Our Divided Political Heart (6 page)

There were other memory losses where America’s history with race was concerned. As the country began commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, defenders of the South’s “Lost Cause” sought to play down the role of slavery as the conflict’s primary cause and instead linked the Confederate revolt against Washington to Tea Party–style concerns about “big government.” One Georgia blogger captured the identification with the Confederacy on parts of the right: “
Some say simplistically
that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Unfortunately, there is no ‘simple’ reason. The causes of the war were a complex series of events . . . Many of the problems Georgians saw more than one hundred fifty years ago are being reiterated today. The ‘oppressive’ federal government. High taxes (tariffs before the war). A growing government unwilling to listen to law abiding citizens. Sound familiar? They were complaints levied from 1816 on in Georgia.”

The Civil War entered the national political debate when Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, named April 2010 “Confederate History Month” in a proclamation that didn’t mention slavery. (McDonnell later revised the document to denounce slavery as “evil and inhumane.”) Mississippi’s then governor, Haley Barbour, spoke up for McDonnell by declaring that the controversy surrounding the proclamation’s rather substantial omission “
doesn’t amount to diddly
.” When Barbour took himself out of the GOP presidential race, his wading into the Civil War argument was often cited as one reason why a popular conservative with strong ties to party officials around the country decided to forgo his opportunity.

The episode underscored not only the extent to which the battle over history had entered contemporary politics, but also how much history was being distorted in the process. Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president and a celebrated chronicler of the war, cited fellow historian C. Vann Woodward’s wry observation that history itself “
becomes the continuation
of war by other means.” In a powerful lecture inspired by the war’s anniversary, Faust made note that some continued to see the aftermath of the great struggle as a defeat for American principles. “
The powers of the centralized
nation-state achieved by the war are now questioned and challenged,” she observed, “seen as the betrayal rather than the fulfillment of the Founders’ vision.”

Moreover, “
significant segments of the American
population, particularly in the South, continue to reject slavery as a fundamental cause of the war, even in the face of irrefutable evidence that what southerners called the ‘peculiar institution’ played a critical role in secession debates, declarations, and decisions across the South.” Even the National Park Service’s chief historian, Robert Sutton, was drawn into politics—simply by doing his job. As Faust observed, when Sutton “
insisted that the nation’s
historic sites emphasize that ‘slavery is the principal cause’ of the war,” he “encountered widespread resistance and controversy.”

One after another, historians took to op-ed pages and lecture halls to explain that slavery had indeed been the central issue behind the conflict, and that no amount of revisionism could alter this. “
A century and a half after the civil war
, many white Americans, especially in the South, seem to take the idea that slavery caused the war as a personal accusation,” the great Civil War historian Eric Foner wrote in the
Guardian
. “The point, however, is not to condemn individuals or an entire region of the country, but to face candidly the central role of slavery in our national history.” After all, it had been Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens who declared that
the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy “rests upon
the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that Slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition,” and that “this, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” That racism and slavery, not states’ rights, lay at the heart of the southern rebellion was an inconvenient truth for some of the conservative rebels of 2011.

Again and again, contemporary politics became the staging ground for arguments about the past, some of them quite surprising. Relitigating history became a central characteristic of the Obama era, as the perceptive progressive writer Elbert Ventura noted in the spring of 2011. “
Beyond the circumscribed world
of academic journals and conferences, history is being taught—on TV and talk radio, in blogs and grassroots seminars, in high school textbooks and on Barnes & Noble bookshelves,” he wrote in
Democracy
magazine. “In all those forums, conservatives have been conspicuous by their activity—and progressives by their absence.”

The new right-wing historical revisionism needed to be taken seriously
as a political matter, if not as an approach to history itself. Revisionist historians on the left had long come under attack from conservatives for using the past primarily for the political purposes of the present. Such conservative criticism is very much alive. Writing in 2011, James W. Ceaser, a neoconservative scholar, offered a lovely and apt metaphor for the value of history: “
Like the experience of foreign travel
,” he wrote, “it can refresh the mind and provide a sense of distance from the familiar.” Then Ceaser added: “How sad it is, therefore, that so much academic history today does just the opposite, projecting current issues back onto the past, invariably for the purpose of promoting a contemporary ideological viewpoint. Instead of freeing us from the present, ‘history’ of this kind ends by imprisoning the past.”

Yet at the moment Ceaser was writing, his criticism of reading the present into the past for polemical purposes had far more relevance to the historical excursions of the right wing than to the work of academic historians. Indeed, many of the professional historians had to spend a great deal of time during the early Obama years rescuing the actual American story from the distortions and inventions of conservative talk show hosts and publicists for whom no issue was too small to escape fictionalization.

Thanksgiving may well be the most unifying of American holidays, even if Thanksgiving dinners have often been staging grounds for fierce if (usually) friendly arguments about politics among extended family and friends. Yet a passion for debunking that was once a habit of the left led many on the far right to assert that our common interpretations of Thanksgiving were tainted. The distortions, they insisted, arose from the socialist assumptions of academic mythmakers. It was a big lie, the right-wing revisionists insisted, to use Thanksgiving to celebrate how the Pilgrims pulled together and, with the help of God, prospered through communal assistance and a little help from their Indian neighbors.

As with almost all of the new historical “accounts,” this one had deep roots in earlier polemics. Rush Limbaugh began promoting the “corrected” vision of Thanksgiving in his 1993 book,
See, I Told You So
. Year after year,
he used his talk show to teach that the settlers suffered because, at the outset, their land and their homes “
belonged to the community
.” As Limbaugh exclaimed on a 2007 show, “
They were collectivists!
” The hero of Limbaugh’s commentary was the colony’s governor, William Bradford, who was wise enough to understand the dangers of common ownership and took what Limbaugh called “bold action” by assigning “a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.” Limbaugh drew what for his audience was the obvious moral: “
Long before Karl Marx
was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work!”

Limbaugh’s persistence in promoting this view
of the
real
Thanksgiving won it an ever wider following, to the point where in 2010 it drew the attention of the
New York Times
and Zernike, the paper’s able chronicler of the new New Right. She pointed out that the actual story of the Pilgrims was a bit more complicated than Limbaugh and his philosophical fore-bears would like it to be.
For this, she was rebuked by Limbaugh
as arguing that, “hey, socialism wasn’t that bad for the Pilgrims.” (That this is not what Zernike actually said did not deter Limbaugh.)

Limbaugh has been wrong about many things, but he was right to understand the extent to which our understanding of the past shapes our present. His reinterpretation of Thanksgiving almost perfectly illustrated the loss of balance that is at the heart of our current discontent. Putting aside that all the facts about the first Thanksgiving cannot be known—and that there has been much mythmaking around the holiday beyond the confines of Limbaugh’s radio show—the more complicated version of the story is certainly truer both to who we are and to who we have been. Capitalism is part of our narrative, but so are solidarity and the idea that no one ever really “goes it alone.” Our rights are embedded in a web of social bonds and mutual obligations. We have a responsibility not just to take care of ourselves and our families but also to look out for one another. And we hope that if we run into trouble, someone, maybe even the entire community, will look out for us.

Such homely sentiments, edited down a bit, could be stitched on a holiday sampler. They are the values not of an angry and radical individualism
but of a tempered individualism that is truer to the Pilgrims’ faith and our national experience. Those early Massachusetts farmers were, on the whole, industrious and hardworking, but they also believed passionately in a common good and the promise of mutual assistance.

One might simply dismiss Limbaugh’s Thanksgiving obsession as good conservative radio theater but for the source of his storytelling. Zernike traced Limbaugh’s Thanksgiving revisionism to the work of W. Cleon Skousen, whose writings were popularized by right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck in his one-day course called “The Making of America.”

And who was Skousen? In a fine piece of what might be called investigative-scholarly reporting published shortly before the 2010 elections, the historian Sean Wilentz took to the pages of the
New Yorker
to explain where Limbaugh, Beck, and parts of the Tea Party movement were getting their ideas. Wilentz traced Beck’s approach to American history to Skousen in particular and to the John Birch Society more generally. “
The political universe is, of course, very different
today from what it was during the Cold War,” Wilentz wrote. “Yet the Birchers’ politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.”

As is often the case with extremists, Skousen’s career had its colorful moments. A “
transplanted Canadian who served as a Mormon missionary
in his teens,” Wilentz wrote, “Skousen was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixties that even J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. watched him closely.” Skousen was employed by the FBI from 1935 until 1951, “
much of that time as a special agent
working chiefly in administration. These desk jobs, he claimed implausibly, gave him access to confidential domestic intelligence about Communism.” Skousen also claimed he had served as Hoover’s administrative assistant, though “
Hoover informed inquirers
that there was no such position.” Skousen was Salt Lake City’s police chief from 1956 to 1960, and as Wilentz wrote: “
His time in office was contentious
, and after he raided a friendly card game attended by the city’s right-wing
mayor, J. Bracken Lee, he was promptly fired. Lee called Skousen ‘a master of half truths’ and said that he ran the police department ‘like a Gestapo’; Skousen’s supporters placed burning crosses on the Mayor’s lawn.”

Skousen then turned to writing the volumes that made him famous in far-right circles in the 1950s and 1960s—and posthumously, thanks to Glenn Beck, with parts of the Tea Party in the Obama years. There was
The Naked Communist
, which Wilentz described as “
a lengthy primer published in 1958
.” In this provocatively titled book, “
he enlivened a survey
of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium.” It was followed by
The Naked Capitalist
, which “
decried the Ivy League Establishment
, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation,” formed what Skousen saw as “the world’s secret power structure.”

The book that grabbed Beck’s attention was
The 5,000 Year Leap
, which Wilentz describes as “
a treatise that assembles selective quotations
and groundless assertions to claim that the U.S. Constitution is rooted not in the Enlightenment but in the Bible, and that the framers believed in minimal central government.” The historian in Wilentz felt compelled to note that both propositions “
would have astounded James Madison
, often described as the guiding spirit behind the Constitution, who rejected state-established religions and, like Alexander Hamilton, proposed a central government so strong that it could veto state laws.”

The 5,000 Year Leap
also challenged the separation of church and state, asserting that “the Founders were not indulging in any idle gesture when they adopted the motto ‘In God We Trust.’” In reality, as Wilentz notes, “
the motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention
was ‘E Pluribus Unum’: out of many, one. ‘In God We Trust’ came much later; its use on coins was first permitted in 1864, and only in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency. The following year, President Eisenhower—who [the Birch Society’s Robert] Welch charged was a Communist agent—approved ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto.”