Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (2 page)

Both of these writers, along with many of the other journalists who have done such sterling work during the past decade in relation to 9/11, Al Qaeda, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
¹
or the levees of New Orleans, have asked important questions and relentlessly pursued the answers through the search for evidence and authentication. If there is any overarching lesson to be learned from history—especially from this recent history—is that we all have to ask a lot more questions, especially when it comes to making sure the levees will hold.

Kenneth C. Davis

OCTOBER
2010

Introduction

B
ack in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop song called “What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the Delaware?” Sung to the tarantella beat of an Italian wedding song, the answer went something like “Martha, Martha, there’ll be no pizza tonight.”

Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington ate only cherry pie.

On that December night in 1776, George might have told himself that this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, better work. Or else he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy Delaware, one of his actual comments was far more amusing than those fanciful lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington—the plainspoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod—nudged 280-pound General Henry “Ox” Knox with the tip of his boot and said, “Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you’ll swamp the damned boat.”

According to
Patriots,
A. J. Langguth’s fascinating history of the Revolution, that is how Knox himself reported the story after the war. I certainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school. And that’s too bad, because it reveals more of Washington’s true, earthy nature than all the hokey tales about cherry trees and nonexistent prayer vigils in Valley Forge. And that’s the point of this book: much of what we remember about our history is either mistaken or fabricated. That is, if we remember it at all.

For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101, the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car. Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants. And the Louisiana Purchase means eating out at a Cajun restaurant. When the first edition of this book appeared more than twenty years ago, several writers had just enjoyed remarkable success by lambasting Americans’ failure to know our past. Americans were shown to be know-nothings in the books
Cultural Literacy
and
The Closing of the American Mind
.

Well, we’re probably not as dumb as those books would have us. But the sad truth is clear: we are no nation of scholars when it comes to history. Just as I was writing the first edition of this book, a highly publicized example of our “historical illiteracy” appeared. It was a 1987 survey of high school juniors that exposed astonishing gaps in what these seventeen-year-olds knew about American history and literature. A third of the students couldn’t identify the Declaration of Independence as the document that marked the formal separation of the thirteen colonies from Great Britain. Only 32 percent of the students surveyed could place the American Civil War in the correct half century.

Sadly, I must say that things have not improved much—if at all—in the past twenty years. Every few years, it seems, another survey comes along that blasts the historical ineptness of American students. Part of the problem may be that those juniors who didn’t do so well in 1987 may be teachers now!

But why dump on the kids? While there are constant warnings issued about the yawning gaps in the education of American students, another question looms larger. Would most of their parents or older brothers and sisters do any better? Most thirty-seven-year-olds or forty-seven-year-olds might not pass a similar pop quiz. Comedian Jay Leno routinely proves this on
Tonight
with his “Jaywalk” segments in which adults demonstrate that they are incapable of answering the simplest questions about history. When Bill Clinton went to Normandy as president for a D-Day observance, even he had to be tutored on what had happened there. So don’t ask for whom the gap yawns. The gap yawns for thee.

The reason for these historical shortcomings is simple. For most of us, history was boring, and a great many Americans were taught by a football coach who got dropped into the history class to give him something to fill out his day. Many of us also learned about the past from textbooks that served up the past as if it were a Hollywood costume drama. In schoolbooks of an earlier era, the warts on our Founding Fathers’ noses were neatly retouched. Slavery also got the glossy makeover—it was merely the misguided practice of the rebellious folks down South until the “progressives” of the North showed them the light. American Indians were portrayed in textbooks in the same way they were in Hollywood Westerns. Women were pretty much left out of the picture entirely with the exception of a mythical Betsy Ross or a lovely Dolley Madison rescuing the White House china.

Truth isn’t so cosmetically perfect. Our historical sense is frequently skewed, skewered, or plain screwed up by myths and misconceptions. Schools that packaged a tidy set of simplistic historical images are largely responsible for fostering these American myths. There has always been a tendency to hide the less savory moments from our past, the way a mad aunt’s photo gets pulled from the family album.

On top of that, the gaping chasms in our historical literacy have been reinforced by images from pop culture. Unfortunately, highly fictionalized films, such as Oliver Stone’s
JFK
or Disney’s
Pocahontas,
or the 2004 release
Pearl Harbor
make a much greater impression on millions of people than a carefully researched, historically accurate, but numbingly dull documentary. Occasionally there are films like
Glory
or
Saving Private Ryan
or
Charlie Wilson’s War
that can stimulate interest in history they way few textbooks or teachers can. Documentary films such as Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
can illuminate controversies in unique ways. But for the most part, mainstream movies and network television have magnified the myths and makeovers. It is important to understand that looking past these myths is revealing. The real picture is far more interesting than the historical tummy tuck. And truth is always more interesting than propaganda.

Somebody will surely read this and say, “So what?”

Why bother with history anyway? What difference does it make if our kids know what the Declaration says—or doesn’t say? Why does it matter if most people think Watergate is just old news?

The answer is simple because history is really about the consequences of our actions—large and small. And that has never been more apparent than in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. If the terror attacks haven’t changed anything else, they certainly changed many Americans’ appreciation of the past and what it has to do with the present.

History explains how we got where we are. We can use it to connect the dots from past to present. Take the Versailles Treaty. (Please!) I know. The very words sound BORING. I can see your eyes grow heavy as you read the words “Versailles” and “Treaty.” But consider what that treaty, which supposedly settled World War I back in 1919, actually did. In one very clear and obvious sense, it laid the groundwork for another world war only twenty years later.

But look past that. You can draw a straight line from the Treaty of Versailles to the modern Middle East, Iran and Iraq, the Balkan countries of Europe, and even Vietnam. All these hot spots of the past few decades were created in the aftermath of Versailles, when the European powers carved up the world into colonies that they thought they could rule as they pleased.

When the CIA overthrew the government of Iran in 1953 during the Eisenhower administration, nobody thought about what it might mean in 25 years. At the time, Americans were worried about Russia and the oil companies. What did it matter what the Iranians thought? Restoring the shah to the Iranian throne in place of a government hostile to America seemed like a good idea. Until the Iranian people thought otherwise in 1979 and began the first wave of Islamic revolutions that have altered recent history.

Another example closer to home is COINTELPRO, a largely forgotten FBI program of illegal wiretaps, dirty tricks, and smears of individuals first aimed at suspected Communists and later at members of the antiwar and civil rights movements. Today, as America debates the future of its intelligence agencies and domestic spying, it is important to remember FBI operations like COINTELPRO and other abuses by America’s intelligence agencies in the past. People in the American government, some of them with the absolute best intentions, have trampled rights and destroyed lives in pursuit of short-term goals.

As George Kennan, the American diplomat and architect of America’s Cold War “containment” policy, once said, “The worst thing the Communists could do to us and the thing we have most to fear from their activities is that we should become like them.” This is the essence of learning from history. But if we all have those enormous gaps in our understanding of the past, how can we possibly learn from it?

This book’s intent is to fill those gaps in our historical knowledge with some simple, accessible answers to basic questions about American history. This single volume is obviously not an encyclopedic history of America. For simplicity, I use a question-and-answer approach, and there are literally shelves of books about each of the questions I have included. My intent is to refresh the shaky recollection, remove the old myths, or reshape the misconceptions with some simple answers. Or, in some cases, to point the way to longer answers. I like to consider a
Don’t Know Much About
book the first word on the subject rather than the last.

What’s different about this version? First, there is an entire new chapter that includes a review of the events that have taken place since I completed the original edition in 1989, including some of the most remarkable events in American history. Like the original, this new edition is organized along chronological lines, moving from America’s “discovery” by Europe to more recent events, including the Gulf War, the end of the cold war, and the events leading up to the enormous national tragedy of September 11, 2001. At this writing, we are still trying to uncover the “truth” about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, what the American government knew beforehand, what it did—and didn’t do. The answers to those questions are still very much in the air, and as a historian, I find it difficult to assess some of these issues yet. But we can try to figure out how we got to that awful moment in history.

In addition to the new material covering events since the late 1980s, I have included a host of new questions in every chapter. Some of these are stimulated by discoveries made in recent years, such as the archaeological dig that uncovered the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia. In other places, I answer questions that readers have asked me over the past twelve years. Often, when I speak on the radio or in lectures, I get a question that was not in the original edition, and I have included some of these “audience participation” questions. Among them are “Did Columbus’s men bring syphilis back to Europe?” Or “Why is there a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot?” And “What was the difference between the Confederate and U.S. constitutions?

The media also create new questions—and mythologies—when a historic revelation gets the attention of news media for a brief time, and the facts are often left a little shaky. Many people, for instance, now accept as proven fact that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser, because that is how the headlines reported it. However, that account was based on the accusation of a single witness who had been paid for the story. No other source could confirm or substantiate the story, but that subtlety of fact gets missed in the shallow coverage by the general news media. There is plenty that we do know about J. Edgar Hoover and his methods in running the FBI as a personal fiefdom for half a century. And it is far, far more important to understand Hoover’s abuse of power than whether he wore strappy high heels or not. Another example of oversimplification is the widespread presumption that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children by a slave, Sally Hemings. The widely reported story that DNA tests had confirmed this as a fact didn’t look past the headlines. The DNA testing showed that any of several of the Jefferson males might also have been the father of those children, but those complexities get lost in the eagerness for a snappy tabloid headline. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence, and oral history, to support that idea, and the subject of Jefferson and his slaves is fascinating—and deserves honest but accurate exploration.

Also from the arena of audience questions I have found enormous interest in issues pertaining to religion, gun control, and a number of other hot-button controversies. I have addressed these both in the text—with questions such as “What three-letter word is not in the Constitution?” (Hint: it begins with “G” and ends with “d.”)—and in a new appendix that examines constitutional amendments and the role they play in important current political and social debates on such topics as the death penalty, gun control, and school prayer.

In writing the first edition of this book, I attempted to focus on the sort of basic questions that the average person might have, emphasizing names, places, and events that we vaguely recall as being important, but forget exactly why. These are what I call the household names of history. The reader is welcome to read the book straight through as a narrative history, or to use it as a reference book by dipping into a particular question or period. Because wars have been central, shaping events in our history, and because many people lack a sense of what actually happened during these wars, I have included a series of chronologies called “Milestones” that condense the events of the major conflicts in American history. Also scattered throughout the book are “American Voices”—selected quotes, passages from letters, books, speeches, and court decisions that reflect the spirit of the times. While many of these “American Voices” include some of the most famous Americans, others are the voices of Americans whose names you do not know—but should.