I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption. – Thomas Jefferson.
1704: Apalachee Massacre. South Carolina creates the first slave patrols, which serve to apprehend and return runaway slaves to their owners and deter slave revolts.
1705: Several colonies pass laws to prevent runaways from fleeing to Canada. Virginia limits the civil and land rights of Indians and Africans, based on blood degree: 1/2 Native ancestry = mulatto; 1/8 African ancestry = Black.
1706: Reverend Cotton Mather teaches Northern slaves that they are sinners, that slave owners perform the “greatest kindness” by overseeing their conversion to Christianity and that their property will be unaffected by conversion.
1718: Parliament passes the Transportation Act, which results in the expulsion of over 50,000 convicts and paupers, a quarter of all British emigrants to North America during the eighteenth century.
1723: Virginia removes all penalties for the killing of slaves during “correction.”
1740: Following the unsuccessful Stono Rebellion, the Negro Law of South Carolina codifies white supremacy. It prohibits enslaved Africans from growing their own food, learning to read, moving freely, assembling in groups, or earning money. It authorizes white slavers to kill slaves for being “rebellious.” Other colonies copy the law.
1776- 1860: Abortion is viewed as socially unacceptable but remains legal in most states.
1780: Thomas Jefferson writes, “…if we are to wage a campaign against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River.”
1783: The revolutionary war ends. Treaties define U.S. territory with no reference to Native people. In the first example of reparations, Belinda Royall successfully sues for a pension from her former slave master.
1787:Massacre of Cherokee peace chiefs. The new government identifies Indian tribes as sovereign nations and establishes the first formal treaties. The Constitution ensures that the international slave trade cannot end for twenty years and grants states the power to establish standards for voting rights. White, Protestant, adult, property-owning males (about 6% of the population) are the only group allowed to vote. Some states require membership in a specified religion. The “Three-fifths Compromise”, which counts three out of every five slaves as people, gives the South a third more Congressional seats and electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored. As a result, these states will have disproportionate influence on the presidency and Supreme Court for over fifty years. After the Civil War, when former slaves count as full persons, the Southern states will gain twenty congressional seats.
1789: Congress insists that Americans hold possession of all territory east of the Mississippi River, argues that tribes which had supported the British forfeit any claim to territory and places the Secretary of War in charge of Indian affairs.
1790-1800: Nearly 100,000 immigrants enter the country, including 20,000 Catholic refugees fleeing political repression in France, Santo Domingo (Haiti) and Ireland.
1790: All foreign “free white persons” are naturalized, and only two years residency is required before one can become a citizen. Freed male slaves can vote in four states. Women carry the legal status of their husbands. Property-owning women can vote in New Jersey only. New York is the only state with no restrictions on civic participation based on religion. The nation’s first census recognizes six categories: (1) the head of each household; (2) free white males over sixteen; (3) free white males under sixteen; (4) free white females; (5) all other free white persons by sex and color; and (6) slaves. Freed blacks begin to found their own churches.
1791: The first Constitutional Amendment stipulates that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. However, since it only specifies what the federal government can or cannot do, not what the states can do, establishment does not immediately disappear everywhere. Congregationalism will continue in New England. The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms, primarily to allay fears of armed black uprisings. Virginian Robert Carter begins to free his 500 slaves and is forced to leave the state.
1792: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claims that the European Doctrine of Discovery is international law, applicable to the new U.S. government as well.
1792–1856: Various states abolish property qualifications for white men but retain them for blacks. Tax-paying qualifications will remain in five states until 1860 and survive in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island into the 20th century. Free black males lose the right to vote in several Northern states.
1793: The first Fugitive Slave Act authorizes local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners and impose penalties on anyone who aids in their flight. The white South, usually vocal in defense of local rights, favors robust national action. Several Northern states pass laws prohibiting state officials from aiding in the capture of fugitives.
1795: The government extends the residency requirement to five years and encourages Indians to embrace mainstream white customs so they can assimilate into American society. The Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes do so, becoming known as the “five civilized tribes.”
1796: The first economic depression, or panic, occurs, as they will in 1796, 1815, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1890, 1901, 1907, 1920, 1929 and 2008.
1798: Congress raises the residency requirement to 14 years. Federalists, accusing Republicans of being in league with France against their own country’s government, pass the four Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Enemies Act permits the government to arrest and deport all male citizens of an enemy nation in the event of war, while the Alien Friends Act allows deportation of any non-citizen suspected of plotting against the government, even in peacetime. Only ten years after freedom of speech becomes part of the Constitution, the Sedition Act restricts speech that is critical of the federal government and results in the prosecution of many newspaper owners.
History…does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. — James Baldwin
Item # one: June 2019. A Salvadoran father and his daughter drown trying to cross the Rio Grande River. Children endure inhuman conditions in concentration camps while their parents are deported. Toddlers are brought into court without translators. Mothers are told to drink from toilets. How, we wonder, can our government treat people with such gratuitous cruelty? Has it ever been this bad? Surely, say the pundits and many innocent liberals, this is not who we are!
Item # 2:July 4th, 2019. While Trumpus and his stormtroopers churn up the National Mall and the streets of Washington with military hardware, I take a break from writing and go for a walk in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery. A series of chance turns takes me to the grave of Fred Korematsu, the Japanese American who fought his conviction for evading internment in World War Two concentration camps for forty years.
Item # 3:June 2021. On “Meet the Press”, Chuck Todd mentions Critical Race Theory:
…parents are saying, “Hey, don’t make my kid feel guilty”…And I know a parent of color is going, “What are you talking about?”
Nikole Hannah-Jones responds:
You said, “parents,” and then you said, “parents of color.”
Item # 4:January 2022. Mitch McConnell snorts,
African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.
I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.
If you don’t get the irony, you really need to read this and take some time – lots of time – to consider how the nation has determined exactly who is privileged to live within the pale of “us” – the good, the true, the exceptional, the innocent – and who is not, how often those definitions have changed, and how violently whites have responded to them.
…the immigrant plays a curiously ambiguous role in the narrative of American innocence. Immigrants are outsiders who in aspiring (or threatening) to be in transition to becoming insiders, force insiders to question something we quite ambiguously refer to as the American Dream. To the Paranoid Imagination, however, they threaten to pollute that dream.
A further ambiguity is that their condition is qualified by their skin color (and of course, for generations, by their gender, their sexual preferences and the degree of choice they had to come to this land – as conquerors, slaves, indentured servants, refugees, unskilled workers, graduate students or anti-communists). The story of American immigration announces a welcome to all that is enshrined on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” There may be no poetic line better known in the entire world. But this story – the Melting Pot, or the Ellis Island myth – is rife with such contradictions that for centuries its adherents have required an entire mythology to resolve them – a massive, ongoing, national, cognitive dissonance. Myths are powerful. When facts meet myth, it is the truth that must change to fit the myth.
One could also argue for the simple statement that the story of American immigration has always been about those (white) people who were welcomed and those others, including the conditionally white, who were merely tolerated.
Immigrants – those who are just arriving, and especially those of darker skin – also provide a convenient mirror for those who desperately need to convince themselves that they are the real Americans, that they are “nativists.” Such people consumed the earliest versions of the myth of American Innocence, in which the story, quite early on, utterly forgot about the actual, original inhabitants of the land.
We mythologists think in terms of the growth and triumph of a grand story Americans tell themselves about themselves, followed by its tantalizingly slow dissolution, along with the sense of how newer, more inclusive stories have yet to be formed. Individual people have always populated this story, have suffered, risen up against it or perpetrated inconceivably terrible violence to reconfirm it. But seen from this perspective – and we have to – all the players in this play, whether innocent or guilty, have been the victims of historical, generational trauma. And, as players in this story, they embody it for all of us. We are all Americans. No one is completely innocent, and no one has completely escaped the trauma.
Mythologists understand that every national narrative has its shadow, the part of the story we have suppressed so deeply that we’ve forgotten it, perhaps out of fear of what I have called the “return of the repressed” (see Chapter Four of my book). The shadow of E Pluribus Unum insists that we can’t speak about how we became one people without considering settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, capitalism and the construction of “whiteness.” We must address how those privileged enough to achieve entrance within the pale were granted permission to help determine who was outside the pale, how some might be admitted within the pale, and how they might be forced to impale others on the projection wall of otherness. We must understand how defining others as outside has been the primary way in which most of us have known who we are on the inside.
The Myth of American Innocence, built up as it was on a mountain of contradictions, is inherently unstable. In every generation, groups of people – the “Others” – rise up to point out these flaws in the national story and demand inclusion. In reaction, privileged groups circle the wagons to reaffirm the old stories, occasionally making the minimal possible effort to modify them.
Why should everyone become familiar with these events? What’s the big deal? Perhaps in looking at them from the perspectives of women, people of color, Native Americans, Muslims, people of unconventional sex or gender, disabled people or very recent immigrants, we can understand the base mode of American identity (white, male, Christian, able and heterosexual), why so many of us cling to it so tenaciously, why so many are so deeply threatened by anyone who questions it, why they persist in seeing people as “the Other”, and why they go to such efforts to try and maintain this story, even to the extent of supporting con-artist politicians and preachers who steal them blind. This of course is the story that Howard Zinn told in A People’s History of the United States. For a related story – how intellectuals, especially professional historians, have and continue to go to such great lengths to ignore or discredit writers like Zinn, see my essay, Old White Men: Historians as the Gatekeepers of American Myth.
We can read this story depending on the deeper narratives we subscribe to. Optimists will claim, “Look how far we’ve come!”, while pessimists (or realists) will see repeated examples of oligarchs persistently manipulating the dreams and desires of millions for their own purposes. Yes, it has been this bad before, and no, we cannot become who we were meant to be (if we can still think in such terms) without fully acknowledging who we are and who we have been.
So here is a detailed timeline of how America has negotiated that fine line – the border – between “us” and “them.” It’s a long and exhausting list, but I suggest that it falls into the “Don’t look away! Bear witness!” category. These events happened to real people. Notice two patterns of events that have regularly pointed out the discrepancies between values and norms, or between official policy and actual behavior, or between mythic narrative and reality:
1 – The regular occurrence of mass, genocidal violence (the word “mob” appears 25 times, “riot” 38 times and “massacre” 122 times), almost exclusively perpetrated by white people.
2 – The activity of the Supreme Court (composed for most of its existence by old, white – and for its first 70 years, primarily slave-owning – men) in the intermittent expansion and contraction of definitions of who is and who isn’t an American with full rights and freedoms:
Please take your time as you read, and consider Thom Gunn’s poem at the National AIDS Memorial in Golden Gate Park:
Walker within this circle, pause. Although they all died of one cause, Remember how their lives were dense With fine, compacted difference.
The 16th and 17th Centuries
1452: Pope Nicholas V issues the papal bull Dum Diversas, which authorizes Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and consign them to “perpetual servitude”. Further bulls will determine that European powers may claim land not inhabited by Christians. France and England will also use this “Doctrine of Discovery” to justify their claims on the New World.
1507: Books begin to use the word “America” to describe the entire New World.
1525-1866: 12.5 million African slaves (30% of whom are Muslim) will be shipped to the New World, of whom 10.7 million will survive the Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. 388,000 will be shipped directly to North America. They will produce ten million offspring, of whom four million will be alive at the start of the Civil War.
1537: Pope Paul III forbids the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
1539: Hernando de Soto executes 200 Timucuan warriors in the Napituca massacre.
1619: The first African slaves arrive. Virginia recognizes the Church of England (Anglicanism) as its official religion.
1622:The Powhatan uprising kills a sixth of the English settlers, who retaliate by ordering the extermination of all Powhatans. In the Pamunkey Massacre, the English poison the wine at a peace conference with Powhatan leaders, killing 250.
1624: Of the 300 children shipped from Britain to Virginia between 1619 and 1622, only 12 are still alive. One-fifth of New England immigrants are indentured servants.
1627: Carib slaves are brought to Jamestown from the West Indies. The Puritans ban maypoles.
1641: The Dutch governor of Manhattan offers a bounty for Indian scalps. The Puritan churches are radically democratic, rejecting centralized authority. Their Massachusetts Body of Liberties is the first modern bill of rights, but it justifies slavery, which will be legal in the state until 1780.
1650: Puritans ban William Pynchon’s book The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.
1656: The first Quakers arriving in America are beaten and imprisoned. Any ship arriving with Quakers on board is fined and forced to return them. Any male Quaker caught in Massachusetts will lose his right ear. Four will be hanged.
1657: New Netherlands upholds the Dutch Reformed Church and refuses to allow other denominations to establish churches.
1661: The Spanish outlaw Pueblo ceremonies in New Mexico.
1662: Virginia determines the free-or-slave status of all people born in the colony according to the race of the mother only and removes any penalties for raping Black women. With this change, enslaved people are forever, while servants completing their indenture will be freed with money and land.
1676:Occaneechi,Peskeompscut and Narragansett massacres. Bacon’s Rebellion occurs in Virginia. The alliance between white and black indentured servants nearly destroys Jamestown. Upon regaining control, the government responds by hardening the racial caste system to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings.
1680: The Pueblo Revolt drives the Spanish out of New Mexico.
1691: Virginia outlaws marriage between blacks and whites.
1693: The Salem witch trials occur. Philadelphia police are empowered to stop and detain any Black person seen wandering about.
1693-1704:The Spanish re-conquer New Mexico. The American colonies are importing over 20 million pounds of mostly slave-grown tobacco per year to England.
Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein
The visionary is the only true realist. – Federico Fellini
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. – W.B. Yeats
In remembrance is the beginning of redemption. – The Baal Shem Tov
Poetry is something more scientific and serious than history. – Aristotle
We are at the end of an age. We exist uncomfortably between those years when our historian gatekeepers provided stories about ourselves with a sense of shared meaning, and some unknown future when new stories might arise to express what we might become.
American culture raises sociopaths and psychopaths to the highest levels. As long as we prioritize stories of heroism, innocence, good intentions and exceptionalism (and still refuse to address the darker stories of white supremacy, empire, brutality and alienation below them), we will always have intellectuals who will be willing to police the boundaries of memory and acceptable thinking. Some of them will rise to become primary gatekeepers because they will enjoy manipulating other people; some for the rewards they will receive; and others because they will have been so well educated as to actually share those beliefs. This third group has always been the more persuasive. We need to imagine something better.
Those revisionists (from Beard to Zinn and beyond) who began to tell the truth about American history (from Columbus to Viet Nam and beyond) provided the first necessary step in a long process of waking up. Zinn wrote that memory
…can liberate us when the present seems an irrevocable fact of nature. Memory can remind us of possibilities that we have forgotten, and history can suggest to us alternatives that we would never otherwise consider…the past suggests what can be, not what must be. It shows not all of what is necessary, but some of what is possible…The only way to compensate for the bullying nature of history is to behave as if we are freer than our “rational” calculations tell us we are.
So here is something for us to do: we can begin the withdrawal of allegiance from the state and its machines of war, from business and its ferocious drive for profit, from all states…all dogmas. We can begin to suggest, and to act out, alternative ways of living with one another. It is possible…that we can be a cause of change, that coming generations will have a new history.
Now it is possible, despite all the censoring, de-platforming and marginalizing that still continues and is actually increasing, to read the texts and know the dark truth of who we actually are as a nation and how the story of welcoming the Other into the Polis continues its agonizingly slow process.
But a second step is equally necessary.
Our task is to do more than simply deconstruct outmoded belief systems. They hold us not merely because of generations of indoctrination, but because of their mythic content. They grab us, as all myths do, because they refer to profound truths at the core of things. Although those truths have been corrupted to serve a culture of death, they still remain truths, and they remain accessible through the creative imagination. The methods for doing so are ritual, art and seeing through – de-literalizing. It means telling the same stories but reframing them until we discover their essence. In Native American terms, we will need to search for our original medicine.
America provides a unique challenge in the study of myth because, except for Native stories, our myths do not arise from this ground, nor do they easily invite us to the work of the soul. Still, they have no less a hold on us because they are only ten or fifteen generations old. Understanding their contradictions will not make them go away. But if we assume telos – purpose – we must imagine that even the myths of American innocence and violent redemption can lead us to the universal archetypes. If we can hold the tension of these opposites (the myths and the realities) perhaps we can begin to re-articulate meaning in a world that is descending alternately into chaos and fascism. If we cannot disengage from our myths, then we need to look deeper into them.
To speculate on the deeper meaning of our civil religion is to risk falling into a morass of cliché. For 400 years, apologists from preachers and dime novelists to Radio Free Europe and Tucker Carlson have presented an America divinely ordained to defend freedom (or: assassinations and military coups), nurture democracy (repress self-determination), spread prosperity (steal resources) and inspire opportunity (enforce oppression). But this mythic language tugs at our emotions. Even when we know better, we want America to be what it claims to be – we want to believe – or disappointed, we become cynical and disengaged.
But what if America were born so that freedom could spread everywhere some day? What if our uniquely good fortune has been the container for a story that has not yet been told? Why not look at history from the perspective of mythology, archetypal psychology and indigenous wisdom? What if we were to move from history to mystery?
My kind of history tries to seek out the mythic patterns that underlie events and ideas in areas as diverse as Psychology, Literature, Religion, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, American Studies and Popular Culture. The writers I like proudly admit to being amateurs (Latin: amare, “to love”); we love stories. We aren’t scientists or theologians, but like Heinrich Zimmer, reckless dilettantes (“to take delight”). He writes:
The moment we abandon this dilettante attitude toward the images…to feel certain about their proper interpretation…we deprive ourselves of the quickening contact, the demonic and inspiring assault…What characterizes the dilettante is his delight in the always preliminary nature of his never-to-be-culminated understanding…We can never exhaust the depths – of that we may be certain…a cupped handful of the fresh waters of life is sweeter than a whole reservoir of dogma…
Our American cosmogony begins, as all do, with the original “deities” (the Pilgrims and founding fathers) who created a world out of “nothing.” Taking a radical perspective, we acknowledge that from the start, their “city on a hill” functioned to steal, concentrate and perpetuate wealth. American history becomes a series of conquests, painful expansions of freedom and counter-measures to protect privilege, culminating in today’s bleak realities. The rich vs. the poor, or the predatory and paranoid imaginations vs. the return of the repressed.
Alternatively, we can take a philosophical approach. Jacob Needleman insisted that the founding fathers were adherents of a timeless wisdom who created a system to “allow men and women to seek their own higher principles within themselves.” The nation was formed of unique ideals and potentials, not from ethnicity; and this explains its universal appeal, even if those ideals have been perverted into their opposites. The American Dream vs. the nightmare of dreams deferred.
Or we can muse poetically about what is approaching, if we could only recognize its song. Time (Kronos) vs. Memory (Mnemosyne). From this perspective, we could read our history as a baffling, painful, contraction- and contradiction-filled birth passage in which the literal has always hinted at the symbolic.
An unveiled look at American history reveals an enormous catalogue of injustice. As painful as it is to contemplate, knowing the truth enables us to see how the dominant myths of innocence and good intentions were constructed to serve the privileged few. But we can also use history as a springboard for imagining the story that has yet to manifest. In two profound essays, Psychologist Stephen Diggs and journalist Michael Ventura do that. Diggs (“Alchemy of the Blues”) proposes
…two histories of America: one is conscious and economic, the other unconscious and alchemical. Nowhere is this experienced more than in race. Africans were stolen into American slavery to satisfy the conscious economic desire to create wealth but also to satisfy the unconscious alchemical desire for psychological transformation…saving the Western soul from its psychotic flight from the body.
This story describes and predicts America’s slow process of transformation and descent from the Apollonian heights of the heroic, isolated ego and the abstract, distanced killing of life. It tells of America’s return to its body, to the communal experience of shared joy and suffering – through the unique forms of music created on this continent.
Michael Ventura’s “Hear That Long Snake Moan” is indispensable to understanding this secret history of America. You can read it here. He writes:
Every true work of culture is a work of resurrection, a work of remembrance that creates the remembered moment anew and blends it with the present moment to create the possibilities of the future…(This) is the story of how the American sense of the body changed and deepened in the twentieth century – how Americans began the slow, painful process, still barely started now, of transcending the mind-body split they’d inherited from European culture.
This was the first necessary step in a process of healing that has been taking place at the deepest levels of our culture ever since, and that continues its difficult way…It is the great strength of this music that it has been able both to reveal the disease and further its healing. And the disease, again and again, whether manifesting itself as racism or an armaments race, is the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh.
The history of America is, as much as it is anything, the history of the American body as it sought to unite with its spirit, with its consciousness, to heal itself and to stand against the enormous forces that work to destroy a Westerner’s relationship to his, to her, own flesh. This music, largely unaware of itself; carried forward through the momentum of deeply rooted instinct; contradicting itself in many places; perverting its own purposes in many instances; sinking many times under the weight of its own intensity…and trivializing its own meanings at many a crucial turn – this music yet rushed and rushes through every area of this country’s life in an aural “great awakening” all its own, to quicken the body and excite the spirit, and, quite literally, to waken the dead.
That’s my kind of history. Here is some more:
When geometric diagrams and digits Are no longer the keys to living things, When people who go about singing or kissing Know deeper things than the great scholars, When society is returned once moreTo unimprisoned life, and to the universe, And when light and darkness mate Once more and make something entirely transparent, And people see in poems and fairy tales The true history of the world, Then our entire twisted nature will turn And run when a single secret word is spoken. –Novalis (Trans. Robert Bly)
This is not the age of information. This is not the age of information. Forget the news, and the radio, and the blurred screen. This is the time of loaves and fishes. People are hungry and one good word is bread for a thousand. — David Whyte
After “The Vietnam War,” I’ll have to lie low. A lot of people will think I’m a Commie pinko, and a lot of people will think I’m a right-wing nutcase, and that’s sort of the way it goes…I want to bring everybody in. – Ken Burns
All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. – Frank Herbert
…and academics in offstage clothes who watch, say nothing, and think they know, because they do not drink wine in the ordinary bars. – Antonio Machado
Academic historians, of course, whether consensus gatekeepers or leftist revisionists not named Zinn, have little impact on anyone (outside of the future gatekeepers they instruct), because their books don’t sell much. They don’t dirty themselves in the world where politics, popular art and entertainment have become almost indistinguishable.
That’s mostly the job and privilege of biographers and creators of historical fiction – gifted and ambitious writers who speak directly to the people – to convey digestible versions of American myth to mass audiences. The novelist E.L. Doctorow wrote, “The historian will tell you what happened; the novelist will tell you what it felt like”. Vladimir Nabokov, however, wrote:
Can anybody be so naïve as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? Certainly not…The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales.
Another novelist, novelist Hilary Mantel, writes that “history is not the past – it is the method we’ve evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past.”
We also have the genre of “popular” historians who emphasize consensus narratives and heroic personalities. This group includes Bruce Catton, Stephen Ambrose, Jill Lepore, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Ron Chernow (whose sanitized Alexander Hamilton has been criticized as simplistic hagiography) and “Lost Cause” popularizer Shelby Foote. Some academics have demeaned popular history as “a seductive and captivating distraction that opens the heart but castrates the mind.”
Two popular historians have attained the status of household name. For better or worse, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln has sold over 2.2 million copies and spawned an entire series (Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing Patton, Killing Reagan, Killing the Rising Sun). Each has sold over a million copies. Andrew Bacevich laments that O’Reilly Is America’s best-selling historian:
In effect, professional historians have ceded the field to a new group of bards and minstrels. So the bestselling “historian” in the United States today is Bill O’Reilly…Were Donald Trump given to reading books, he would likely find O’Reilly’s both accessible and agreeable. But O’Reilly is in the entertainment business.
I would argue that whenever history books (popular, fictional or academic) set out to confirm the basic premises of our national mythology, all it takes is a decent writing style to make them “entertaining.” We want – sometimes desperately – to have our myths confirmed.
Finally, we have Ken Burns, and his massively popular (and massively promoted) historical documentaries. Time Magazine called him “the master film chronicler of America’s past”. Stephen Ambrose has said that “more Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source.” Since he is America’s most famous historian, we need to spend some time on him.
His vast field of interests and subjects have opened him to much criticism, that he has consistently minimized alternative voices in favor of a highly sanitized vision of American exceptionalism. His hugely popular and influential The Civil War claims that the war was caused not by slavery but by a failure to compromise, that the Confederacy fought for a noble cause. He gave Shelby Foote 45 minutes of screen time and allowed him to praise the brute Nathan Bedford Forrest and idolize the slaveowner Robert E. Lee. Irrelevant? A quick image search for the series reveals four types: romantic pictures of canons, iconic 19th-century photos, pictures of Burns and pictures of Foote.
David Harlan writes that “Burns is a traditional liberal, clinging to that narrow ledge of psychic landscape that lies between the capacity for doubt and the will to believe.” Since Burns seems to believe in the possibility of national redemption, he is willing to discount or completely ignore radical critiques of America. And, since he really wants us all to get along with each other, his typical stance is to situate himself right in the center and create false equivalencies. “In their ostentatious rejection of ideology,” writes Alex Shephard,
…they (Burns and his co-writers) have sneakily put forth their own: that these rival perspectives are of equal value…This is Burns’s reconciliation in action…the Confederates were just as human as the Union soldiers, and presented in the same sentimental light. The problem, as Charlottesville made abundantly clear, is that those divisions still define American life and keep roaring back.
Leon Litwack noted how the last episode jumps ahead to the gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans, at Gettysburg, in 1913 and 1938. The effect is “to underscore and celebrate national reunification and the birth of the modern American nation, while ignoring the brutality, violence, and racial repression on which that reconciliation rested.” Eric Foner, similarly, wrote that “Burns privileges a merely national concern over the great human drama of emancipation.”
Burns amplified his gatekeeping role in his series on the Vietnam war, which, writes Jeffrey Kimball,
…gathers testimony from over eighty people, including United States soldiers, intelligence officials, politicians, journalists, and an anti-war activist or two…In their zeal to reconcile these various factions, however, Burns and Novick handle division with kid gloves. They portray it, sure, but mournfully, as a kind of unavoidable, human tragedy. There’s a reluctance to assert that these divisions grow out of real forces that continue to influence American culture…While it can’t forgive the presidents who lied, it’s too forgiving of everyone else…It also betrays a flawed conception at the heart of Burns’s enterprise…a requiem for a time that never really existed – a period before the 1960s, when this country was supposedly unified.
His coverage of the antiwar movement has been described as “inaccurate, disjointed, incomplete, and fundamentally negative”. He never interviewed Zinn, Chomsky or any other radical historian. If he had, he might have heard Chomsky argue that America invaded Viet Nam, to prevent it “…from becoming a successful model of economic and social development…”
Burns completely ignored the questions of U.S. imperialism, the causes of the Cold War and capitalist economic motives in favor of the feel-good mythology of benign intentions and crusading idealism gone wrong. He portrayed this vast tragedy in exactly the same terms as any other centrist voice: We screwed up, but we meant well. His introductory statement – “It was begun in good faith by decent people…” – is the quintessential expression of the myth of American innocence.
The series on Country Music danced cynically around the issues of race. To not acknowledge the popularity of reactionary politicians from Tom Watson to George Wallace to Trumpus among Country fans was a sin of omission. Most recently, his series on Ernest Hemingway had plenty of time to address the writer’s lifelong leftist politics but chose instead to give excessive attention to his love life.
Burns’ work, while immensely entertaining, has established itself as a predictable, uncontroversial and much more palatable version of the MAGA narrative that surprised liberals, seemingly arising spontaneously in 2016. In fact, that narrative had been nurtured not only by right wing media and televangelists but also by centrist historians.
Meanwhile, even when those centrists get it right, they may still have to negotiate the real world of politics. In 1983 a coalition of academics warned that the U.S. was falling behind other nations and needed to define goals for history curricula. By 1994, however, a backlash deploring “political correctness” led to the U.S. Senate voting 99-1 for a resolution disavowing the proposed standards and demanding that any future guidelines show “a decent respect for the contributions of Western civilization”. Further pressure resulted in the Department of Education destroying 300,000 copies of a pamphlet, Helping Your Child Learn History.
As mythology trumps facts, Academia reflects politics. Despite the common notion that university history departments are filled with younger progressives, those gatekeepers who have proudly proclaimed their conservative prejudices have continued to dominate intellectual discourse around empire, white supremacy and American innocence. The great majority have attended or taught at Ivy League universities: George Kennan (Princeton), Gil Troy (Harvard), Robert Tucker (Johns Hopkins), Robert Maddox (Penn. State), Bruce Catton (Oberlin), Victor Hanson (Stanford), Michel Oren (Harvard), Donald Kagan (Brown), Daniel Boorstin (Harvard), Daniel Yergin (Yale), C.V. Woodward (Yale), Niall Ferguson (Harvard), Oscar Handlin (Harvard), Timothy Snyder (Harvard, Yale), Kimberly Kagan (Yale), Fred Kagan (Yale), George Nash (Harvard), Richard Pipes (Harvard), Daniel Pipes (Harvard), Paul Gottfried (Yale), Walter Lord (Yale), Herbert Feis (Harvard) and Sean Willentz (Yale).
Ivy League historians such as these have instructed fifteen U.S. Presidents; all but one of the current Supreme Court Justices; six of Biden’s fifteen Cabinet members; politicians Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), Elise Stefanik (Harvard), J.D.Vance (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale), Ben Sasse (Harvard), Mitt Romney (Harvard), Amy Klobuchar (Yale), Kirstin Gillibrand (Dartmouth), Chuck Schumer (Harvard) and Tom Cotton (Harvard); and notable warmongers Madeleine Albright (Columbia), William Colby (Princeton), Zbigniew Brzezinski (Harvard), Dick Cheney (Yale), both George Bush’s (Yale), Prescott Bush (Yale), Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), Anthony Blinken (Harvard), Max Boot (Yale), Michael Novak (Harvard), Nathan Glazer (Harvard), Steve Bannon (Harvard), Norman Podhoretz (Columbia), George Schulz (Princeton), Jeane Kirkpatrick (Columbia), Richard Perle (Princeton), Bill Kristol (Harvard), Charles Krauthammer (Harvard), Laura Ingraham (Dartmouth), David Horowitz (Columbia), Dinesh D’Souza (Dartmouth), Ann Coulter (Cornell), Pat Buchanan (Columbia), William F. Buckley (Yale), Elliot Abrams (Harvard), Robert Kagan (Harvard, Yale), Scooter Libby (Yale), John Ashcroft (Yale), John Bolton (Yale), Steve Forbes (Princeton), Victoria Nuland (Brown), Jake Sullivan (Yale), David Frum (Harvard, Yale), George Will (Princeton), Francis Fukuyama (Harvard), Paul Wolfowitz (Cornell), James Baker (Princeton), Michael Bloomberg (Harvard), Dick Cheney (Yale), Michael Walzer (Harvard), Robert Gates (Georgetown) and Lawrence Summers (Harvard). This is how prospective leaders and servants of empire are formed.
Please note that nowhere in this essay do I blame teachers, thousands of whom understand exactly what I’m talking about and persist within the system to educate – rather than instruct – their students. But in our demythologized world, we can only offer one of two possibilities about the institution of American education. Either it, like all our institutions, is collapsing as the myth of innocence itself loses potency; or that system, like all the others, was specifically designed to bring out the worst in us, not the best, and it’s working quite well.
We need to imagine something better. We need to re-imagine the telling of history itself.
History is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. – James Loewen
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who, when their turn comes, will manufacture professors. – Simone Weil
I love the poorly educated. – Trumpus
Before college it’s mostly about textbooks, as James Loewen and Donald Yacovone have shown. Consider The American Pageant, a high school Advanced Placement history textbook assigned to over five million students annually. Its gross racism can be excused because it was first published in1956. Updated sixteen times, most recently in 2019 by Pulitzer Prize winner David Kennedy (Stanford), it has been described as “a patriotic work that celebrates American progress and the free enterprise system, while largely ignoring dissenting political viewpoints…”
Loewen, however, wrote, “It is likely that Houghton Mifflin (the publishers) took pains to avoid the subject (of slavery) lest some southern state textbook adoption board take offense.” Ibram X. Kendi notes that the 17th edition still contains false representations of slavery, for instance by referring to kidnapped and enslaved Africans as “immigrants” and stating that free people of mixed race were “usually the emancipated children of a white planter and his black mistress.” The N-word is not mentioned anywhere, but there is a list of racial terms used against poor white people.
If, on the sixteenth revision, this garbage is still in the book, we can only assume four possibilities: the esteemed Professor Kennedy is senile and hasn’t noticed it; he only lent his name to the title and hasn’t even read it; he thinks it is not insulting to People of Color; or he wants it to remain for more nefarious reasons.
Texas established a textbook committee in the early 1960s. It required that texts omit any references to Pete Seeger, Langston Hughes or anyone else attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee; another proposal would require every public school teacher to swear to a belief in a supreme being.
Gatekeeping works through exclusion, as above, or through marginalization: As I noted in “False Equivalencies – How Media Gatekeepers Marginalize Alternative Voices”, only a few years ago liberal Harvard invoked a shady, right-wing “fact checker” and used false equivalencies to blacklist large swarths of progressive media. Conservative David Horowitz has taken the next logical step in book-burning, publishing his The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, claiming they are sympathetic to terrorists.
Despite all the commies he claims have taken over the teaching of History, the reality of course is quite different. In 1995, Loewen published Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which reflected his lengthy survey of 12 leading high school textbooks. It revealed a dull Eurocentric history presented with a mix of bland optimism, blind patriotism and misinformation. He also polled thousands of undergraduates on their political views. Although 90% of the public assumed that college-educated persons were both more knowledgeable and more dovish,
Educated people disproportionately supported the Vietnam War…the grade-school-educated were always the most dovish…we must conclude that the more educated a person was, the more likely she/he was to be wrong about the war…education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act…the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand Vietnam or any other historically based problem…education correlates with hawkishness.
This only happens in history education:
Education does not have this impact in other areas of study. People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not. The same holds true for English, foreign languages and almost every other subject. Only in History is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling.
Chomsky agrees: the most highly educated people are the most highly indoctrinated. At a certain level, the distinction between stupidity and ignorance slides into willful denial. For those privileged to attend the best universities and train to become the next generation of corporate, political and media leaders, “…you just don’t think certain things”. Others who display their psychopathic inability to feel empathy for others are channeled into the foreign service and learn the arts of manipulation. In a rare moment of candor, Henry Kissinger admits:
This (foreign policy) is not an honorable business conducted by honorable men in an honorable way. Don’t assume I’m that way and you shouldn’t be.
William Deresiewicz, formerly of Yale, echoes Chomsky’s views on gatekeeper training:
At Yale…the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university – its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals – is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor – because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity – at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.
Such “secret” societies reveal how modern culture has taken the universal desire among young men to be recognized and welcomed into mature adulthood by their elders and perverted it to serve the needs of capitalism. As I write in Chapter Five of my book,
Fraternity initiations can seem quite realistic. But they typically allow boys to remain boys while cementing future business and political unions. In these ceremonies of entitlement, their elite group identity excludes the vast majority of their own social class, let alone the rest of the polis.
…America is still deeply influenced by its heritage of Puritanism. This has left a residue of moralistic education – teaching and schooling through denial, both of the wisdom of the body as well as of the innate needs for initiation and purpose. It is more concerned with restrictions on behavior and speech than on hearing what may be emerging from a young person’s soul.
Since tribal societies valued all their young men, their initiations were communal and usually mandatory. The dangers were real, but all were encouraged to complete the transition. By contrast, the primary function of our advanced degrees, professional licensing exams and corporate promotion is to choose who will succeed, not to ensure that all will. In business, academics and sports, definitions of success and masculinity require the failure of others. Thus, money and consumer goods – rather than wisdom – mark successfully socialized men.
The most elite of the elite receive their initiations into the traditions of those secret societies, most notably Skull and Bones, which has nurtured William Howard Taft, Potter Stewart, William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, William F. Buckley, Robert Taft, Henry Luce, Prescott Bush, G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush, John Kerry, David McCullough, Steven Mnuchin, Dana Milbank, J.J. Angleton and many other warriors for empire who have made their bones (and their fortunes) in the C.I.A. and the State Department. Deresiewicz continues:
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not…As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni…The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell
I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are. – George H.W. Bush
Universities commonly mirror what students have already endured. Public education reverses the age-old tradition of identifying a child’s innate and unique gifts. Indigenous cultures emphasized what the Romans called educare – to identify, encourage and welcome that which that already exists. Progressive educators such as John Pulliam acknowledge this:
The true purpose of education…is to study the principles operant within an activity in order to facilitate new questions and new answers. In essence, education requires an environment in which students are not asked questions for which the answers are known; if the questions involve predetermined conclusions, the process is training.
But America ignored educare and institutionalized instruere (to build into). The Yiddish word is more poetic: assuming that children enter the world with nothing in their heads, schooling schtups them full of information.
Much of that information has less to do with what to know than with how and even when to know. Everything became standardized. David Henkin writes:
As daily school attendance became a normative activity outside the southern US in the early 19th century, masses of schoolchildren learned early and often to expect certain regular activities (examinations, early recesses, special classes) to take place on the same day of the week.
Standardized testing converts natural curiosity into docility and narcissism and trains middle class students not in critical thinking but merely in how to take tests. For the rest, the cruel euphemism of “No Child Left Behind” relies on threats and punishment, imposes narrow agendas, overrules local control and punishes entire schools for the failures of the few. Finally, it ignores the impact of poverty, which leads to the familiar vicious circle of inadequate funding and migration to charter schools.
We can explain why white, suburban students perform so much better on the tests with the simple fact that their school systems spend far more per pupil than urban systems can. The reason is that the U.S., nearly unique in the world, requires local jurisdictions to fund education through local property taxes. And our national obsession with scapegoating, punishment and blaming the youthful victims of capitalism has produced a situation in which most states spend more on prisons than they do on education. California is the worst, investing $65,000 per prisoner compared to $11,500 per student. But to ask why they do that – and why we allow them to do it – is to question the most fundamental aspects of American myth.
“Zero tolerance” policies allow school administrators no leeway for interpretation. Examples are endless, if tragic. A valedictorian is charged with a felony and banned from her graduation for mistakenly leaving a kitchen knife in her car. A thirteen-year-old who brings a model rocket to show in class is suspended. An eleven-year-old is jailed for bringing a plastic knife in her lunch box. A ten-year-old girl is charged with sexual harassment and suspended for asking a boy if he liked her. Mall police turn away girl scouts for being “similarly dressed.” A third of the students of a Chicago high school are expelled because of zero tolerance. It began not through political correctness, but because governments that cannot enact real gun control for adults divert the spotlight onto children. And youths convicted of any drug offense permanently lose federal financial aid (over 130,000 when I wrote my book ten years ago), even if possession laws are later overturned.
We’re talking about public programs, but we’re also talking about those 25-35% of Americans who are evangelicals and who have strangleholds on state and federal budgets.
Ten percent of the sixty million students in the country attend private schools, three-quarters of which are religious. Large numbers of these 4.5 million students learn in atmospheres that are misogynist at best and racist at worst. Their parents are Trumpus’ base. According to Christian researcher Robert P. Jones,
…white Christians – including evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics – are nearly twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of Black men by police are isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how police treat African Americans…White Christians are also about 20% more likely to disagree with this statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”
Thirty-seven states require that when schools offer sex education, they must discuss abstinence. In 2017, a third of the $300 million federal funding for teen sexual health education programs was for abstinence education. All told, the feds have spent well over $2 billion on it. However, claims researcher Laura Lindberg, “…it leaves our young people without the information and skills that they need…We fail our young people when we don’t provide them with complete and medically accurate information.”
The government continues to throw money at these programs even though its own studies have shown that they have no effect on sexual behavior among youth. Worse, they generally withhold information about pregnancy and STD prevention. They don’t reduce pregnancy or STD rates, and they have no effect on adolescents delaying intercourse. However, when they do become active, many teens fail to use condoms, unlike their peers in other countries who have routine access to contraceptive education and counseling.
The final insult is that language used in abstinence-based curricula often reinforces gender stereotypes about female passivity and male aggressiveness – attitudes that often correlate with domestic violence. The cumulative result: It is likely in vast areas of the country for a girl who has been raped and impregnated by a relative to have no access to abortion (family rape is the source of 40% of teen pregnancies). She might run away with her child to escape the ongoing abuse, go on welfare (until the funds run out and the state takes the child) and become a homeless prostitute. She would be a sacrificial victim, no different in any respect from similar girls in the Middle East. But she would also carry the uniquely American, Puritan blame for her own suffering.
This entire issue of how our institutions function to dumb us down is part of something even larger than the myth of American Innocence. The myth of the killing of the children is the most fundamental narrative upon which all of Western patriarchal culture is founded. In Chapters Six and Ten of my book I discuss the immensely long story – beginning with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to impress his god – in which fathers learned to invert ancient male initiation practices into the literal sacrifice of male children in the cauldron of war.
It is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.
Indeed, even if we retain our belief in the value of public education, this process has produced a nasty feedback mechanism in which the most ethically-challenged and pathologically ambitious individuals rise to the highest corporate and political heights, and then we continue to elect them as they shamelessly, even proudly go about destroying that institution. Why? Because they work for people who know that if the rest of us really learned how the world works, we might rise up and throw them out.
This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state…a “terrible anti-American academic. – Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue University, on Howard Zinn
It’s not an unbiased account. So what? If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story. – Howard Zinn
You’ve got to graduate from an Ivy League university and read all the latest reports from the most esteemed think tanks to get smart enough to understand why it’s a good idea to fight Russia and China at the same time. – Caitlin Johnstone
The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security. – Julian Assange
Academics also directed the narrative of American imperialism, one of our most deeply held stories about ourselves, how the nation never starts wars but only fights to aid deserving people. Seven generations of schoolchildren have learned that the nation of extreme individualism is an individual among nations, the exceptional one, chosen by Divine Providence to redeem the world. If we were honest with ourselves, most of us – at least most whites – would still admit some adherence to this story, of which World War Two is our most shining example, and which still drives our support for sanctions, coups and direct military intervention in Ukraine, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Nicaragua and countless other places.
To those outside our mythic bubble, however, this is a story that we regularly need to tell ourselves, to still our doubts that our long-distance murder and denial of self-determination to other people have moral meaning. This helps explain why our gatekeepers – historians and journalists – speak with nearly one voice (as they do now, concerning Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and other whistle blowers) to condemn anyone who might question our stories, regardless of their popularity or stature in their profession. American myth is highly unstable and questioning any particular aspect of it can lead to skepticism about all of it.
Historians claim to be objective, even scientific. Yet during World War One, historians in all the combatant countries eagerly endorsed the war effort and wrote books proclaiming the essential goodness of their own sides. In the U.S. the first university survey courses on the history of Western civilization taught that America was fighting to defend the progressive values supposedly embodied in British and French history and contradicted by German universities, and most certainly by socialism.
Immediately after the war, the U.S. and twelve other nations attacked the Soviet Union in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent consolidation of communist rule. Afterwards, compliant intellectuals inverted history; Yale historian John Gaddis terms this invasion a “defensive” action.
Between the wars, writes Novick, the old guard of increasingly insecure Protestant historians expressed widespread anti-Semitism. One professor regularly warned Jewish graduate students that “History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. You belong in economics or sociology.”
Letters of recommendation repeatedly tried to reassure prospective employers on this point: Oscar Handlin “has none of the offensive traits which some people associate with his race,” and Bert Loewenberg “by temperament and spirit…measures up to the whitest Gentile I know”…Daniel Boorstin “is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception”, and Richard Leopold was “of course a Jew, but since he is a Princeton graduate, you may be reasonably certain that he is not of the offensive type”…Solomon Katz was “quite un-Jewish, if one considers the undesirable side of the race”.
Since World War Two is closer in memory, academic Gatekeepers still insist on controlling the narrative, both of how we got into it and how we got out. This is the myth of the Good War.
The social function of myth is to validate the social order. At this level of understanding, myth equals ideology plus narrative. Stories help us digest the ideology. Myths determine perception, like the lenses of a pair of glasses. They are not what we see, but what we see with. We can’t see outside our bubble (but outsiders can see us.) We give our attention to one set of possibilities rather than another, and our intentions and dreams follow. So, myth creates fact. Indeed, myth trumps fact.
We draw stories from our past and abstract them into evocative icons (the Alamo, Pearl Harbor) that contain the essential elements of our worldview. So obvious that they never have to be “explained”, they transform history into sacred legends that describe reality to us and prescribe our choices and behavior within acceptable limits. “Myth,” writes Richard Slotkin, “is history successfully disguised as archetype.”
Curiously, if we add Custer’s Last Stand, the sinking of The Maine and 9-11 and to that list, we find that most of those iconic images are of our most famous defeats. On one level, this reflects the complex interweaving between the American Hero (or winner) and his shadow, the victim (or loser), that our mythology has been dreaming for four hundred years. The innocent nation, once again, finds itself victimized, under attack by evil men, with dark skins. Since, as G. W. Bush said, they hate us for our freedoms, we are justified in responding with Biblical ferocity, as we did to the Japanese – the racialized Other – much more so than to the Germans.
From the very beginning, history and myth intersect throughout the story of America, and it’s almost impossible to tease out the differences. But let’s be clear about this: we’re not simply talking about lies, distortions, omissions and propaganda. That’s “myth” in the lesser meaning of the term. We are talking about why we frame our stories about ourselves in the way we do, and why we are – increasingly – desperate to believe them, to use them to re-stabilize the crumbling building blocks of our collective self-image.
Franklin Roosevelt had decided by 1940 on the necessity of defeating Germany. But to overcome strong anti-war sentiment he needed to lure the Japanese (whose codes had been broken and whose exact intentions were well known) into attacking Pearl Harbor, after which treaty obligations would force the Germans to declare war on the U.S.
But every American has been taught that America suffered a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, was drawn into the war reluctantly and then proceeded to save the world from evil. This scenario of only fighting when provoked is a bedrock aspect of our national mythology. It provides the essential energy of disillusioned innocence – why would they attack us? – that has propelled the nation into every war since the invasion of Mexico.
Historians have long been charged with maintaining this narrative – and ostracizing those who question it. To really understand what the gatekeepers can do, consider Charles Beard.
Beard, like Dunning before him, served as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. Historian and retired military officer Andrew Bacevich writes:
…Beard stood alone at the pinnacle of his profession. As a historian and public intellectual, he was prolific, influential, fiercely independent, and equally adept at writing for scholarly audiences or for the general public.
In 1947 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him their gold medal for the best historical work of the preceding decade. But that same year he published President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, which accused FDR of lying to the nation. He also revealed (in “Who’s to Write the History of the War?”) that the Rockefeller Foundation had subsidized an official history of how the war had come about. Yes, writes Gary North,
…the victors always write the history books, but when the historians are actually policy-setting participants in the war, the words “court history” take on new meaning.
Indeed, some of those who did write such histories attained high government positions, and many of them, including Samuel Morison, savagely attacked Beard as at best an “isolationist” and at worst a senile old fool. They quickly and permanently destroyed his reputation because he had committed the grave sin of questioning their heroic “Good War” narrative, or in current terms, of promoting a conspiracy theory. Beard died in 1949. His book on Roosevelt quickly went out of print and was not reprinted until 2003. Today the public has forgotten him. Within the profession, however, Beard remains a reviled and discredited figure. North writes:
This is why there are no tenured World War II revisionists who write in this still-taboo and well-policed field. The guild screened them out, beginning in the early 1950′s…What the guild did to…Beard (and others) posted a warning sign: Dead End.
For more detail on how Roosevelt provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, see Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit.
The other half of the “Greatest Generation” myth conveyed by most historians is how the nation avoided a costly invasion of Japan and ended the war with the atom bomb. However, revisionist writers such as Gar Alperovitz have shown that the U.S. didn’t need to drop the bombs, that the mass atrocities had much more to do with the approaching confrontation with the Soviet Union. Read here, here or here.
The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. – President Dwight Eisenhower
The actual narrative of World War Two is full of accounts of similarly unnecessary, mass atrocities that the Allies committed, and the lies that followed to justify them. Zinn himself gives accounts of two such crimes that he personally participated in as a bombardier: the bombings of Plzen, Czechoslovakia and Royan, France.
Still, most Americans hold to the story that the Exceptional Nation fought the Good War reluctantly and ended it with humanitarian motives (at least in terms of American lives saved). Bacevich concludes:
Present-day Americans have become so imbued with this narrative as to be oblivious to its existence. Politicians endlessly recount it. Television shows, movies, magazines, and video games affirm it. Members of the public accept it as unquestionably true…Today the Good War narrative survives fully intact. For politicians and pundits eager to explain why it is incumbent upon the United States to lead or to come to the aid of those yearning to be free, it offers an ever-ready reference point…
In that sense, the persistence of the Good War narrative robs Americans of any capacity to think realistically about their nation’s role in the existing world. Instead, it’s always 1938, with appeasement the ultimate sin to be avoided at all costs. Or it’s 1941, when an innocent nation subjected to a dastardly attack from out of the blue is summoned to embark upon a new crusade to smite the evildoers. Or it’s 1945, with history calling upon the United States to remake the world in its own image.
(Or it’s 2022 and liberal Democratic congresspersons unanimously support over $50 billion to extend the war in Ukraine.)
After the war both liberal and conservative historians encouraged an overwhelmingly affirmative and celebratory stance toward the American experience, in three basic themes. The first was nearly-universal justification of the cold war and the development of government-supported social science research which assumed that the nation’s foreign policy was identical with the promotion of peace and freedom.
And this could still arrive along with sloppy writing and generalization. Ernest May (Harvard), who had prepared a confidential study of strategic arms buildups and would later advise the 9/11 Commission, wrote of the Spanish-American War: “American public opinion had frenziedly demanded war.” Zinn responded that in 1898 “…there were no ways of testing general public opinion…the frenzy was mostly the fulminating of a few very important newspapers.” Is this a silly example? Only if we don’t realize that May was really offering a historian’s rationale for current warmongering:
Such a generalization obscures the way decisions for war are made by a handful of men at the top, and the way public opinion is manipulated…to build support for it.
The second was specialization and escape into trivia. Zinn criticized 1960s academics who held such:
…cluster of beliefs…roughly expressed by the phrases “disinterested scholarship”… ”dispassionate learning”…”objective study”…”scientific method” – all adding up to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper…Knowledge can also serve the purposes of social stability in another way – by being squandered on trivia. Thus the university becomes a playpen in which the society invites its favored children to play – and gives them toys and prizes, to keep them out of trouble…The larger interests are internalized in the motivations of the scholar: promotion, tenure, higher salaries, prestige – all of which are best secured by innovating in prescribed directions…There is no question, then, of a disinterested” community of scholars, only a question about what interests scholars serve.
This reinforced the third theme. Many academics were still colluding in the nation’s refusal to address its original sin of racism. Zinn discovered that
From 1960-1966…of 3,265 dissertations in modern history, eighteen dealt with this problem (race)…Of 446 articles in The American Historical Review from 1945 to 1968, five dealt with the Negro question.
The Daughters of the American Revolution helped blacklist 170 textbooks that did not sufficiently reflect Christian and anticommunist values. African American history remained on the margins of academic scholarship, and blacks were excluded from teaching positions at most universities. Meanwhile, many of the “best and the brightest” academics, including the future war criminal Henry Kissinger, entered the revolving door circuit between academia, media, business and government. Novick writes:
“Intellect has associated itself with power as perhaps never before in history,” Lionel Trilling observed in 1952. With the exceptions of physics, it would be difficult to think of any academic discipline which, during World War II and the cold war, participated more wholeheartedly in that association than did history…There was, in fact, criticism within the CIA concerning what some considered the overrepresentation of historians within its ranks.
After the 1960s the culture wars began in earnest. In 1974 local schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia adopted new textbooks and works by Eldridge Cleaver, Arthur Miller and George Orwell. Opponents firebombed school buildings, shot up buses, beat journalists and shut down the school system.
On campuses the 1960s had seen a new generation of politically active historians including Jesse Lemisch, Herbert Apthecker, William Appleman Williams and Staughton Lynd. They collectively promoted “history from the bottom up”, a more inclusive and comprehensive formulation that brought all subjects, especially blacks and women, more fully into the discipline. It was an explicit challenge to the elitist and insular traditions of historical writing within the academy, and more specifically to the deadening “consensus” approach to the American past that had grown out of the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War. Zinn’s People’s History of the United States followed in 1980.
Centrist historians ignored most of these radicals. For example, a recent introduction to historiography (the writing of history) mentions Lemisch once, and Chomsky (not a historian but certainly a major world intellectual on historical issues) not at all. Nor does it address the question of political bias in the profession. It does mention Beard, but not his marginalization. An online list of 269 “Famous American Historians” doesn’t mention Zinn, Chomsky, Lemisch or Lynd.
However, as with Beard, the gatekeepers really couldn’t ignore Zinn. And twelve years after his death, they still can’t. Why? After the turbulence of the sixties and disillusionment of the seventies, people were hungry for history that acknowledged what they could see with their own eyes. Millions now knew how the nation had raped Viet Nam and countless other nations, and they wanted context. Forty-two years after its publication, A People’s History has exceeded 3.6 million copies in the U.S. edition alone. And, where the book burners haven’t fully established their restrictions, over 100,000 teachers have registered with the Zinn Education Project.
Gatekeeper criticisms of Zinn tend toward two common themes:
1 – He was too left-wing for decent academics. The sole mention of him on the History Today website attacks People’s History with this gem:
Among the (otherwise entirely noble) contributors are several known Communist agents, a pederast, a terrorist and two men involved in a bloody prison revolt.
2 – While Zinn was acceptable for idealistic teenagers, wrote Jill Lepore (Harvard), he was not (like them) a serious scholar. He was not objective or dispassionate. Worst of all, he was “politicized” and had “contempt for society’s elites”. David Greenberg (Yale) sniffs:
Zinn was in effect saying that Big-Time History – with its formidable air of authority, its footnotes and archival documentation, its vetting by communities of expert scholars—had really just served to shore up the power of established elites and put down stirrings of protest.
David Greenberg doesn’t hate Howard Zinn because he was a bad scholar, but because he was a radical…Most historians, as educated and privileged offspring of the middle class, are ideologically invested in a liberal ideal of America as a place where various groups…negotiated their differences through a clash of forces that produced some reasonable outcome, and for many this becomes the only way to tell the story.
Zinn responded to the inquisitors:
Holding certain fundamental values does not require that historians find certain desirable answers in the past, it just turns their attention to certain useful questions.
It was perhaps a matter of timing. Zinn opened the door in ways that earlier revisionists had not. Since A People’s History, dozens of excellent histories written “from the ground up” have appeared, both within academia and without, even if few of their authors have attained anywhere near the influence and old school reputations of their elders. Proud that Zinn blurbed my book, I’ve written about his accusers here. And he wrote plays also:
They are all proclaiming that my ideas are dead! It’s nothing new. These clowns have been saying this for more than a hundred years. Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again? – Zinn, as Karl Marx, in “Marx in Soho”
Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields. – Frederick Nietzsche
For empires, the past is just another overseas territory ripe for reconstruction, even reinvention. – Alfred McCoy
Let’s return to our main theme, the history of history.
The gatekeepers were succeeding. By 1900 descendants of the Confederate aristocracy were in complete control of the racial narrative, as I write here. Immediately after the war, Edward Pollard’s book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the Confederatesportrayed the Old South as a multicultural paradise of racial harmony untouched by the evils of industrial capitalism. It recast the struggle to perpetuate slavery as a noble defense of a traditional way of life, led by gallant gentleman-officers and fought by loyal soldiers in the “War of Northern Aggression”. The fact that tens of thousands had deserted was not included in the story.
Within two generations, most white Americans remembered the war as one “between brothers”, fought over states’ rights rather than slavery. And they believed that blacks hadn’t been ready for freedom because, as one preacher wrote, the former slaves couldn’t “sacrifice their lusts.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded in 1894) erected some 700 monuments to the Lost Cause, most of them in the 1950s. But their most effective tool was the propaganda they forced into the schools. The primary focus was on insuring that Southern schools used only those history books that defended slavery and praised the Ku Klux Klan, and banned those books that didn’t.
The 1908 History of Virginia claimed, “Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition.” Another textbook, Virginia: History, Government, Geography, used in seventh-grade classrooms into the 1970s (!), claimed, “Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner…” A high school textbook described a slave’s life:
He did not work as hard as the average free laborer since he did not have to worry about losing his job…his food was plentiful, his clothing adequate, his cabin warm, his health protected, his leisure carefree. He did not have to worry about hard times, unemployment, or old age.
How ubiquitous were these texts? Greg Huffman estimates that seventy million students were enrolled in the South’s public elementary and secondary schools for the 80 years between 1889 and 1969. All of them were subjected to this “Born With the Wind” version of history. And they exerted great influence on Northern book publishers as well, who
…had decisions to make if they wanted to sell books to Southern schools. Go all in with Lost Cause dogma and…sell the book only in the South? Or have two versions of the same book – one with…watered-down history for the South, and another one with historical facts for everyone else? The latter was often the choice.
Mississippi’s public schools used Lost Cause textbooks exclusively until a federal court forced them to stop in 1980.
But we have bigger fish to fry. Two social myths – a reunited America with a national purpose and the hugely popular Horatio Alger tales of enterprising young men who prospered without government assistance – were just what the oligarchs of both North and South needed to divide the working classes.
So we need to talk about the teaching of Lost Cause mythology in the North, where most intellectuals accepted the continuation of white supremacy. They learned their trades not in Bible schools but in the most elite institutions. Donald Yacovone surveyed 3,000 textbooks that they wrote and concluded:
For the most part, the textbooks from the pre-Civil War period through the end of the century followed a basic format: They would go from exploration to colonization to revolution to creation of the American republic, and then every succeeding presidential administration. Anything outside of the political narrative was not considered history and was not taught.
But as recently as the 1940s,
…it was astonishing to see positive assessments of slavery in American history textbooks, which taught that the African American’s natural environment was the institution of slavery, where they were cared for from cradle to grave…They dismissed the slave narratives as propaganda, downplayed the history of Africans before slavery, and ignored the work of African American scholars…
Again, much of this deadly nonsense centers around Wilson, the only president with a PhD – in History – and even by the standards of his time, a racist. In 1915 he showed the film Birth of a Nation in the White House, making it the first mega-hit. Depicting heroic whites rescuing young women from the clutches of their drooling black abductors, it quickly led to a massive resurgence of the KKK. Earlier, Wilson had written of Reconstruction:
…the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded…The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation – until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.
On immigration, he contrasted “the men of the sturdy stocks of the north” with “the more sordid and hopeless elements” of southern Europe, who had “neither skill nor quick intelligence.”
In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. We cannot make a homogenous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.
Two forces contributed to what Peter Novick calls a “racist historiographical consensus” around the turn of the century. One was the nationalism that was quickly replacing religion, even in the South, as a central unifying cultural and political factor. The second was the increase in racism among intellectuals who relied on Social Darwinism and Eugenics to back the concept with the new religion, science.
…professional historians worked to revise previous northern views on several related questions. They became as harshly critical of the abolitionists as they were of “irresponsible agitators” in the contemporary world, they accepted a considerably softened picture of slavery, and they abandoned theories of the “slave power conspiracy.” Above all, they joined whole-heartedly with southerners in denouncing the “criminal outrages” of Reconstruction…
For another forty years, the “Dunning School” dominated the writing of post-Civil War history. To these learned men, black suffrage had been a political blunder. Republican state governments had been corrupt, unrepresentative and oppressive. The revisionist historian Eric Foner condemns this perspective as
…not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow System. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction…a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations…helped to freeze the minds of the white South in resistance to any change whatsoever…historians have a lot to answer for in helping to propagate a racist system in this country.
William Dunning headed both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association and edited their journals. At Columbia, he directed much graduate work in U.S. history, teaching that blacks were incapable of self-government, that the North’s greatest sin consisted of relinquishing control of the Southern governments to “ignorant, half-civilized former slaves (who) had…no aspiration or ideals save to be like whites.” His influence was enormous.
His student Ulrich Phillips taught at Tulane, Michigan and Yale, critiquing slavery (inaccurately) as an unprofitable economic system, but one that had value in civilizing “savage Africans”. His books remained the standard texts on slavery for decades. John Burgess, who taught at Columbia, wrote that “a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason.” George Beer (Columbia) wrote that “the negro race has hitherto shown no capacity for progressive development except under the tutelage of other peoples.” Other members of the school included James Garner (U. Illinois), William Davis (U. Kansas), J. G. Hamilton (U. North Carolina), Walter Fleming (chair in history at Vanderbilt), Charles Ramsdell (U. Texas), Mildred Thompson (History Chair at Vassar), the Holocaust denier Harry Barnes (Smith College) and Ellis Oberholzer (U. Pennsylvania), who claimed that Yankees didn’t understand slavery because they “had never seen a nigger except Fred Douglass…Blacks were as credulous as children, which in intellect they in many ways resembled.”
Avery Craven (Harvard) took pro-slavery positions. Milo Quaife (U. Chicago) derided the “absurd doctrine of racial equality.” Ellis Coulter, who taught at Georgia for sixty years, founded the Southern Historical Association and edited the Georgia Historical Quarterly for fifty years, pontificated:
…most of the Negroes (would) spend their last piece of money for a drink of whisky…Black participation in government was a diabolical development, to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.
But the gatekeeping didn’t end with unrepentant racists. Henry Commager (Columbia) and Samuel Morison’s (Harvard) The Growth of the American Republic, read by generations of college freshmen, claimed that slaves “suffered less than any other class in the South…The majority…were apparently happy.” Such respected Anglo-Saxon eminences could produce high school-level prose without ever being questioned. In The Founding of Harvard College, Morison wrote: “They (the Puritans) were a free and happy people”. Many years later, Howard Zinn would observe that such “sloppy generalizations…contribute to the common glorification of this country’s early years…feed arrogance and dull the critical faculties…”
Arthur Schlesinger Sr (Harvard), suggested that high achievement among some blacks could only be the result of an “infusion of white blood.” Seymour Lipset (Harvard) wrote, “America has been a universalistic culture, slavery and the black situation apart.” Jon Meacham, Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek, received the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson, which covers the Trail of Tears in four paragraphs. Arthur Schlesinger Jr (Harvard) also won the Pulitzer for The Age of Jackson without mentioning it at all.
Of course, there were occasional exceptions. Harold Rugg’s high school social studies textbook series traced the evolution of American democracy in the face of pervasive social problems. But conservatives attacked it as subversive, and by the early 1940s it was removed from schools.
No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. – Cornell West
Why is it that, in a land founded on the secular belief that “all men are created equal,” we are so obsessed with the need to find a scientific basis for human inequality? – Orlando Patterson
Philosophers were hired by the comfortable classes to prove everything is all right. – Brooks Adams
Antebellum college textbooks reflected regional prejudices. Some published in the North questioned slavery, even though Early American History (1841) by Yale’s Noah Webster, often considered the first American history textbook, mentions no African Americans. Southern historians such as William Simms and Thomas Dew (President of The College of William and Mary) published pro-slavery histories.
Other issues claimed people’s attention in the late 1840’s. One was spreading the gospel of enlightened Anglo-Saxon republicanism to Mexico and the western part of the continent through invasion and conquest. Hampton Sides writes:
At universities across the country, the youth had become smitten with the notion of American exceptionalism, and…a fashionable campus craze called the Young America Movement, which, among other things, advocated westward expansion. Even the country’s literary elite seemed to buy into Manifest Destiny. Herman Melville declared that “America can hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia.” Walt Whitman thought that Mexico must be taught a “vigorous lesson”.
Other intellectuals who supported the movement were William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, George Evans, Edwin De Leon and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
After the Civil War, white people everywhere were forced to confront the fearful notion that black people could be voting citizens, theoretically equal to themselves. It was a time of deep insecurity about notions of race and identity (not unlike the present), and university teachers could no longer ignore these issues. But they could certainly channel the discussion into very narrow confines of opinion acceptable to the elites.
One of the privileges of “men of their times” is that they don’t need to be consistent. Consider popular historian Francis Parkman, who claimed that the conquest and displacement of Native Americans represented a triumph of civilization over savagery. Their “own ferocity and intractable indolence” had caused their demise. Apparently, Parkman didn’t notice that he’d confused two opposite traits, because both aggression and laziness were sins in the eyes of his Puritan ancestors, and “othering” does not have to be logical, even for upper-class academics. Much later, Martin Luther King Jr would correct the record:
Generally we think of white supremacist views as having their origins with the unlettered, underprivileged, poorer-class whites. But the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergyman, men of medical science, historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation. With such a distinguished company of the elite working so assiduously to disseminate racist views, what was there to inspire poor, illiterate, unskilled white farmers to think otherwise?
Nell Irvin Painter, in The History of White People, lists many 19th-century American intellectuals who spread pseudo-scientific justifications of imperialism, manifest destiny and white supremacy.
The list begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson and includes anthropologists Samuel Morton (Pennsylvania Medical College), Daniel Brinton (U. Pennsylvania), John Burgess (Columbia), George Gliddon and Louis Agassiz (Harvard); ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft; paleontologists Edward Cope and Nathaniel Shaler (Dean of Sciences at Harvard); economists William Ripley (Columbia) and Francis Walker (President of M.I.T.); sociologists George Fitzhugh and Edward Ross (President of the American Sociological Association); political scientist Francis Giddings; philosopher John Fiske (Harvard); historians Henry Adams (Harvard), Parkman (Harvard), Henry Cabot Lodge (Harvard), George Bancroft (Harvard) and two presidents of the American Historical Association (James Rhoades and Theodore Roosevelt).
Physicians seem to have been particularly invested in policing the racial narrative. John Van Evrie wrote books warning against “mongrelization” of the white race. Samuel Cartwright said that the plantation was “converting the African barbarian into a moral, rational and civilized being”. Josiah Nott claimed that “no full-blooded Negro…has ever written a page worthy of being remembered.” James Sims, the father of modern gynecology, did his research on un-anaesthetized Black female slaves.
Twisting the idea of natural selection into “scientific racism” and “Social Darwinism,” many intellectuals claimed that America’s wealth proved its virtue, that exploitation and elimination of the weak were natural processes and that unregulated competition resulted in the survival of the fittest. The next step was to infer that only the affluent were worthy of survival. They were merely restating the Calvinist view of poverty as a condition of the spirit. Life was a harsh, unsatisfying prelude to the afterlife, redeemable only through discipline.
Deeply religious people passionately argued that the suffering of the poor was good because it provoked remorse and repentance. A hundred and fifty years later, some academics still claim that giving money to the poor makes them lazier, while giving it to the rich makes them nobler.
William Harper, first president of the University of Chicago, was more candid: “It is all very well to sympathize with the working man, but we get our money from those on the other side, and we can’t afford to offend them.”
Secular apologists, meanwhile, simply substituted “nature” for “God” and used Social Darwinism to justify colonialism. Competition for survival had produced a new human type, the Anglo-Saxon, with the moral sense to accept the White Man’s burden. Such men were uniquely qualified to help civilize those who couldn’t improve themselves without the prolonged tutelage of enlightened colonial rule – or to prevent those (predominantly dark-skinned) people who were inherently stupid from breeding before they sullied the purity of the better races.
The American eugenics movement included prominent academics such as biologists Paul Popenoe (Stanford), Charles Davenport (Harvard) and Harry Laughlin; geologist Henry Osborn (Princeton); psychologists Carl Brigham (Princeton), Henry Goddard, William Sadler, Thomas Bailey, Hugo Munsterberg (Harvard), Elmer Southard (Harvard) and Robert Yerkes (Radcliffe); biologist Charles Davenport (Harvard); theologian Oscar McCulloch; historians Lothrop Stoddard, Carleton Coon (Harvard) and William McDougall (Harvard); economist Irving Fisher (Yale); doctors John Kellogg and Clarence Gamble; lawyer Prescott Hall; sociologist Richard Dugdale; theologian Joseph Fletcher (Yale); conservationists Charles Goethe, Gifford Pinchot (Yale) and Madison Grant; philanthropist E.S. Gosney; botanist (and President of Stanford) David Starr Jordan; and Charles Eliot (President of Harvard). Physicist William Shockley (M.I.T.) revived this nonsense in the 1960s, and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (both of Harvard) proposed connections between race and intelligence well into in the 1990s.
Other Eugenics proponents included Luther Burbank, Calvin Coolidge, Daniel Gilman (Yale), John D. Rockefeller, Jr (Brown U.), Alexander Graham Bell, Wickliffe Draper (Harvard), Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harvard), W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Margaret Sanger, Nikola Tesla, Robert Graham (who created a “Nobel sperm bank” in 1980) and, of course, the Nazis, whose forced sterilization program was partly inspired by that of California.
But let’s take a brief detour and discuss public education. John Gatto, former New York State “Teacher of the Year”, writes:
We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform…you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children.
Much later, millions of us are really dumb – or to be generous, profoundly misinformed – despite our educational system. Or, we must ask, is it because of this system? In Chapter Five of my book I compare indigenous initiation traditions to mandatory – that is, forced – public education and refer to Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. The Social Darwinists and eugenicists who designed America’s educational system modeled it on that of the militaristic Prussian state. Since then, seven generations have endured a routine designed to restrain dissent and originality and reduce everyone to a uniform, standardized level. Gatto asks, “Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure that not one (child) ever really grows up?”
By the 1890s, many were demanding schoolbooks that would bind the nation together, while minimizing sectional differences. For Confederate veterans, reconciliation meant a reunion of whites across regional lines while rejecting both racial equality and a strong central government that would enforce civil rights. Mainstream publishers responded to the southern market, minimizing discussion of slavery.
As public education evolved, it had two specific goals: (1) to make and keep the young only as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty in a time when religion was being replaced by nationalism. Duke historian William Laprade candidly acknowledged that the function of history in the schools was “the inculcation of a species of patriotic religion.” Ellwood Cubberley, Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education from 1917 until 1933, wrote:
Our schools are…factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned…And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
Textbook authors need not concern themselves unduly with what actually happened in history, since publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to sell their books…the requirement to take American History originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign early in the (20th) century…Many history teachers don’t know much history: a national survey of 257 teachers in 1990 revealed that 13% had never taken a single college history course…
Quoting from early texts, Gatto distills schooling’s intent into six functions:
1 – Adjusting: establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority to preclude critical judgment.
2 – Integrating: making people as alike as possible.
3 – Diagnosing: determining everyone’s proper social role.
4 – Differentiating: sorting children by role and training them “only so far as their destination in the social machine permits.”
5 – Selecting: identifying the unfit at an early age.
6 – The propaedeutic function: teaching a minority to manage the rest, who are “deliberately dumbed down and declawed…”
Public schooling taught children to exchange obedience for favors and advantages. It was never intended to create citizens, but servile laborers and consumers. After a few generations it left children vulnerable to marketing, which ensured that they would grow older but never grow up. And it reversed the age-old tradition of identifying a child’s unique gifts. By the 1950s an unexpected bi-product would be an epidemic of illiteracy.
In 1909, Wilson, then president of Princeton (which would refuse to admit black undergraduates for another forty years), told teachers,
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class…a very much larger class…to forgo the privilege…
From that point (when the system was installed universally), literacy began to decline from nearly 100% to a point when, in 1973, functional illiteracy kept 27% of men from military service. Now, claims Gatto, “40% of blacks and 17% of whites can’t read at all.” At one end of the spectrum, 45 million adults are functionally illiterate, and at the other, 42% of college students never read a book after they graduate.
Meanwhile, as a growing Catholic population desired history books that were less steeped in Protestant prejudices, their presses began issuing books for parochial schools. By the 1920s, some large publishers were producing books that were acceptable to Catholics while others were appeasing Southerners.
An exception, An American History (1911) by David Muzzey became a standard text until it came under fire during the 1920s Red Scare when conservatives attacked it as subversive.
Students – at all levels – were reading what local gatekeepers wanted them to read, if they could read at all. We’ve all seen statistics about ignorance of basic facts in America.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. – American college student.
You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. – George W. Bush
What went before, as told by those who think they know it. – Gary Snyder
Everything comes to the reader as interpreted by the historian. Everything is seen through the medium of his personality. The facts of history when they are used to teach a moral lesson do not reach us in their entirety…but selected and arranged according to the overmastering ideal in the mind of the historian. The reader is at the historian’s mercy. – Peter Novick
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill
I invoke the muse of history, Clio, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory).
Book banning in America dates back to 1637, a year after Harvard College was founded. Recent efforts across the country have hit their highest level in twenty years, partially because in 2021 Fox News stoked the Culture Wars by mentioning critical race theory 1,300 times in four months. Now, Senate candidates are going full-paranoid on white replacement theory.
Along with the threats, the levels of comic hypocrisy have gone through the roof. Republicans can’t resist mis-quoting Martin Luther King Jr. One of the groups lobbying for book banning is Moms For Liberty! Meanwhile, a “scholar” from the American Enterprise Institute suggests, “Ban critical race theory now. States must assert the power to enforce the principles of the Civil Rights Act!”
At least four states have done that, and another dozen are debating the issue, which is – do I really need to say this? – performative idiocy at best, and cynical, unrepentant racism and misogyny at worst. In addition, dozens of states are or soon will be considering anti-LGBTQ bills. And now we have the mendacious Supreme Court admitting its plans to ban abortion rights by citing a 17th-century witch hunter. Gotta laugh to keep from crying.
Everywhere, reactionaries are scurrying to shore up the latest cracks in the façade of the myth of American innocence by controlling the narrative of history, how it is taught and even if it is taught.
It’s all being done, of course, by Republicans, usually in safely Republican states, meant primarily as entertainment for the choir, since most public and private history education in those states has already been controlled for generations by the racists and religious inquisitors who have served as the gatekeepers of culture and memory in the former Confederacy. I’ve addressed this theme in detail here. Naturally, powerful Southerners want to retain their influence by any means, including perpetuation of ignorance, division of the working class and outright violence.
They want to decide how their – and increasingly your – children think and what they know about two main issues characteristic of 1950s white thinking. The first would accept discrimination based on race, gender and sexual orientation as reflections of acceptable traditional values.
The second – propelled mostly by Democrats – involves reviving the old Cold War narrative of a bipolar world. One side, led by the United States, is allegedly a “free world”, a “global community” whose intentions are universally benign, and the other, led by Russia and China, is a hostile, dictatorial and expansionist world. Pure black and white.
But this essay is pursuing bigger game. For most of human history, the shamans and poets and later the priesthood served as the gatekeepers of culture, channeling their populations into the narrow confines of acceptable opinion regarding everything from personal behavior to national identity to which “Other” people to hate. The result is what used to be our generally agreed-upon collective memories, which Jeremy Yamashiro describes as
…those representations of the shared past that members of a community hold in common. Collective memory is different from history. Whereas historians aim to create a relatively objective account of the past using rigorous professional standards of what counts as evidence, when members of a community recall their collective past, they do so through the filter of a contemporary set of concerns…These selective renderings help us create imagined communities – nations, races, religions, “the West” – by endowing those communities with a story of continuity and self-sameness across time.
Do historians create objective accounts of the past? Is there work really any different from collective memory? We’ll have to see about that.
Another way of talking about collective memory is to use the language of mythology. Joseph Campbell taught that a living myth refers past itself to the ineffable, serving four distinct functions. The mystical function introduces the individual to that which underlies all names and forms. It awakens religious awe, humility and respect. Second, the cosmological function explains how the universe works. Third, the pedagogical function defines a moral life as defined by each culture.
Fourth – and most pervasive – the social function validates the social order and integrates individuals within it. Originally, this was a good thing: it oriented people to the mystery by presenting noble figures at the center of the realm who radiated the blessings that flowed through them from the other world. These figures showed that everyone carried such potential.
The word “noble” is related to “knowledge.” A noble, mythologically speaking, is one who knows him or herself. If people still revere royalty in places like Britain and Thailand, they may be accessing some vestigial memory of what the sacred King once meant. We know who we are and where we fit in because the gatekeepers have taught us. However, in modern culture, “it is this sociological function of myth that has taken over,” wrote Campbell, “…and it is out of date.”
When I speak of myth in this article, I am referring to it as it has devolved in a world that, as Campbell wrote, is demythologized. That is to say, the first three functions are essentially gone, and we are left with only the fourth, sociological function. In a demythologized world this function is essentially identical with the narratives put forth by the ruling elites to serve only their interests. It does not feed the soul, and when we are honest with ourselves, we admit it.
But we need stories to tell us who we are, even if we know they are false. They provide us with a bare minimum of truth about ourselves, just enough to keep us alive (in Chapter Ten of my book I write about Robert Johnson’s concept of “low-quality Dionysus”). And it’s possible that even such low-quality mythologies may lead us to deeper mysteries.
Myth shapes our values, organizes our experience, brings emotion to our festivals and sacrifices, sets the boundaries of dissent, names the children, sends them off to war and justifies their deaths. It is the most compelling story we tell ourselves about who we are, especially when we hear it from the noble ones, those upon whom we project our own nobility. And frequently it is the story of who we are not – the Other.Howard Zinn wrote:
The more widespread is education in a society, the more mystification is required to conceal what is wrong: church, school, and the written word work together for that concealment. This is not the work of a conspiracy; the privileged of society are as much victims of the going mythology as the teachers, priests, and journalists who spread it. All simply do what comes naturally…to say what has always been said, to believe what has always been believed.
In this post-modern world, more than at any other time in history, we are quickly losing any collectively shared sense of what is real, or true, or to be trusted. With our identities shaken to the core, millions of us are searching for leaders or ideologies to revive some sense of meaning, even as a return to racism or misogyny.
In American secular culture (the South and parts of the Midwest aside), religion has long lost its gatekeeping function. It has been replaced by mainstream media, by consumerism, by the culture of celebrity, and – for the upper middle class – by elite educational institutions, especially in the teaching of our national stories. Since cultural and political gatekeeping no longer reaches us through revealed truth, these secular gatekeepers have assumed greater importance. I’ve written several articles about gatekeeping in America:
For a long time we’ve known – or should have known – that all politicians lie. But we need to pursue that statement to its antecedents: those politicians went to college, and most of those who have risen to the highest levels (including Trumpus, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Chuck Schumer, J.D.Vance, Josh Hawley, Mitt Romney, Amy Klobuchar, Kirstin Gillibrand, Elise Stefanik and Tom Cotton) attended Ivy League institutions.
America’s elite universities have served, consciously or not, to maintain the mythology of American innocence, good intentions and exceptionalism (which necessarily involves faith in white supremacy and imperial privilege) since the middle of the 19th century. So it can be useful to know who taught these people, and who taught their teachers.
Students interested in journalism, politics, public administration, international relations or the more rarified realms of college teaching all enter what Noam Chomsky calls “a system of imposed ignorance” and emerge from the elite universities as the most highly indoctrinated future gatekeepers:
A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things…that are threatening to power interests …which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society…you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions…
People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it)…are likely to be weeded out along the way…There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience…The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. (In) a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.
All historians sift through the historical record and cherry pick the facts that will best buttress their arguments. Again, some gatekeepers are nothing but liars and con men who faithfully serve the powerful. Some of them are honest racists and propagandists for empire. But the most convincing are the ones who have emerged from these institutions as true believers in the myth of American innocence.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Yes, some would still excuse men such as Thomas Jefferson who never freed their slaves as “men of their times”, men who were so blinded by their prejudices that they simply did not know any better. Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, writes that even Jefferson’s cousin John Randolph did so, and
…In the two decades after the Revolutionary War, so many planters freed slaves that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased from less than one percent in 1782 to 13.5 percent in 1810…The notion that Jefferson was merely following the crowd, and that everyone else did the same thing is convenient for us.
At some point a historian must – or ought to – look deeper. Let’s dispense with the excuse that men didn’t know better. If they didn’t, it was because of their own moral failure. Ten of the first twelve presidents (and two others) were slave owners, as were 27 Supreme Court Justices. These men knew precisely what they were doing, and how they were profiting. And they surrounded themselves with other men who were smart enough to articulate justifications for their actions – and teach them to following generations.
How did the leadership of the exceptional nation that had only recently proclaimed that all men are created equal justify themselves? The French philosopher Montesquieu explained:
It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures (Blacks) to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.
Slavery was big business. Most early American fortunes were derived at least partially from it, and most 18th-century intellectuals (with many exceptions) grew up taking it, or at least the assumptions of white supremacy, for granted.
Religious authorities were still the primary gatekeepers. But in Colonial America this necessarily had to do with race. Two of the period’s most influential preachers, associated with the First “Great Awakening”, Jonathan Edwards (also a President of Princeton) and George Whitefield, owned slaves. In the South, preachers (including college professor and Woodrow Wilson’s father) J.R. Wilson continued to justify slavery during the Civil War and for decades afterwards. Pastor Thornton Stringfellow wrote that slavery “…was incorporated into the only National Constitution which ever emanated from God”.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson writes that well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.” Clergymen presided over many lynchings from 1880 onwards, and perhaps 40,000 of them joined the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. White supremacy was inseparable from Southern religion, wrote theologian James Sellers; therefore, all threats to it took on mythic importance:
Segregation is a system of belief…It therefore becomes a holy path, complete with commandments, priests, theologians…
Psychologist Joel Kovel asserts that there are two kinds of racism. One is the obvious dominative racism that developed in close contact (including the privilege of rape) between master and slave. The second – aversive racism – arose from Puritan associations of blackness with filth, and it was strongest in the North. In the 1820s the French visitor Alexis De Tocqueville noticed that
Prejudice appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.
For the entire 19th century, Ivy league professors were among the gatekeepers of the Northern consensus on race. Since that time, elite educational establishments have maintained that essentially religious function: preventing, or at least marginalizing, heresy. They especially target those tasked with maintaining our sense of identity through construction of memory: the professional historians and those they mentor who go on to become teachers themselves. To understand how we got to this point, we’ll need to look at the history of history in America.
Barry Spector's Blog 