It’s fun to fool around with history. It’s sort of like playing with a slinky: you can bend it in any direction, twist it, contract or expand it, tie it in a knot, but it never loses its fundamental singularity, its linear metallic structure. There are many ways history could have happened (or so we presume) and many ways of viewing it, which we can never agree upon based on our different perspectives, values, and habits of mind.
And yet, for all the twists and turns and accidents, the causal structure of the universe (i.e., what makes the world coherent to our minds) dictates that a) history happened, and b) it happened in exactly one way, not in three ways or five hundred and seventy-four. There’s a unity about the past even if we can never quite see it whole – and obviously we can’t; the deeper we look, the more complex, inscrutable, and unattainable that “whole” becomes. We get the broad outlines and the bare facts, but learning history is like stumbling through a hall of mirrors. You come out one way, but it seems like it could have been any which way.
So just for fun, let’s play with that slinky a bit. Suppose that James A. Garfield had not been assassinated by a frustrated and deranged former supporter, Charles Guiteau, just four months into his term? I’m taking my cue here from the current Netflix series “Death By Lightning,” which seems to provide a reasonably accurate account (though I can’t vouch for details) of this extraordinary event. I have to say I learned a lot from the miniseries. Garfield was a good man who wanted civil rights for African Americans and opposed the corrupt machine politics of the time, personified by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. What if Garfield had had four years, or eight, as president? Instead, after just six months in office (two of them seriously wounded, although his death was due to medical malpractice and sepsis) he succumbed and was succeeded by an alcoholic hack named Chester A. Arthur. What if indeed.
The “what ifs” of history are infinite, and sometimes absurd. We can’t go back and change things. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn or gain perspective from seeing alternative paths that the world or the nation might have taken. Part of understanding the past is seeing, on the one hand, how unitary it is – the one-way street of events; and part is understanding just how plastic it is, and how likely or unlikely that singular chain of events was compared to alternatives. This is one more way in which critical thinking demands a kind of binocular vision, an ability to switch between two irreconcilable perspectives.
Maybe, as Shakespeare suggested, history is just “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” Or maybe not, because we desperately need to find significance in it. In the same way, we need to find (and our brains are designed to find) significance, or at least coherence, in everyday experience. History is just everyday experience on a much larger scale, is it not?
We must also think carefully about what we mean when using a word like “possibilities.” History seems plastic in hindsight, like it could have gone in various directions if…if…if only… And yet, it went the way it went, and not another.
But enough with the pondering. Let’s get back to playing doctor on the past. What if the Continental Army had been defeated by the British in the Revolution? It didn’t happen, and yet, if it had, it seems (as others besides me have argued) that things could have been better in the long run. Better for the slaves, who would likely have been freed sooner. Better for the Indians, who would not have been oppressed and exterminated, or not to the same degree they were under the United States of America. Independence would have come, and a constitution, and (like Canada and elsewhere under British rule) a parliamentary system – a far more just and efficient form of democracy than what we have.
I did say “could have,” didn’t I? Of course I’m going out on a bit of a limb; that’s what makes idle speculation fun and, perhaps, interesting. I could be all wrong. But now that I’m out on the limb, what if the South had won the Civil War – or been granted independence without a fight? Slavery was a consummate evil but suppose it had lasted a decade or two longer. A dreadful prospect, if that’s the right word; but it has to be weighed against the loss of life. The official toll on both sides of the War was about 620,000. But historians now think it may actually have been much higher, possibly well over 700,000. That awful equation is at least worth thinking about.
As for two countries sharing a continent, I don’t have a problem with that. In many ways we have those two countries now, living under the same government and detesting one another. Abraham Lincoln’s original case for saving the Union was based on a dubious Constitutional argument that the South had no right to secede. It’s at least debatable. By 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, it had become a war to end slavery. I like to think that the United States without the South (like the United States after losing the Revolutionary War) would have developed along more, um, Canadian terms. And it might have been a little – or a lot – less violent. But who knows?
A final heresy, and then I’ll quit. We were dragged into World War II by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and a good thing too; the world would have been far worse off had we not been dragged into it. Roosevelt, like Lincoln, didn’t have strong political support for going to war until the enemy forced the issue. But what about all the bloodshed? Could any of it have been avoided or minimized?
I’m thinking mainly of the war in the Pacific, although one could conjure scenarios in Europe that might have saved lives. I don’t want to get into the moral complexities of strategic bombing, i.e., of massive air attacks on cities and civilian populations, typically at night. That can be debated in connection to both theaters of war. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are likewise indefinitely debatable. They may well have saved lives in the long run, but we’ll never know.
I also wonder whether the “island-hopping” campaign of the U.S. military in the Pacific was necessary. As I’ve suggested in previous posts, those bloody island invasions were predicated on an ultimate planned invasion of Japan that never took place. Not only that, but there is also reason to believe that, at a certain point in 1945, it wasn’t going to take place, and the cancellation of Operation Olympic was covered up. Why? Presumably because the Truman Administration wanted the public’s full post-hoc support for the decision, based on the false belief that the alternative was an invasion projected to cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. The figure of a million was even bandied about.
Counterfactual historical scenarios may seem pointless or even unhinged. “What was” would seem more important than all the “what ifs.” Well, yes and no. Yes, if you’re trying to do history or understand it. But for any leader or group in power, for any commentator in a free press, for any activist embracing a cause, for any citizen casting a vote about the future and not about the past, it’s the “what ifs” of the future that matter most. History is a guide, but the future isn’t a singularity until it’s the past. It will ultimately take a single course, but until then, we at least have the necessary illusion of choice. We must consider the alternatives carefully as if any of them might happen; and maybe once in a while, despite all our human frailty, ignorance, and depravity, we can get it right. Or maybe not.