The Past Recaptured

By Paul Gray

AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION by James Davidson and Mark Lytle; Knopf; 388 pages; $19.50

Like artists of every stripe, the best historians make their work look easy.Their research may have been long and arduous, but they filter the odor of archival dust and mildew out of the finished product. Also gone are the blind alleys and dead ends, all the large and petty frustrations of scholarship. Few readers mind being spared such details. Yet the tracks that historians cover are sometimes as fascinating as the past they recapture.

This point is not new, but it is amply demonstrated and expanded in After the Fact, a collaborative effort by two young writers and teachers of history (both received Ph.D.s from Yale in 1973). Authors Davidson and Lytle want to interest others in the challenges and occasional romance of their discipline. Historians, they insist, are not simply messengers in time, bearers of immutable facts: "For better or worse [they] inescapably leave an imprint as they go about their business: asking interesting questions about apparently dull facts, seeing connections between subjects that had not seemed related before, shifting and rearranging evidence until it assumes a coherent pattern. The past is not history; only the raw material of it."

To support this thesis, the authors adopt a casebook approach. They select 14 incidents from the U.S. past, ranging chronologically from the Jamestown colony to Watergate. They show how each subject makes different demands on the historian. The Salem witch trials of 1692, for example, call for close scrutiny of a single, tiny village, while the U.S. decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima demands a broad inquiry into the dynamics of overlapping committees and bureaucracies. Finally, Davidson and Lytle show how certain historians have faced and stared down these problems.

The story of how the Indian maiden Pocahontas saved Captain John Smith from execution by her tribe is taught to nearly all American schoolchildren. Most of them grow up thinking they know better, just as they stop believing in Santa Claus and George Washington's cherry tree. Because the only source for this episode is Smith's journal, the skepticism seems justified, especially since the captain elsewhere describes a suspiciously similar rescue by another young woman in Central Europe. But historians have found that where it is possible to double-check Smith's facts, the old adventurer comes off remarkably well. Perhaps the drawings showing Pocahontas throwing herself across Smith's neck are roughly accurate. The same cannot be said of John Trumbull's famous group portrait, Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Most members of the Continental Congress signed the documents not on July 4, 1776, but on Aug. 2; furthermore, the ceremony did not play to a full house of participants. Historians who have traced the whereabouts of the members conclude that some could not have put their names to the Declaration until October or November.

Many facts are simply beyond the reach of research, no matter how dogged. The guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti will probably never be demonstrated to the satisfaction of all. Historians have turned instead to the question of why this case became such a cause celebre. Surveying their work, Davidson and Lytle suggest that the trial and the lengthy appeals process coincided with a swing in public opinion, away from a postwar suspicion and fear of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants toward a more tolerant view of the melting pot in the late 1920s. The case became a long-running drama of founding fathers pitted against alien, clamoring children.

Watergate occurred too recently to have yielded up a definitive history, but the authors offer a surprising defense of Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days (1976), which was widely criticized on publication for its lack of attributions and footnotes. No matter, they argue. Most of the sources would not have spoken at all without the promise of anonymity; preserving firsthand accounts is one of the historian's obligations. Besides, the shifting points of view employed in The Final Days almost always reveal where the reporters got their information. Alexander Haig and Tricia's husband Ed Cox did not talk; J. Fred Buzhardt did, apparently a great deal. Accounts of Nixon family gatherings can be traced to Speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Son-in-Law David Eisenhower or his confidants.

To seek recruits, as this book does, to the practice of history seems a bit per verse. Academic jobs, where most historians earn their keep, are dwindling. Applicants who get one are not necessarily the happier for it. The pressure to publish something, anything, quickly does not encourage beginning scholars to take on long or difficult projects; if Gibbon had been prodded by a tenure committee, he might have said to hell with the Roman Empire. But After the Fact conveys an enthusiasm for its subject that is infectious enough to override reality. Who can resist making sense out of the world, trying to decide what happened at lunch or a millennium ago?

-- By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Indeed, the variety of methods even more than the range of subjects is what lends history its breadth. This is seen most obviously in the willingness, even the downright avidity, of recent historians to adopt the many approaches of the social sciences. Psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, organizational theory -- each of these disciplines has formulated characteristic ways of analyzing human behavior and reducing a mass of particular facts to coherent and general laws . . . Yet . . . good history begins with a good story; ... the narrative tradition remains central to the discipline."

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