Man’s Responsibility
Chance or Destiny: Turning Points in American History.
by Oscar Handlin.
Atlantic-Little, Brown. 220 pp. $3.75.
Every imaginative historian must occasionally ask himself how far the destiny of nations has been determined by the intrusion of events which belong to some non-historical causal sequence and therefore appear in a historical frame of reference as accidental. Would the fortunes of mankind have been decisively altered if the weather on some critical occasion had behaved differently or if some individual in a key position had inherited different genes, survived a madman’s bullet, or succumbed prematurely to an epidemic? But although such speculations may provide agreeable after-dinner conversation, they rarely lead to conclusions of much validity or significance. The kindest comment one can make about Professor Handlin’s Chance or Destiny is that it will not add to his reputation. The Uprooted, which was a masterpiece of both literature and historiography, established him as one of the ablest of the younger American historians. His present opus is an unconvincing jeu d’esprit, written in a painfully oversimplified style and containing more than the scholar’s legitimate quota of factual errors.
Mr. Handlin takes eight episodes, all of them connected directly or indirectly with American foreign policy, and suggests that each of them shows how chance “at some decisive turning point gave an unexpected twist to historical development.” The episodes are the Battle of Yorktown, the purchase of Louisiana, the explosion on the Princeton which killed Secretary of State Upshur in 1844, the Battle of Gettysburg, the purchase of Alaska, the acquisition of the Philippines, the sinking of the Lusitania, and Pearl Harbor. At the end of the book he declares that “it may help men to remember now that if nothing is inevitable, and chance within the limits of the situation is everywhere a possibility, then there is always scope for the assertion of man’s influence. He has not been absolutely governed by historical law, but at the numerous turning points of his past has been capable of acting freely, for good or ill, upon the opportunities the situation afforded.”
Insofar as Mr. Handlin actually attempts to demonstrate the importance of chance, the examples which he chooses are not very persuasive. Washington’s victory at Yorktown was partly due to the weather; but in spite of French suggestions of a compromise peace, it is likely that another American failure would merely have postponed the establishment of full independence. One can argue that Napoleon might have decided to keep Louisiana if a French expedition destined for the New World had not been held ice-bound in a Dutch port; but on the other hand Mr. Handlin offers no convincing reason for supposing that this was actually a decisive factor in his decision to sell it. The death of Upshur and the succession of Calhoun caused the negotiations for the annexation of Texas to become more deeply involved with the slavery controversy; but the controversy was already inescapable, and the assertion that “the shells that fell around Fort Sumter in 1861 had long before been touched off by the explosion of the ‘Peacemaker’ on the Princeton” must surely be one of the most startling nonsequiturs ever perpetrated by a responsible historian. As for the failure of the Russians to develop Alaska, it had more fundamental causes than the fact that in 1805 a Russian official fell in love with a Spanish girl; and even if Schweiger had missed the Lusitania, it is predictable that other events would have aroused American feeling against Germany. With regard to Gettysburg, the conquest of the Philippines, and Pearl Harbor, Mr. Handlin does not even try to show that chance was significantly involved.
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Mr. Handlin’s conclusion suggests, however, that what he is really interested in demonstrating is not that history is sometimes determined by chance—a thesis which can promote only an attitude of fatalistic acquiescence—but something fundamentally different: namely, that since the course of events is not governed by immutable laws of causation, it may be influenced by human intelligence or folly. In actuality, of course, all history is a product of human decisions, although most of them are made by large groups, so that extremes of wisdom and stupidity tend to cancel each other out, statistical laws come into play, and the power of any individual is relatively small. But there is always a wide margin of contingency, and at certain moments, even in a society governed not by a king but by the popular will, a few individuals may decisively change historic processes. Obviously Washington’s capacity for leadership was more important in determining the outcome of the War of Independence than the state of the weather at Yorktown; neither Louisiana nor Alaska would have been purchased if men who believed in expansion had not been in control of American foreign policy; and Pearl Harbor might not have been a disaster if certain officials in high places, instead of being obsessed with the threat to Indonesia, had paid more attention to General Short’s message indicating that he was taking precautions not against a surprise air attack but against sabotage. But the clearest example—for which, fortunately, American history offers few parallels—is the acquisition of the Philippines. This was brought about by a few determined men, especially by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who were able to take advantage of the incredibly haphazard policies of the McKinley administration and the vague dreams of imperial glory that were beginning to infect the American people. If, instead of plunging into the Philippines as a result of the maneuvers of Theodore Roosevelt, American leaders had shown enough wisdom to resolve that Hawaii should be the western limit of our interests, would we ever have found it necessary to oppose Japanese expansion, or have fought a war in the Pacific, or have confronted a Communist China? It was neither chance nor destiny that caused the United States to become inextricably involved in the affairs of the Far East, but the actions of certain individuals in the year 1898. Human beings have always been afraid of recognizing the extent of their freedom, and have found it more comforting to attribute events not to their own decisions but to the gods or Fate or chance or immutable laws of biology or of economics. But at certain historic turning points man’s responsibility for his own destiny becomes unmistakably clear.
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