Fact, Fictions, Fraud - American History from
Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin

Introduction: Two-Faced History

American history is two-faced, like the ancient Roman god Janus. One face proudly bears the accomplishments of heroes and heroines and reflects the rise of a handful of isolated European enclaves in a vast wilderness to the greatest democratic and industrial power in the world. On this face of our history are chiseled the essential facts that everyone is expected to know about our past, along with a series of useful fictions that celebrate our achievements. This celebratory version of our history has a very old pedigree, going back to the first Fourth of July orations at the end of the eighteenth century. The other face bears a different, less appealing, aspect. On its facets one sees the sad tales of the displacement of native peoples, the wickedness of slavery, the exploitation of workers and nature, and the many failed promises of equality and justice that have marked American history from its inception. I have called this the "new history," following a usage made popular in the turbulent 1960s.

These are the two countenances of American history, both exhibiting substantial truths, but neither, like the faces of Janus, able to regard the other. Because American history is two-faced, everyone who undertakes to write about or teach American history in a thorough manner has an almost intolerable burden: to balance a critical approach and a rightful pride. The effort to carry that burden began with the creation of the American nation, continued through two centuries of historical scholarship, and provides the context for the achievements and the failings of Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin. For in different ways they tried to shoulder that burden, and in different ways it proved too heavy for them.

All of the four knew that Americans want and need a history that reassures us that we can manage our democracy, find a way to work through our cultural conflicts, make use of our diversity, and give every American the opportunity to fulfill his or her dreams. Americans certainly want and perhaps need heroes, and this presses us to see the strengths and achievements of past generations. Thus, perhaps too often we ask for simple, straightforward historical answers to highly complex questions. Historians should not be insensitive to the needs and wants of their countrymen, but neither can we ignore the way that they may lead historians to bend facts and dictate interpretations-demanding fabrications, rewarding falsehoods, and promoting repetition of soothing phrases and inspirational slogans. For we also need a history that is critical of the past and critical of itself, a history that is always trying to instruct us by bitter example and by self-examination.

On July, 5, 2003, my nineteen-year-old son and I visited the newly opened National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, two blocks from Independence Hall. We joined eager crowds surging through the exhibits. I asked a few people what they were looking for, and they answered that they had come to celebrate the founding of the greatest nation the world had ever seen. They were proud to be Americans, and assumed that the objects and the demonstrations in the center would foster that pride. None told me that they had come to find evidence of oppression, even though the newspapers that week had been full of the efforts of civil rights groups to create some kind of memorial to the slaves brought to the city by the very men who framed the new Constitution. The sites of the slave quarters, unmarked, were no more than a block away from the new center.

My favorite room was the hall of signers, containing a tableauvivant of life-size posed bronze statues of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As I stood next to the figure of James Madison, I imagined conversing with him about his views. I knew that we did not have much in common other than our love of history. He was a Virginia planter, a member of a land-owning, ruling elite, and a slaveholder highly suspicious of democracy, equality, and the masses. I do not share any of these characteristics with him, but have written many pages about him. The intellectual assumption that we historians, so different from the people we write about, can leap over the years and enter into their minds and hearts, the fragile but enduring faith in a scholar's imagination and learning, is the foundation on which all historical scholarship is built.

My son interrupted my reverie and asked me to join him at the multimedia presentation on the history of the Constitution. Averse to what I anticipated would be a mindless celebration of 216 years of unalloyed liberty and progress, I reluctantly consented. We found seats in a steeply banked theater in the round, enjoyed an introduction of stirring images and sound effects, then for 15 minutes listened to an actor reciting the lines in a script. As he began to speak, I recalled another occasion, nearly a quarter century before, when I heard a National Park Service guide's recitation during a tour of Independence Hall. His account did not mention people of color, slaves, or women at all. Indeed, it sounded as though there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the Revolution. How different was the actor's narrative; it was not uncritically patriotic and self-congratulatory. His script conceded how the Constitution bowed to slave owners and how it left out the rights of women, minorities, and Indians.

It seemed that our story-the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, in a word, our history-had mutated. Instead of one people, with one great dream that we fulfilled, we had become many people, with many dreams, some not yet fulfilled. Instead of unalloyed progress, we had a mixture of achievement and turmoil. Those who were marginal in earlier accounts had become central; once powerless victims now exercised agency; and the dispossessed and enslaved gained a history worth knowing. The exhibits and the multimedia show at the National Constitution Center certainly celebrated the achievement of the Founders, but also they raised questions about inclusiveness, diversity, and contested values. The distinguished professional historians on the advisory board of the council of the center-the University of Pennsylvania's Richard Beeman, among others-insisted on going beyond mere celebration, but stopped short of depicting "the American experience in liberty and constitutional justice as a fraud and a sham."

But how could our past itself change? Surely the events of 1776 and 1787 happened as they happened. How could the history we teach and write change so much when the past could not change at all? Were we simply inventing a new past to suit current needs and ideals-a past more welcoming to diversity, dissent, and minority rights? Was everything in history a matter of interpretation and perspective, or were there basic facts and great truths that should not be made the subject of contemporary fads?

One of the foremost academic historians of the 1950s and 1960s, Harvard University's Oscar Handlin, titled his personal memoir Truth in History because that is what he thought historians should be seeking. He was upset by the rise of what others had called "politically correct history," warned against faddish reinterpretations, and decried "theoretical political considerations." As if in reply, Eric Foner, one of the most respected historians of the 1980s and 1990s, insisted that truth itself was culturally constructed in the past as it is in the present. History did not reveal truths; it revealed the struggle among people to define their beliefs as truth and their opponents' ideas as falsehoods. Thus "history always has been and always will be regularly rewritten." In other words, historians were always rewriting the past.

But many Americans are uncomfortable with that process of continual renewal. They demand that certain themes not vanish from our history. The most important of these is our desire to celebrate our past. As the literary critic Norman Podhoretz insists in My Love Affair with America, the "institutional structure of American democracy . . .must be defended against the people both at home and abroad who thought that it was bad. . . . More than merely being defended, it deserved . . . to be 'celebrated.'" The political theorist Thomas G. West put the need for finding and celebrating heroes more plaintively in his Vindicating the Founders: "Although America has not always lived up to her own best principles, she has a great and noble heritage. It would be a shame if that heritage were to be squandered because of misunderstandings and distortions of the Founders' principles by today's intellectuals." Historians who would undermine this view of history with their critical ideology become the enemy in this "culture war." As the historian Joseph Ellis explained

A kind of electromagnetic field, therefore, surrounds this entire subject [of our founding], manifesting itself as a golden haze or halo for the vast majority of contemporary Americans, or as a contaminated radioactive cloud for a smaller but quite vocal group of critics unhappy with what America has become or how we have gotten here.

The value of celebratory history, in theory at least, is that it brings Americans together in harmony. The other side of the story is that celebratory history hides the blemishes, the injustice, oppression, and divisiveness that marred our past. The most tangible manifestation of the celebratory ideal is the historical theme park. In the 1970s, there was a boom in what Michael Kammen, a historian of American culture, called, "the heritage phenomenon." Historical parks, exhibitions, preservation societies, and living history museums blossomed all over America. Some were public, others commercial. All valuable and praiseworthy on their face, they were vehicles for promoting consensus, even when, like Gettysburg National Park, the historical event they commemorated was one of violent divisiveness. Thus when I visited Gettysburg, my historical guide stressed the common values, heroism, and sacrifice of the Union and Confederate troops and never mentioned the issues of slavery and sectional animosity that led to the Civil War and the carnage at battles such as Gettysburg. Kammen was concerned that many of the historical theme parks masked "an ideologically useful" task, a "self-indulgent" defense of traditional ideas that celebrated a nonexistent past.

Over the past decade I have visited many memorial parks, historical reenactments, living museums, and historical sites relating to early American history and seen evidence of their inspirational power and their ideological bias. I have enjoyed the efforts of the reenactors and conservators, and have learned much from them. I believe that the experiences they recounted provide a deeply moving sense of the accomplishments of our forebears. I also encountered a sanitized past. Colonial Williamsburg, for example, did not present an accurate picture of the importance, or the horrors, of slave life in Virginia's colonial capital, though the reenactors included people of color discussing slavery. None of Jamestown Festival Park's many exhibits revealed the mortal enmity between colonists and Indians. Instead, the captions in the display cases and the talks of the reenactors suggested a harmonious, if harsher, time.

In recent years, the conceptual gap between a comforting celebration of our past on one side and a demanding critique of our past shortcomings on the other has become a yawning political rift, conservatives standing on one side of it, ignoring the need for self-criticism, and liberals on the other, demanding reparations for the victims of past misdeeds. On September 17, 2002, President George W. Bush made clear where he stood. He announced a National Endowment for the Humanities initiative called "We the People" that would sponsor "projects designed to explore significant events and themes in our nation's history" and an annual "Heroes in History" lecture by a scholar "on an individual whose heroism has helped to protect America." He had as little use for criticism of his policies from historians as he did for critical historical writing. When some historical experts questioned his rationale for the Second Iraq War, President Bush furiously assailed "revisionist historians" for undermining the consensus necessary to prosecute the war. Liberal historians, led by James M. McPherson, president of the AHA, replied that "there is no single immutable 'truth' about past events and their meaning. . . . Revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. . . . Without revisions we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction that were conferred by D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation," a film of such transparent racism that it has become the epitome of malignly distorted consensus history.

But the contest for control of our history is much more complex than a simple conservative celebrant versus liberal critic lineup. Early in 2003, Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina proposed a national park site to commemorate the history of Reconstruction. It would have brought federal dollars and thousands of visitors to depressed Beaufort County. Who could oppose a public history project that would also benefit the economic welfare of a local area? The Sons of Confederate Veterans is who. They wanted a veto on potentially offensive exhibits, claiming that Reconstruction was a "blight" imposed on the South by carpetbaggers and federal troops. Jefferson Mansell, director of the Historic Beaufort Foundation, replied that "history is not always pretty. It is often controversial and open to interpretation." He continued that all South Carolinians who suffered after the war would be included in the exhibits, but the Sons of Confederate Veterans were not mollified. The split was there, all right, and where one stood depended on what one wanted from history.

It would be reassuring to think that professional historians could find a way to bridge this gap. We are a nation that honors the professionally trained person and turns to professionals when something has gone wrong. Lawyers, doctors, and psychological counselors are all professionals. Modern professional historical study, in the hands of well-trained, supposedly objective practitioners, should save us from short-sighted, partisan, adversarial contests over the uses of our history. In the hands of the professionals, no one supposedly need fear "revisionism," for all revision would be improvement and refinement of knowledge. As one of the most honored members of our profession, the late Daniel Boorstin, told an audience at the Library of Congress in December, 2000, "For me the task of the historian is not to chisel a personal or definitive view of the past on granite. Rather, it is to see the iridescence of the past, fully aware that it will have a new and unsuspected iridescence in the future."

But professionalization of its members has not brought harmony to the historical academy. Although the American Historical Association's Statement on Standards of Professional Historians urges all historians to show "an awareness of [our] own bias and a readiness to follow sound method and analysis wherever they may lead," in fact, as the historian Lawrence Levine recently wrote, "Academic history in the United States . . . has not been a long happy voyage in a stable vessel characterized by blissful consensus about which subject should form the indisputable curriculum; it has been marked by prolonged and often acrimonious struggle and debate." Professional historians valued the mastery of facts but vigorously challenged one another's interpretations of those facts.

Until our own day, professional historians' quarrels with one another have not had the same visibility as their publications. Disputes within the profession generally stayed there. Indeed, relative invisibility had brought a kind of oracular authority to the historical profession, especially for historians at elite universities. Such scholars were held in a special esteem, occupying a pedestal they had built for themselves with all their talk of special training, long apprenticeships, peer (collegial) review, and blind refereeing of book and article manuscripts (the reviewer not knowing the author) prior to their acceptance for publication.

In our age of talking historians' heads-on the History Channel, in documentaries like Ken Burns's Civil War, and on C-Span's Booknotes-for the first time many Americans have the opportunity to see and hear elite professional historians. Professional historians who also or primarily write for general audiences popular history now "do the circuit" at the huge bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, giving spiels and signing copies of their latest books. Leading trade publishers schedule their historians' appearances on television and radio as part of advertising campaigns for books. The impact of the marketing of popular history has been immense. Near-celebrity status for these historians has meant a magnification of both their importance and their flaws.

There is a lot more institutional support for history now than ever before, too. It is big business. The only historians who got rich in the 1940s and 1950s were the ones with successful textbooks. Today, the salaries of the star professors, the royalties from best-selling books, and the honoraria of doing the lecture circuit have moved the top tier of the profession out of genteel poverty into the upper middle class. One colleague much in demand on the military and diplomatic history lecture circuit explained to me that he would not give any more invited talks unless he was paid a minimum of $1,500. And that is chicken feed compared to the fees commanded by some of the best paid historians, including two of the individuals discussed at length in this book.

Leading professional historians can also rely for support on well-endowed universities and private foundations. In one recent biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the author Meryle Secrest thanked "four main foundations and research centers" and then listed another 91 institutions and organizations. In the opening pages of his recent exploration of the idea behind the new history, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History, Lawrence Levine revealed that the book began life as his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians in 1993. Before and after, he had "tried out the ideas" on "a wide variety of academic audiences from Colby College in Maine on one side of the country to the Stanford Humanities Center on the other." The individual chapters began to take form as lectures at George Mason University, to which Levine had migrated after long service at the University of California at Berkeley. Before another year had passed revised versions of the chapters became the Carl Becker Lectures at Cornell. A John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a short stay at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, permitted Levine to put the finishing touches on the work. He did not work alone: "Once again I have been privileged to work with research assistants who aided me with consummate skill and unfailing thoughtfulness."

Wherever one stood in this quarrel over the value and use of history, whatever one's politics, it was clear that the divide between celebratory history and critical history had grown wider. But those on both sides did not recognize that the contest for control of America's past started in the first years of the nation. Historical writing then was just as politically potent, just as partisan, as it was at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, the framing of historical writing in the formative years of our republic set the stage for the current controversy-and the crisis in historical confidence that it has spawned.

From the book, PAST IMPERFECT, by Peter Charles Hoffer. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.

Available now from Amazon.com - Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Frauds - American History From Bancroft And Parkman To Ambrose, Bellisles, Ellis, And Goodwin by Peter Charles Hoffer, professor of history at the University of Georgia.

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