We’re a Christian nation! The Civil War wasn’t about slavery! Fighting Hitler was a mistake! The lies run deep.
Published Nov. 4 2023 in Salon
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past
— George Orwell, “1984”The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
— Friedrich von Schlegel, “Philosophical Fragments”
The phonetic resemblance of the word “history” to “story,” which can be anything from a factual narrative to a fairy tale, should warn us about the pretended objectivity of any interpretation of past events. The ambiguous nature of the discipline is even more obvious in foreign languages: In German, “history” and “story” are the same word, Geschichte. The French word histoire also does double duty; “Quelle histoire!” means “what a story!” but inevitably conveys a subtext of doubtful credibility.
It is hardly surprising that ideologues are tempted to hijack history to vindicate their worldview; the interpretive nature of the field makes it vulnerable to misappropriation in a way that math or physics, generally speaking, are not. As we have seen in Florida, Texas and other laboratories of autocracy, once Republicans obtain unified control of government, they are compulsively driven to monkey with the history curricula of the public schools.
This flare-up of officially sanctioned historical fiction (“slavery taught useful skills”) is just the most recent example of the long struggle over who gets to tell us who we are. The desire to seize history and manipulate it to flatter present-day conservatives and help them feel they are the culmination of an historical inevitability, while their opponents are doomed to defeat, is what motivates the historical polemics on the far right.
A glance through the catalog of Regnery or almost any other conservative or evangelical publishing house will reveal works of “history” covering just about every aspect of America, but they tend to concentrate on three eras. These eras were the key inflection points in the development of the United States.
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The first of those is America at its inception. What is America supposed to be? Who gets to rule? What is the cultural foundation of the country? Who were the so-called founding fathers, and what were their intentions?
The second theme is America at its bloodiest moment of crisis, the Civil War. What was the war about, and what was the role of slavery, the most peculiar institution in all American history? Who were the heroes, and who were the villains?
Finally comes the great crisis of the 20th century, the Great Depression and World War II. Was it good or bad that the federal government assumed greater responsibility for the well-being of its citizens? Which economic theory would have worked best to end the Depression? Was a world war against fascism necessary to defend freedom, or a dangerous entanglement America should have avoided?
The pious Founding Fathers fraud
The near-deification of the founders has been a feature of popular histories for over 200 years; one need only think of Parson Weems’ legends about the flawlessly virtuous George Washington. This view was subscribed to across the political spectrum until relatively recently, when more critical scholarship spotlighted, among other things, Thomas Jefferson’s monumental hypocrisy in proclaiming the rights of man while owning slaves and never even manumitting them. That facts such as these weren’t obvious from the beginning only shows the power of myth in subduing skeptical thinking.
Overwhelmingly, conservatives still reject a balanced, critical view of the founders or the debates leading to the establishment of the Constitution, in favor of full-on adulation. The only exception is the lunatic fringe, such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, which believes the Constitution was a capitulation to central planning and the extinction of state sovereignty by the federal Moloch. But then, the anarcho-capitalists at the institute also believe in the right to drive drunk (no, really!).
The vast majority of conservatives, with their alleged constitutional originalism, claim to venerate the founders. But there’s a problem: The signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution were, if not exactly creatures of the Enlightenment like Voltaire or Hume, then heavily influenced by its political and social theories. While the great majority were formal members of some Protestant denomination or other, many were, at most, Deist by inner conviction. Tom Paine opposed organized religion altogether.
Given that the modern-day American conservative movement is largely a political campaign against the Enlightenment and its fruits, the founders’ beliefs present a problem. Conservatives solve it by systematic distortion of the historical record, even as they hand-wave away the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The best-known and most influential of contemporary pseudo-historians to take this approach is David Barton, whose history qualifications consist of a BA in religious education from Oral Roberts University. Among his more risible claims is that 29 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lay ministers. This is technically known as a lie; only one was. Likewise his claim that the Constitution was derived verbatim from Scripture. Given Barton’s appeals to religious prejudice and his attacks on minorities, the Southern Poverty Law Center has profiled him as a bigot.
A favorite conservative technique is to place some delicious quote, concocted in the present, in the mouth of a founder, preferably Thomas Jefferson.
Nevertheless, Barton remains an influence, with Republican operatives like Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich endorsing him. His 2012 book “The Jefferson Lies” was a New York Times bestseller — until fact-checking by authentic Jefferson scholars found so many outright falsehoods that the publisher finally withdrew the book. But no doubt thousands of children afflicted by home schooling or attendance at Christian academies are being indoctrinated with Barton’s lies to this day.
A favorite conservative technique is to place some delicious quote, concocted in the present, in the mouth of a founder, preferably Jefferson. There are almost too many bogus Jefferson quotes to count; one of them is this: “My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government.” It makes him sound both prophetic and like a gung-ho disciple of Ayn Rand.
The uncivil war on historical truth
If the founding of the American republic was imbedded with ambiguities that conservatives refuse to acknowledge, the country’s greatest internal crisis ought to appeal to their generally binary, Manichaean worldview. What could possibly be a greater evil than slavery, the institution that mocked the claims of a nation conceived in liberty? But in this case, conservative chroniclers become agonizingly nuanced; so nuanced, in fact, that one glimpses definite signs of sympathy for the Confederate cause.
The key to conservative historiography on the Civil War lies in its claims as to causes: The war was supposedly about states’ rights or sectional rivalry or discriminatory protective tariffs or internal improvements or disputes over westward expansion and the transcontinental railroad — about pretty much anything and everything except slavery, in other words. You will notice that his viewpoint is highly consistent with the ex-Confederates’ Lost Cause myth that began to spread soon after the war ended.
That myth consistently downplayed the role of slavery, despite the plain words in the Southern states’ proclamations of secession, as well as the infamous cornerstone speech given by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens. (The speech also gives the lie to Lost Causers’ claim that Southerners were simply trying to protect the liberties of the original republic from Yankee encroachment; Stephens used the word “revolution” several times to stress that Confederates were rejecting the old form of government.)
Central to the Lost Cause was the elevation of Robert E. Lee to sainthood. Lee was unquestionably a talented military leader, but he made his share of mistakes, as a glance at the field across which he ordered Pickett’s division on a suicidal charge at Gettysburg will attest. But according to Southern legend his leadership was faultless, and any disasters were the fault of subordinate commanders.
Conservative historiography on the Civil War is focused on causes: The war was about states’ rights or sectional rivalry or tariffs or westward expansion — but never about what it was actually about, which was slavery.
The principal architect of Lee’s reputation was Douglas Southall Freeman. A native of Richmond, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his multi-volume biography of Lee in 1935. Freeman was very influential, teaching at the Army War College for seven years. Respectful study of Lee’s campaigns has been a feature of U.S. Army curricula right up to the present. Only recently has he become subject to critical evaluation, with Civil War scholar Eric Foner calling Freeman’s works on Lee “hagiography.”
Freeman’s work, along with many other encomiums, resulted in a cult of Lee and a cult of the Lost Cause that curses us to this day. Its strength can be measured by the fact that it took 160 years to topple statues of Lee and other Confederates from numerous Southern cities, and the Army is only now in the process of rechristening bases named for Rebel generals. (Whatever one thinks of Lee, he was at least a capable commander; but there’s no defense for sub-mediocrities like George Pickett or Braxton Bragg, not to mention disastrous incompetents like John Bell Hood — yet all were memorialized in military base names. Consistent with his sociopathic nature, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to restore Bragg’s name to the base in North Carolina.
Not until 2021 was a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest removed from the state capitol in Tennessee. Forrest was a monster even by Confederate standards: a slave trader, a war criminal (the Fort Pillow massacre, in which 600 Union soldiers were slaughtered, about half of them Black) and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. To gain some perspective, imagine the reaction if the postwar Federal Republic of Germany had erected a statue to Heinrich Himmler. It is a tribute to the crass pettiness of Tennessee’s political hacks that a statue of Admiral David Farragut was removed along with Forrest’s likeness. Farragut was a Tennessean who remained loyal to the Union and became a genuine hero; the zanies of the Tennessee legislature thought that if their beloved war criminal had to go, dumping Farragut was an acceptable “compromise.”
America has always been a self-absorbed, parochial country. Evidently we must conduct debates with millions of our fellow citizens about why the nation should not memorialize treasonous insurrectionists and slaveholders, and about why they should not view slavery and treason as a precious “heritage” that must not be criticized for fear of hurting their feelings. It’s among the worst possible examples of American Exceptionalism, one stoked at every turn by bogus histories.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: the archfiend in peace and war
The economic crash of 1929 descended on America like an ice age, ending a meretricious prosperity. In the four years of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, U.S. gross domestic product plunged by an astonishing 41 percent. Commerce was so completely frozen that by the eve of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, according to William Manchester, money had very nearly ceased to circulate in parts of the country.
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, as he cheerfully conceded, largely consisted of guesswork and experimentation. They also mostly worked: GDP increased in every year of his presidency but one, and that only happened because he gave in to fiscal conservatives and tried to balance the budget. Unemployment also fell significantly, and throughout his presidency was substantially better than under Hoover.
Trickle-down economics and fiscal austerity was precisely what had created and deepened the Great Depression (although those terms were not yet in use), and unwisely heeding conservatives’ advice resulted in the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937-38. Yet despite their dismal record, conservatives have made a cottage industry ever since of claiming that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. Not only that, they have persistently characterized the Roosevelt years as un-American and akin to the fascist movements of the 1930s. As I have written elsewhere, when you consider the fascist sympathies of Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and other FDR opponents, this looks like another example of the extreme right’s propensity for psychological projection.
Indeed, the political reaction against Roosevelt’s presidency probably created American conservatism as we know it today. “The Conservative Manifesto,” a 1937 document wrapped in the same high-minded language of fiscal probity and individual initiative that would be recognizable today, was the movement’s blueprint. Its lofty slogans about rugged individualism were code for “let ‘em starve” and the reference to states’ rights was decipherable as “no equal rights.”
Political reaction against FDR’s presidency and the New Deal probably created American conservatism as we know it today, beginning with “The Conservative Manifesto” of 1937.
It seemed that everybody hated Roosevelt but the voters, and his blowout re-election victory in 1936 caused immense exasperation to his enemies. How could this charlatan possibly get away with it? From ex-President Hoover himself, who crisscrossed the country giving anti-New Deal speeches, down to present-day tirades in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, FDR hatred is a wellspring that nourishes the roots of reactionary conservatism.
One of the more recent and ballyhooed polemics against Roosevelt was “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” a 2007 bestseller by Amity Shlaes. The author’s political views may be inferred from her hagiography of Calvin Coolidge, her work at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and her co-authorship of a diatribe about America’s slide into socialism with none other than Peter Navarro, would-be overthrower of the Constitution and former Trump White House adviser. Ironically, Shlaes’ indictment of the New Deal was published just before the financial crash of 2008, during the last gasp of a Republican-engineered financial bubble similar in destructiveness to the one presided over by Coolidge.
As with David Barton, whenever Shlaes confronts inconvenient facts, she manipulates them to suit her narrative. She contends that FDR’s record with unemployment was miserable, but only because she omits government-provided jobs from the employment rolls, on the pretext that those were temporary jobs, with no long-term prospects. Workers, we might insist, do not eat in the long term. And never mind that those hired by the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps learned skills in a wide range of trades that would later serve many of them well in the private sector. Go to any national park or look at any of thousands of post offices and libraries across America, and you will see their handiwork.
What good is an economic history that doesn’t discuss the economy as measured by gross domestic product? It’s a crude measure of well-being, but it’s surely better than subjective and agenda-driven accounts. Yet “The Forgotten Man” contains none of this, despite the fact that “Historical Statistics of the United States” is available free online. Instead, Shlaes gives impressionistic sketches of “self-starters” who made good during the New Deal, and offers those as evidence that FDR’s programs were unnecessary. That also suggests that if people found success in private enterprise, then the New Deal was hardly a Stalinist command economy. As Jonathan Chait wrote when reviewing her book, “intellectual coherence is not the purpose of Shlaes’s project. The real point is to recreate the political mythology of the period.”
Reputable scholars tell us that while some of Roosevelt’s programs, like the National Recovery Administration, were clearly failures, he stabilized the economy enough to prevent a potential fascist takeover of government. Likewise, industry was sufficiently revived to make possible the Arsenal of Democracy that buried Nazi Germany. Without New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Grand Coulee Dam, the U.S. might have lacked the surplus electricity to smelt the aluminum required for the 300,000 military aircraft it produced in the war, or to generate power for the enormous gaseous diffusion plants necessary for building the atomic bomb.
But no matter — conservative historiography was as quick to condemn Roosevelt’s war leadership as it was to pounce on his domestic record. In the right’s telling, FDR was either an icy manipulator, exerting a Svengali-like control over events to drive a reluctant America into war, or a naïve bungler who guilelessly handed over half of Europe to Joseph Stalin — if, that is, he wasn’t secretly in cahoots with the Soviet dictator. Sometimes he apparently managed the difficult feat of being all these things at once.
World War II revisionist Charles Tansill claimed that FDR, understanding the political strength of the isolationist movement, sought to “enter the war by the back door,” duping the Japanese into firing the first shot.
One of the earlier efforts that established the template for World War II revisionism is “Back Door to War,” by Charles Tansill, published in 1952. Tansill had earlier been a historian of the U.S. Senate, and by the 1930s had become a staunch isolationist. His account of World War II claims that Roosevelt jawboned British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain into reversing his policy of appeasement by guaranteeing Poland’s sovereignty, a move that provoked an otherwise peace-minded Adolf Hitler into war. In reality, there is no evidence that Roosevelt forced any such decision; Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement by invading and occupying all of Czechoslovakia alarmed and outraged both the British public and establishment, leaving Chamberlain little choice but to forge alliances meant to contain German expansion.
Roosevelt then proceeded to supply Britain with armaments, and in Tansill’s narrative this was just a prelude to FDR driving the U.S. directly into the war. But since Roosevelt understood the political strength of the isolationist movement, Tansill claims, he sought to “enter the war by the back door”: By duping the Japanese into firing the first shot, he would get his pretext for war.
Another pop historian who replicated Tansill’s thesis was Harry Elmer Barnes, a pro-German apologist and rabid isolationist. During the war and for more than 20 years thereafter, Barnes amplified and embellished the ”back door to war” theory, making it even more extreme: Germany was blameless, while Roosevelt and Churchill were the villains entirely responsible for the war. And worse yet, either through stupidity or ideological allegiance, FDR then handed half of Europe to Stalin on a plate.
Barnes represents the interpretive bridge between wartime isolationists and the red-baiting McCarthyism of the postwar Republican Party; all the elements of conspiracism, scapegoating and a narrative comprising an implausible chain of events are evident. This kind of stuff lingers on into the present day: “the U.S. deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine,” or “Biden’s deal with Iran to release U.S. citizens provided the financing for the Hamas attack on Israel” are contemporary examples of the paranoid style Barnes perfected.
Even more fatefully, Barnes forever conjoined World War II revisionism with right-wing extremism and Holocaust denial. Possibly his most important spiritual heir is the notorious Englishman David Irving, a veritable publishing machine who has cranked out countless paeans to the Third Reich with a side helping of Holocaust denial. His career received a considerable financial setback, however, when he had the poor judgment to sue a genuine scholar for defamation.
Even Pat Buchanan, author of the infamous “culture wars” speech at the 1992 Republican convention (prompting Molly Ivins to quip that it “probably sounded better in the original German”), has gotten into the act. In 2008, he published “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” a polemic that literally argued the world would have been much better if the democracies had simply stood aside and allowed Hitler to conquer Europe. It is no more than one might have expected from Buchanan, who arranged Ronald Reagan’s scandal-plagued trip to the cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, where Waffen-SS members were interred.
Why does it matter?
Poring over these examples of systematic distortion and noting their persistence over the decades (in 2012, Tansill’s book was reprinted) has driven me to conclude that there is a vast market for bad history, just as one supposes Thomas Kinkade will always be more popular than Vermeer. Look at Amazon reviews of a book on some historical topic; if several of them announce, “The truth at last! This is a book that really opened my eyes!” you have likely stumbled on a work of right-wing hack history. But this isn’t just a matter of degraded popular taste. Social and economic factors combine to give reactionary pseudo-history an advantage that may grow even larger in the future.
History, like other humanities, is getting short shrift in both secondary and higher education curricula compared to scientific subjects. History departments are being downsized, and career prospects for history PhDs are bleak.
That is much less true, however, when it comes to the types of pseudo-history I have outlined. The American conservative metaverse contains its own diffuse history department as a component of its larger bad ideas-industrial complex: the countless billionaire-funded think tanks, institutes and foundations that keep “scholars” on payroll or make grants to people like Amity Shlaes. If you don’t want to pay for a reprint of “Back Door to War,” the Mises Institute has thoughtfully provided a PDF online. Online ads denouncing “woke” history by Hillsdale College, a propaganda ministry disguised as an academic institution, are practically unavoidable, and their bogus history lectures blanket YouTube. While legitimate academic history declines in funding and influence, the right-wing alternative prospers.
But more than wingnut welfare is responsible. This may sound unlikely given the anti-intellectualism that pervades conservatism, but the right cares passionately about ideas. They may be bad ideas or even dangerous ones, but the flood of conservative manifestos, Republican campaign biographies and Bill O’Reilly-style histories that continue to roll off the presses demonstrates a purposefulness in the marketplace of ideas that liberalism lacks.
The paradox is this: Their ideas are not supported by facts, evidence or empirically derived data. As Kellyanne Conway put it, they are “alternative facts.” Saying that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, the death camps never existed and Donald Trump was duly elected in 2020 are all symptoms of epistemological nihilism: If literally nothing can be proved, let’s repeat our version over and over while coercing schoolchildren to memorize it at taxpayer expense.
The current political struggle, whether at the ballot box or in the pages of real or imagined history, is not just a struggle for the country. It is a struggle over the nature of reality itself.