Clio's New Overalls

Extract

The general idea of my title was hatched some years ago for an after-dinner speech at the annual meeting of the Midwest Economic Association. It proved to have been hatched from a double-yoked egg. In the first place some of the younger members, nurtured in the New Deal and the labour developments of the late thirties, said there was a printer's error on the programme. My title should be, not CLIO, but CIO. In the second place, the toastmaster primed himself for introducing me by looking Clio up in the Encyclopædia. He was baffled to learn that it is “a shell-less pelagic mollusc in the class Pteropod. A small spindle-shanked animal with six tentacles on its head. It forms the principal part of the food of some species of whales.” Being brought up on short-run phenomena, he read no further. Had he persisted he would, of course, have discovered that another Clio was one of the nine Greek muses; that she got her Ph.D. for a thesis on epic verse, then settled down to that other branch of poetic licence, history; and that she was thus an eternally young lady who never forgot a date.

From the evidence of sculpture and pottery it seems clear that Clio, unlike Venus, always wore clothes, choosing her apparel to fit the story she was writing. When dealing with military history she dressed like an Amazon, spear and shield and all; for political and constitutional history she had a whole clothes-closet—a crown and a purple coronation robe, a black gown which made her look like Portia, a knee-length coat copied later by southern senators, also miscellaneous wigs, cloaks, and daggers; the history of art and literature called for a corduroy tunic and flat-heeled buskins; for religious history she was garbed like a priestess; and when psychiatry was invented she experimented at length to see what went best with a couch. When, having passed through the drum and trumpet stage of history writing, she got round to economic history, she donned overalls: blue jeans, with copper rivets, pockets everywhere, white stitching, and union-made label. The get-up did not look divine, or even muse-like, especially from the back. But for the job in hand it has proved functionally well suited, and Clio at work has chalked up a creditable record of achievement during three quarters of a century's full employment of all her resources. It is about that record that I want to talk this afternoon.