Do Facts Speak for Themselves?

Youth in America, like most in modern western societies, intuitively absorb a historical consciousness as well as a his­torical methodology. Unfortunately, when we teach history, we seem deter­mined to destroy this historical under­standing.

For example, ask any ten-year-old baseball fan, returning from Wrigley Field where the Cubs defeated the Mets 5–1, who won and why. The child will give a history of that game. The ten-year-old will tell you that the Cubs’ pitcher’s fastball was consistently low and crowded the hitters. His change-up completely fooled the Mets’ power hit­ters. The fan will tell you about a crucial error in the fifth inning and a rally ending double play in the eighth inning. His or her history will not contain extraneous or irrelevant information. The fan will know that the delicious hot dogs consumed, the souvenirs pur­chased, and the fist-fight in the stands, although interesting, did not bear upon the outcome of the game.

Compare this performance with what we get in the classroom. If we ask stu­dents in a history course to tell us who won the Civil War and why, we will usually get a hodge-podge of informa­tion, much of it extraneous, justified by explanations such as “it was in the text­book” or “you said it in class.”

The ten-year-old baseball fan will have no trouble identifying a turning point in the game—in the sixth inning the Mets’ pitcher lost control and filled the bases with no one out and set the stage for a four-run Cubs’ rally—but the history student will regularly fail to see a turning point and will write an essay consisting of a disconnected list of events. The ten-year-old will have little trouble seeing cause and effect, but the history student will have a great deal of trouble.

True, the ten-year-old’s history might lack sophistication and depth, as com­ pared with a Tribune sports writer. Therefore, the ten-year-old’s history may not be good history. But somehow when we teach history, providing stu­dents with information and explana­tions that should guide them to write better and more sophisticated history, we often succeed in only temporarily filling their heads with bits of informa­tion while destroying the historical and methodological understanding they had originally. The result is that the history student fails to see what is relevant and why. Furthermore, if the ten-year-old baseball fan processed information from the game in the way our students deal with information from textbooks and lectures, his or her history of the game would include the hot dogs, the souvenirs, and the fist-fight.

The reason why students lose their historical understanding is that we do not teach our students how a historian works. We tell them, or provide them with books that tell them, what hap­pened and why. But all of this comes in the form of data or “facts.” In grade school we teach fewer facts; in high school, more; and in college, still more. Books get fatter, the print gets smaller, and the amount of information in­ creases. Even when students are shown that historians disagree, the information usually comes in the form of data: Charles Beard said this about the found­ing fathers; Daniel Boorstin said that about them.

Is it any wonder that when we give an essay exam or assign a term paper we often get essays filled with information (facts), relevant or otherwise. Students cannot explain why they’ve included something and excluded something else. Even on the most advanced levels, when students write graduate research papers and PhD dissertations, the same problems often persist.

If we do not teach how the historian works, we assume that the books we assign and the lectures we give amply show by example how the historian works. Even courses in historical meth­od usually concentrate on how to find data and take notes rather than on how to decide what data to use. We teach the need for objectivity usually by warning students against editorializing and im­posing an interpretation by selectively choosing facts to fit some preconcep­tion. We stress the need for data; the implication being that if you get the facts right, the results will be right. “Let the facts speak for themselves” appears to be the priority.

Even if we do not use this cliche, students get the impression from texts that the facts are doing the speaking with neither distinctions and connec­tions  nor  generalizations  and interpretations. The impressment of American sailors, the charges that the British were inciting uprisings by the Indians, the election to Congress of a group that John Randolph called “war hawks,” and President James Madison’s call for war against Britain for violating the neutral rights of the United States are facts presented to explain the causes of the War of 1812. The reasons why these particular facts are chosen to  explain the war above all the events that oc­curred between 1810 and 1812 are miss­ing.

Of course, some precocious students may sense that historians do not always agree. The students may remember their first introduction to the War of 1812, perhaps in elementary school, and recall learning that the United States declared war because of the British impressment of American sailors. Then in high school they learned about the Indian uprisings, the war hawks, and neutral rights. And in college they might also learn that not all sailors taken from American ships were  Americans, some were British deserters, and that the British refused to revoke the orders in council.

Usually, however, students do not view each new piece of information as sources of disagreement among histori­ans. Instead, they merely conclude that the issue is more complex than they first thought. Apparently, as they get older, students are expected to remember more facts, among which are more causes.

They are not, of course, altogether wrong in this conclusion. Explaining the War of 1812, like explaining any other historical event, is a more complex prob­lem than it appears when first intro­duced in grade school. But learning that the past is complex is only the first step in learning how the historian works. For many students, however, it is usually the last step. Consequently, they never learn how and why historians choose some facts and not others.

Facts presented in textbooks certainly seem relevant and important, and if at first glance they do not, the historians tell the reader why they are. The con­clusion to draw seems obvious enough. When historians have a problem to solve, they search the sources for rele­vant information and present it to their readers. The  relevant   information­ that is, the facts they discover-provide the answers. Bad historians, like C students, fail to get all the facts, o they get Some of them wrong; good h1stonans, like A students, get all the facts, and they get them right.

You see the results when you assign a term paper. The students find a num­ber of books and articles on the subject assigned, pick facts and conclusions from each, and present the results. A few students might notice that one au­thor insists that the most important cause of the War of 1812 was the im­pressment of American sailors; while another insists that the most important cause was the pressure exerted on Presi­dent Madison by the western war hawks. These contradictions may create some initial confusion; after all, how can sev­eral different causes be most important? But the contradictions are easily re­solved and confusion fades. Drop the “most” from “most important” and you get a list of important causes. The cliché remains unscathed. The facts speak for themselves and provide the answer to the problem of why the United States entered the War of 1812.

Some teachers demand more than a recitation of facts. Historians, they tell their  students,  do  not  always  agree. Good historians studying the same events often come to different conclu­sions, and the true or best conclusion is not necessarily merely a sum of all of them. Furthermore, the teachers may point out that historians do not always use the same facts even when they seem to be writing a history of the same subject and may even give a different interpretation when they do use the same facts. Consequently, the histori­ans, not the facts, are doing the speak­ing.

Students may acknowledge this point, but most remain unconvinced, for it seems to go counter to both common sense and their own experience. Surely if two historians come to different con­clusions, one must be wrong. Students know that in a chemistry class if they use the wrong formula, the answer will be wrong. Even in their history classes they have learned that they will be marked down if they forget a fact requested in an exam or if they list only three of the five causes of the War of 1812.

Even research in primary sources does not always help students to see the point. They dutifully go through the newspapers, government documents, diaries, and other sources, seek the relevant information, and then write up the results. Knowing what is relevant seems obvious enough; relevancy is deter­mined by the subject being investigated, not by any choice they, as historians, make. Thus, a student, after carefully going through the manuscripts of a Sen­ator, may explain that the student ex­cluded some information in his or her notes on the basis of the topic being investigated. The student was trying to find out why the Senator voted against the US joining the League of Nations. Obviously, therefore, information in the papers about the Senator’s argument with his son, his purchase of a new house, his attempts to get a new post office in his state, or his degree from Princeton, were irrelevant.

Other information, clearly relevant, required some assessment. Letters from leading bankers and manufacturers in his district expressing opposition to the League and letters from an organization called “Citizens for Peace and Democra­cy” favoring the League will probably both be mentioned in the finished pa­ per. But, inasmuch as the Senator final­ly voted against the League, the student will conclude that the Senator obviously gave greater weight to the bankers’ and manufacturers’ opinions in making his decision.

We stress the need for data; the implication being that if you get the facts right, the results will be right.

This experience will give the student no reason to question the cliche. The student carefully went through the doc­uments, found the relevant facts, and these facts, speaking for themselves, solved the problem. If the paper is well written, if the data presented are shown to be relevant, and if the argument unfolds in a logical and sensible way, most of us will give the paper a high grade.

Still, our student historian may re­ main unaware of his or her selective process. For example:

1. In framing the question a certain way, the student automatically excluded some facts as irrelevant. In this case, the student was clearly looking for political reasons for the Senator’s vote rather than psychological or personal reasons. Thus the Senator’s fight with his son and his degree from Prince­ ton (where he had disagreements with the then president of Prince­ton, Woodrow Wilson) are irrele­vant.
2. In giving more emphasis to the letters from bankers and manufacturers than those from the “Citizens for Peace and Democra­cy,” he was unconsciously making an important assumption about what motivates politicians that they pay more attention to the wealthy and influential than they do to ordinary folks, an assump­tion clearly supported by the fact that the Senator did vote against the League.
3. In deciding that the letters from the bankers and industrialists led the Senator to vote against the League, the student is assessing behavioral motives. The Senator, after all, could have had other reasons in deciding how to vote (his hatred of Wilson, for example). If the Senator had voted for the League, the student might have concluded that he showed courage in opposing the bankers or industrialists or that he was more interested in the opinions of the masses.

In short, our hypothetical student is mistaken in the belief that the facts speak for themselves. By the process of selection and evaluation, the student does the speaking. For example, how questions are framed, what assumptions are made from the selection of  facts, and what assessment is then made of motivations have a direct bearing on the final evaluation, but unless the student realizes this, he or she will not fully understand what he or she is doing and why. This lack of understanding weak­ens students’ ability to both write a good historical essay and evaluate the works of others, including professional histori­ans.

To assist in their understanding, in recent years I have worked out a successful exercise that provides for a con­crete, hands-on writing and evaluation of a historical essay which the students write and evaluate. Although the details of the exercise are my own, the idea is not. I got it from Jack Hexter, who told me he uses it in his course on Tudor and Stuart England.

After a general discussion dealing with the issues I have raised here, I distribute photocopies of three docu­ments I found in the course of my research in the Freedmen’s Bureau Pa­ pers at the National Archives. One is a letter from a Captain Charles Soule, dated Orangeburg, South Carolina, June 12, 1865, addressed to General O. Howard, head of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, an agency of the War Depart­ment in Washington, DC. Among other things, Soule tells Howard that he has prepared a speech that he gives to as­sembled freedmen (ex-slaves) in the area. The second document is a copy of that speech which Soule enclosed in his letter to Howard. The third document is Howard’s response, dated Washington, DC, June 21, 1865.

The students’ assignment is to write a brief historical essay on the Freedmen’s Bureau and conditions in the Orange­burg District of South Carolina in mid-1865. I ask the students to use only the documents I provided, assuming that this is all the documentary evidence available. I inform them that I have deliberately avoided providing either a title or an exact description of what should appear in their essays, but that I expect them, after reading the docu­ments, to determine theme and content and to give their essays titles that describe their themes. I remind them to be sure to support their arguments with concrete evidence from the documents.

To get them started I use the three original documents to teach them some­ thing about using internal evidence to gain information. For example, I show them that they can determine that Cap­tain Soule, although identified as being from the 55th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, is white while his troops are black. This information can be gathered from the documents themselves in the absence of any prior knowledge about general Union Army policies concern­ing the recruitment of blacks and the placing of white officers over black troops.

When I first tried this exercise, I was uncertain about what to expect  when the students returned after a week with their papers. The results, however, were exactly what I had hoped for. Now, having used it several times, I can pretty well predict what I will receive. The results serve better than all my explana­tions, admonitions, and cookbook anal­ogies.

First of all, I always get a wide variety of interpretations. Inasmuch as every student is given exactly the same docu­ments  and  therefore  exactly  the  same facts, everyone can readily see that the facts do not speak for themselves. My student historians produce different interpretations using the same facts. Clearly, they, and not the facts, do the speaking.

This established, I show by concrete examples from the student papers that although each paper is as long and sometimes longer than the documents, no one uses all the facts available in the documents and sometimes several peo­ple use the same facts but give them different significance and meaning. In other words, some facts are deemed relevant and are included while others are not; moreover, how the relevant facts are used differs from paper to paper. From this, I make the point that the facts did not speak for themselves.

This variation in the facts used and how they are used also allows me to demonstrate that the essays’ themes or interpretations determine the choice and ordering of the facts. Some essays consider the problem of race relations in the occupied South; others deal with the attitudes of blacks, or of southern whites, or of occupying soldiers; some discuss the problems of the adjustment from slave to free labor; others empha­size the problems being faced by an occupying army trying to pacify a newly conquered people. Students can easily see that different facts became relevant and assumed particular significance de­pending upon the argument made in the essay. They can also see that they differ in their interpretations not be­cause they got the facts wrong, but be­cause they asked and answered differ­ent questions. This insight is useful for understanding at least one reason why professional historians disagree.

I can then raise the more difficult and important questions with the students: How did they decide, after reading the documents, what interpretation to adopt? How convincing were the vari­ous interpretations, given the evidence available-did the facts chosen really justify the interpretation presented? A discussion of these questions shows that most facts they used depended for their significance on the interpretation the students gave them. Soule, for example, told Howard what he believed, what he saw and experienced, and how he inter­preted the attitudes of the blacks, the planters, and his troops. Every student agreed that Soule’s statements could not simply be taken as accurate reflections of reality; his views could be influenced by his hatred of the enemy, by his rac­ism, or by his attitudes about how a free labor system should work.

Our discussion of these and other interpretive matters clarifies even  further that the facts are not just lying there ready to be appropriated by historians and allowed to speak for them­ selves. Rather, the historians  choose some facts and give them meaning and significance by applying certain assump­tions based upon other knowledge. In this way, historians actually manufac­ture facts, those that might be valid but are not documented.

Recognizing the existence of these assumptions and then evaluating them, allows the students to test the validity of their interpretations as well as those of professional historians.

Several students have reminded me that I told them  to write their histories as if the only documents available were the three I gave them. They needed further information to make the evalua­tions I insisted were necessary. It is easy to show them that they in fact used other information not in the documents when they called Soule a racist or a ruling class apologist.

Since further information would be helpful, I provide them with a dozen additional documents including some testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, a letter from C. G. Memminger to President Andrew Johnson, and some additional reports from Freedmen’s Bureau officials and visitors to the South on fact-finding missions. I instruct the students to use this addi­tional material to rewrite their histories. The new information, the students quickly discover, does not solve their problems. Indeed, problems are com­pounded because the new documents contain not only new information but information that often is sharply contra­dictory. Consequently, the rewritten pa­pers are more varied in their use of available facts and in their interpreta­tions, which provides the opportunity for a richer discussion of the matters raised in the discussion of their first papers.

Of course, I would not claim that my little exercise makes historians out of my students and that in all their succeeding work they avoid the problems which plague student writing and thinking. But I do believe that it makes them more alert to the problems of historical writing and gives them new insights into how historians work and how to evalu­ate that work, including their own.