The Historians' Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time

4. Cause for Alarm: Historical causation in words and with numbers is a vital part of our scholarship, and any philosophy of history.

65 4 Cause for Alarm Who has ever heard of Ebenezer Chaplin? . . . The effort to comprehend, to communicate, and to fulfill this [American revolutionary ] destiny was continuous through the entire Revolutionary generation. . . . It was then that the premises were defined and the assumptions set. It was then that explorations were made in new territories of thought. . . . It was the most creative period in the history of American political thought. Everything that followed assumed and built upon its results. —Bernard Bailyn (1967) Part of the value of certain kinds of loaded questions is their analytical force. Who was Ebenezer Chaplin? He was a minor figure in a major event, the intellectual origin of the American Revolution. He wrote a sermon, reprinted as a pamphlet. The pamphlet writings of the future revolutionaries revealed to them a conspiracy against American liberty. That revelation powered a “transforming debate.” The debate let loose the tide of rebellion and at the same time channeled it. The result was a republic of laws and liberty. By making us ask and answer “why?” through loaded questions like “Who has ever heard of Ebenezer Chaplin,” the author turns history from one damn fact after another into an explanation of the facts. Just as no one wants a diagnosis of their illness as “idiopathic,” so no one wants a history without causation. After 9/11, Americans asked a great many “why” questions. Why had we been unprepared for a terrorist attack? Why had the Twin Towers fallen? Why had so many first responders to the fires been trapped in the buildings when they collapsed? A blue-ribbon commission sifted evidence, took testimony, and finally published its report. The conclusion makes sober reading: “In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember 66 Cause for Alarm that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. . . . But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply in shadow. . . . As time passes, and more documents become available . . . the bare facts of what happened become clearer. Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine.” Cause? Multiple failures in “imagination, policy, capabilities, and management”: in short, mistakes that cascaded, each leading to the next. While the multiple mistake is a common form of answer to the why question, the more closely we focus the camera of history on individual events, the more clearly the causes come into view. Alas, clarity does not bring agreement about causation. For example, no one doubts that the buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed because of a combination of their design and the fiery impact of the two collisions. But investigations differed on the precise cause. As I wrote in Seven Fires, engineers and design consultants asked to determine the reasons for the towers’ collapse came to opposing conclusions . They clinically examined the burned trusses and outer wall “curtain ” panels, built computer simulations, reviewed the videos of the accordion collapse, went back to their computers, and still disagreed. At their inception, skyscrapers were giant heavy-limbed cages—lattice works of steel, concrete, and tile many feet thick. Influenced by the terrible 1904 fire that reduced the high-rises in Baltimore to burned-out skeletons, builders put larger cages of steel around smaller cages of steel until the shell of a high-rise looked like an impenetrable maze of columns and girders. The columns placed every twenty feet or so anchored the floors. Redundancy provided strength. If there was a local collapse, the rest of the building could support the fallen floors. To prevent fires from spreading, offices and apartments were sealed compartments, and building members were encased in concrete and fireproof ceramics. Fire stairwells were distributed throughout the building and “hardened” with fireproof doors and walls. Not so in the Twin Towers. The architect and the builders found a way to replace the multiples of interior columns with load-bearing external panels and heavy core supports. To reduce weight on the outside walls and interior core columns, thin steel was used for the floor trusses, and a spray-on fire retardant replaced the conventional concrete and tile fireproofing . The result was more open, rentable space—and the chance for fire to spread rapidly across entire floors. The entirely inadequate number (three) of too-narrow internal fire escapes were clustered in the core space instead of distributed throughout the towers. Cause for Alarm 67 In...