Historians' Triumphs

by Stephen Cox

Many people think of history as something that exists wholly apart from the human mind — a collection of facts that stand on their own and vouch for their own significance. Of course that's not the way things are. Some of the most important and interesting historical facts make no impression at all until someone wakes us up to what they really mean. Probably everyone obscurely realizes that the United States, unlike other fertile parts of the globe, has never suffered a famine. But so what? We may know that fact of history, but do we feel its significance? Do we recognize its dramatic confirmation of the value of this country's social and economic system?

Doubtful. Yet a good historian could make us see and feel such things. A good historian can open our eyes both to the big facts and to the purportedly small ones.

It follows that a good work of history pleases not just by its revelation of the facts but by its revelation of the mind that is shaping those facts for our understanding and enjoyment. A limp work of history can be harder to endure than any of the events it describes; a brilliant work of history can be much more exciting. One turns the pages hastily, eager to discover what happened to Washington or Lenin or the first person who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and just as eager to find out what the historian is going to do next.

But how does one locate such exciting works of history? If they weren't written by someone who is alive and well and being interviewed on TV, almost no one but narrow specialists ever hears of them. And narrow specialists are usually too narrow to do anything so obvious as consider the literary quality of the works they study.

They may be too narrow even to read the classic works in their disciplines. I have met many specialists (note that I do not say "experts") in English literary history who have never opened C.S. Lewis' classic, and vastly entertaining, "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century." A couple of weeks ago I picked up a recent book about the history of Cuzco, the Inca capital. It was a collection of essays by several people, each of whom offered many references to other studies. None of them brought up B.C. Brundage's monumental "Empire of the Inca," the great work of literature on the subject. Presumably, this was because of the book's extreme old age — 42 years! — although in certain circles, high literary merit is considered a positive detriment to "scientific" history.

In any event, it's up to nonspecialists to keep their own lists of great achievements in historical literature, and pass the lists around. The present review is one of those lists. It's concerned with six works of New World history that deserve to be read — especially because each of them shows what a good author can do with an unpromising subject.

Even William Cronon's subject, the creation of a great modern city, is unpromising in several respects. Histories of places are almost always long on conscientious detail and short on epic sweep. And Chicago isn't exactly a name that sets the heart a-singing. Rightly or wrongly, the allure of America's Second City, the Capital of the Heartland, the City with Big Shoulders, Hog Butcher to the World, etc., etc., is pretty much confined to the city limits of Chicago. I was born 50 miles away, into a family that had lived in the Midwest for 150 years, to a mother who once lived in Chicago itself, and I remember the word "Chicago" being mentioned in our home about as often as the word "malaria." As a young man, I made the Michiganian's rare visit to Chicago and was thrilled by the sight of the Loop rising superbly beside the waters of the lake, the most magnificent architectural ensemble in the world. Yet the idea that there was anything intellectually interesting in the history of Chicago itself was completely foreign to me, until I read Cronon's book.

Cronon isn't a great writer; he's a serviceable writer with a great conception: the uniqueness of Chicago as a city that was born exactly where a city should be born, at a natural crossroads for capitalist commerce and industry. On the west was an enormous, fertile, empty plain; on the east, the open highway of Lake Michigan, promising ready access to the mines and virgin forests of the upper midwest. Chicago was also born at exactly the right time, a time when the newly exploited power of steam was making revolutions in almost every type of human endeavor. Chicago was the place where trains and steamboats brought the products of the fields and pastures, to be graded and traded and transformed by industrial processes into salable commodities that could then be hurried back across America to the consumers hungrily awaiting them.

It wasn't "nature" that created Chicago; it was the inventive genius of the industrial age. Everyone knows Chicago's importance in the development of the skyscraper. Cronon shows its importance in the development of grain elevators, futures markets, balloon frame houses, catalog marketing, meat packing, and a hundred other inventions that modern America was soon able to take for granted and regard as if they had no history.

The story of these events is uniformly exciting, despite the fact that "Nature's Metropolis," unlike the other books I'm discussing, is more about economic processes than it is about the individual people who devised and used them. The futures market, for instance, grew out of a generation of commercial experience and a common desire for orderly means of making a profit. Particular individuals contributed only incrementally to the process. But Cronon's vivid picture of human action — which contains many illustrations from individual lives — lets readers imagine their way into 19th-century America, feeling the surprise and speed of its economic development as they would have been felt by the participants themselves.

Cronon's charts and maps help, too. On page 77 there is a pair of them, one showing how far you could travel from New York City in a day, two days, a week, and so forth, in 1830; the other showing how far you could travel in the same amounts of time in 1857. The first map has you reaching Ann Arbor in two weeks, traveling, presumably, by boat along the Hudson-Erie Canal-Lake Erie route, then by stagecoach the last 50 miles. Another week would take you to Chicago. The second map shows the lightning progress you'd be able to make just 27 years later. Now a train takes you to Chicago or Springfield in two days or less. This isn't just "material progress": it's a new vision of human capability. Everyone knows that advances like this were made during the industrial (or, more fundamentally, the capitalist) revolution; Cronon's book makes you feel just how revolutionary 19th-century capitalism was.

There is only one thing wrong with this book: despite Cronon's vast knowledge of economic processes, he seems to have practically no understanding of economic theory. In one of the most confused passages of economic discussion that I have ever encountered, he declines to repudiate Marx's long-exploded labor theory of value (perhaps because, as seems probable, he doesn't understand it), while admitting that "it cannot by itself explain the astonishing accumulation of capital that accompanied Chicago's growth."

What explains that phenomenon, of course, is people's willingness to invest in enterprises that they thought would make them money. But Cronon believes that nature somehow did the trick. It was "the light of the nearest star" that put energy and therefore value into the fields and forests, then into the pockets of the people who exploited them. An absurd picture emerges of trees and weeds rejoicing in economic "value," despite the fact that nobody ever used or, perhaps, even encountered them. It doesn't occur to Cronon that certain things simply had no economic value before capitalists found a way of making them available to people who might want to buy them.

Almost as absurd is Cronon's revival of Frederick Jackson Turner's idea that western land was in some sense "free" to its settlers. If it was, why didn't everybody east of Pittsburgh show up right away to cash in on this strangely valuable "free" commodity? True, you could buy an acre of land from the government by paying the modern equivalent of $50 or so, but to make your investment worthwhile you'd have to pay a great deal more in terms of time, effort, and money to get to your property, clear it, develop it, and market its products. That's why so many western farmers were so deep in debt. This part of Cronon's book (149–50) is so embarrassing as to be unworthy of comment, except to emphasize the fact that the rest is fascinating enough to make one forget his feckless economic speculations. Their goofiness actually contributes its mite to the book's human interest.

If Cronon faced a difficult literary task — arousing interest in the history of Chicago — then B.C. Brundage faced a seemingly impossible one. The affairs of the Inca empire are wholly irrelevant to modern American life. The student of Roman history can rely on the assumption (false or true) that Rome's various wars and revolutions made a deep and enduring impact on Western thinking; the chronicler of Tahuantinsuyo (The Four Quarters, the Inca empire) has no such assurance. Even Brundage pronounces it an "error" to regard the Incas as "precursors or practitioners of the politics of today." Their empire was "unique and sui generis" (xiii).

In addition, the history of the Andean peoples, who possessed nothing that we would call a written literature, isn't the easiest thing to reconstruct from available records. Yet Brundage, the master both of the historical and of the anthropological sources, knew how to assess their omissions and divergences, and he knew, better than almost any other serious historian I can think of, how to integrate his findings into a compelling historical narrative.

His inspiration, at least in matters of approach and style, appears to have been Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," with an important qualification. Gibbon's style is almost always loftier than his subjects; it is continuously arch and ironic, even when Gibbon has no particular reason for irony. Brundage hasn't gone that far. His characters are often as deserving of ironical treatment as Gibbon's, but he is willing to treat them with respect and, in a way, to take them at the value they gave themselves.

Unlike most experts on Amerindian civilizations, he views his subjects neither as exhibits in an anthropology museum nor as quaint instances of primitive life nor as implied protests against Western civilization. He gives them the dignity of their original status, using the same words for them that he would for Europeans of similar position and character. Like Europeans, they have an "emperor," "an imperial mystique," a "nobility," a "theology," a "hymnology," "centers of intrigue and immorality," "factions," political "parties," and so on. He writes "Tahuantinsuyo" as easily as if he were writing "France." And wherever he has the data to do so, he evokes the personalities of the people in his story, treating their individual ideas and motives as things that matter, not as mere static on the screen of historical theory. He describes their "counsels" and "stratagems" and "policies" in the same way in which one would describe the political affairs of Hadrian or Bismarck.

This interest in individuality is conspicuous in his account of the fascinating last half-century of Tahuantinsuyo, a history first dominated by powerful and creative rulers, then debased by a savage conflict between Atahualpa, the last true Inca ruler, and his crazed half-brother Huascar. It was during those latter days, when the empire was wholly absorbed in its internal affairs, that the Spanish crept over the horizon, first as rumors, then as facts, at last as conquerors. It is as if Lincoln had finally gotten the drop on Lee and Davis, only to be captured, the next day, by invaders from Mars.

Brundage relishes the ironies of history; he also relishes its grim poetry. Describing the plague that preceded the conquerors' appearance in the Andes, he says: "A fulminating disease introduced by the Spaniards had been gestating along the reefs and rotting beaches of the Caribbean; perhaps it was that illness, similar to both typhus and bubonic plague, which had been brought into Darien during August, 1514, by the armada of Pedrarias. It had flared and smoldered its way over the Isthmus and down along the mangrove coast of Colombia, bartered unwittingly by native traders. It flashed inward wherever there was a road, a trail, or any passage through the thicket. No skirmishers could have been more cunningly insinuated — like hooded heralds they flew silent and unseen ahead of the bearded men, their captains, and few were their poisoned darts that missed the mark" (261).

Brundage has no illusions about the moral qualities of the people whose adventures he narrates. Describing the conquistadores' entrance into the city of Cajamarca, where they captured Atahualpa and killed 2,000 of his followers "like ants," he gives his assessment of the conquest in a single sentence: "The years of Peruvian history have echoed to the sullen sound of that entry, which has cast a spell of gloom, of blood, of deceit, and of extortion over every passage of Peruvian life since" (301). Yet the Incas, with their hideous cults of human sacrifice and their unrestrained delight in war and torture, are hardly models of ethical behavior, and Brundage never tries to present them as such.

In this case, as in that of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, one has the strong impression that the Europeans and the Americans richly deserved each other. The impression is confirmed by Hugh Thomas' magisterial account of the Mexican affair. Like Cronon, Thomas is not a great stylist. He is a writer of clear and persuasive prose, with a fine intuition for the scene or speech that will illuminate his story. His special virtues are vast research, a deep interest in showing the conquest from both the Spanish and the Aztec point of view, and a splendid fairness and sensitivity to facts.

As with "Empire of the Inca," there is no hint in Thomas' book of a desire to make the facts fit a preconceived hypothesis. It's easy to come up with an explanation of how the Spanish were able to conquer the Aztecs, a warlike people, vastly more numerous than the Spanish, and residing in their own country. The obvious explanation is technological: the Aztecs, who lacked even such things as draft animals and wheels (except on toys), could never have stood up against Western weapons and Western wealth. If anything was inevitable in human history, it was the Aztecs' elimination by some European power. But Thomas' story of how it actually happened complicates the picture considerably.

Even if one retains the "technology" explanation (which I think is basically correct), one cannot point to one particular technology as crucial. Surely it wasn't firearms. Thomas shows that guns were much less effective than crossbows as tools of conquest. Even more effective was the Spaniards' ability to construct ships on the lake that surrounded the Aztec capital, besiege it, and gradually reduce it. "Who could conquer Tenochtitlan?" asks an Aztec poem. "Who could shake the foundation of heaven?" (5). Well, boat-builders could.

Yet without the aid of the Aztecs' neighbors, who took the arrival of Cortés as an invitation to throw off the hateful domination of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish couldn't have built or launched their boats, or done much of anything else, either. And without the dogged courage and brutal self-assertion of a certain type of Spaniard, no allies would have been mustered, and nothing resembling a conquest would have taken place. Any technological explanation must be supplemented by a political explanation, and any political explanation must be supplemented by a cultural and psychological explanation. As Thomas says, "One does not have to be a believer in any special theory that great men dominate history to see at once that Cortés' combination of intelligence and prudence, bravery and originality [was] decisive in the extraordinary events in Mexico between 1519 and 1521" (602).

Thomas dispenses with theories about the conquest and presents the facts, in all their amazing variety, vitality, and strangeness. These are not just the big facts about the Aztecs' peculiar religious and political customs. They are also the small facts that give history its fascinating, serrated edge. Did you know that the Mexican emperor's descendants, far from being destroyed, became "counts of Moctezuma" and "survived many generations" after the conquest (594)? I didn't know that. And who could have guessed it? Who could imagine or predict the things that actually happen in this astonishing world?

Alas, most of the astonishing events that Thomas relates are far from charming. No one who reads his descriptions of Aztec rituals will ever fall for the idea that the culture of these "Native Americans" has been misrepresented as cruel and bloodthirsty in order to legitimize the cruelties of the "Christian" invaders. I cannot bring myself to recite the details; I wish, indeed, that I had never read them. Acquiring such memories is the one really bad thing about reading Thomas' book. One might think that its length — 832 pages, including notes — would pose another problem. It doesn't, and neither does the fact that this is the kind of book in which names like Cuauhtémoc, Coanacochtzin, and Tetlepanquet-zatzin are apt to turn up in the same sentence (485). As remote and difficult as everything about the characters may be, their story never loses its attraction.

Not so unlikable, but not so grand a subject, either, is William Walker, a young American journalist who during the 1850s mounted filibustering expeditions — private attempts to take over foreign countries — in Baja California and Central America. ("Filibuster" comes from a Spanish term for "freebooter.") One of these forays, the expedition of 1855–1857 that made him president of Nicaragua, was the most important filibustering adventure in American history. Still, that doesn't put the topic very far up on the scale of intellectual urgency. And Walker's reputation, among the few people who have heard of him, is simply that of a horrid purveyor of Yankee imperialism.

That, perhaps, is what he was. But to see him chiefly as an agent of "imperialist ideology" misses his personal motivation, which seems to have been a childish but besetting desire to make himself the president of something. The Yankee-imperialism approach also misses the fact that he gained considerable support among Central Americans trying to extricate themselves from the swamp of the region's cruel and ridiculous politics. In the republics of the isthmus, anyone who came from abroad and looked as if he might actually change something exerted an instant and not wholly irrational appeal.

William Scroggs, a professor at the Louisiana State University, was the Audubon of this political landscape. He identified its rare birds and startling flowers, and he showed how little you know the country until you know the swamp. His "Filibusters and Financiers" is the type of book that all professors should aspire to write, but virtually none have the wit to try — a learned, judicious, and irresistibly amusing account of an episode that expands one's knowledge of human life.

Gracefully, without apparent effort, Scroggs turns the story of Walker's expedition into a window on the world as it was, and perhaps still is, in places now gently described as "underdeveloped nations." In 1855, the population of Nicaragua was barely 200,000. Its sole visible asset was an American company that shuttled travelers from the Atlantic (or New Orleans) side of the country to the Pacific (or San Francisco) side. The nation's demoralized citizens were the sport of "violent factionalism which was based on no real principles" (82). Travelers on the transit company's riverboats and macadam road beheld "disorder and desolation . . . deserted fields, abandoned houses, and churches whose walls were marred by shell and bullet as a result of their use as fortresses" (83).

Into this bedraggled outpost of progress waltzed the dynamic Mr. Walker and his gullible comrades, the "Fifty-Six Immortals." (Scroggs, in the kind of footnote that warms the reader's heart, observes that "the number actually carried [to Nicaragua] was fifty-eight, though the newspaper accounts at the time gave it as fifty-six. For some reason, which it is useless to try to explain, the number reported by the papers became commonly accepted even by the men themselves, who gloried afterward as belonging to the 'Fifty-six Immortals'" [92].) By playing off one local faction against another and exercising superior military and organizational skills, Walker managed to establish himself as the dictator of Nicaragua. So tenacious was his grip on power that he could be pried loose only by the united forces of the other Central American republics and Cornelius Vanderbilt, owner of the transit company and the principal "financier" to which Scroggs' title alludes. Vanderbilt was angry because Walker had expropriated his property, and he had the means to satiate his wrath.

The picture Scroggs paints of Walker is that of a soulless man, ambitious only for power and prepared to take all practical means of seizing and holding it, a man who was relentlessly clubbed into the ground by the same intractable circumstances that had opened Central America to his ambitions in the first place. The region was capable of supporting many warring factions but incapable of supporting a government that any sane person would regard as legitimate.

Walker's position was rendered still less secure by foreign rivalries. The ownership of the transit company was booted back and forth between Vanderbilt and a couple of his former colleagues, and Walker himself became a political football in the contest between politicians in the American South, who hoped to expand the empire of slavery, and politicians in the American North, who wanted to keep it from expanding. I haven't even mentioned Great Britain's intrigues.

"Whenever he gained a new friend," Scroggs says of Walker, "he usually also made a new enemy. . . . He could favour neither political faction in Nicaragua without displeasing the other. What made his cause popular to Americans as a whole was to make him an object of suspicion to the British. He succeeded in gaining support in the Southern States only at the expense of antagonizing his friends in the North. By winning the support of one group of American capitalists he incurred the wrath of a powerful captain of industry, who resolved that he must be destroyed. These were matters beyond the filibuster leader's control. For lack of any better explanation, we may as well attribute them to the decrees of fate" (123–24).

Scroggs has a droll style, and he appreciates a droll style in others, such as Vanderbilt: "'I won't sue you,' he is quoted as saying to his rivals, 'for the law is too slow. I will ruin you'" (135). When it comes to character and morals, however, he disapproves of nearly everyone in his story — Walker, who was "mastered by, rather than master of, his dreams" (397), his "misfit" followers (40), his European and Central American foes, who "vented their rage on . . . helpless noncombatants" and committed "treachery of the basest sort" (253, 392), and the civilian population of Nicaragua, which was, "as a whole . . . proud, ignorant, and intolerant" (82). (Scroggs has no notion of political correctness.) Yet he sees, in his Olympian detachment, how funny it all is. It "needs," he says, "the pen of a Cervantes to do it full justice" (40). In the absence of Cervantes, Scroggs himself will do very nicely.

The literary problem for Francis Parkman, the great 19th-century historian, was many times what it was for Scroggs. Parkman, who had written the story of the Oregon Trail, faced a much larger task in the story of the contest between France and England for the empire of North America. When his work, the labor of a lifetime, was completed in 1892, it occupied seven volumes, published over a period of 27 years. The current Library of America edition occupies only two, but it's still over 3,000 pages long — and there aren't any useless sections. It takes that long to tell a story that extends across two centuries and ranges across the map of North America from Green Bay and the Straits of Mackinac to the suburbs of New York and the bayous of Louisiana.

This is the North America whose wealth was the beaver and the fox, the America of the coureur de bois and the missionary priest, the America of primitive blood-letting and of starlight on the inland sea. It is also the America of fractious New England legislators and godlike French proconsuls, of Indian cultures both savage and civilized, of bottomless cruelty and limitless spiritual striving, and above all of European wars — the first world wars, played out amid the colossal scenery of America. To tell this story, Parkman had to explain what it was like to sit at Versailles and plan an empire; he also had to show what it was like to sneak through the frozen woods of northern New York, trying to survive till your Indian allies could slit some English farmer's throat.

Parkman presents this tale of America both exhaustively and perspicuously. His resources are an encyclopedic knowledge of history, a novelist's understanding of character, an adventurer's feel for exotic landscapes, and a philosopher's understanding of the reasons why some civilizations succeed and other civilizations fail. He demonstrates the futility of the plausible French idea that all the important things in life must be planned and ordered by the state, and he explains the astounding success of Britain's failure to organize its colonies on a "logical" basis.

While France was doing everything it could to keep any unlicensed person, settlement, transaction, or idea from appearing on its American frontiers, Britain was treating its own settlements with salutary neglect, broken only by some blundering and spasmodic attempts to get them to contribute to their own defense. The British government's laxity and the French government's assiduous care of its possessions — its "unmitigated paternalism" (2,416) — resulted in the British dominions' becoming ten times wealthier and more populous than the French. British North America was a military asset; French North America was a sitting duck, waiting for the British to capture it.

The capture came in 1759, with the conquest of Quebec by British and North American forces. The last campaign wasn't easy, but its success had been prepared by generations of systematic mistakes on the part of France. The classic discussion is Parkman's chapter on France's colony in Louisiana, which was in desperate need of settlers, but in still more desperate need of common sense.

To this place where everything was always going wrong, France sent "about eight million livres . . . without any return." But even the simplest initiatives failed to work: "The settlers, always looking to France to supply their needs and protect them against their own improvidence, were in the habit of butchering for food the live-stock sent them for propagation." The king replied with an edict forbidding anyone to kill any livestock "without permission of the authorities . . . on pain of death" (2,548). One can imagine how effective that edict was.

To one Antoine Crozat the king granted a monopoly on enterprise in Louisiana, with predictable effects: "As the inhabitants were expected to work for Crozat, and not for themselves, it naturally followed that they would not work at all; and idleness produced the usual results" (2,544). In communist Poland, they used to say, "The state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work." The only difference seems to be that in Louisiana no one even pretended. Crozat's resignation produced no change for the miserable inhabitants; it was the statist system that was at fault: "Louisiana was a prison. But while no inhabitant could leave it without permission of the authorities [a common situation in non-English colonies, whether French or Spanish], all Jews were expelled, and all Protestants excluded. The colonists could buy nothing except from the agents of the [government monopoly], and sell nothing except to the same all-powerful masters" (2,546).

Far from being a strong regime, however, this was an extraordinarily weak one: "Authority and order were the watchwords, and disorder was the rule. The agents of power quarrelled among themselves, except when they leagued together to deceive their transatlantic masters and cover their own misdeeds" (2,548). Much the same might be said about all the French dominions in North America. The seat of the folly was the central government. Though desperate to populate Louisiana with hard-working Frenchmen, the king refused a petition of four hundred Protestants who had emigrated to the Carolinas but were anxious to remove to a French colony: "The King replied, through the minister, Pontchartrain, that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America. Thus, by the bigotry that had been the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV. threw away the opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of the Mississippi" (2,537). As in many modern regimes, it was the victory of ideology over every other consideration.

When you reach the final page of Parkman's marvelous book, setting it aside with reluctance and wishing that its 3,000 pages could have been still more, you might take a look at Willa Cather's little novel, "The Professor's House" (1925), which is about the sense of desolation that comes to an historian who has written a great work like Parkman's, once his life's work is completed. Or — seeking the comic rather than the tragic effect — you might look at David Hackett Fischer's richly amusing analysis of the ways in which other historians, especially historians of America, have failed to complete their work, at least in any intellectual sense of the word "complete."

Fischer is himself a prominent historian, the author of powerful books on early American history: "Albion's Seed," "Washington's Crossing," and the eloquent and affecting "Paul Revere's Ride." But when he wrote "Historians' Fallacies" he was not yet an august figure. The book is a remarkable performance for a young scholar. It exhibits an enormous range of historical knowledge and historiographical reference; it is virtually a guidebook to approaches that have been taken to the study of America's past. It also exhibits enormous courage. There is hardly a school of historical or social thought whose logic it does not satirize; there is hardly a prominent historian who is not made to look the fool.

Anyone interested in argument should read this book, if only to enjoy its encyclopedic lists of logical fallacies: "fallacies of question-framing," "fallacies of generalization," "fallacies of motivation," "fallacies of narration," "the fallacy of essences," "the fallacy of the lonely fact," "the fallacy of the insidious generalization" — anything your fallacious heart desires. At the moment, my favorite is "the fallacy of false dichotomous questions," which Fischer exemplifies with a review of book titles that will send a thrill of merriment down the spine of anyone who has even the slightest appreciation for history's complexity: "Napoleon III: Enlightened Statesman or Proto-Fascist?", "The Abolitionists: Reformers or Fanatics?", "Renaissance Man: Medieval or Modern?", "The Absolutism of Louis XIV — The End of Anarchy or the Beginning of Tyranny?", and finally (you probably knew this was coming) "What Is History — Fact or Fancy?"

There is also the pleasure of watching Fischer pounce on self-important people. He requires no more than a footnote to deal with the vagaries of Herbert Marcuse, whom some people still regard as a distinguished philosopher. Fischer is criticizing "materialist" thinkers for imagining that all ideas are historically "determined," except, of course, their own, when he remembers the existence of Marcuse and adds the following note: "The same mistake appears in Herbert Marcuse's 'Eros and Civilization' (Boston, 1955), which, with other work by the same author, seems to be an attempt to combine the metaphysical determinism of Hegel, the economic determinism of Marx, and the psychic determinism of Freud with a plea for human freedom!" (195). Off with his head! So much for Marcuse. His work "seems to be an attempt . . ."

A worthier victim is Jeremy Bentham, whose "Book of Fallacies" is an important precursor of Fischer's own work. Fischer sees merit in Bentham but does not like his suspicious moralism: "He tended to assume that these forms of error [logical fallacies] are usually evidence of some sort of sinister interest in their authors. 'Is it credible . . . that their inanity and absurdity should not be fully manifest to the persons who employ them?' he asked. 'No,' he answered in his solemn way, 'it is not credible.' But this is a very great mistake. Many [fallacies] are clearly not the result of a deliberate attempt to deceive but rather of obscured understanding by authors who were themselves deceived" (283).

Authors cannot be acquitted quite so easily. If there is deception, it is ordinarily self-deception. Wasn't Bentham deceived ("in his solemn way") by his own failure of imagination? In any event, Fischer is right in emphasizing the complexity of human character. A good person, a brilliant person, as Bentham certainly was, may be a very bad arguer. As Fischer's book demonstrates, even the study of logic can be enriched by a feel for life as it is lived, in its inexhaustible variety, by individual human beings.

How much more is this true about the study of history! That's the lesson of virtually all the books I've discussed, whether they are concerned with the ambitions of William Walker or the struggles of Cortés and Montezuma or the disappointments of Pontchartrain and Atahualpa or the whims of professional historians. And whoever has that feel for individual human life will always have a claim on the attention of other individuals.

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Works Cited

"Empire of the Inca," by Burr Cartwright Brundage. 1963; reprint: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, 414 pages.
"Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West," by William Cronon. Norton, 1991, 555 pages.
"Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought," by David Hackett Fischer. Harper & Row, 1975, 360 pages.
"France and England in North America," by Francis Parkman. Library of America, 1983, 3124 pages (2 volumes).
"Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates," by William O. Scroggs. 1916; reprint: Russell & Russell, 1969, 420 pages.
"Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico," by Hugh Thomas. Simon & Schuster, 1993, 832 pages.

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