SOURCE: Woodward, C. Vann. “Truth and Consequences.” New Republic 200, no. 8 (20 February 1989): 40-3.

[In the following review of That Noble Dream, Woodward questions Novick's success in addressing the “objectivity question” and offers his own evaluation of historians' duty to represent the past.]

A thesis, or better a theme, does run in and out of this large volume from beginning to end. It is proclaimed in its title, That Noble Dream, borrowed from Charles A. Beard, who used it for one of two essays renouncing faith in objectivity in historiography. As developed here, the theme deserves attention on its own, and I shall return to it later. But it is also used as an idea around which to organize an informal history of the American historical profession. Since the latter is of more general interest, I shall take it up first.

It was only in the 1880s that academics set about claiming professional status for historians, and it took some time and a bit of doing. So a historian of ripe years and more than a half century of active involvement can have known or encountered at a distance members of all the generations participating since then. There were still a few founding fathers around in the early 1930s. One's mentors take charge before this volume is half done; by midway one's contemporaries are past their prime and fading out, and junior colleagues are taking over; by the last chapter one's students are rivaling them for attention. These are people one knew, or knows, some of them quite well, and these pages are filled with what they were saying and thinking, often in private, about each other and each other's work.

Relativist or not, Peter Novick works, like most of us, on the assumption that there is truth, or some of it, to be learned about the past by research in documents. He turns over millions of them, many of them private papers never before used, on that rather old-fashioned objectivist assumption, and his researches produce a perfect flood of information: call it truth, fact, theory, what you will. A fully engaged and reasonably informed member of the guild for some years (first book, 1938), I admit that I learned a lot about four generations of my fellow craftsmen that I did not know—some I never suspected. Much of what I learned has little if anything to do with “the objectivity question” or any thesis about it, but it is no less interesting for that.

Among the “telling” truths, for example, are such mundane ones as those about salaries, textbooks, productivity, teaching loads, student patronage, appointments, tenure, and security. In all these aspects, wide variations occurred from one period and one place to another, and the fluctuations had their impact on the teaching and the writing of historians and on their conduct toward each other. Rivalries abound. One early definition of a historical scholar was “a man who has a quarrelsome interest in his neighbor's work”; another called them “more or less cannibals: they live by destroying each others' conclusions.” Squabbles and vendettas often got more attention than work of merit. J. Franklin Jameson's classic on the Revolution sold fewer than a thousand copies, and it took 17 years for John Hicks's book on Populism to sell 1,500 copies. And all this while pandering amateurs like Claude G. Bowers commanded large sales for his travesty on Reconstruction.

Professional history started, and for a good while remained, an Anglo-Saxon enterprise, with members largely of that breed, with a theory holding that institutions and ideas of any great value came of Anglo-Saxon origins. Anglophiles apologized for the Revolution against “race brothers.” Racial biases of various kinds were “near unanimous.” Acceptance of Jews was rare and long resisted. The amount of casual slurs and over anti-Semitism in correspondence regarding the appointment or the promotion of Jews is little short of incredible, and the victims were not confined to the obscure.

In the two decades following World War II American history enjoyed what I have called a “boom period,” a period of unprecedented expansion and prosperity that was followed immediately by a sudden and rapid decline. Neither boom nor collapse is adequately pictured in this book, but both had profound effects. The number of bachelor's degrees awarded in history in 1970-71 reached the all-time high of 44,663, then rapidly plunged in the next 15 years to a low of 16,413 in 1985-86. The barometer of confidence, optimism, and vitality in the profession rose and fell accordingly. At the peak of the boom, just before the fall, with enrollments, publications, and periodicals soaring to new heights, the assurance manifest in the history profession verged on complacency. That mood has long since vanished, but while it lasted it produced striking results.

The expansion brought job opportunities not only for Jews, but for other underrepresented ethnic groups as well. Some considerable number with unorthodox views, including assorted leftists and Marxists, also found a footing in the guild during this period. Novick is especially informative about the so-called “New Left,” a term he rightly dismisses as a “misleading designation” because of the multiplicity and the diversity of opinions it covers. The diverse wings of the New Left usually rallied together for mutual support, but without common policy or doctrine. He is most helpful in sorting out and identifying by origin and school members of the leftist cohort of historians. There were not only “red diaper babies” but “red romper toddlers,” with and without Communist Party attachments, and endless varieties of Marxists. Novick, for example, identifies himself as starting in “the ‘Shachtmantide’ Young Socialist League” when it was “evolving from dissident Trotskyism to the left wing of social democracy.”

We are treated to inside stories and revealing episodes from the McCarthy era of persecution. In the early and mid-'60s, there followed a climate of tolerance in which “leftist historians had good grounds to see bright prospects for their eventual acceptance … an era of good feeling, both within the left, and between left and center.” That era ended with the outburst of militant student protest that not only divided leftist and liberal historians, “but polarized the left itself.” Among issues at stake were questions of whether destruction of the university was required or total disruption was sufficient. The book includes a priceless report of a doctoral oral examination in Fayerweather Hall at Columbia in October 1968, written by the student under examination, who was in complete sympathy with the protesters. The professors, he wrote:

began their questioning amidst the sounds of breaking furniture, shouts of rage and pride, fragments of falling plaster and chants of “shut it down.” … The behavior of the faculty members was curious. … Every time plaster fell on their heads they felt a strange thrill; they alone stood between America and Totalitarianism. … I sensed, during the whole awful comedy, that they were more interested in their own performance than in mine. … I played the game by all the rules.

Unlike the new Jewish recruits to the profession, who were integrationist and usually assimilationist, who were historians who happened to be Jews, the new black historians were separatists, nationalists of some sort, scornful of assimilation. They came on organized as black historians, who shared some of these characteristics, usually presented themselves as feminist historians. Both claimed distinctive styles of perception and thought. But black radicals struck a militant pose against white radicals who ventured onto what they claimed was exclusively their turf. They repeatedly shouted down and insulted white intruders of the left. As it became institutionalized in black studies departments, however, the separatist movement declined as rapidly as it rose, and only half of the departments survive with dwindling support.

Women started earlier in the profession than blacks, but until recently their numbers and influence were marginal, and are still quite low. Novick finds “striking parallels” between new black and new women members. Some similarities do exist, though feminist history and women's studies have not shared the decline that black studies have undergone. The new women were as particularist and exclusionist as blacks, and those whose subject was women's history were opposed to integration and supported separate departments or “studies.” Both stressed the neglect of their subject, the overlooked contributions of their group, oppression and its consequences, and some measure of cultural and institutional separatism. To illustrate the harshness with which feminists could treat women historians whom they regarded as apostates, Novick cites the treatment accorded Rosalind Rosenberg when she appeared as a witness for the company in the Sears case regarding charges of discriminatory employment practices.

All this and more of the history of professional historians is related without much reference to the conflict between objectivists and relativists. That theme is implicit in some of the discussion of individual historians, however, and explicit in a separate treatment of ideology.

Confronted with the “demand to know if I am ‘for’ or ‘against’” historical objectivity, Novick declares that he does not think the idea “true or false, right or wrong: I find it not just essentially contested, but essentially confused.” And it is “not a single idea, but rather a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies … the exact meaning of which will always be in dispute.” Once a term as sacred to historians as “health” to physicians, “valor” to men of arms, or “justice” to men of law, “objectivity” has fallen in and out of favor of late among historians and philosophers of history. Neither a celebration nor a jeremiad, this book, according to its author, “is not a call to arms, nor even a plea for reform,” but rather an effort to expand the historians' awareness of what they are about and their readers' understanding of what historians present them and the claims they make for it.

The American conception of historical objectivity leaned heavily on a rather faulty reading of von Ranke's phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen (“as it really was”), and a translation of the word Wissenschaft as “science.” Borrowing the inflated prestige of empirical science, the fledgling professionals of history gained confidence and pride in their craft. No mere storytellers or propagandists they, members of the Johns Hopkins historical seminar called it “a laboratory of historical truth.” Founding fathers of the new profession built the doctrine of empirical objectivity into its foundations and hammered it home. For the first two generations it remained an article of faith.

World War I shook 19th-century certitudes in all realms of thought and culture, but less in history. Among historians “applied common sense” still claimed the mantle of science and continued to claim it for quite a while. The foremost challengers of “that noble dream” of historical objectivity in the '30s were Carl L. Becker and Charles A. Beard. The doctrine they shared was that historical interpretation was, and always had been, relative to the historian's time, place, views, prejudices, interests, and circumstances. Their heresy was promptly named “relativism” by their objectivist detractors.

Sharing a Midwestern, Republican, Progressive background, Becker and Beard were also united by bonds of mutual affection and esteem. Becker had the lighter touch and the quicker wit, but was more shy. Both enjoyed making fun of the pretensions of the objectivists. Becker gravely assured them that the pasts men created were “perhaps neither true nor false, but only the most convenient form of error.” Such levity about the founding myth of the profession evoked from the old school a response that resembled the excommunication of heretics. Indeed, “the horror of relativism resembled the common horror of atheism.” Apprentices in the mid-'30s enjoyed the dismay of their elders; but the old school continued to prevail generally through the interwar years.

The exigencies of the cold war helped to strengthen the defenders of objectivity, and so did the upsurge of confidence and optimism in the profession that accompanied the history boom in the universities. Beard was in disfavor for his opposition to American intervention in the War, and his relativist heresies were unfairly associated with fascism; his views were denounced by Lewis Mumford, Allan Nevins, and Samuel Eliot Morrison, among others. A mood of consensus, affirmation, and reconciliation of extremes proved congenial, or at least tolerant, toward the objectivist posture.

The collapse of that consensus occurred during the turmoil of the '60s, and it is attributed by Novick chiefly to the lurch toward the left in political culture, the increase in the number of leftist historians, and the cynicism about truth and objectivity in the criticism of the Vietnam War. If everyone was lying, went the reasoning, why not simply believe whatever one found congenial and convenient? A crisis in objectivity swept through virtually all the disciplines in the academy (including the sciences themselves, provoked by Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigms). Some variety of radical relativism seized the social sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and jurisprudence. History departments were certainly not left alone to weather the crisis. A few quantifiers joined with the humanists to speak up for the faith in objectivity, but their voices were sometimes drowned out. Fragmented beyond hope of unification, “The historical profession of the 1980s would have been unrecognizable to those who had established it in the 1880s.”

From the start, Novick is at pains to dissociate himself from partisanship as between objectivists and relativists. He also attempts to maintain that neither position has “any clear, permanent political valence,” and that both are “defended from a variety of points on the political spectrum,” far left to far right. He has no trouble finding examples to support his point, from Marx on down. Yet he is obliged to admit that the defense of objectivity often came from the right, and the criticism from the left. In the nature of things, objectivity is frequently associated with the status quo, and relativity with the maneuverability of attack and change. If logic be pressed, Novick's claim that neither position is “true or false, right or wrong” is itself essentially relativist: it is the more congenial with his generally leftist sympathies.

It might help to declare my own position on the matter. While I reject the evasive solution of one group of historians who claim to be objective relativists, I do hold that valid needs exist for both of these views. In this, as in many important historical controversies, it is not the existence but the comparative importance of the disputed phenomena that is the real issue. That is certainly true of another historical controversy with which I have some familiarity, that over continuity and change in history. However passionate the advocates of the one or the other, they would end (if they lacked the wisdom to begin) with the admission that there would be no history at all without some of both. So it is also with all but the most extreme partisans of objectivity and relativity.

In his final chapter Novick chooses, for reasons not clear, to illustrate the ideological issues of the “Objectivity Question” with the case of David Abraham's book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (1981). The reasons are unclear because the issue at stake in this case is not objectivity, but integrity in the use of evidence. A highly controversial dispute over the scholarship of Abraham's book on the relation of German business to the rise of Nazism, the case has divided the profession bitterly. With his usual candor, Novick writes that “David Abraham was my student, and is my good friend,” and that “the reader should know at the outset that I am not at all ‘neutral’ about David Abraham, his persecution, or his persecutors.” Abraham himself admits “there are simply too many errors in my work,” that some of them are serious—“inexcusable” is his word; his critics say “flagrant”—but that they are errors of carelessness, not deviousness, and do not affect the validity of his argument. His critics maintain that his errors are tendentious and do support his thesis. His defenders draw distinctions between “facticity” and “truth” that suggest the independence of historical truth from the faithful use of valid historical evidence. All this may in Novick's eyes support the view that objectivists are inflexible in method and conservative in outlook, while relativists are liberating and forward-looking. But if so, it does seem a more felicitous and less dubious illustration might have been brought forward.

On the whole I believe historians and their readers owe rather more to Peter Novick's efforts than the above illustration might suggest. He has made us more conscious of the confusion that prevails in the history profession, where, as in Israel, to use his quotation from the Book of Judges, there is no king and “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The old dispute between objectivity and relativity will never be settled to the satisfaction of doctrinaire extremists on either side. In the meantime, in spite of their cries of woe and chaos, much honest and productive work in history goes forward.