, difficult, embarrassing periods of its own past. Look again at the United States: where in any American museum or public history site can you find much mention of the dozens of U.S. military interventions in Central America or the Caribbean over the twentieth century? Where will you find anything about the war we waged against Philippine independence just over a hundred years ago? Belgium is not alone in ignoring parts of its past.

  Countries only treat the past differently when someone or something forces them to do so. Belgium has not experienced anything comparable to the civil rights movement in the United States or to the large postwar immigration of Africans and West Indians to Britain, events that have forced public history to deal differently with slavery in both those countries. The black population of Belgium is, by comparison, small and politically powerless.

  • • •

  I want to end by talking about one more country that I’ve had some experience with, South Africa, because when it comes to public history, it is one of the most interesting places in the world today.

  You know, I’m sure, the basic history: South Africa was built by a long series of colonial conquests and then, for almost all of the twentieth century, saw the right to vote in national elections and many other rights restricted to the very small percentage of the population who were white. Only since 1994 has the country enjoyed full political democracy, and the new president elected that year, Nelson Mandela, was himself able to vote for the first time in his life. You can easily imagine how the power of the old regime was reflected in school classrooms and in the public history displayed by museums, historic sites, and much else. One tiny reflection of it that always struck me when I traveled there before 1994 was that in a country whose population was more than 85 percent people of color, I don’t think I ever saw, in a town square, park, museum, public building, or anywhere else, a statue of anybody who was not white. This, and much more, has now started to change dramatically.

  Since 1994, there has been an explosion of historical documentary films reckoning with the apartheid years. An Apartheid Museum has opened in Johannesburg. The prison on Robben Island, in the sea off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela and his comrades were jailed for many years, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year. Historic sites elsewhere in the country have been reinterpreted. The list could go on far longer.

  The most spectacular example of new public history I’ve seen in South Africa is in architecture. I’m referring to the building in Johannesburg that houses the country’s Constitutional Court, which has the ultimate authority in interpreting the post-apartheid constitution. The building’s outer and inner walls are largely of glass, so you can see who is walking where and who is going into which office—a visual representation of transparency. The room in which the Court meets is unlike any courtroom I’ve seen anywhere in the world: a bowl-shaped auditorium, which means that the judges of this high court sit below the audience rather than above it. Besides skylights, the room has one long window, which is maybe a hundred feet long and eighteen inches high, and it looks out, level with the ground, at a pedestrian plaza outside. The reason it is constructed that way is because virtually all you can see of the people walking by are their shoes and socks. And, when you see only the bottom twelve or eighteen inches of a person, you usually can’t tell if he or she is rich or poor, black or white. The law applies to everybody equally.

  And where does public history come in? The building is built on the site of one of the most notorious prisons of the old regime, a jail in which Gandhi, Mandela, and thousands of others spent time over the years. And it is built, in part, out of the actual bricks of that prison. To me, that is public history at its best: taking the bricks of the past and using them to build something solid for the future.

  2010

  * * *

  * In Russia it has become still more so. In 2017, Russian police arrested the Memorial activist Yuri Dmitriev on an implausible array of trumped-up charges: pornography, child endangerment, and possesion of illegal firearms. Dmitriev’s real crime was to have identified more than 9,500 victims from many countries buried in a mass grave in 1937 and 1938 northeast of St. Petersburg and to have helped organize an annual international memorial meeting at the site.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Practicing History without a License

  SOMETIMES WHEN I MEET ACADEMIC HISTORIANS, I feel like a plumber who, by accident, has found himself among heart surgeons, for I’ve had no graduate training, in history or anything else. And often people assume that authors like me who write history for the general public and historians inside the academy belong, like plumbers and heart surgeons, to two separate professions. Each has its place, perhaps, but with an unbridgeable gulf between them.

  Writers of history for the public (sometimes called popular historians), the assumption goes, skip over complexities and prefer heroic subjects. Sometimes, like Doris Kearns Goodwin or the late Stephen Ambrose, they get caught borrowing others’ words without attribution. Or sometimes they simply invent details or conversations, as did Edmund Morris in his biography of Ronald Reagan. Academic historians, on the other hand, deal in subtlety and paradox and are meticulously careful, but their writing is often dust-dry and pedantic.

  This assumption about the two cultures of history writing surfaces in odd ways. Sometimes people presume that if a book is lively enough to draw them in, it has to be made up. From time to time I get letters or e-mails telling me how much someone has enjoyed my novel. When I answer, I have to prune out the exclamation marks. “No!!!” I want to say. “There are more than eight hundred source notes! Look at the bibliography! I didn’t invent anything!” Or, the nonspecialist reader assumes that anything written by a professor of history is likely to be deadly dull, and so “academic” becomes a term of opprobrium.

  Not so long ago, all history was written for the general public. The Greeks felt that historical writing should be of a piece with good writing generally, and so they had a muse of history, Clio, who reigned over our field just as her fellow goddesses reigned over the arts of music, tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. Clio is often pictured with a trumpet, so she clearly expected us to broadcast history far and wide. She might blanch at some of today’s monographs, but I think she’d be pleased that there’s more museworthy writing by university historians than by professors in any other academic field. If the Greeks were still inventing muses today, I don’t think they’d have one for economics or linguistics. And they certainly wouldn’t have one for literary criticism, with its talk of tropes and discourses and privileging essentialist paradigms.

  The idea that the historian’s craft includes outreach to a wider audience has lasted over the millennia. In the eighteenth century, David Hume wrote, “The first quality of an historian is to be true and impartial; the next is to be interesting.” The great American historians of the next century, like Francis Parkman and Henry Adams, were certainly writing for an audience far beyond their own fellow scholars, who were few: in 1895, there were only about a hundred full-time history teachers at U.S. colleges and universities. When Thomas Babington Macaulay was writing his History of England, he said he would only be satisfied if, for a few days, it displaced the latest novel from women’s tables.

  It’s only for little more than a century that the United States has seen a parting of the ways between those writing history for the public and those writing for their fellow scholars. This began when the number of historians who could write for each other mushroomed. In history, as in so many other fields that also followed the example of German universities, it was the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth that saw the founding of a professional society (the American Historical Association, or AHA, in 1884), an academic journal (the American Historical Review, in 1895), the growth of the idea that there were certain standards to be followed, and a rapid expan
sion of Ph.D. programs.

  Ever since, we have seen periodic outbursts of concern about the bifurcation of the audience for history. In 1920, concerned by the “general protest of a large portion of the public against the heaviness of style characteristic of much of the history now being written,” the AHA appointed a committee to study the problem. In one chapter of the resulting report, John Spencer Bassett of Smith College asked, “Can writers devoted to research and filled with the scientific spirit be true to their purposes, and at the same time write history that has the charm of literature?”

  In the late 1930s, the historian Allan Nevins (who taught at Columbia but came from the world of journalism) let loose a blast against the academic who writes only for other academics. Such a person, he said, “at long intervals . . . prints an unreadable paper in some learned periodical. He may once in a decade excrete a slender, highly specialized, and . . . quite exhausting monograph. Apart from this his literary production is confined to an occasional spiteful review.” More such fusillades followed, even after Nevins, later in his life, was elected president of the AHA.

  Peter Novick, in his That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, traces a further “inward turn in the profession” in the years after the Second World War. Universities were expanding dramatically because of the GI Bill, foundations were passing out more generous grants, and so historians no longer needed to earn extra money by writing or lecturing for the public. Those who wrote history outside the academy, like William L. Shirer or Barbara Tuchman, were regarded by “most professional historians . . . as the equivalent of chiropractors and naturopaths.” According to Walter Prescott Webb, an AHA president in the 1950s, too many academics believed that “there is something historically naughty about good writing.”

  Another recent salvo in this sniping was fired by Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton who also has written for nonacademic venues, from Salon to Rolling Stone to Bob Dylan’s web site. In the course of an excoriating 2001 New Republic attack on David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, he took aim at many other targets. Among them were the “pleasantly weathered baritone” with which McCullough and others have narrated various TV history shows, the “crushingly sentimental and vacuous” Ken Burns PBS series The Civil War, and PBS itself for staging the “egregious advent of the ‘presidential historian,’ a hitherto unknown scholarly species whose chief function is to offer television viewers anodyne tidbits of historical trivia.” When it came to books, Wilentz blasted “costume-drama Americana,” and biographies like those by McCullough, a “genre of spectatorial appreciation . . . a reliable source of edification and pleasant uplift” filled with “pieties.”

  • • •

  What are we, plumbers and heart surgeons both, to make of all these years of harsh accusations? Unfortunately, some of the charges fired in each direction are true. Whether they are truer now than fifty or sixty years ago I doubt, because the past saw plenty of overspecialized pedantry, on the one hand, and uplifting popular pieties, on the other.

  What are the forces that have so long pushed the two types of history writers in opposite directions? In the academic world, of course, promotions and tenure largely depend on getting published: for articles, that means scholarly journals, and for books, almost always university presses. Knowing that such work is peer reviewed may encourage high standards of care and accuracy but all too often leads to the kind of writing that cites previous scholars of the subject in every other paragraph. After all, you never know: several of them may be among your peer reviewers; heaven forbid that you failed to mention their names. Graduate students in history are often further trained to write—unnecessarily—for a small audience. In choosing a subject for a Ph.D. thesis, for example, they are often encouraged to find a phenomenon, a trend, a group or person that no one has fully examined before. Should that be the only criterion? Why not take up a subject that until now has been dealt with only by specialists writing for each other but whose moral or intellectual significance merits a wider readership—and then write it for that audience? Isn’t that as worthy a challenge as looking at some angle of nineteenth-century tariff reform that no one has studied before?

  “To produce a mighty book,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” Too often, the pressures in the academic world push Ph.D. candidates and other historians towards writing books about fleas rather than whales.

  People writing for the general public face different dangers. To begin with, it’s an extremely difficult way to earn a living. If you want to attract enough readers to pay the rent, you usually have to write narrative history, and to do that you have to bring characters alive. But that often leads to the temptation to go overboard and imply that Abraham Lincoln single-handedly freed the slaves, that Eisenhower alone won the Second World War, or that it was the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson that created the American nation and has guided us beneficently to the present day.

  Similarly, the narrative arc needed to carry a reader through a story also has its fatal seductions, one of which is happy endings. It makes for a much better story if the history of some tyranny describes how after Nazism, South African apartheid, or American slavery came to an end, the surviving victims all saw their lives dramatically improved. But that, of course, is seldom the case. Every system of oppression is tenacious and all too often reorganizes itself into something similarly nasty under a different name. Lawrence Langer has written insightfully about the way many people, including the popular historian Martin Gilbert, are eager to see the testimony of Holocaust survivors as showing “the triumph of the human spirit,” when their words, if listened to carefully, usually tell a much darker story.

  The greatest danger of all in writing history for the general public is a more hidden one: letting popular taste, or publishers’ beliefs about popular taste, determine your subject matter. This can bar the door to worthwhile writing even more firmly than the conventional image of what a Ph.D. thesis should be. Big publishers can be very small-minded. When I was looking for a publisher for my book on the conquest of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, nine out of the ten publishers who received the book proposal turned it down. African history? Belgium? Forget it! Nobody would be interested: why, there isn’t even an African history shelf in most bookstores. If historians wrote for the public only on subjects with a strong record of popular interest, 90 percent of all history books would be about the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, or the Second World War.

  As it is, sometimes it seems that 90 percent of nonacademic history books already are about these Big Three subjects. The interlibrary electronic catalog lists more than fifty-four thousand books on the Civil War, for instance; as Drew Gilpin Faust has pointed out, that’s more than a book a day since Appomattox. The Big Three have long reigned in American popular taste; when Barbara Tuchman first tried to get her book on the Zimmermann Telegram published in 1955, an editor told her that this was the “wrong war”—the public only wanted the Civil War and the Second World War. Looking just now at the selections available on the History Book Club web site, I note a total of 166 volumes on the Big Three subjects, compared to a mere 19 for all of Africa and the Middle East. It makes me want to demand a moratorium on new books about the Big Three.

  But I will make exceptions to my moratorium for books that challenge our traditional picture of these events, such as Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2005), which makes the provocative case that many wavering white Southerners joined the rebel side in the American Revolution because Britain had so enraged them by granting freedom to the slaves of rebel masters. Or Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (2007), with its disturbing revelations of cruel British and American treatment of German POW’s at the end of Second World War, in camps that ma
ke Guantanamo look like a health resort. But except for rare volumes like these, the torrent of books on the Big Three find so many readers mostly because they are reassuring: the Founding Fathers were brilliantly farsighted; the Civil War was tragic, but the country reunited; the good guys of the Greatest Generation won the war against the Nazis. It’s no surprise that our most prolific interpreter of history for the public, the filmmaker Ken Burns, has exhaustively filmed two of the Big Three—all three, in fact, if you count his three-hour documentary on Thomas Jefferson.

  • • •

  If we put aside these pitfalls, both forms of history writing have tremendous merits. The craft of history inside the academy is immeasurably more rigorous, more accurate, and more thoughtful and wide-ranging than it was a century ago. It is no longer a history merely of presidents and kings but of ordinary people, of women, of the dispossessed. It makes use of the tools of statistics, sociology, anthropology, and more. Refereed scholarly journals and university presses have produced an enormous wealth of sophisticated and reliable material that had few equivalents in the nineteenth century.

  At the same time, the writing of history for the general public has become, at its best, more sophisticated and careful as well. And more accurate: as any writer who has been through the process can testify, seeing an article go under the magnifying glass of fact checkers at the New Yorker or at a few other magazines is as potentially humbling an experience as being peer-reviewed by a scholarly journal or university press. We know that if we write, “Marie Antoinette felt gloomy as she woke up on that fateful morning” we’d better be able to show the fact checker a diary entry for October 16, 1793, that says, “feeling gloomy today.”