A feature of the evening was the rendition by the orchestra of “Ben Bolt,” out of compliment to the author, Dr. Thomas Dunn English, who was present. He is now about eighty years of age, and tears glistened in the old man’s eyes at this thoughtful tribute. The post-prandial exercises were opened by General O’Beirne who, after a stirring address on the objects of the society, read the annual address of the President-General, which was frequently applauded. He then successively introduced the speakers of the evening, who were Dr. Emmet, Dr. English, Mr. Gargan, Colonel Linehan, Captain Condon, Judge Lynn, and a number of others.
A great feature of this part of the program was an able paper by Mr. Joseph Smith, on “American History as it is Falsified.” He said:
Some Ways in which History is Falsified.
When the American-Irish Historical Society was organized a year ago in Boston, it declared its purpose to be the investigation into, and the recording of, the influence of the Irish element in the up-building of the American nation. We said then that the work and contributions of the Irish race on this soil had received scant recognition from the writers of American history; and we announced that whether that omission sprang from carelessness, ignorance, indifference, or design was not so important as the imperative necessity of remedying such a state of affairs in the interest of historical accuracy and racial fair play. For the past year our society has been in its formative stages; in the coming years I have ample faith that numbers, funds, earnestness, and enthusiasm will enable us to do our work effectively.
American history is being rewritten; the legendary and sentimental method of writing it is growing in disfavor; a scientific age demands the truth, and under its insistence new data are coming to light and old myths are passing away. It is beginning to dawn on American minds that this republic is the child of Europe and not of England; that old man of buckram—the Anglo-Saxon—is having a hard time with that new man of straw—the Scotch-Irishman; and when science gets the latter on the dissecting table there won’t be much left of him but rags and papier-maché.
To-night I will try to direct your attention to “Some Ways in which American History is Falsified”; and by falsification I do not mean so much the deliberate perversion of facts as I do the false effects produced by evasion, distortion, wrong point of view, and the physical and mental limitations and defects of writers, which in their results are quite as mischievous as those produced by perversion and design.
I will for my purposes group my object lessons under four heads, illustrating each with a writer passing current as an historian.
1. Mental Invalidism. The disease of certain literary doctrinaires whose natural defects have been aggravated by education and fixed by training. Prof. John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, is a fine type of this arrogant school of dogmatism.
2. Legend and Sentiment. The exploitation of legends, inherited ideas, race and family myths, made current and passing into literature by the efforts of those whose faith in folklore as historical data is profound, and to whom facts and documentary evidence are unimportant. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an amateur historian, is the high priest of this cult; he is the custodian and incense swinger of the deified Puritan, the marvel and fountain of the graces of the modern age.
3. Imagination. The school of writers who add to the gayety of nations, who make history from their own inner consciousness, and who record it as they imagine it ought to be, not as it is. Under this head comes that humorless horde of scribblers, the Scotch-Irish littérateurs, and the intellectual giant of Tennessee, Judge Temple, author of Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan.