Historical Evidence and Argument

10. Poisoned Chalices

10 POISONED CHALICES . . . and yet I often think that it is odd that [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention . . . I am fond of history—and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. I In baseball record books Ted Williams is credited with hitting .406 in 1941, and with six American League batting titles during his career. Behind these statistics are some intriguing variables. One involves the fitful evolution of the sacrifice fly rule. Except from 1931 to 1938 and 1940 to 1953, a fly ball out that drove in a run was not counted an official time at-bat. In 1941 Williams hit six sacrifice flies, but in that year a sacrifice fly was just another out. Deduct these six at-bats and he would have hit .411, as he would have had he exactly replicated his 1941 season just two years earlier or thirteen years later. Deducting just those six atbats would also have raised Williams’ lifetime batting average enough to round it off at .345 instead of .344.1 In 1954 Williams had a batting average of .345 and Roberto Avila an average of .341. But from 1951 to 1956, in order to be eligible for the batting title, a player needed at least 3.1 official at-bats for every game his team played, and bases on balls did not count. Over his career Williams drew the third highest total of 102 bases on balls in history, and in 1954 he led the league, as usual, with 136 walks, whereas Avila had only 59. As a result, Williams had only 386 official at-bats and was deemed ineligible.2 The rule was changed two years later, but this did Williams no good in the record books, because Major League Baseball does not attempt to rationalize its checkered rules history. II As Alfred Hiatt aptly puts it: “[f]orgery never goes out of fashion. It is not unique to any period or any people; it can occur across a variety of media (including printed, handwritten and, now, electronic texts, artworks, and currency of both paper and plastic varieties); its eradication seems, at the beginning of the twentieth -first century, impossible.”3 This is hardly an exaggeration, and in the circumstances any historian must keep the possibility—sometimes even the probability —that some of his sources were intentionally falsified, either from the beginning or at some point along the way to the present. An important way to test sources is to search ruthlessly for anachronisms. The notion of anachronism is fundamental to the study of history. It is well known, for instance, that the surest way to unmask a pseudepigraphical document is to detect some mention of an event or person that postdates the time supplied or implied by the document. More importantly, historians learn to be wary of assuming that the past thought and acted like the present. Finally, historians must take no less care in avoiding assuming that what was taken as true in a historical record was also true outside the time/space referents of that record. Nowadays we have learned enough to recognize some of the overdeveloped credulity of our professional forebears. Still, it would be fatuous to feel either that no such sources remain or that we can detect them on sight. Methods must be in place to assist in the defrocking. No forgery can survive a proved anachronism unless it can also be proved that it was a rogue later interpolation. Wriggling out of a patent anachronism is one of historians’ more grueling challenges. It is most difficult with a document purportedly written by a single author within a restricted period of time—worse yet if the document claims to be holograph. An entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary mentioning something that occurred after Pepys died—or even for that matter after the date of the entry, given Pepys’s professed modus operandi (“and so off to bed”)—would immediately raise danger signals and put Pepys’s diary in dire trouble as an unalloyed primary source. Works in which an original author and later editor-scribe collaborate, offer more Poisoned Chalices ❖ 103 scope—and more perplexity. Thus the journal of Columbus’s first voyage can accommodate up to sixty years of apparent anachronisms, although in cases where...