AMERICAN TRADITIONS AND THE ICONOCLASTS.
Persons Who Hew Too Close to the Line of History Get Little Thanks for Their Pains.
Iconoclasts have been busy with American history for a good many years. They have cut the props from under more than one valued tradition. In the interest of literal fact they have destroyed much that is imaginatively valuable. Too often the one can be gained only by loss of the other, and it is not easy to decide which vantages most. At least there is some ground for nourishing tradition.
H. J. Haskell praised the “researchers” in a recent article in the Independent. The Chicago Inter-Ocean makes reply, saying:
Mr. Haskell cites as a correction of “important errors in the viewpoint” “the proof that the Revolution was not the result of conscious tyranny and oppression on the part of the British Government.”
Well, who now cares whether it was or was not? What difference does it make either way in the relations of the American and British peoples and their governments? Those relations are determined by present interests and future hopes.
We know our forefathers were right, and we do not care whether their opponents were right from their own viewpoint or not. Englishmen who count know that their forefathers blundered egregiously, and do not care whether they were conscientious or not in their folly.
It may be true—it probably is—that Weems fabricated outright the cherry-tree story about George Washington. But what difference does that make? The story simply imputed to Washington the boy the known character of Washington the man. It hurt no one, and it has inspired millions of American boys, by setting before them the example of a man whose greatness and goodness none could question, to be true rather than false, even when it was hard to tell the truth.
The “Rehabilitation” of Burr.
A great deal is said about the “rehabilitation” of Aaron Burr. But what is the effect of it all? To show that Burr was not technically a traitor? The courts said so long ago, and, despite personal opinions, the verdict was accepted as the law in practise. In trying doubly to prove Burr no traitor, the rehabilitators have proved him a blackmailing filibusterer—a man who lacked the courage to conquer a State, but sought to steal one—a man whose ambition and effort it was to play the part of
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole.
And put it in his pocket!
A great deal is also said of the evidence from his own diary of the “hollowness” and the “double dealing” of President Polk in his conduct toward Mexico. What is really proved by this evidence is that James K. Polk was not a cheap opportunist, waiting to be forced to act by situations created by others, but foresaw those situations and was ready to take advantage of them for the expansion of his country and the increase of its power.
To discover that James K. Polk was never taken by surprise, and that all his great political acts were purposed and planned for long in advance, does not degrade him, but exalts his character by proving its conscious strength. It lifts James K. Polk out of the Gladstone class and puts him at least on the borders of the Bismarck class of statesmanship.
Game Not Worth the Candle.
And of what earthly or heavenly importance is it to any human soul to know that the Pilgrims did not actually land in a body on Plymouth Rock on a certain day? Or that the old stone tower at Newport is not what Longfellow suggested, a relic of the Northmen, but merely Governor Arnold’s windmill?
Or that the Spanish settlers in America treated the Indians, on the whole, more humanely than did the English? Or that, if the Americans’ powder had not run out and they had been able to hold Bunker Hill, they would probably have been captured the next day?
With all their labor and kicking up of dust, and the personal notoriety they get by it, the “researchers” whom Mr. Haskell praises have not changed the main and abiding conceptions of our history at all. Their game seems hardly worth the candles consumed at it.
Truth is the first aim of the historian. History has been characterized as a pack of lies, generally agreed to by its makers.
“Anything but history,” said Horace Walpole, “for history must be false.”
The business of the scientific historian is to examine all witnesses, hear all the evidences, and get at the exact facts, even though they make ancient reputations tumble.
And yet we cannot but ask with Wordsworth:
Those old credulities, to nature dear,
Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of History?