Fighting for the Past – Part 3

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President(1913 -1921), was one of the most influential intellectual thinkers during the Progressive Era.  He had a Ph.D. in both history and political science from Johns Hopkins University, and he was the president of Princeton University for 10 years.  As an academic, he contributed major scholarly works in progressive thoughts.  As an educator, he liked “to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible…”  Finally, as a practicing politician, he pursued an ambitious agenda of progressive reform.

Wilson did not believe the Founding Principles were immutable and applicable to all men and all times.  To Wilson, the Founding Principles of natural rights, constitutional checks and balances and limited government, were obstacles to progress.  Wilson believed that human nature had progressed and the government had not posed a threat to the governed.  Government composed of experts would be able, through regulation and redistribution, to remove social ills.  To Wilson, democracy and socialism were ”almost if not quite one the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.  Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.”  In his 1911 address to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles, Wilson said, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.”   Lincoln, in contrast, believed that the Declaration of Independence is a document embodying “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression”(Lincoln’s Letter to Henry Pierce, 1859).  

Wilson’s progressive political philosophy and practice paved the way for FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.  However, no one has done more than John Dewey in proselytizing many to Progressivism.

John Dewey was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University for 25 years(1905 -1930).   He was also the president of the American Psychological Association in 1899 and the president of the American Philosophical Association in 1905. John Dewey, together with Charles Peirce and William James(Father of American psychology), developed the philosophy of Pragmatism.  The Pragmatic Theory of Truth holds that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe. The truth, defined by William James, “is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.  Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run…” (Pragmatism: A new way for some old ways of thinking, 1907). According to Dewey, what is useful and what is good are defined by an elite composed of social scientists who will lead humanity, by way of social engineering, toward the kingdom of God where everyone will have all the means to full-realization.  In his book, A Common Faith, Dewey advocates his philosophy as a religion, writing  “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race…Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.  It remains to make it explicit and militant.” John Dewey was also considered to be the most significant educational thinker of the Progressive Era.  He taught philosophy of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, which is the first and largest graduate school of education in the United States. Under Dewey’s leadership, Teachers College became the premier school of education in the United States.  In 1932, the National Education Association elected John Dewy honorary life president. Dewey’s long and prominent positions in academia contributes to his lasting impact on the culture of this country.    

To John Dewey, a teacher’s job is not to educate students to seek the truth and to hand down the best that has been thought and said.  In My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey writes, “The teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in the true kingdom of God… that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.”   In other words, teachers are to proselytize students to the religion of Progressivism.  Dewey’s philosophy of education has fundamentally changed how schools educate our children.

For Wilson, Dewey, and other progressives, the Western tradition and America’s Founding Principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the ultimate shackles to their agenda. Western metaphysical notions about truth and morality have no place in a society that demands absolute liberty and equality; the idea of inalienable rights challenges the state’s right to transform society through redistribution and regulations.  One of the ways to discard tradition is to denigrate the past with which the tradition is associated.  The traditional American History that lauds Columbus for his spirit of discovery, pilgrims for their religious freedom aspiration, the Founding Fathers for their courage and political sagaciousness did not serve the progressives’ purpose.  Therefore, they needed a new philosophy of history which affirms historical relativism and the idea of a living history.  American progressive historians like James Harvey Robinson, one of Dewey’s colleagues at Columbia, came to answer the call.

Robinson was the president of the American Historical Association in 1929,  an editor of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and an associate editor of the American Historical Review.  Robinson taught History in Columbia University for 24 years.  Together with John Dewey, Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen(an economist), they founded the New School for Social Research in 1919.  Through his editorial position, his writings and lectures, Robinson exerted an important influence on the study and teaching of history.

Robinson, articulated the conception of New History in his article The New History: Essays illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook, published in the July 1912 issue of The American Historical Review.   In Robinson’s own words, historical writing could no longer “catalogue mere names of persons and places which have not the least importance for the reader.”  Robinson believed that the study of history had to be made to inspire social improvement and the selection of historical materials had to be relevant and useful to contemporary people.  In his 1929 address to the American Historical Association, Robinson described history, ”in the form of a record prepared by a human being is about as malleable as potter’s clay.”  Professor Robinson’s message to his students is clear, the discipline of history is not a noble pursuit to find what happened in the past, but to search for materials from the past that can advance a present cause.

Robinson’s thesis of historical relativism was further advanced by his student and collaborator Charles Beard.   After he graduated from Columbia, Charles Beard went on to teach at Columbia for 13 years.  In his 1933 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Beard said, ”The assumption that any historian can be a disembodied spirit as coldly neutral to human affairs as the engineer to an automobile have both been challenged and rejected.”

Once historical facts are regarded as malleable, the past can be shaped to serve the progressive agenda.  Progressive historians find that analytical and thematic formats provide them with more flexibility in molding the pattern than the traditional chronological narrative.  They also frequently utilize sociological models, psychoanalytic theories, statistical tables, anthropology and even animal psychology to find evidence to support the “presumed” real motivation behind the written records.  The 19th century English historian Lord Acton’s conviction that “history, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinion” is not something to which they subscribe.  What they subscribe to is Karl Marx’s interpretation of history: that the history of all societies has been the history of class struggles.  Complex historical events full of contingencies and particularities are often reduced to simple, generalized, deterministic, and binary framework.

To repudiate America’s Founding Principles, progressive historians seek to discredit the Founding Fathers.  Beard is the first historian to challenge the motives of the Founders.  Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States argues that the structure of the Constitution of the United States was motivated primarily by the personal financial interests of the Founding Fathers.  Beard contended that the Constitutional Convention was attended by, and the Constitution was therefore written by, elites seeking to protect their personal property and economic standing.  He concluded that “The Constitution was essentially an economic document.”  Beard’s thesis captured the historical profession and became a must-read in college classrooms by the 1920s.  Though Beard’s research was debunked by historian Forrest McDonald in his 1958 book We the People, and the progressive movement as a whole was abated during the Second World War and the Cold War,  the false narrative that the Founders were greedy elites has stood the test of time in academia.  A historian with a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University,  67 years after Beard published An Economic Interpretation, published a book in which he managed to diminish the standing of almost all our national political heroes.  That historian is Howard Zinn and the book is A People’s History of the United States of America.

A People’s History of the United States of America is one of the most widely read and translated U.S. history books with more than 2.6 million copies sold as of 2018.  In 2012, Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council called A People’s History the nation’s “best-known work of American history and best-selling survey of American history.”  The People Speak, a cinematic version of A People’s History with celebrities such as Matt Damon, John Legend, Pink, Morgan Freeman, Bob Dylan and Danny Glover, was screened at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver that nominated Barack Obama for president.  The Zinn Education Project (ZEP) was founded in 2008 by Zinn’s student William Holtzman to promote Zinn’s work.  According to ZEP’s website, there were more than 84,000 teachers who signed up to access its site for teaching materials in 2018.  Most recently, ZEP has added a whole set of teaching resources centered on The 1619 Project.

A People’s History  manifests many characteristics of the New History.  Even though it is chronological, a reader can hardly miss the theme that runs through the book: American History is a history of exploitation and persecution.   Columbus was a genocidal villain whose murder, and enslavement of the Indians is the original sin that throws the legitimacy of the United States into question.  The American Revolution was a way for the new aristocrats (the Founding Fathers) to defeat potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for their rule.  Zinn considered Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible.  The purpose of the Civil War was to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful by creating “an aura of moral crusade” against slavery.  Zinn also claimed that U.S. entry into the Second World War was motivated by the profit of the military industries and racism toward the Japanese.

Zinn never claimed that his work was objective.  In the Afterword of A People’s History, Zinn writes, “By the time I began teaching and writing, I had no illusions about ‘objectivity’, if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that as a historian(or journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit.  And that decision inevitably would reflect, consciously or not, the interests of the historian.”  Zinn also writes, ”The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological…”   Zinn made no bones about his ideology.  He described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist.”  Zinn’s motivation for writing A People’s History was, in his own words, “to change the world.”

The New History has made great strides since James Robinson published his New History in 1912.  The success of A People’s History shows that the New History has established itself as a respectable way of writing history.  In 2020, we can safely say that New History has become orthodoxy in the writing of our national history.  Hence, there is little surprise that intellectual elites are so disdainful of their own country, and that many of the Baby Boomers, Gen X and the Millennials have so little knowledge of how exceptional their heritage is.  

A recently released book by Mary Garbar, Debunking Howard Zinn, is a well-researched critique on  A People’s History.  Efforts like this are necessary, but not sufficient.  For more than a generation, American students have been indoctrinated into believing that historical relativism is the truth.  To refute this dogma, we have to obliterate the progressive idea of relativism, wherever it rears its ugly head.  We have to show why it is unreasonable to say that history is relative, culture is relative, and morals are relative.  When we abandon reason, we abandon knowledge.  When we abandon knowledge, we surrender our value system to an ideology that destroys the human soul and eventually reduces human existence to a state of bondage.  My next essay will further expound on the danger of relativism.

“Demosthenes, the great Athenian patriot, cried out to his countrymen when they seemed too confused and divided to stand against the tyranny of Macedonia: “In God’s name, I beg of you to think.” For a long while, most Athenians ridiculed Demosthenes’ entreaty: Macedonia was a great way distant, and there was plenty of time. Only at the eleventh hour did the Athenians perceive the truth of his exhortations. And that eleventh hour was too late. So it may be with Americans today. If we are too indolent to think, we might as well surrender to our enemies tomorrow.” -Russell Kirk