History May Be Partly Bunk: Part One by Dave Jaffe.

   History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    Henry Ford was one of America's most important 20th century innovators. Ford helped create the mass production of cars at the giant plant he set up near Detroit. In fact so successful was this mass production plant at River Rouge that some social scientists called the methods and the age that he pioneered 'Fordism'.
     Ford and his cars helped change the way North Americans travelled, made love,  shopped and many other things.Yet he had little time for intellectuals or progressive movements. He was definitely anti-intellectual. "History is bunk," he once said. Now near the end of my life, I realize that Ford may have had part of the truth. For some historians' account of the 20th century do seem to stress the negative and not the good things that happened.
     Many historians of the 20th century write  histories chockfull of wars, purges, massacres by leftists and rightists as well as endless suffering. In fact much of the pop history I've written on my blog, is just like those more professional accounts by trained historians. Yet if someone asked me how I'm doing right now, I'd reply, "Never felt better. The first part of my life had its problems. The last half of my life has been very good." And I think most of my friends would give a thumbs up to their lives in the 20th century.
    Let me zero in on two Canadians who've written about 20th century Canada and may have given us misleading impressions of the country's life and times. Michael Bliss was a conservative who wrote a number of books about Canada. One of his books dealt with Canadian prime ministers. It just about trashed every prime minister save for the country's founder, John A. MacDonald. Yet anyone reading Bliss's account of Canada would miss some very important points.
       First off, life got way better for most Canadians between 1900 and 2000. Life expectancy shot up from about 45 to 75. Miracle drugs swept away polio, tubercelosis, whooping cough, and scarlet fever. Public health improvements wiped out cholera, plagues and typhoid fever. Living standards rose dramatically. In the late 1940's and after millions of new Canadians and native born citizens moved from inner cities to prosperous suburbs. And the list of improvements in people's lives goes on and on.
   Governments for the first time built up social programs. Somehow these things and a great burst of Canadian culture that started in about 1960 slip under the radar screen in Bliss's history. They do the same by the way in many other writings by historians. The next writer who I'll look at is Pierre Elliott Trudeau who wrote a lot about 1950's Quebec and its history before that time. He became a prime minister who was judged an expert on Quebec, which he was. Yet he too painted a very dark picture of 1950's Quebec that was only partly true.