Beyond Truman. Douglas A. Dixon
strands of postmodernism challenged the Indiana University historian’s approach to the past. Ironically, Ferrell’s experiences soldiering in the Second World War, application to Yale, or courtship of lifetime mates, explored in the following chapters, serve as exemplars of the potency of postmodernist claims. Serving in the Army Air Force in the unique way that Staff Sergeant Ferrell did provides alternatives to mainstream narratives of the war; finding his way into an Ivy League graduate history program defies one’s attempt at a unified, singular, coherent explanation; defining Ferrell’s persona leading to marriage points to multiple realities of truth. So, though Ferrell defended the empirical tradition against these challenges, some evidentiary trails of his life reinforce his opponents’ beliefs—illusive truthful essences of the past, multiple realities, male-dominated history, the merits of bottom-up history, and so on. Broadly speaking, postmodernism rattled Ferrell’s orientation toward historical topics, sources, perspectives, claims to a singular, truthful historical reality, and disciplinary boundaries; yet his lived experiences might be considered at odds with traditional historical and social values. These debates continue to be worthy of our attention.
The stories shared here also reveal something of the character, one might say bias, that inevitably lay behind the public face of historians like Ferrell. Truth seekers claim that the experiences, background, values, or demographic traits that historians bring to the task influence the topics explored, sources used, the topical framework or arguments proffered, in the end, the illusion some project of objectivity. Ferrell’s characteristics and background match those traits, in many ways, of President Harry Truman (as examined in chapter 4). Thus, it is not too difficult to imagine that this, in part, may explain why the president’s most prolific biographer was apologist for the struggles of, as well as advocate for ranking highly, the thirty-third chief executive. Readers can see how well the Indiana storyteller adhered to several conventional criteria of historical objectivity defined by the profession in other instances too.
One can find plenty of enjoyment solely in reading the intrigue that infused Ferrell’s world. Overall, this book illuminates in a personal way the ongoing struggles that producing history can present to the storyteller. The lessons of historian Ferrell continue to inform current practices, even today.
Truth does not always run down the middle.
—Robert H. Ferrell (Letter to Margery M. McKinney, July 23, 1973)
In the last half of the twentieth century and beyond, Indiana University’s Robert Ferrell was caught up in the battle raging among historians characterized as the “quasi-scholarship of revisionists.”1 Critics accused revisionists of impugning the intentions of the United States. Revisionists were tattooed “ideological,” and ironically, denied awards due to their political beliefs.2 Ferrell branded them the “Cannon to the Left,” and if not anti-capitalists then at least budding socialists.3 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. labeled them the self-appointed “moral censors of the history profession.”4 Protagonists of this “new school of revisionism,” as Ferrell described it, found their way into several discussions of the past such as events leading the United States into the Great War or those preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the origins of the Cold War and characterizations of presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.5 In a poignant example, the new collegial breed offered a radical storyline for Pearl Harbor that questioned President Roosevelt’s judgment if not intentions.6 Editors at The Historian and The Review of Politics and leaders of the American Historical Association aired the fight in journals and newsletters.
Not surprisingly, the rebel storytellers were questioning generally accepted understandings of the past at a time when United States was caught in the tumultuous era of civil rights protests, Vietnam, and President Nixon’s implosion. But fertile ground for the new revisionism had been laid in the postmodernist push in other professions such as art, literature, and sociology, well before the 1960s.7 While different in most respects, the chaos of postmodernism and revisionism in this context had some overlap. Revisionists, in the middle of Cold War angst, mixed Marxist ideology with history making according to Ferrell traditionalists; facts were chosen to lead to preordained conclusions (anti-capitalist/imperialism), and at times made up altogether.8 Cold War revisionists as they came to be categorized, viewed in the context of conventional standards of history practice and theory, were considered unprofessional scoundrels.
Although too multiheaded to address fully here, postmodernism as described by historian Callum Brown contrasted sharply with how traditionalists practiced and thought about history. The following explanation underscores a basis for the difference.
The event is something that happened in the past, the fact is a human construction (or representation or statement) of it. The event occurred; the fact is a record and expression of it. The event is neutral. But the fact is built upon documents or records of the event, making it laden with problems of accuracy, bias, editing, significance, and the sheer restrictions of human description. This is the shift from that which can be ascertained to have happened to that which is being packaged by an historian in statements.9
An example Brown described of postmodernists’ critique focused on the commonly understood narrative of the French Revolution, an interpretation of its beginning at the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The fact that the Bastille was overrun is placed with numerous other facts to create a narrative of significance, one celebrated today. Yet, the historian bunches the Bastille episode with an assortment of other events and facts out of an infinite possibility to create the narrative of the revolution’s starting point. As the storyteller characterizes the facts from the chaos of the past, orders and interprets them, neutrality is lost to imposition, so the theory goes. The grander the scale of interpretation, the further the facts from the events, the more problematic as the basis for objective claims to what happened. Different event selections result in different potential narrative statements and interpretations and approaches to truth.10 A recent discussion among French Revolution experts contrasts the Bastille beginning with a long-term view resting on the decline of the French nobility.11 There is much to postmodernism that is disputed by historians that stem from the evaluation of events, to selection of facts, to narrative interpretation, to whether in fact, one can recapture a/the past. Ferrell and colleagues rejected a specific group of Cold War revisionists based on more than interpretation. They argued that these revisionists also resorted to unethical historical practices to arrive at their interpretations. Aside from Cold War antagonists, Ferrell was experiencing postmodernist influences from scholars at Indiana in other disciplines too.12
Ferrell labeled one group of these followers “crackpot” sociologists.13 In college classes, history students, following the postmodernist philosophy, were dismissing facts and singularly true narratives as only one person’s reality; to some professors, so students shared, “nothing was certain or even true in this world.”14 Ferrell’s response to the new revisionists suggested he questioned stories of the past that did not have a unified coherence, a truthful essence, a right and wrong. Notre Dame colleague Stephen Kertesz, among others (Robert Maddox or Oscar Handlin), agreed with the thrust of Cold War antirevision criticism.15 Ferrell and Kertesz reasoned that these young college students and their green-eared professors had not experienced the world sufficiently to understand it, especially during the decades immediately following the Second World War, as they had.16
With the postmodernist controversy as canvas, there is some irony embedded in three episodes that characterize Ferrell himself, as reflected in the artifacts in his collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. These personal episodes are framed using