July 23, 2007
Verdict: Not Proven Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:05 PM EST A recent article (registration may be needed) by William Kristol was headlined: “Bush the Winner: Why History Will Judge the Prez a Clear Success.” Regardless of how you feel about our current Prez, this headline is nonsense, because history doesn’t judge. The recent “founders boom” revealed this clearly: For every Beavis saying “John Adams was cool,” there was a Butt-Head saying “No way, dude, John Adams sucked.” The same goes for Thomas Jefferson (oracular sage or racist voluptuary), Benjamin Franklin (master of practical wisdom or hedonistic faker), and all the rest. A book just published argues that Aaron Burr, despite trying to steal the 1800 presidential election, killing Alexander Hamilton, and then attempting to start his own country in the Southwest, all within a period of half a dozen years, was actually a noble patriot. If history can’t get its story straight on these old-timers, how long will it take to make up its mind about President Bush? Not to mention the books we receive almost every day purporting to “debunk” the “conventional wisdom” on this or that historical event or person. Just about everyone thinks Washington and Lincoln were pretty good eggs (though even there you’ll get an argument), but outside of them and a handful of others, there is nothing close to unanimity about who the good guys and bad guys are in American history. The need to say something new about any well-worn subject leads to a sort of oscillation in which the academic reputation of a person or thing oscillates up and down with a period of roughly 30 years. When combined with the endless supply of graduate students in search of doctorates, this turns the old Hegelian dialectic into an eternal cycle: Instead of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, it’s thesis, thesis, thesis, thesis . . . The above discussion, of course, leaves aside the question of what is meant by “history”: University historians? Informed readers? The general public, most of whom probably could not name more than two or three Presidents? Personally, I would prefer leaving the verdict up to an impartial body, like the staff of American Heritage—except we have trouble even agreeing on a place to eat lunch. And any community of historically informed persons that you decide to empanel as a jury will be more numerous and further from agreement than that, even if it were somehow possible to predict how people will think in the future. Whether you like President Bush or hate him, the Kristol piece shows that whenever somebody appeals to “the verdict of history,” all it means is that he’s losing the present-day argument.
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