by is Mooney
In 2011 David Barton, a Christian conservative and head of a Texas-based organization called WallBuilders—which describes itself as “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage”—claimed that the Founding Fathers already had “the entire debate on creation-evolution,” and that Tom Paine had stated that “you’ve got to teach creation science in the public school classroom. The scientific method demands that.” Paine, a deist and a crusader against organized religion, died in 1809, the same year that Charles Darwin was born. “Creation science”—centered on the claim that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—is an American fundamentalist invention of the 20th century.
Embedded in these examples, one finds historical errors of many types. There are simple factual mistakes that seem to emanate from confusion, but that also have an ideological tinge and then are rigidly defended. There are egregious, motivated misrepresentations (the Texas Board of Education trying to sow doubt among students about whether the First Amendment creates a separation of church and state). Finally, there’s anachronism, “the unthinking assumption that people in the past behaved and thought as we do,” as the British historian John Tosh defines it—which is the only way Barton can possibly talk about a “creation-evolution” debate occurring before Darwin, and about Tom Paine advocating “creation science.”
But don’t just focus on the specific errors and misrepresentations—we know by now that people will commit almost any sort of reasoning flub in service of an emotional goal. Rather, what’s important here is to sense that goal, that deeper purpose. The misinformation here isn’t of an idle, accidental sort. As with the Huckabee videos, these erroneous stories are told in service of a broader triumphal and providential narrative about America—Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”
In this story, America is a unique nation, blessed and chosen by God, founded in religious faith. It has righteousness and good on its side—and its enemies (Nazis, Soviet communists, and so on) are the purest incarnation of evil on Earth. America has been threatened, but great leaders (chosen by God) have emerged at critical times to win the fight against those forces—epitomized by Ronald Reagan.
The story is a Christian one, a Manichean one, a simplistic one, a comforting one, and a certain one. Psychologically, it is deeply conservative. It is about nothing if not maintaining and honoring tradition—in this case, the tradition of America as a great and heroic nation (whose citizens keep themselves armed and free!).
The problem—for fact-loving liberals—is that this isn’t an accurate story. It doesn’t obey the evidentiary canons of academic historians, and the details it ignores deeply complicate or confound the conservative narrative. There are ugly moments in America’s past, too, ones that you can’t paper over. Slavery. Segregation. Lynchings. The slaughter of native Americans. Japanese internment during World War II. This doesn’t make America a bad country today: We’ve changed a lot, learned a lot, progressed a lot. But it doesn’t help to whitewash and mythologize things—or, so reason liberals and academic historians.
But as we’ve already seen, when it comes to biased conservative reasoning on behalf of deeply held beliefs, rigorous scholarly accuracy has little to do with it. What matters is having an argument—any argument, so long as it meets the minimum threshold of making you feel reaffirmed and sure of what you think, and what your group thinks. What matters is whether you can cobble together, and defend, an assortment of facts that bolster your identity and satisfy your psychological needs.
On history—as on science, as on economics—conservatives have done just this. They’ve written a powerful and compelling (though inaccurate) script that reinforces their system of beliefs in both a logical and an emotional way—a narrative they can then pass on to children at their earliest ages, as in Huckabee’s videos. In many ways quite brilliant and even beautiful in its simplicity, this script casts them as—yes—“The Tea Party,” sharing the same values as the original American revolutionaries, and carrying forward their tradition.
And what have liberals done in response to the right’s historical narrative? As we’ll see, they certainly haven’t twisted history in the same systematic way (a few troubling cases notwithstanding). But they rarely know how to respond to conservatives’ historical misinformation—which is not with rebuttals, but by telling moving and accurate historical stories of their own.
In the words of historian Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, the intellectual traditions of liberalism on the one hand, and rigorous historical analysis on the other, are closely linked. As Perlstein puts it:
Liberalism is rooted in this notion of the Enlightenment, the idea that we can use our reason, and we can use empiricism, and we can sort out facts, and using something like the scientific method—although history is not like nuclear physics—to arrive at consensus views of the truth that have a much more solid standing, epistemologically, than what the right wing view of the truth is: which is much more mythic, which is much more based on tribal identification, which is much more based on intuition and tradition. And there’s always been history writing in that mode too. But within the academy, and within the canons of expertise, and within the canons of professionalism, that kind of history has been superseded by a much more empirical, Enlightenment-based history.
The basic story of how this happened closely parallels the story of the Scientific Revolution, which began in the mid 16th century. If you go back to the illustrious historians of Greece and Rome, you do find occasional pushes toward the sort of accuracy that is now an academic norm—particularly with a historian like Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. But you also find much storytelling and mythos. The rigorous rules for identifying and handling original sources that now mark the profession didn’t yet exist.
True modern history originates first in the Renaissance, and then especially in the so-called Age of Reason. How to ring in the change? To put it bluntly, historians started debunking mythology and nonsense that had been passed down uncritically over the ages. In one classic early case, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla conclusively proved in1440 that the “donation of Constantine,” a document allegedly from the 4th century that gave the pope power over much of the Roman Empire, was a forgery. As part of Valla’s case, he showed that the text contained words that would not have been used in Constantine’s time, like satrap—a classic historian’s maneuver.
From there, what we now call the “historical method” gradually developed, often with many important contributions from religious scholars. In the 19th century came the development of a movement called “historicism” at the hands of scholars like the German Leopold von Ranke, who pledged “merely to show how things actually were.” For the historicists, the goal was to understand the past on its own terms, shielded from the presentist impulse to read it in service of some immediate goal or impulse—nationalistic, nostalgic, or outright political.
In other words, history was becoming more of a science. It was developing its own standards of objectivity. History can never, as Perlstein notes, be physics. Nor can it tell all that happened in the past—there’s simply too much information. Historical evidence always has to be organized into some type of narrative, which inevitably involves some picking and choosing.
Nevertheless, good history can practice rigor, it can validate and refute vying accounts, and it can arrive at scholarly consensus. And just like science, it has a methodology and a community of scholars dedicated to enforcing the standards and norms associated with quality work.
However—and by now this will come as no surprise—the scholars who practice these critical techniques within universities today are overwhelmingly liberal. In Neil Gross’s and Solon Simmons’ survey of the politics of university professors, the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters among historians was 18.9 to 1. With economists, you’ll recall, the ratio was roughly 3 to
1. Such figures lend at least a superficial validity to the standard conservative critique of academia—that it has its own raging biases—a critique that then empowers conservative counterexpertise and, ultimately, counterreality.
In the case of history, that critique takes a distinctive form: It levels charges of historical revisionism against the academic left. The argument is that rather than telling the traditional story of America as a land of liberty and opportunity (perhaps blessed by God), leftist historians who actually loathe the country have instead been telling stories about the evils of capitalism and the U.S.’s leaders, and trying to get those into the textbooks.
Revisionism is often used as a term of opprobrium—with undertones of “Holocaust revisionism”—although technically speaking, every good historian engages in this process. New historical research is nothing if not an attempt to “revise” our understanding of the past by bringing to light new details and new interpretations. That’s a good thing, most of the time. However, revisionism has also come to mean retelling history with an ideological agenda, and perhaps going so far as to deny past events (or fabricate them). Thus, the term has attached to the faux “historical” arguments used to support Holocaust denial and conspiratorial ideas about U.S. history, such as the notion that Franklin Roosevelt knew the Pearl Harbor attack was coming but did nothing about it, because he wanted us to be drawn into war.
There’s no reason, however, that excessive or indefensible forms of revisionism should only be found on the left. In fact, as we’ll see, many of the most abusive revisionist takes on U.S. history are of recent conservative vintage (although there really is some biased left-wing history out there to be wary of).
The conservative critique of revisionism sharpened greatly in the 1990s, amid charges of “political correctness” on the campuses. In a much noted 1994 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History,” Lynne Cheney, wife of the later vice president and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, denounced a new set of National Standards for the teaching of U.S. history that, she said, delivered a breed of “politicized history” typical of the “academic establishment.” Cheney’s chief complaint was that the new standards privileged the counternarratives of disadvantaged groups (native Americans, African Americans, women suffragists) over a standard U.S. history focused on the founders, the presidents, the wars, and so on. “We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it,” wrote Cheney.
The critique in some ways culminated—as critiques often do—in the mouth of a president of the United States, George W. Bush. In 2003, as “WMD” failed to materialize in post-invasion Iraq, Bush accused critics of the war of engaging in “revisionist history.” Actually, the true revisionists in this case were to be found in the Bush administration itself. After the biological and chemical weapons that we went to war over weren’t to be found, the administration began to goalpost-shift about its causus belli, suddenly stressing the importance of liberating Iraq’s oppressed people or preventing the country from getting dangerous weapons (rather than on the pre-war claim that Saddam needed to be disarmed).
Nevertheless, we must concede that the critique of left wing “revisionist” history has some merit. Take the late Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present has sold over a million copies and greatly influenced many high school and college students. Alas, Zinn’s account—allegedly focused on the people, rather than the powerful—has been severely criticized by other scholars, and not just on the right.
“Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence,” writes the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, a liberal and co-editor of the magazine Dissent. “A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.” One key problem, Kazin explains, is that Zinn is so busy painting a battle between the Little Guy and the Man—“a class conflict most Americans didn’t even know they were fighting”—that “his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity.” If he doesn’t understand these two phenomena, Zinn could scarcely be said to understand America—or, ironically, average working-class Americans, the much touted people of his title.
This is hardly an inconsequential oversight. Zinn’s approach prevents those liberals and leftists who fall under its sway from understanding why middle- and lower-class Americans seem so often to vote against their economic interests—and for the Republican Party, the party of the wealthy. Such behavior is inexplicable if you’re only able to think in terms of an egalitarian narrative pitting “people” against “the powerful.” However, it’s very understandable if you recognize the psychological motivations that ground our politics, and that truly separate left and right—in turn allowing you to perceive that egalitarianism is only one moral impulse or intuition among many, and one that runs much stronger in liberals.
That’s not the only problem with Zinn: His book even goes so far as to suggest that the U.S. entered World War II out of questionable motives: racism (against the Japanese), imperialism, business interests. Never mind, uh, Hitler’s racist quest for world dominance. Clearly, conservatives have a point about left wing revisionism.
Zinn deeply troubles me, because I recognize his kind of thinking all too well among my intellectual compatriots. But thankfully, and in good Enlightenment fashion, it is liberal historians themselves, like Kazin, who have criticized him and set the record straight. Meanwhile, conservatives have taken a few cases of academic excess as an excuse to ignore academia entirely, and simply spin out their own reality—in the process far outstripping anything Howard Zinn has done.
For a telling case study, consider how right and the left have told the story of one of the lowest moments in American history—the disgusting forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children, the majority of them U.S. citizens, during World War II. Following upon Pearl Harbor, the roundup was centrally driven by racism, hate, and of course, wartime fear—leading, very predictably, to authoritarian responses and the demonization of out-groups. One newspaper columnist at the time wrote of Japanese Americans that we should “herd ’em up, pack ’em off, and give ’em the inside room of the badlands.” General John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Army’s Western Defense Command, put it like this: “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”
Howard Zinn highlights this event in A People’s History, and you can hardly blame him. It really did happen, and it really can be used to cast our country in a bad light. But highlighting a real historical event is no crime. And it is nothing compared to the right-wing answer: Columnist and TV personality Michelle Malkin’s 2004 book In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. In her book, Malkin rejects the historically established explanation for Japanese internment—which, not surprisingly, strongly emphasizes racial prejudice—and claims instead that we’ve all been laboring under a “politically correct myth of American ‘concentration camps.’” To the contrary, Malkin argues, there was strong evidence—in the top secret MAGIC cables from Japanese diplomats, which U.S. intelligence forces had intercepted—of a “meticulously orchestrated espionage effort” on the part of Japan, using Japanese Americans. And this, says Malkin, justified internment.
Historians, however, have sternly rejected her “speculation” about the MAGIC cables, as one scholar puts it. As a group of them wrote in protesting the book:
. . . This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission.
Sounds much like what you hear whenever the experts stand up to denounce bad science or bad economics—only it’s history this time.
I lack the s
pace to enumerate how many other important episodes from the American past have been subjected to a similar form of conservative revisionism. Books could (and will) be written on the subject; and at least one sweeping book of bad right-wing history is already in circulation—The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, authored by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and published by the conservative Regnery Press (also the publisher of Malkin’s book). From the Revolutionary Era up through the Clinton years, it’s all there. To summarize it, here is the slap-down provided by one academic critic:
Suffice it to say that the book asserts that the American Revolution was no revolution at all; that the Civil War was not about slavery; that the so-called robber barons made America great; that the New Deal made the Depression worse; that the war on poverty made poverty worse; that Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia was a waste of taxpayer money. Not only does Woods reduce complex events to these kinds of simplistic interpretations, he doesn’t even acknowledge that rival interpretations exist. It’s history not as analysis but as catechism.