A lesson from the present: people in the past didn't know the future any more than we do

There is a historical lesson in the social and political turmoil now roiling the United States – even beyond the many historical antecedents and parallels to current events.

That fundamental lesson – a valuable reminder to students of the past – is that participants stuck in the middle of in historical events never know how those events are going to turn out.

This may seem rather obvious. But it is in fact a reality that can be hard to keep in view. Simply put, we, the historians, know how events came out. It is very difficult to keep that knowledge out of one’s analysis of past people’s actions. Of course, historians should not simply ignore their knowledge of where things proved to be heading. Identifying the emerging realities that would lead to a future crux is a key part of historical analysis – so long as our knowledge of the outcome does not lead us to treat that outcome as foreordained and inevitable, to miss the contingencies and choices that led to the end result, and most of all, to act as if the historical actors themselves had any real idea where everything was going.

Current uncertainties make the case with visceral force. It’s very obvious to any observer that America is in a period of flux. It is equally obvious that current happenings are going to lead to major developments in the future. Once those developments have played out, future historians will look back with a clarity we, of course, entirely lack. They will see plainly what currents were leading to the major ultimate outcomes. They will also see which voices, however loud and confident, ultimately proved to represent dead ends.

And as always, they will have to struggle to remember that we, stuck in the middle of these events, did not know what they know. We do not know which of the many possible futures now envisioned will actually come into being – or if some future no one has yet imagined will result.

One example helps make the point, from the work of a historian close at hand: my father, Sheldon M. Stern. When he published his detailed account of the tape-recorded October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis meetings (Averting the Final Failure, 2003), some critics cried foul, claiming the tapes were an unreliable source. The recordings capture every tense minute of many key meetings during the crisis. But, the counter-claim went, Kennedy knew he was being recorded, while the other participants did not. (This is indeed true, with the all-but-certain exception of JFK’s Attorney General, his brother Robert Kennedy.) Therefore, the critics argued, most participants spoke honestly on the spur of the moment – yet the president was able to posture for the microphones, carefully tailoring his words to sound good for posterity.

The problem with that argument should be evident: President Kennedy did not know, any more than his advisers, how events were going to come out. He could not know which positions would look good to posterity – or even, at the height of the crisis, if there would be a posterity. He consistently pressed for caution over more hawkish advisers (including his brother Bobby, who, it is worth noting, did also know he was being taped, yet took stances quite different from his brother’s). That, the critics claim, was JFK “posturing” for the tapes.

But what if he had been wrong? What if his caution had, as the generals and many of his advisers feared, led the Soviets to sense weakness and react with greater aggression? (It was not an absurd argument. Khrushchev had indeed taken JFK’s off-balance discomfiture at their 1961 Vienna summit as a sign of weakness, which probably helped embolden him to defend Cuba with provocative nuclear missiles in the first place.) What if Kennedy’s efforts to avoid a war had actually started one – just as hawks like General Curtis LeMay strongly, even contemptuously, warned? Then Kennedy’s caution would have been remembered as dangerous weakness… if there had been anyone left to remember it at all.

Kennedy could not posture for the tapes, because he did not know which position would finally be seen as “right.” He could only do his best to emerge from the crisis. The tapes capture him, and his less cautious advisers, each trying to get that balance right.

Another example, from my own work, offers a more nuanced case. When I was researching my doctoral dissertation, I pulled out a remarkable set of sources, to which I would not have space to do full justice in my thesis: the “election sermons,” preached each year before the Massachusetts provincial government as it prepared to elect the next year’s Council (upper house of the legislature and the governor’s advisory board). The gradual rise in disaffection to British policy, and ultimately to the imperial system itself, is very striking among the invited preachers during the late 1760s and early 1770s.

Some years ago, I drafted a paper on these sermons, presented it at a conference, and then submitted it to an academic journal. One of the anonymous peer reviewers objected to my argument that the sermons showed the evolving roots of Revolutionary ideas. The annual preachers, the reviewer insisted, did not know they were heading towards revolution. Since they did not know the Revolution was coming, the argument went, they could not be showing proto-Revolutionary positions, and I must be reading radicalism into their sermons that wasn’t there. Since I knew that the Revolution ultimately came, the reviewer insisted, I was allowing that knowledge to warp my analysis.

This reviewer, to my mind, took an important and undeniable fact – that historical actors do not know the outcome of the events in which they are enmeshed – and completely misapplied it. The fact that these preachers did not know they were heading towards a true breach with Britain (which, indeed, few if any of them would have suspected until 1774 at the earliest – and probably not even then), did not change the fact that their words were helping set the stage for the Revolution that actually did result!

It is, certainly, key to remember that the election day preachers did not – could not – predict the world their own arguments would ultimately help create. But nonetheless, their actions were helping to shape that eventual outcome… even though they themselves did not yet know it. It is the historian’s job to trace the lines of causation to the events that did finally occur – without assuming that those outcomes were inevitable, or imposing foreknowledge on the actions of historical actors who were, in fact, wading through events as best they could with no way of knowing how it would all turn out.

As I said, when historians look back on today’s events, they will see what we can’t: which threads and currents are leading towards the actual eventual outcomes, whatever they ultimately prove to be. Identifying those threads and currents will be a crucial part of their analysis. But they, if they are good at their jobs, will also remember that we, living and politicking now, did not know where events were headed; that while our actions would eventually be seen to lead to certain outcomes, we had no benefit of that knowledge to shape our choices – any more than President Kennedy could pose for the tapes to look good, when he did not know which choices would ultimately be judged “right.”

Right now, looking ahead, I have strong opinions about how current events will play out in the long term. I have theories, but far less confidence, about likely results in the medium-term. I have hardly any idea what’s going to happen over the next few months. And once the next few months have happened, those events will inevitably alter my sense of what will happen later.

So it is to live in the middle of history. And so it was for President Kennedy in the midst of the Missile Crisis. Or for the Congregationalist ministers invited to preach on good government before the governor and legislature of their province in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. Or for anyone living during any past events, when they were still the present.