HARD TIMES FOR HISTORY

That is why Grand Expectations matters: The consistent biases of this author who is trying so hard to be unbiased are terribly revealing, and give his book the poignancy of a beating moth stuck in flypaper.

The work’s other faults are merely Patterson’s, and one hesitates to make a federal case out of them. And yet they include bad writing and shallow reading, two defining intellectual sins of modern times. They include intellectual passivity — the author raises big questions and then ignores them — and a touch of moral passivity, sufficient to allow for discussing a certain type of criminal with respectful neutrality. In short, Grand Expectations is a Fodor’s Guide to Modern Culture. Reading it is an illuminating and memorably depressing experience.

A reader might be forgiven for unfairly classifying Patterson at first. Think of the world at the close of 1945: Europe and Asia in ruins, the Cold War beginning, Truman struggling to assume not merely FDR’s job but his authority and his aura, the U.S. bracing for the economic and social transition from total war to a new sort of peace — a hinge-of-history moment if ever there was one. So naturally Patterson’s Chapter One is called . . . (Guess right and earn your Junior Historian’s badge!) “Veterans, Ethnics, Blacks, Women.” (Those of you who guessed the right title before you heard the topic of the book, go straight to Associate Professor.) By the end of the brief prologue, we have already encountered racial tensions wracking the army, Admiral Halsey telling his men to “kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs,” the “many historians” who “believe that Japan was on the verge of surrender before Hiroshima and that America’s use of the bomb was unnecessary” — the sheer predictability of these opening passages makes them embarrassing, like the third-string comic who is unaware that his jokes stopped being funny in 1952. And naturally you assume that Patterson is a leftist nitwit.

But he is not. Once he has got his bearing, he works hard to tell both sides of every story, and deserves credit for his determination and integrity. But listen to this book!

Kennedy’s “selectees for top posts were hardly known as reformers-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon were Republicans . . .” Which pretty much settles it.

“While McCarthyite excesses had ebbed, a virulent anti-communism still flourished . . .” When you think of American anti-communism, doesn’t “viral disease” leap immediately to mind?

“Given America’s grand expectations of leading the so-called Free World . . .” Of course it wasn’t actually free.

Patterson doesn’t mean anything by these pronouncements. They just keep popping out, which makes the book a treasure trove of academic psychology, as in: “The place of women in society was as accessory, chiefly in the home as housewife and mother.” It is hard to imagine a more repulsive assertion: To believe that a mother should rear her children full-time is to relegate her to the status of “accessory” — unnecessary gewgaw. Cup holder. Moonroof.

Truman’s “selective reading of history inclined him to believe that the Jews had the best claim to a homeland in the area” — evidently the error could have been avoided if Truman had been better informed.

Reading Patterson carefully is unfair in a way, because carelessness- careless writing, careless reading — is the essence of his method. That is an odd charge to level against a man who has produced an 829-page mountain of facts with a detailed bibliography to boot. But what do you make of this assertion: “When Japan, confused by what had happened, did not surrender, the bombing of Nagasaki went off according to standing orders”? Hiroshima left Japan wanting to surrender but too confused to bring it off?. And the confusion cleared up after Nagasaki?

“It was immediately clear” that the 1948 U.N. partition plan for Palestine ” would drive the Arabs to war.” You are driven to do a thing when you cannot avoid it. Is Patterson saying that the Arabs couldn’t have left Israel in peace even if they had wanted to? But that’s absurd and he couldn’t mean it.

He describes Whittaker Chambers as a “facile writer” who worked at Time. Meaning Chambers wrote with facility? His writing struck people as facile?

Maybe it is nitpicking to insist that a historian write sentences so you can understand them, but Patterson is a careless reader too, and these shortcomings are connected. He quotes the New Republic on Truman’s acceptance speech at the 1948 Democratic convention: “It was fun to see the scrappy little cuss come out of his corner fighting . . . not trying to use big words any longer, but being himself.” This is supposed to show us how Truman “electrified the faithful” but is most striking for its excruciating condescension. What should we infer? Patterson offers nothing.

In the ’48 presidential election, Henry Wallace was “strongest in New York City.” A flaky left-winger overwhelmingly rejected by the nation at large does best in our largest, most Jewish city; the new culture capital of the world. What does it mean? Patterson offers nothing.

When he does venture interpretations, some are too automatic and superficial to be taken seriously. “Sales of tranquilizers were beginning to boom by 1960, suggesting that prosperity, for all its blessings, was associated with anxieties of its own.” Except that he’s just got through telling us that tranquilizers were new on the market, so what makes him think that the “tranquilizer boom” means anything whatsoever? Sometimes he is so trite he leaves you gasping. It rained at the Woodstock rock festival, but ” no one seemed to mind.” “Accidents and individuals,” he tells us portentously, “sometimes make a difference amid the larger determinants of history.” Ain’t it the truth.

Literary incompetence is no mere academic issue. Some fellow conservatives don’t understand why I still hit the roof when I hear phrases like “Native American” for American Indian, phrases with lies built in. Many of them don’t understand why sentences like “everyone displayed their depressing ignorance” continue to make me sick. We have lost the battle for decent English, they tell me, and at any rate there are more important crises to worry about. But I am not certain there are more important crises. Writing straight is tied up (always has been) with thinking straight. Look at Patterson.

Back in the disastrous 1970s, intelligent people started to accept and then use stupid phrases like “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” like “he or she” for the indefinite pronoun, and we started tumbling down the slippery slope that Orwell wrote about in one of the crucial essays of the century (“Politics and the English Language,” 1946). Today we are reaching the bottom. The distinction between cutting a program and slowing its growth is impenetrable to most journalists and many citizens, and if you insist on it you are classified as a Jesuitical nit-picker. Our language and thinking have unraveled simultaneously. Blather like “when you are trying to find the money to pay for tax cuts, for heaven’s sake don’t be too obvious about it” (from a recent New Yorker) ought to be dismissed without further discussion because its underlying logic is no good. But editors let it stand and readers inhale the false premise — that we owe government a certain level of taxes and are selfishly putting it in a bind when we fail to pay up — and assimilate it without thinking.

Pervasive liberal bias is bad; the refusal of journalists and academics to admit it is worse. But if you read Patterson carefully — his honorable desire to be neutral and fair, his inability to be — you learn something important, sobering, pause-giving about today’s elite. When these people deny being biased, they may well be sincere. It is possible that they simply don’t hear their own bias — not because it is subtle but because their language faculties are too far gone to pick it up.

Having accused Patterson of bias, I hereby admit my own — to see history as literature, a matter of good writing and bold, brilliant reading. It may be an unfashionable view, but I find evidence to support it in the fact that, when a history book is indifferent to language, it is often indifferent to ideas also.

I understand that the 1990s fall outside the author’s designated official period, but if a historian won’t tell us why history matters, who will? Where does Patterson get off discussing Joseph McCarthy without reference to the way he looms in our consciousness like a National Wicked Stepmother even today? In 1994 our first attempt at nationwide History Standards mentioned McCarthy twentysome-odd times — amazing, but typical of the weight this man swings. (Edison got zero mentions. The Wright brothers, also zero.) Don’t honesty and pure curiosity impel you to acknowledge this strange situation and explain it?

And then there is the ticklish fact that, as Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year, “McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much.” Yes, he was a drunken bullying lout, and he was also onto something; historians ought to be capable of handling that kind of complexity. Patterson doesn’t even try. The public release of the Venona transcripts (Soviet cable traffic intercepted and decoded in a U.S. intelligence operation of the 1940s) has revolutionized our understanding of McCarthy and the broader issue of U.S. Communists. The revelations continue to come to light, and this year’s crop emerged too late for the book. But the story first broke last summer, and Patterson’s preface is dated October 1995; at any rate, records have been emerging from the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History since the early 1990s.

No serious person doubts any longer that Alger Hiss was guilty. “Whether Hiss was innocent remained a much-disputed fact years later,” writes Patterson, which is true but not true enough. The execution of the Rosenbergs crops up on a list purporting to explain why George Kennan “had good cause for pessimism” in the early 1960s: During the eight years of the Red Scare, ” a few thousand people lost their jobs, a few hundred were jailed, more than 150 were deported and two, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg . . . ” Patterson tells us that they were accused of being traitors but forgets to tell us that they were guilty.

How can you discuss Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family in its mid-1960s context without saying how it resonates today? Without reference to its catastrophic prescience? Moynihan was alarmed by a degree of illegitimacy in the black community that would count as a major moral triumph if it could be reestablished today, and the white community seems to be headed down the same path he once forecast for blacks.

How can you trot up with one the biggest questions of modern American history, then drop it on the floor and romp off without a second glance? Patterson faithfully reports the “widespread sense among Americans” that student demonstrators of the late 1960s “were spoiled brats.” He also reports that, by and large, the universities caved in to their spoiled-brat demands. And it doesn’t compute; how can a historian not be overwhelmed by the importance of the implied question? The “reforms” the students demanded — the gutting of requirements, just to start — continue to shape the modern university. Universities shape the public schools, the culture at large. Our culture and schools are in crisis. The Surrender to the Spoiled Brats shaped modern history and continues to resonate every day, but why did it happen? Why did the Establishment cave? What did that Grand Surrender mean? Patterson has nothing to offer.

If you go fishing for theories or big pictures, you won’t find any here. So here is one of my own. At the start of Patterson’s period, the most important fact about American culture was a literary archetype: Americans thought of America as a person. America was a person with a particular personality, habits, point of view. Some people weren’t factored into the canonical American’s personality, and they fought to be included. The word “integration” itself (integrare, to make whole) attests to a long-ago urge to be folded into the grand American whole. But whoever you were, you were invited to call yourself American; you were invited to assume the canonical American’s identity, look at the world through his eyes, put on his authority. The consequences were profound. You could speak not merely on your own puny authority but in the archetypal American’s name and in his stentorian voice — anyone could. You weren’t scared to condemn bad behavior because you could speak ex cathedra as the American.

The pronouncements of journalists, politicians, and intellectuals had a radically different tone back then. When you wrote a news story or a work of history, you didn’t need to look at the country merely as a private citizen or disengaged outsider; the role of the American was yours for the taking. It allowed you the remarkable privilege of speaking with authority and yet from the inside, not as a pompous down-talker, not as an aristocrat or elite bureaucrat or university graduate — those were European roles — but as “one of us.” As literary inventions go, it was marvelously powerful.

In the late 1960s it started to crack apart, and we have since become not too sophisticated but too unsophisticated to sustain it. Literary devices are not our strong suit. We don’t understand them. We are bad readers, inanely literal-minded. We say “Hispanic-American,” “he or she” and expect to be patted on the head for our meretricious precision like teachers’ pets in fifth grade.

Neither the elite writer nor the plain citizen has an archetypal, larger- than-life role to slip into anymore, and people are terrified and uncomprehending without it. They no longer have the stomach to pass judgment. Catastrophe follows. You have a man like Patterson write a thing like this, about the 1965 Watts riot: “Urban blacks, like blacks in the South, had grown proud and angry. Charging police brutality, they rallied to the man’s side. What followed was five days of rioting, sniping, looting and burning.” Thirty- four people died. And you want to ask Patterson: Aren’t you proud too? Don’t you get angry sometimes? When you do, do you head out onto the Brown campus and kill people at random? If you had a brother, let’s say, who called up to tell you that yesterday he had joined a mob stealing and destroying and killing, and you asked him why, and he told you “because I’m proud and got angry” — would that strike you as a good explanation?

To hear Patterson tell it, the Watts rioters lived on a different moral planet from ours. When the American still existed as a role you could slip into, Patterson would have spoken as an American describing the behavior of other Americans: loathsome behavior. But he no longer has a viewpoint from which to judge or a standard by which to measure.

Professor Patterson, you want to ask him, isn’t the one biggest item on your agenda the fact that your period began on moral solid ground — we were a flawed community, but hopeful and improving — and ended in a raging moral freefor-all that is still tearing us apart? A free-for-all where violence, illegitimacy, divorce, abortion, and sheer ignorance have all reached levels that would have been staggering in 1945? Isn’t it conceivable that you are showing us in your book exactly how it happened? How people lost track of right and wrong, forswore (not out of malice but timidity and good intentions) their obligation to judge? Ever since we decided that it is nasty to “be judgmental,” we have tended to forget that it is also each citizen’s most important duty.

Here is the good news. The history department is the center of the university; if our students don’t learn history, they learn nothing. Maybe we can’t deliver a deep grasp of the subject, but if they get the facts down straight, that will do nicely.

Thoughtful people have reason to wonder whether the American university might be willfully destroying itself, whether it even wants to impart knowledge anymore. Patterson’s book is reassuring. For all its faults it is the work of a thoughtful scholar who takes history seriously, is doing his level best to educate the public, and can be counted on to deliver the facts to his students as honestly as he can manage. In this sense Grand Expectations is a big relief.

And in another sense it is troubling, for in the end Patterson himself has virtually disappeared. Like a good scholar, he struggles for neutrality, anonymity. He largely achieves it. His book is transparent. It is a window on his times. The view is frightening.

By David Gelernter