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Ed Quillen

All honest historians are revisionists
By Ed Quillen


Name-calling is part of politics, but President George W. Bush took it
a step further last week when he referred to some of his critics as
"revisionist historians."

Last fall, the president and his vassals frequently told us that
America had to invade Iraq because its dictator, Saddam Hussein,
possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Now the armed forces of the United States and Great Britain are more
or less in control of Iraq, able to search wherever they choose, and
no persuasive evidence of such weapons has emerged.

Thus there are questions, addressed to both Bush here and to Prime
Minister Tony Blair in England. And their general tenor is, "Were you
deliberately lying about the presence of these weapons in Iraq? Or
were you misled by your intelligence services? Or was this just plain
ignorance?"

To answer such questions last week, our president said, "The nation
acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who
would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I call
them."

If we take him at his word that there was a growing threat from Iraq,
then why did the president wait so long to respond to it? He took
office early in 2001, and it wasn't until the summer of 2002 that
invasion plans began to leak.

And even last summer, there were no formal announcements from the
administration. They waited, for a reason explained by Andrew Card,
Bush's chief of staff: "From a marketing perspective, you don't
introduce new products in August."

So was the Iraq war a response to a real threat, or something to be
sold to the American public? It seems that an honest historian would
examine both possibilities.

Bush's use of the phrase "revisionist historian" implies that there is
a full and accurate history that is carved in stone, and everyone
accepts this history.

This happy state is disturbed when one of those pernicious
"revisionists" defaces this stone and scribbles some graffiti on it.

I'm not a historian, just a history buff, but from my reading, all
practicing historians are revisionists because history is constantly
being revised as we learn more. New techniques are discovered, like
carbon-14 dating. New documents come to light, like letters and
diaries, or the long-thought-to-be-lost files of some mining-camp
newspaper.

That's in the everyday world where words have their normal meanings,
though. In the GOP dialect, "revisionist historian" is some subversive
liberal who is trying to destroy the beliefs that we should hold dear.
That is, the people whom Bob Dole accused of trying to "sow doubt
about the nobility of America in the minds of our children."

In other words, there's a noble history that says John M. Chivington
ordered an attack on a camp at Sand Creek in 1864 to protect the
wholesome hard-working people of Denver, and anyone who says otherwise
- be it an Army court-martial then or our Sen. Ben Campbell now - is
one of those horrible doubt-sowing revisionists.

The problem with this liberal-conservative analysis of revisionism is
that revisionism works both ways.

For instance, when I was in high school and college, the "Robber
Barons" of the Gilded Age in the 1870s and '80s - Jay Gould, Jim Fisk,
William Vanderbilt, etc. - were always portrayed as stock-jobbing
speculators and swindlers. They were men who just milked corporations
dry instead of trying to run honest enterprises that earned legitimate
profits. Reading about them was like reading about Ken Lay and Bernie
Ebbers now. That was the accepted version; they were just greedy and
destructive.

But the revisionists have visited this topic, and Gould often comes
across now as an honest investor and officer who strove zealously to
add to the real value of his two major holdings, the Union Pacific
Railroad and Western Union Telegraph. Gould was a builder, not a
plunderer, at least in his later years.

So which is right? Which version should be taught in school, and which
should be denounced by some politician as "revisionist"?

Consider the American Civil War. You can find arguments that it was a
result of slavery. Or that it was really an economic conflict. Or it
was about state vs. federal sovereignty. Which is the "official
version," and which is the "revisionist version" that good Republicans
should denounce?

History is a dynamic field. Good historians, like good scientists, are
always revising their theories to fit new data, and they're always
looking for new facts, new ways to learn what really happened in the
past - and that seems to bother our name-calling president.