SIX THE NEW AMERICAN HISTORY WARS I Why Textbooks Matter

In the American Chronicle novels of Gore Vidal, the left liberal revisionist view of American history has achieved a major breakthrough into the American cultural mainstream. But this is far from its only important victory in recent years. It has also made its way into the textbooks that American high school and college students are required to read when they take courses in American history.

And the importance of this last achievement can scarcely be overestimated. For, as Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser note in a recent report in The Journal of American History, "most teachers of United States history survey courses assign a textbook as core reading, and many assign only a textbook.[...] American history textbooks shape how American college students encounter their nation's history and their society's cultural heritage."³⁸⁵ It has long been thus—and not only for college students. According to Frances FitzGerald,

[i]n the nineteenth century, a heavy reliance on textbooks was the distinguishing mark of American education; it was called "the American system" by Europeans. The texts were substitutes for well-trained teachers; in some parts of the country, they constituted the whole of a school's library and the only books a child would ever read on the subject of, say, American history.³⁸⁶

More than a hundred years later, the story is little changed. As of 2003, according to Diane Ravitch,

[t]extbooks are very important in American schools, especially in history. In most history classes, they are the curriculum. Many teachers are dependent on their textbook because they have not studied history. Today, most teachers of history in grades 7-12 have neither a major nor a minor in history. Instead they have a degree in social studies education, some other branch of pedagogy, a social science, or a completely unrelated field.³⁸⁷

Early in 2005, Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University education professor and author of the book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (2001), reported in the Los Angeles Times that "[n]early a third of the students who apply to Stanford's master's in teaching program to become history teachers have never taken a single college course in history." Nor is this at all out of the ordinary, for "[a]mong high school history teachers across the country, only 18% have majored (or even minored) in the subject they now teach."³⁸⁸

For most students of history in public secondary schools in this country, then, the implications seem straightforward: "what they are taught will be the material in the textbook."³⁸⁹ A chance to influence what appears in that textbook is, accordingly, a prize of great moment to all those who seek to hale their particular truth before the court of public opinion. And consequently, the history of American history textbooks in American public schools has been a history of controversy and struggle for advantage—not from the very beginning, perhaps, but certainly from the time when public secondary schools first became an important force in American education.

That time was the 1890s. "Before then," as Frances FitzGerald notes, "American history was not very widely taught. The public grade schools had very little history of any kind in their curricula, and the private academies that prepared students for colleges and universities concentrated on classical studies and European history." But as the "Gay Nineties" dawned, the "public high schools" for the first time actually "had more students than the private academies."³⁹⁰ And the question of what was written in the history textbooks used by those public high schools therefore began to interest a great many people who had heretofore invested little or no thought in such matters.

By 1897, according to Jonathan Zimmerman, the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans' organization for soldiers who had fought in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, had formed a "school history committee" and had begun issuing calls "for a unified schoolbook that would bind [all sections of the country] together." At around the same time, the history committee of the United Confederate Veterans (ucv) made a similar demand.

"There shall not be one history for Massachusetts and another for South Carolina," declared the Mississippi war hero Stephen D. Lee, chair of the UCV's history committee," but Americans everywhere shall read the same books." The following year Lee predicted that the Spanish-American War would link North and South "at home"— that is, in their textbooks—as well as "on the field of battle."³⁹¹

By the 1920s, these newly interested observers, along with a horde of others, had begun reaching some tentative conclusions about the specific textbooks they'd been studying, and they had begun taking their specific grievances public—with a vengeance. In 1927, Chicago Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson convened "a dismissal hearing for Superintendent William McAndrew, whom Thompson accused of imposing 'treasonous' and 'un-American' texts on the schools." Thompson made these history textbooks—"texts by Charles Beard, David Muzzey, and other leading scholars"—the centerpiece of his public case against McAndrew. Nor was Chicago the only venue in which protests against Beard and Muzzey were mounted during the '20s. They raged nationwide, "from Boston and Baltimore to Seattle and San Francisco."³⁹²

What the protesters found so objectionable about Beard's and Muzzey's texts was their unduly "pro-English" character. Zimmerman notes that the movement against these books "drew most of its support from Irish and German immigrants," neither of whom would have been too keen on any book that portrayed the English too favorably.³⁹³ And there can be little question that this is precisely what many of these books did. David Muzzey was a student of James Harvey Robinson of Columbia University, whom we first met in Chapter 2 in his capacity as one of the founders of the New History, the first revisionist movement in American historiography. Muzzey took Robinson's ideas to heart and, under their guidance, created a high school American history textbook, An American History, which, as Frances FitzGerald points out, "survived for sixty-five years, selling more copies for much of that time than any of its competitors—and in certain periods more than all of them combined— and proving almost as popular in the days of the jet aircraft as in those of the horse-drawn carriage." According to FitzGerald, "[f]or nearly half the [20^th] century, a high percentage—perhaps even a majority—of American schoolchildren learned American history" from Muzzey's book.³⁹⁴ And those who didn't likely learned it from one of Muzzey's many imitators.

These texts, FitzGerald argues, placed enormous emphasis on "the English ancestry of Americans. In their discussions of exploration and colonization, they gave far greater space and approval to Sir Francis Drake than to any of the other explorers except Columbus, and they concentrated on the English colonists to the near-exclusion of the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch." In general, these books "viewed the Colonies as extensions of England into the New World," and they ended with "acclaim" for "the American entry into the First World War on the side of the British."³⁹⁵ Muzzey insisted that there were two sides to the American Revolution. According to Zimmerman, the original edition of An American History described "Stamp Act demonstrators as a 'mob' and [...] the Boston Massacre's victims as 'ruffians.'"³⁹⁶ More important—at least from the point of view of early-20^th Century immigrant Americans from Ireland, Germany, and Southern and Eastern Europe—Muzzey and his imitators depicted all these non-English arrivals on our shores "as nothing more than a problem.[...] they gave no information about how these people lived, what they did, or where they came from, much less why they came."³⁹⁷ In a word, the non-English newcomers felt excluded.

Charles Beard's books were another matter entirely. The unduly pro-English material in Beard's books was more subtle, less overt than in Muzzey. Still, it was there. In his most famous and most successful textbook, The Rise of American Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife, Mary Beard, and published only a year before its public denunciation by Big Bill Thompson, he wrote that support for the newly minted U.S. Constitution in the 1780s

ran along economic lines. The merchants, manufacturers, private creditors, and holders of public securities loomed large among the advocates of the new system, while the opposition came chiefly from the small farmers behind the seaboard, especially from the men who, in earlier years, had demanded paper money and other apparatus for easing the strain of their debts.³⁹⁸

But this might put in children's heads the notion that the Founding Fathers had masterminded a revolution and created a new government, not because of the intolerable tyranny of George III and the sanctity of individual rights, but in order to make a profit. And if the children somehow got that idea in their heads, it would be a small and easy step for them to an unduly pro-English attitude.

"It is true," the Beards wrote in 1927,

that one branch of American mythology represents the second war with England [the War of 1812] as springing inevitably from her de-pradations on American trade and her impressment of American seamen, but the evidence in the case does not exactly support that view. Northern shipowners, upon whom the losses fell with special weight, did not ask for armed intervention. On the contrary, they took great pains to prove that the federal government's report listing thousands of impressment outrages was false and they were almost unanimous in their opposition to drawing the sword against England.

Diplomatic efforts might well have done the trick, the Beards argued, without the necessity for a costly war that included the destruction by fire of the nation's new capitol at Washington, D.C. "[I]t must be remembered," they wrote,

that two days after the United States declared war—before news of the event reached London—the British government withdrew its obnoxious Orders in Council, leaving only the impressment issue unsettled by parleys and diplomacy. If, as had been said, that alone was sufficient cause for war, the fact remained that the communities which suffered most from it did not so regard the matter.³⁹⁹

Perhaps worst of all, from the viewpoint of the protesters, the Beards questioned the originality of the Founding Fathers, whose "high doctrines," they declared,

were essentially English, being derived [...] from the writings of John Locke, the philosopher who supplied the rhetorical defense mechanism for the Whig revolution of 1688 which ended in the expulsion of James II. In Locke's hands, the catechism of politics was short indeed: the aim of government is to protect property and when any government invades the privileges of property, the people have a right to alter or abolish the government and establish a new one. The idea was almost a century old when Jefferson artfully applied it in a modified form to the exigencies of the American Revolution.⁴⁰⁰

The Veterans of Foreign Wars were indignant. "The inspired men," they complained, "who startled the world with their new conception of human rights are charged with having plagiarized it all from England."⁴⁰¹

The protests and official inquiries into the unduly pro-British textbooks did have impact here and there. The historian Andrew C. McLaughlin was forced to change a sentence in his account of the battle of Bunker Hill, for example. His original, unduly pro-British sentence had read: "Three times the British returned courageously to the attack." His new sentence read: "Three times the cowardly British returned to the attack."⁴⁰² But by and large, the efforts of the reformers were not repaid with significant success. The first textbook activists to reach that milestone were to do so nearly twenty years later, during the war years of the early 1940s.

Back in 1917, a report issued by the National Education Association had suggested that secondary schools then in the habit of teaching "subjects such as history, geography, and economics" might consider an alternative proposal—"that the various disciplines be replaced by an integrated system of 'social studies,' in which the emphasis would shift from history to the social sciences and from the past to the present and the future."⁴⁰³ Far and away the most successful of the various writers and pedagogues who sought to transform this vision into reality was Harold Rugg, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose fourteen-volume series, Man and His Changing Society, began appearing in print in 1930. "Throughout the 1930s," Jonathan Zimmerman writes, "no American textbooks were more popular than the works of Harold Rugg." The publisher of Man and His Changing Society credited the series with "keeping [us] in the 'black' during the depression."⁴⁰⁴Diane Ravitch notes that Rugg's "textbooks were read by millions of students in some five thousand schools across the country."⁴⁰⁵

Then the Advertising Federation of America, "which was offended by Rugg's disparaging remarks about advertising," launched a frontal assault on the series, circulating "brochures against the books" on a national basis.⁴⁰⁶ The American Legion soon followed suit, distributing a million copies of one polemic against Rugg's texts and "nearly half a million pamphlets reviling them" a year later.⁴⁰⁷

[T]hen the National Association of Manufacturers [...] and a columnist for the Hearst press joined in, calling the series Socialist or Communist propaganda. The charges caught on and spread to community groups across the country. Dr. Rugg went on an extensive lecture tour to defend the series, during which he announced publicly that he was neither a Communist nor a Socialist. But in vain. A number of school boards banned the books, and others simply took them out of circulation. In 1938, the Rugg books sold 289,000 copies; in 1944, they sold only 21,000 copies; not long afterward, they disappeared from the market altogether.⁴⁰⁸

Twenty more years were to pass before a comparable triumph was achieved by protesters bent on influencing the textbooks used in public schools. It was in 1962, Frances FitzGerald tells us, that the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the Detroit Board of Education, asking that a "history text, published by Laidlaw Brothers, [which] depicted slavery in a favorable light" be withdrawn "from the city school system."⁴⁰⁹ The NAACP had been protesting textbooks for thirty years at that point, ever since 1932, the year in which it established its first textbook committee and "called on local branches to examine their history, literature, and civics textbooks—and to protest the most offensive texts."⁴¹⁰ As FitzGerald notes, however, though "[t]he N.A.A.C.P. and other civil-rights organizations had denounced racial prejudice in the textbooks a number of times in prior years," they had had "no real effect."⁴¹¹

In 1962, the NAACP finally prevailed.

[T]he Detroit board withdrew the text, and subsequently began to examine for racial bias all the history texts used in the school system. The Newark Textbook Council soon followed suit. The movement then spread to other big-city school systems and was taken up by organizations representing other racial and ethnic minority groups— Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Asian-Americans, Armenian-Americans, and so on—all of whom claimed, with justice, to have been ignored or abused by the textbooks.

Then the new "movement," as FitzGerald styles it, mushroomed.

Within a few years, a dozen organizations from the B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League to a new Council on Interracial Books, were studying texts for racial, ethnic, and religious bias and making recommendations for a new generation of texts. What began as a series of discrete protests against individual books became a general proposition: all texts had treated the United States as a white, middle-class society when it was in fact multiracial and multicultural.

The Detroit NAACP's modest protest of 1962 had made what seemed like massive changes in the nation's history textbooks, and it had wasted no time in doing so—"by the late sixties," FitzGerald reminds us, the "general proposition" that "all texts" had shortchanged minorities had "come to be a truism for the educational establishment."⁴¹²

And so it was that over the next few years "[d]ozens of states passed laws or resolutions requiring the study of American minorities, including Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans as well as African-Americans." So it was that textbooks began devoting

far greater attention—and more accurate information—to blacks and other minorities. As recently as 1966 southern school districts had balked at the mere appearance of blacks in textbook illustrations. By the early 1980s, however, students across the country read about Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Textbooks also admitted an assortment of other ethnic luminaries, ranging from Pocahontas and Sacajawea to Roberto Clemente and Cesar Chavez.⁴¹³

The process of implementing these changes was never perfectly smooth, needless to say. Nor was it without moments of unintended hilarity. As of 1979, for example, according to Frances FitzGerald, textbook publishers were producing "guidelines for authors and editors on the treatment of racial and other minorities in the textbooks. These guidelines[...] give instructions on such things as the percentage of illustrations to be devoted to the various groups, and ways to avoid stereotyping in text or pictures." For example,

A history book [...] would not sell in Texas if it did not have a good deal of material on Mexican-Americans, and it would not sell anywhere if it had pictures of minority-group members who were not aspiring people: pictures of black sharecroppers could not be used in order to illustrate Reconstruction; if blacks were pictured they had to be, say, technicians in lab coats.⁴¹⁴

Twenty years later, at the dawn of a new millennium, Diane Ravitch found very similar guidelines still very much in place in the offices of American textbook publishers. She quotes from a guideline published by McGraw-Hill advising illustrators researching historical photos to (in Ravitch's words) "be on the watch for the following stereotyped images":

Pioneer women doing domestic chores must be replaced by pioneer women chopping wood, using a plow, using firearms, and handling large animals.

Pioneer woman riding in a covered wagon as man walks must be replaced by both man and woman walking or both riding, or woman walking while man rides.

Women as passengers on a sailboat must be replaced by women hoisting the sails on a boat.

Women depicted as nurses, elementary school teachers, clerks, secretaries, tellers, and librarians must be replaced by women as doctors, professors, managers, police officers, sports figures, and construction workers, and by men as nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers.

It is useful to remember, at this point, that our only purpose in following such guidelines as these at all is to remedy the failure of traditional history textbooks to include the true history of women and minorities. For, as Diane Ravitch notes,

[s]ome of these replacements require writers and artists to tell lies about history. Until the latter decades of the twentieth century, most women who worked were in fact nurses, teachers, and secretaries; not many women were doctors, professors, managers, police officers, sports figures, and construction workers. To pretend otherwise is to falsify the past. It minimizes the barriers that women faced. It pretends that the gender equality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was a customary condition in the past.⁴¹⁵

Then again, truth—fidelity to the past as best we can reconstruct it—has never been the chief goal of textbook writers. Frances FitzGerald notes that in the 1970s, it was the conventional wisdom among textbook publishers that "the inclusion of nasty information constitutes bias even if the information is true."⁴¹⁶ As FitzGerald explains, "[h]istory textbooks for elementary and secondary schools [...] are written not to explore but to instruct—to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country. This information is not necessarily what anyone considers the truth of things."⁴¹⁷ James J. Martin is more blunt: "If you mistake a zinc rainspout for a hollow tree," he writes, "and you are a woodpecker, you have a fundamentally flawed conception of the total situation. The same thing can be said for those who think that school history books are primarily intended to assist the young in appreciating and understanding history."⁴¹⁸ Public school history textbooks are meant to inculcate a certain general view of America in their student readers— a view that can be as well (perhaps better) served by a dose of myth as by a dose of truth. (Nor is this true only of American history textbooks. As Zimmerman notes, "All nations—not just the United States—construct narratives that are partly 'untrue' or mythological. But these narratives provide a common discourse of understanding" for those who read and study them.⁴¹⁹)

"The idea that the United States was a pure, high-minded nation and model of virtue"—this is where the general view of America, the "common discourse of understanding," promoted by public school history texts in this country begins.⁴²⁰ From that point, what J onathan Zimmerman calls "America's majestic national narrative" unfolds inexorably—a "triumphal narrative" of the steady evolution toward perfection of America, land of "liberty, prosperity, and equality" and "beacon of hope and liberty to the world."⁴²¹

What is perhaps most amazing about the otherwise dramatic changes in textbooks during the 1970s and after, including the systematic inclusion of more information about the roles of women and minorities in American history, is the fact that this subtext, this "triumphal" tale of America's inexorable march to greatness, has been left substantially unchanged. As Jonathan Zimmerman argued in 2002, while "[r]eform-ers did win important victories, forcing text publishers to add minority achievements and to delete egregiously racist passages," at the same time "the traditional themes of American high school history—freedom, progress, and prosperity—remained mostly undisturbed." While "hundreds of textbooks that had ignored or denigrated minorities now included accurate and sympathetic material about them," this "was not allowed to alter the old story about peace, justice, and freedom." In sum,

Our "history wars" have usually surrounded the issue of "inclusion"— who gets into the national narrative, and who does not—rather than the structure of the narrative itself: each "race" gets to have its heroes sung, as the New York Times put it in 1927, but no group may question the melody of peace, freedom, and economic opportunity that unites them all.⁴²²

II

The Breakdown of the Consensus— the Case of Howard Zinn

Writing only two years later, in 2004, the University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer, focusing on college-level American history textbooks, saw a somewhat different situation. In college classrooms around the country, according to Hoffer, the big change came in the 1980s, and it was a genuine change, as consensus history—the triumphant story of peace, justice, freedom, and the American Way—gave way to what he calls "the new history."

The "new history," as we have seen, was the name adopted for their revisionist movement, the first in American historiography, by James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard of Columbia University in the 1890s. What set that earlier New History apart from its consensus competitors was the enthusiasm with which the New Historians drew on social sciences like economics and sociology to revise the historical record as needed. The new "new history" that arose in the 1960s and began affecting public school textbooks late in that decade was similarly enthralled by the contributions the social sciences could make to historical understanding. More importantly, the new "new history" had two distinct "wings" or "branches." As Hoffer puts it, there were the "historians who focused on major public events, political and military figures"—the New Left Historians already familiar to readers of Chapter 3, many of them products of the Beard-saturated history department of the University of Wisconsin—and there were the historians "who thought that the everyday life of ordinary people—birth, marriage, child rearing, and other demographic issues—was more important."

The latter group, the social historians, enjoyed their first successes working as consultants to ethnic and racial pressure groups like the NAACP, agitating for the removal of racist passages and the inclusion of accurate historical accounts of the African-American experience in this country in public school textbooks—or writing the new textbooks that would be needed to address the concerns of the pressure groups in question. It wasn't long before the New Left Historians focused on political, military, and diplomatic history found that their fellow "new historians" had begun "radically shifting the angle of repose of all history in the direction of social and cultural life. The two sides in this debate—the major-events group and the everyday-life group—began to struggle for control of the programs at the major conventions, each accusing the other of intellectual imperialism."⁴²³

Divided though they were, however, the purveyors of the new "new history" were able to conquer their opponents, the consensus historians, with little difficulty. Hoffer reports that "by the middle of the 1980s," a number of "major textbook publishers scrambled to assemble groups of authors who would focus on the new-history perspective—stressing social as well as political history and inclusiveness and diversity." And "[b]y the end of the 1980s, the purveyors of the new history were buoyed by their apparent triumph in the classroom and the textbooks." It was, as Hoffer describes it, a "sweeping victory, in which consensus history was left to the popular historians (and a few notable academics of the old school)."⁴²⁴

On the other hand, the triumphant new historians were visibly squabbling among themselves even as they emerged victorious in the classrooms and in the college textbooks—which showed that historians could violently disagree with each other about what should be included in the national narrative, something consensus historians had never done. By conducting this squabbling in public as they did, and by explaining in detail the errors and misdemeanors of the consensus historians who had preceded them, the new New Historians "required all of us to think about the way history was constructed. [The new "new history"] fostered critical, and self-critical, thought. But in so doing, it undermined the intellectual authority that consensus historians had claimed and, until the rise of the new history, had routinely exercised."⁴²⁵

If the consensus historians had really been as full of it as the newly dominant New Historians claimed, and if the New Historians themselves could not reach agreement about the Truth in at least certain cases, then why, more and more students and teachers of history began asking, should we pay any more attention to the pronouncements of the New Historians than we apparently erroneously paid to the pronouncements of their predecessors? Why not study history on our own and reach our own conclusions?

And so they did. And so it is that today, for the first time in American history, we see textbook wars in which the competing textbooks do not all tell the same story—textbook wars in which, for the first time, there is true diversity of opinion about our nation's past. It is instructive to examine a sample of today's college-level American history textbooks and reflect on the situation this latest development in left liberal revisionism has brought about.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition of A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn, published in 1999 by HarperCollins, enjoys a special status among current college-level American history texts. It was the first text to blend successfully the two strains of the new "new history"—"the major-events group and the everyday-life group"—and it was the first such text to enjoy widespread adoption and use on American college and university campuses. According to Michael Kazin, A People's History "has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity." ⁴²⁶ According to Zinn, whose Ph.D. in history was awarded by the ubiquitous Columbia University, he wrote his People's History because "the circumstances of my own life [...] demanded of me that I try to fashion a new kind of history [...] a history different from what I had learned in college and in graduate school and from what I saw in the history texts given to students all over the country."

By the "circumstances of [his] own life," Zinn referred to his "upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York," his "three years as a shipyard worker," his service in the U.S. Air Force "as a bombardier in the European theater [...] in the second World War," and his twenty years of experience "teaching history and what is grandiosely called 'political science'" in American colleges and universities. These experiences had made it clear to Zinn that "[t]here were themes of profound importance to me which I found missing in the orthodox histories that dominated American culture." One case in point was

the issue of class. It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. The use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us—rich and poor and middle class— have a common interest.⁴²⁷

Another case in point was the issue of U.S. foreign policy. "My own war experience," Zinn wrote,

and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke "the national interest" or "national security" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed several million people, that Johnson and Nixon carried out a war in Indochina in which perhaps 3 million people died[...].

Zinn wonders

how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.

Nor was this all that Zinn found wanting in consensus history. There was also the issue of "how badly twisted was the teaching and writing of history by its submersion of nonwhite people"—and, for that matter, of women and gays.⁴²⁸ In writing his People's History, Zinn was not planning to retell the venerable old tale of America's inexorable evolution toward greatness as an international beacon of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Zinn had something very different in mind. "I wanted," he says, "to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance." His vision of the American past was one of "continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, [...] political power in the hands of liars and murderers [...]."⁴²⁹ Not a pretty picture.

It is instructive to examine Zinn's treatment, in his People's History of the United States, of the three topics in U.S. political, military, and diplomatic history which we have already traced through the pages of Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and through the works of the revisionist historians—namely, the nature and significance of the U.S. Civil War, the role of the United States in the two world wars of the first half of the 20^th Century, and the origins and significance of the Cold War.

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards the U.S. Civil War as having been touched off by something other than slavery.

Behind the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected President in the fall of 1860 as candidate of the new Republican party, was a long series of policy clashes between South and North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution—most northerners did not care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war.

Among the "policy clashes" Zinn names are "free land" (Southerners believed public lands being opened to settlement should be sold, not given away), "a high protective tariff for manufacturers," and "a bank of the United States" (both rejected by Southerners as not in their economic interest). He quotes Lincoln's statement to Horace Greeley that "[m]y paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it [...]." And he comments: "The American government had set out to fight the slave states in 1861, not to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market and resources."⁴³⁰

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards Lincoln as having been something of a tyrant. The Civil War, he writes "was a war proclaimed as a war for liberty, but working people would be attacked by soldiers if they dared to strike, Indians would be massacred in Colorado by the U.S. army, and those daring to criticize Lincoln's policies would be put in jail without trial—perhaps thirty thousand political prisoners." Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn regards Lincoln's reputation as the "Great Emancipator" as something of a joke. He approvingly quotes the London Spectator: "The principle [behind the Emancipation Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."⁴³¹

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn sees Woodrow Wilson as having led the United States into another useless, destructive war (World War I), while using his power as chief executive, in defiance of the First Amendment, to silence all dissent and all criticism of his policies. "Congress passed and Wilson signed, in June of 1917, the Espionage Act," Zinn writes, a law that "was used to imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war." When Charles Schenck was convicted under the law and sentenced to six months in jail for the "crime" of having "denounced the draft law and the war," he appealed his conviction—one of "the shortest sentences given in such cases," Zinn reminds us—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There Schenck fell victim to the dubious "justice" of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who ruled, rather irrelevantly, that "[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." Schenck went to jail.⁴³²

As for World War II, Zinn observes that "if the entrance of the United States into" that conflict "was (as so many Americans believed at the time, observing the Nazi invasions) to defend the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, the nation's record cast doubt on its ability to uphold that principle." After all, Zinn reminds us, the United States

had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.

The United States had, moreover,

engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the "independent" state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal.[...] Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States.

And these interventions sometimes lasted for years, even decades. The United States, Zinn notes,

sent five thousand Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years.⁴³³

In short, whatever its pretensions, the United States was an imperial power, and its "main interest" in entering World War II "was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States [...] Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy [...] was not minority rights, but national power." In fact, as Zinn sees it, there was precious little evidence of any concern at all for minority rights on the part of the Roosevelt administration. He particularly takes the president to task for

calmly sign[ing] Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—110,000 men, women, and children—to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions. Three-fourths of these were[...] American citizens.

They "remained in those camps," Zinn laments, "for over three years."⁴³⁴

Like Vidal and the revisionists, Zinn looks upon Harry Truman's decision to drop the new atomic bomb on a pair of Japanese cities in 1945 as both unnecessary and inexcusable. He refers to the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later as "atrocities." He quotes the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which "reported just after the war" that "Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped," and sneers at President Truman's argument that the only alternative to the bombing—an invasion of Japan—could cost half a million American lives. "These estimates of invasion losses," Zinn writes, "were not realistic and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings, which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people."⁴³⁵

In defense of the United States Bombing Survey's conclusion that Japanese surrender was already imminent when President Truman ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Zinn points out that

[t]he Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace...."

The Truman administration ignored all this, Zinn argues. Instead of working toward peace through diplomatic channels, the administration insisted on unconditional surrender, used the Japanese rejection of those terms as an excuse to murder more than 150,000 Japanese outright (to say nothing of the "tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning"), then turned around and accepted Japanese surrender with one condition—"that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place[...]."

Since this was the only condition the Japanese had requested in the first place, Zinn contends, it is absurd to believe the Truman administration's contention that the bombings were necessary to avoid an invasion the administration already knew full well was utterly unnecessary. Why, then, did Truman order the bombing? Zinn believes, with the Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Sir Patrick M. S. Blackett (1887-1974)— and with Vidal and the revisionists—that Truman "was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the War against Japan," thus insuring that "the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was 'the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia....'"⁴³⁶

This Cold War is another war Zinn is inclined to think needn't have been fought, and here again he is in agreement with Vidal and the revisionists. "United States foreign policy was not simply based on the existence of the Soviet Union" during the Cold War years, he writes, "but was motivated by fear of revolution in various parts of the world." He approvingly quotes Noam Chomsky's declaration that "the appeal to security" as a rationale for the Cold War "was largely fraudulent, the Cold War framework having been employed as a device to justify the suppression of independent nationalism—whether in Europe, Japan, or the Third World." And he opines further that what the U.S. government feared about this "independent nationalism" was its potential to

jeopardize powerful American economic interests. Revolutions in Nicaragua or Cuba or El Salvador or Chile were threats to United Fruit, Anaconda Copper, International Telephone and Telegraph, and others. Thus, foreign interventions presented to the public as "in the national interest" were really undertaken for special interests, for which the American people were asked to sacrifice their sons and their tax dollars.⁴³⁷

III

American History According to Eric Foner

Altogether, then, it seems fair to say that Zinn's very successful People's History of the United States conveys much the same vision of American diplomatic history that one finds in Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and the works of the revisionist historians. Nor is Zinn's text the only current text that does this to one extent or another. Consider, as a case in point, Give Me Liberty! An American History by Eric Foner, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2005.

Foner (born 1943) was a classic red diaper baby. "Shortly before I was born," he writes, in an autobiographical essay included in his book Who Owns History?,

my father, Jack D. Foner, and uncle, Philip S. Foner, both historians at City College in New York, were among some sixty faculty members dismissed from teaching positions at the City University after informers named them as members of the Communist party at hearings of the state legislature's notorious Rapp-Coudert Committee, a precursor of McCarthyism.

The Rapp-Coudert Committee had been established a year earlier to investigate "subversive activities" in New York public schools, colleges, and universities. On the same day his father and his uncle lost their jobs, another uncle, Moe Foner, who worked in the CONY registrar's office, lost his. Still another uncle, Henry Foner, a New York City high school teacher, was questioned by the committee but allowed to keep his job. "A few years later," Eric Foner tells us in Who Owns History?, "my mother was forced to resign from her job as a high school art teacher. During my childhood and for many years afterward, my parents were blacklisted and unable to teach."⁴³⁸

Eric Foner earned both his B.A. and his Ph.D. in history during the 1960s at that hotbead of revisionism, where Charles Beard had taught and Harry Elmer Barnes had studied, Columbia University. His first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, was published in 1970. He went on to publish many more books and articles and to hold down the presidencies of both the Organization of American Historians (1993-1994) and the American Historical Association (2000). Peter Novick sees Foner as one of the "New Left historians," but as part of "the second wave" of that movement. The sensibility of the first wave "had been shaped in the fifties," while the second, in which Foner was "prominent," was characterized by "a countercultural sensibility." Moreover, the members of this second wave "were more likely than those in the previous group to have an activist orientation."⁴³⁹

As we have seen, the New Left Historians of the first wave looked on the U.S. Civil War as a sectional conflict with principally economic origins and not as a holy war against the moral evil of slavery. They tended to view Abraham Lincoln as a power-lusting tyrant, bent more on creating an invincible, centralized American State than on freeing slaves. Foner begs to differ. "The attack on Fort Sumter," he writes, "crystal-ised in Northern minds the direct conflict between freedom and slavery that abolitionists had insisted upon for decades. The war, as Frederick Douglass recognized as early as 1862, merged 'the cause of the slaves and the cause of the country.'" Nor was Lincoln's conduct of the war overly high-handed. Foner acknowledges that an "intense new nationalism made criticism of the war effort—or of the policies of the Lincoln administration—seem to Republicans equivalent to treason." He acknowledges that during the war years "[a]rbitrary arrests numbered in the thousands. They included opposition newspaper editors, Democratic politicians, individuals who discouraged enlistment in the army, and ordinary civilians like the Chicago man briefly imprisoned for calling the president a 'damned fool.'" He acknowledges that Lincoln "twice suspended the writ [of habeas corpus] throughout the entire Union for those accused of 'disloyal activities.'" He acknowledges that Lincoln had Clement Vallandigham, a Democratic Ohio Congressman "known for his blistering antiwar speeches," brought up on charges of treason before a military court, and, following his "conviction," had him deported to the Confederacy. Yet Foner concludes that "Lincoln was not a despot. Most of those arrested were quickly released, the Democratic press continued to flourish, and contested elections were held throughout the war."⁴⁴⁰

Somehow all the very same sorts of repressive and unconstitutional behavior became much more objectionable half a century later, however, when they were being committed by Democratic politicians in the Wilson administration. "More than any other individual," Foner reminds us, "Woodrow Wilson articulated [...] the conviction that [...] greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and self-interest." And the masquerade began early on in the century. "American involvement in World War I," Foner writes,

provided the first great test of Wilson's belief that American power could "make the world safe for democracy." Most Progressives embraced the country's participation in the war, believing that the United States could help to spread Progressive values throughout the world. But rather than bringing Progressivism to other peoples, the war destroyed it at home. The government quickly came to view critics of American involvement not simply as citizens with a different set of opinions, but as enemies of the very ideas of democracy and freedom. As a result, the war produced one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history.⁴⁴¹

A few pages on, and the superlatives are applied without further recourse to such sickly, wishy-washy phrases as "one of the most." A few pages on, and it's a flat out certainty that "the war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known." Look at the case of Eugene Debs: sentenced to ten years in prison in 1918 at the age of 63 for the "crime" of speaking out publicly against the war. Even "[a]fter the war's end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that he commute Debs's sentence. [...] It was left to Wilson's successor, [Republican] Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921."⁴⁴²

The moral of the story seems clear. It is an intolerable affront to constitutional principles if a spokesman for a self-evidently righteous cause like keeping America out of a World War is silenced by government; it is no big deal if a spokesman for a self-evidently evil cause like protecting slave owners from getting their just desserts is silenced by government. Eugene V. Debs is a martyr to the cause of American freedom; Clement Vallandigham—well, it's too bad that he wasn't among those who were "quickly released"—most of those who were arrested were quickly released, you know, and just because one slips through the net here and there doesn't make Lincoln a despot. Freedom of speech, maybe the whole First Amendment, is for the politically correct, not the politically incorrect.

Still, Foner's treatment of World War I, for all its apparent hypocrisy, is quite comparable to the treatments of the same subject written by members of the first wave of New Left historians. "[T]hose who believed that the United States must prepare for possible entry into the war," he writes,

included longtime advocates of a stronger military establishment, like Theodore Roosevelt, and businessmen with close economic ties to Britain, the country's leading trading partner and the recipient of over 2 billion dollars in wartime loans from American banks. Wilson himself had strong pro-British sympathies and viewed Germany as "the natural foe of liberty."⁴⁴³

And, once America was in the war for these less-than-idealistic rea-sons—a chance to build up national military power, a chance to guarantee the financial gambles various big financiers and big corporations had made in enabling England's war effort—it quickly became apparent that the conflict, bloody and long as it was, would not advance any worthwhile ideals anywhere else in the world, but would only undermine American freedom here at home. Foner's treatment of American involvement in World War I is yet another instance of the historical vision of Gore Vidal's American Chronicle novels and the American revisionist historians making its way into major, mainstream textbooks.

Foner's treatment of American involvement in World War II, like his treatment of the U.S. Civil War, is another kettle of fish altogether. Where Vidal and the revisionists argue that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so he'd have a publicly acceptable reason for entering the war—something he'd been scheming for years to find a way to do—Foner assures his readers that "Pearl Harbor was a complete and devastating surprise" and that though "conspiracy theories abound suggesting that FDR knew of the attack and did nothing to prevent it so as to bring the United States into the war," the fact is that "[n]o credible evidence supports this charge."⁴⁴⁴

Vidal and the revisionists are relentless in their condemnation of President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They portray this decision as having been not only utterly unnecessary to end the war but also motivated in truth by a desire to impress Joseph Stalin with the reality of American power. Foner tries to straddle the fence, briefly describing the arguments for and against Truman's decision, without taking any position on the issue himself—and without even mentioning the all-important Stalin connection.

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.

V

History, Fiction, and Objectivity— Some Concluding Observations

Nor is it incongruous to include Vidal in such company. Not only does his vision of American history square with the vision sketched out in the works of Beard, Barnes, Martin, and Williams, but he is as much and as legitimately an historian as any of them. The majority of his historical works are novels, which is to say, works of fiction—yes. But as we have seen, there is much about conventional history that is fictional or quasi-fictional in character, since to tell stories about the past—to do, that is, what history does, first and foremost—is to falsify or fictionalize that past.

The fact is, too, that there are historical novels and historical novels. One sort of historical novel—the more common sort—is a tale of the invented events that make up the lives of invented characters set against an historical backdrop: the American Revolution in Kenneth Roberts's Rabble in Arms, the French Revolution in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, the U.S. Civil War in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, World War I in John Dos Passos's U.S.A., the Russian Revolution in Ayn Rand's We, the Living. The historical backdrop in such novels can be well or badly rendered, of course. It can be rendered accurately or inaccurately. It can be detailed and precise or general and vague. But a backdrop is a backdrop. The focus of such novels is less on history than on an invented story.

There is another sort of historical novel, however, a sort perhaps best typified in the present period by certain works of Gore Vidal and William Safire, in which there are few if any fictional characters and few if any fictional events. Virtually all the dialogue in novels like Vidal's Burr and Lincoln and Safire's Freedom is carefully drawn from the letters and journals of the historical figures who speak it (and from the reports of writers who knew them at first hand). In the "Afterword" to Lincoln, Vidal wrote that "[a]ll of the principal characters" in the novel "really existed, and they said and did pretty much what I have them saying and doing[...] I have reconstructed them from letters, journals, newspapers, diaries, etc."—which is, of course, precisely what an historian does.

In writing his American Chronicle novels, Vidal tells us in a 1988 essay, he attempted to "make the agreed-upon facts as accurate as possible. I always use the phrase 'agreed upon' because[...] the so-called facts are often contradicted by other facts. So one must select; and it is in selection that literature begins. After all, with whose facts do you agree?"⁴⁶³ And, as we have seen, this is a problem confronting the conventional historian as well. S/he too must select. S/he too must decide whose facts comport best with what we know about how things happen and about the way the world is.

Novels like Vidal's Burr and Lincoln and Safire's Freedom are exhaustively researched and painstakingly accurate depictions of actual events. Such books deserve to be regarded as works of history. Like Beard and Barnes and Martin and Williams, Vidal made choices, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, choosing what he regarded as the important facts and passing over the less important or unimportant ones. Because he is a liberal, a man of the Left, a man who values individual liberty and free institutions, his choices are not unlike those that lie behind the works of Beard and Barnes and Martin and Williams— liberals and men of the Left, every one.

Conservatives have different values and choose different facts when they set about the task of writing history. But thanks to the true liberals of our past and present, a fairly vigorous marketplace of ideas exists in this country, and thanks to the decadence of our culture—which is to say, thanks to the steady decline of authority in our culture—since the late 1960s, that marketplace of ideas is now fairly roiling with dozens of competing American histories reflecting dozens of political views and senses of life. As readers, we get to pick and choose among them, and judge for ourselves.

This is the very best situation we could possibly expect, and we should be happy about it. Peter Novick was right: there is no objectivity in history—not if by "objectivity" we mean "neutrality," not if by "objective history" we mean a history untainted by "ideological assumptions and purposes" and the "distortions" such assumptions and purposes supposedly introduce into the historical record.⁴⁶⁴

If, on the other hand, we mean by "objectivity" something more like fairness or evenhandedness, then indeed it could be said that objectivity is possible in historical writing, however seldom it may in fact be achieved. Thomas L. Haskell, who teaches historical method and U.S. cultural and intellectual history at Rice University, considers it preposterous "to think of truth seeking as a matter of emptying oneself of passion and preconception, so as to become a perfectly passive and receptive mirror of external reality." In point of fact, no coherent history could be produced in any such way. As John Tosh notes, any attempt to simply read through the available primary sources without presuppositions or assumptions of any kind leads only to the production of "an incoherent jumble of data." Haskell invites us to contemplate an historian of a totally different kind.

Consider an extreme case: a person who, although capable of detachment, suspends his or her own perceptions of the world not in the expectation of gaining a broader perspective, but only in order to learn how opponents think so as to demolish their arguments more effec-tively—who is, in short, a polemicist, deeply and fixedly committed as a lifelong project to a particular political or cultural or moral program. Anyone choosing such a life obviously risks being thought boorish or provincial, but insofar as such a person successfully enters into the thinking of his or her rivals and produces arguments potentially compelling, not only to those who already share the same views, but to outsiders as well, I see no reason to withhold the laurel of objectivity. There is nothing objective about hurling imprecations at apostates or catechizing the faithful. But as long as the polemicist truly engages the thinking of the enemy, he or she is being as objective as anyone.

As Haskell sees it, "the most commonly observed fulfillment of the ideal of objectivity in the historical profession is simply the powerful argument—the text that reveals by its every twist and turn its respectful appreciation of the alternatives it rejects." The author of such a text, Haskell maintains, has "to suspend momentarily his or her own perceptions so as to anticipate and take account of objections and alternative constructions—not those of some straw man, but those that truly issue from the rival's position, understood as sensitively and stated as eloquently as the rival could desire."⁴⁶⁵

This is a tall order, of course, and one not frequently filled. But it is difficult indeed to imagine why a work of history that did achieve such fairness, such evenhandedness, should not be described as "objective." It is this standard, the one so clearly and persuasively delineated by Thomas Haskell, that should guide the efforts of historians to be "objective"— rather than the "essentially confused" ideal of "objectivity" that Peter Novick argued against two decades ago, the one he found to be based on "philosophical assumptions" that were (and are) "dubious," the one he judged to be "psychologically and sociologically naïve."⁴⁶⁶ Properly done, history is plenty difficult enough already. To saddle historians with a standard of objectivity that cannot be met—to make their work, not merely hard, but actually impossible—profits no one and, by turning historians into producers of incoherent jumbles of data, impoverishes us all.