Should the Candidates Be Talking More About History?

At the National Book Festival this past August, Michael Beschloss, an American presidential biographer and award-winning historian, urged the nation to choose a president with historical knowledge—a task he suggests the electorate has ignored in the past two presidential campaigns.

In a Q&A session after presenting his new book Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, a member of the audience asked Beschloss if he could “expound” on characteristics voters should look for in the next president.

“Please make sure it’s someone who reads some history and understands the real lessons. We have never gone wrong with doing that,” he replied. Warmly receiving Beschloss’s words, the audience roared with applause.

With the exception of the blow-up over LBJ and Martin Luther King, Jr., history has barely entered the campaign debates in 2008. Why are the candidates and the mainstream media so reluctant to engage in such discussions?

Edmund Morgan, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a 2000 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, put it simply.“I suspect one reason is that none of the candidates know much about history,” he said.

Morgan also cited the debate formats as making meaningful historical allusions nearly impossible, “You don’t have two people debating each other and you don’t have a single topic set for debate; you have questions thrown out almost casually by the public or by newspaper reporters. For one reason or another, the debates have not been framed historically.”

Appreciating the “freshness of the moment” is more important than understanding the candidates’ policies in a historical context, according to Joyce Appleby, a professor emeritus at UCLA and a Thomas Jefferson biographer.

“I think they’re good debates of modern policy issues,” Appleby said. “I don’t like historical analogies. They’re usually glib.”

She said it is important for the candidates to understand their own history, but that historical knowledge is “something a little deeper” and advised the candidates to shy away from using historical analysis to govern their policies.

Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt biographer, H.W. Brands, said of the recent presidential debates, “I don’t find these…to be lighter on history than others; historical issues generally have played a small role in shaping presidential elections.”

“I think they would be well advised to pay attention to history, but historically, they don’t. Americans tend to think that history applies to other countries but doesn’t apply to them.”

“A candidate who does pay attention to history might lose,” said Brands--a political risk that Beschloss would be sure to identify as “presidential courage.”

Kathleen Dalton, a visiting professor of history at Boston University, said an historical test would be “perfectly legitimate” and could be used as a “screening device” to see if candidates have a coherent understanding of the past.

However, Patricia Cline Cohen, a professor of American history at UC-Santa Barbara, asks if voters really can measure knowledge of history in their elected officials when “we conduct campaigns with only short-answer expectations for complex policy questions of the present.”

“I don’t expect campaigns will ever be the place to conduct PhD orals with presidents—nor would the general public benefit from that,” Cohen said.

“First thing I would say is that a couple of our great presidents have also been historians: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Not only have we had presidents in the past who knew something about history, but they wrote books about it,” said Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston University.

But Wolfe believes that most Americans are uninterested in history in 2008. “Americans themselves don’t know much about history. Today history is almost taken as pejorative. ‘We don’t want history lessons from our politicians,’ the vast majority of people would say.” Hence, political candidates are less likely to use history to woo voters.

“It’s ultimately up to the candidates [to engage these questions] and it requires a certain kind of leadership,” Wolfe added.

However, he warned that a president’s knowledge of history does not mean that its lessons have been absorbed. “One of the worst of our recent presidents is Richard Nixon who had a much vaster interest in history than other presidents.”

“[I think that] the Kennedy/Nixon debates were a high point—there’s been a decline since the 1960 campaign.” Asked if any particular issue might prompt a more historical-rooted debate, Wolfe said, “If Iraq can’t do it, I don’t know what can.”

As a presidential candidate’s credential, Sean Wilentz, a Bancroft Prize-winning professor of history at Princeton University, sees “historical understanding difficult to calibrate” in the current political environment. “But I believe strongly that the more that candidates’ views and positions are historically informed, the better,” Wilentz noted.

Wilentz said he worries that a more “pointed [historical] discussion” might “detract from debating where we should be headed as a country.” But he added, “An awareness of where we’ve been—not just over the past forty years, but since the founding—informs plans for the present and future.”

From its birth, Wilentz said, the United States has moved to form “a more perfect union.” He believes that the candidates should “speak to that history and to their own ideas about how they would lead the nation toward being more perfect.”