(2015)
“History is now and England,” the expatriate poet T. S. Eliot wrote back in 1942. Not any more. Today, as far as 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. My aim in this brief essay is to explain why that’s a problem.
In Donald Rumsfeld’s famous taxonomy of known knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, the History That Matters—hereinafter the HTM—occupies a special niche of its own. 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 endpoint;
• that history is purposeful, tending toward the universal embrace of values indistinguishable from American values;
• that in the interest of propagating those values, history confers on the United States unique responsibilities and prerogatives.
None of these propositions qualifies as empirically true. Yet pretending that they are facilitates the exercise of power, which describes the HTM’s underlying, even if unacknowledged, purpose.
By no means does the HTM purport to tell the whole story. Rather, it 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 conduct. In doing so, the HTM makes the past usable and, by extension, suitable for exploitation.
This usable past, laced throughout with mythic knowns, finds expression in a simple and straightforward narrative. This narrative depicts the twentieth century—nothing occurring earlier possessing real importance—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 triumph, which signifies vindication and offers reassurance. On balance, things are headed in the right direction.
In this sense, the HTM concerns itself as much with the present and future as it does with the past. Endlessly reiterated in political speech and reinforced by popular culture, its “lessons” prescribe what the United States—the indispensable nation—is called upon to do and what it must refrain from doing. Paying homage to the HTM affirms and renews its validity.
That history consists of a drama in three acts, each centered on a large-scale military undertaking. Cast in the principal roles are politicians, generals, bankers, press barons, industrialists, and functionaries of various types acting in the capacity of warlords. Serving as a chorus of sorts are millions of ordinary soldiers sent into harm’s way. The HTM is nothing if not bloody.
The first act in this drama, initially known as the Great War, subsequently renamed 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.”1 That this uplifting vision was considerably at odds with the actual war aims of the several belligerents on both sides did not trouble the president.
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. Disaster ensued. 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, a group of historians had mounted an energetic challenge to this interpretation of World War I as a worthy enterprise prematurely abandoned. In effect, they launched a preemptive attack on the HTM even before it had fully formed. These so-called revisionists argued forcefully that US entry into the Great War had been a huge blunder. This became a rare occasion when scholarship both reflected and reinforced the popular 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 derives its significance not from the baleful events that actually occurred—devastation and slaughter, starvation and revolution—but from what came next. Act One represents missed opportunity, warning of the consequences likely to result should the United States fail to lead.
Act Two 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. As an episode in the HTM, World War II offered Americans a “second chance” to get it right and redeem themselves. Largely remembered today as a Great Crusade to defeat Nazi Germany, 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 but overlapping brands of totalitarianism, one of them aligned with the United States. One thing World War II was emphatically not: it was not a war to avert genocide. At the time, the fate of European Jews facing extermination at the hands of Nazi Germany figured as an afterthought. By contrast, exterminating the inhabitants of large German and Japanese cities through strategic bombing claimed considerable attention.
Per Rumsfeld, we might categorize these several realities as discomfiting knowns. Americans intent on imparting moral clarity to the History That Matters generally prefer to ignore them. Crediting Europe’s liberation to the Anglo-American alliance—forged by Franklin and Winston singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” onboard HMS Prince of Wales off Argentina in August 1941—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 along with the interval between them, the third segment in this drama ran from roughly 1947 to 1989.
Act Three consisted of many scenes, some of which resisted easy incorporation into the HTM. Despite having ostensibly absorbed all of the wisdom offered by Acts One and Two, the warlords in Washington seemed at times to take leave of their senses. Nuclear arsenals containing tens of thousands of weapons; partnerships with various 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 astonishing course change that found the Leader of the Free World exchanging pleasantries in Beijing with Red China’s murderous Great Helmsman: each of these made it difficult to cast Act Three as a virtuous sequel to Act Two.
Historians took note. A new generation of revisionists challenged the official line depicting the Cold War as another round of good against evil, freedom against slavery, civilization against barbarism, and democracy against dictatorship. Among HTM proponents, now aligned with the warlords, these revisionists provoked outrage. At least briefly, the History That Matters seemed up for grabs. For a time—the last time—a debate among American historians actually drew the attention of the general public.
The end of the Cold War deflected this challenge, with the HTM now emerging in mature form. To wide applause, a political scientist announced that history itself had ended. That ending validated the mythic knowns that had underpinned 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 keen to distance himself from the controversies that had roiled Act Three 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 rebuilt Europe and Japan, 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 thereby 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.
When those challenges duly appeared and with the History That Matters now sacrosanct, Clinton’s successor 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 History That Matters mandated a large-scale military enterprise comparable to those that had made the twentieth century an American Century. The Global War on Terror, in effect, constituted an addendum to the HTM—a fourth act in history’s onward march. To emphasize the continuities, some observers even proposed styling the US response to 9/11 World War IV, with the Cold War retroactively designated World War III.
Alas, by whatever name World War IV has proven a bust. Fifteen years after it began, victory is nowhere in sight. Indeed, it seems fair to say that no plausible conception of how exactly the United States might achieve victory exists, either in Washington or anywhere else. Muddling through has become the order of the day. In that regard, the ongoing military campaign against the Islamic State offers Exhibit A. For Exhibit B, see Washington’s flaccid support for the “moderate rebels” in Syria’s civil war.
Meanwhile, when it comes to devising an alternative to muddling, the ostensibly usable past has become a straitjacket. Finding solace and reassurance in its familiarity, Americans remain firmly moored to the HTM, although Acts One and Three have taken a backseat to Act Two. So the debate over the Iran nuclear deal during the summer of 2015, for example, inspired innumerable references to Iran as Nazi Germany and Barack Obama as Neville Chamberlain, while warning of Israelis being marched off to death camps.
For their part, 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.
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. So no less than was the case in the 1920s/30s and 1960s/70s, the times call for revisionism. The task this time is to reframe the entire twentieth 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 critically engaging the HTM with vigor sufficient to affect public understanding of the past implies a revival of fields that have become decidedly unhip. The present-day historical profession does not prioritize political, diplomatic, and military themes. Whether for good or for ill, race, class, gender, and sexuality claim pride of place.
So among Americans at least, count on the HTM to endure—history that lets us feel good, even as it makes us stupid.
____________
1. Woodrow Wilson, “War Message to Congress” (April 2, 1917). U.S. 65th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Document 5.