Historical Revisionism is nothing new and it’s actually a good thing. The falsification of history, however, is a more recent development; and that, obviously, is a bad thing.
On both the left and the right today, there’s a lot of concern about “rewriting history.”
“The entire effort to rewrite American history makes my blood boil,” writes a reader in the Fence Post, a nationwide agricultural newspaper that reaches more than 80,000 readers weekly.
“The Civil War happened. That’s a historic fact… The history of the Civil War will not go away just because it’s protested today.”
A left-wing writer, likewise, complains that the Democratic Party “is clearly uninterested in truth or accountability, and is more than willing to rewrite history to advance its political goals.”
Why does the writer say this? Because President Obama had the audacity this week to praise his predecessor, George W. Bush, for having “a basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of our institutions of democracy.”
Balderdash! says the writer, and Obama should know better.
Rewriting v. Falsifying. Of course, what these and other observers are criticizing is not the rewriting of history per se, but rather the falsifying of history as they see it. In truth, history is constantly being rewritten in light of new events and circumstances to glean lessons from the past.
This is a good and laudatory thing and something that should be encouraged.
Some of the best history, in fact, is history that has been rewritten by historians who look back upon our past from a new angle or fame of reference to draw insights that may have been hidden or obscured by previous interpretations of history.
In 1957, for instance, an unknown assistant secretary of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, Bray Hammond, wrote a magisterial history, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution the Civil War, that completely upended the history of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian era in American politics.
In so doing, Hammond took direct aim another great work of history, The Age of Jackson, by the acclaimed Harvard historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Jackson (1945) was itself a work of revisionist historical scholarship that won rave reviews.
Both Hammond and Schlesinger, in fact, won the Pulitzer Prize for History for their respective books and have contributed mightily to our historical understanding.
Both books were sincere, good-faith attempts to interpret and make sense of the past. However, they employed contrasting analytical frameworks that created widely divergent narrative histories.
For Schlesinger, the Age of Jackson was all about class conflict and the efforts by the working and laboring classes to seek redress from the government against business domination and control. In so doing, Schlesinger argued, Jackson was the precursor to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Schlesinger thus broke from the previously dominant historical narrative, which argued that sectional differences, not class differences, defined American politics in the Age of Jackson; and that Jackson himself was the political embodiment of the country’s ascendant western frontier.
Hammond, meanwhile, offered an altogether different interpretation dubbed the entrepreneurial thesis.
Hammond argued that the Jacksonian era was, indeed, defined through class conflict. However, the class conflict pitted not the laboring classes against the business interests, but rather a new class of entrepreneurs and speculators who conspired against the old monied interests. This new class was eager for easy money to fuel their entrepreneurial and speculative ventures.
The Jacksonians, Hammond argued, employed virtuous and high-minded democratic rhetoric to conceal their true motives and true objectives, which were self-interested and self-serving. And the end result of their attack on America’s Second National Bank, Hammond wrote, were economically damaging and reverberated for decades.
All three of these historical interpretations—the initially dominant sectional conflict thesis, Schlesinger’s class conflict thesis, and Hammond’s entrepreneurial thesis—involved rewriting history.
However, none of these interpretations involved falsifying history, and that is a crucial distinction. The essential historical facts in question were all agreed upon and not in dispute.
What was in dispute (and still is to a considerable extent) is how to interpret and apply those facts to our understanding of history.
To be sure, sometimes newly discovered facts are unearthed that alter our understanding of history. That certainly was the case with Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution the Civil War.
Because he worked for the Federal Reserve, Hammond understood banking and finance in a way that Schlesinger and previous historians simply did not. Thus he was able to bring to light new facts that helped to explain how the Second Bank worked and what its demise meant for the U.S. economy.
Still, in the main, the disagreements here are not about the facts of history; they are about the interpretation and application of those facts.
False History. This is not to say that all interpretations of history are equally valid or legitimate. To the contrary: there is such a thing as bad, biased, and simply false history or historical writing. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States comes to mind.
Historian Michael Kazin (no conservative, by the way, but rather, a man of the left) called A People’s History “a Manichean fable… better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship.” Another reviewer called the book “absolutely atrocious agit-prop.”
In short, Zinn was a Marxist political activist, not a serious and fair-minded historian, and there is real difference between these two types. But for serious historians, disagreements in interpretation and analysis can be legitimate and illuminating.
The real risk is that an historian can become so blinded by his frame of reference that he distorts or falsifies history by omitting or glossing over other critical facts and perspectives that complicate or contradict his thesis.
James Bouie. This is what appears to have happened to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
Although Bouie is a journalist, and not an historian per se, he is, nonetheless, a serious student of history. However, in his zeal to argue that America’s black slaves were not simply passive victims, but instead, had real agency and self-awareness, he offers up a very bad and inaccurate historical account.
“Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves,” Bouie brazenly asserts in a recent column.
They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.
Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.
This is complete nonsense. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin points out in a thorough debunking of Bouie’s thesis:
Bouie is right that black Americans played a significant role in contributing to the abolitionist movement, the escalating sectional tensions that led to secession, the transformation of the Civil War in the North from a war for the Union to a war of liberation, and the Union’s victory.
He is wrong to claim that those contributions in and of themselves were enough to bring about the end of slavery, and that Lincoln, the Republicans, the Union Army, and the majority of the American population were merely passive conduits, bobbing like a cork on the unstoppable streams of history.
Bouie skips the crucial step. All the abolitionist agitation in the world only mattered because the people with real political, military, cultural, and economic power in America—the federal government, Northern state governments, the military, the churches, the leaders of the economy, and ultimately, the voting public—eventually chose to side with the abolitionist movement.
It was not a given that they would; in the 1820s and 1830s, they had chosen not to.
In short, Bouie took a legitimate historical insight—that America’s black slaves helped to effect their emancipation—and blew it up into a holistic explanation when it quite obviously is nothing of the sort.
Historical Moment. So, what does this have do with our present political and historical moment?
Well, American history today is under fire and under review in a way that it has not been in quite some time if ever. Indeed, the very legitimacy of the American founding is being called in to question, as “woke,” left-wing radicals seek to advance a far-left agenda.
For this reason, we are seeing historical statues and monuments being toppled, vandalized and defaced as new historical narratives are introduced into the public debate and foisted upon the public.
In key respects, these new historical narratives are really not new. They’ve been adopted in colleges and universities, elementary and secondary schools, for decades, and they are not entirely bad.
They typically give greater historical weight to the experiences of blacks, Indians or native Americans, women, and other marginalized groups.
Cultural Marxists. But as with Howard Zinn’s People’s History and James Bouie’s column, these narratives often are highly politicized and distorted, and designed to advance an explicitly left-wing political agenda.
Their intent is to deconstruct America and create a new country that will embody Marxian and socialist ideals.
But whereas Marx believed that capitalism could be undermined by appeals to the proletariat or working class, his modern-day heirs recognize that America’s greatest source of vulnerability and weakness lie in its racially troubled past; and that appeals to white guilt and black racial grievance are far better suited to deconstruct and remake the United States.
This means that we should be wary and discerning of new historical narratives, and equally wary and discerning of historical groupthink and consensus.
Simplistic and reductionist histories that attempt to explain the past through one narrow prism are especially suspect. History, like life itself, is complicated and typically results from a variety of sometimes seemingly irreconcilable factors and decisions.
All of us, moreover, are going to have to become better consumers of history. This means referring to source documents—many of which are available on the Internet—and making our own assessments of the past.
Patriots, meanwhile, liberal and conservative, must engage in their own historical revisionism. We must rewrite history for a new generation of Americans: poorly educated, ill-informed, and lacking in historical knowledge and perspective.
This new generation has been fed a lie—to wit: that American history is a source of shame; and that Western Civilization itself is a mistake that must be corrected. But in truth, what must be corrected is this false and dangerous narrative.
That means rewriting history in light of modern-day circumstances to illuminate the past for a people increasingly haunted by the darkness.
Feature photo credit: Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. via the Washington Examiner.