History That Makes Us Stupid

“History is now and England,” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1942. Not anymore. Today, as far as most Americans are concerned, the History That Matters centers on the recent past — the period from 1914 to 1989, to be exact — and on the United States. That’s a big problem — one for which today’s academic historians bear no small responsibility.

In Donald Rumsfeld’s famous taxonomy of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, the History That Matters (HTM) occupies its own special niche. That niche consists of mythic knowns.

All history is selective and interpretive. In the HTM, mythic knowns determine the process of selection and interpretation. Chief among the mythic knowns to which most Americans (academic historians excepted) subscribe are these:

• that history itself has an identifiable shape, direction, and destination;
• that history is purposeful, tending toward the universal embrace of values indistinguishable from American values;
• that in the interests of propagating those values, history confers on the United States unique responsibilities and prerogatives.

By no means purporting to tell the whole story, the HTM reduces the past to its pith or essence. Like the Ten Commandments, it identifies specific shalts and shalt nots. Like the Sermon on the Mount, it prescribes a code of behavior. In doing so, the HTM makes the past usable. Endlessly reiterated in political speech and reinforced by popular culture, the “lessons” of this usable past prescribe what the United States — the indispensable nation — is called upon to do and what it must refrain from doing.

This usable past finds expression in a straightforward narrative depicting the 20th century as the first American Century, shaped throughout by the actions (or inaction) of the United States. Although incorporating setbacks and disappointments, the narrative culminates in reassuring triumph. On balance, things are headed in the right direction.

The drama unfolded in three acts, each centered on a large-scale military undertaking.

The first, World War I, occurred between 1914 and 1918. When this conflict began, Americans were having none of it. Yet after considerable hesitation, urged on by a president who believed it incumbent upon the New World to save the Old, they took the plunge. The United States went off to fight, Woodrow Wilson declared, “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples,” a stirring vision considerably at odds with the actual war aims of the belligerents on both sides.

Alas, before permanent peace was fully achieved and the liberation of peoples well and truly won, Americans began having second thoughts and reneged on Wilson’s vow. World War I thereby set the stage for another even more horrific conflict just two decades later, widely attributed to the refusal of Americans to fulfill the duties to which destiny had summoned them.

In the interim, historians had mounted an energetic challenge to this interpretation of World War I. In effect, revisionists such as Harry Elmer Barnes, eventually joined by Charles A. Beard, launched a pre-emptive attack on the HTM, arguing that U.S. entry into the Great War had been a huge blunder. Ever so briefly, scholarship reflected and reinforced the mood of the moment. When the moment passed, however, revisionism fell out of fashion and the HTM’s onward march resumed.

As an episode in the History That Matters, therefore, World War I is presented as a missed opportunity, a warning of the consequences that result when the United States fails to lead.

Act II began in 1939 or 1938 or 1936 or 1933 — the date dependent on the “lesson” to which you’re calling attention — but ended definitively in 1945. World War II offered Americans a second chance to get it right. The war pitted good against evil, freedom against slavery, civilization against barbarism, and democracy against dictatorship.

Not merely in myth but also in fact, World War II was all of these things. But it was much more as well. It was a winner-take-all contest between rival claimants to Pacific dominion, between competing conceptions of how to govern peoples deemed inferior, and between two decidedly different brands of totalitarianism, one of them aligned with the United States.

One thing World War II was emphatically not: a war to avert genocide. The fate of European Jews facing extermination at the hands of Nazi Germany was an afterthought.

Per Rumsfeld, we might categorize these realities as discomfiting knowns. Crediting Europe’s liberation to the Anglo-American alliance — forged by Franklin and Winston singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” onboard HMS Prince of Wales — makes for a suitably uplifting story. Acknowledging the Red Army’s far larger contribution to defeating the Nazi menace — with Eastern Europeans paying a steep price for their “liberation” at Soviet hands — only serves to complicate things. The HTM has a decided aversion to complications.

Lasting considerably longer than the first two acts combined, Act III ran from roughly 1947 to 1989 and consisted of many scenes, some of which resisted easy incorporation into the HTM: nuclear arsenals containing thousands of weapons, partnerships with unsavory despots, coups and assassination plots by the bushel, not to mention Korea, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and Vietnam, all capped off with the Leader of the Free World exchanging pleasantries in Beijing with Red China’s murderous Great Helmsman. All of this made it difficult to cast Act III as a virtuous sequel to Act II.

Historians took note. A new generation of revisionists, the disciples of William Appleman Williams prominent among them, challenged the official line depicting the Cold War as another round of good pitted against evil. At least briefly, the past seemed up for grabs. For a time — the last time — a debate among American historians engaged broad public attention.

The end of the Cold War deflected this challenge, and the HTM emerged in mature form. To wide applause, a political scientist announced that history itself had ended. That ending validated the mythic knowns underpinning the HTM from the outset. History’s trajectory and purpose now appeared self-evident, as did America’s extraordinary singularity.

In 1992, an unproven presidential candidate reduced the History That Matters to a homely parable. “I am literally a child of the Cold War,” Bill Clinton began.

My parents’ generation wanted little more than to return from a world war and resume the blessedly ordinary joys of home and family and work. Yet … history would not let them rest. Overnight, an expansionist Soviet Union summoned them into a new struggle. Fortunately, America had farsighted and courageous leaders … who roused our battle-weary nation to the challenge. Under their leadership, we helped Europe and Japan rebuild their economies, organized a great military coalition of free nations, and defended our democratic principles against yet another totalitarian threat.

In declaring his fealty to the HTM, Clinton hoped to establish his credibility as a would-be statesman. Yet implicit in his succinct and sanitized account was a handy template for dealing with challenges to come.

But of course history had not ended, and when new challenges appeared policy makers reflexively reverted to that very same template. “We have seen their kind before,” George W. Bush reassured his badly shaken countrymen after 9/11.

They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

For President Bush, the need for a large-scale military enterprise comparable to those that had made the 20th century an American Century was self-evident. The Global War on Terrorism, in effect, constituted an addendum to the HTM — a fourth act in history’s onward march. To emphasize the continuities, some observers styled the U.S. response to 9/11 as World War IV, with the Cold War retroactively designated World War III.

Alas, by whatever name World War IV has proved a bust. Fifteen years after it began, victory is nowhere in sight.

Meanwhile, the ostensibly usable past has become a straitjacket. Finding solace in its familiarity, Americans remain firmly moored to the HTM, although Acts I and III have taken a backseat to Act II. Hence the innumerable comparisons of Iran to Nazi Germany and Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain, along with predictions of Israelis marching compliantly off to death camps, inspired by the Iran nuclear deal.

The prevailing version of the usable past is worse than unusable. In the United States, it obstructs serious debate over the use and misuse of power. No less than was the case in the 1920s-30s and 1960s-70s, the times call for revisionism. The task for historians this time around is to reframe the entire 20th century, seeing it for the unmitigated disaster that it was and recognizing its profound moral ambiguity without, however, succumbing to moral equivalence.

To cling to the History That Matters is to make real learning impossible. Yet for academics to critically engage the HTM in a way that might affect public understanding of the past requires a revival of fields that have become decidedly unhip. The HTM is essentially a war and politics narrative, and the present-day historical profession does not emphasize political, diplomatic, and military themes. Today it’s race, class, gender, and sexuality that claim pride of place. The effect, whether intended or not, is that comforting fantasies go unchallenged and lodge themselves ever more deeply in the public consciousness. So the “Good War” remains ever good, with the “Greatest Generation” ever great.

Not without reason, members of the historical profession tend to view the HTM as a caricature or cartoon. Yet their very disdain provides one explanation for why it persists. In effect, the myths sustaining this fatuous narrative go unchallenged. For ordinary citizens, “history” becomes what they see on TV — the History Channel! — or what they hear from agenda-peddling politicians.

So among Americans at least, count on the HTM to endure — history that lets us feel good, even as it makes us stupid.