Category: forensic history

The Arc of Presidential Libraries

~ Michael A. Innes

Paul Musgrave, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, has published an op-ed on problems with the Presidential library system in the US, and how the current (outgoing) President could exploit it to his usual ends. The essay is a fine complement to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece on the transition politics of official records.

Musgrave, scene-setting:

President Trump has reportedly spent little time thinking about his post-presidential life. (“You can’t broach it with him,” an anonymous friend told the New Yorker in recent days. “He’d be furious at the suggestion that he could lose.”) But he will surely avail himself of the same consolation prize his predecessors did: a presidential library. What will it look like?

The federal presidential library system traces its origins to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 establishment of a library to make his records more accessible in the interests of transparency. But lack of funding and weak oversight by the National Archives and Records Administration mean that, without significant changes in the law, Trump will have a perfect pedestal where he can erect a shrine to himself. His records won’t be available in full until after he dies; he’ll be able to raise millions to award sinecures to his aides as they tout his supposed successes at “making America great again”; there is no mandate to pursue historical accuracy; he can whitewash his legacy. This will be the headquarters for Trump’s permanent post-presidential campaign.

And while Trump’s presidency was distinguished by constant departures from norms, the library is one place where all presidents are consistent. Following a trail blazed most successfully by Richard Nixon, turning his presidential library into an image-making prop will be among the most normal things Trump ever does.

This line is especially pithy:

The arc of presidential libraries bends toward loyalty, not truth.

Good tie-in to larger points about the seemingly never-ending, self-perpetuating character of American political campaigns:

With a big war chest, the hallowed “permanent campaign” of the modern presidency could achieve its final form in a foundation dedicated to burnishing Trump’s record. Such a foundation could easily generate enough revenue to support endless functions at Trump resorts, hotels and Mar-a-Lago. It could even prove a launchpad for political careers for the next generation of Trumps — or, given that the president would still be in his 70s, for Trump to pull a Grover Cleveland-esque comeback himself.

That They Can Gain in Judgments

~ Michael A. Innes

The writer and historian Jill Lepore has penned a great piece in the 23 November 2020 issue of the New Yorker (posted online 16 November). Her focus, in “Will Trump Burn the Evidence?“, is the politics of historical records and archives. It’s a great, topical essay that captures some of the anxiety about how the current Presidential transition period will unfold. It also usefully highlights tensions tugging at the professional practice of history.

There is no shortage of such challenges, as historians point out often enough. The one that I’ve been thinking through over the last few years, and that I think Lepore really draws out in her article, is the difference between public history, applied history, and forensic history. People who make a living studying and doing history will probably object to such crude categories, so to them I offer apologies in advance (with a promise to try to do better in future).

Public history, arguably the oldest and most mature of the three, is about memorializing and commemorating the past in a way that benefits the public. Applied history is currently trending but also has a history of its own, and fills a narrower, more particular niche: understanding and solving contemporary policy challenges through recourse to historical description and explanation. Forensic history is a complex beast, but sits somewhere between public and applied history, in its application of historical methods to issues of legal consequence.

Lepore’s piece is a wonderful read on the historical context for what to expect of the currently (outgoing) U.S. President’s attention to official records. She calls it an “evidentiary shell game”, which is sobering. For anyone interested in this kind of politics of information, it’s worth the time it takes to read it. Some great quotes:

Lepore, setting the stage:

Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words, at the dedication of the US National Archives Building in 1941:

To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women living in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgements in creating their own future.

The historian Fredrik Lovegall, on private efforts to short circuit politically-motivated attempts in Washington to destroy documentary evidence:

I can imagine that at State, Treasury, D.O.D., the career people have been quietly copying important stuff all the way along, precisely with this in mind.

It’s a point that reminds me of the work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which in a very different context has been doing essentially the same thing to safeguard evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Lepore again, on the wider context – citing historical episodes from the destruction of libraries during the two World Wars of the 20th century, to its litany of occupations, genocides and civil wars:

National archives uphold a particular vision of a nation and of its power, and, during transitions of power in nations that are not democratic, archives are not infrequently attacked. Most attacks involve the destruction of the evidence of atrocity.

Regimes have done this to suppress evidence of brutality, dial back the national clock to year zero, and eliminate the documentary sources needed to hold the guilty accountable and enable survivors to recover. It’s a tough mix of international history and domestic patterns of political abuse that Lepore presents. I especially liked this pithy blurb, which highlights quite nicely the differences between primary and secondary sources, and what they mean for anyone involved in public, applied or forensic history:

Libraries house books: copies. Archives store documents: originals. Archives cannot be replaced.

A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards

~ Michael A. Innes

In 1994, the legal scholar John Phillip Reid published a somewhat cynical article on forensic history in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.  It contains some real zingers on the intersection between law and history, how practitioners of each perpetrate mutually abusive disciplinary transgressions, and the meaning (and substance) of forensic history. Here are some bits and pieces, for flavour. These are by no means representative of Reid’s entire argument – you’ll have to read the article yourself for that.

From the introduction (p. 193):

A venture into cross-disciplinary legal studies may be a mark of scholarly sophistication for the law academic, but it does not do to assume the benefits without understanding the risks. Serious problems result from the crossing of disciplines. Take the crossing of history with law: It is a mixture containing more snares than rewards, as it risks confusing rules of evidence basic to one profession with canons of proof sacrosanct to another.

On implied similarities of method:  (p. 193-194):

The implication – one that is shared by lawyers perhaps even more than by historians – is that there is a similarity between the methodology of law and the methodology of history…  the argument goes much further than process. It is not just techniques or procedure that the two disciplines have in common; they share substance as well. Certainly there have been times when first-year law students thought so.

On the difference between what lawyers and historians do (p. 196):

The lawyer and the historian have in common the fact that they go to the past for evidence, but there the similarity largely ends. Some historians, such as Kelly, believe that common-law methodology requires the lawyer to play “the role of historian” and to go “to the ‘primary sources.’ For such historians, Maitland warned there is a temptation “to mix up two different logics, the logic of authority, and the logic of evidence.” The differences in the logics are the differences that Kelly missed. They are so basic that they make the ways that the two professions interpret the past almost incompatible. In discovering the past, the historian weighs every bit of evidence that comes to hand. The lawyer, by contrast, is after the single authority that will settle the case at bar.

On “lawyer’s law office history” (p. 197):

The way that lawyers think about history is an eccentricity foisted on them by their professional training and, although it may amuse historians who stumble over lawyering anachronisms,  it is not a matter of controversy among lawyers. What has been controversial is the way that lawyers argue and use history. Critics of their methodology have coined terms to describe it. They call it lawyer’s history or law office history. Lawyer’s history and law office history are really the same despite the variety of definitions they have been given. Lawyer’s history has been called “a stark, crabbed, oversimplified picture of the past, developed largely to plead a case,” and law office history has been described as “the selection of data favorable to the position being advanced without regard to or concern for contradictory data or proper evaluation of the relevance of the data proffered.” 18 “The ‘law office historian,'” one critic has argued, “imbued with the adversary ethic, selectively recounts facts, emphasizing data that supports the recorder’s own prepossessions and minimizing significant facts that complicate or conflict with that bias.”

On “forensic history” (p. 203):

Historians understand that criticism of law office history is criticism of forensic advocacy; that lawyers practicing lawyer’s history use it as advocates; that the complaint is that they are too much the lawyer and not enough the historian. Historians know lawyers are beyond reformation, but wish judges would adopt a more acceptable standard.

On judicial abuse of history (p. 204):

Although their opinions may often be confused, the judges generally are not. When they tell their law clerks  to find them some “history” supporting a point of law they plan to promulgate, their interest lies in authority, not in evidence. This use of history is not to learn about the past, but merely to support an outcome. Law office history does not lead the judge to a decision. In almost every instance when history is employed, the decision has already been formulated. Unprofessional history is used to explain the decision, to make the decision more palatable, or, in most cases, to justify the decision.

Again, on “forensic history” (p. 205):

According to the academic canons of the historical method, there is no need to consider instances of the proper use of history either to prove a fact” or to establish a point of law – if such instances can be found. Instead, attention should be given to a species of history that does not meet the canons of historians’ history, but for centuries has made legitimate contributions to Anglo-American law, especially to Anglo-American constitutional law. It is forensic history.

A way forward? (p. 220):

The legitimacy of forensic history cannot be left to the professional standards of academic historians. A different measure is needed, one turning on the restraint historical adjudication clamps on judicial discretion. Our problem is to separate history used to screen a judge’s activism from history that fixes the limits of decision. Perhaps the distinction cannot be tested, but at this stage of our knowledge we cannot be sure.

From John Phillip Reid, “Law and History,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 27 (1993-1994): 193-223. URL: https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/lla27&i=229.

Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined

~ Michael A. Innes

I’ve been digging into the use of Pearl Harbor analogies in America’s response to the 9-11 attacks – and, because of a curious twist in the political landscape in 2001, I’ve been looking a little more closely at a well known study of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, 1962). Wohlstetter’s book is a classic examination of military intelligence (and its failures). It  also enjoyed a parallel life as a physical prop in certain defense circles, where invoking the lessons of this particular past – military preparedness and managing strategic surprise – was part of a ploy to justify budget increases. Among the reviews of Wohlstetter’s book that appeared after its release, one by Sir Michael Howard, published in 1963, caught my attention. Howard appreciated Wohlstetter’s attention to the historical minutiae of intelligence work, and her use of such detail to attempt an explanation of the American failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor. But he was also cynical about her use of historical method in the service of something other than a Rankean telling-it-like-it-really-was account of past events. It’s a sensitivity of long standing among historians, and goes to the heart of the discipline as a professional practice animated by principles of forensic inquiry. Howard’s opening paragraph gets right to it:

Few professional historians stray into the field of strategic studies, and those who do are not likely to find it congenial. They will be surrounded by men of great ability and quicksilver minds who link events into patterns, reduce the chaos of experience to predictable order, deduce principles, extrapolate trends, and in general toss around the stuff of history with an insouciance which the historian, knowing from his own laborious researches how delicate, complex, and intangible is every one of the historical “events” so cheerfully used as the basis for these theories and predictions, finds it hard to regard as academically reputable or even logically sound. Like the lawyer or the philosopher, he winces at the labels casually slapped onto historical phenomena or human behavior of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined. Faced by terribles simplificateurs whose confident analyses and predictions may easily become the bases for national attitudes and policies, he can only continue, quietly and insistently, to repeat his creed. Every event is for the historian unique, unforeseeable, and indescribable in its full complexity. In some respects it will resemble other events, and out of these resemblances useful patterns may be deduced as intellectual tools. But all these patterns are subjective and hypothetical. Like the psychiatrists’ ink-blobs, they teach us more about our own minds than they do about the ingredients which compose them. To suspend judgment, to refuse to make patterns at all, is not only sterile but destructive of all historical writing. But any patterns made or deductions drawn from events before the record is established as completely as human effort can do it will be worthless as foundations for any form of political, economic, or strategic thought.

Reference: Michael Howard, “Military Intelligence and Surprise Attack: The ‘Lessons’ of Pearl Harbor,” World Politics 15:4 (1963): 701-711.

[Ed.: “ploy” isn’t quite the right word for it – it was no more conspiratorial than any other political agenda.]

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

~ Michael A. Innes

Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like “research” and “information”, and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It’s a world in which understanding is less contingent on a cognitive capacity for critical engagement and creative insight than it is on the accessibility of information. Access is all. It trumps (sorry) the value that large volumes of data imply. It trumps (where is William Safire when you need to pick apart a travesty of a word and find a pallatable substitute for it?) the value that fast data processing speed implies.

Access can be about a lot of different things.  It can be about decryption of safeguarded secrets, conversion to a usable medium, or translation of foreign language script into one that’s comprehensible.  At its most basic, it can be about the ability to directly observe information or physically possess it, on a drive, on paper, in a photograph, on a stone tablet. Sometimes it’s about finding a keeper of the secrets, and a place where the secrets are kept. Secrecy is a relative thing. It correlates directly with notions of access, and one of my favorite archetypal keepers, the archivist, is also the one I most frequently invoke when I’m talking to  colleagues, clients and friends about research specialties like  data science, e-discovery and open source intelligence.

According to this piece in the Village Voice on archivists, one of their number may well be  – with apologies for repeating a brutalized meme  – the most interesting man in the world. The “paradox of being an archivist,” it tells us, is that while archivists should know things so that they can help others know those things, “it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else… [i]ndeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important.” It’s a view that misses one of the most fundamental aspects of archival work, in that archivists routinely select what to preserve and what not to preserve, and so by definition impose their knowledge on others. It’s a point that the author explores and explains well. Ideal types are fine in isolation, and archival work is nothing if not isolating, but relegating keepers of secrets to the role of neutral, disinterested arbiters of knowledge strikes me as more than a little self-indulgent.

Archivists and archival investigators have a role to play as activists, especially if there’s a forensic element to the materials buried amid unprocessed and uncatalogued holdings. I can sympathize with the romantic view that “Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?” But that’s about preservation, not discovery, and once discovered, one would hope that the discovering archivist would do more than just stare wanly at the information in question and then file it dutifully away, with nary a word of imposition about its singificance to anyone.

Archival investigation undertaken by living, breathing human beings unfolds at a comparatively soporific pace, and for investigators and researchers used to fast search engines and aggregate query results, it’s a practice that’s surely too musty and staid and boring  to be taken seriously or ascribed much worth. But plodding historical gumshoes poking about the stacks and sifting yellowed documents, for all their retrograde pathos, embody a particular spirit of discovery. Tech-savvy number crunchers and online seekers of insight surely experience their own versions of this. Smoking guns appear in all shapes and forms. But there’s a tactile, sensory difference between the two. “The need to pore through boxes forces you to connect with them,” writes our Village Voice author. It may well be, he notes, “one of the few kinds of formal research left. You can’t google — you have to think about what you want. You have to talk to an archivist, and find the right box, and go through that box.”