Just Tell the Story Well

THE HISTORIAN AND HISTORY by Page Smith. 261 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Though they have been writing history for several centuries, historians are still arguing about how it should be written. Some would like to inject more economics into history, some more sociology, others more psychology. Some would place more emphasis on free will, others on impersonal forces. Page Smith, biographer of John Adams, would settle for a little more imagination.

In a witty, incisive, appetizingly readable book, Smith tries to show where modern history has gone astray. Mesmerized by all the new sciences of the time, 19th century historians decided that history, too, could be a science. Eloquent layman historians like Gibbon, Burke and Hume went out of fashion. Academicians took over the writing of history, and they have had a hammerlock on it ever since. With enough research and "objectivity," they were sure that history could be reduced to a number of immutable laws, that human behavior could be neatly categorized and predicted. They gave up trying to see the big picture and began grinding out monographs to which Gibbon would have allotted a footnote.

Botching the Revolution. Nowhere is this kind of history produced in greater or grimmer volume than the present-day U.S., where a not-too-untypical Ph.D. candidate will write on "The Dairy Industry in Wisconsin Between 1875 and 1885." ("He must have covered the subject teat by teat," groaned a professor.) Though there are now an average 15 Ph.D.s laboring over each year of American history, historical interpretations have not noticeably improved. Pseudoscientific systems are no substitute for imagination. A case in point, writes Smith, is the American Revolution.

As Smith sees it, the best history of the Revolution was written by a participant, David Ramsay, in the decade after the war. Ramsay concluded that the chief cause of the Revolution was implicit in the Stamp Act: the British Parliament wanted more power over the colonies than the colonies were willing to allow. But later historians were not content with this sensible explanation. George Bancroft turned the war into a moral crusade for freedom and made poor old bumbling George III a sinister villain. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. saw the war as a class struggle in which colonial merchants were pitted against colonial proletariat. Then, in the 1950s, Edmund and Helen Morgan astonished the historical community by declaring that resistance to the Stamp Act was, after all, the cause of the war. Historical interpretation had come full circle.

Lives Relived. History can never be a matter of scientific exactitude, argues Smith, and historians who take pride in their objectivity on the ground that they are writing at a time remote from the event are merely imposing their own system on the past. "Individuals in history achieve authenticity through their actions," writes Smith, "and historians cannot arbitrarily deprive these lives of their meaning by judgments imposed long after the event. That we should ever have accepted any convention which held the contrary is monstrous."

The great tradition of history has been maintained by those few historians --Jakob Burckhardt in the 19th century, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Reinhold Niebuhr in the 20th--who have entered sympathetically and imaginatively into the lives of people of the past. These historians have understood that history is a vital part of living, that it both shapes and reflects a civilization. "The history that has commanded men's minds and hearts," writes Smith, "has always been narrative history, history with a story to tell that illuminates the truth of the human situation, that lifts spirits and projects new potentialities."

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