Tragedy of History

Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.* (The Age of Jackson) has a serious quarrel to pick with his fellow scholars and with the teaching of history in U.S. schools. Too many of them, he thinks, have become victims of "historical senti-mentalism." Their view of the past has become clouded by a vogue of optimism, their work distorted by a wave of wishful thinking and a burning determination to push moral issues under the rug. In the current issue of Partisan Review, Professor Schlesinger states his case.

He begins it by taking issue with the scholars now writing about the Civil War.

The new school of historians, he argues, insists on playing down the moral issue of slavery as of little or no importance. Some go so far as to declare that the whole struggle was a tragic blunder that could have been avoided by more discussion, less action.

A Workable Adjustment. The noted Lincoln biographer, James G. Randall, holds that the Civil War was the work of a "blundering generation," stirred up by "fanaticism" and "warmaking agitation." Other "revisionists," e.g., Professor Avery Craven of the University of Chicago, argue that slavery would have broken down of its own weight, that the war was made inevitable as a result of irresponsible leadership by power-driven politicians. What those leaders should have done, adds Columbia University's Allan Nevins, "was to furnish a workable adjustment" between the North & South.

To Arthur Schlesinger, this view of the Civil War is both pulpy and dangerous. It glides over the fact "that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South" and that to protect its slave economics, the South was resorting to "book-burning, the censorship of the mails [and] the gradual illegalization of dissent." Adds Schlesinger: "When a society based on bond slavery acts to eliminate criticism ... it outlaws what a believer in democracy can only regard as the abiding values of man."

An Afterglow. The problem, in Schlesinger's view, involves more than the Civil War alone. It "raises basic questions about the whole modern view of history ... I cannot escape the feeling that the vogue of revisionism is connected with the modern tendency to seek in optimistic sentimentalism an escape from the severe demands of moral decision."

As for the "revisionists": "We have here a touching afterglow of the admirable nineteenth-century faith in the full rationality and perfectibility of man; the faith that the errors of the world would all in time be outmoded ... by progress. Yet the experience of the twentieth century has made it clear that we gravely overrated man's capacity to solve the problems of existence . . .

"The unhappy fact is that man occasionally works himself into a logjam; and that the logjam must be burst by violence."

No Assurance. In the long view of history, says Schlesinger, "We delude ourselves when we think that history teaches us that evil will be 'outmoded' by progress and that politics consequently does not impose on us the necessity for decision and struggle . . . History is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time; nor is man capable of transcending the limitations of his being . . .

"History is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfillment. Nothing exists in history to assure us that the great moral dilemmas can be resolved without pain ..."

* Not to be confused with Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger (Political and Social Growth of the American People, 1865-1940), his father.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.