American History is not What They Say by Jeff Riggenbach

[Stephane Budge]

Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century
over the contents of the American-history textbooks used in the
nation's high schools and colleges. Nor is the reason far to seek. If,
as seems to be the case, these textbooks encompass one hundred percent
of the information that most high school and college graduates in this
country will ever encounter on the subject of American history, the
American-history wars would appear to be well worth fighting. For what
Americans know and understand about the history of the society in
which they live will determine the degree of their willingness to
honor and preserve its ideals and traditions. More than that: it will
determine what they regard as the ideals and traditions of their
society. It will determine nothing less than the kind of society they
will seek to strengthen and perpetuate.

Until very recently, however, the range of the conflict over American-
history textbooks was narrow indeed. All sides tacitly agreed that the
story of the United States was the triumphant tale of a people
fervently devoted to peace, prosperity, and individual liberty; a
people left utterly untempted by opportunities of the kind that had
led so many other nations down the ignoble road of empire; a people
who went to war only as a last resort and only when both individual
liberty and Western civilization itself were imperiled and at stake.
There had been injustices along the way, of course — the Native
Americans had been grossly mistreated, as had the African Americans.
Women had been denied the vote and even the right to own property. Yet
these injustices had been corrected in time, and the formerly
mistreated groups had been integrated into full citizenship and full
participation in the liberty, prosperity, and peace that were the
birthright of every American — the very same liberty, prosperity, and
peace that had made America itself a beacon of hope to the entire
world.

So the consensus view of American history has long had it, at any
rate. And so almost all the textbooks involved in the American-history
wars waged before the 1980s had it, too. The only question at issue
back then, really, was whether any given textbook gave one or another
of the various formerly aggrieved groups what was felt to be its
proper due. Was the suffering of the Native Americans (or the African
Americans or the women) detailed at sufficient length? The many
contributions the African Americans (or the women or the Native
Americans) had made to American culture — contributions without which
American culture would simply not be the same — were these detailed
sufficiently? The nobility of the female (or the Native American or
the African American) leaders who helped bring about recognition of
their people's rights — was this sufficiently stressed?

Then, a little over a quarter-century ago, the terms of the debate
changed — radically. One might say the opening salvo in the new
American-history wars was fired by Howard Zinn, in the form of a
textbook entitled A People's History of the United States. First
published in 1980, this volume is still in print, was reissued in a
revised, updated, "20th Anniversary Edition" in the year 2000, and has
become one of the most widely influential college-level textbooks on
American history currently in use in this country. Today, Zinn faces
intensified competition, however, not only from peddlers of the
traditional, America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-
and-peace version of our past, but also from a number of other writers
who have, in varying degree, adopted the rather different view of
American history that Zinn himself promotes.

This alternative vision sees America's past as a series of betrayals
by political leaders of all major parties, in which the liberal ideals
on which this country was founded have been gradually abandoned and
replaced by precisely the sorts of illiberal ideals that America
officially deplores. In effect, say Howard Zinn and a growing chorus
of others, we have become the people our founding fathers warned us
(and tried to protect us) against. And what may be the most
significant fact about this alternative or "revisionist" view of
American history is the remarkably hospitable reception it has enjoyed
both from the general public and from the selfsame educational
establishment that only a few short years ago was assiduously teaching
students something else entirely.

How can we account for this? Why, suddenly, is there a substantial
market for a version of American history quite unlike anything most
Americans had ever encountered? Why are the combatants in the current
American-history wars so different from each other, so different in
their fundamental assumptions about America? Why are the current wars
so much bloodier (figuratively speaking), so much more intense, than
ever before?

It seems to me that the correct answer to this question is complex and
multifaceted. It seems to me that several different forces are at work
here simultaneously, combining synergistically to produce the "single"
effect we call "our current American-history wars." One of these
forces is generational change. It was in the 1980s that college and
university history departments came to be dominated by a new
generation of historians — historians who had earned their PhDs in the
1960s and '70s and who had been strongly influenced in their thinking
about American history by a group of "revisionist" historians, the so-
called "New Left Historians," whose books were widely popular and
widely controversial at that time. These "New Left Historians" —
William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, and a number
of others — had in turn been strongly influenced by an earlier group
of "revisionists" — the so-called "New Historians" or "Progressive
Historians" — whose most prominent figures included Charles A. Beard
and Harry Elmer Barnes.

Another of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the
perennial American-history wars was the brilliant critical and popular
success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in
Gore Vidal's six-volume[1] "American Chronicle" series of historical
novels about the United States. Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln
(1984) were enormous successes. They proved beyond any doubt that the
public would not rise up in indignation and smite any author who dared
to question the motives and the wisdom of even the most venerated
American presidents. They proved that there was, in fact, a
substantial market for just such skepticism about the glorious
American past.

Partisans of the America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-
prosperity-and-peace mythology attacked Vidal's novels, of course, but
Vidal made it quite clear in a couple of detailed replies to his
critics (first published in the New York Review of Books) that he knew
at least as much about the history of the periods he depicted in his
novels as any of them did — PhD's and members of the professoriate
though they might be.
Still, doubts lingered in more than a few minds. First there was the
problem of Vidal's well-known political views and his high-profile
activities as a polemicist and proselytizer for those views. Could a
man so opinionated be counted upon to provide an objective account of
America's past? Second, there was the problem of historical fiction.
Was it really advisable to take any work of fiction seriously as a
source of information about history? Fiction was … well, you know —
fiction.

It was "made up." How could we rely on any information we picked up
about the events of the past from reading such a work?

To answer these questions properly, it will be necessary to take a
brief but closely focused look at the discipline of history itself.
How does a historian go about determining the truth as regards the
past? Is the historian's methodology in any way similar to the fiction
writer's? Is the work the historian writes in any way similar to a
novel? Is it really appropriate to dismiss historical fiction as "made
up," while looking to the writings of historians for an objective
assessment of past events?

And so we begin…