Nothing can be duller than historical facts -- Carl Becker

To me, nothing can be duller than historical facts; nothing more interesting than the service they can be made to render in the effort to solve the everlasting riddle of human existence.

– Carl Becker, Letter to Frederick Jackson Turner, May 16, 1910^[1]

Becker is writing to Turner one of his many laudatory letters, emphasizing FJT’s impact on his thinking and crediting FJT with his own interest in history. In doing so, he reminisces on the first course he had taken with Turner, at the University of Wisconsin, when he “learned but few facts,” but remembered many of FJT’s “casual remarks” which had become important to him over time.

I don’t think I’ll make a habit of posting super long excerpts here, but in this case the longer discussion is fascinating, both for Becker’s appreciative note to FJT - which is really quite touching - and for the larger ideas looming behind it.

FJT, in Becker’s memory, was humble about what one could know about the past with certainty yet had a way of “selecting, from the infinite number of things that were said to have happened, things that had meaning and significance.” This leads into a brief riff on logical thinking and historical thinking, and more generally on the place and value of (historical) facts, facts in the past and facts about the past in the present.

Becker also remembers FJT defending Philosophy of History (with some reticence!) as “after all it was impossible not to have some kind of a Philosophy of history[.]” What matters, according to FJT via Becker, is “whether one’s Philosophy amounted to anything.”

The final line thanks FJT for teaching him “to distinguish historical facts from their uses,” which I think is a pretty great line, and a pithy summary of a particular perspective on all of this that feels more commonplace now is striking for its time.

Below is not the whole letter, but the latter two-thirds or so:

I do not remember whether sovereignty resided with the States or with the nation in 1789; but I remember you drew a diagram on the board to illustrate the problem (which I had never seen anyone do except for geometry), and that you said you hadn’t a logical mind, which one ought to have if one wanted to be positive about such a question. That remark I have often recalled, and have pondered, in a desultory way, the difference between the logical and the historical mind; and have come to the conclusion that logic and history are two distinct ways (and perhaps the only ways) of apprehending ‘reality’; history being, however, the more comprehensive, since there is no logic of history but [there] is a very interesting history of logic.^[2]

Then I remember you said once that it was all very well to poke fun at the Philosophy of history, but that after all it was impossible not to have some kind of a Philosophy of history, the vital point being only whether one’s Philosophy amounted to anything. And more than once I have heard you say: ‘History is the selfconsciousness of humanity.’ That, at the time, meant absolutely nothing to me, but the phrase must have been working in the ‘fringe’ of my consciousness all these years, for I have recently hazarded in print the thesis that ‘we must have a past that is the product of all the present.’ That, I take it, is the same as saying that history is the selfconsciousness of humanity.

Thus you see you are responsible even for what I publish, although, as they say in the prefaces, while quite agreeing to give you the credit for the little good there may be in it, I hold you in no way liable for the much that is bad. I remember that you tried to interest us in the Blue Ridge, and the Cumberland Gap, and the Old Cumberland Road, (or some such road.) What it was you said, I have forgotten; but I remember precisely the manner in which you have said it. It was a manner that carried conviction – the manner of one who utters moral truths; and somehow it has ever since stuck in my mind that the Blue Ridge, and the Cumberland Gap, and the Old Cumberland Road, (or whatever road it was) are threads that will unravel the whole tangled skein of American history.

To me, nothing can be duller than historical facts; nothing more interesting than the service they can be made to render in the effort to solve the everlasting riddle of human existence. It is from you, my dear Professor turner, more than from anyone else, that I have learned to distinguish historical facts from their uses.