Why History Matters -- by Bruce S. Thornton, David Horowitz Freedom Center (Oct 2020)
This summer our country witnessed an all-out assault on American history. Riots and protests that began as reactions to a black suspect who died in police custody quickly escalated into an attack on American institutions, heroes, culture, and history. Some targets like Christpher Columbus and Southern slave-holders have long been objects of leftist protest. But as the vandalism spread and the range of targets increased, a surreal ignorance of history became obvious.
Soon statues and monuments dedicated to abolitionists and military heroes from the Civil War that ended slavery came under attack: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and many others who fought and died because "black lives matter" were just as guilty as Confederates Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The statue honoring the namesake of Whittier, California, John Greenleaf Whittier -- abolitionist activist, poet, and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society -- was vandalized with the graffiti "Fuck Slave-Owners." Even more baffling, Augustus Saint-Gaudens's famous Civil War Monument -- financed by black Bostonians, and dedicated in 1884 to the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment led by abolitionist Robert Gould Shaw -- was defaced for being a monument to "white supremacy."
Worse yet, this assault on Clio, the muse of history, has the support of many civic authorities and university presidents and boards of trustees. Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser has formed a committee to survey all public statues and monuments to decide which will be removed for their "disqualifying histories": "The District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expression," the Heritage Foundation reported, "is recommending that the federal government 'remove, relocate, or contextualize' about 1,300 'assets,' including 'statues, public schools, libraries, parks, and roads'" -- not even sparing the iconic Washington monument obelisk.
Such historic ignorance has for decades been obvious in American society, though not as publicly pervasive as we have witnessed over the last several months. In 2018, a survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation revealed that just one in three Americans could pass the citizenship test of basic historical knowledge. In 2010, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute surveyed college students and found that 57% could pass ISI's civic knowledge test.
As the current indiscriminate vandalism of statues and monuments demonstrates, this ignorance of American history and civic principles is deeply embedded in the schools and universities. For years, illiberal identity politics and leftist dislike of America have shaped the curriculum with books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of America, which has sold 2.6 million copies, mainly to schools and universities. It distorts American history with a Cultural Marxist presentation of the U.S. as racist, xenophobic, colonialist, and oppressive, a global villain responsible for all the world's ills.
In recent years, two more similarly biased visions of American history have been adopted by school districts across the nation. The New York Times' "1619 Project" claims that the United States was founded in order to protect and advance slavery, an interpretation rejected by numerous American historians, most of them liberal. And now, Black Lives Matter has produced a social studies curriculum that wants to turn "classrooms and schools" into "sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness."
In other words, the teaching of history is continuing to be transformed into indoctrination by illiberal, leftist propaganda. Nor is this phenomenon new. In 1984, George Orwell described how the abandonment of belief in objective historical truth makes possible a politicized history that legitimizes tyrannical power:
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death. ... And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past" ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
In America today, Orwell's fiction has traveled a long way to becoming fact.
History is not just the record of events in chronological order. Such works are called "chronicles," and were common in the premodern period, with more than 2500 written between 300 and 1500 A.D. Chronicles like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide the raw material of history, but are not history properly understood.
The first history is the Greek Herodotus's Histories, "inquiries" in ancient Greek, which date to around 425 B.C. Herodotus is known as the "father of History" because he first created the elements of history as we know it: not just the recording of events in chronological order, but a critical examination of their sources, an interpretation of what the events mean, and an analysis of the motivating ideas behind what men and states do. These interpretations frequently had a didactic purpose, reminding contemporaries and posterity about human nature consistent over time and space, and how it can be understood from people's motivations and behavior.
For example, Herodotus's narration of two Greek wars with the Persian Empire provide the empirical evidence for his theme: the superiority of political freedom over autocracy, and of self-governing citizens ruled by law over subjects oppressed by the whims and interests of unaccountable autocrats. Throughout the Histories, he contrasts the hubris and tyranny of the Persian kings Darius and his son Xerxes, who issue commands and brook no dissent, with the public deliberations of equal Greek citizens who then vote on a course of action to defend their way of life. One image of this contrast is the description of the free Athenian hoplites at the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., who ran or trotted to engage the Persians though outnumbered three to one. These were contrasted with the polyglot, quasi-slave subjects of Darius who have been impressed into his army and so must be whipped into fighting and dying on behalf of their king and his interests.
A few decades after the Histories, the Athenian Thucydides wrote what is still one of the greatest analyses of states at war, his History of the Peloponnesian War. Like Herodotus, Thucydides narrates the events and discusses the civic and military leaders of the 27-year conflict (431-404 B.C.) between Athens and Sparta. But Thucydides marks an advance in historiography with his conscious awareness of how important it is to confirm as far as possible the accuracy of events, his critical examination of the sources for those events, and his frank admission of the difficulties in confirming the truth of facts from decades earlier. Important as well is his distrust of mythic or legendary sources, instead relying on his own investigations of the sites of those events, and interviews with people who had firsthand knowledge of them, with the "accuracy of the report," he writes, "being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible."
Next, like Herodotus, Thucydides tells the story in the context of an idea. But whereas Herodotus' controlling idea is the superiority of consensual government of free citizens who rule themselves, Thucydides' main theme is the permanent flaws of human nature that egalitarian democracies exacerbate, such as the abuse of citizen political freedom and its offices in order to advance personal and factional power and interests.
This critical eye turned towards one's own political community stakes a claim for history's duty not to play favorites, but to present the facts as established by evidence, and to make reasoned judgments consistent with those facts.
Thucydides, moreover, draws larger philosphical conclusions from his realist view of human nature. The dangerous effects of these flaws can be managed and mitigated in times of peace, but are magnified in times of war and civic violence, which compromise and endanger the political and social order. Describing the horrors of the civil war in Corcyra (427 B.C.), he writes in one of his most enduring and famous insights:
The suffering which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.
This tragic truth about human nature as manifested in human action illustrates the importance of history -- as a record over time of how human nature and fortunes have fared depending on how good or bad, noble or ignoble, are the ideas that motivate people. Thucydides explicitly says that is the purpose for writing his book: to provide "an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to understanding the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it." Thus he writes "not to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time."
Ever since Thucydides, this notion of history as a guide to a permanent human nature, with due acknowledgement of "the variety of the particular cases," has been what separates genuine history from antiquarianism, an interest in the past as a form of highbrow entertainment. We can see the influence of Thucydides' history on the American Founding, which similarly assumed a flawed human nature vulnerable to the lust for power and its aggrandizement, an assumption for which a history like Thucydides' provided empirical evidence.
History, then, bestows perspective on the present, a larger context in which to situate and understand our own times and ideas, just as perspective in a painting provides spatial depth for interrelating figures, landscapes, and structures that fill the canvas. Without that perspective, the past becomes a Cubist painting, everything flattened on the canvas of the present, now filled with caricatures of people and their actions and ideologies, which are understood and judged in terms of present ideologies and political aims and interests.
This view makes history matter, for in the words of the late Roman Republican historian Livy, it shows us "what to imitate," and "mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result." The modern sensibility, however, distrusts lessons from the past.
Rather than constant through space and time, the progressive narrative believes human nature can be shaped and improved by education and the removal of economic, environmental, and political dysfunctions that lead to crime, conflicts, and wars. These improvements suggest that events of the past have little utility in describing the more advanced present, and so every historical analogy is necessarily false -- a sentiment crudely suggested in Henry Ford's observation that "history is bunk." The differences between two events separated by time and different levels of intellectual and technological sophistication will necessarily outweigh any usefulness that comes from similarities.
This disregard for the lessons of the past is particularly dangerous in the decline of military history and the study of war. Once a prestigious presence in universities, departments of military history have dwindled even as "peace studies" programs have proliferated, despite the continuing market for popular histories of war. One factor is the modern belief that war is an anachronism, a throwback to our benighted and unenlightened past. More important has been the development of an interpretation of history that predicts an evolution in global political, social, and economic improvements. This interpretation assumes this evolution is improving and will continue to improve life and thus minimize the need for wars, and perforce the study of them.
The modern world, then, rejects the Thucydidean notion that human nature is driven by permanent destructive passions and selfish interests that will start wars only force can stop. Thus modernity rejects the wisdom that Plato records in the Laws, "War is the natural state of relations among states, and peace is just a name." In contrast, the Enlightenment interpretation of history begun in the late 18th century believes that humans are universally rational and peace-loving, and human nature can be improved if only external constraints on their innate goodness -- ignorance, poverty, parochial ethnic and nationalist loyalties, oppression by priestly and aristocratic elites, and unjust economic institutions -- can be mitigated and eventually removed, as modern technology and greater knowledge of human psychology and motivation promise. The people will progress to the realization that their true interests like peace, freedom, and prosperity will be achieved not by force, but by international trade, economic development, liberal democracy, human rights, and non-lethal transnational institutions and international laws, which can adjudicate conflict and eliminate wars.
This influential belief was famously expressed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace." There Kant imagined a "federation of free states" that would create a "pacific alliance ... different from a treaty of peace ... inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars, whereas the latter only finishes one." In his conclusion, Kant expressed the optimism that would become an article of faith in subsequent centuries: "If it is a duty, if the hope can even be conceived, of realizing, though by an endless progress, the reign of public right -- perpetual peace, which ... is not then a chimera, but a problem, of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the progress of the human mind, promises us the solution."
Throughout the 19th century, international institutions were created to realize this dream and lessen, if not eliminate, the savagery and suffering of war. The First Geneva Convention in 1864 and the Second in 1906 sought to establish laws for the humane treatment of the sick and wounded in war. The first Hague Convention in 1899, which established an international Court of Arbitration and codified restrictions on aerial bombardment, poison gas, and exploding bullets, in its preamble explicitly acknowledged its Kantian aims: "the maintenance of the general peace" and the "friendly settlement of international disputes" that both reflected the "solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations" and their shared desire for "extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice."
These ideals were seemingly validated by the growth in global trade empowered by new technologies of transportation and communication like the steamship and telegraph. Later technological advances paralleled the growth in transnational global institutions like the League of Nations and the World Court that reflected the new "harmony of interests and peace between nations," as 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat put it decades earlier. Such international cooperation promised to achieve Kant's "perpetual peace," as British writer Narman Angell argued in 1913 in his influential book The Great Illusion, which predicted the ultimate end of warfare. After all, wars are expensive and contrary to the economic interests of all, and to the universal human desire for peace and prosperity.
This interpretation of history reveals the problem that can occur in historical writing when the idea that frames the narrative is unsound and dismisses traditional wisdom and the collective knowledge of prior generations of people often recorded in history. Today, there is not much historical evidence that the "rules-based international order," as globalist idealism is usually called, has been as successful as its proponents and functionaries of international agencies claim, or that the great diversity of peoples and cultures really just want to become like Westerners.
The most famous example of the failure of transnational diplomacy and institutions to prevent war is the 1938 Munich conference, the third of three meetings between Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The Munich conference ended with the surrender of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, putting German troops on the southern border of Poland, which a year later Germany invaded, igniting World War II. The Munich debacle was a consequence of the two prior decades, which saw the proliferation of international conferences, treaties, and institutions intended to achieve the Kantian dream and ensure that the horrors of the Great War were not repeated.
Less famous, but no less significant, the League of Nations was created as a "parliament of nations" that could adjudicate disputes and conflicts through collective deliberation and treaties, and promote the reduction of armaments that made war more likely. In practice, it failed miserably to prevent the aggression of Germany, Italy, and Japan in the decades leading up to World War II. It could only function, as Winston Churchill in 1946 would warn about the newly created United Nations, as a "cockpit in the Tower of Babel."
One of the most celebrated multinational agreements was the 1924 Locarno Treaty negotiated among France, England, and Germany, with some provisions that included several other nations. Its promises were proclaimed in a New York Times headline: "France and Germany Bar War Forever." At the time, this treaty was promoted as the end of the bad blood and mischief caused by the supposedly unjust and vengeful Versailles Treaty, and the welcoming of Germany back into the international community. It was wildly celebrated as the beginning of a new age of prosperity and peace.
In reality, Locarno facilitated Germany's stealth rearmament, the reconstruction of its war machine, its return to dominance of the continent, England's serial appeasement of those efforts, and France's withdrawal into the false comfort of the Maginot Line and the "cult of defense." It wasn't long before the emptiness of the treaty was clear to all, and the praise of it became known as "Locarny-Blarney."
A few years after Locarno came another globalist expression of unwaranted optimism, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. By the terms of this agreement, the contracting parties "condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another," and "agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts ... shall never be sought except by pacific means." It was signed by 49 nations, including the future Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan. Its hollowness was exposed a mere three years later when Japan invaded Manchuria -- an act of brutal aggression met with feeble bluster and empty threats on the part of the League of Nations.
Munich, then, became the culminating failure of half a century of idealistic internationalism. The Twentieth Century's spectacular carnage in two world wars graphically showed the futility of such utopias and, of the subsequent multiplication of international institutions, from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization. Yet we have continued to embrace the Kantian ideal that international institutions, treaties, diplomacy, and laws can resolve disputes and conflicts peaceably or for a much lower price than the costly world wars of the previous century.
In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a multinational coalition's swift defeat of Iraq, seemingly confirmed the triumph of democracy, free markets, and transnational institutions, or as George H.W. Bush said in his inauguration address of that year, "a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind -- peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law."
During the Nineties, events seemed to confirm Bush's optimism about the future: The swift defeat of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, and the ending of brutal revanchist violence in the Balkans by multinational coalitions; the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, the creation of the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty, and the welcoming of communist China into the World Trade Organization. All were signs of history's "end," understood as the triumph of liberal democracy and "moralizing internationalism," as historian Corelli Barnett called the Kantian paradigm. At the same time, the tech revolution was relentlessly shrinking the world further, increasing the efficiency and reach of global trade and communications, and bringing more nations into its fold.
This optimism should have been shattered by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The rise of al Qaeda, and its series of attacks on American forces and embassies, was a graphic assertion that history had not ended with the triumph of the "rules-based, democratic world order." The ensuing decade saw the United States embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that the UN and extensive diplomatic efforts could not prevent. More seriously, the George W. Bush administration expanded the wars' rationale to include the extension of the Wilsonian principles of democracy promotion, and the globalist ideal "to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind -- peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law," as Bush put it. Few considered the radical differences between the Western dream and Islamic cultures that did not recognize the West's cargo of political and cultural goods like human rights, democracy, separation of church and state, religious tolerance, sex equality, and peaceful relations with the West.
More recently, the failure to learn the lessons of Munich -- that multinational agreements without a credible threat of force to back them can lead to catastrophe -- was in 2015 evident in Barack Obama's committing the United States, without the approval of the Senate, to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This multinational agreement was intended to get Iran to open up its nuclear development facilities to inspectors in exchange for $150 billion and removing sanctions on its economy, particularly its oil industry.
By its own terms, the JCPOA would only slow, not definitely stop, Iran from acquiring nuclear capability in a decade. But as the Israelis showed in 2018 with the daring theft of 100,000 documents from Iran's nuclear program archives, the Iranians had been violating the agreement from the day it was signed. Just as Hitler had been emboldened by Britain and France's appeasement, after the JCPOA was signed, Iran ramped up its interference in Syria and Iraq, and along with Russia now rivaled the U.S. for influence in the region. All the nuclear deal accomplished was to put Iran -- the world's most lethal state sponsor of terrorism that has threatened Israel with genocide -- on a subsidized glide-path to nuclear weapons capability. For now, Donald Trump's withdrawal from the agreement and reimposition of serious sanctions in 2018 have slowed Iran's progress -- a course-correction hostage to the outcome of the presidential election in November.
There are many reasons for the Iran agreement, from the EU's eagerness to do business with Iran, to Barack Obama's desire for a legacy achievement. But more important is the now two-centuries-long idealization of the "rules-based international order" and its pretense that multinational institutions and multilateral diplomacy can resolve conflicts without force. This interpretation of history dominates our State Department and foreign policy thinking in universities and think-tanks, leaving them hostile to new thinking and ideas. As Professor of International Relations Stephen M. Walt wrote in The Hell of Good Intentions, "Instead of being a disciplined meritocracy that rewards innovative thinking and performance, the foreign policy community is in fact a highly conformist, inbred professional caste whose beliefs and policy preferences have evolved little over the past twenty-five years, even as the follies kept piling up."
This institutional myopia and "professional deformation" are the wages of ignoring the collective wisdom of humanity as recorded in history, and the consequences that follow the arrogance of moderns who think somehow human nature has improved along with our technology, and that we are much wiser than those who came before us. But the empirical evidence for this progress is thin outside the West, and even there what seems to be improvement is in fact the result of a greater redistribution of wealth, security and comfort, which shield our citizens from the danger and discomfort that most of humanity lived with every day.
But as Thucydides shows us, when such favorable circumstances change, then the reality of an unchanging human nature becomes obvious: "in peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants and so proves a rough master that brings most men's character to a level with their fortunes." He also cited as evidence the plague that devastated Athens in 430 B.C. and brought on "lawless extravagance" to make this point: "Men now did just what they pleased, cooly venturing on what they had formerly done only in a corner." Over the last four months the burning streets, mayhem, vandalism, and killings in our biggest cities have borne witness to this permanent truth.
When it comes to foreign relations, this truth is equally valid. In 1932, a year before the Nazis took power in Germany, Charles de Gaulle articulated this bedrock principle of realist foreign policy: "But, hope though we may, what reason have we for thinking that passion and self-interest, the root cause of armed conflict in men and nations, will cease to operate; that anyone will willingly surrender what he has or not try to get what he wants; in short that human nature will ever become something other than it is? ... 'Laws unsupported by force soon fall into contempt,' said Cardinal de Retz. International agreements will be of little value unless there are troops to prevent their infringement. In whatever direction the world may move, it will never be able to do without the final arbitration of arms."
This interpretation of history, founded on a tragic view of human nature, for centuries has been proven to be correct.
The Kantian globalism that ignores or dismisses that long realist tradition reveals the pitfalls of interpretive history. If the controlling idea is unsound or incoherent, and if it ignores empirical evidence that questions its accuracy, then such history can be dangerous when it is used to guide and justify policy. This prevalence of subjectivity and bias is a permanent risk of historical writing, and the primary duty of historians is to critically examine their predecessors -- and themselves -- for any such distortions.
More dangerous, however, than these all too human frailties is the willful distortion of history in order to serve as propaganda for an ideological cause. In modern times, Marxism has been a powerful interpretation of history, one that led to the world-changing Russian Revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union, one of history's most bloody and brutal regimes. Despite the collapse of Soviet Russia and the end of the Cold War, the Marxist historical narrative in various adaptations still poses a threat to the American Constitutional order of unalienable rights and political freedom. Indeed, in the last few decades, Communist China with its hybrid version of Marxism has become the most powerful challenge to the free West.
The Marxist historical narrative holds that the utopia of social justice and perfect equality will inevitably arrive as the culminating stage of history, once the proletariat throws off their capitalist overlords, private ownership of the means of production is abolished and communally owned, and the state "withers away." Marxism's theoretical and practical failures, evident by the end of the 19th century, required adjustments to its historical determinism. Imperialism and colonialism were demonized as capitalism's expansion into new markets, and its exploitation of new labor and resources, came at the expense of the undeveloped nations and peoples, whom Karl Marx earlier had scorned as laggards in communism's preordained historical development.
Additionally, the increasing distribution of wealth that accelerated after World War II shifted the struggle from the factory floor to the broader culture, a project taken up by the Frankfurt School. The New Left of the 1960's -- who battled working-class union members on the streets of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic Convention -- focused on the "long march through the institutions," as cultural Marxist Antonio Gramsci called it, especially the universities. Rather than mobilize the workers for the decisive communist revolution, now an assault on bourgeois morals, sexual mores, faith, and history would undermine the liberal democratic and free-market capitalist order until it collapsed.
Hence the rise of identity politics, the replacement of the industrial proletariat by "internal" colonized peoples like ethnic minorities, especially blacks, along with women and sexual minorities. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other crimes against oppressed identities replaced the oppression of the workers as the rationale for taking power and reforming institutions tainted with "systemic racism." This fusion -- evident in the founders of the racialist Black Lives Matter, who call themselves "trained Marxists" -- has been the host keeping alive the Marxist bacillus, the toxic pandemic currently infecting our culture and politics, and destroying our largest cities.
This new Marxist interpretation for decades has infected history. The most influential has been Howard Zinn's A People's History of America, which was published in 1980 and has sold more than 2.6 million copies. It has been a staple of middle school (in a simplified version called A Young People's History of the United States, high school (Advanced Placement U.S. History teachers use Zinn's book in teacher-training seminars) and university history curricula ever since.
Zinn, of course, was not the first to write a leftist revisionist history of America, but no mainstream historian then and now, despite his manifest historiographical flaws and crimes, has achieved Zinn's influence on school curricular and popular culture, or indulged as blatantly the duplicitous distortions Zinn has.
For example, Mary Grabar, author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America, has pointed out recently at The Heritage Foundation that Zinn's claims to have unearthed new evidence exploding the myths of American achievement and exceptionalism were exaggerated at best, and frequently duplicitous.
Moreover, the present attempt to "cancel" Christopher Columbus from America's pantheon of heroes no doubt derives from Zinn's treatment of the explorer that has informed much of the nation's high school American history curricula. "In terms of Columbus," Graber said, "He mostly copied from passages quoted in a book he plagiarized, a book for high school students written by a fellow Marxist and anti-Vietnam War organizer who was not a historian, but a novelist, by the name of Hans Koning." Worse, Zinn abused historical documents like Columbus' diary by using ellipses to shape the narrative to suit his interpretation, excising sentences and whole pages that give qualifying context and nuances in order to portray Columbus as a genocidal exploiter and enslaver of indigenous peoples.
Such malfeasance mars every page of Zinn's book, and the result has been to indoctrinate students with anti-American propaganda. As Graber writes in her book, Zinn "has succeeded in convincing a generation of Americans that the nation Abraham Lincoln truly called 'the last best hope of the earth' is essentially a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and oppressing the working man." The conclusion of this indictment is that the United States should be replaced by political order that provides social justice and radical egalitarianism for America's victims -- precisely the policy program the Democrats have endorsed with their Green New deal, Medicare For All, subsidized college tuition, reparations for slavery, and a radical "reformation" of the nation's police departments.
This animus against America predicated on fake history more recently informs the New York Times's "1619 Project," published in 2019, a Pulitzer Prize winner already becoming a part of school curricula. A rehash of Zinn's biased and historically challenged thesis, this interpretation of U.S. history dates the founding not to 1776, but to 1619 when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. The master narrative of American history now comprises the consequences of slavery on every institution of the U.S., including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were crafted to ensure slavery's existence. Or as the Times put it on its interactive website, the project "aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."
As history, the "1619 Project" rivals Howard Zinn in its historiographical sins. For example, as the Smithsonian Magazine pointed out, the first slaves came to North America in 1526 with a Spanish expedition, and probably later in 1586 when Sir Francis Drake brought Africans to Roanoke Island. More important, the focus on 1619 simplifies the complex, global phenomenon of chattel slavery, and keeps black Americans in a state of permanent marginalization. Worse, "1619" attempts to revise history in order to justify dubious notions such as "white privilege" and systemic racism," the ideas that slavery has permanently stained not just American history, but its white citizens' psyches, creating a sense of entitlement among whites and subconscious racist treatment of black people.
Just as Howard Zinn was criticized by some leftist historians for bad history, so too has the "1619 Project" faced a barrage of complaints from scholars of American history, most of them liberal. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sent the Times a letter also signed by eminent historians like Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and several others, that criticized the project's misuse of history. The letter noted the Project's "errors" of "verifiable fact," and the "displacement of historical understanding by ideology." As for the thesis that the Founders declared independence "in order to ensure slavery would continue." as the Project claims, the letter states flatly, "This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding -- yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted."
Yet, as in the case of Zinn, these criticisms are unlikely to discredit a document so politically useful for leveraging power by exploiting white guilt. Though the Times slightly edited its website's claim that America was created to protect slavery, it has not corrected its other historical errors. And the Pulitzer Center, as the Heritage Foundation reports, has "adapted the project for use in K-12 schools, and teachers in some 4500 classrooms are using it. It's not clear how any changes made to the project will find their way into schools teaching this content."
The lead writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has responded to criticisms by stating that "the fight over the 1619 Project is not about history. It is about memory." This admission is more damning than any minor corrections and retracted tweets that Hannah-Jones and the Times have made. "Memory" is notoriously unreliable and subjective, prone to rewriting the past in order to serve some present need -- exactly the function of propaganda. The "1619 Project" is the verbal equivalent of the destruction and defacing of public statues and monuments: an attempt to replace the facts of American history and exceptionalism with a leftist and racialist melodrama that political factions can leverage for power and influence.
As I said earlier, good history matters because it gives us a larger perspective in which to understand our own times and events. Having discounted the wisdom of the past, modern times too often is like Miranda in The Tempest: Seeing Europeans for the first time, she exclaims, "O brave new world, that hath such people in it!" But more interesting is her father Prospero's retort: "Tis new to thee." We prize novelty both in products and ideas, often at the expense of thousands of years of human experience.
This bad habit gives influence and traction to the fashionable criticisms of our history and culture that have expanded over the years beyond the intellectual elite. Every such criticism must answer an important question: Compared to what? Once that context, which a historical perspective documents, is provided, then the problems and crises over which we fret become not so important, or even seem trivial. But the problems that progressives inflate into existential crises serve to legitimize the pursuit of impossible utopias -- at the price, of course, of the technocrats aggrandizing more power at the expense of our freedom and autonomy.
More importantly, an accurate, fair history of the United States, warts and all, still reveals a factual basis for celebrating our accomplishments and principles such as political freedom, unalienable rights, equality under the law, free speech, and an open economy that gives a chance for all to rise to the level of their talents, virtues, and hard work.
Furthermore, in a nation as diverse as the U.S. has been from the start, we need a common history that helps to bind in solidarity the unum comprising ao many pluribus, a story of our country that validates our affection and loyalty. This does not mean that the histories of the various peoples who make up the country should be ignored or neglected. But those histories cannot come at the expense of the national history. Nor does it mean that the excesses and mistakes of our history should be ignored, for they do not negate our achievements. Indeed, in the case of slavery and legal segregation, the story of our collective and bloody struggle against those evils enhances our national story and stature even more.
Finally, when ideological history that villainizes our country becomes widespread, it insidiously erodes that affection and loyalty, and it emboldens our enemies to see us as weak and primed for a fall -- the theme of many of Osama bin Laden's sermons in his training camps. This dynamic is not new; it appeared in the decades between the two world wars, when self-doubt and disdain for their own country dominated British intellectuals. This phenomenon was noted by two very different people: the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill, and the socialist George Orwell.
In a speech delivered in 1933, Churchill warned about "the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals." In 1941, George Orwell similarly noted, "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality" and feel it is a "duty to snigger at every English institution." Before the Second World War "left-wingers were chipping away at English morale," and consequently even the morale of the once patriotic middle-classes was damaged, which "made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young man to enter the armed forces."
Such attitudes may seem fashionable and sophisticated in times of peace and prosperity, but when fierce enemies challenge a country, such fashions are suicidal. As Napoleon once said, "In war, moral power is to physical as three part out of four." Without people willing to kill and die for their country, no amount of materiel will compensate for that failure of nerve.
And that's why history matters: to remind us not just that our flaws and mistakes make us human, but that our achievements make us exceptional.