Using and Misusing History

By Otis L. Graham, (The Long Term View, Spring, 1988)

The value of an analogy depends crucially upon our understanding of its limits, and our vocabulary betrays a widespread confusion. To say "History proves . . ." rather than "History suggests . . ." is to make a fraudulent claim. "No amount of analogy can prove anything in history," commented British historian G. R. Elton. Similar conditions are followed by similar outcomes only when the entire web of causation is immune to any change-or when some changes exactly offset others. Since change is pervasive, relentless, and rarely exactly offsetting, analogies between past and future events are inherently risky as predictors.

The Dangers of Analogizing

We begin life learning that history teaches by analogy. When we encounter something similar to remembered experience, we form a picture of what should come next. Experience, however, also makes us aware that reasoning by simple analogy, expecting past outcomes to predict future ones, is tricky business. When Heraclitus observed that we can never step twice into the same river, he simply took note that nothing is ever the same as it was. Rivers change, as does the self who crosses them. Mark Twain provided yet another lesson: "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but also she will never sit down on a cold one." The cat misused the comparative method, of which the historical analogy is one form; it analogized. The cat used one experience to predict all future ones.

It seems odd that we are not more suspicious of analogies, since we employ them lavishly in the effort to manipulate the thoughts and actions of others. At the extreme, Aristotle considered that history was not a valid form of reasoning and regarded it as fit only for the arts of deliberate persuasion. A deft and plausible analogy to some past event had the value of instantly legitimating one's own position and piling a burden of proof upon the opponent. Similarly, Richard Neustadt has said that people employ analogies only to persuade others or for personal comfort; they use analogies as "battering rams or Linus' blankets." Either way, repeated often enough, they become myths.

The New History of History's Misuses

Neustadt's and Aristotle's disdain notwithstanding, the persistence of analogies in the arsenal of rhetoric offers impressive evidence that minds are moved, or thought to be moved, by historical analogy. In public policy making, they surface in predecision rhetoric (in which the uncommitted are manipulated), as well as during and after the decision, as justification. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has commented that the question whether historical references are "the source of policies ... or the source of arguments designed to vindicate policies adopted for antecedent reasons" is "in the abstract, insoluble." To discover whether ideas about what history teaches function for policy makers as legitimaters to persuade, or as foundations of decision, we must look to particular cases.

Fortunately, there is a growing body of research on the question. In 1972, in his pioneering Lessons of the Past, Harvard historian Ernest R. May analyzed the misuses of history in presidential decision making from the 1930s to the Vietnam intervention, where he found a long series of foreign policy miscalculations rooted in faulty analogies. May penetrated beyond the official rationales found in state papers, where references to history might be dismissed as mere rhetoric, with no connection to the structure of thought of those in power. He assessed also the internal and informal evidence, where there was far less necessity for dissimulation. Here, unmistakably, history lessons shaped decisions. Later, they appeared again as rationales, for public consumption. Either way, history became a steady source of mistaken policy. In 1986 May and Neustadt, in Thinking in Time, greatly expanded the analysis and surveyed more than 30 other cases. A handful were examples of astute learning from the past, as in Franklin D. Roosevelt's handling of the politics of Social Security. Most, however, involved mistakes with varying degrees of costliness.

Occasionally a leader was led into error by knowing little history and making little pretense of thinking historically. Jimmy Carter's administration, for example, commenced work with the mistaken assumption that his "First Hundred Days" would, like Roosevelt's in the spring of 1933, afford an opportunity for quick passage of a large reform program. The administration's secret formulation of an energy plan demonstrated a simpler kind of blunder: ignorance of relevant history. Any knowledge at all of the history of relations between the federal government and the fossil fuels industries would have reminded energy planners that extensive consultative mechanisms linked government and petroleum industry executives through half a century of federal regulation and subsidy. Of all U.S. industries, petroleum and coal mining, and the congressional committees that guarded policy in the energy area, were the least likely to respond to administrative fiat. Carter broke with that tradition of consultation without even knowing it, let alone estimating the costs.

In the majority of cases, however, faulty analogy was the root of error. There was Harry Truman's misjudgment that in Korea he faced a situation similar to Hitler's challenge, which the Allies mishandled at Munich; Lyndon B. Johnson's unsuccessful struggle to escape entanglement in a Vietnam conflict that to him, his advisers, and the public looked very much like the China whose "loss" had hurt the Democrats so badly in 1949; Gerald R. Ford's mistake in the costly and ultimately unnecessary swine flu inoculation program as he took advice from a medical bureaucracy whose most influential memory (unknown to Ford) was the great (and "preventable") influenza epidemic of 1918.

The May and Neustadt books are mainstays in the growing number of studies on the influence of historical assumptions in American policy making-notably in the areas of constitutional law, social welfare, and immigration policy.

More important perhaps than any books in alerting the public to the mischievous powers of history lessons has been the presidential performance of Ronald Reagan. He was the master of using simple history lessons in political rhetoric, especially in attaching the blame for every social ailment from recession to welfare fraud to any liberal Democrat of whatever age and background. Of course, any politician's rhetoric bristles with references to the glories of the past, back to which he can lead us, and to the recent disasters brought upon us by his opponent's policies. But it was soon obvious to even casual observers that Reagan used history not merely to persuade but also to reach decisions. He appeared to decide most questions by reference to simple analogies to a few deep-seated and unexamined memories or near-memories. Often these had to do with national events, but more typically they derived from his own personal past.

We will better understand Reagan's mentality when time opens the archives and permits more studied appraisals, but his early biographers have made a beginning. Central American policy appears to have been at the center of the president's attention, and he was guided there by applied history of his own fashioning. "In an administration where analogy too often substitutes for thought," wrote Reagan biographer Lou Cannon in the spring of 1985, the Nicaraguan rebel forces labeled "contras" were, in the president's mind as well as in his rhetoric, "likened to the Founding Fathers, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, and the French Resistance." This was because Reagan "is a romantic who looks at the ill-trained and not necessarily democratic contra forces and sees the Continental armies at Valley Forge." Reagan's mind, in former budget director David Stockman's observation, did not take its direction from a plan or blueprint, but from certain interpretations of his own experience, which found sufficient substantiation if "validated by an anecdote from his personal history." Those who would understand how the White House remained fixated upon the battle to overturn an isolated Marxist regime in a small, poor country while our own economy slid deeper into a chasm of debt and industrial weakness will need an ear for the pivotal analogies that aligned the Reagan mentality. In a 1986 speech on the counterrevolutionary "contras" upon whom the administration lavished such ill-advised and occasionally illegal succor, Reagan specified the sun of history he steered by. His own presidency should be seen as a campaign in an old struggle that began with the Truman Doctrine, whereby a president acted "just in time to save that country from the closing grip of a Communist tyranny." John F. Kennedy was told by Clare Booth Luce, Reagan recalled, that the only question to be asked of his presidency was whether or not he "stopped the Communists." Luce, no historian, had, in Reagan's view, asked the only historical question that mattered, and it was one Reagan wished to answer in the affirmative in Nicaragua. As Kant observed in his Critique of Pure Reason, "All error has its origin in resemblance."

"The Terrible Burden of the Past"

Given the misuses made of history in policy formulation, one wonders if reflection upon the past helps human decision making, particularly in times of rapid change. The historian Herbert Butterfield, in pondering the animosities sweeping through Ireland and their nurturance by historical memory, remarked: "One must wonder sometimes whether it would not have been better if men could have ... thrown off the terrible burden of the past, so that they could face the future without encumbrances." Nearer to our own time and troubles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Donald observed that because "the age of abundance has ended" for America, the habits ingrained in us by our history make "the `lessons' taught by the American past ... today not merely irrelevant but dangerous."

Donald's skepticism is well founded The more we learn about the use of history lessons in policy making, the less we are inclined to welcome their influence. The generals of policy continue to fight the last war, plunging into misjudgment by failing to understand what historian C. Vann Woodward calls "the built-in obsolescence of the lessons taught by historians." Some errors induced in significant degree by misapplied history are minor and forgettable. Others are life-threatening, to individuals, groups, nations.

Yet Americans have special reason to believe that knowing and pondering the past can inform and steady human judgment about what to do tomorrow. The men at Philadelphia in 1787 had studied what James Madison called "the fugitive and turbulent existence of ... ancient republics," making good use of their classical educations and drawing upon the Library Company of Philadelphia's 5,000-volume collection, approximately one-third of it classified under "Memory" (history, geography). What they learned from historical studies, by their own account, helped to produce that summer of remarkable policy making.

However central to the American experience, this apparent link between historical study and sound policy making is only one swallow, not a summer. Have humans made port more often than run upon shoals, with history as a pilot? We can say little with confidence about the balance sheet, for study of the matter has not been rigorous. Errors minor and disastrous are undeniable in the record, with various kinds of historical misuse-analogizing, mindless extrapolation of past trends, reliance upon dangerous myths, neglect of useful lessons-deeply embedded in the cumulating strata of human decisions. Learning from the past is difficult enough in stable times, but our own era compounds the hazards by changing the situational elements so rapidly and relentlessly. "As soon as you learn the lessons," said a political campaign consultant whose specialty is the volatile electoral behavior of Americans in the 1980s, "you lose-because the lessons always change." One of his colleagues added, "We always fight the last war. There's always an effort to apply those lessons to the next time. And the next time is not going to be like the last time."

Disciplining Analogies

Can this skepticism of analogies be carried too far? Not long ago, hearing my exposition on the dangers of analogies, the redoubtable Nelson Polsby thundered, "No land wars in Asia! Don't invade Russia in the wintertime!"

The point was well made. We direct our lives by reference to experience, by past lessons learned and stored as unexamined maxims, and we could not function otherwise. Most of these lessons, most of the time, are durably reliable. Mark Twain also reminded us that while history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes. Analogies may and often do carry something useful, almost a promise, of a pattern bound to repeat.

Comparison of the remembered with the prospective remains important and indispensable. The future is always uncertain, and as we ponder it, like cases will and should attract us; for they have certain uses. On matters not much involving the quirky human race, analogizing saves mental energy to be expended more profitably elsewhere. The sun rises every morning, and it confirms expectations. It rises because of causal forces at work, and a time will come when those forces will change. Then, after much faithful service, the analogy will finally mislead. Few presumed past lessons, in addition, apply so reliably to the problems ahead as the rising of the sun. Analogies must be used, but prevented from becoming analogizing. How, then, do we domesticate historical comparison without analogizing into eventual error?

Ernest May and Richard Neustadt offer one simple method for disciplining analogies into aids to rational choice rather than rhetorical legitimaters of delusion. When an analogy surfaces in decision making, they suggest a parallel listing of Ls and Ds, the "Likes and Differences" between the past episode to be harvested of lessons and the future to be shaped. Almost at once this interrogation undermines false analogies. Occasions initially thought to be comparable tend to bend apart, become significantly different, and at once questions frame themselves. An analogy between past and present circumstances is thus transformed from an answer machine to a question generator, inviting an analysis that reveals, not formulas for what "will work," but indications of just what is at work. We should make analogies toil for a while before acting upon any knowledge gleaned from them; be prepared for no answers at all out of certain pasts; and always expect that the history lessons large enough to stay in the net must be held as tentative and conditional goods.

A History of History Use

After a brief tour of the theory of history's usefulness, the historian gladly turns to the empirical record. The federal government, in fact, has long experience of reliance on expert advice. Natural scientists came first, to map and survey the West and to develop new agricultural techniques; the social sciences came later, anthropologists working on Indian affairs, psychologists advising the armed services on testing or the Central Intelligence Agency on counterinsurgency, economists claiming their very own Council of Economic Advisors in 1947 and after. But historians? They have played a very minor, and intermittent, role on the edges of the policy process. Governments have called upon historians for their expertise at earlier times. President Woodrow Wilson commissioned "The Inquiry" as he prepared for the Versailles Treaty talks of 1919, and this body of scholars included historians. The "Violence Commission" headed by Milton Eisenhower arranged for a volume of historical essays as it probed the causes of the presidential assassinations and generalized violence of the late 1960s. Congress paid for a study of the history of presidential "misconduct" when pondering the Watergate scandals. John Kennedy brought a historian (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.) into the White House, as did Lyndon Johnson (Eric Goldman), though in both cases they assigned the scholars to work mostly on nonhistorical duties. Ronald Reagan invited a historian (Edmund Morris) to follow him about and write a presidential biography from the inside.

These examples call attention to a sort of tradition of historians engaged with national policy. Until recently it was an intermittent tradition that probably made most historians uneasy. As the 1980s arrived, the name "public historian" had been devised to designate a growing body of trained historians working in nonacademic settings-for corporations, governments, or general hire. Most public historians worked in archives or historic preservation, or prepared institutional biographies, but a policy role was evolving. The historians long employed by the Department of Agriculture to answer questions from the public and minor officials found themselves in the 1950s and after asked by Congress to assess past policies as a part of the larger decision stream. The Army, Navy, and Air Force have long utilized historians to prepare studies of battle groups or bases. In the mid-1980s, however, the director of the Air Force Historical Office reported that his office was receiving more questions from and engagement with top Air Force strategists who were becoming aware of the importance of institutional memory. In the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department, in the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers, and elsewhere across the federal bureaucracy, historians were engaged in work that touched the policy process. The U.S. Army gathered historians at, among other places, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to research battlefield lessons to guide officer training at the Center for Army Lessons Learned, and teams of historians followed combat units during the Gulf War to collect the materials required for subsequent battle histories.

The legislative branch moved to provide itself with institutional memory in 1975, when Senators Mike Mansfield and Hugh Scott sponsored the formation of the Senate Historical Office, now in its third decade of archival collection and publication, in which a direct, explicit policy role has not materialized. This safe development path, historical services without direct policy advice, was not safe enough on the House side. The depth of politicians' skepticism about the usefulness of historians was revealed when Congressman Claude Pepper in 1982 urged the House to establish the office of House Historian. A long dispute ensued, and many objections piled up-not all of them budgetary. One member confessed that he could not tell from the debate "whether we are talking about hiring a historian or a PR man or a psychiatrist." "All we are asking is one historian," Pepper protested. The vote was 230 to 97 against. Congressman Newt Gingrich, an historian, reintroduced the idea months later as an Office for the Bicentennial, and this institution became the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives in 1989, was shut down to save its budget of $337,000 in 1995, opened by Speaker Gingrich under a new chief historian who was immediately fired for allegedly having the wrong views of the Holocaust, whereupon the history office was merged downward into the Librarian's office and then to a low-profile home in the new Legislative Resource Center. History was a risky profession on Capital Hill, even without any explicit policy connection.

The role of professional historians in the courts until the 1980s was to sit on the outside writing academic articles assessing (usually critically) the quality of "law office" history. But the bar was beginning to hire historians to testify as expert witnesses on everything from water law to Indian claims to tobacco health claims to whether Sears, Roebuck and Company was guilty of discriminating against women in its pay and promotion practices. A few historians and their allies pressed for larger and more sustained policy roles. The planner Peter Hall has argued that historians should be centrally involved in the strategic planning function, for their training has prepared them superbly to draft the scenarios with which planners could frame the future.

Going further, historian Robert Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, founder of the first graduate program to train public historians, aspired to something more permanent, wide-ranging, and close to the presidency. At his urging, a joint letter from 21 distinguished American historians went to President-elect Jimmy Carter on November 3, 1976, stating: "It is time, we believe, for the national government to begin thinking historically about the problems it must solve." This was to some extent already being done, but through "hasty and shallow ... use," with bad analogies and inaccurately stated precedents leading to "poorly-considered policies." Professional historians were ready, as the economists had been when called upon to staff the Council of Economic Advisers in 1946, to improve governmental use of history. One model might be a Panel of Historical Consultants to "conduct studies for you, or reach out to the profession to have them conducted.... The historical method is now ready to be put to use as an aid to decision-making." The historians' letter to Carter left to the future the precise delineation of functions that a council or panel might perform-preparing background papers upon request, suggesting experts to be tapped for these or other purposes, writing an annual report, writing strategic planning scenarios.

Doubts About "Court Historians"

Informally, some historians were skeptical about the idea, and happy that Jimmy Carter did not even answer the "Kelley letter." Historians should not work for government, in this view-at least, not in connection with decision making, even if some archival or case-history writing services were permissible. A Council of Historians would only embarrass the profession, either through occasional blunders or through repeated servility. This had been the result, certainly in recent years, of a Council of Economic Advisers, whose inability to foretell the future was annually evident.

This argument held that, as with the economists in Ronald Reagan's CEA especially, historians would be tempted to become, and some would become, propagandists for the regime. They would write favorable case studies of their paymasters' favorite programs; upon demand, they might even analogize, offer their professional authority that some piece of history indeed "proves" some point to the liking of their employers. This suspicion finds some support in history, as one discovers upon reading the monographs by George Blakey (1970) and Carol Gruber (1975) on the National Board for Historical Service during World War 1, which too often lent historians' expertise to the uses of governmental propaganda.

Along with the anticipated compromises of professional integrity, historians aspiring to future-shaping policy roles could also expect to expose themselves to occasional ridicule. Other academic experts, serving as legislative consultants or court witnesses, have provided a spectacle of self-contradiction and absurd statements that average people know to be nonsense. This has been especially embarrassing, professionally, to psychologists and psychiatrists, whose clinical judgments are charged with being no better than those of lay people, while both are consistently out-performed by simple actuarial calculations.

To historians of this mind, it was a bit of good luck that the profession has not been invited into such activity and is not institutionalized in an office down the hall from the president, where it might be routinely consulted and certainly would be implicated in and obliged to defend decision making on public policy. Policy is, after all, an effort to peer into and manipulate the future. Some historians aggressively assert the profession's incompetence in looking forward. More, I suspect, believe that the past confers some useful wisdom to those who must make policy decisions, but would have to admit that historians have not readied themselves for policy service to the modern state, as have the "policy sciences" such as economics, political science, psychology, sociology. Historians are thinly deployed along the line of modern policy experience, and usually do not link their findings with contemporary policy concerns. Since they often shun a theoretical framework, whether on principle or by habit, they tend to pile their narrative case histories atop one another without responding to the questions either of the theoretical or applied policy research community. "Their work runs along innumerable separate paths which rarely connect," two historians of social policy have recently observed.

These limitations are compounded when it is realized that the discipline of history in America has (probably) never been in a period of such internal confusion as the 1970s and 1980s. Historians in recent years have been increasingly divided internally as to subject matter and methodology, and have lost their working consensus upon the elements of a common national story. Epistemological confusion was deepened as the deconstructionist critique raised questions of whether historical accounts could possibly bear any relationship to reality.

It is doubtful that Jimmy Carter's non-response came because he knew that many historians were opposed to a policy role, that he feared that historian Bruce Stave spoke for his colleagues when he wrote: "Our responsibility is not to policy makers, but to laity, public, not to confirm but to be critical of the policy makers and of their political scientists." The president did not answer Kelley's invitation-Carter's domestic policy advisor Stu Eisenstat later told me apparently because it was lost in the pre-inaugural shuffle. Governments and historians remain uneasy partners. Some policymaking bodies, finding a historian in their midst, are simply baffled. Historian John Demos, appointed to the Carnegie Council on Children, found that no one, including himself, knew what to do with his expertise, which "seemed inherently less practical, more diffuse, and more esoteric than the others" and "to lead nowhere in particular." Indeed, they hardly seemed to need him, as the other council members usually opened a new line of discussion with their own "historical preface" which invariably served to legitimize some policy option about to be endorsed.

Some policymakers are more actively hostile to historians than this. "Historians are dangerous, and capable of turning everything topsy-turvy. They have to be watched," said Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. "When I have a problem, I want it addressed," was one executive's terse summary of why that type of academic should not be invited to assist in corporate policymaking: "Historians bleed too much." This must refer to the academicians' alleged inability to move quickly to decision without lengthy pondering of every relevant fact, combined with the assumption that all historian experts are academicians, which is no longer true.

History, With and Without Historians, in Policymaking

Despite reservations on both sides, the engagement of historical expertise and policymaking is expanding. Both the formal, institutionalized policy of engaging historians and their role as critics of policy substance and policy logic are on the increase. Historians have many useful roles as a consequence-archival management, preparation of institutional histories and custody of institutional memory, scenario building with planners, interrogation of visible and invisible analogies. Within the historical profession, there is a growing interest in the "policy connection," reflected in national conferences on "policy history" in Bowling Green in 1997 and St. Louis in 1999, and in the robust expansion of the readership and influence of the Journal of Policy History edited by Don Critchlow.

A part of the historians' role is outside government, as monitor and critic. A former President of the American Historical Association, Joyce Appleby, joined with former Princeton historian James M. Banner to establish in 1996 the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians promoting informed professional media commentary upon current events in which history is, or ought to be, in play.

Yet using history is quite different from using physics. Policymakers defer to space scientists, computer specialists, genetic engineers of agricultural products. But historical expertise is thought to be universal. Lay deciders are the end-users of historical insight, and will not be especially deferential to the new set of historical experts who have made their way into the deciding system. When the subject is atomic physics, or the molecular biology at the foundation of genetic engineering, inexpert politicians rarely attempt-to construct independent views of the science itself. Yet when the lessons of the recent and remembered past arrive in the stream of deciding-which is every time, and from front to end of it-policy makers show no reluctance to practice historical interpretation without a license or much thought of the need for expert assistance. However significant the advisory role that might ever be accorded historical expertise, the lay policy maker will operate from Everyman's confidence in herself as historical interpreter. Given this reality, the first line of improvement in turning misuse more frequently into wise use lies in lay education. Who else to do this, on campus and off, but the historical community? Before policy roles, and during and after, the historian is now obliged to research that role as a distinct new subject area, and to serve as educator upon that foundation.

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