Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud
American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin

Peter Charles Hoffer

New York: Public Affairs, 2004; ISBN: 1-58648-244-0; Pp. xi, 272, notes, index

Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev

After reading the atrocious Historians in Trouble, I developed an appetite for academic scandal and, to redeem my interest, a thirst for an explanation. This is the second book (the other is Scandals & Scoundrels) that purports to tell me why the academic profession, in this case history, is in such deep trouble with the public. The author, Mr Hoffer, is a professional historian and, very relevantly, has served on the American Historical Association's Professional Division that investigates (or used to) professional wrongdoing by historians. Unlike the journalistic, holier-than-thou, accounts that simply defend a "guilty" or "not guilty" verdict (usually depending on the part of political spectrum the author comes from), this one is more ambitious. Mr Hoffer wants to place the scandals in a broad historical context, to make them understandable as part and parcel of the process of reinventing itself that the historical profession has been undergoing since the 1960s. The book is written for the general public and provides more detail on the cases than any of the others I have seen. Still, one must weigh the author's conclusions very carefully before accepting them.

And what, pray, are these conclusions? In the first part of the book, Mr Hoffer traces the development of American historiography as an evolution from mindless jingoism that celebrated the achievements of white Protestant men (what he calls "consensus history") to the richer, diverse, and more accurate newer version that incorporates the dark side of the story---the oppression of women, races, minorities, and the contributions these groups made---to weave a more complete and not as gratifying picture (he calls this "new history"). Briefly, before history became institutionalized, it was practiced by gifted amateurs who promoted a very simplistic view of the past. They did not care with appropriate attribution (simply citing each other without bothering to indicate that), they peddled visions of greatness without any hints about the costs of the achievements they were celebrating. They were motivated by their desire to unite and inspire all Americans, and to this end they created myths to guide them. Mr Hoffer can scarcely contain his disdain here, and cannot escape the all too common anachronistic trap: he judges people like Bancroft and Parkman by modern standards rather than by the standards prevailing at the time they lived and worked.

To take a nearly random example, on p. 26, he says "Parkman's aim was an accurate account, but it was filled with what can only be regarded as misrepresentation at best and prejudice at worst. These derived not from intention to deceive, but from deep-seated opinions that he never bothered to explore... For the Indians' role in his history was to people 'the savage prologue of the American drama... coming to a close, [as] the civilization of Europe was advancing on the scene." OK, so Parkman saw the Indians as too primitive to explain what happened here after the Protestants came. I wonder why this is such a big problem. Did the Indians found the United States? Did they contribute to the Constitution? To the Revolutionary War? It is naive to dismiss them as agents of history, of course. After all, much of the initial history had to do with their displacement as the Europeans conquered the continent and wrested its control from the locals. Parkman wrote about the conflict between the French and the English over North America, a conflict in which Indians figured prominently too, even if often treated as pawns in the larger game. In the end, one must spend as much time with the Indians as it is necessary for the purposes of his project. Parkman was biased, no doubt, probably nearly all of his contemporaries were. But to accuse him of failing to meet modern requirements for politically correct writing is just dumb. [I also can't help but wonder just how many academics bother to explore their own deep-seated opinions, like the one that one must always see history in terms of the victimhood of oppressed groups and then dwell on the moral failings of the oppressors.]

Why were these people who wrote consensus history so popular? Because they "had given the general American reading public what it wanted, a popular history... satisfying all its patriotic conceits and ignoring all its past sins" (p. 53, with reference to Boorstin). This statement reflects Mr Hoffer's outlook that colors the entire book. One can be forgiven if one detects the unmistakable whiff of elitism; after all, the average Joe Shmoe Reader can't be expected to swallow easily an account that exposes just how evil his grandfather was. Erudite academics, on the other hand, can pretty much handle anything. (Or so it would seem.) As long as there was "ethnic and religious homogeneity of [the history's] craftsmen" (p. 59), the success of consensus history was assured (some prominent Jewish practitioners notwithstanding). In the end, this unsatisfying and deplorable state of affairs would be brought down by the influx of new historians, people of diverse backgrounds (racial, religious, and sexual), who would create a new history, "inclusive, diverse, self-critical," and would demand "methodological sophistication that profoundly widened the divide between academic and popular history" (pp. 60-61).

What does this mean? This means that in the 1960s a lot of leftists started practicing history (what Mr Hoffer calls the New Left). These were the radicals disenchanted with US foreign (Vietnam War) and domestic (racial tensions) policies. These historians were activists who wanted to change the world around them, and who wrote histories that reflected their political stance. (One can't help but recall Mr Hoffer's verdict about the unexamined deep-seated opinions here.) In practice that meant Marxists wrote about class and capitalist oppression, feminists wrote about gender oppression, gays and lesbians wrote about sexual oppression, blacks wrote about racial oppression, and everyone essentially wrote about the evils of the white heterosexual Protestant men of European descent.

Whereas it is doubtless necessary to set the record straight and explore the varied American history in all its aspects, it is nevertheless incumbent upon practitioners to place their findings in context. Rather than providing a gloomy litany of constant past abuses, historians must apply the common sense corrective and compare that both to prevailing practices of the day and overall results of that behavior. This is hard to do, and it will necessarily muddy the waters to an extent that it may undermine altogether the call to arms these new historians were interested in making. But bad history does not necessarily mean failing to get one's facts right, it also means failing to evaluate the evidence rationally and communicate one's findings truthfully without the ideological blindfold. No wonder, then, that the public would feel alienated from the works of these academics. It's not that people are stupid and do not want to read criticisms of their past, as Mr Hoffer would have us believe. It's just that many people probably could not stomach the idea that there was nothing good in American history. I, for example, happen to think that on the whole the good in American history far outweighs the bad (very, very far indeed), both in terms of what the American society has achieved and what it has brought to the world. I don't believe I am unwilling to read critical work just because it is critical or because it is methodologically sophisticated (most of new history is actually pretty bad there, as we shall see).

But I digress. In the last chapter of part I, Mr Hoffer analyzes three instances of the history profession finding itself in the glare of public controversy. In each case it came off badly, contributing to the decline of its prestige with the public. The first was the celebration of Columbus Day in 1989, and the eruption of protest against this biased account of what some perceived as the plunder of the New World, the coming of the Dark Ages for the Indians. Mr Hoffer contents himself with the observation that "most professional historians, standing on their reputations and expertise, observed the controversy as if they were above the fray" (p. 97). He does not really examine why this happened. I would be curious to know: after all, both sides made appeals to history to justify their positions. Is it really that difficult to take a stance? Of course it is, especially when one's political sympathies align with the group that is presenting the weaker argument. I will not claim to know why historians kept silent, but it is telling that they did when they did not remain aloof in other instances.

The National History Standards fiasco is not as well-known as it probably ought to be. This was the attempt to establish a common minimum standard of historical knowledge that any student in America should be able to meet. This seems like a worthy goal (especially considering reports that clearly show the sorry state of this knowledge these days) and should not be particularly difficult to achieve. After all, we do not want to make students experts in history. All we want is for them to have some awareness of their past, the struggles their nation has gone through, the achievements it has made, its triumphs and its failings. Shockingly, this entire effort fell apart because one of its leaders, Gary Nash, decided that this was license to teach new history to the students. In practice that meant multiculturalism run amok, an attempt to indoctrinate young people with profoundly anti-Western messages (pp. 103-04). AHA, the professional organization, was the worst perpetrator: it "wanted 'all cultures' to have 'equal billing'" (p. 107). The view that "American history began as the meeting of three worlds: African, Amerindian, and European... that the nation began with cultural blending, in which no culture took precedence over any other" (Ravitch, The Language Police, pp. 137-38) won the day, and naturally led to the collapse of the national standard. Can one really teach students such a fundamentally distorted view of American history? That Indians and blacks were as pivotal for the formation of the American culture as the descendants of the European immigrants defies common sense, logic, and does severe violence to the facts.

But that's not why Mr Hoffer thinks the project died. In his world, people like the perennially unpleasant Rush Limbaugh torpedoed it. That is, the ubiquitous militant uneducated uncouth right blasted the result and succeeded in stirring up enough controversy to scuttle it altogether. Whereas Nash was trying to convey "the incomplete complex and critical activity" that history truly is, the simplistic Limbaugh just wanted an uncritical celebration of heroes (p. 111). That may have been so, I don't doubt that Mr Limbaugh made some dumb comment along these lines. What matters here is that by presenting Mr Limbaugh as the exemplar of the reaction to the proposed standard, Mr Hoffer suggests that all of it had this idiotic cast. In other words, it was all coming from people who were not experts and who knew nothing of real history. In all this, Mr Hoffer detects "a classic expression of anti-intellectualism" (p. 113), and ends up blaming the supposed fundamentalist anti-intellectualism of Americans for their failure to adopt the progressive attitudes of Nash and his helpers. To wit, Mr Hoffer is saying, We are the experts, we know what happened, and you have no idea. But you do not agree with us. The only way you could do that is if you dismiss what we say. But since we are correct and you cannot deny this, it must be that you discount what we say because you don't like us.

But does one need anti-intellectualism to dismiss the standards as a charade, a farcical attempt at brain-washing? Not really. What the so-called anti-intellectuals argued for was horse sense, a common sense based on facts. Yes, there are facts in history, much posturing to the contrary by the postmodernists notwithstanding. One does not need to know much about Indians to know just how instrumental they were not in drafting the Constitution. Yet one can hardly deny that this document laid the foundations for the great experiment in democracy into which this nation plunged. Historians like to dazzle people with recondite knowledge of minutia, and it's all good, although largely irrelevant here. We are not arguing about minute detail, but attempting to provide students with a sense of history painted in broad strokes. Not to mention that a lot of the reading public is not as ignorant of the basics as some historians pretend them to be. In the end, the old elitist defense simply fails here. This is not an instance where a physicist has to defend his experiment against people who know nothing about physics. Horse sense won't help there. But I just cannot see how anyone can claim that this situation is equivalent.

I am skipping the Enola Gay fiasco at the Smithsonian, where the experts who insisted on focusing the exhibit on the Japanese victims were forced to retreat in the face of sustained criticism (yes, of course, you guessed it, by the indefatigable right). It really is too obnoxious to discuss. Suffice to point out that Mr Hoffer offers the same "analysis," pitting experts against the stupid anti-intellectual public who has no patience for fine detail. Concluding this section, he says "The historians of the 1990s found themselves in a public arena where image and spin control trumped nuanced, thoughtful scholarship, and terms like 'politicized' and 'politically correct' had no fixed meaning" (pp 127-28). He is careful to acknowledge dissent within the profession, like the one coming from the diplomatic historian Marc Trachtenberg (who eventually sought refuge in the Political Science department at UCLA). He also offers some hilarious insights into just how disconnected the experts really are: "We need some Karl Marx alongside our Foucault," he quotes Nell Painter say (p. 129).

Where does this all lead to when it comes to fraud? To (a) the professionals circling the wagons when an amateur attacks one of them, and (b) in gleeful lambasting of popular historians as unworthy. This is precisely how Mr Hoffer sees the several cases unfolding. First, we have Michael Bellesiles and his work on early gun culture in America where he falsified his data to reach the pro gun-control conclusions he wanted. Incidentally, this chapter is the most extensive treatment of this case that I have seen, a very nice antidote to the truly hyperbolic and misleading account in Mr Wiener's book. In this version, Mr Bellesiles used the profession to hide his shoddy scholarship and nearly got away with it. Mr Hoffer makes it very clear that it was not the NRA or the pro-gun lobby that brought down that particular historian. In fact, it was the profession's elitism that caused the controversy to expand into a storm of criticism. The profession, comprising as it does mostly left-leaning pro gun-control professors, enthusiastically accepted the book because of its conclusions despite the early voices of dissent from specialists and non-specialists alike. When Mr Bellesiles succeeded in picturing these early attacks as coming from the lunatic fringe on the right, the profession rallied around him. Later, when experts began raising doubts, he charged them with being NRA stooges. The damage, of course, was done. Although the corrective was eventually applied, the public's perception was probably correct: despite their claims to superior knowledge, the experts had allowed ideological blindfolds to skew their assessment, and had thus aided Mr Bellesiles in perpetrating a fraud on the general public.

The plagiarism of Mr Ambrose and Mrs Goodwin are also well-documented, and Mr Hoffer provides an excellent overview that should leave readers in no doubt about the guilt of the two popular historians. Curiously, he offers almost no analysis of their cases, which he sees as examples of two professionals seeking the public forum in order to escape scrutiny by fellow experts and to make money. In what one can read as lament of the separation between academic and popular history, Mr Hoffer meditates that if the profession had not insisted on such a sharp distinction, then popular historians would not be exempt from the requirements of scholarship (as in do not plagiarize). Maybe. Or maybe the general reader really does not give a hoot about the author placing a footnote to someone else's text rather than properly enclosing it in quotation marks. Mr Hoffer does note this (p. 205), along with the usual allegations about anti-intellectualism: The general public apparently does not want "deep analysis," "intellectual originality, or analytical acuity." Rather, "readers wanted a page turner, with fascinating detail,... heroes, villains, and the triumph of good over evil." This is only an indictment if one sincerely believes that all deep thought requires equivocation. I know it is rather fashionable to remain in limbo forever, and to see many sides to everything. But that does not excuse from rendering a judgment. Indeed, many of the most memorable characters in fiction are flawed. Why can't this be the case with real historical personages? Why would that alienate readers? The problem with "deep analysis" is that its unrelenting gloom produces history that nobody wants to read. Nobody, that is, except fellow travelers.

Mr Hoffer then comes perilously close to a Jesuit "ends justify the means" position when he discusses the case of Mr Joseph Ellis, the Mt. Holyoke professor who fabricated an eventful past for himself. [As an aside, my wife graduated from that elite college. She cannot recall the controversy even though it erupted while she was still there. This may mean she's incredibly insular. Or it may mean that it was not much of a big deal to the students.] What was the story here? Mr Hoffer praises Mr Ellis' historical works and then assumes the role of a psychoanalyst who will probe the depths of Mr Ellis' soul and uncover just what motivated him to lie (mostly to his students). Since I am no expert at reading other people's minds (and, indeed, Mr Ellis may himself have little clue why he did what he did), I will not pretend to know more than Mr Hoffer. (It still strikes me as rather presumptuous to divine someone's motives in this way, but then again, historians do it all the time.) What interests me here is Mr Hoffer's argument that since Mr Ellis' writing improved incredibly after he let his imagination run wild, perhaps we can excuse his lapse. The idea goes something like this: here's a historian in midcareer who has not achieved all that much; he wants fame and recognition; the public wants great stories; he injects his imagination into history and manages to write these nice books; unfortunately, his imagination gets the better of him, and he starts fabricating stories for his students (who, by the way, are all guilty of wanting to be entertained, much like the general public). So in the end, it is the general public's insatiable thirst for imaginative history that corrupted this fine man.

We have thus come full circle. The thesis of this book is that professional and popular history are two different beasts. One is deep and self-critical, an area where nothing is immutable, where truths today may be falsehoods tomorrow, where everyone has a place and everyone is equally important, where the West is only privileged insofar as it is the only really bad thing that happened to humanity. The other is simplistic, jingoist, racist, sexist, homophobic; a parody of good scholarship, detrimental to anyone who reads it. But it makes money and garners fame for its authors who can continue producing that "thing" without having to respond to the strictures of academic experts. The public demands popular history and has no patience for the deep stuff. If only the public could be smarter, then everyone would know just how profound academic historians really are. If only new history did not become victim to "its own worst tendencies" (p. 233), when "with the authority and expertise of its creators... thrown into disrepute in the 1990s, the new history adapted to public controversy by becoming consumer-driven," when "it became whatever its buyers wanted and ultimately proclaimed that there was no historical truth out there," if only...

Mr Hoffer does finger the problem on p. 237: "Interviewed by reporters... leading historians voiced judgments so complex and vague that the oracle at Delphi would have been envious." But the problem was not that the public pressured history to abandon standards of truth or that it was too stupid to understand the complex judgments. The problem was that the profession had already abdicated responsibility when it embraced ideologies that any thinking person should have discarded long ago, ideologies that did not allow many historians to speak out for fear of being ridiculed for their beliefs (in many cases, rightly so). The popular disillusionment arrived after history came to this sorry state, after the controversies had revealed what was happening in the ivory towers. To claim that the public caused the mess historians are in is disingenuous. Historians really have only themselves to blame.

April 29, 2005