I’ve just finished re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower — which, if you haven’t read yet, I urge you to do so — and despite the fact that Tuchman was a tired old Lefty, she still was of an era where historians relied on facts, uncomfortable though they may be. Unlike today’s crop of Newspeak toads, for whom the old adage “If the facts don’t conform with the theory, they must be eliminated” is carved into their stony little hearts.
Here’s one such fact, and it’s a quote of then-Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (R-Maine), who said of the Progressives of his era:
It was true of Progressives back then, and it’s still more true of their philosophical descendants of today, whether politicians, Greens or the Gender Studies Brigade [some considerable overlap].
Seriously: think of Guam “tipping over”, the “trillion-dollar coin”, “defunding the police”, “anthropomorphic climate change”, “ESG”, “patriarchal hegemony”, “DEI”, “Green New Deal” and all the other modernist, oh-so fashionable tropes and tell me that these “philosophies” (actually more like religions because they rely on belief rather than substance) are not doing today exactly what Reed ascribed to the mountebanks of his era.
Actually, today’s “progressive” tropes are even more antithetical to knowledge than before, because they insist on ignoring or worse, destroying the fundamentals of civilization’s accrued wisdom — because it’s obvious that it’s only without that wisdom that their policies can survive the first question or challenge.
Even worse, when the time comes to write the history of their many failures, the historians, being of the same tribe, will almost certainly lie and ascribe the causes thereof to “fascists”, “counterrevolutionaries” (an old Marxist standby), “revanchists”, “Trumpists” or whatever their fevered little imaginations can devise — anything other than admit to the inherent fallacies of their policies and the crashing, grinding failures and concomitant miseries caused thereby.
Even Tuchman would weep.
[stupidity erased because embarrassing]
Calvin Coolidge was from Vermont, which these days is an even bluer state than Maine.
As Richard said, Coolidge was from Vermont. He moved to Northampton, MA which is also a basket case of left wing moonbats and became governor of Massachusetts. The farm in Vermont where Coolidge grew up is well worth visiting. His presidential papers are in the Northampton public library. Amity Shlaes wrote a biography of Coolidge a few years ago. It was well received.
JQ
Apologies for the umpteenth time I’ve cited this bit of truth:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.” ― Lord Kelvin
Haven’t read Proud Tower. Did read “August” and “The March of Folly”.
Dunno overall what to think about Tuchman. She was a product of her era, and limited to the research available to her in her era (I don’t mean any of those statements as pejorative). Grow her up in today’s zeitgeist and I think she’d probably end up being one of the wokemob as apposed to any sort of research based hero. Or she’d never have gotten any sort of credentials to be published.
One of the reasons at least the two books referenced above ended up being loved by the new left, is that they went contrary to the traditional narratives. Kind of like why Howard Zinn became well-regarded. Largely by confirming what the leftist’s wanted to be true.
As a historian she did not do the violence to historical studies like the Beard’s and others did, but I think she tended to be a fellow-traveler that was regarded as such. Kind of along the line of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.