WHY STUDY HISTORY?

"History is one damn thing after another,'' said Henry Ford, implying that there is no rhyme or reason in history, that there is no significant difference between a grocery list and a lengthy parade of empty facts and meaningless dates. Every time I take my Ford to the dealer for repairs I cannot help but suspect that the engineers who designed it and the men who put it together had the same conception of engineering and workmanship that Henry Ford had of history. If Ford has better ideas - as the catchy commercial used to say - than its competitors must be fools.

Fortunately, Henry Ford had better ideas about how to make four-wheeled instruments of locomotion than he did about the nature and meaning of history. He himself would have had to admit that without a knowledge and understanding of the long history of the internal combustion engine and the process of making steel, the Model-T would never have emerged from his innovative Detroit assembly line.

What Henry Ford expressed, however, by his memorable aphorism, probably is a common conception that many people still carry around with them in their packed mental compartments for useless half-truths, dangerous generalizations and downright stupidities. Isolated facts, meaningless dates and dead heroes and villains thrown together in random fashion do not make history--like nuts, bolts, pieces of metal and rubber do not make an automobile. There has to be imagination, purpose, design, testing, experience and precise scientific knowledge to make a car. The engineer provides these things. The historian, whether teacher or student, is also an engineer.

There is a bit of truth in that old saying. The facts of history are dead and meaningless like a pile of rusty bolts in a junkyard. The facts, dates and carcasses of history have to be injected with life and blood, they have to be arranged into a meaningful pattern and design, they have to be tested and transformed by individual and group experience. Only the living mind of the engineer-historian can do that. And he does it by a process of scientific method and artistic finesse.

History is the memory of living yesterdays and the promise of predictable tomorrows. Even our uneducated, uncivilized, materialist Henry Ford would have found life a meaningless shell, a Barbi doll stuffed with sawdust, if it had to be lived in the fleeting moment of the present. We all live and breathe and think in the realm of history. So, why study history? Because we are human beings, possess a memory, function by using experience, our own and that of others.

If you have a philosophical bent of mind we could stop here and you would be content that your reading, writing and thinking about history this semester will be well worth the effort. But I suspect that most of you are not yet satisfied. You have practical questions. What good will history do me? How will it help me choose and succeed in a career? How can I justify my parents' investment in dollars and cents? These are legitimate questions, although they are not as important as they might be in other fields of study.

History deals with everything that has happened to man. History deals with people, both humanistically (because of its attention to the individual person and the unique event) and scientifically (because it deals with people in groups and as the focus of long-term trends). History is deeply involved with language and communication, not only because it concerns itself with the ways in which people have related to one another, but also because history, as a subject or discipline, can only be set forth through the medium of language.

The laboratory or workshop of history is society. past and present---the tools and instruments of history are ideas or the minds of historians. Ideas become relevant only when they are expressed, shared, communicated. Consequently, because of its breadth, its concern with people and their institutions, and its essential connection with language, the study of history prepares a person for a considerable number of occupations and professions to which these qualities are central.

What then can you do with history? The obvious thing is to pass it on, in other words, teach. But the teaching profession today has fallen upon sad times - like in the past, or any other particular time period you want to pick. Unless you are prepared to go to Guam and work for peanuts, you will have a hard time finding the ideal teaching job four years from now or ten years from now, whether you have a B.A., M.A. or Ph.D. The market is always flooded with clever competitors.

But there are other ways to utilize your knowledge and perception of history. There are thousands of positions in government, especially our ever-expanding federal government, for which the breadth of history and the familiarity with Western institutions, that it can provide, make excellent preparation. Aside from the obvious jobs like the Peace Corps and its various domestic equivalents, almost every government job demands the doing of research for which the techniques and subject matter of history prepare a person directly. For the few who are able to qualify, the diplomatic profession or the Foreign Service is a fascinating career which demands preparation in history - at least equally with political science and economics.

There is another whole field open to students of history, namely the legal profession, ranging from corporate law to the storefront lawyers, depending on whether your ambition in life is to make a lot of money or whether you have compassion for the legally deprived, disadvantaged and forgotten. An undergraduate major in history has always been looked upon by law schools as one of the best preparations for successful attorneys. Undergraduate study of history can also be an effective route to library school or to the profession of archivist in state, private, federal or university archives. The National Park Service employs many former history majors in locating and preserving the countries historic sites and monuments.

History and politics have always been closely associated. The majority of politicians have always been lawyers, but an increasing number of them have been students - and many still are - of history. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were undergraduate history majors. Both of these men and several other national politicians in the not so distant past - Woodrow Wilson, William Fullbright, George McGovern, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger, Roger Hilsman, Ken Hechler - wrote history books before or after they were elected or appointed to political office. In fact, these days, just about anybody - a general, political candidate, journalist, olympic contestant, defense lawyer in a famous case, talkshow hosts like Springer or Montel or Jenny Jones - are bound to write a "history" book rather sooner than later!

The business world, while it prefers accounting or engineering students for many of its jobs, looks for liberal arts, including history, majors for others, such as personnel and public relations positions. Public relations has always been a thriving business and will become even more so in an era when there is increasingly vocal criticism of corporate and government operation and practice. The necessity to explain what you are doing and why to a dubious public has become a way to survive for large institutions. In theory there are no better explainers than history students. That is what history is largely all about.

The advertising industry in fact employs many former history majors. Why? Because of their combination of writing competence, familiarity with American and Non-American cultures and frequent acquaintance with the skills of social research. Newspaper and periodical journalism at every level employs thousands of people who studied history in college. Some history majors with the proper flair have made attractive careers for themselves in book publishing, as editors and publishers agents.

There is much you can do with history besides teach it. History then can help you make a living. But there is a far more important question then the practical one of economic survival. That is: How can history help me become a better person? In other words, what should history do to my mind, my character, my growth into a mature human being who has inner resources, who enjoys being alive? The English poet Alexander Pope once said:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
the proper study of mankind is man.

To do anything, to build anything, to be anything, one first has to know oneself - one's strengths and weaknesses, one's peculiarities and potentialities. Without knowing were you were you can't possible know where you are going - and people who don't know where they are going usually end up going nowhere.

We are talking here about purpose, goals, ambition in the humane sense. You may say that a study of psychology or a psychoanalyst can do this for you. The great playwright Menander had an answer to that:

Know thyself is not well said. It were more practical to say 'Know other people'".

No where do you study more people in more varied circumstances than in history. Everyone is a product of his society; every society is a product of its past. To know the past and that of other people is to know yourself. Bertrand Russell, the great English philosopher, wrote:

History is invaluable in increasing our knowledge of human nature, because it shows how people may be expected to behave in new situations. Many prominent men and women are completely ordinary in character, and only exceptional in their circumstances.

Character is molded by circumstances and circumstances are the nitty-gritty of history.

History can be a cure for prejudice and provincialism. The study of history used to be thought of as training in patriotism and national loyalties. How many of you can remember your social studies teachers in grade school and high school waving the flag, praising American motherhood and apple pie--America first in everything. This is what our modern conservatives think history is all about. In fact, president Nixon said once that "America should be Number One in all endeavors.''

There is nothing wrong with healthy patriotic pride, but there is something pathological about parochialism, self-righteousness and blind nationalism. These types of social diseases have twice led to world wars in this century. Learning that your own national way of doing things is not the only way (and certainly not the norm for other people) and learning that the behavior of other people in other times and places is not particularly bad or unworkable because it is old or foreign is an essential revelation for any person who pretends to be educated.

There is a greater loyalty than national loyalty - a loyalty to mankind, to human improvement, international understanding and general enlightenment. To exploit history as nationalistic propaganda is a form of intellectual prostitution. You will not find me engaging in such illegal activity. History is the collective experience of mankind, and as such it teaches us lessons that may help us avoid in the future some of the mistakes we have made in the past. That requires thinking properly about the past, present and future.

History shares with the other liberating arts, such as literature, philosophy or mathematics, the virtue of being able to train us to think. This does not mean necessarily training to think about particular things, but rather training in the process of thinking in general. A trained mind, one that is flexible and perceptive with respect to whatever new problem confronts it, is the most practical tool imaginable. History is a mind-training discipline and has a practicality that is supreme. No other subject pulls together all of human experience so broadly - and thus teaches synthetic thinking - and no other subject relates the many parts of this experience to each other - and thus teaches analytic thinking.

Today more than ever we will have to use our wits and analytic power, if the human species is to survive. The modern world in which we live is in fact as revolutionary as everybody says it is. The profound contradictions that we confront everyday are not the result of mere perversity or simple folly. They are due to the tremendous developments in science and technology. These have led to far more rapid and radical change than any previous society has known. Our society has not been prepared to deal with these changes. We suffer from a variety of cultural gaps. We can send a man to the moon, but we cannot eliminate simple poverty, malnutrition and slum housing - not to mention learning to live with our fellow human beings whose skin might have a different color.

Because the paradoxes of our age are so violent, people have been violently oversimplifying its issues. On the one hand, many political and business leaders are still celebrating the triumphs of technology, science and free enterprise as if there were nothing fundamentally wrong with our civilization, and the world depressions and world wars were unfortunate accidents. On the other hand, many intellectuals are ignoring the obvious triumphs, seeing only a monstrous folly and evil. Some would-be student intellectuals give vent to their pessimism by bombing computers and banks. It may be helpful for all of us if we viewed our world with both pride and alarm, tempered by historical sense.

You have all heard that famous quotation by the American philosopher, George Santayana:

Those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

We could, perhaps, revise that by saying, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned," period. Our only hope of survival as sane human beings in a sane society is to bet on the education history can give us.

The history of the twentieth century seems to suggest that parochial pride and prejudice on a national scale leads to war and attempts at world conquest, no matter how well these are hidden under the mask of noble ideals. World domination comes in various forms and is not the exclusive ambition of Communists and Nazis. You can also try to dominate the world by monopolizing its trade or presuming to educate it in the proper political principles.

Senator William Fullbright from Arkansas, who gave us the famous scholarship bearing his name, once wrote a book entitled Arrogance of Power. He warned us against a foreign policy based on super patriotism, puritanical faith and military power. "The great challenge in our foreign relations", he said,

"is to make certain that the major strand in our heritage, the strand of humanism, tolerance, and accommodation, remains the dominant one. I do not accept the excuse, so often offered, that communist zealotry and intransigence justify our own. I do not accept the view that because they have engaged in subversion, intervention, and ideological warfare, so must we and to the same degree. There is far more promise in efforts to encourage communist imitation of our own more sensible attitudes than in ourselves imitating the least attractive forms of communist behavior. It is of course reasonable to ask why we must take the lead in conciliation; the answer is that we, being the most powerful of nations, can afford as no one else can to be magnanimous. Or, to put it another way, disposing as we do of the greater physical power we are properly called upon to display the greater moral power as well".

That statement today, when another man from Arkansas is in the White House, is truer than ever.

Only the arrogant can believe that any one people has enough wit and virtue to rule the world. Ultimately then the real question is whether the ideal values of Western civilization are more vital than they have appeared to be in recent times. I can only believe that, in spite of all the failures, problems and wars that have troubled this civilization over the centuries, these ideal values deserve to live.

The supreme gift of the West to mankind is that it has promoted the sentiment of equality and realized a measure of actual equality, political, economic, and social. It has thereby laid the only possible basis for a world federation, or "one world" or the "global village" - as current usage will have it. The study of history then may justify itself simply as an act of piety that deepens and widens our aesthetic, spiritual and essentially religious sense of continuity and community. History shows nothing so simple and certain as both liberals and conservatives would have us believe - that there are final solutions to all human problems. That is only the commercial pretense of the screaming heads you see on your television screen.

In the final analysis history solves and settles nothing. We cannot and must not hope for final solutions. History shows us something far more valuable for our living purposes. It is perhaps the best means to achieving full consciousness of both necessity and freedom, permanence and change - of the always difficult but honorable terms of mortality, on which human beings have repeatedly failed, and in failure have created deathless values. In this consciousness we may know more freedom amid our necessities, more rest amid change.