980
PARTISAN REVIEW
century has made it clear that we gravely overrated man's capacity
to solve the problems of existence within the terms of history.
This conclusion about man may disturb our complacencies about
human nature. Yet it is certainly more in accord with history than
Professor Randall's "enlightened" assumption that man can solve
peaceably all the problems which overwhelm him. The unhappy fact
is that man occasionally works himself into a log-jam; and that the
log-jam must be burst by violence. We know that well enough from
the experience of the last decade. Are we to suppose that some future
historian will echo Professor Nevins' version of the "failure" of the
eighteen-fifties and write: "The primary task of statesmanship in the
nineteen-thirties was to furnish a workable adjustment between the
United States and Germany, while offering strong inducements to
the German people to abandon the police state and equal persuasions
to the Americans to help the Nazis rather than scold them" '? Will
~ome
future historian 'adapt Professor Randall's formula and write that the
word "appeaser" was used "opprobriously" as if it were a "base"
thing for an American to work with his Nazi fellow? Obviously this
revisionism of the future (already foreshadowed in the work of
Charles
A.
Beard) would represent, as we now see it, a fantastic
evasion of the hard and unpleasant problems of the thirties. I doubt
whether our present revisionism would make much more sense to
the men of the eighteen-fifties.
The problem of the inevitability of the Civil War, of course, is
in its essence a problem devoid of meaning. The revisionist attempt to
argue that the war could have been avoided by "any kind of sane
policy" is of interest less in its own right than as an expression of a
characteristically sentimental conception of man and of history. And
the great vogue of revisionism in the historical profession suggests,
in my judgment, ominous weaknesses in the contemporary attitude
toward history.
We delude ourselves when we think that history teaches us that
evil will be "outmoded" by progress and that politics consequently
does not impose on us the necessity for decision and for struggle.
If
historians are to understand the fullness of the social dilemma they
seek to reconstruct, they must understand that sometimes there is no
escape from the implacabilities of moral decision. When social con–
flicts embody great moral issues, these conflicts cannot be assigned
