nothing like that has ever happened to me. It was impossible. I just stood there. My voice choked up. That was it.
Barsamian: I’d like to focus now on something else. What about the notion of history as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. Do you accept that?
I once wrote an essay called “History as Private Enterprise.” What I meant was that I thought so much history was written without a social conscience behind it. Or if there was a social conscience somewhere in the historian, it was put aside for the writing of history, because writing history was done as a professional duty. It was done to get something published, to get a job at a university, to get tenure, to get a promotion, to build up one’s prestige. It was printed by publishers in books that would sell and make a profit. The profit motive, which has so distorted our whole economic and social system by making profit the key to what is produced and therefore leaving important things unproduced and stupid things produced and leaving some people rich and some people poor. That same profit system had extended to that world, which as an innocent young student I thought was a world separated from the world of commerce and business. But the world of the university, of publishing, of history, of scholarship is not at all separated from the profit-seeking world. The historian doesn’t think of it consciously this way. But there is the fact of economic security that operates in every profession. The professional writer and historian is perhaps conscious, perhaps semiconscious, or perhaps it has already been absorbed into the bloodstream, is thinking about economic security and therefore about playing it safe. So we get a lot of safe history.
Barsamian: You’re fond of quoting Orwell’s dictum “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Orwell is one of my favorite writers in general. When I came across that I knew I had to use it. We writers are real thieves. We see something good and use it, and then if we’re nice we say where we got it. Sometimes we don’t. What the Orwell quote means to me is a very important observation that if you can control history, what people know about history, if you can decide what’s in people’s history and what’s left out, you can order their thinking. You can order their values. You can in effect organize their brains by controlling their knowledge. The people who can do that, who can control the past, are the people who control the present. The people who would dominate the media, who publish the textbooks, who decide in our culture what are the dominant ideas, what gets told and what doesn’t.
Barsamian: Who are they? Who are the guardians of the past? Can you make some general comments about their class background, race?
They are mostly guys, mostly well off, mostly white. Sometimes this is talked about as the history of rich, white men. There’s a history which is done by rich white men. Not that historians are rich. But the people who publish the textbooks are, the people who control the media, the people who decide what historians to invite on the networks at special moments when they want to call on a historian. The people who dominate the big media networks, they’re rich. Not only are the controllers of our information rich and white and male, but they then ask that history concentrate on those who are rich and white and male. That is why the point of view of black people has not been a very important one in the telling of our history. The point of view of women certainly has not been. The point of view of working people is something that has not been given its due in the histories that we have mostly been given in our culture.
Barsamian: You’ve made the astounding comment that objectivity and scholarship in the media and elsewhere is not only “harmful and misleading, it’s not desirable.”
I’ve said two things about it. One, that it’s not possible. Two, it’s not desirable. It’s not possible because all history is a selection out of an infinite number of facts. As soon as you begin to select, you select according to what you think is important. Therefore it is already not objective. It’s already biased in the direction of whatever you, as the selector of this information, think people should know. So it’s really not possible.
Some people claim to be objective. The worst thing is to claim to be objective. Of course you can’t be. Historians should say what their values are, what they care about, what their background is, and let you know what is important to them so that young people and everybody who reads history are warned in advance that they should never count on any one source, but should go to many sources. So it’s not possible to be objective, and it’s not desirable if it were possible. We should have history that does reflect points of view and values, in other words, history that is not objective. We should have history that enhances human values, humane values, values of brotherhood, sisterhood, peace, justice, and equality. The closest I can get to it is the values enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Equality, the right of all people to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are values that historians should actively promulgate in writing history. In doing that they needn’t distort or omit important things. But it does mean if they have those values in mind, that they will emphasize those things in history which will bring up a new generation of people who read history books and who will care about treating other people equally, about doing away with war, about justice in every form.
Barsamian: How do you filter those biases, or can you even filter them?
As I’ve said, yes, I have my biases, my leanings. So if I’m writing or speaking about Columbus, I will try not to hide or omit the fact that Columbus did a remarkable thing in crossing the ocean and venturing out into uncharted waters. It took physical courage and navigational skill. It was a remarkable event. I have to say that so that I don’t omit what people see as the positive side of Columbus. But then I have to go on to say the other things about Columbus which are much more important than his navigational skill, than the fact that he was a religious man. His treatment of the human beings that he found in this hemisphere. The enslavement, the torture, the murder, the dehumanization of these people. That is the important thing.
There’s an interesting way in which you can frame a sentence which will show what you emphasize and which will have two very different results. Here’s what I mean. Take Columbus as an example. You can frame it, and this was the way the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison in effect framed it in his biography of Columbus: Columbus committed genocide, but he was a wonderful sailor. He did a remarkable and extraordinary thing in finding these islands in the Western Hemisphere. Where’s the emphasis there? He committed genocide, but…he’s a good sailor. I say, He was a good sailor, but he treated people with the most horrible cruelty and committed genocide. Those are two different ways of saying the same facts. Depending on which side of the “but” you’re on, you show your bias. I believe that it’s good for us to put our biases in the direction of a humane view of history.
Barsamian: I know you were present at the 1892 celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage…
Of course, I try to be at all these important events. I tried to be there in 1492 but I didn’t make it.
Barsamian: In terms of 1992, were you surprised at the level of protest, indignation, and general criticism of Columbus?
I was delightfully surprised. I did expect more protest this year than there ever has been, because 1 knew, just from going around the country speaking and from reactions to my book [A People’s History of the United States], which has sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. It starts off with Columbus, so anybody who has read my book is going to have a different view of Columbus, I hope. I knew that there had been more literature in the last few years. Hans Koning’s wonderful book, which appeared before mine, Columbus: His Enterprise, to give one example. I was aware that Native American groups around the country were planning protests. So I knew that things would happen, but I really wasn’t prepared for the number of things that have happened and the extent of protest that there has been. It has been very satisfying. What’s interesting about it, much as people like me and you rail against the media, they don’t have total control. It is possible for us, and this is a very heartwarming thing and it should be encouraging, even though we don’t control the major media and