WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY : AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM also by jeff riggenbach In Praise of Decadence WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY : AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM Jeff Riggenbach Ludwig von Mises Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832; mises.org. Copyright 2009 © by Jeff Riggenbach Published under Creative Commons attribution license 3.0 ISBN: 978-1-933550-49-7 History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. —ambrose bierce The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) This book is for Suzanne, who made it possible. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Portions of Chapter Three and Chapter Five appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in Liberty magazine, on RationalReview. com, and on Antiwar.com. David J. Theroux of the Independent Institute, Andrea Millen Rich of the Center for Independent Thought, and Alexia Gilmore of the Randolph Bourne Institute were generous with their assistance during the researching and writing stages of this project. Ellen Stuttle was her usual indispensable self. And, of course, responsibility for any errors of fact, usage, or judgment in these pages is entirely my own. CONTENTS preface 15 one The Art of History 19 O i. bjectivity in History 19 History and Fiction ii. 25 The Historical Fiction of Kenneth Roberts iii. 36 The Historical Fiction of John Dos Passos iv. 41 two The Historical Fiction of Gore Vidal: The “American Chronicle” Novels 49 Burr i. and Lincoln 49 1876, Empire, ii. and Hollywood 59 Hollywood iii. and The Golden Age 65 three The Story of American Revisionism 71 The Birth of American Revisionism and i. the Rise of Harry Elmer Barnes 71 Charles A. Beard and William Appleman Williams: ii. From Progressivism to the New Left 78 Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin: iii. From Progressivism to Libertarianism 85 James J. Martin: Historian and Pamphleteer iv. 93 The Libertarian Historians and Their Colleagues on the New Left v. 96 four Some American Wars—Both Hot And Cold— Through Revisionist Eyes 100 The i. u.s. Civil War—the Revisionist View 100 America in the World Wars—A Revisionist Perspective ii. 104 A Revisionist Look at America in the Cold War iii. 110 five The Politics of the American Revisionists 114 “Left” and “Right,” “Conservative” and “Liberal,” i. Differentiated Historically 114 The Decline of American Liberalism—the Early Years ii. 123 Conservative Republicans and Liberal iii. Democrats in 19 th Century America 129 Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, iv. and the Triumph of Conservatism 138 Herbert Hoover’s New Deal v. 145 The Myth of the “Old Right” vi. 151 The Goldwater Anomaly vii. 159 The Reagan Fraud—and After viii. 165 six The New American History Wars 174 Why Textbooks Matter i. 174 The Breakdown of the Consensus—the Case of Howard Zinn ii. 184 American History According to Eric Foner iii. 192 Thomas E. Woods, Jr. iv. vs. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen 196 History, Fiction, and Objectivity—Some Concluding Observations v. 203 index 207 “Now there are some who would like to rewrite history— revisionist historians is what I like to call them.” —george w. bush June 16, 2003 15 PREFACE PREFACE Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation’s high schools and colleges. Nor is the reason far to seek. If, as seems to be the case, these textbooks encompass one hundred percent of the infor- mation that most high school and college graduates in this country will ever encounter on the subject of American history, the American his- tory wars would appear to be well worth fighting. For what Americans know and understand about the history of the society in which they live will determine the degree of their willingness to honor and preserve its ideals and traditions. More than that: it will determine what they regard as the ideals and traditions of their society. It will determine nothing less than the kind of society they will seek to strengthen and perpetuate. Until very recently, however, the range of the conflict over Ameri- can history textbooks was narrow indeed. All sides tacitly agreed that the story of the United States was the triumphant tale of a people fer- vently devoted to peace, prosperity, and individual liberty; a people left utterly untempted by opportunities of the kind that had led so many other nations down the ignoble road of empire; a people who went to war only as a last resort and only when both individual liberty and Western Civilization itself were imperiled and at stake. There had been injustices along the way, of course—the Native Americans had been grossly mistreated, as had the African Americans. Women had been denied the vote and even the right to own property. Yet these injustices had been corrected in time, and the formerly mistreated groups had been integrated into full citizenship and full participation in the liberty, prosperity, and peace that were the birthright of every American—the very same liberty, prosperity, and peace that had made America itself a beacon of hope to the entire world. So the consensus view of American history has long had it, at any rate. And so almost all the textbooks involved in the American history 16 WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY : AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM wars waged before the 1980s had it, too. The only question at issue back then, really, was whether any given textbook gave one or another of the various formerly aggrieved groups what was felt to be its proper due. Was the suffering of the Native Americans (or the African Americans or the women) detailed at sufficient length? The many contributions the African Americans (or the women or the Native Americans) had made to American culture—contributions without which American culture would simply not be the same—were these detailed sufficient- ly? The nobility of the female (or the Native American or the African American) leaders who helped bring about recognition of their people’s rights—was this sufficiently stressed? Then, a little over a quarter-century ago, the terms of the de- bate changed—radically. One might say the opening salvo in the new American history wars was fired by Howard Zinn, in the form of a textbook entitled A People’s History of the United States. First published in 1980, this volume is still in print, was reissued in a revised, updated, “20 th Anniversary Edition” in the year 2000, and has become one of the most widely influential college level textbooks on American history currently in use in this country. Today, Zinn faces intensified competi- tion, however, not only from peddlers of the traditional, America-as- pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace version of our past, but also from a number of other writers who have, in vary- ing degree, adopted the rather different view of American history that Zinn himself promotes. This alternative vision sees America’s past as a series of betrayals by political leaders of all major parties, in which the liberal ideals on which this country was founded have been gradually abandoned and replaced by precisely the sorts of illiberal ideals that America officially deplores. In effect, say Howard Zinn and a growing chorus of others, we have become the people our founding fathers warned us (and tried to protect us) against. And what may be the most significant fact about this alternative or “revisionist” view of American history is the remark- ably hospitable reception it has enjoyed both from the general public and from the selfsame educational establishment that only a few short years ago was assiduously teaching students something else entirely. How can we account for this? Why, suddenly, is there a substantial market for a version of American history quite unlike anything most Americans had ever encountered? Why are the combatants in the cur- rent American history wars so different from each other, so different in their fundamental assumptions about America? Why are the current 17 PREFACE wars so much bloodier (figuratively speaking), so much more intense, than ever before? It seems to me that the correct answer to this question is complex and multifaceted. It seems to me that several different forces are at work here simultaneously, combining synergistically to produce the “single” effect we call “our current American history wars.” One of these forces is gen- erational change. It was in the 1980s that college and university history departments came to be dominated by a new generation of historians— historians who had earned their Ph.Ds in the 1960s and ’70s and who had been strongly influenced in their thinking about American history by a group of “revisionist” historians, the so-called “New Left Histori- ans,” whose books were widely popular and widely controversial at that time. These “New Left Historians”—William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperovitz, a number of others—had in turn been strongly influenced by an earlier group of “revisionists”—the so-called “New Historians” or “Progressive Historians”—whose most prominent figures included Charles A. Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes. Another of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the peren- nial American history wars was the brilliant critical and popular success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in Gore Vidal’s six-volume “American Chronicle” series of historical novels about the United States. Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984) were enormous successes. They proved beyond any doubt that the public would not rise up in indignation and smite any author who dared to question the mo- tives and the wisdom of even the most venerated American presidents. 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—Ph.Ds 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 18 WHY AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT WHAT THEY SAY : AN INTRODUCTION TO REVISIONISM 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 an 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 ap- propriate 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 . . . . 19 ONE ONE THE ART OF HISTORY THE ART OF HISTORY I Objectivity in History I T is two decades now since University of Chicago historian Peter Novick published his landmark work That Noble Dream, a gloomy analysis of “the objectivity question” and its importance for the American historical profession. In 1989, That Noble Dream won the American Historical As- sociation’s prize for the best book of the year in American history. From the date of its original publication a year earlier, it attracted much, and heated, attention. Yet, in all the years that have passed since its first ap- pearance, little or no progress has been made toward any sort of solution for the conundrum Novick posed in his book. On the one hand, Novick argued, the “ideal of ‘objectivity’” had long been “the rock” on which “the professional historical venture” in this country “was constituted, its continuing raison d’être. It has been the quality which the profession has prized and praised above all oth- ers—whether in historians or in their works. It has been the key term in defining progress in historical scholarship: moving ever closer to the objective truth about the past.” 1 On the other hand, this ideal of objectivity is “essentially confused.” It is based on “philosophical as- sumptions” that are “dubious.” It is “psychologically and sociologically naïve. As a practical matter, I think it promotes an unreal and mislead- ing invidious distinction between, on the one hand, historical accounts ‘distorted’ by ideological assumptions and purposes; on the other, his- tory free of these taints.” 2 1 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American His- torical Profession (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 6.