A new year presents an immediate challenge to the historian who trains one eye on bygone eras and another on the present: How should we best manage the uncertainties of our own time? And yet, in the archives, historians constantly uncover information about the improbable and implausible events of the past – the forgotten disasters, controversies, scandals, and personal upheavals that show us we have all been here before.

Take, for instance, a December 1919 letter found in the papers of Republican foreign policy wise man Elihu Root at the Library of Congress. In the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and amid an annus horribilis filled with a global pandemic, race riots, abused civil liberties, strikes, and severe inflation of more than 15 per cent, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge can be found lamenting to Root that Wilson was in ‘no condition’ to consider reservations to the Treaty of Versailles. ‘I believe him to be much worse than the White House bulletins indicate,’ he wrote, adding in a scrawled postscript: ‘The President’s inability to carry on the government is now clear and the situation is bad. I think the country is awaking to it. A regency of [Wilson aides Joseph] Tumulty and Barney Baruch I venture to think was uncontemplated by the Constitution.’

Or visiting the Houghton Library at Harvard, read this diary entry from 31 December 1933 by William R. Castle, Jr, Herbert Hoover’s Under Secretary of State, contemplating what he saw as the horrors of the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, including his recognition of the Soviet Union, the classic rogue state:

Most of what I have written during the year has been very depressed and often bitter. I could not help it because I have been often sad and often frightened, always convinced that national policy must, if it is going to succeed, be built on what has been learned in the past. Present policies seem to me an almost total break with everything that has made America what it is. Almost I can subscribe to Senator Glass’ violent remark, probably already recorded here, ‘I can better understand how we can recognize Russia than how Russia can recognize us.

To live in times of seemingly radical change is never easy, but it helps to remember that living at the threshold of a new era is neither unprecedented nor necessarily apocalyptic – that some of our ancestors felt profound dislocation but nonetheless persevered. This is not to say that history is simply a means of sliding into the lukewarm bath of the present, inured to the possibility of calamity and tragedy, for one only needs to flip to later entries in Castle’s diary. A comment in January 1932 states that the ‘great trouble with Japan is that the nation believes its greatness depends on its military prowess. This is not true and it may well be that the military will reduce Japan to an inferior power’. Another from March 1933 observes that the newly empowered Nazis might invade Poland, but despite their anti-Soviet rhetoric, ‘they probably realize that the Russians will do anything for money, that they have no principles as we understand the word and will willingly help both sides – for a consideration’.

These scraps of paper from the past can be cautionary tales, not just historical comfort food – a reminder that the world can get radically worse and that seemingly dramatic change often masks underlying rot. As then-Secretary Hoover put it in a June 1926 press conference when commenting about the strange resilience of the Soviets after years of famine and upheaval:

Can they muddle along indefinitely as they are today? Oh! Yes, it will be a process of evolution. Gradually the commissars will become dukes, and the lesser folks will come to wear white collars. The tenor [sic] of office of most of them seems to be pretty perpetual already. They have lived under various forms of aristocracy for thousands of years in Russia and they probably will be living under some form of aristocracy a thousand years hence.

It was such a caustic aside that Hoover directed one of his assistants to clarify that the remark was not for quotation; though not, evidently, for destruction, since it ended up in a dusty folder at his presidential library in West Branch, Iowa.

Whether historian or not, another habit of the heart and mind worth cultivating through the archives is a willingness to explore one’s ideas at length – something our forebears often did and that their writing challenges us to do. Encountering a letter written by a candid correspondent less prone to distraction and unconcerned with the shibboleths of contemporary political discourse tests our modern propositions and reveals tensions more clearly than we might see them otherwise.

Lodge, one of the first three individuals to earn a PhD in History in the United States and a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, was particularly loquacious when it came to unpacking what he saw as political cant. In a 1921 letter to his friend John T. Morse, he noted that, while President Warren G. Harding had ‘an affection for odd words which I do not share, words like “normalcy” and instead of saying that after the election that the League [of Nations] was dead that it was “deceased”,’ it was not the worst quality.

Americans had just lived through eight years of Wilson, he noted, a man ‘who wrote English very well without ever saying anything and who was also a phrase-maker, and some of whose phrases, like “self-determination”, have probably caused more human suffering and the loss of more lives needlessly than the phrases of anybody else whom I happen to recall’. A man, he argued, ‘may not write English well and yet may be a good President. Contemporaries of Lincoln, who represented the same people whom you saw at your dinner club, had a very poor opinion of him when he was nominated’. Harding, who presided over the Teapot Dome Scandal among other debacles, was no Lincoln – but the juxtaposition should give us pause about what makes a great leader.

More pertinently, even as Lodge criticised ‘self-determination’, he also defended representative self-government in the same letter – a seeming contradiction to us today:

I probably realize the shortcomings of democracy as a system of government as well as anybody can. I have lived and worked with it now for nearly 40 years. I know what the defects are, but as I run my eye over the history of my own time, I fail to see anything that has worked out as well on the whole. Is it possible to conceive of more ghastly failures than the autocracies of Austria, Germany and Russia? Look at them today.

Such comments should spur us to reflect upon what Lodge might have meant.

The raw layers of partisanship and personal animus towards Wilson exist alongside the principles and policies at stake. Lodge, a conservative in the mould of Alexander Hamilton, was a nationalist and an internationalist. An ardent believer in Anglo-Saxon superiority, he had supported America’s imperial expansion in 1898 and its entry into the First World War on the side of the Allies in 1917. He wanted to see Germany, which he believed represented ‘materialist’ values, constrained – even if it took a security commitment to Britain and France. He clearly did not lament the fall of the old autocracies and believed in the power of constitutional, representative government. He also championed the creation of new independent national states, such as Poland, as ‘of a greater importance for the future peace of the world than anything else’.

At the same time, however, the unresolved questions of seemingly indefensible national borders and minority populations scattered across contested territory – to say nothing of the application of self-determination to many non-Europeans – gnawed at him. One can reframe his perspective in light of the bloody fighting and revolutions raging across Eastern Europe and the Middle East through 1923 as ‘the First World War failed to end’ as the historian Robert Gerwarth puts it. Among those conflicts was the Polish-Soviet War, which raged from the River Dnieper in Ukraine to Warsaw, a nearly forgotten war that killed over 100,000 people between 1919 to 1921. Lodge, inveighing against the League of Nations in the summer of 1920 as the Soviets advanced on the Polish capital, argued that signing up without reservations would force the United States to ‘send over, perhaps, several hundred thousand – perhaps a million of our men and spend billions’ to repel the Soviets from Poland, all without congressional sanction.

By putting the matter so baldly on paper and leaving it for us to encounter it over a century later, Lodge has done us a service: exposing an enduring debate that stretches from the Treaty of Versailles to George H.W. Bush’s Chicken Kiev speech to today, when the largest war in Europe in 70 years forces us to ask whether we believe that two fundamental principles are divisible or inseparable, and what the West’s obligations might be.

Finally, reading other people’s mail connects us in joy and sorrow to those who came before us – we should do well to prepare for similarly unexpected events.

For me, leafing through the correspondence of these men on paper or looking through the spin of a microfilm reel is akin to speeding through someone’s else’s life and experiencing their triumphs and tragedies. Even as they debate issues that seem impossibly abstruse – bimetallism, political patronage in customs houses, obscure factional disputes among Mugwumps, Half-Breeds, Old Guard, Bourbons, and the Sons of the Wild Jackass – their most personal writing has an immediacy that could have been set to paper yesterday.

After the death of my twin daughters, born prematurely in the summer of 2022, the archives yielded the shock of recognition again and again. Here was Secretary of State John Hay’s correspondence dealing with the aftermath of the tragic death of his older son Adelbert. There, too, was Lodge, comforting President Calvin Coolidge after his 16-year old namesake died of an infected blood blister from a game of tennis on the White House courts – and reflecting upon the loss of his own son Bay:

Since then you have passed into the shadow of a terrible shadow. The sympathy of a nation rose up around you, but I could not refrain from joining mine in that of the multitude because it seemed to me that the blow which has fallen so heavily, so suddenly upon you and Mrs. Coolidge came to me with peculiar force. In 1909 I lost my eldest son. He was in the prime of life, a career of unusual promise opening up before him. He and I were away together on a remote and lonely island. He died suddenly in my arms by a sudden stroke of heart disease. It seemed to me that I knew only too well the suffering which you and Mrs. Coolidge were enduring and I sent messages wholly inadequate and helpless because my own memories were stirred and my own heart so deeply moved by the sense of your loss – the loss of youth, handsome, manly, beloved youth.

Castle, too, knew loss, losing his daughter to acute pneumonia just weeks before her 28th birthday. Amid serious crises in China and Europe, he recorded, ‘The last month has been out, so far as work is concerned. If war had begun it would not have interested us. Rosamond died on 26 February, after an illness of only a few days. Life will never be the same for us.’ Her husband, the war hero Alan Winslow, died a little more than a year later after falling from a hotel window, leaving Castle and his wife to take in and raise their three grandsons: a seven-year old and two four-year old twins.

Here, too, the proximity to the past through the letters and diaries that were second nature to the politicians, diplomats, journalists, writers, and everyday people of yesteryear speak to us.

Who can fail to be moved by the final two journal entries from Hay’s diary at the Library of Congress, written as he lay dying at his home in New Hampshire in 1905? The former secretary to President Lincoln, he wrote about a dream in which he encountered his old hero, ‘very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness’, who gave him some ‘unimportant letters to answer’. On the next day, his last, Hay reflected upon the totality of his time on Earth:

I say to myself that I should not rebel at the thought of my life ending at this time. I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. I have lived my life. I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualification, which may I suppose be called fame. By mere length of service I shall occupy a modest place in the history of my times. If I were to live several years more, I should probably add nothing to my existing reputation, which I cannot reasonably expect any further enjoyment of life, such as falls to the lot of old men in sound health. I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet – instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness and gained nearly all the great prizes.

One can only hope that we will approach our own ends with a similar sense of satisfaction, even if dispassionate stoicism proves impossible. As Wordsworth put it, ‘Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind; / In the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be; / In the soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering; / In the faith that looks through death, / In the years that bring the philosophic mind.’

If headlines around the world are any indication, 2025 is already set to be a year of radical uncertainty. To understand that world and to navigate it, we would be well served to embrace the old slogan of the Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers: ad fontes – back to the sources. Hopefully, we will leave some of our own to guide those who come after us.