April 2004 Newsletter

History is Just One Damn Thing After Another

By Thomas Schoonover

After close to a half-century pursuing elusive Clio as student, scholar, and teacher, I have reflected upon my education and adventures in history. The wanderings described here will be both intellectual and physical, and some of the adventures will be, I think, real adventures. But as historians, we should always be skeptical, even of eyewitness accounts. The human mind and human senses play tricks on everyone, including historians. These words will, I hope, educate, morally challenge, inspire, amaze, and at times amuse young and old historians and well-wishers of history, in the best tradition of P.T. Barnum (periodically, I teach a course on leisure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). For the reader's astonishment and edification, I will relate three sets of experiences that shaped my life as an historian in the hope that they might instruct others in some indirect way and make their journey in and through history enlightening, satisfying and, perhaps, a bit adventurous and amusing. We will follow three roads with long names. The first road is "things are not always what they appear, and, anyway, they can change"; the second route is "be careful what you wish for, you might get it"; and the third road is "even when things appear proper and normal, fate and Clio intervene in mysterious ways." As one wit said, "History is just one damn thing after another."

First, "things are not always what they appear to be." It is possible for young historians to become many things by approaching undergraduate and graduate education in history as broadly and expansively as possible and eschewing a narrow, restrictive perspective. Let curiosity guide. History is a subject for nosy people. Remember, historians are paid to do what others (with the exception of the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agents) would be arrested and jailed for doing. We read other people's mail. Learn historical methods and techniques, historiography, and acquire the widest range of bibliographical, archival, and resource information during your education. Put as much as possible in your head and rely upon the internet to amplify and expand your memory, not substitute for it. Then you should be able to pursue whatever opportunity arises and also change your course and goals in research, teaching, and learning with relative ease. These are some of the shifts of fate and fortune that have fallen upon me:

a) I have some modest reputation in U.S. foreign relations, but I never took a course or seminar as an undergraduate or graduate in U.S. foreign relations.

b) I have some modest reputation in Latin American history, but, you guessed it, I never took a course or seminar as an undergraduate or graduate in Latin American history.

c) I have little or no reputation in U.S. military or Civil War era history, but I took a dozen or more courses and seminars in those fields. Indeed, my first publication was an undergraduate paper in the reputable national journal, Civil War History. As an undergraduate and in the early years of my graduate studies, I was a Civil War nut.

d) My interests as an undergraduate and graduate student were not narrow. I eagerly pursued British history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, and I toyed with the study of the Middle East. I took courses in all aspects of U.S. history from the colonial to the modern era. In all of these areas, I labored to acquire methodology, interpretive perspectives, familiarity with reference works and guides, and the historiographical literature. My mental wanderings taught me how to find material on almost any topic in history.

e) When I finally decided to "switch rather than fight" (that is, to leave U.S. military studies for U.S. foreign relations with Latin America), the task of learning U.S. foreign relations and Mexican/Central American/Latin American history was time-consuming but not daunting.

If you are well trained and have been receptive to new ideas, I suspect you can wander through almost any place you wish in the mental geography and chronology of history.

How do you become an historian? I know. Follow the second road: "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it." Poetically, this street might be described thus: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley. An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain for promis'd joy" (Robert Burns, "To a Mouse," stanza 7). An observant, thoughtful mouse at Winona High School in Minnesota many decades ago would have been certain that my future would be in science and mathematics. Before the National Science Foundation began its nationwide tests, the Westinghouse Company sponsored a nationwide competitive test in science and mathematics. My quarterfinal result led to a scholarship to the University of Minnesota large enough to pay for my tuition and books and leave me some spending money (room and board was at home). After doing from fair to exceedingly well in accelerated math, chemistry, and physics courses for several years, rakish history took advantage of my tender, naïve youth. I switched before my junior year. My clouded and beguiled senses rejected the honest, reliable, and honorable sciences for the deceitful, dishonest, and seductive tramp called history. My chemistry and physics classes demanded about ten hours of lab per week in my sophomore year; my history class made no demands (but revealed nothing about archival work). Looking out of the lab windows at the University of Minnesota in the fall and spring at the leaves turning or the birds returning (I was and still am an outdoors person) made my virtue an easy target for Clio. Only years later, as a fallen historian, did I learn about the scores of hours in archives and manuscript collections. False and deceptive history took me from dust-free, well-lit and well-ventilated labs with large windows into the stale air of windowless research rooms where dusty, musty, worm- and insect-marked old paper collections awaited me. A sad tale of the moral decline of a once-upon-a-time honest, clean, upstanding chemist.

And the third road, "Clio and fate intervene in mysterious ways (and with astounding outcomes)," led me to many adventures and escapades. What adventures and escapades? Perhaps dodging falling stacks of documents? Responding to multiple paper cuts? Surviving the dust and insect droppings of ages? All of these hazards are commonly confronted during archival work in exotic materials in seldom-used archives or collections. I certainly experienced all of them, but I also survived other more heroic adventures that my wife and friends have been telling me to write down for over three decades. Better late than never. I hope I can borrow a bit of style and humor from Mark Twain in narrating my daring deeds, but I will try not to borrow his memory. Late in his life Twain said, "As I grew older my memory got better. I could remember things whether they happened or not." But I am reasonably convinced that the following death-defying events are true and probably happened.

My first experience with Latin American revolutions occurred in the fall of 1968. I was in Mexico City, the site of that year's summer Olympics, researching for my dissertation on U.S.- Mexican relations in the 1860s. My research led me to various archives, including a major collection housed on the thirty-second and thirty-third floors of the Torre Latinamericana (the Latin American Tower). One day in October, I descended from my perch atop Mexico City's tallest building and stepped outside. There, right on the corner, 15 feet away, was a machine gun in a sand-bag nest; across the street was an armored half-track; down that street, half way to the Zócalo, Mexico City's central plaza, was a large vehicle, apparently a bus, overturned and burning. There were lots of armed soldiers and military vehicles on all four corners of the street. This was the heart of Mexico City, at the junction of Avenida Juárez and San Juan de Letrán. Kitty-corner was Bellas Artes, the principal stage and concert hall in Mexico City, and the expansive city park, La Alameda. Before me unfolded part of the long summer and fall of the Mexican student rebellion of 1968. Students were protesting recent corrupt elections and the money wasted on hosting the Olympic games when it was needed to help the poor. Mexico remained a semi-armed camp until just before we left in January of 1969.

Three and a half years later, I undertook research in U.S.-Central American relations with a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the academic year 1972-73. In July 1972, my family and I were driving our VW beetle from Lafayette, Louisiana, toward Costa Rica. After passing immigration and customs inspections on the Mexican-Guatemalan border, we were stopped a mile or two inside the country at a second checkpoint, this time by the Guatemalan army. The soldiers asked for our passports and my driver's license. Several experienced Central Americanists had warned us not to show any university documents or to claim faculty or student status. My colleagues advised saying we were tourists just enjoying Guatemala and Central America. The Guatemalan military often detained, sometimes tortured, and occasionally killed university students and faculty. Guerrilla groups were smuggling weapons and explosives across the border, and this checkpoint was the second of three that day. As the soldiers examined our documents, I looked into the rear view mirror. Behind us, hidden by bushes, were soldiers aiming a large machine gun at our car. The Guatemalans looked into and under the car, but they found no explosives, so we went on our way. At the third checkpoint, a few miles further into Guatemala, we had to unload the car; the Guatemalan officials opened boxes, suitcases, and even made my wife empty her purse. We were allowed to proceed after about an hour.

That summer and fall of 1972, I (with the help of my wife Ebba) worked in Guatemalan, El Salvadoran, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Costa Rican archives. We experienced episodes of angry reaction to U.S. cultural imperialism in the education ministries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica. El Salvador's National Archives were located on the second floor of the Presidential Palace. One day, it got noisy in the courtyard area. Curious, my wife and I looked outside. The interior passageways of all three floors, the courtyard below, and all the stairways were packed with people. We listened to leaders of a teachers' union from across the country protest U.S. interference in El Salvador's Ministry of Education and educational program.

A few weeks later we were in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, staying at the Hotel Prado. One evening the Prado, in the center of Tegucigalpa near the Parque Morazán, was awash in tear gas. A look out of the hotel revealed a few burning cars or other objects, people running in the streets, some with bandanas over their faces, and troops with gas masks moving on the other side of Morazán park. Curious, and fortuitously wearing tennis shoes, I took to the streets and followed some of the protesters down a street. Hiding with them behind an overturned but not burning car, I inquired what was happening. Of course, I asked in Spanish with a strong North American accent. The young people told me that there had been a demonstration heading to the U.S. Embassy to protest U.S. cultural imperialism in the education system of Honduras. Honduran forces had intervened with violence. Fortunately, these students did not extend their grudge against the U.S. government to me, and also fortunately, the Honduran police and army, admittedly at a distance, either did not shoot at me or missed. After a few more minutes in the streets running to a few more spots with the students, I headed back to the Hotel Prado to celebrate my five minutes as a Latin American revolutionary (in Mexico I had been a mere observer). Incidentally, for those of you who are undergraduate or graduate historians, I would like to express the hope that my colleagues who are instructing you in research writing have not been remiss in your historical training. Undergraduates and graduates are supposed to run at least ten miles and do twenty-five 100-yard sprints each week. At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, we recently renamed our History 390 and 505 courses as "Research, Writing, and Running" I and II. I hope all young historians are receiving adequate preparation.

As soon as we left Honduras to enter Nicaragua, we encountered President Anastasio Somoza's atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The border officials noticed we had several books in German. They were fairy-tale collections from the brothers Grimm and others. My wife Ebba is German, and our son Paco, almost five at that time, spoke and understood German well. Somoza's officials may not even have been certain the language was German, but they were certain it was not Spanish or English. Since Somoza ran a tight and quite unforgiving ship, the officials made a series of urgent phone calls to various people and then waited for orders. After most of an hour and various questions, we were finally allowed to proceed. Later, at a routine stop in Nicaragua, I had to talk fast and summon all my magical powers when the police official, who had trouble with the language and information fields on my Louisiana driver's license, thought he detected an expired document. He had, but I somehow persuaded him to doubt himself. He let us continue, but I drove with an expired license until we returned to Louisiana.

About three weeks later in San José, Costa Rica, I left the side street connecting the University of Costa Rica with the main thoroughfare from the east to the center of San José. I had a bit of trouble entering the street because there were many vehicles and people walking slowly along toward the center of the city, where I was also headed. A gap opened and I got my vehicle situated in a dense phalanx of cars, trucks, flatbeds, and pedestrians. I rolled the windows down to inquire in my Yankee Spanish what was happening. Students or young Costa Ricans who strolled beside my VW threw flyers into my front seat and informed me that U.S. cultural imperialism was trying to manage the schools, curricula, and the education ministry in Costa Rica. I looked around. A flatbed truck that was sharing the street with me had a straw dummy of Uncle Sam, clad in red, white and blue, hanging from a gallows. But everyone seemed friendly.

After completing work in Costa Rica, we started our return trip in November 1972. When we had entered Costa Rica, we had spent some time at the border clarifying exactly what we needed in documentation for our later departure. In San José, we went to the various bureaucracies to follow the correct procedures and secure the right documents. Despite these efforts, Costa Rican officials at the border claimed we lacked one item. After many attempts to solve the problem, I had had enough. Aware of the peaceful nature of the Costa Ricans and seeing that few weapons were visible and none of the guards actually held a gun, I devised a plan. Acting as if I was about to return to the next city about one and a half hours away, I headed over the border into Nicaragua, deaf to the shouts of the unarmed Costa Rican guards. Since Nicaragua and Costa Rica were having a tiff at that time, I assumed the Nicaraguans would welcome the chance to tweak the noses of the Costa Ricans. Ebba thought we were dead. We were both wrong. I was compelled to return to the Costa Rican border station and then head to the next city after ascertaining that the Costa Ricans were not going to arrest us. History teaches us to assess phenomena from all sides. In that situation, my scientific and historical training suggested that what I tried was not unreasonable. It was, however, unsuccessful, and certainly it was embarrassing as hell when it did not work. As historians, we learn to live with our capacity to analyze, interpret, and comprehend.

One final episode in the life of a wandering historian. Historians know the national myth: if we are god-fearing, diligent, honest, persevering, helpful, family-oriented, and hardworking, our reward will be prosperity and success. This myth does not have to be true. Hard work, however, gave my family a special reward in the winter of 1972-73. We had originally planned to spend Christmas in Managua, Nicaragua, at a hotel we knew from a previous trip. But with Ebba's help, I finished my research early, and in mid-November we passed through Nicaragua, did a week's work in Honduras, then drove through El Salvador and Guatemala and back into Mexico City so I could finish some research for my first book on U.S. and Confederate roles in the French intervention in Benito Juárez's Mexico. Had we not worked so hard and efficiently, I might not be here. The hotel we had planned to stay at in Managua was leveled in the major earthquake that struck Managua in December 1972.

Besides my wife, Ebba, I had another very influential (albeit unsuspecting) assistant in my work. When we were in Managua, my five-year-old son Paco would disappear each day on the hand of a young staff person at the Banco de Nicaragua, the national central bank. Only near the end of my research in Managua did we learn that Paco had spent part of every day playing in the corner of the office of the director of the Banco de Nicaragua--the Alan Greenspan of Nicaragua--because he had neat stuff in his office and windows that overlooked most of Managua. A few weeks later, at the Archivo Nacional of Costa Rica, Paco again disappeared daily with a young staff person. At the end of that stay, all three of us were called into the office of the director. We thanked him for his cooperative staff, and he thanked us for the regular visits of Paco. He then gave his buddy Paco various mementos, including a pre-Colombian artifact. With two such accomplished aides, I gathered enough research materials to write about Central America for two decades.

I hope my stumbling adventures, as I recall them, might give future and present historians the confidence that whatever career decisions they might make, things might not turn out so badly after all. I would also like to thank Peter Hahn and Mitch Lerner for indulging me in this nostalgic retrospective of a wandering historian's adventures and escapades in the pursuit of a better understanding of "just one damn thing after another."