April 24, 2006
What Would Earle Combs Do? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:15 PM EST Last week I was reading The Divided Family in Civil War America, by Amy Murrell Taylor, which has recently been published by the University of North Carolina Press. On the subject of mail service between the two sections, she writes: “Union and Confederate postal authorities carefully monitored the mail that came through their offices and employed postal clerks for the sole purpose of reading every letter to look for anything suspicious.” This made me think of our recent discussion regarding President Lincoln’s wartime policies and their applicability to the present day, a subject that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of American Heritage’s contributing editors, takes up in today’s Washington Post. Let’s see, if Lincoln were in charge of the United States during a war, what would he do? If history is any guide, he would suspend habeas corpus, arrest anyone who opposed him, and intercept all communications with the other side. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Times change, and if history teaches us anything, it should be the perils of translating thoughts and acts from one era to another (as I have discussed in a previous post). My own guess is that if Abraham Lincoln were somehow brought back to life in the twenty-first century, his first order of business would be to find out why everyone was walking around talking to themselves with a hand clamped to their face. The same situation occurs in sports when people try to make comparisons between eras. Last week I read yet another baseball writer dragging out the cliché about how “today’s Royals [who were 2-12 at the time], if put in a time machine, would probably thump the 1927 Yankees.” Sportswriters love to make statements like that because they know they can’t be denied, for the simple reason that they don’t mean anything. What would happen if you could actually try this experiment? Playing on the road is tough enough as it is—how would the poor Royals deal with a world without GameBoys or ESPN, in which they had to travel by train and wear flannel uniforms? How long would it take them to adjust to the different strike zone and the lack of lights and 460-foot outfields and smaller roster sizes? Would they be restricted to 1920s training methods? Would the teams have time to watch each other beforehand and gauge their styles of play? In real life you can’t send Babe Ruth to the plate against Zack Greinke, any more than you can put Abraham Lincoln (after a quick course in air power, perhaps) in charge of American military policy. For any such hypothetical exercise to have meaning, in baseball or politics, you need to make all sorts of assumptions about which things would stay the same and which things would change in the transition between eras—and the people who make these arguments always choose assumptions that yield the conclusion they want. If Lincoln were around today, would he adopt modern attitudes about privacy, press relations, dissent, international law, and so forth? Or would he retain the mentality of an age when public executions were common, reporters could casually stroll into Army field headquarters, and the biggest military threat the United States faced was from Indians? Similarly, would today’s baseball players, transported back to 1927, have the benefit of videotape analysis of the opponents they were facing—a staple of modern baseball? And which factors would weigh more heavily—the dilution of talent caused by expansion and baseball’s decreasing importance in American life, or the increase in talent caused by population growth and the greater use of African-American and foreign players? In all these cases, you can rig the conditions in such a way as to support whatever point you’re trying to make. I’m reminded of James Bryce’s remark that “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” It makes sense to ask how Lincoln would have handled, say, a defeat in the 1864 election, or how the 1927 Yankees would have fared against a team of Negro League stars. Those are things that could actually have happened. But once you start moving people from one era to another, you might just as well imagine that Grover Cleveland is a teenaged girl living in Ohio today and ask what color dress he would wear to the prom. Cross-era comparisons can be fun, and mildly instructive in a general sort of way, but the terms and conditions that govern them are so amorphous that it makes no sense to base a serious argument on them.
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