A louse cannot molt and emerge a jackrabbit.

Likewise, the dishonest historian who wrote “The Age of Jackson” would not mature into a writer characterized by forthrightness and intellectual rigor.
 
As was discussed last week, Arthur Schlesinger passed over whole oceans of countervailing evidence in his partisan determination to prove that Andrew Jackson’s economic policies were something other than the catastrophe they proved to be, and he ignored basic political questions, like Jackson’s shameless thieving of the Cherokee, to try and wipe clean Jackson’s much marked-up ethical slate. Moreover, with Schlesinger, all discussion of the men of the Jackson era falls back on the use of simplistic dichotomies in which hardy “yeoman” face off against villainous “plutocrats”. Never considered is the idea that the two groups’ interests might be aligned insofar as a strong currency is concerned.

The two histories for which Schlesinger is now best known are in similar fashion purposefully misleading and reliant on crude character analysis.

In his three-volume The Age of Roosevelt, Schlesinger again depends upon heavy-handed and simplistic moralism. Good Democratic men are “sage,” “sober” and “judicious”. Bad Republican men are “hidebound” and “partisan.”

The series depicts the background of the depression roughly chronologically. The key word here is “roughly”.

In Volume One, the chapter on Harding skips over the depression that Harding — and Andrew Mellon, his brilliant Treasury Secretary — got the country out of in 1921. The reader is left to think that Mellon had no purpose in cutting taxes but to make the rich richer. That their tax-cutting policies not only encouraged economic activity but increased discretionary income and spending at a time of pervasive joblessness is not acknowledged. (In Schlesinger’s history we only find out about the 1919-1920 Depression in passing although it produced near 20% unemployment. Because it arose under President Wilson, a Democrat, it is never referred to as a depression and the reader is not informed of its great severity.)

But this is comparatively a small matter. More serious is Schlesinger’s outrageous misrepresentation of the events of the Great Depression. Schlesinger’s multi-volume history never even mentions that under Hoover top marginal income tax rates rose from 25% to 63%. Although meant to balance the federal budget, Hoover’s liberal tax policies greatly — and inevitably — reduced the amount of money in circulation and terribly exacerbated the initial slump of 1930-1931. Schlesinger’s complete failure to report on such an immense change in federal tax policy cannot be accidental. This is intellectual fraud perpetrated on a grand scale.

But if such an omission must be deliberate, it is likely a consequence not only of his lack of probity but also of his almost wholesale incomprehension of basic economic concepts. Consider that the book argues a priori for higher taxes on capital gains, and that excess savings is the major cause of inflation!

But then there is much confusing nonsense in these volumes. Indeed, at one point Schlesinger attempts to shock the reader with the disturbing fact that in 1930, 1931 and 1932 the great banker J.P.Morgan did not pay any taxes. (Sounds troubling, no?) Schlesinger neglects to provide the explanation: Morgan made no money in those years.

One wonders: does Schlesinger think that the rich should be forcibly expropriated from for the misdeed of being rich?

Equally silly is Schlesinger’s treatment of John Maynard Keynes. To Schlesinger, Keynes is a saint and a savant, the man with the answers. He was the seer, the interpreter. Schlesinger does not ask the obvious question of why the Great Depression continued right up through the onset of the Second World War if Roosevelt’s quasi-Keynesian policies were so copasetic.

Today most economists acknowledge that a number of New Deal policies may have actually served to lengthen the Depression. And empirical evidence has brought into question the achievements of some New Deal reforms. For instance, it’s now known that people in Tennessee got electrification and higher wages more slowly than the people in Alabama for the simple reason that the people in Alabama rapidly moved to the cities, where the power and the good jobs were, while the people in Tennessee tended to remain around the hardscrabble fields surrounding the basins the Tennessee Valley Authority was damming up. Yet Schlesinger omits these facts while making an array of unsupported summary judgments. Thus, Schlesinger tells us that the Securities and Exchange Commission “far from destroying [the securities] business, were offering it a new lease on life.” (While I’m sympathetic to the claim, there is little evidence for it; after all, rates of return on common stocks have not appreciated since the SEC was created.)

And if Schlesinger was partisan in his treatment of Roosevelt, he was similarly partisan in his contemplation of the President he served, John Kennedy.

Schlesinger claimed that he was obligated to “put it all down” in his history of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days, by his “memory of the President and to the historical profession”. He then chose to deliberately mislead readers into thinking on some pages that Kennedy was not a seriously ill man wracked by Addison’s disease, at one point inscrutably remarking that Kennedy “did not have Addison’s disease in the classic sense.”

Nor was Schlesinger a terribly prescient writer: in his The Cycles of American History, he insisted that Reagan’s foreign policy towards the USSR wouldn’t work and would prove counterproductive.

Schelsinger may be a charming man and a hard worker. But the study of history needs more than that. It requires integrity, objective analysis and substance.

We are now in the 21st century. It’s time to make judgments of 20th century historians every bit as much as 20th century history.