EDWARD PESSEN

Some Timeless Standards for the Modern Historian

Historical scholarship in the United States is

in a state of crisis. Perhaps it always is, since those who write history are invariably up to no good in one way or another. Given the deficiencies of the evidence and the limitations of historians, the question is not whether their work will be marred by imperfections but rather what form the imperfections will take. The presence of weaknesses does not a crisis make, however, unless the weaknesses are serious enough, if persisted in, to pose an obstacle to the performance and recognition of good work in the future. Recent lapses in the judgment, the methods, and the language of historians appear to be of that order of significance that can be said to constitute a crisis.

As a child of our relativistic era, I am quite aware that the crisis I perceive testifies more surely to my own state of mind than to any objective reality. I proceed nevertheless to my brief examination of disquieting tendencies in historical thought, fortified by my awareness that subjective observers are sometimes capable of accurate perceptions and, if more rarely, useful judgments.

1975 by Edward Pessen

This is the second in Prologue's series "A Historian's Perspective," essays by America's distinguished historians on the nature and purpose of historical research and writing.

In Praise of Clear Writing. One of the evils of the day is the impenetrable writing style of a number of influential historians- if pages filled with tables, graphs, and equations can be said to possess a writing style. I am referring not to the artless form of communication unavoidably used by those incapable of anything better but to the manner adopted by historians who are unusually gifted. Evidently convinced that history is a social science and that scientists are concerned only with the substance, not the form, of their communication, some practitioners of the "new histories" of our era appear to delight in using a language incomprehensible not only to students and general readers but to most of their fellow scholars as well. Perhaps part of the blame for this aberration can be laid at the door of the original "New History," ca. 1912, which in the language of James Harvey Robinson advised the historian that his task was "essentially different from that of the man of letters."1 For whatever the reason, some of the most important research of our time has been reported to us not in English but in gibberish.

Some devotees of computers and quantitative methods appear to regard the well written 1 James Harvey Robinson, The New History (New York, 1912), p. 52.

sentence as faintly belletristic if not hopelessly outmoded. In a recent book review, one of the bold new men chides the author for concentrating on "well phrased descriptions of events" rather than the "systematic comparisons and analysis of process" that ostensibly "produces the most challenging and meaningful history."2 My argument is not with "systematic comparisons and analysis of process." The age of narrative history, alas, is gone. But why should not the analysis be "well phrased"? If that is asking too much, why can't it at least be clear and understandable?

Some quantifiers may have become spoiled by the evident acquiescence of some polite traditional historians in the inaccessible mode of discourse used by the former.3 But should not the burden properly be on the publishing scholar, no matter what his specialty or the nature of his research, to report his findings clearly and in the mother tongue? And should he not be required to present his documentation just as clearly? Scholars, better than anyone else, know that the greater one's mastery of a subject, the greater his lucidity in explaining it. One suspects that the reason for the impenetrable form of some recent reports is the fumbling grasp of new methodologies by authors whose expertise resulted from their recent completion of a crash course. Yet even where the historian has truly mastered the statistical or mathematical technique he relies on, is it not an enormity for him to insist that the scholars he seeks to influence either go to school to learn his exotic "language" or accept his conclusions on faith? Scholars have the right if not the obligation to insist that the historian make his argument plain, translating it into English if need be. Sensible quantifiers will, I believe, accept this challenge. I am heartened by a recent review essay written by the new economic historians Paul David and Peter Temin, which

2 Paul Kleppner, "Beyond the New Political History': A Review Essay," Historical Methods Newsletter 6 (Dec. 1972): 23, 24.

3 See, for example, C. Vann Woodward, "The Jolly Institution," New York Review of Books (May 2, 1974): 2-6, a review of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston, 1974). Woodward appears to praise portions of the book, the methodology of which he admittedly does not understand. For a more informed and very much harsher review of the same work, see Herbert G. Gutman, "The World Two Cliometricians Made: A Review-Essay of F+E T/C," Journal of Negro History 50 (Jan. 1975): 54-227.

takes two fellow cliometricians to task for needlessly using esoteric equations to "prove" a point about slavery-equations that confuse rather than clarify.4

Clear writing represents clear thinking. It is not a stylistic adornment but an essential proof of the historian's grasp. That it also enables historians to reach a broad audience is yet another not insignificant virtue. When the distinguished cliometrician Douglass C. North, in his recent presidential address to the Economic History Association sadly noted that a major failure of the new economic history is the fact that it has proved unteachable to undergraduates, he was conceding that scholars commit a fatal error when students do not know what they-the scholars-are talking about.5 If historians hope to influence students and others they have no alternative but to write clear English.

The Perils of Utilitarian History. With few exceptions, serious history in the twentieth century is history that answers or tries to answer questions: "fundamental" and "vital" questions or "questions of the first importance," of course. Historians in our day may scoff at the notion of the Progressive historians that written history should serve as a weapon in the "struggle for human betterment."6 Yet if we have dismissed the instrumentalism of our public-spirited predecessors, we have retained their utilitarianism. Whether we are neophytes writing doctoral dissertations, older hands writing new interpretations, or that rarefied few creating new syntheses, our histories seek to explain, not entertain. As the best of us, from Thucydides to Hofstadter, have shown, history animated by the former purpose can achieve the latter effect. The rub is that in lesser hands history that strives only to be edifying often degenerates into history that is boring.

The problem has become acute in recent years, intensified by the vogue of the "new economic history," the "new political history," the "new social history," the "new urban history," and other "new histories" largely committed to answering questions by quantitative measurements. As a sometime participant in

Paul David and Peter Temin, "Slavery: The Progressive Institution," Journal of Economic History 34 (Sept. 1974): 739. 5 Douglass C. North, "Beyond the New Economic History," ibid. 34 (Mar. 1974): 1-7.

6 Robinson, The New History, p. 21.

such exercises, I should like to think they are not devoid of value; certainly a number of my quantifying colleagues have thrown useful light on important facets of the American past. We are all in the debt of those heroic researchers who have shown among other things that poor Americans were more footloose than we dreamed or that the correlation between several noneconomic variables and voting preferences was higher than we thought.7

It is hard to avoid the feeling, however, that even some of the best of the new studies, with their interminable tables, graphs, equations, learned rebuttals of the wrongheaded methodologies used by unlikeminded fellow quantifiers, and the rest of our mournful if modish apparatus - all of which fill footnotes and appendixes of ever more stupefying length and intractability-are not themselves history so much as they are possibly useful footnotes for subsequent histories.8 Written history is of course what historians make it. Yet when it takes the form of a monotonous litany of statistical data documenting a thin generalization of modest import, one is sometimes driven to the hope that perhaps the findings that result from computerized research will serve a future Motley or Prescott, enabling him to sketch in the social or economic or political background of his narrative more accurately than his great storytelling predecessors had done, relying as they had on impressions or on the data that came to hand.

7 Peter R. Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860 (New York, 1971), and Stephan Thernstrom and Peter R. Knights, "Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations About Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (Autumn 1970): 7-35, document the physical mobility of Americans. A large and growing number of "new political historians" have demonstrated that higher correlations often obtained between voters' ethnocultural identities and their political preferences than between their socioeconomic status and their party choices. An informed and critical evaluation of the latter approach is Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behavior," Political Science Quarterly 89 (June 1974): 351-377. More sympathetic is Allan G. Bogue, "United States: The 'New' Political History," Journal of Contemporary History 3 (Jan. 1968): 5-27.

This point is sharply made in Beatrice Himmelfarb, "The New History," Commentary 58 (Jan. 1975): 72-78. I would not go so far as Professor Himmelfarb who, as I read her, questions whether much of the quantitative monographic literature is truly history. In my judgment history is what historians do. I would derogate neither the focus on narrow topics nor the treatment of these topics quantitatively.

Another explanation of the ineffable dullness of some of the new histories, in addition to their addiction to numbers, is their aversion to the unique and the individual. A practitioner of the new social history proclaims that it is concerned not with the unique but “with the fundamental patterns of behavior . . . which lend continuity to historical processes."9 Samuel P. Hays, one of the creators of the new political history, has urged political historians to subordinate study of "the episodic, the unique, and the individual" to the study of "socioeconomic and ethnocultural groupings" and "pressure groups," "as well as the interrelationships of these elements."10 As for the cliometricians, their practice is in perfect consonance with their theory on the matter: history is to be understood not by examining the thinking, feeling, and actions of individuals but rather by examining the statistical relationships connecting aggregates of measurable data. The subjects of their discussion of slavery are not individual slaves but statistical abstractions.11

Even when the bold new work is done sensibly and solidly, confirming or refuting venerable notions, it is likely to be less than exciting to read, for all its importance. For generalizations about statistical masses lack the appeal of descriptions or generalizations about individuals. Readers appear to be so constituted as to find greater interest in a discussion of unique individuals than in a discussion of impersonal entities. When individual human beings are treated solely as components of large groupings, whether ethnocultural or socioeconomic, they in effect become impersonal entities.

And what happens when the methodology or the particular way of using it is other than "solid and sensible"? We are then left with history that, since it is neither interesting nor reliable, is good for little except perhaps as a case study in how not to do it or in what was wrong

My only request is that the work be done sensibly and reported clearly.

9G. D. Allinson, "Modern Japan: A New Social History," Historical Methods Newsletter 6 (June 1973): 100.

10 As cited in Bogue, "United States," and in Robert P. Swierenga, ed., Quantification in American History: Theory and Research (New York, 1970), p. 47.

11 In addition to Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, see Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South," Journal of Political Economy 66 (Apr. 1958): 95-130, which was the first application of the new economic history to the study of slavery.

with these slack times. In contrast, the reader who finds unacceptable either the values or the historical generalizations in Motley's description of the rise of the Dutch Republic can hardly avoid being charmed by his account of the Duke of Parma's magnificent feats of arms. The reader who finds unacceptable the values and the generalizations of some of the utilitarian tracts of the past two decades is left with absolutely nothing likely to bring comfort of any sort.

If subordinating individuals to masses diminishes the liveliness and interest of history, it also impairs the search for the very "scientific truth" that appears to motivate so many utilitarian historians. Masses or large groups are indeed worth studying and understanding. But, as historians, of all scholars, should know best, individuals-complex, perverse, inexplicable-affect the course of human events. The "predictive history" that one new political historian suggests may be lurking in the wings,12 awaiting the improvement of our vaunted new quantitative techniques, is impossible of realization primarily because "future history" like past is the product of individuals in action. The future behavior of individuals is no more predictable than their past behavior is fully knowable. To dismiss this or that individual human being or phenomenon or event as unique and therefore unworthy of close study in advance of such study has more in common with dogma albeit rationalist dogma than with scientific empiricism.

Their preoccupation with the study of masses appears to have blinded some users of the computer to the actual relationship between actions of the individual human actor, on the one hand, and historical generalizations about human actions, on the other. The latter are dependent on the former. Generalizations are useful only to the extent that they accurately capture the behavior they seek to clarify. If they should always be tentative, it is precisely because unique actions presently inexplicable may yet become understandable, and unique actions presently undisclosed may yet come to our attention. To the historian, as to anyone who would understand human behavior, the individual and the unique are the central subject matter of history.

The devaluation of the individual is only one of a number of lapses in judgment mani12 Swierenga, Quantification, pp. xix-xx.

fested in some of the new histories. History, of whatever sort, will of course yield examples of deviation from good sense. A recent book on "historians' fallacies" not only records many examples of the errors committed both by traditional and new historians, but, insofar as its author relies for his last word on secondary sources that are themselves fallible, is itself a case study in the very fallacies it derides in others. 13 A special feature of some of the recent lapses is that they appear to be related to the quantitative methodology used by their authors.

Some modern studies leave the impression that massive data have been collected and measured not because this evidence was particularly illuminating or important but because it was available. Historians' lives are too short to be spent in doing what they would not have thought of doing had there not been available a way of doing it. Quantifiers for a long time now have counted votes, whether cast by citizens in polling places or by officeholders in legislative halls. They have also tabulated the measurable characteristics of voters, focusing formerly on socioeconomic traits, more recently on those the new political historians call ethnocultural, in order to trace and compare the correlations between diverse voters' characteristics and their political and party preferences. For all the admitted flaws in the methodology of head counters, 14 their findings are not without value or interest. It is important to know that in some districts in some elections a higher correlation obtains between the religious denominations and ethnic identities of voters and their party choices than between occupations and socioeconomic class and their political choices. Yet in confining their research largely to this kind of measurement, it appears that some of the new historians have made too much of what is after all evidence of limited suggestiveness.

Correlations, as V. O. Key long ago reminded us, are not causal relationships. To know the ethnocultural identities of voters of a particular

13 David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970).

14 Informed criticisms of the quantitative political studies include David Thelen's review of Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture, in Civil War History 17 (Mar. 1971): 85-86; Joel H. Silbey, ed., Political Ideology and Voting Behavior in the Age of Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, 1973), p. 8; Bogue, "United States," p. 24; and McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations."

district and to know as well the breakdown of votes in that district does not indicate who voted how, nor does it explain why individuals there voted as they did. Neither does it demonstrate that the community voted as it did because of the ethnocultural identifications of the voters; other things may have been on their minds.

The increasingly detailed investigation of voters and voting by some new historians appears to be accompanied by their increasing disinterest in the consequences of the measures voted on. The latter information is, I believe, more illuminating than is evidence about voting patterns. To know the kind of voters a political party appealed to may be testimony primarily to the effectiveness of the propaganda of the party and the delusions of its supporters. It is not uninteresting information, yet how does it compare in importance to information on the policies and actions of the party? To refer to an example that is perhaps overly dramatic, are the Nazis not better understood by their actions and the consequences of their actions than by the types of voters who may have found them less than repulsive or even attractive? In violation of the biblical adage, the new political historians have operated on the premise "By their propaganda shall ye know them." They may have done so in part, I fear, because questions about party appeal are easier to answer than questions about the consequences of party actions.

The consequences of political actions have been relatively neglected because, being diverse, complex, far-reaching, and slow in unfolding, they do not lend themselves to quantitative measurement. In addition, consequences are often unanticipated. Paradoxically, it is this feature of political action that makes it more amenable to scholarly investigation than would otherwise be the case.

Let me illustrate this point. We know that in the mid-twentieth century the Supreme Court played a role with regard to the rights of blacks and the free speech of radicals never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers when they created the federal judiciary. Who would answer the question "Why did the Founding Fathers create the kind of Supreme Court they did?" has therefore the relatively manageable task of determining the likely consequences of the Court's creation- as estimated by sensible and knowl

edgeable men in the late 1780s- rather than the never-ending and therefore impossible task of determining its actual consequences. To ascertain the likely consequences of any measure and to do so in a manner that commands the attention of intelligent readers requires great knowledge both of politics and of the spheres of life affected by politics, and much mother wit in evaluating the interrelationship of men, measures, and the community. I remain convinced that, although presently submerged, the necessary quantity of mother wit exists, awaiting only its release from an ephemeral thralldom.

My final caveat concerns the present-mindedness of some high-minded utilitarians, particularly those who insist on calling themselves "radical historians." When I was a graduate student at Columbia University a quarter of a century ago I remember smiling indulgently at Prof. Robert L. Schuyler's denunciation of present-mindedness as the deadliest of all historians' sins. Mr. Schuyler never ceased exhorting us that history should be studied for its own sake and that if it were not, it would inevitably be distorted. Many of us thought we detected an antiutilitarian if not an aristocratic bias in his aversion to the Progressive historians' demand that history should serve the cause of human improvement. My own criticism of present-mindedness is not altogether similar to my former teacher's. It seems to me that the present-mindedness of some activist historians ill serves their own purposes.

The enthusiast of this or that cause sometimes uses history most selectively. Concerned, say, with present-day mistreatment of blacks and anxious to make a strong case against it, he vigorously searches the historical record not in its entirety but for those portions of it most likely to contain evidence of earlier mistreatment. Such partial research does a disservice to history, whatever the social purposes of the historian who does it. For it is not fruitful to examine the past only for signs and evidence that seem to bear directly on issues of current interest. Combing the historical record for words and deeds relating to blacks, labor, or pollution is excessively limited. An open-ended curiosity about earlier eras in all their dimension will yield knowledge and insights about the general nature of earlier