History and Memory: They’re Different
But memories, hero-worship, the loyalties of youth, are the stuff of novels, not history. My latest book, The New Dealers' War, owes its existence to my painfully acquired belief that the historian's chief task is to separate history from memory. In our understanding of the cataclysm that historians call World War II, we are in the final stage of celebrating the riches of memory. We are saluting the generation that won the titanic global conflict. There is nothing wrong with this impulse. These men deserve the literary and cinematic cheers we are giving them.
But memory is not history. It is too clotted with sentiment, with the kind of retrospective distortion that we constantly inflict on the past. History gives us, not the past seen through the eyes of the present, but the past in the eyes, the voices, the hearts and minds of the men and women who lived through a particular time, as they experienced it.
11For some people, this kind of history is a disturbing experience. When I wrote 1776: Year of Illusions, which described the unreal assumptions that confused the founding fathers and their British adversaries in that seminal year, as well as the illusory"golden glow" in which Americans viewed the Revolution thereafter, I was accused of lese majeste, sacrilege, unpatriotism. One man rushed up to a platform as I finished speaking about the book and roared that I was one of those people who said a glass was half empty rather than half full.
I could have replied (but I didn't) that if the rest of the glass was full of hot air or some other ingredient that altered the contents, it was not a bad idea to know this. That is a somewhat crude way of explaining why history is more important than memory. History is valuable because it may make us more sympathetic (or at least, less apocalyptically judgmental) toward the politicians of our own time. They too grope into the future that becomes their history with the same or similar confusions and weaknesses.
False memories, on the other hand, can lead to badly flawed judgments of men and policies in our own time. Nowhere has this been more evident than the debate on the war in Vietnam. The critics repeatedly decried the way the war was"dividing" America -- as if no divisions existed in previous wars. In the American Revolution, the rebels never constituted more than a third of the population. During the War of 1812, the New England states were so alienated they seriously considered secession. The Mexican War was equally scorned by the Yankees and the Middle Atlantic States. As for the Civil War -- in the summer of 1864, Lincoln drafted a dolorous letter to his successor, on the assumption that he would not be reelected. His own party was so disenchanted with him, they were frantically looking for a successor.
Vietnam's turmoil was frequently contrasted to World War II -- the"good war." Anyone who reads The New Dealers' War will swiftly realize this term is myth. No one thought World War II was a good war while it was being fought. The home front was torn by ideological rancor that equalled anything seen during the Vietnam years.
In the 1942 midterm elections, liberals took a shellacking. This produced near hysterical assaults on their opponents in the ensuing months. In a 1943 speech, Vice President Henry Wallace said the postwar world was menaced by the Republican Party's isolationists, reactionaries and imperialistic nationalists such as Time's Henry Luce. All of them added up to"American Fascism."
Ex-Governor Alfred E. Landon of Kansas, the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, replied nationwide on NBC radio. He accused Wallace of starting a political civil war. Landon asked his listeners a rhetorical question:"Who, then, are the real Fascists in American Life today?" He offered a plethora of evidence that it was the Democratic Party's New Dealers, who never stopped maneuvering behind the scenes to reduce Americans to obedient helots in their elitist command economy. The Kansan said he feared American soldiers would return from foreign battlefields to discover New Deal fascism established on their home soil.
The New York Times, among many others, was appalled by this exchange of ideological insults. The paper saw it rending national unity at a time when it was never more desperately needed. In an editorial, the Times rebuked Wallace for his"reckless accusations." Even some of Wallace's liberal backers had second thoughts, urging him to return to"decency and dignity." But other liberals hailed the tirade as a master stroke that made Wallace a leader of global proportions. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania said he could hardly wait to renominate the Iowan as vice president in 1944.
As for Vietnam's moral ambiguity -- the South Vietnamese were less than perfect allies -- what was more ambiguous than our World War II alliance with Josef Stalin's USSR, a police state which had massacred millions of its own citizens in state-created famines, show trials and arbitrary sentences to the gulag archipelago? The ultimate embarrassment was the Katyn Massacre, Stalin's murder of 9,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940. When the Germans discovered the mass graves in 1943 and trumpeted the news, the Roosevelt White House did everything in its power to suppress it. Polish-American radio stations which attempted to discuss it were silenced. When a Navy intelligence officer and close Roosevelt friend, former governor George Earle of Pennsylvania, threatened to tell the truth, Roosevelt forbade him to say a word and transferred him to Samoa for the rest of the war.
Many other aspects of this"good war" were deeply troubling -- Roosevelt's provocative policy that led to Japan's decision for war, giving FDR the"back door" entry to the war he wanted to fight, with Germany; the hate-filled insistence on unconditional surrender, which Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall and many others repeatedly urged Roosevelt to rescind; the terror bombing of German and Japanese civilians, culminating in the use of atomic bomb.
After the war America's vision of the ordeal underwent a transformation. The realization of the horror of Hitler's campaign of extermination against the Jews, which only a few Americans understood during the war, justified in many people's minds unconditional surrender, the ruthless air war and even the atomic bomb.
Similar things have happened to American memories of other wars. The American Revolution was won by a small"band of brothers," the officers and men of Washington's Continental Army, who stayed in the ranks to the bitter end of the eight year struggle, while the rest of the country did very little to aid the Glorious Cause. In the years after independence was secured in 1783, this dolorous truth was transformed. Every militiaman who had served thirty or sixty days in the ranks of his local regiment in an emergency told his children and grandchildren of his magnificent contributions to the triumph of American liberty. Bunker Hill, a battle fought before the Continental Army was formed, became enshrined by poets and Fourth of July orators as proof that the militia -- and a gaseous entity called"virtue" -- had really won the war while the regulars were mostly expensive spectators.
The Civil War -- at least in the North -- underwent a similar transformation in memory. The terrorist, John Brown, who dreamt of starting a race war by distributing the guns of the Harper's Ferry arsenal to the enslaved blacks, and the Yankee abolitionists who financed him, became elevated to the status of heroes. No one remembered that among the many condemners of Brown was the would-be Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Equally forgotten was the attitude of the men of General William Tecumseh Sherman's army, the unbeatable host who marched through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea. These midwesterners often said they would much rather shoot an abolitionist than a rebel. In memory the war became a crusade to end slavery and the terrific acrimony over its purpose -- and the widespread loathing for Lincoln -- were forgotten.
World War I's transformation from crusade to global deception followed another pattern. For ten years after the Armistice, Americans were proud of their participation, which won the final victory, in their opinion. But a steady drumfire of books by French and English generals denigrating the American contribution slowly soured many people. When our erstwhile allies defaulted on their billion dollar war loans, cynicism grew apace. The final blow was a series of hearings in the mid-1930s conducted by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, which purported to prove America had been lured into the war by an unholy cabal of Wall Street bankers and munitions makers. Soon World War I became synonymous with slaughter and futility, vastly compounding Roosevelt's difficulties when he attempted to bring Americans into World War II.
That ultimate realist, Abraham Lincoln, has left us a good guide for examining the history of our wars. Toward the end of the Civil War he said:"In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged." To that we might add Harry S. Truman's aphorism:"There is nothing new in the world but the history you do not know."