by Eric Rauchway

I'm going to disagree, a little, with my distinguished colleague David Bell: I think it's not the anti-counterfactualism of social science that's the reason for the parlous state of military history.

First, counterfactualism belongs properly to the social sciences. A theory of causation says a cause is some x without which some y would not have occurred. That's a counterfactual argument--"without x, no y" means thinking seriously through what "without x" means. My friend Bill Summerhill explains this is why he loves regression analysis--it's got counterfactual assumptions built in--but Bill may be, if you'll excuse the metaphor, an outlier. Even so, economic historians (like Niall Ferguson) enjoy the more traditional counterfactuals for similar reasons: if you're going to argue that British involvement in World War I was an error, i.e., the cause of many Bad Things, you owe it to yourself and your readers to explain what would have happened otherwise.

Second, History-Department History (HDH) has, it's true, included less military history lately. But HDH also includes less economic history lately, less political history lately, less diplomatic history lately. And I don't think this is because of what those fields are (narrative, contingency-driven) but because of what they are not: HDH has included a lot more history inflected by certain kinds of social theory. You can do military history inflected by social theory, but generally, most people don't.

Finally, you can do very good social-sciency military history, especially using data like SIPRI's and the Correlates of War.

Bloggy addendum:

Speaking of Niall Ferguson, I talk about the special relationship, of which Niall is one of the better products, here.

by Richard Stern

Today is Studs Terkel's 95th birthday, and tributes to him are being played over WFMT, the station on which he interviewed, played records, and reminisced sometimes five times a week between 1942 and 1997. When I first heard Studs, I thought he rattled on too loosely, unmoored by grammar or anything but misty benevolence. His first interview with me, probably around 1960, was surprisingly better. Studs was well-prepared. There were underlines throughout the book we were discussing, and again, if memory serves, he seemed to have a good take on it. Over the years, I'd see him at parties and funerals, on the street, my home, and then during interviews. There I was more and more impressed by his preparation, his seriousness, his understanding, his easy charm, his--yes--goodness. In The Nation, I reviewed his first book, Division Street America in relation to such other books of oral history as Oscar Lewis's Children of Sanchez, contrasting them with works of fiction from the Canterbury Tales on. I said Studs was no Chaucer but a kind of Harry Bailly, the pilgrims' amiable host. (Studs asked me who Bailly was.) Two years ago, I sat with him over lunch before the Printers' Row Book Fair where in separate booths we were to read. Although "practically deaf," and a beat or two slower, he was more or less as he'd always been, the easy pace of being Studs somehow assimilating age better than most of us do. This Chicagoan, himself no chicken, couldn't help feeling a sort of love for him.

In the newspapers today, I read the obituary of another American monument, Jerry Falwell. Although I'd only seen and heard him on television, and although I found most of his views either abhorrent, naïve, ignorant or intrusively mean and wild, I was often surprised by his apparent amiability, lack of theatricality and occasional spasms of common sense. The obituary revealed other surprises: He was an American go-getter who, just as his father expanded one small restaurant into a chain to which were added service stations and at least one well-known night club, expanded an almost unattended church into one with a huge congregation, then started his own church and, finally, Liberty, the fundamentalist university of which he was chancellor till his death yesterday. His Moral Majority is said to have elected Ronald Reagan, and speaking at Liberty U. is almost a prerequisite for getting the Republican nomination for president. (The first posthumous speaker will be Newt Gingrich; the last Falwellian speaker was John McCain.)

Which of these two men has had a greater impact on their country? Almost everyone would opt for Falwell, for there is little doubt that as far as present day political power goes, it was his. I prefer to think that Studs's books and decades of radio work, his genial intelligence, the fusion of common sense with empathy, his political and esthetic sensitivity and then the editorial gifts which make his books a remarkable biographical history of his time and country, will in years to come be seen as having made a more enduring and profound contribution to national well-being. I'll close with lines from a poet Studs and this blogger admire, Alane Rollings:

             My Dead, having lived, must be kept, somehow, alive...
What they'd been was me. The only way to keep them
was to hold closely as I could
all the borrowed elements that recompose me by the hour
on this substantial planet where I live.

"Sweetness Night and Day," from To Be in this Number

by David A. Bell

My recent TNR essay on military history--which itself grew out of a discussion on this blog last fall [starting five posts down the page]--seems to have touched a nerve of sorts. I cannot remember receiving so many interesting and thoughtful e-mails about a piece of writing. I doubt this was due to the piece itself, which was brief, but simply to the large public interest in military history, and the feeling that it is ignored in American universities.

The mail has prompted some further thoughts. In the essay, I speculated on the reasons why American universities have slighted military history, and spent some time discussing the fact that relatively few social scientists have considered military conflict a phenomenon that deserves sustained analysis.

But as several correspondents pointed out, a big reason for this neglect is that military history indeed does confound our expectations of "social science," because it is the domain, par excellence, of chance and unpredictability. Social scientists like to identify large-scale patterns of change, and explain them in terms reminiscent of natural "laws." They like their social phenomena regular and predictable, and loathe the possibility that everything might have turned out differently because of trivial, essentially random factors. Of course, the chaos of battles and the vagaries of military intelligence offer the best examples of fields where tiny events can have potentially vast consequences. Imagine if the Union had not intercepted crucial Confederate orders before the battle of Antietam. Might the Confederates then have won a decisive victory there? And had they done so, at this crucial battle, might the South have won the Civil War? And had this happened, might subsequent world history itself have fallen into very different patterns? Speculation like this challenges the notion that we can explain history, or social change, by reference to anything akin to natural laws, and so it makes social scientists and historians very uncomfortable.

Still, even professional historians cannot always resist asking "what if?" My friend John Merriman, at Yale, has edited a fascinating collection of essays that explores various counterfactual scenarios. Harvard's Niall Ferguson has edited another, asking what might have happened had Britain stayed out of World War I, and so on. President Bush's favorite historian, Andrew Roberts, has edited yet a third. In these books, the only truly silly piece is David Frum's egregious speculation, in the Roberts volume, on what might have happened after 9/11 had the Florida chads turned out differently in 2000. Frum ludicrously imagines a President Gore debating with his advisors about whether a strongly-worded message to the U.N. Security Council about the Taliban is too harsh a response to the terrorist attacks.

In the end, though, the notion of the same story having multiple, radically different possible endings is more congenial to literature than to social science. And so it is no coincidence that some of the most genuinely thoughtful treatments of "what if?" questions have come from novelists rather than academics. Indeed, by now the genre of "alternate history" fiction has become quite well established (see this website, for example). Novelists as distinguished as Kingsley Amis have tried their hands at it (his The Alteration takes place in a modern Britain that had never experienced the Reformation, and Russian Hide-and-Seek in a Britain conquered by Russia after World War II). The genre has its acknowledged classics, such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, about an America occupied by the Axis powers, or Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder," about a time traveler stepping on the wrong insect in the distant past, and so altering the shape of American politics in the present. Many of the most successful efforts have, not surprisingly, followed Dick in exploring the consequences of an Axis victory in WWII. Robert Harris's excellent Fatherland, set in a modern Germany still ruled by Nazis, is probably the best known, although to my mind Len Deighton's SS-GB, set during the war itself, in Nazi-occupied London, is even better.

My favorite titles, though, come from the prolific American author Harry Turtledove, originally a historian of the Byzantine Empire, who has devoted the most sustained attention to the "what if?" question I mentioned above, about the Battle of Antietam. Indeed, he has now written no fewer than ten novels, totaling well over 6000 pages, that explore the consequences of a Civil War Confederate victory. In the eleventh installment, due this summer, he has gotten up to the end of an alternate World War II in which the North finds itself at war once again with the South--which has succumbed to fascism and is carrying out genocide against African-Americans. Turtledove is not a memorable stylist. He is brilliant, however, at braiding together the stories of large numbers of ordinary characters over long time periods, and showing the effects of contingency and freakish chance on the scale of individual lives, as well as in national histories. Thus a character we originally meet as a frustrated sergeant denied promotion in World War I emerges, several volumes later, as the Confederate Hitler. A former slave who takes part in a failed rebellion against the Confederacy spends years in hiding, only to be sent to his death in an extermination camp. Although a little hard to get into because of the large cast of characters, the books quickly become addictive. At the conclusion of volume ten, The Grapple, North and South were racing each other to build atomic weapons. Stay tuned.

Content Continues Below

by Sanford Levinson

Below is part of the transcript from the first Republican "debate" at the Reagan Library. The moderator, Chris Matthews, asked Mitt Romney the following:

Moderator:Should we change our Constitution, which we believe is divinely inspired [Editorial Note: This is a reference to Mormon theology, which indeed views the U.S. Constitution as divinely inspired] to allow men like Mel Martinez, the chairman of your party, born in Cuba, great patriot, the senator from Florida, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to stand here some night?
Romney: Never given that a lot of thought, but with Arnold sitting there, I'll give it some thought, but probably not.
Moderator: No?
Romney: No.
Moderator: Yes or no?
(Unknown): I love the Governator, but...
Moderator: We got two noes.
(Unknown): I think there are other ideas that we should...
Moderator: Governor Gilmore. Two noes. We're moving here.
Gilmore: No, I don't intend to want to amend this Constitution in a variety of different ways, and this would be not a good start to do it that way.
Moderator: So that's a no. Three noes in a row.
Huckabee: After I've served eight years as president, I'd be happy to change the Constitution for Governor Schwarzenegger.
(Laughter)
Moderator: Three to one. Congressman?
Hunter: We haven't seen his endorsement yet, Chris.
Moderator: OK. Three to one to no-show?
Hunter: That's a no.
Moderator: OK. Four noes to one. Governor?
Thompson: No.
Moderator: Five to one. Senator?
McCain: Depends on whether he endorses me or not.
(Laughter)
He and I have many similar attributes, so I have to seriously consider it.
Moderator: OK. We've got an overwhelming vote against you, Governor, in your own house.
(Laughter)
Congressman?
Paul (?): I'm a no, because I am a strong supporter of the original intent.
[Editorial note: Whatever the Constitution means, it is truly mindless to oppose amending it because of supporting original intent, unless one believes, contrary to all available evidence, that the Framers got everything right.]
Moderator: Oh, God. OK, Mayor Giuliani?
Giuliani: When he called me up to endorse him, he got me on the phone, he said, "Will you endorse me?", and I was too afraid to say no.
(Laughter)
Moderator: OK. Congressman Tancredo -- is it no or yes?
Giuliani: I would say yes.
Moderator: Yes.
Tancredo: Intimidating as he might be, I'm saying no.
Moderator: OK. We've got two yeses here.

This is a stunning display of what can only be called bigotry, i.e., retaining a part of the Constitution that says that a naturalized American citizen, whatever his or her demonstration of good judgment, political talent, virtue, or whatever it is that we want in a president, is disqualified from the office simply because of the circumstances of birth. This is nothing less than the endorsement of "second-class citizenship." Imagine if we would be laughing if the issue involved a constitutional bar to non-whites or women running for office. (If one is an original intent buff, one might want to interpret "he" in the Constitution as barring women from running for president, since it surely the case that no Framer could have envisioned any such possibility.)

To be sure, it's easy to understand why all of these worthies would be opposed to making Arnold Schwarzenegger eligible for the office, since were it not for the Constitution, it is almost certain that he would be among the leading candidates--and among this crowd of candidates, perhaps even deservedly so. Though I am no fan of Rudy Guiliani, I will give him genuine credit for having the integrity to stand out from his yahoo colleagues in functionally endorsing an amendment originally proposed, I think in 2004, by Senator Orrin Hatch. Mr. Straight Talk John McCain seems to have pledged only to "think about it." Perhaps he wanta to find out whether it might cost him votes among "the base" in an upcoming primary?

The real question is whether Democrats will recognize a political gift and rally behind the Hatch amendment, as they should have originally instead of remaining somnolent. It would be wonderful to put House and Senate Republicans on the line and make them justify this discrimination against naturalized citizens. One can imagine a laundry list of faces that might appear in ads, with the tag line: Whatever you think of their politics, do you think that their place of birth should disqualify them from serving as president? Such faces might include, for starters, Ted Koppel, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Mel Martinez, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, and former head of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili, not to mention an impressive number of aliens who are risking their lives in Iraq in order to get on a preferred list for citizenship. Most of these I wouldn't vote for, but certainly not because of their status when they were born. Perhaps the Republican worthies who oppose the amendment should explain why they believe that naturalized citizens can fill literally all other offices in the national government save only for the presidency.