I. Objectivity in History

It is two decades now since University of Chicago historian Peter Novick published his landmark work That Noble Dream, a gloomy analysis of "the objectivity question" and its importance for the American historical profession. In 1989, That Noble Dream won the American Historical Association's prize for the best book of the year in American history. From the date of its original publication a year earlier, it attracted much, and heated, attention. Yet, in all the years that have passed since its first appearance, little or no progress has been made toward any sort of solution for the conundrum Novick posed in his book.

On the one hand, Novick argued, the "ideal of 'objectivity'" had long been "the rock" on which "the professional historical venture" in this country "was constituted, its continuing raison d'etre. It has been the quality which the profession has prized and praised above all oth-ers—whether in historians or in their works. It has been the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship: moving ever closer to the objective truth about the past."¹ On the other hand, this ideal of objectivity is "essentially confused." It is based on "philosophical assumptions" that are "dubious." It is "psychologically and sociologically naive. As a practical matter, I think it promotes an unreal and misleading invidious distinction between, on the one hand, historical accounts 'distorted' by ideological assumptions and purposes; on the other, history free of these taints."²

For, of course, there is no history that is free of such "taints." In a post to an e-mail discussion group on December 12, 1995, Novick noted that

[i]n writing a work of history, the historian inevitably [...] is radically selective, choosing from among the infinite number of ("true") facts which could be recorded a small portion which he or she will record. Further, also inevitably, some are centered, others marginalized. And all of them are necessarily arranged, in different ways. Selection, centering, and arrangement are inherent in the process; and are typically decisive in determining the sort of picture which emerges.³

And yet, to say all this is barely to have scratched the surface of the problem. For before the historian can select, center, marginalize, or arrange the facts, he or she must first ascertain the facts. And this is by no means as unproblematical a matter as at first it might seem.

"The past is never dead," the attorney Gavin Stevens declares in William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. "It's not even past."⁴ What he means by this is plain enough to anyone who has ever taken a stroll through any of our older American cities—Boston, for example, or New York or Philadelphia or San Francisco. Walking through such a place, one passes, like a geologist, through what Carl Gustavson calls "a present world which is also the world of the past," a world in which "outcroppings" of the past—buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and even transportation infrastructure (like San Francisco's famous cable car tracks)— appear cheek by jowl and fully contemporaneous with buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and transportation infrastructure established only within the last few years, or at least within living memory.⁵ Stevens was right. The past is still here. It is all around us, inescapable, no matter how we may try to shatter the bonds that tie us to it.

There is a problem, however. For not all of the past is still here. Some of it is still here. But the rest—the majority—is indeed past, gone, inaccessible. The historian, in studying the past, "is at a great disadvantage when compared to the trained journalist on the spot," wrote Harry Elmer Barnes, for that journalist "witnessed the events at first hand." The historian, by contrast, "can never have more than a secondhand and remote contact with the issues, events and peoples he is seeking to describe."⁶ Still, the historian, in putting together the best possible secondhand account, can make productive use of such buildings, statues, place names, institutions, and transportation infrastructure as may remain from the time in question. Mainly, however, s/he will tend to rely on documents. "The reason," John Tosh reminds us, "is not just academic conservatism. From the High Middle Ages (c. 1000-1300) onwards, the written word survives in greater abundance than any other source for Western history."⁷

The surviving written word is of a number of types. There are published and unpublished sources. The unpublished sources include the diaries, journals, and letters of individuals; the records and correspondence of those engaged in business enterprises; and the paperwork generated by government at all its levels. The published sources include flyers, pamphlets, almanacs, catalogues, newspapers, magazines, and books. Far and away the most important of these latter—"the most important published primary source for the historian," Tosh calls it—is the daily newspaper. Nor should this be surprising. Newspapers "record the political and social views which made most impact at the time"; moreover, they "provide a day-to-day record of events" and "from time to time present the results of more thorough enquiries into issues which lie beyond the scope of routine news-reporting."⁸

On the other hand, daily newspapers are by no means perfect sources of information for the historian. As Tosh notes,

the very fact of publication sets a limit on the value of [...] these sources. They contain only what was considered to be fit for public consumption—what governments were prepared to reveal, what journalists could elicit from tight-lipped informants, what editors thought would gratify their readers, or [politicians] their constituents. In each case there is a controlling purpose which may limit, distort or falsify what is said.⁹

More important, "they recount only what people found worthy of note about their own age—which may not be what interests us today."¹⁰

Then, too, even if newspaper accounts of events did focus on what interests us today, and even if the reporters and editors responsible for them were able to gain access to the information they sought, there would still be the age-old problem of journalistic incompetence. A hundred years ago, George Bernard Shaw satirized it in The Doctor's Dilemma in the person of an unnamed character, The Newspaper Man,

a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism (for a newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity), he has perforce become a journalist, and has to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment.¹¹

Fifty years ago, H. L. Mencken did not find the situation markedly improved. "The more reflective reader," he wrote "reads next to nothing" in the way of newspapers

and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile. The essential difficulty here is that j ournalism, to be intellectually respectable, requires a kind of equipment in its practitioner that is necessarily rare in the world[...]. He should have the widest conceivable range of knowledge, and he should be the sort of man who is not easily deluded by the specious and the fraudulent. Obviously, there are not enough such men to go round. The best newspaper, if it is lucky, may be able to muster half a dozen at a given moment, but the average newspaper seldom has even one. Thus American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.¹²

And today, according to the late David Shaw, longtime media critic of the Los Angeles Times, the situation detailed by Bernard Shaw and by Mencken persists. "I've long since lost track," Shaw reported to his readers on May 22, 2005, not long before his death, "of the number of times that readers from all walks of life have told me, 'Any time I read anything in the paper that I know anything about, it's wrong.'"¹³

Consider then the plight of the historian dependent upon newspaper accounts for his information about a period, a series of events, the doings and sayings of an historical figure—the "facts" which are his principal concern. "The historian possesses the advantage of better perspective on the events recorded in the newspapers," according to Barnes, "and he can check and compare the reports submitted in the various newspapers. Yet, his results cannot, in the end, be more accurate than the sources which he has used."¹⁴

Of course, newspapers do not stand embarrassed and alone with regard to these deficiencies. Quite the contrary, for, as John Tosh observes, "[m]any primary sources are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay or intended to mislead," and, indeed, "the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest."¹⁵

So some of the facts the historian needs are inaccessible and much of what is accessible is also unreliable. But never mind all that. When it comes to the facts of history, we have what we have, and whatever its deficiencies we must make do with it. Novick emphasizes, as we have seen, that history is "radically selective." Tosh agrees. "The facts are not given," he writes, "they are selected." Moreover,

Historical writing of all kinds is determined as much by what it leaves out as by what it puts in. That is why it makes sense to distinguish[...] between the facts of the past and the facts of history. The former are limitless and in their entirety unknowable; the latter represent a selection made by successive historians for the purpose of historical reconstruction and explanation.

But "[i]f historical facts are selected, it is important to identify the criteria employed in selecting them. Are there commonly shared principles, or is it a matter of personal whim?"¹⁶

The answer, of course, is neither—or, perhaps, both. To some extent the criteria will be personal—though, for all that, not necessarily whimsical; and such commonly shared principles as may exist may not necessarily redound to the benefit of those who seek useful information from their study of history. Consider, as a case in point, the commonly shared principles that informed most high-school-and-col-lege-level textbook writing in the field of American history until very, very recently. The American history taught in most schools during the past hundred years faithfully reflected received opinion, and received opinion sees the United States as a consistent, devoted partisan of the same spirit of individual liberty that once moved its Founders— a peace-loving nation that wishes the rest of the world only the best and never goes to war except in self-defense (or in defense of Western Civilization itself).

Apply this set of principles to what we know of the past and, at the end of the day, you'll wind up with quite a pile of facts that didn't meet the criteria for selection and now litter the cutting room floor. The facts about the gross violations of individual liberty that have been championed by U.S. presidents almost since the beginning, for example— John Adams's Sedition Acts, Andrew Jackson's genocidal treatment of the American Indians, Abraham Lincoln's military conscription (to say nothing of his suspension of habeas corpus and his imprisonment of newspaper editors who dared to disagree with his prosecution of the Civil War), William McKinley's brutal suppression of the independence movement in the Philippines after the Spanish American War, Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up American citizens of Japanese ancestry and imprison them in concentration camps—are any of these inconvenient facts likely to be selected for inclusion in a textbook based on the "commonly shared principle" of the saintliness of the U.S. government?

But if John Tosh is correct, the only alternative to such "commonly shared principles" is "personal whim." As Harry Elmer Barnes put it,

[a] historical fact refers to a specific concatenation of circumstances which was both born and terminated at the moment of its occurrence. When we say that we have discovered a historical fact we actually mean only that we have acquired information which allows us to make a highly subjective and incomplete reconstruction of one or more of the elements which once existed in a now extinct historical situation. No one can ever entirely recreate this historical entity and, in general, we make of a historical fact essentially what we put into it as a result of our subjective imagination.¹⁷

When Barnes refers to the historian's "reconstruction" of an historical event as "highly subjective," when he declares that what "we make of a historical fact" is "essentially what we put into it," using "our subjective imagination," this may sound at first like a warning of impending disaster. Surely if every historian relied on "subjective imagination" as the basis for selecting facts, no two historical accounts would agree, and the discipline of history would be plunged into chaos.