Is History Bunk?
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 16th, 17th,
18th or 19th 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 20th 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 20th 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 20th 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 17th 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 18th and early 19th
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 19th
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.
