IV. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. vs. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

All things considered, however, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. does at least as good a job as Eric Foner of incorporating the left liberal vision of American history propounded by Vidal and the revisionists into a contemporary textbook—in this case, his wildly popular and wildly controversial Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Technically, of course, the Politically Incorrect Guide is not a textbook at all. As Woods puts it, "when Regnery Publishing approached me with the idea for this book, they gave me a strict word limit of 80,000. Any serious historian knows how quickly 80,000 words go by. That's why I point out in my preface that the book is not intended to be a systematic textbook on American history. Good heavens, how could it be?"⁴⁴⁵

Nevertheless, Woods's book has been discussed just as though it were a textbook. During the spring of 2005, when it was fresh off the press and discussion of it was white hot, two separate articles published by the online History News Network made a point of comparing and contrasting the Politically Incorrect Guide with current textbooks in American history. One article, published in May, opened with the observation that "[d]isputes over history textbooks in the United States have not sent protesters into the streets (not recently, anyway), as they have this spring in China. But as readers snap up copies of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas Woods, Jr., the old story of a fight between 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' has returned." ⁴⁴⁶ An earlier article discussed Woods's book along with Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's Patriot's History of the United States,⁴⁴⁷ just as though the three works were all of the same general type—i.e., textbooks.

And to judge from the Politically Incorrect Guide's popularity among students, it might as well be a textbook—it seems likely to have the sort of influence over them that only textbooks ordinarily can claim. It was published in December 2004. A month later, The New York Times reported that it was "being snapped up on college campuses and[...] recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list."⁴⁴⁸ Come February, and sales were still brisk, especially to students. The History News Network noted that Woods's book was still "selling like hotcakes on college campuses."⁴⁴⁹

The view of the U.S. Civil War that students will find inside Woods's Politically Incorrect Guide is strongly reminiscent of both Gore Vidal and all three groups of revisionist historians. "No one who has studied the issue," Woods writes, "would dispute that for at least the first eighteen months of the war, the abolition of slavery was not the issue." "Lincoln fought to 'save the Union,'" he argues, "and consolidate its power." "The question that no textbook bothers to raise," Woods complains, "is whether the Southern states possessed the legal right to secede. They did." Oddly, though, unlike Vidal and the revisionists, he passes over Lincoln's sorry record as a civil libertarian in silence.⁴⁵⁰

He is similarly silent about Woodrow Wilson's sorry record as a civil libertarian during World War I. But, again in common with Vidal and the revisionists, he is convinced that the United States had no business involving itself in that conflict. "No American interest was at stake," he writes, "and American security was not threatened in the slightest." Wilson dragged the nation into war, Woods contends, in order to win himself a role in the peace process that would ensue when the war ended. "Progressive" busybody that he was, Wilson was convinced that he knew better than anyone else how the postwar world should be planned and administered. But to put that superior understanding into practice required that he get a seat at the peace table. "And in order to get a seat at the peace table, Wilson believed that he had to be the head of a nation that had taken part in the war." In effect, 320,000 young Americans died to give Woodrow Wilson a chance to prove his greatness as a planner of other people's destinies.⁴⁵¹

Woods's opinion of American involvement in World War II is little better. Like Vidal and the revisionists, he portrays Franklin Roosevelt as so "desperate to involve the United States in the war" that he "used deceptive means" to achieve that end. He quotes Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the president's desire "to maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot." He quotes Herbert Hoover's accusation that FDR and his appointees were "doing everything they can to get us into war through the Japanese back door." He passes over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in silence and makes no reference at all to the U.S. role in the Cold War, beyond his observation that that conflict "resulted in trillions of dollars in military spending, large and small wars across the globe, the deformation of the Constitution, and the threat of nuclear annihilation."⁴⁵²

When former New Left historian Ronald Radosh compared Woods's Politically Incorrect Guide with Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's Patriot's History ofthe United States on the History News Network in March 2005, it was for the purpose of lamentation. Woods, Radosh felt, was unfairly and unjustly hogging public attention that properly belonged to Schweikart and Allen. Adam Cohen had recently denounced Woods's book in The New York Times, calling it "an attempt to push the [historical] record far to the right." Radosh lamented:

Tellingly, Cohen does not alert Times readers to the quite different serious reinterpretation recently published, Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States. Any reader of Schweikart and Allen's book will see immediately that it is a serious and substantive volume, based on a full recognition of the important secondary sources written by our major historians. While one may differ with some of their judgments and conclusions, no one would accuse them of conscious ideological distortions of the facts. Rather than let its readers know that conservatives are equipped to write honest historical interpretations, the Times omits any reference to this new book and lets Woods's nuttiness stand as the representative book of conservative thought.⁴⁵³

In fact, of course, in light of our discussion of Left and Right in the preceding chapter, it is obvious that Woods's book is not "conservative" in any meaningful sense at all. Woods the man, a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. in history from Columbia (!), is another story. In his early 30s at the time his Politically Incorrect Guide was published, he had been teaching history at a Long Island community college. He told an interviewer in July 2005 that "I think of myself as antistatist in politics and conservative in most other areas, though I can't find a term to describe my outlook that's totally satisfactory."⁴⁵⁴ Woods's personal friend and fellow scholar Paul Gottfried, who also thinks of himself as a "conservative," has written of Woods as a man "who wears his Catholic traditionalism on his sleeve."⁴⁵⁵ One of Woods's books is entitled How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Another is entitled The Church Confronts Modernity. Still another is entitled The Church and the Market. So there may well be some legitimate grounds for calling Woods the man a "conservative." In his book, however, on the test issues of the U.S. Civil War, U.S. involvement in the World Wars, and the origins of the Cold War, Woods's positions are solidly liberal.

Schweikart and Allen, by contrast, offer a vision of American history that is profoundly conservative. To be exact, it is neoconservative. The neoconservatives are really the old false liberals of the 1930s, the New Deal "liberals," dressed up in new clothing. This time, at least, their clothing is appropriately chosen. Their political values have not changed, but they are now calling themselves by their rightful name. They are indeed conservatives, and the Republican Party is precisely the right political party for persons of their stripe.

By Schweikart and Allen's account, the U.S. Civil War was inevitable because "[n]o amount of prosperity, and no level of communication could address, ameliorate, or cover up the problem of slavery." And make no mistake about it, they assert: slavery, and not states' rights, was the issue. "[W]henever the historical record says 'states' rights' in the context of sectional debates," they write, "the phrase 'rights to own slaves' should more correctly be inserted." "It is not an exaggeration," they write, "to say that the Civil War was about slavery and, in the long run, only about slavery."⁴⁵⁶

As for Vidal's and the revisionists' contention that Lincoln was a tyrant who disregarded the Constitution and created a federal government much stronger and more centralized than anything the Founders had ever had in mind, Schweikart and Allen patiently explain that "a small federal government content to leave the states to their own devices" was "neither desirable nor possible to sustain." And further, "[t]hat the Republicans, in their zeal to free slaves, enacted numerous ill-advised taxes, railroad, and banking laws, is regrettable but, nevertheless, of minor consequence in the big picture."⁴⁵⁷

Where World War I is concerned, Schweikart and Allen maintain that Woodrow Wilson was too slow to involve the United States. If only the United States had entered the war on the Allied side in 1915, they complain, "it might have shortened the war and short-circuited Russian communism. Certainly Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin, exiled in Switzerland when the war started, would have remained an insignificant figure in human history, not the mass murderer who directed the Red October Revolution in Russia." But, alas, "Wilson opted for the safe, and cheap, response." And once U.S. troops were involved in the war, the Wilson administration's crackdown on dissent, like Lincoln's wholesale jailing of newspaper editors who disagreed with him, was entirely acceptable. For "even if somewhat censored, the press continued to report[...] and people still experienced a level of freedom unseen in most of the world during peacetime."⁴⁵⁸

FDR too was absurdly unwilling to go to war, according to Schweikart and Allen, of whom it might well be said that they never met a war they didn't like. "[A]lthough he clearly (and more than most American political leaders) appreciated the threat posed by Hitler," they write,

he [...] never made a clear case for war with Germany or Italy, having been lulled into a false sense of security by the Royal Navy's control of the Atlantic. When he finally did risk his popularity by taking the case to the public in early 1940, Congress gave him everything he asked for and more, giving lie to the position that Congress wouldn't have supported him even if he had provided leadership.

In short, though the president "recognized both the moral evil of Hitler and the near-term threat to American security posed by Nazi Germa-ny.he nevertheless refused to sacrifice his personal popularity to lead the United States into the war sooner, knowing full well it would come eventually—and at a higher cost."⁴⁵⁹

As to the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, according to Sch-weikart and Allen, "FDR had[...] no advance warning about Pearl Harbor." The revisionists' claims to the contrary they dismiss as the deranged "back-door-to-war theories of the Roosevelt haters." "Pearl Harbor," they insist, "was a tragedy, but not a conspiracy."⁴⁶⁰

And the atomic bombing of Japan four years later that marked the end of U.S. involvement in the conflict? "Recent research in classified Japanese governmental documents," Schweikart and Allen tell their readers, "confirms the wisdom of Truman's decision" to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In retrospect, three central reasons justified the dropping of the atomic bombs. First, and most important, the invasion of Japan would cost more American lives—up to a million, perhaps far more. The interests of the United States demanded that the government do everything in its power to see that not one more American soldier or sailor died than was absolutely necessary, and the atomic bombs ensured that result. Second, Japan would not surrender, nor did its leaders give any indication whatsoever that they would surrender short of annihilation. [...] Third, the depredations of the Japanese equaled those of the Nazis. The Allies, therefore, were justified in nothing less than unconditional surrender and a complete dismantling of the samurai Bushido as a requirement for peace.⁴⁶¹

In short, everything the U.S. government has ever told you is the unvarnished truth. American history really is a triumphal tale of the inexorable march to greatness of the United States of America, a pure, high-minded nation and a model of virtue, a land of liberty, prosperity, and equality, and a beacon of hope and freedom to the world. There is no need—no need at all—for revisionism in American history.

The problem here is not, mind you, that Schweikart and Allen get their facts wrong. They don't. Their facts are all in order, and they're all correct. It's their selection of the facts that is troublesome. To put the matter in a slightly different way, it's not so much what they chose to include that is troublesome; it's what they chose to leave out. Given the facts Schweikart and Allen choose to present to their readers (not a few of whom will assume, erroneously, that these are all the facts that matter), their conclusions—that it was necessary to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise to FDR, that Lincoln and Wilson were justified in suspending the U.S. Constitution—follow, if not inexorably, then at least quite satisfactorily. But the facts Schweikart and Allen chose to leave out, the facts they regarded as insufficiently important to include in their account of America's history, facts like the all-but-prostrate condition of Japan during the last year of the war, facts like the indirect efforts the Japanese government made through diplomatic channels months before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to sue for peace, facts like the support the Founding Fathers lent to the doctrine of secession and the all-but-universal esteem in which that doctrine was held, the extent to which it was viewed as "sacrosanct" by "almost all political theorists [...] before the [Civil] war"⁴⁶² — the inclusion of these facts would cast things in a somewhat different light.

Why were these facts left out? Because Schweikart and Allen's "sense of life," their understanding of "the way things happen" in the world, their estimate of "the way the world is," told them these facts were, if not unimportant, then at least less important than those they chose to include. And what sort of sense of life, what sort of understanding of the way things happen, what sort of estimate of the way the world is, are we talking about here? Essentially, as has been noted, Schweikart and Allen's worldview is a profoundly conservative one: The welfare, and especially the freedom, of any particular individual is of no importance. What matters is the welfare of the State, of society at large, of America. What is good for General Motors (and big business generally) is good for the country. There is no need to dwell on the abrogated rights of those young Americans forced at gunpoint to kill or be killed as soldiers in Lincoln's, Wilson's, and Roosevelt's wars. There is no need to fret over newspaper editors locked in prison cells for criticizing federal policy. Nor is there any need to concern oneself with the individuals resident in other countries whose lives and property have been destroyed by American troops and American bombs.

Liberals, men of the Left, men like Gore Vidal, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, J ames J. Martin, and William Appleman Williams, have been driven to select different facts when assembling their own accounts of American history. The facts they chose seemed important to them, worth including, because of their liberal values, their belief in the supreme importance of the individual.