Why American History Is Not What They Say
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WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY: AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM also by jeff riggenbach In Praise of Decadence WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY: AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM Jeff Riggenbach Ludwig von Mises Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832; mises.org. Copyright 2009 © by Jeff Riggenbach Published under Creative Commons attribution license 3.0 ISBN: 978-1-933550-49-7 History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. —ambrose bierce The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) This book is for Suzanne, who made it possible. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Portions of Chapter Three and Chapter Five appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in Liberty magazine, on RationalReview. com, and on Antiwar.com. David J. Theroux of the Independent Institute, Andrea Millen Rich of the Center for Independent Thought, and Alexia Gilmore of the Randolph Bourne Institute were generous with their assistance during the researching and writing stages of this project. Ellen Stuttle was her usual indispensable self. And, of course, responsibility for any errors of fact, usage, or judgment in these pages is entirely my own. CONTENTS preface 15 one The Art of History 19 i. Objectivity in History 19 ii. History and Fiction 25 iii. Th e Historical Fiction of Kenneth Roberts 36 iv. Th e Historical Fiction of John Dos Passos 41 two The Historical Fiction of Gore Vidal: The “American Chronicle” Novels 49 i. Burr and Lincoln 49 ii. 1876, Empire, and Hollywood 59 iii. Hollywood and Th e Golden Age 65 three The Story of American Revisionism 71 i. Th e Birth of American Revisionism and the Rise of Harry Elmer Barnes 71 ii. Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams: From Progressivism to the New Left 78 iii. Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin: From Progressivism to Libertarianism 85 iv. James J. Martin: Historian and Pamphleteer 93 v. Th e Libertarian Historians and Th eir Colleagues on the New Left 96 four Some American Wars—Both Hot And Cold— Through Revisionist Eyes 100 i. Th e u.s. Civil War—the Revisionist View 100 ii. America in the World Wars—A Revisionist Perspective 104 iii. A Revisionist Look at America in the Cold War 110 five The Politics of the American Revisionists 114 i. “Left” and “Right,” “Conservative” and “Liberal,” Diff erentiated Historically 114 ii. Th e Decline of American Liberalism—the Early Years 123 iii. Conservative Republicans and Liberal Democrats in 19th Century America 129 iv. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Triumph of Conservatism 138 v. Herbert Hoover’s New Deal 145 vi. Th e Myth of the “Old Right” 151 vii. Th e Goldwater Anomaly 159 viii. Th e Reagan Fraud—and After 165 six The New American History Wars 174 i. Why Textbooks Matter 174 ii. Th e Breakdown of the Consensus—the Case of Howard Zinn 184 iii. American History According to Eric Foner 192 iv. Th omas E. Woods, Jr. vs. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen 196 v. History, Fiction, and Objectivity—Some Concluding Observations 203 index 207 “Now there are some who would like to rewrite history— revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” —george w. bush June 16, 2003 PPREFACEREFACE Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation’s high schools and colleges. Nor is the reason far to seek. If, as seems to be the case, these textbooks encompass one hundred percent of the infor- mation that most high school and college graduates in this country will ever encounter on the subject of American history, the American his- tory wars would appear to be well worth fighting. For what Americans know and understand about the history of the society in which they live will determine the degree of their willingness to honor and preserve its ideals and traditions. More than that: it will determine what they regard as the ideals and traditions of their society. It will determine nothing less than the kind of society they will seek to strengthen and perpetuate. Until very recently, however, the range of the conflict over Ameri- can history textbooks was narrow indeed. All sides tacitly agreed that the story of the United States was the triumphant tale of a people fer- vently devoted to peace, prosperity, and individual liberty; a people left utterly untempted by opportunities of the kind that had led so many other nations down the ignoble road of empire; a people who went to war only as a last resort and only when both individual liberty and Western Civilization itself were imperiled and at stake. There had been injustices along the way, of course—the Native Americans had been grossly mistreated, as had the African Americans. Women had been denied the vote and even the right to own property. Yet these injustices had been corrected in time, and the formerly mistreated groups had been integrated into full citizenship and full participation in the liberty, prosperity, and peace that were the birthright of every American—the very same liberty, prosperity, and peace that had made America itself a beacon of hope to the entire world. So the consensus view of American history has long had it, at any rate. And so almost all the textbooks involved in the American history 15 WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY: AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM wars waged before the 1980s had it, too. The only question at issue back then, really, was whether any given textbook gave one or another of the various formerly aggrieved groups what was felt to be its proper due. Was the suffering of the Native Americans (or the African Americans or the women) detailed at sufficient length? The many contributions the African Americans (or the women or the Native Americans) had made to American culture—contributions without which American culture would simply not be the same—were these detailed sufficient- ly? The nobility of the female (or the Native American or the African American) leaders who helped bring about recognition of their people’s rights—was this sufficiently stressed? Then, a little over a quarter-century ago, the terms of the de- bate changed—radically. One might say the opening salvo in the new American history wars was fired by Howard Zinn, in the form of a textbook entitled A People’s History of the United States. First published in 1980, this volume is still in print, was reissued in a revised, updated, “20th Anniversary Edition” in the year 2000, and has become one of the most widely influential college level textbooks on American history currently in use in this country. Today, Zinn faces intensified competi- tion, however, not only from peddlers of the traditional, America-as- pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace version of our past, but also from a number of other writers who have, in vary- ing degree, adopted the rather different view of American history that Zinn himself promotes. This alternative vision sees America’s past as a series of betrayals by political leaders of all major parties, in which the liberal ideals on which this country was founded have been gradually abandoned and replaced by precisely the sorts of illiberal ideals that America officially deplores. In effect, say Howard Zinn and a growing chorus of others, we have become the people our founding fathers warned us (and tried to protect us) against. And what may be the most significant fact about this alternative or “ revisionist” view of American history is the remark- ably hospitable reception it has enjoyed both from the general public and from the selfsame educational establishment that only a few short years ago was assiduously teaching students something else entirely. How can we account for this? Why, suddenly, is there a substantial market for a version of American history quite unlike anything most Americans had ever encountered? Why are the combatants in the cur- rent American history wars so different from each other, so different in their fundamental assumptions about America? Why are the current 16 PREFACE wars so much bloodier (figuratively speaking), so much more intense, than ever before? It seems to me that the correct answer to this question is complex and multifaceted. It seems to me that several different forces are at work here simultaneously, combining synergistically to produce the “single” effect we call “our current American history wars.” One of these forces is gen- erational change. It was in the 1980s that college and university history departments came to be dominated by a new generation of historians— historians who had earned their Ph.Ds in the 1960s and ’70s and who had been strongly influenced in their thinking about American history by a group of “ revisionist” historians, the so-called “ New Left Histori- ans,” whose books were widely popular and widely controversial at that time. These “ New Left Historians”— William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, a number of others—had in turn been strongly influenced by an earlier group of “ revisionists”—the so-called “ New Historians” or “ Progressive Historians”—whose most prominent figures included Charles A. Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes. Another of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the peren- nial American history wars was the brilliant critical and popular success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in Gore Vidal’s six-volume “American Chronicle” series of historical novels about the United States. Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984) were enormous successes. They proved beyond any doubt that the public would not rise up in indignation and smite any author who dared to question the mo- tives and the wisdom of even the most venerated American presidents.