"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." --attributed to Winston Churchill.
The recent controversy surrounding Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of April as "Confederate History Month" and the earnest defense of the governor by a number of conservatives has, not surprisingly, caused a great deal of outrage here at Daily Kos. Their denial that slavery was the cause of the Civil War strikes many of us as either disingenuous or insane. On this issue the evidence of the historical record is clear and the conclusions to be drawn from it are as inevitable as they are incontrovertible: The Civil War was about slavery.
Still, there are a great many people to whom that simple fact is not obvious and one of the reasons it is not obvious is that they were educated to believe otherwise. This is not simply the case with those educated in the South. My father, something of a Civil War buff, and I have been having this argument now for more than two decades. A couple of years ago he finally conceded that I was right, but he still has an emotional attachment to the romance of the Lost Cause (even though he grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania).
The simple fact is that not that long ago mainstream public education minimized the importance of slavery in the Civil War while it often lionized the characters of Confederate generals, men who were held up as "great Americans." Even men like Harry Truman and George Marshall greatly admired Robert E. Lee. We are constantly told that history is written by the victors and yet, with the single exception of the martyred Abraham Lincoln, the victors in this struggle were presented as the moral inferiors of those they bested. How could that be?
The reason for this is simple: bluntly stated, the idea that history is written by the victors is specious. That it maintains its currency is primarily a result of its inherent appeal to two influential demographics: losers and fools.
To losers its appeal comes from the obvious political advantage of justifying any moral shortcomings of the cause for which they fought by the fecklessness with which they did so. Their incompetence excuses their immorality. The mere fact that they lost somehow ennobles their cause and by extension themselves. It is no coincidence that this saying is very popular among apologists for numerous evil losers, from the Confederacy, to Imperial Japan in the Second World War, to Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
For fools, the lure is that which always attracts fools to pithy but vacuous assertions: it allows them to pretend to a wisdom they are too stupid or too lazy to acquire through study and reflection. However, in this case, their pretensions are so transparent that it is nothing less than mind-boggling that this pernicious platitude is still mouthed by a great deal of people who should know better. The idea that losers have no role in shaping the subsequent presentation of events is quite simply a prima facie absurdity and cannot survive even the most superficial scrutiny.
Losers have always played a prominent role in shaping the way we perceive events. The very first work generally recognized as true history, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, was not only written by a loser but a disgraced one at that. Xenophon, the man who picked up the story where Thucydides left off in his Helenica, was also from defeated Athens and the work for which he is most remembered, the Anabasis, is a tale of military disaster. The rise of the Roman Empire was recorded by Polybius, a defeated member of the Achean League who were beaten by the Romans. The history of the Franks was penned by Gregory of Tours, a member of the Gallo-Roman race the Franks subdued in the conquest of Gaul.
Indeed it should come as no surprise that such an enormous amount of history is written by the losers, for unlike the winners they often find that they suddenly have a great deal of time on their hands and many frustrations to vent. The winners generally have other things to occupy them. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this dynamic in action came after the Second World War when MacArthur’s GHQ actually hired Hattori Takushiro, a war criminal and former officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, and a group of his associates to write a history of the Second World War. While this particular case may have been unique in the extent to which it overturned conventional wisdom, there has never been a shortage of losers seeking to get their side of the story into print. Hattori’s co-conspirator Tsuji Masanobu wrote a history of Japan’s disastrous Guadalcanal campaign. Fuchida Mitsuo wrote an account of the battle of Midway. Meanwhile, Arthur Percival, who fell victim to Tsuji’s plans during the Malaya Campaign wrote a history of that British disaster. Husband E. Kimmel wrote his version of Pearl Harbor. Westmoreland wrote his own account of Vietnam. Jefferson Davis gave his version of the Civil War. Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg wrote their own accounts of the First World War. Indeed at times it seems more difficult to think of a prominent loser who survived a war that did not somehow manage to have his say after the fact.
There are far too many works penned by losers to even treat seriously the idea that victory is a prerequisite for writing history. Of course, if the losers wrote in such a manner as to merely reinforce the overall narrative of the victors, if theirs were but subordinate voices allowed to make themselves heard so long as they did not upset the grand story of glory spun by the winners, this would be but a technical point. But that is not the case. The fact is that many such histories have a profound and lasting influence on the way events are perceived even decades later and they are decidedly biased in favor of the those who wrote them.
Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said, "Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it." What he meant by this, of course, is that there is more to writing history than simply recording events. Writing history requires the imagination to structure those events into a coherent narrative. The most enduring and influential histories are those that not only render the past comprehensible but do so in a way that capture’s the imaginations of their readers. The genius of which Wilde spoke lay not in the painstaking and clinically detached examination of the historical record, but in the ability to use that record in such a way as to present the reader with a pattern that speaks to them on a fundamental level. Classic histories, like any other literary classics, endure because they resonate with something deep in the human soul. The simple fact of the matter is that insofar as people study history, they do so for more often for affirmation than enlightenment.
For all too often the objective study of history leaves us cold. With the dawn of modernity technology has not only increased the efficiency of human monstrosity but recorded it in painstaking, nauseating detail. After two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, ethnic cleansing and slow-motion genocide, and countless other atrocities besides, many may find Edward Gibbon’s characterization of history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," to be somehow quaint. Rather we find that the only enlightenment to be gained from the study of history is an unholy communion with the twisted horrors of the human soul. Staring into this abyss, we find it staring back at us and we instinctively recoil. We find ourselves searching for someone to give meaning to the apparent chaos around us and the chaos that led to our current condition. There are no people for whom this yearning is stronger than those who have suffered defeat in war.
The sacrifices made to the Moloch of war must be rationalized to be endured. Victory provides its own rationale, but as historian John Dower has pointedly asked, "What do you tell the dead when you lose?" To those who survive them, "your sacrifice was in vain" is something akin to blasphemy and thus almost any struggle, no matter how futile, immoral or wrong-headed, can become righteous in the hearts of the bereaved when it has been sanctified with the blood of their loved ones.
There is something very human about the desire to ennoble defeat. This tendency was something that did not escape Albion Tourgee, a "carpetbagger" judge who had gone to North Carolina in an attempt to help remake its society. As he noted with chagrin that many Southerners were then in the process of successfully rewriting the history of the recent Civil War, he wrote:
Pathos lies at the bottom of all enduring fiction. Agony is the key to immortality. The ills of fate, irreparable misfortune, untoward, but unavoidable destiny: these are the things that make for enduring fame.
Indeed these themes are all but irrepressible. One sees them in the story of the Field of Blackbirds at Kosovo Polje, the Dolchstosslegende of interwar Germany and the battle cry of "remember the Alamo." The is a profound and deeply human desire to see a defeat as a noble sacrifice or to explain it away as the result of some nefarious treachery. Stories that accomplish this survive and endure. What’s more, they affect the political landscape years, or even generations after the events in question have taken place. After China’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the British in the First Opium War, patriotic Chinese penned lurid tales of Chinese valor and British poltroonery. They wrote of the lopsided victory of the great Chinese militias being undermined by corrupt Qing officials who bargained the people’s military victory away for a share in the spoils they surrendered to the British scoundrels. When this East Asian Dolchstosslegende made its way to Japan, it convinced hundreds of young men that Western arms were no match for Eastern spirit and they demanded an uncompromising stand against foreign demands. Many of the most radical of these men went on to conspire against the shogunate and eventually overthrow a dynasty that had lasted for two and a half centuries. Southern tales of bloodthirsty and lascivious black Union troops during the Reconstruction era became an impetus for the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century. The unparalleled tragedy that stemmed, in part, from the interwar German Dolchstosslegende, is, of course, familiar to everyone.
Make no mistake about it. Losers write history and the histories they write profoundly influence the perception of events for ages. This is not to say that victors do not write history, for they certainly do and they often distort the record every bit as much as those they bested. That allowed, the idea that history is somehow nothing more than an ex post facto justification of the actions taken by winners is utterly untenable. It is a notion as pernicious as it is absurd. The enduring popularity and influence of Lost Cause narrative in our public discourse should be evidence enough of that. History is not written by the victors. History is won by the writers, and woe betide the complacent conqueror that forgets that.