9 - The battle joined

Summary

In the immediately preceding chapters I have traced the influences which, during the interwar years, produced a widespread questioning of the founding program of the American historical profession: the scientific and detached search for impartial, objective historical truth. In the largest sense the interwar criticism of the objectivist posture was a moment in a philosophical debate that went back to Aristotle and Protagoras. But the “why” and “how” of its development in these years were closely tied to the specific forms of the enduring factualist, inductivist orthodoxy against which the dissidents were revolting, and the contemporary influences which mobilized doubts and provided the rebels with ammunition.

The experience of the war, various intellectual currents, professional disappointment, and ideological controversy had the direct and immediate consequence of leading a number of historians to abandon objectivist orthodoxy. And during the decade of the twenties there were signs that a growing number of historians were assembling for themselves elements of what would come to be designated “historical relativism.” James Harvey Robinson laid down as “law” that “what passes for history in any generation is what Voltaire called une fable convenue—only one of the many, many stories which could be told of man's doings.” Allen Johnson of Yale, in a widely used manual of historical method, was sharply critical of the empiricist certitude in the works of Bernheim and Langlois and Seignobos. Selection of facts was necessarily a value-laden process, and we could only know history “as constructed in human consciousness under distinct limitations.”