Essays

The Utility of the Study of History: Reflections on a Recurring Folly

by Larry DeWitt
April 2005

The Temptation of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written the definitive historian’s brief against the Bush Administration’s foreign policy in Iraq (War and the American Presidency) . He has done it as well as it can be done: with his usual elegance, wit, wisdom and learning. Reading his newest book, like reading so many of his others, is a source of deep and abiding intellectual pleasure. Now in his eighth decade as a working historian, Schlesinger has given us more of this type of pleasure than we have a right to expect from any one person. And yet this latest book, as rich and profound as it is brief and breezy, is at its core unpersuasive, because it arrogates to the craft of history a role in public policy that it is ill-suited to play.

Schlesinger understands, better than most historians, both the ill-fit and the temptation to proceed anyway. In this book, Schlesinger gives in to the temptation. At the same time, his concluding chapter, suitably entitled “The Inscrutability of History,” is one of the finest summations ever penned of genteel skepticism about the ability of historians to inform present policy decisions.

This temptation, to make the study of history somehow about the business of present politics, is perhaps the oldest vanity to which historians have succumbed. Probably the only historiographical idea that most non-historians know is the well-worn George Santayana observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana was of course not the first to assert this notion of history. Thomas Fuller, in his 1639 book The Historie of the Holy Warre, put the same point this way: “What a pity it is to see a proper gentleman to have such a crick in his neck that he cannot look backward! Yet no better is he who cannot see behind him the actions which long since were performed. . . . [history] not only maketh things past, present; but enableth one to make a rational conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new accidents, but in the same sense wherein we call it a new moon, which is the old one in another shape, and yet no other than what hath been formerly. Old actions return again, furbished over with some new and different circumstances.” Even Thucydides thought generals and statesmen should study history since it would better equip them to cope with future challenges because history repeats itself in a circular pattern, and so the same life-quizzes are bound to come around again, for which the historian can offer the cribbed answers in advance.

The opposite instinct–that too much by way of utility for history may be too much to claim–has also been widely and amply expressed. To take just one example, Henry Steele Commager once put it this way: “History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it–as with these–life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life.”

In his present surrender to the siren call of present politics, Arthur Schlesinger makes a half-way compelling case. He argues, rather convincingly, that isolationism is the oldest instinct in American foreign policy. Then he quickly equates isolationism with unilateralism, and to bolster his analysis, he reminds us of some historical analogies of unilateral executive action—a case he made years ago in his book on The Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger recounts for us Thomas Jefferson’s actions in the Barbary War and James K. Polk’s misadventures in the Mexican War; he reminds us of Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties after Fort Sumter and Franklin Roosevelt’s skating close to the edges of lend-lease; he points at Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada and George H.W. Bush’s snatching of Manuel Noriega from Panama. His interesting thesis in this regard is that in prior examples of the “imperial presidency” the presidents involved either had the decency to recognize that their actions were unconstitutional, or the semi-decency to at least think them linked to a specific crisis. George W. Bush, he tells us, is the first president in history to claim permanent unilateralism as a high principle of governance. This arrogance is what makes Bush stand out from the stream of history and reveal himself as someone uniquely ignorant of its lessons.

As Schlesinger puts it: “Ignorance is no pathway to success; and Iraq seems likely to end as a repetition of Vietnam. It is improbable that Cheney and Rumsfeld are going to overcome deep-rooted religious and cultural obstacles and transform the land they have impetuously invaded into a Jeffersonian democracy.” This is a fair guess about the future in Iraq, but it is in no way certified by the “lessons of history.” There is much that is true and insightful in Schlesinger’s critique of the eyeless Samson in Iraq, but it is all essentially present politics and policy analysis—for which the services of an historian are not required.

In his chapter on patriotism, Schlesinger is very persuasive in arguing that history shows dissent in wartime to be an old American tradition. When turning the historian’s eye to the nature of democracy, Schlesinger presents some interesting history about the Electoral College and he tables an intriguing proposal for reforming it (to award Electoral College bonus-points to the winner of the popular vote). But a reader of even this forward-looking proposal cannot escape the impression that this idea is really an arrow aimed backward in time toward the 2000 election—it is an angry dart from an historian to a recent-past of which he disapproves. This, too, is very revealing. Historians, like the rest of us, have a hard time discerning the difference between their political grievances and the “lessons of history.”

But being wise as well as learned, Schlesinger well understands the limitations of history and historians. As he says, “the oracle of history, like the oracle of Delphi, is very often clouded and ambiguous.” This is why, he confides, professional historians “privately regard history as its own reward; they study it for the intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment they find in the disciplined attempt to reconstruct the past and, perhaps, for the ironic aftertaste in the contemplation of man’s heroism and folly, but for no more utilitarian reason.” But he also admits that many historians are sorely tempted to “invoke arguments of a statelier sort in justifying themselves in society.” Schlesinger is one historian who is perpetually so tempted.

The Lessons of the Past

In Fuller’s and Santayana’s sense we seem to expect that people can learn something from a study of history which has the present utility of allowing them to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. But is that really how anyone uses history? I doubt it. Mostly we use history as a form of rationalization for justifying whatever course of action we have already decided to pursue. Thus in the interwar years American foreign policy planners used what they took to be the lessons of World War I (an inflexible and absolutist notion of freedom of the seas; unbridled trade in armaments; an unbalanced sympathy for one side in European disputes; too much trade with belligerents, too many entangling alliances, etc.) to justify an isolationist indifference to the gathering storm clouds in Europe and Asia in the 1930s. After the application of these lessons from history led us to the disaster of the Second World War–which was arguably deepened and worsened by the very lessons we “learned” from World War I–we then applied the new lessons from our mistakes in World War II (the hazards of appeasement; the unreality of “fortress America;” naive Neutrality Acts, etc.) to the new circumstances of the Cold War, pursuing a foreign policy of endless conflict and little compromise with the communist world, which led us into a disastrous conflict in Southeast Asia–that was, arguably, made much worse by our inability to escape the grasp of our lessons from history.

In recent decades very skillful historians like Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have sought to carve out a professional niche for history by training bureaucrats and corporate middle-managers to think like historians. They were convinced that graduates of their Columbia history seminars would be better decisionmakers, and thus, that history in the future will take better paths than it has in the past.

In their Thinking in Time, Neustadt and May analyzed a series of failed policy narratives to identify the faulty historical analysis that led to these bad decisions. They then trained their corporate and government clients in how to recognize bad historical analogies, so as to avoid them in their decisionmaking, and good historical analogies, so as to sprinkle their decisionmaking with more of these. In this way, they confidently predicted, better policies, and better futures, were sure to result.

Thus the Vietnam War was expanded and doggedly pursued by Lyndon Johnson, we are encouraged to believe, because Johnson saw Ho Chi Minh as Hitler with a goatee and North Vietnam as Germany circa 1930. Having the right historical analogies about Vietnam (that America’s involvement in 1964 was more like that of the French in 1950) would have caused Johnson to see the folly of his ways and hence to have avoided the debacle of Vietnam. And of course, it would be professional historians who would provide this clarifying service, thus vouchsafing our enterprise as one which, contrary to traditional conceptions, is actually in the business of engineering better futures.

The example of Lyndon Johnson’s personal quagmire in Vietnam is actually quite instructive. LBJ expressed many times (in especially revealing ways in his secretly recorded telephone conversations) his sense of his dilemma: he could not see any way to win the war, yet he could not see any face-saving way to just stop trying. As he typically put it: “damned if I am going to be the first President to lose a war.”

The core problem was that Johnson never asked himself the right question about Vietnam. The right question was: who did Ho Chi Minh see in the mirror each morning when he was trimming his beard? Lyndon Johnson, you see, had one masterful political skill: he could always see every political issue through the eyes of the guy on the other side. The problem was that Johnson kept looking at Vietnam not through Ho’s eyes, but through the eyes of his advisers–McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, and the rest of his circle of corporate managers. But when Ho looked in the mirror each morning he saw Abraham Lincoln looking back at him. Ho, like Lincoln, saw himself as trying to preserve the union––trying to hold his nation together. The “slow squeeze” strategy of gradually escalating application of military might assumed that when Ho looked in the mirror he saw a member of the board of directors of the Ford Motor Co. looking back––someone wearing a three-piece suit and doing cost/benefit analyses. Thus, when the cost/benefit analysis became too adverse (when the “squeeze” got tight enough) the rational manager would cut his losses and move on to other things. But would Lincoln have “moved on to other things” if Union losses mounted? That was the key failure of Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. He forgot to inquire about the image in Ho Chi Minh’s mirror.

But could an historian have helped him out, even if we made this failure of insight palpable to Johnson? More likely, it would not have made a dime’s worth of difference to the dilemma faced by LBJ. Using my historical analysis–available in reality only through the gift of historical hindsight–might we speculate that Johnson would have come to the realization that there was no possible light at the end of that tunnel, provided we could somehow take our hindsight back in time? How would this change his basic choice? It wouldn’t. It might only mean he would lapse into despair and hopelessness earlier than he did. But I doubt he would have seen any virtue in ending the war.

Decisionmakers don’t really want nuance from their historians. It is Harry Truman’s point about the need for a one-armed economist. Decisionmakers—if they allow historians in the building in the first place—want a bunch of one-armed historians. They want historians like Arthur Schlesinger, with his confident reading of history’s tea-leaves, only when those readings are in harmony with what they want to do anyway. There is a word for this sort of relationship, and it is not a polite one. But this is pretty much what historians are up to when they present themselves as the help-mates of policymakers.

The Essence of History

I am, like some of my colleagues, deeply skeptical about the prospects for much utility in the study of history. My own sense of skepticism about learning from history was well-captured in a bon-mot that John Kenneth Galbraith once offered up about financial history. Galbraith observed that the period of time between one stock market crash and the next is approximately the period of time it takes to have forgotten about the first one. I think that pretty much sums it up as far as learning from history is concerned.

“But surely,” one might say, “you do not mean to deny that it would be desirable for history to have some present utility? What could possibly be wrong with that?” The reason engineering better futures is a dangerous business for historians to be in is because once we decide that the purpose of history is to somehow affect present policies and politics, then it is but a short walk across a mean street to the exceedingly dangerous idea that historical narrative is to be judged by the nature of its ambitions for those better futures. In other words, once we start looking at history with political aims in mind, it becomes tempting to want to politicize our historical narratives. Then we start thinking about historical narratives in terms of their political commitments. So instead of better narratives being those that capture the past more truthfully, better narratives become those that cheer for the home team.

The purpose of the study of history—I am just old-fashioned enough to suggest—is to recover a truthful account of the past. All historians know the thrill of discovering something unexpected and previously lost to history in some archive somewhere. Artifacts and archival documents are magical. It is marvel and a wonder to hold an object from a past time in one’s hands and to contemplate the amazing fact that this very object was present in some distant time and place and was held in some other, now long-gone, hands. This object I twirl about so casually, and look at so quizzically, seems to have some residue of other times coating it, like the unseen evidence the forensic scientists are always discovering hidden from amateur eyes in all those TV crime scene investigation shows. This is the reason that tourists visit historical sites; and the reason we display objects from the past in museums; and the reason that collectors of historical artifacts collect; and the reason that history holds such a fascination for us. This is all a trifle odd, but it is the case nevertheless. It stirs some ancient human instinct. And this is yet another reason why historians ought to take special care to always give us a truthful account of the past: because our narratives, like our artifacts, are semi-sacred objects, connecting us in some mysterious but precious way with the real past.

So it is the search for something real that is at the heart of our enterprise. And even if we never capture our quarry, the chase for a real past is the only adventure worthy of the name history.

Consider an analogy. It’s rather like setting out on one of those barbarous English fox hunts, with the hounds yapping and the horses snorting and pawing the earth, and then the mad dash, the running and the jumping of the hedgerows, the rushing hither and yon, all in pursuit of something only the hounds can sense and that you as a mere rider may not even catch a glimpse of. And at the end of a bone-weary day of riding, you might well turn up completely empty-handed. But how different this empty-handedness would be from that of the country squire who spent the day sitting in his overstuffed armchair at the hunting lodge, slipping his tea from fine china, and imaging himself on hunts he never made, riding mounts who never lived in any stable, and catching a quarry that never was. The rider on the hunt is as an historian chasing a glimpse of the past; the contented squire a consumer of the fictional arts. The difference is subtle; especially when they both end up empty-handed, but the two are worlds apart. And somewhere in that difference, lies the essence of history.

Politically-Engaged History

Although historians have the same duty as any other citizen to be politically engaged in their societies, this is not to say that history itself must be so engaged. We can uphold the ideal of the public intellectual as an involved citizen, without the additional weighty obligation of the idea that history, qua history, must somehow serve present political purposes.

We can see an example of the mischief historians get up to when they blur this distinction by recalling the embarrassing conduct of some of my history colleagues during the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. As the members of the House Judiciary Committee were earnestly pretending to consider the merits of the case for impeachment, a large group of eminent historians–led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz–took out a full-page ad in the New York Times under the rather grandiose heading “Historians in Defense of the Constitution.” Their ostensible purpose was to help the Judiciary Committee by informing them about the history of the impeachment process. These historians confidently told the legislative decisionmakers that an understanding of the history of the impeachment process indicated that Bill Clinton’s misconduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Now this group of historians, as learned public intellectuals, had every right and duty to make their political views on the impeachment known, and to try and influence the decisionmakers to the right political outcome. But to suggest that history itself contains the answer to the political question of whether or not to impeach Bill Clinton, is a kind of hubris that is an embarrassment to our profession.

This pointless exercise in newspaper advertising as a form of historical scholarship was followed by another pointless exercise when the Judiciary Committee itself convened a panel of historians and legal scholars–including Wilentz–to instruct them directly in the historical context of the impeachment process. Among Wilentz’s helpful tutoring in the findings of history was his report to the Committee that the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 led directly to the Gilded Age and to a succession of “unremarkable chief executives” lasting until Theodore Roosevelt’s elevation to the presidency. Did it indeed? The point is, need I say, debatable. But even so, it connects in no necessary way to an answer to the political decision of whether or not to impeach William Jefferson Clinton in 1998.

The ostensible purpose of the Judiciary Committee’s summoning of a group of scholars to give testimony on the history of the impeachment process was to ponder, in a wise and large frame of vision, the weighty consequences of the action they were contemplating. This gesture was of course as empty as that of the historians’ ad. The relevant majority of the Judiciary Committee had long before made up its political mind to seize this opportunity for all it was worth; and the assembled scholars might just as well have recited at random passages from Finnegan’s Wake, for all the good their learned testimony did. But rather than entertain the decisionmakers with a little Joyce, Wilentz thought the way to their hearts and minds was to insult them, so he hectored the Republican members of the Committee that if they voted articles of impeachment “your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics.” Actually, history will show, if it shows anything on the point, that the reputations of these members of Congress will brighten for those who agreed with their decision and darken for those who did not.

This is the kind of nonsense we get when we try to pronounce on the “lessons of history” using the megaphone of present political interests. Before spending good money for an ad in the Times, Schlesinger and his colleagues might have done better to reflect more thoughtfully on some of Schlesinger’s own advice about the utility of history:

History . . . can answer questions, after a fashion, at long range. It cannot answer questions with confidence or certainty at short range. Alas, policy makers are rarely interested in the long run . . . and the questions they put to history are thus most often questions which history is least qualified to answer. Far from offering a short cut to clairvoyance, history teaches us that the future is full of surprises and outwits all our certitudes.

Like many of us, Arthur Schlesinger has trouble taking his own advice. Notwithstanding his genteel skepticism regarding the utility of history, he persists in thinking history contains definitive detailed instructions for present policymakers.

History does perhaps contain lessons. But history is not a fortune cookie that we can crack open and read the past’s message to the present. It is nonsense to suppose that the story of James K. Polk’s Mexican War contains hidden within it a message of the form: the Iraq policy of George W. Bush is bound to turn out badly.

Hubris, Thy Name is Clio

If the past is so inscrutable that statesmen must exercise self-restraint in applying the lessons of history, does not this same limitation afflict the scribblings of historians? Arthur Schlesinger wants George Bush to be humbled by the inscrutability of history, but he seems to have not nearly so much trouble with history’s inscrutability himself.

In any case, Schlesinger deploys his genteel skepticism to cast doubt on the Bush Administration’s present policies. But his argument works equally well with any present policy. What if the Bush foreign policy had been to temporize on Iraq and wait and see if things really got as bad as some feared? Would not this alternative policy be just as prone to the scolding historian’s skepticism? Inscrutability is inscrutability. Restraint is a policy choice every bit as epistemologically audacious as action. Sometimes our circumstances call for action and sometimes for restraint, and history cannot vouchsafe the one course with any more assurance than the other.

We should be clear about the craft of history as applied to the business of politics. If historians wish to instruct policymakers, then historians become would-be policymakers. In this regard, an historian is just a statesman without an army at his command. But then the statesman and the historian are up to pretty much the same unscholarly business—trying to squeeze from the past insights that will help them engineer a preferred future. But typically, when historians become policymakers, both crafts suffer.

Need I say that these skeptical reflections on the limitations of the discipline of history ought not to be confused with an indirect political brief for the Bush foreign policy? The point is precisely the contrary: historians cannot certify any present policy as vouchsafed by history. Not even historians who write with the wisdom, the grace, and the vision of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. can tell us what messages are contained in history’s fortune cookie.

There is a huge temptation to read the past and try to discern the future by putting two-and-two together. So the idea that the practice of history ought itself to have present utility persists, despite the equally prevalent suspicion that whatever utility is claimed is usually a wild exaggeration. But if we could predict the future based on a study of the past, then historians would be kings–which has not been our fate.

The most beguiling temptation of history is to suppose the past is pointing across the gulf of time to the path we should take to the future. The only cure for this bewitchment is the genteel skepticism Arthur Schlesinger describes so well in the concluding chapter of his book. It is just that he cannot bring himself to admit he is bewitched every bit as much as those politicians with whom he disagrees.

Historians really ought to limit themselves to providing the first half of the equation (a true description of the past) and allow their customers the freedom to put in the second half (expectations about the course of the future) for themselves. But many historians simply cannot resist the urge to make sure that the consumers of their craft see in the mists of the past the same outlines of the future they discern there. But our one sure salvation as historians is the safety that comes from only facing backwards when pontificating. When historians descend from their safe past-facing Olympus, they become just another group of carnival barkers trying to sell their fellow citizens trinkets from their wisdom-collection.