On December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Inside Higher Ed reported on a long simmering, now boiling controversy over the nature of the Japanese government’s role involving “comfort women” — Korean and other women who were forced into military brothels during World War II — and the efforts of the Japanese government today to suppress or alter the treatment of those sordid events in textbooks. In December 2014, as the New York Times reported, Japanese diplomats requested that McGraw-Hill make a number of revisions to its textbook Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, a request supported by a group of Japanese scholars.
McGraw-Hill refused to make the changes, and that refusal has been vigorously endorsed by 20 leading American historians, in a March letter published in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History, and by a second letter in May signed by 180 Japanese studies scholars, primarily Americans.
With history of a different sort under attack on American campuses this fall — such as the demand to erase architectural and honorary evidence of Woodrow Wilson’s close association with Princeton, to change the name of Calhoun College at Yale, to remove some statues even of Jefferson elsewhere — it is encouraging to see American historians offer a strong defense of the sanctity of the historical record and the need for their product, written history, to be free from political interference.
“Like our colleagues in Japan,” the 180 scholars of Japanese studies asserted with great force, “we believe that only careful weighing and contextual evaluation of every trace of the past can produce a just history. Such work must resist national and gender bias, and be free from government manipulation, censorship, and private intimidation.” The 20 American historians concluded their letter with similar fervor, “We practice and produce history to learn from the past. We therefore oppose the efforts of states or special interests to pressure publishers or historians to alter the results of their research for political purposes.”
These are impressive testaments to the importance of keeping the historical record free from political interference. They would be even more impressive, however, if American historians had not remained all but totally silent in the face of massive political interference with the historical record of their own country that was revealed even as they aimed their ire at Japan.
“Over the years,” I noted recently here and here at the beginning of a long discussion of that embarrassing and damning silence,
the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and other historical organizations have spent much effort, and funds, successfully establishing that they have standing to intervene in litigation and public controversies about the preservation of government records. Why, then, are they sitting silently on the sidelines in the face of Hillary Clinton’s so far successful attempt to privatize, under her personal ownership and control, large swaths of the history of the State Department under her leadership and her destruction (or attempted destruction) of at least 30,000 emails that she and her staff alone have deemed “private”?
Just to pick one example discussed in that piece, historians were consumed with apoplectic rage when Henry Kissinger left office carrying “his” papers with him, and pursued him all the way the the Supreme Court. But then Henry Kissinger was a Republican.