Historians and Everyman

Yesterday I quoted: 'history is a mode of scholarship and thinking that can construct narratives that are themselves actors in public life.' This is a true remark that also has an interesting double-edge. Back in the 1930s two American historians called Carl Becker and Charles Beard both used their respective Presidential Addresses to the Association of American Historians to think about this question of how history can act in public life. Needless to say, they came to contradictory conclusions.

Becker's speech, given in 1931, was called "Everyman His Own Historian". In it he said history is 'an imaginative creation... an engaging blend of fact and fantasy, a mythical adaptation of what actually happened.' But this does not mean the historian himself has any power to create these blends of fact and fantasy as tools of social and political change, because each work of history derives authority only from what use Everyman may wish to make of it:

[For Everyman] is stronger than we are... The secret of our own success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.

Beard's speech came two years later, and it was called "Written History as an Act of Faith". He urged that writing history 'is an act of choice, conviction, and interpretation respecting values, is an act of thought,' and that as such it entails 'the intellectual and moral perils inherent in any decision.' Beard, without contradicting Becker directly, implied in these statements a far greater influence of the historian upon the public. It was that influence that made the role of the historian a moral and political one, and that made his work 'an act of faith.'

This question could be broadened to include all scholarship and all culture: how, if at all, do these types of activity [help] make change happen? Are historians the tools of a public life that has already chosen its direction; or are we actors who face meaningful choices about what we write? Perhaps the answer to that question is itself an act of faith.

It would be much too crude to say that Beard sought in his version of relativism a justification for an activist stance, while Becker found in his a justification for abstention. Much too crude, but with more than a grain of truth. [Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, 1998]