[This was the actual answer to my PhD qualifying exam question on United States History (Part II) that I took on 27 September 1991. This part of the examination was four hours to answer two out of four possible questions. No notes, books, or other materials were allowed but they did allow students to answer their questions on the computer, the first time they had done that in the History Dept. at the University of Florida. I remember writing the essay quite angrily. I felt like in the choice of questions I was being maneuvered to answer this one as if the qualifying exam committee wanted to see how I would answer it. Would I play it safe or go out on limb? I decided to hell with it and tackle the question head on. The exams are supposed to be anonymous with only your social security number to identify them but I knew the committee would know exactly who wrote this one. If they didn’t like it, well that was just too bad. As it turned out, the committee was quite pleased with my answer which made me quite happy.]
2. Peter Novick in That Noble Dream finds American historians naive about their craft in that they have seldom recognized the limitations that personality, culture, knowledge, and circumstances impose upon the aim of achieving “objectivity.” Choose a subject about which you know most and judge the leading scholars on that topic with regard to their “objectivity” or, if you prefer, explain what factors make that particular topic of history so difficult to be objective about. The more references you have to specific ideas and authors the better.
2. First, a little philosophical background. Relativism and objectivity, in the pure philosophical forms, may be mutually exclusive but in practice there is much overlap and can easily exist in the same mind. Although the argument goes back at least as far as Aristotle and shows no hope of solution, for me I both accepted and rejected relativism during my undergraduate years. Having often had a lot of time as a youth to wonder whether or not I was a figment of someone else’s imagination or a tick on a giant’s nose, relativism as a pure philosophical premise came easily to me. But after thinking long and hard on how to resolve this impossible dichotomy, and realizing relativism made it impossible to decide whether anything was better than anything else and totally stymied action, I decided to turn Descartes on his head and claim: “I think, therefore, I don’t give a damn!” I came to accept the mutual coexistence of a world in which I am totally insignificant and in which I am everything. There is no dichotomy. A personal knack and a desire for solving real world problems turned me to engineering where my talent flourished. But solving mundane little problems soon bored me so I turned to the greater world and eventually found myself in history. I brought with me my talent for solving problems and realized soon the great opportunity for such a talent in history.
Running smack up against the objectivity-relativism debate again forced me to pause but I quickly charged past this boring debate. To me pure relativism, the only philosophically acceptable form of relativism, cannot exist in real life. Historians like Jacques Derrida who pretend to follow such a course will quickly lose their audience. Only a politicized relativism like that preached by Michel Foucault and other post-modernists can draw an audience but the politicization ruins any claim for philosophical superiority. Turning to objectivity, I realized immediately the falsity of any claim to objective knowledge. There is no such thing. But, in pursuit of solving practical problems, I realized that the only way to move forward is to at least pretend to objective knowledge, to set ground rules for testing solutions to problems and the measure results against objectives. I thoroughly accept Thomas Kuhn’s description of “paradigms” as an explanation for how knowledge develops in practice. But I believe, like Marvin Harris, that the “scientific method” still provides the best method of obtaining social science knowledge. By “scientific method,” I mean the explicit formulation and testing of hypotheses developed from models drawn from a coherent corpus of theory for the purpose of improving models in the ultimate quest to improve theories of human society.
While most historians would abhor such a rigorous methodology in what has always been a thoroughly eclectic, sui generis discipline existing simultaneously as both art and science, I believe that it provides the only way to improve our understanding of the past. Every social historian would acknowledge that one of the goals of history is to selectively choose elements from the past record to communicate a heavily simplified account of our best understanding of the complexities of past society. The question becomes how do we test one account against another to find which best fits the past record. Relativists can only fall back on a multiplicity of stories, either with the attitude of “live and let live” with no objective criteria for judging which is best or more usually simply which criteria for judging which is best or more usually simply which account fits only a priori political persuasion. Traditional historians would fall back on the standard examination of footnotes, comparison with one’s own historical understanding of footnotes, comparison with one’s own historical understanding of the account, or the skill with which the artist paints his portrait. For me, neither traditional nor relativist approaches prove satisfactory. In my mind, the “scientific method” is by far the superior method. This requires forcing historians:
(1) to become more explicit in their theories (which historians always have but which usually remain implicitly buried)
(2) to bend over backwards to examine the subject from a different perspective (which historians either refuse to do or fail miserably at giving the other view a fair chance
(3) to gather as expertly as possible all available evidence that might touch on the subject (which selection often depends heavily on delimiting theory since it remains impossible to consider everything in face of diminishing returns
(4) to be willing to work with other historians in testing and discrediting one’s own theories
(5) to work within a coherent corpus of theory rather than constantly seeking to establish one’s own paradigm shift (the testing and retesting of theories at the core of the scientific method).
After this lengthy digression, I will examine the historiography of the Populism on the criteria of objectivity that I have identified. This is a narrow, well-defined body of literature which to my mind has reached a strong “moderate” neo-Hicksian consensus following the work of Walter Nugent, Stanley Parsons, Robert Larson, James Turner, Peter Argersinger, James Wright, and “new economic historians” Robert Higgs, James Stock, and Robert McGuire. However, the general consensus among graduate students and the greater historical profession seem stuck on New Left interpretation following most prominently Lawrence Goodwyn and of late Steven Hahn, along with support from Norman Pollack, David Montgomery, and Bruce Palmer. After reading Goodwyn’s book I realized why. Goodwyn’s sweeping prose had me believing that these Populists with their cooperatives and subtreasury plan might possibly win. I was pulling for the good guys, the underdogs. Only after setting the book down did I begin to ask myself: Yes, but is this the way it really happened? I had my doubts but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Either the whole book was terribly flawed or Goodwyn was correct, because he certainly was convincing. However, after reading Stanley Parsons et al. devastating critique in the 1983 Journal of American History, I realized that Goodwyn was a fake.
Parsons convincingly shows that there was no cooperative to movement culture to political action sequence, that the cooperatives were few and far between and hardly supported by the leaders, and that any “political culture” that the Populists had was one generally shared by everyone in one of the most highly democratic eras in American politics. The Populists were not the last stand against a Capitalism which had always oppressed them, but simply marginal, culturally isolated farmers hard-pressed by a immediate economic difficulties and unresponsive political parties who turned to alternative political means to get results.
Much of the difficulty in understanding the late 19th century has been a persistent failures of historians to consider the findings of the “new economic historians.” Among their important “findings,” the “new economic historians” have discovered that the late 19th century was an era of persistant deflation which generated a shift of economic power from capital to labor as real wages rose. Yet the traditional historians’ picture of the Gilded Age and Robber Barons continues to live on simply because it is a better story. (Recently, one “traditional” historian, James Livingston, has accepted this interpretation but butchered any comprehension of changes after 1896 by turning to discourse analysis of corporate leaders and contemporary economists rather than continuing to work within a solid socioeconomic framework.) Farmers in the late 19th century faced, not declining, but increasing real prices for farm goods and, not increasing, but declining railroad transport charges. Not the poorest farmers, but farmers with some property often purchased on credit in prosperous times as means of expansion, joined the farmers’ alliances which eventually merged into the Populist movement. They were not worried about fleeing from or obstructing the advance of Capitalism, but simply preserving their farm from cyclical downturns in a very volatile economy and potential mortgage foreclosure.
So why do Goodwyn and Hahn continue to dominate the interpretation of Populism. Simply because historians prefer their story to that of Parsons et al. Perhaps because Goodwyn and Hahn fit the class-cum-ideological mode that seems to represent the best solution to achieving a politically correct synthesis. Perhaps because their stories are simply better written; indeed, Goodwyn and Hahn rest their case in books the dominant form of historical expression whereas the others rest in articles, and everyone knows anything worth saying in history eventually makes its way into books. Perhaps because historians are afraid of “new economic historians” and prefer to simply reject their findings out of hand or ignore them rather than acknowledge that their findings might actually contribute to the historical discipline. Perhaps simply an American preference for clearly delineated underdogs.
But, by my rules, Stanley Parsons and the “new economic historians” have moved our historical understanding of Populism forward towards a more “objective” understanding within the context of the “scientific method,” by explicitly testing and rejecting hypotheses of Goodwyn and Hahn. I would not say that theirs is the only understanding and that a better may not come about, perhaps even taking off from Goodwyn and Hahn. There may not be an “objective” description of Populism (for what is Populism but an historical construct), but we can I believe move “toward” an objective understanding through the “scientific method.”
As I professional historian, I may not be able to say “I think, therefore, I don’t give a damn” and I certainly understand that my wishing to be rid of this dead horse will not make it go away, but I believe that the relativism-objectivism debate is thoroughly self-defeating. While the debate undoubtedly will continue to divide history and other social sciences into the 21st century, I believe a “paradigmatic” strategy far more fruitful than continuing to harangue back and forth at each other with each discipline. Simply let each pursue their own approsch in conjunction with similar believers in other disciplines, strengthening interdisciplinary ties, and let the best approach win by whatever criteria can be decided upon. That way “scientific” historians can work closely with “new economic historians” as well as behavioral geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists to develop a more sophisticated social science history.