COLLOQUY

We historians are in a bind these days. If we do our jobs -- digging up and interpreting evidence, reinterpreting what others have found -- we are frequently accused of

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high ideological crimes. When our work challenges self-congratulatory mythology, critics from Rush Limbaugh to Lynne Cheney (the distance between them is less than you'd like to think) call us "revisionists," hell-bent on defacing American democracy and Western civilization. If, on the other hand, we object to inaccuracies in historical novels and films, we're pedantic, humorless "scholar-squirrels," as the author Gore Vidal put it once, collecting and banking obscure facts until the day we can rain them down on somebody's artistic parade.

No wonder most of us hide. We shun writing for a larger public. We avoid the politics of museum displays. And too often we choose to discuss historical films or other ways that history shows up in popular culture only with our colleagues and students. Except in our classrooms, we historians pull our punches. (If we don't have tenure, we're careful even there.)

The 1994-95 fiasco sparked by charges from veterans' groups that the Smithsonian Institution's planned Enola Gay exhibit was insufficiently patriotic, along with the brouhaha over alleged left-wing bias in the federally supported project to produce the National History Standards for public schools, made clear to professional historians that accurate scholarship doesn't matter a damn to many people. The atomic bomb, yes; questions about its use, no. George Washington, applause; W.E.B. Du Bois, boos.

Attacking what scholars have to say about the past works because most Americans get their history from journalists, writers of memoirs, novelists, film makers, and politicians. People don't distinguish between memory and history. "I was there," intones Senator Stalwart. "No footnotes, please."

Or, as President Carter put it baldly in a 1980 press conference, when asked (in the midst of the Iranian-hostage crisis) if it had been "proper" for us to have put the Shah on Iran's throne in 1953: "That's ancient history, and I don't think it's appropriate or helpful for me to go into the propriety of something that happened 30 years ago." Maybe "proper" was the wrong word. But had the President paid attention to the deep Iranian resentment of America -- first for putting the Shah on his throne, then for arming and defending his regime -- he might have understood the repercussions of giving the Shah refuge in the United States.

Not all historical ignorance is so immediately costly. But in the past few years, the popularity of several "historical" films has raised anew the question of whether scholars have an obligation to try to correct distortions. Does it really matter that Oliver Stone has created his own fictions about J.F.K., Vietnam, and President Johnson? Or that Steven Spielberg has played fast and loose with the historical record in Schindler's List and Amistad?

I didn't always think so. I was moved by Schindler's List, even with its corniness and the just-in-time heroics that saved some Jews from the slaughter. After all, I reasoned, the mere fact that the Holocaust was on the big screen, shaped by Spielberg's talent, seen by millions of non-Jews, made the film worthwhile. But I don't know much about the Holocaust. As a Jew, I've heard lots of stories, read lots of articles, even a few books. Knowing something as a historian is different.

I recently asked a colleague who teaches about the Holocaust what he thought of Schindler's List. He told me that he had been too upset to sleep the night he saw the movie. As a historian, he knew much more than what appeared on the screen. He knew how the Nazi movement grew, about concentration-camp life and death, about the bureaucratic structures and moral compromises of millions of ordinary people that helped produce Hitler's "final solution." Lovable rogues such as Oskar Schindler were a sideshow.

My friend wasn't gloating about his knowledge of these things: Knowing them -- and teaching about them -- is part of his job. But when he saw the manic-depressive, sexually frustrated concentration-camp commandant Amon Goth pick up his rifle during breakfast and casually shoot an inmate, his heart sank. A gifted film maker had recast camp administration into the sexual pathology of a moody individual. Similarly, the slaughter of millions -- and the complicity of millions more -- had been forever transformed into the triumph of Oskar Schindler and "his" 1,100 Jews. Tellingly, my colleague said these things to me in my office, in a private conversation -- not in public, where he would have had to confront a tidal wave of positive publicity for the film.

I'd posed the question about Schindler's List because I, too, had spent a sleepless night after a Spielberg movie. My wife, a United Church of Christ minister, and I saw Amistad mostly out of obligation, but also with the hope that the film -- the story of 53 captive Africans who mutinied aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1839, were recaptured, and finally were freed by the U.S. Supreme Court, after a two-year legal battle -- would help us with our constituencies: parishioners in her case, students in mine.

Spielberg's co-producer, Debbie Allen, has suggested that Amistad was designed to dramatize an allegedly "suppressed" story of black rebellion and victory. Unfortunately, with the exception of some powerful (if melodramatic) and disturbing scenes of slaves being transported from Africa, Spielberg and Allen passed up history for mythology. Yet most historians have, understandably (if mistakenly), kept mum. We know the score: We are supposed to be grateful that someone has finally put the horrors of slavery on the big screen.

The price is too high. The history in Amistad is frequently incomprehensible, and misleading when it isn't just plain wrong. Sometimes it's downright slanderous.

In Amistad, the abolitionist movement has disappeared. In its place, we find depicted only Lewis Tappan -- the white merchant, philanthropist, and prominent abolitionist who is shown (falsely and shamefully) in the film as willing to see the Africans sacrificed as martyrs to his cause -- along with a wholly fictional black abolitionist, played by Morgan Freeman, who says little but appears profound.

No viewer could know from the film that abolitionism was a brave, dangerous calling for thousands of Northerners, white and black; that the abolitionist publisher William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through Boston streets in 1835 by a mob; that the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by an anti-abolition mob two years before the Amistadincident; that Lewis Tappan and his brother, Arthur, faced nationwide denunciation, death threats (including a bounty on their heads), and mob violence for their antislavery activities.

Nor could viewers know that abolitionists paid for sophisticated legal representation for the Africans who mutinied; that the lawyer they hired, Roger Baldwin -- far from the boyish, ambulance-chasing loner played by Matthew McConaughey -- was actually a 46-year-old lawyer from a prominent family who would soon run successfully for Governor in Connecticut.

Nor do viewers learn anything about the church folk throughout the North -- principally Congregationalists, many of them women -- who raised the money, subscribed to the newspapers, collected the petitions, wrote the letters, and attended the meetings that built the abolitionist cause. Portrayed by Spielberg-Allen as ineffectual, pious sourpusses, they supposedly represent the irrelevance of Northern evangelical Christianity to the antislavery struggle (and to everything else); they are worthy of everyone's derision.

The picture is profoundly false. Tappan took his faith seriously -- he even hired Yale divinity-school students to give the captive Africans from the Amistad instruction in Christianity. Thus the scene in which a noble, intuitive African looks at pictures and "figures out" the Jesus story are patronizing to both the Africans and the abolitionists. And although early-19th-century America was overwhelmingly Protestant, Christianity receives respectful treatment only when (in a wholly fictional scene), a discreetly Catholic judge goes to his huge, empty cathedral to pray for divine guidance.

There's more. Tappan's Amistad Committee (the group that carried out the litigation on behalf of the Africans) eventually was renamed the American Missionary Association. The association later became the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, a large social-justice agency within the United Church of Christ (which itself grew out of New England Congregationalism). So much for historical enlightenment.

Spielberg's search for "seriousness" -- taking on the "big issues" of slavery and the Holocaust -- ought to lead him to produce something more than a story about individuals. Does this matter? Yes -- because bad history is bad for a culture. Americans need to know how change has occurred throughout our history. They need to know about the place of religious faith in the fight against slavery (and in the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam, and women's movements). They need to understand the importance of institutions and organizations and movements.

Historians needn't object to dramatic license. The trial of the Amistad captives, for example, actually employed two translators of the Africans' Mende language, instead of the one shown in the film. That detail is unimportant. Dramatic misrepresentation is something else again, and when it occurs, historians should not hide. We have an obligation to say what we know, to support what's correct, and to criticize what's wrong or misleading.

We have one more obligation. As the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has argued with her customary wit and eloquence, historians need to take far more seriously the need to reach the general public with good history. That means promoting and rewarding scholarship that is accessible and interesting to readers beyond the confines of our profession. The longer our primary role is to solicit, praise, and produce tedious, well-footnoted monographs, the longer we will remain on the cultural sidelines while the action -- dramatic, compelling, seductive, and wrong -- unfolds in museum exhibits, in blockbuster novels, and on movie and television screens.

Warren Goldstein is an assistant professor of history at the University of Hartford and the author, with Elliott Gorn, of A Brief History of American Sports (Hill & Wang, 1993).

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