Is History Bunk? Notes of a Talk by Professor Bill Speck

Is History Bunk?

[A few months before he died, Bill came to Wolsingham and gave a talk to our Probus club. There were several asides and his final thoughts were unscripted, hence the abrupt ending. But I thought that you would like to read what he had to say.The talk was more high powered than the usual fare, but it was very well received and for several meetings thereafter, members commented favourably about Bill and what he had said.      Dr.Robert Hopkinson]

In an interview with Charles Wheeler for the Chicago tribune of 25 May 1916, Henry Ford said.” I don’t know much about history and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history of the world. It means nothing to me, History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.”

The quotation raises the question, What is history? Ford defines it as tradition, but that merely begs the further question, what is tradition? He seems to imply the whole of the past; now historians don’t and can’t deal with the past i.e. everything that ever happened. It is far too vast to be comprehended. Instead they try to cut it down to size. One way is by periods, reducing the vastness into manageable chunks, such as ancient, medieval or modern. Another is by geography. concentrating on a country, or even a county or a town; yet another is by subject – politics, economics, society, culture etc.

Thus political histories of the 16^th, 17^th, 18^th or 19^th centuries are the standard historical works that most Britons would have in mind when they think of history. for ford it would be a textbook on the history of the USA. In 1935, he expanded on the kind of history that had led him to dismiss it as “more or less bunk”. “As a young man,” he observed, “I was very interested in how people lived in earlier times; how they got from place to place, lighted their homes, cooked their meals and so on. So I went to the history books. Well, I could find out about, kings and presidents, but I could learn nothing of the everyday lives, so I decided that history is bunk.”

Although it is an exaggeration to say that historians a hundred years ago dealt exclusively with kings and queens and presidents and politicians, it is fair to say that most of them dealt with high politics. The success of “1066 and all That” by Sellars and Yeatman, which first appeared in 1930 is testimony to the British history to which most people were exposed to in the early 20^th century. It included 103 good things, 5 bad things and 2 genuine dates. It has never been out of print and the Folio Society included an edition of it in its Christmas collection for 2016.

High politics remained the staple fare of historians for much of the 20^th century. One of the few rivals to its ascendancy was economic history, but not many took to it. As RH Tawney observed, ”it has a dullness all to its own”. Then in the 1960’s, along with other major changes in that decade, there was a shift towards what became known as the new social history. One of the seminal works that marked this change in England was Peter Lazlett’s book, “The world We have lost”, which first appeared in 1965 (and is still in print). It investigated social structure and social change in England before the Industrial Revolution. Lazlett shattered several myths about the early modern period. e.g. that people lived in the communities in which they were born; on the contrary there was a great deal of geographic mobility; that people married in their teens – they tended to delay marriage until their early twenties in fact.

The new social history opened up areas of research which had not previously been investigated by many historians; e.g. the family, women, ethnic communities. Not all historians welcomed these changes. One dyed in the wool political historian sourly commented that “we used to ask big questions like what were the causes of wars such as the civil wars in England and America and the world wars in the 20^th century. Now we ask questions like “what did medieval babies wear”.

But the biggest challenge to traditional history came not from the new social historians. Rather it was launched against the whole concept of history as a distinct academic discipline by critics who came to be call post modernists. Historians had always claimed that their methodology reconstituted past realities. Whether it was ancient Rome or early modern Europe or some other past community, the objects of their research were deemed to be objective verifiable entities. While it was true that almost all the evidence for their existence had vanished, enough survived to provide clues for historians to reconstruct their essence. Painstaking scrutiny of surviving documents enabled them to piece together valid accounts of past political, social, economic and cultural realities. Post-modernism dealt these assumptions what seemed to be fatal blows. There was no objective reality. Even if there was, the fragments of evidence available to historians were pitifully inadequate to document any assertion about it. Assertions about the past were anyway not objective but subjective. There were no historical facts. The historian was not recreating reality but using his or her imagination, like a novelist. Different “takes” could be taken on the past, one historian’s “take” was no more valid than another’s. Post-modernism really did appear to uphold Henry Ford’s assertion that “History is bunk”.

Now of course there were different interpretations of history before the rise of post-modernism. to give but two of many possible examples: there was Whig history; and Marxist history. The Whig theory of history applied to Britain saw its central narrative as the story of the triumph of progress over reaction. One of the leading Whig historians was Lord Macaulay. He described English history in the following terms: the story of the people through Parliament restricting and eventually controlling the power of the monarchy and with it the development of our modern system of democracy.

The 17^th century also attracted major Marxist historians, the most prominent of whom was Christopher Hill. They saw the main dynamic of historical change as class struggle, where Whig historians attributed progress to the triumph of the progressives over reactionaries; Marxists saw it as the overthrow of a ruling class by those over whom they had ruled. Both sets of assumptions have been challenged.

Thus it has been criticised as anachronistic of Whig historians to ransack the past looking to distinguish between the forces of progress and reaction, and for Marxists to be detecting class warfare before recognisable class even existed.

Yet, though both these views of the past are largely discredited these days, their practitioners did base their conclusions on documentary evidence. They might disagree in their interpretations of the sources, but their narratives were firmly based on the evidence. An outstanding example of Marxist interpretation of the late 18^th and early 19^th century British history was EP Thompson’s epoch making book, “The Making of the English Working Class”. Though its thesis was highly controversial, its sources were thoroughly traditional. Thompson based his argument that the workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution were politicised by radical such as John Thelwall and Thomas Paine in radical literature – pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides. These were used to document his case. They are the principal sources many historians of the political history of the period would draw on, even if they came to different conclusions from Thompson. Some, for example, deny that a working class came into existence until later in the 19^th century. This is not because one group is right and the other wrong. It is quite normal for scholars to interpret the evidence differently. The important thing is that they base their conclusions on valid sources.

Of late, however, there have been claims made for accepting assertions about the past for which traditional rules of evidence are disregarded. For instance, it used to be agreed that It was anachronistic to judge people in the past by modern standards. They  were to be judged by the norms that prevailed in their own times. But some of the new social historians disregard this view. thus some feminist historians condemn men in the past  for treating women as subordinate. But this was an acceptable norm in the past. It seems as if history has moved into the post-truth era.

Fortunately for historians an historical event intervened to establish that objective history can be verified. This was the case the right wing historian David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books for publishing an attack on him in the book, “Denying the Holocaust”(1993). In it, she denounced him as a Holocaust denier who deliberately falsified evidence. He sued her for libel in September 1996 and lost. Lipstadt engaged Professor Richard Evans, who held the chair of Modern History at Cambridge University and is a leading authority on Nazi Germany, as an expert witness. He reported on Irving’s works concluding that “not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them were completely worthless as history because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere in any of them to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. Irving has fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among historians that he does not deserve to be called a historian at all. Irving lost the case and was obliged to pay the costs it incurred which bankrupted him. What the verdict established was that Irving’s take on the holocaust was not as good as Evan’s. Despite post-modernism’s critique of history, there are historical facts that do exist, independent of subjective views. Traditional historical method, seeking to use the shards of evidence that have survived about past events, can be used to recreate past realities. The Holocaust happened. It is not a myth, but a fact. Some countries, e.g. Austria have made it a crime to deny its existence. I think that is the wrong approach. It only encourages deniers like David Irving to claim that they are being silenced. Far better to let them peddle their lies and distortions in the public arena where they can be challenged and exposed as falsehoods.

One service which post-modernists did for historians was to challenge the view held by many of them that they studied the past “for its own sake”. This claim seemed to deny that history had any relevance to the present. As a leading post-modernist (Hayden White) objected “postmodernists are less interested in the past as a thing in itself than as a means of comprehending the present.

As a historian who supports this view, I maintain that history is not confined to the past, but it can inform the present. Those who share this view speak of a usable past. Its usefulness to present concerns can be demonstrated with the example of Brexit.

In the debate on the EU referendum, the Leave campaign urged that it would restore Britain’s sovereignty. It was never spelled out what this entailed beyond taking back control. But the idea of sovereignty has a long history which could been drawn on to illuminate the issues at stake. It is a constitutional term for the sovereign power in Britain. In the middle ages this was the sovereign himself. Kings exercised sovereignty. However the supreme power in the constitution was challenged by parliament which claimed that monarchs were accountable to the lords and Commons. There ensued a struggle for sovereignty which contributed to the civil wars between 1642 and 1648, resulting in the execution of Charles I and the establishment of a republic. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, revived the struggle for sovereignty culminating in the Revolution of 1688. This led to the triumph of the sovereignty of the crown in parliament. Parliamentary sovereignty, however, was challenged by the notion of the sovereignty of the people with the rise of radicalism. When Parliament tried to assert its sovereign power over American colonists, they resisted. their victory was a triumph of popular sovereignty enshrined in the opening words of the US constitution – “We, the people…”

Brexit has caused these rival views – monarchical, parliamentary, popular sovereignty to surface in the debate over the implementation of Article 50. The PM insists that it can be implemented because the royal prerogative of negotiating with foreign powers, the last remnant of monarchical sovereignty, has been lodged in the office of Prime minister. MP’s and peers object that they have a right to be consulted. UKIP insists that the referendum was the direct exercise of the sovereignty of the people. The high Court upheld the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament. It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court decides. Historically it should uphold the decision of the high Court. The referendum came about by passing an Act of Parliament. Incidentally, it stated that the result would be advisory and not mandatory.

Bill and I

[by Dr.Robert Hopkinson, former Head of History, Wolsingham School and Secretary of Durham Branch of the HA,  then Treasurer of Cumbria Branch of the HA]

Bill Speck was my tutor and supervisor at Newcastle between 1966 and 1972. Our first meeting was rather unusual; as I entered his room and sat down he began by asking where I came from – Bradford, as he did. So I asked if he was related to a Jack Speck who was the manager of the Bindery and Packing dep’t of Lund Humphries, the printing firm where my father worked. When we had established that our fathers worked in the same place and that we had both worked as students during the summer vacations, Bill quizzed me about some of the people he had known; I was able to bring him up to date on several of the well.-known characters. That seemed to cement a bond between us, though he had attended Bradford Grammar and Belle Vue Boys Grammar.

I first appreciated that Bill was a “jazz” man when he hosted a party in his Jesmond home and played his clarinet – few were in a state to appreciate his “mastery” of the instrument.

After leaving University, I only saw Bill occasionally when he gave talks to student societies, and only resumed full contact when he had retired and settled in Stanwix. The story of how I became  treasurer of the Cumbria branch of the Historical Association  in the great palace revolution will have to wait for another time.