4 - A most genteel insurgency

Summary

Not all American professional historians before World War I accepted the orthodox scientific posture in toto. Especially among the elder statesmen of the profession there were those who retained elements of an earlier, pre-professional sensibility. Woodrow Wilson questioned the injunction to “Give us the facts, and nothing but the facts”:

Without the colors your picture is not true. No inventory of items will even represent the truth: the fuller and more minute you make it, the more will the truth be obscured.… The investigator must display his materials, but the historian must convey his impressions.… The historian needs an imagination quite as much as he needs scholarship, and consummate literary art as much as candor and common honesty.

Edward Channing expressed a willingness to subordinate factual accuracy to a “truthful impression.” He wrote that oftentimes the historian

must sacrifice absolute accuracy in detail and in perspective. If the impression produced upon his reader is truthful, it matters little whether all his dates are correct, all his names are properly spelled, or if all his facts are accurate. Indeed, his dates may every one of them be correct, his names may all be properly spelled, his facts may be absolutely accurate, and the impression left upon his reader be entirely false.

“It was all very well,” wrote Albert B. Hart, “for Ranke to begin his lectures: ‘I will simply tell you how it was.’”