March 5, 2007
Sam Tanenhaus’s Arthur Schlesinger Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 AM EST Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, had a piece in yesterday’s Times Week in Review section, “History in the Present Tense,” celebrating and mourning Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Tanenhaus calls Schlesinger “our last great public historian,” linking him with Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward. He defines public historians as academics who write “classic works that reanimated the past even as they rummaged in it for clues to understanding, if not solving, the most pressing political questions of the present.” The best widely selling historians today—Tanenhaus mentions Gordon S. Wood and James M. McPherson—do not, on this account, “command the broad cultural authority that Mr. Schlesinger and his contemporaries did.” I am not sure this is entirely correct about McPherson—I know a lot of laymen who read him and seem to revere him—but assume, for the moment, that it is true. For Tanenhaus, “this raises a troubling question: ‘Why do current historians seem unable to engage the world as confidently as Mr. Schlesinger did?’” Tanenhaus tentatively answers his question by noting that Schlesinger “wrote less often about the past than about the present or the nearly present,” and he also notes that “it is hard to imagine our more recent leaders being discussed in such lofty terms.” He goes on to canvass other possibilities, for example that bestsellers on the Founders “are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival. And that may be the problem.” Maybe, but I think Tanenhaus was on to something interesting in his first shot at the problem. My guess is that many modern academic historians are to a degree focused on the present, no matter what their period and whether or not they acknowledge the fact, but they have a less than heroic vision of the country and of its political leaders. Schlesinger had heroes, and they wielded political authority. Political history has not been the dominant strand in the academy for a generation, nor has a sense of political authority as heroic been much in fashion. A vision of American history that is relentlessly antiheroic will not easily rise to the level of imagining American history even as tragedy. Tragedy, by a traditional definition, is about the fall of great men, and our political classes are not too widely understood by modern academics as great men. I have the impression that many historians, nowadays interested in demystifying and deconstructing visions of American political elites as great men, have also been interested in trying to deconstruct the notion of “broad cultural authority.” In that case, it is perhaps no mystery that people who spend their lives trying to overthrow “broad cultural authority” should not themselves command it. One more thought: When recently reviewing a somewhat sour account of some of our traditional elites—World War II American generals—for this website, I had occasion to recall a remark of Goethe’s, for it is possible that our modern historians are quite correct in their post-heroic views. On this theory, modern historians choose to look hard at squalid and often ugly facts, and as Goethe remarked, “No man is a hero to his valet.” On that occasion, however, I then remembered Hegel’s rejoinder that this is “not because the hero is not a hero but because the valet is a valet.” After all, if many modern historians are hostile to the notion of great men, several explanations for this propensity are logically possible.
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