THE CULTURE WARS : Seeing the Messiness of America’s True History

Out of the classroom and into the sound bite--Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas wants to make history a campaign issue. Dole blames elitist academic historians--such as those who prepared the voluntary national history standards--for emphasizing “some of our worst moments” as a society to the exclusion of the triumphs in our national history. In a recent speech, the Republican presidential front-runner asked, “Do we embrace ideas that unite us, regardless of our sex, color or religion? . . . Or are we just a crowd of competing groups thrown together by fate between two oceans?” According to Dole, the “false theories” of the “embarrassed-to-be American crowd” threaten the unity that common language, history and values have enabled the United States to achieve. The problem with Dole’s question is that it ignores the actual history of the United States.

Unity has been a sometime thing in American history. It is embarrassing to have to remind a proud Kansan like the senator that his own state was born out of decades of national disunity that resulted in the nation’s costliest and bloodiest war. The issues that gave Kansas its “bloody” label were slavery and race--issues that have bedeviled that state until our own day. The “board of education” in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was the Topeka, Kan., school board. Earlier, there were the populists who mobilized Kansas against the centralizing power of industrial capitalism in the 1880s; Mary Lease advised farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” Their critique of American politics and economics resounds to this day. The traditions of his own state, like those of the rest of the country, are not Dole’s formula of concentrating on the good but of democracy in action, trying to make justice apply to everyone “regardless of sex or color or religion.”

Dole says diversity “requires us to bind ourselves to the American idea in every way that we can--by speaking one language, taking pride in our true history and embracing the traditional American values that have guided us from the beginning.” This view would have startled James Madison, whose classic argument in Federalist Paper #10 was that it was America’s very diversity of interest and expanse of territory that would encourage compromise and prevent tyranny. It would also have surprised the generations of Americans who fought about language, values and history. It is also hard to reconcile with the Bill of Rights--which prefers the risk of debate to the control of imposed unity.

What does Dole mean by “true history?” He means a story that justifies many middle-class white males’ hazy and sentimental view of what America has meant to them. It does not disparage the opportunities many Americans have enjoyed to point out that their advantages were not achieved because of a general equality of opportunity. Any history that tells only about fortunate Americans, like me and the senator, must ignore the experience of most Americans at any given time.

The unity Dole remembers was achieved through systematic restrictions on the freedoms of a substantial number of Americans, identified by race, sex and religion. It may be that some people would like to return to a time when African Americans, women, native Americans, Asians, Latino, gays and many others were silenced, but that time will not return.

Of course, Americans amount to more than a “crowd of competing groups thrown by the fate between two oceans.” But we are not a chosen people brought by Providence to this continent, either. The United States was founded by immigrants who took over the land and systematically eliminated native populations and developed a country with the slave labor of African Americans and the forced labor of immigrant groups and women. It is a story of complex human motives and actions, some brave, some base, some proud and others shameful.

The whole point of contemporary, diversity-minded U.S. history is to tell how American history happened to everyone, not just to a few privileged and notable Americans. If much of it is troubling and even shameful, that shouldn’t worry us. The United States has always been a nation that aspired to the free marketplace of ideas Thomas Jefferson imagined. Surely, Dole would not have us imitate Japan’s apparent incapacity to acknowledge the conduct of its soldiers in World War II.

It is understandable that much of what is being written disorients those such as Dole, who have gotten used to being the primary subjects of American history--white, male politicians. The narrative of U.S. history Dole advocates is triumphalist and ethnocentric and unfounded. It requires that the contributions, equality and even the humanity of substantial numbers of Americans be denied.

The senator might have been better advised to make sure there are enough teachers in classes small enough for students to learn U.S. history. He should try reading the vaunted voluntary standards--like any standards they can be faulted, but they provide an excellent framework for just the kind of history the nation needs and whose absence the senator laments. He should worry about libraries closing, archives and research projects going unfunded, community histories losing federal support.

Recovering the best American values--democracy, freedom, individualism--requires that we not flinch from the difficult truths of our past--the difficult truth that the United States often accomplished greatness while at the same time falling short of its own highest standards. The unity that truth fosters, however contentious, is the American kind of unity.