IF THEY LEARN nothing else, James Loewen's students at the University of Vermont get clear on one thing: America's history is nothing to brag about.
Why was the United States able to grow from a few colonies clinging precariously to the Atlantic coast into the most powerful, prosperous, and democratic republic the world has known? Because its founders were statesmen of exceptional character and insight? Because American culture prized freedom and entrepreneurship? Because this was the first nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal?
 James Loewen trashes America's history |
Oh, no. In the World According to Loewen -- set forth in an admiring Boston Globe profile last week -- the United States rose to greatness by killing Indians, enslaving Africans, and napalming Vietnamese. Loewen is appalled by history textbooks that teach otherwise. He goes out of his way to say so in a book of his own, Lies My Teacher Told Me.
In US history as Loewen teaches it, Abraham Lincoln is a racist, Patrick Henry is a hypocrite, and Thomas Jefferson is both. The Louisiana Purchase is a looters' pact, Woodrow Wilson is a roaring segregationist, and the settlers at Jamestown are cannibals. "What the United States has gotten itself into is American exceptionalism, the idea that we're different from other countries," Loewen snorts. But "all that amounts to is . . . American ethnocentrism, because our history is just as bloody as Russia's or Britain's.
Mind you, says Loewen, pausing in his bashing of America, "I'm not saying we should bash America." Of course not.
In US history as Loewen teaches it, Abraham Lincoln is a racist, Patrick Henry is a hypocrite, and Thomas Jefferson is both. The Louisiana Purchase is a looters' pact, Woodrow Wilson is a roaring segregationist, and the settlers at Jamestown are cannibals. "What the United States has gotten itself into is American exceptionalism, the idea that we're different from other countries," Loewen snorts. But "all that amounts to is . . . American ethnocentrism, because our history is just as bloody as Russia's or Britain's.
Revisionists like Loewen are everywhere these days, vandals of history pasting an indictment of America's sins over each page of the American story. Loewen may fancy himself a revolutionary, but his leave-no-image-unsullied approach to teaching history isn't new. It's hackneyed, the prevailing dogma in countless history departments and academic associations.
Richard Bernstein, an accomplished journalist, describes in his recent book Dictatorship of Virtue what he found at the 1987 convention of the American Historical Association. "The unvarying underlying themes were the repressiveness inherent in American life and the sufferings of groups claiming to be victims of that repressiveness.. . . The history of the United States was the history of suffering for all but the white establishment."
A case in point, well documented by Bernstein, is the job the history vandals did on Christopher Columbus. By the time they finished preparing for the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus' landing, nothing was left of the brave Admiral of the Ocean Sea. He had been transformed into a genocidal, slavetrading monster.
This frenzy to bust icons, to spotlight the injustices of Western civilization, to teach the past as a litany of persecuted minorities and oppressed women, runs through the recently issued National Standards for US and World History. These standards see fit to refer 19 times to Joseph McCarthy and 17 times to the Ku Klux Klan, but not once to Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, or the Gettysburg Address. The theme of "diversity" surfaces eight times in the US history standards; the theme of "liberty," zero times. "Science" exists only as a career from which women were exluded. And so forth.
For true lovers of history, this is all a bit infuriating.
Will Fitzhugh, editor of the esteemed Concord Review, writes that the revisionists "seem to have as their mission making white male youth feel guilty about racism, homophobia, and descending from Europeans. Yes, there is plenty of guilt and shame to spread among all of the groups and individuals on earth. There is also much to be proud of." But that notion -- that ours is a history to inspire pride -- is just what Loewen and the revisionists reject.
Why, Fitzhugh asks.
"I wonder if they have ever considered the story they tell their own children about their own past. Or the histories all peoples tell about their past. Do they think African village headmen fill their stories with the shameful, embarrassing, and foolish things done by their ancestors? Do they think fathers should regale their children with tales of their faults, misjudgments, and instances of cowardice or dishonesty?
"Of course history books are incomplete. Of course they are written by people who want to emphasize the accomplishments of those who have gone before and who are worth remembering. We cannot study the individual histories of all persons who ever lived, however triumphantly revisionist that might make us feel. Students should be encouraged to realize that every people has sinned and that the building of any institution whatever is difficult, and that peace and good government do not come to anyone without sacrifice and surprising effort."
The damage revisionists do, Fitzhugh writes, "is in encouraging students to think that if they arm themselves with a few guiding putdowns -- about racism, sexism, ethnocentrism -- they really don't need to know much history at all."
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)