In 1955, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote a song with these lyrics:
Love and Marriage, Love and Marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage,
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one
You can't have none
You can't have one without the other.
The same connection applies to revisionism and progress.
A site member posted this.
Revisionist HistoryI found this to be a very good read from a standpoint that I hadn't considered.
Go to https://mises.org/wire/why-revisionist-history-important
I had not seen this article. It is an excellent article. It quoted Eric Foner, a Left wing historian, and one of the most widely respected.
It’s hard for people not versed in history to get the point on why historical interpretation changes. In the general culture “revisionist historian” is a term of abuse. But that is what we do. Revising history is our job. So every historian is a revisionist historian in some sense.
There is a reason why revisionism is basic to all historical study. Any historian who spent five or 10 years researching a topic, and who came to the conclusion that the standard textbook interpretation of the subject is accurate, would not find a publisher for his book. Who wants to publish this? "Me, too."
The term revisionism is applied to new interpretations of a widely shared opinion within the historical guild. More specifically, revisionism applies to the politics of war. Even more specifically, it applies to the politics of World War I and World War II. Why did the United States go into these wars? Was this because of machinations by Woodrow Wilson and, two decades later, Franklin Roosevelt?
A student would be unwise to tackle a subject that was widely accepted by the guild of historians, and which is universally repeated in the textbooks. He would be regarded as too big for his britches. His thesis advisor would advise him not to do it. If his thesis advisor never saw the dissertation until it was handed in, the student would probably be told to rewrite the dissertation or find a new topic. A student who has passed all of his written and oral examinations in preparation for the Ph.D. knows how the game is played. If he is wise, he will find a topic that is so obscure that there is no conventional opinion about it. It is not considered important enough to have an opinion about it. Then he writes a 300-page, double-spaced dissertation.
The ideal dissertation is one in which the student selects an obscure and long-ignored topic, and he is able to prove that it was significant enough to be considered by others in the profession. He will get a short summary of his dissertation published in an academic journal, though probably an obscure academic journal. That may help him get tenure someday.
I have never heard of a Ph.D. dissertation that argued that Franklin Roosevelt manipulated the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. That thesis has been limited to outsiders who have not received a Ph.D. in history, and who are not on any faculty. It is also limited to old-timers who are either retired or who have tenure, and cannot be fired. An example of the first is Robert Stennett, who wrote Day of Deceit. He was careful to say in the beginning that he approved of the fact that Roosevelt deceived the American people. His thesis still has not been accepted. An example of the second is the classic book by Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (Yale University Press, 1948). He was an old man. He had been widely respected. He was the only man to be elected president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. He died in the same year it was published. I don't know whether it was published immediately before his death or immediately after. He died on September 1, 1948. His book was vilified. It was never accepted by either political scientists or historians.
TEXTBOOKS
You can judge the impotence of revisionism regarding Franklin Roosevelt and the coming of World War II by the fact that the revisionist position has never made it into any conventional college-level textbook.
The triumph of New Deal ideology is manifested by the fact that there has never been a detailed, highly footnoted book critical of both Roosevelt's interventionist foreign policy and his domestic economic policy. A person who could have written that book was Murray Rothbard. I can think of only one other person who could have written it better than Rothbard, maybe: Ralph Raico. Raico had been a member of Rothbard's little group in the 1950's, Circle Bastiat. Sadly, he wrote almost nothing in a long career of teaching.
There has been enormous progress in our understanding of history over the last century. But this progress has not always been reflected in the textbooks. Textbooks are written by university professors who must write for a committee that will screen the manuscripts. The committees in turn will screen in terms of committees known as academic departments, who make decisions about which textbook to adopt for introductory courses. Anything that is governed by a series of committees is going to lag behind the latest information, sometimes for a decade or more. The output will reflect conventional opinion.
This is why it would be possible to do a study of academic opinion in every field by carefully investigating the three best-selling textbooks, decade by decade. The problem is this: libraries do not put textbooks on the shelves. So, it is almost impossible to find a research library that has old textbooks. The one university that does is Columbia University because of the famous Teachers College at Columbia. The only book that I can think of that took this approach to studying the changing opinions of historians is Frances FitzGerald's book, America Revised (1979). It studied high school textbooks in American history. It is rarely quoted. It is long forgotten. I have a marked-up copy. Not many people do.
I think it would be possible to write a very good PhD dissertation on this topic. To do this, a student would have to go to New York City for a week, go to Columbia University's library, and identify the major textbooks in the field. He would then have to have enough money to pay a student at the college to photocopy all of the books. Maybe this could be done through photographing the pages and making PDFs out of them. At something like $.10 a page, it would cost about $100 per textbook. It would therefore cost something in the range of $5,000 to have this done. Most graduate students don't have this kind of money. It would have to be funded by some research institute that had money in reserve for this kind of study. The student would then have to identify key themes that reflected the politics and ideology of the era in question. Here is where the real creativity would be involved: identifying the key ideas, and then being able to compare these ideas with events outside of academia. I have doubts that a Ph.D. candidate could do this effectively. But it would be a terrific project for an experienced historian taking a paid sabbatical.
I would like to see this done for both high school textbooks and college textbooks. It would be two separate projects.
This is the kind of project that the Mises Institute could sponsor. It could pay for the photocopying of the textbooks. It could then have these textbooks bound permanently after the professor is finished with them. Even if he marks up the photocopies, that would be valuable. These would go onto the shelves of the Mises Institute's library.
CONCLUSION
In every field, there is always revisionism going on. If there were no revisionism going on, there could be no progress in the field. There is an old saying about the progress of science: "Science advances one funeral at a time."
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