In Search of History

In January 1962, when Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August was released. The New Yorker noted that it was one of the few books ever heralded by three consecutive full-page ads in the same issue of the Sunday Times Books Review. The book itself was no anticlimax; quickly greeted with critical acclaim, it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. But Tuchman's dramatic account of the opening weeks of the First World War achieved an even more astonishing feat for a history book-in eight months it sold over 270,000 copies, and by October, The New Yorker could report that the book had already seen 33 weeks of best-sellerdom Tuchman appeared to have done the impossible she had made pure history sell.

Tuchman has always been an anomaly in the field of historical scholarship. Although she never earned a Ph.D and did not write her first book until she was nearly 45, the historian has received two Pulitzer prizes as well as plaudits from scholars around the world. Unlike most historians who generally publish variations on a theme, the subjects of her books have ranged from ancient Palestine to medieval Europe and 20th-century China. Finally, her books have been uniformly successful--and several have been massive best sellers.

One frequently proffered explanation for the Tuchman magic is her unique style. In a time when history as a discipline is becoming increasingly quantified and scientific, Tuchman has led a single-handed crusade for a humanistic approach "Prefabricated systems make me suspicious and science applied to history makes me wince, "Tuchman told the Radcliffe chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1963. Quoting Leon Trotsky, she added "Cause in history refracts itself through a natural selection of accidents."

Rebelling against the "systematizes," Tuchman has instead spread a vision of the historian as artist, and advocated history for its own sake. "Is it necessary to insist on a purpose" Tuchman wrote in 1965.

No one asks the novelist why he writes novels or the poet what is his purpose in writing poems. The lilies of the field, as I remember were not required to have a demonstrable purpose. Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all? Insistence on a purpose turns the historian into a prophet--and that is another profession.

In an interview conducted last week when Tuchman was in Cambridge to deliver the Atherton lecture, the historian suggested a second reason for her runaway success--an explanation which reveals another dimension to Tuchman's histories, as well as the evolution her work has undergone. That explanation is her use of history as a "distant mirror"--a historic parallel of 20-th century problems.

* * *

On August 10, 1914, at the age of two, Tuchman stood on the deck on an Italian liner, and watched two German warships exchange shots with the British cruiser Gloucester on the horizon. The ships soon disappeared, but, as Emerson wrote on another historic occasion, the shots echoed round the world. Although neither Tuchman nor the other passengers knew it at the time, they had just witnessed the opening battle of World War I.

This sea skirmish eventually reappeared in Tuchman's The Guns of August. The scene is perhaps the closest she ever comes to merging her personal experiences and her writing, and the convergence is strangely appropriate. For though Tuchman scarcely remembers the event, those shots--and others fired later that day--fundamentally shaped her life and work. As Tuchman her self observes. "That's when the 20th century really began."

And, though history is Tuchman's medium, the current century is her philosophic obsession. Born into a world of hope and self-confidence, she watched the idealism of the 19th century dissolve in war and recongeal into the recrimination and self doubt of the 20th. In contrast to the proud and noble self-image of the Victorian man, "our self-image looks more like Woody Allen or a character from Samuel Beckett," Tuchman declared in her 1980 Jefferson lecture. "It is a paradox of our time in the West that never have so many people been so relatively well off and never has society been more troubled."

On a personal level, Tuchman's early years gave her a first-hand view of this 20th-century disillusionment by bringing her time and time again into contact with the forces and events that shaped the century.

Graduating from Radcliffe in 1933, Tuchman went to work at the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a liberal organization which included members from all the countries rimming the Pacific. After a one-year stint in New York, Tuchman transferred to the organization's Tokyo branch, where she helped prepare an economic handbook of the Pacific. "The Japanese militarist/fascist movement was getting very hot and IPR wanted to encourage the liberal Japanese who were still holding on," the historian recalls. The situation looked bleak, however, and in 1935. Tuchman came home--via the trans-Siberian rail-road.

Taking the trans-Siberian across Stalin's Russia in 1935 was a tense and dreary experience. Thousands were dying of famine and purges and the country was wracked by economic and social chaos. Anxious to hide as much as possible from their foreign travelers. Soviet officials stopped the train at Baiku on the excuse that a log had fallen across the tracks--and held it there for 12 hours. "The result," Tuchman recalls, "was that we hit every station thereafter in the middle of the night--and didn't see anything."

Tuchman got her only sense of the country from a fierce argument with a Siberian schoolteacher she met on the train. The woman had taught her self English, the two got into a "terrific argument" about "who was better known, Stalin or FDR." As Tuchman recalls, "She thought the Soviets had invented everything--including neon lights."

Returning to New York, Tuchman worked for The Nation for two years, then in 1937 left for Spain to do several stories on the Spanish Civil War. On the trip, Tuchman travelled with Hemingway, his female companion and another male journalist. Tuchman grins slightly as she recalls that Hemingway's companion was very annoyed at her because "there were only two staterooms--and it wasn't proper for me to stay in the same room with either of the men!"

Although she only spent one and a half months in Spain, Tuchman observes those six weeks were perhaps the most inspiring of her early years. "[The war] was the great cause of young people in those days--everyone left of center," Tuchman recalls. "You felt that you were engaged in something--you were fighting fascism. When you have a movement like this, life takes on new meaning."

After leaving Spain, Tuchman stayed on in Paris, writing for United Editorial--a U.S.-sponsored publishing outfit that issued a weekly report on the war--and working against non--intervention and appeasement. As she later wrote, "It was a somber, exciting, believing, betraying time, with heroes, hopes, and illusions. I have always felt that the year and decade of reaching one's majority, rather than of one's birth, is the stamp one bears. I think of myself as a child of the '30s. I was a believed then, as I suppose people in their 20s must be (or, were, in my generation). I believed that the right and rational would win in the end."

After the Munich appeasement, Tuchman's worried father urged her to come home. Returning to New York, she worked with journalist Jay Allen, compiling a chronological record of the Spanish Civil War. The defeat of the Spanish Republic later that year, she wrote, was "the event that cracked my heart, politically speaking, and replaced my illusions with recognition of Real-politick; it was the beginning of adulthood."

On June 18, 1940--the day Hitler entered Paris--Tuchman got married. She spent the morning of her wedding day drafting a letter to the President, urging him to take action. One year later, the U.S. too was at war.

* * *

The war and her marriage brought Tuchman's journalistic career to a close, and it was nearly a decade before she again began thinking about writing. "I always thought that to write a book was the greatest thing in the world," Tuchman says, "but I never really had the confidence. Then, in 1948, when the state of Israel was created, it gave me a push."

The result was Bible and Sword, a history of the relations between Britain and Palestine from the Phoenicians to the close of World War I. Although the book took "six or seven years of very interrupted effort" and significantly longer to find a publisher, it eventually appeared in 1956. The experience taught Tuchman two things: that she could write history well, and that "I could not write contemporary history if I tried."

Originally, Tuchman was intended to carry the story through 1943--through the years of the British mandate, the Arab-Israel war, and the final re-establishment of Israel. She spent six months of research on the history of these bitter last 30 years but, as she later explained. "When I tried to write this as history, I could not do it. Anger, disgust, and a sense of injustice can make some write eloquent and evoke brilliant polemic, but the emotions stunted and twisted my pen." This lesson has remained with her throughout her work.

But if she scrupulously avoids writing about contemporary events. Tuchman admits that she often looks for mirrors of the present in the past and frequently chooses her subjects because of their current significance. The Guns of August, she says, arose because "I felt I had to do something on 1914, since that's when the 20th century really began." Finishing that, she turned to The Proud Tower because "I realized that the cause of World War I was not really in the diplomatic correspondence of 1913 and 1914, but the social forces of the decades before that "Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, sprang from her frustrations over the Vietnam War. "I had worked on the Far Eastern desk of the Office of War Information, during the war, and knew that Americans really knew very little about Asia. The Stilwell and Vietnam experiences seemed to be very similar.

But it is perhaps in her most recent history, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, that Tuchman's parallel is most explicit. "The Bomb is very much a factor in everyone's mind," she says, "and I wanted to find out what was the effect on society of a massive destructive force." Tuchman had originally intended to focus the book on the Black Death," the most lethal disaster in recorded history" which ---between 1308 and 1350--killed an estimated one-third of the population living between India and Ireland. The book eventually expanded to cover the entire century, a period when "assumptions were cracking institutions were breaking up, and everything people believed in was being destroyed. "Pausing for a moment, Tuchman adds quietly. "That's very much what's happened in my own time. To me, that's the mirror.

* * *

In 1966, in an address to the Chicago Historical Society, Tuchman observed.

I visualize the "large organizing idea as one of those iron chain mats pulled behind by a tractor to smooth over a plowed field. I see the professor climbing up on the tractor seat and away he goes pulling behind his large organizing idea over the bumps and furrows and history until he has smoothed it out to a nice, neat, organized surface, in other words, into a system.

Since Tuchman, the humanist, spoke these words, her philosophy, of history has gradually evolved to a place more and more emphasis on the second dimension of her theory. Half a century ago she saw institutions destroyed in Japan and Stalinist Russia, and watched idealism self-distract in the country side of Civil War-torn Spain. In the last 15 years--she has seen the Vietnam War. Watergate and the atom bomb trigger the same reactions in the United States, she has with increasing frequency turned to history for answers. Although she still retains her humanistic vision, she has gradually focused more attention on dredging history for clues.

Folly and Government, Tuchman's forthcoming book which she described at the Atherton Lecture, appears to carry this evolution to its logical extreme. Where Tuchman once proclaimed that "I am a disciple of the once because I mistrust history in gallon jugs," her new book will span 4000 years of legend and fact. Where Tuchman once wrote that "insistence on purpose turns the historian into a prophet" her new book is defined by purpose, its conclusions implicitly prophetic. And the 12 case studies, Tuchman uses to explore her question were explicitly chosen because of their conformance to strict criteria. Stated or not, Folly and Government employs a "large organizing idea" to transform at least one small branch of history into a system.

In the book, Tuchman says she will explore the reasons that governments, "pursue a policy contrary to their own self-interests." "Mankind makes a poorer performance of government than any other human activity." Tuchman said in her lecture. "The ubiquity of the problem today is almost a disease."

Both chronologically and geographically, the cases she will consider are widespread: the Trojan decision to knock down their walls to admit the wooden horse. Montezuma's refusal to send his vast armies against Cortes. Napoleon's fated invasion of Russia, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the American involvement in Vietnam.

But while Tuchman's approach reveals a shift in her philosophy, her conclusions reflect her unwavering belief that "history is people--bizarre is not inexplicable." She finds the answers to her quest, not in institutions or social forces, but if the failings and foibles of the individual. Her final conclusion reflects both a cynical understanding of human nature, and an ultimate faith in the tenacity of mankind. "I don't think we're going to improve, but we're going to muddle through."