Our Divided Political Heart (9 page)

Our historical heroes themselves looked back for heroes of their own. A significant portion of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 address at Cooper Union in New York City, the speech that helped to make him president, was an argument over where the Founders of our republic—“
our fathers,” Lincoln called them
—
really
stood on the question of slavery. His learned speech concluded that he was on their side in opposing the spread of slavery, and they on his.

In his war against the Bank of the United States a generation earlier, Andrew Jackson (whom Lincoln had opposed) thought of himself as “
the guardian of a threatened Republican tradition
” defending the nation’s Founding principles against what Jackson saw as the “
tyranny and despotism
” of the big financiers.

And in his 1932 Commonwealth Club speech, the campaign address that most closely prefigured the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt carefully defended his proposals for a stronger national government by harking back to the American Revolution and Thomas Jefferson’s intentions. “
A government must so order its functions
as not to interfere with the individual,”
FDR declared. “But even Jefferson realized that the exercise of the property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism but to protect it.”

Of course, the homage that politicians pay to the past is often a form of opportunistic piety. If the devil can quote scripture for his purposes, politicians can ransack our national tradition to justify virtually any course they are commending to the country. Lincoln’s opponents, after all, invoked the Founders in
support
of slavery. Jackson’s critics accused him of subverting the Constitution’s conception of the presidency and turning himself into a king. Opponents of the New Deal organized the Liberty League under a Jeffersonian banner of their own. Many old Liberty League arguments have been brought back to life by the Tea Party against Obama. References to the Founders and the Constitution, so routine in today’s conservative rhetoric, also studded the polemics against the New Deal.

No American orator was more steeped in the American story than Martin Luther King Jr. His “I Have a Dream” speech was an extended and impassioned essay on the American promise, rooted in our Founding. From the speech’s second sentence—“
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today
, signed the Emancipation Proclamation”—King made clear that the civil rights movement’s demands reflected American history’s own vows. “
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution
and the Declaration of Independence,” King declared, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’” One of the most dramatic moments in the speech came next. “
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note
, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” And all this within the first four paragraphs of the speech.

Our debate over our history is only rarely over whether our past should be seen as noble or ignoble, defined primarily by our love for freedom and justice or by the oppressions of race or class or gender. These debates do occur, especially in disputes over how American history should be taught in the schools and how much schoolchildren and teenagers should learn about our nation’s mistakes. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that giving students an accurate account of the country’s shortcomings as well as its triumphs will not endanger anyone’s patriotism. On the contrary, doing so is just as likely to show how acknowledging and correcting mistakes is an American long suit.

But most of our politically relevant debates reflect a widely shared respect and affection for the American story across philosophical lines. American history has been contested terrain from the beginning of the republic precisely because even critics of a particular American present have tended to view the past as a resource. Egalitarians, from abolitionists and trade unionists to civil rights leaders and feminists, have drawn on the Declaration of Independence’s promises of
universal
liberty in a land where all are created equal. Libertarians have used the pledges in the Bill of Rights to highlight the American promise of
negative
liberty, a guarantee against the power of an overweening state. Traditionalist conservatives have stressed that ours, from the beginning, was an experiment in
ordered
liberty, resisting radicals who were seen as threatening the stability on which freedom depends. Contemporary liberals have seen the Constitution as containing an inherent drive toward greater democracy, toward
active
liberty, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer’s phrase to describe our commitment to “
the principle of participatory self-government
.”

But politics has also shaped historical writing. In their interpretations, in the stories they tell, and in the evidence they select, America’s historians are powerfully influenced by the political culture in which they work. This is not, it should be emphasized, simply a habit of the Tea Party.

To say that the politics of the moment influences history is neither to justify the intentional distortion of our story for partisan purposes, nor to assert that one account is as “good” or “valid” as another, regardless of its
factual basis. It is simply to acknowledge that the heart of the historian’s task lies “
in explanation and in selection
,” as the scholar Morton White noted in his classic book
Foundations of Historical Knowledge.
In describing events, the historian “
depends upon generalizations
,” White noted, and “because he records certain events rather than others, he may depend upon value judgments that guide his selection.” How a historian explains, selects, and generalizes is affected by many factors, and politics is one of them. White noted Samuel Eliot Morison’s classic observation: that at the turn of the last century, it was difficult to find a general history of the United States that did not “
present the Federalist-Whig-Republican point of view
, or express a very dim view of all Democratic leaders except Grover Cleveland.” But by the 1950s, it was hard to find a good history of the country “
that did not follow the Jefferson-Jackson-Franklin D. Roosevelt line
.” Some intervening elections, which ended a long Republican era and inaugurated an extended period of Democratic rule, had a large impact inside the quiet studies where historians wrote their books.

“
Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity
,” Richard Hofstadter observed in
The Progressive Historians
, and “the business of history always involves a subtle transaction with civic identity.” In turn, civic identity is defined by a set of political and philosophical assumptions. “Historians,” wrote Eric Foner, whose exceptional work on Reconstruction I turn to later, “
view the constant search for new perspectives
as the lifeblood of historical understanding.” He recounts a conversation he had with a reporter for
Newsweek
during the debate a few years ago over standards for the teaching of American history. “
‘Professor,’ she asked, ‘when did historians stop relating facts
and start all this revising of interpretations of the past?’ Around the time of Thucydides, I told her.” Foner is fond of James Baldwin’s observation that history “
does not refer mainly, or even principally, to the past
. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally
present
in all we do.”

The work of George Bancroft, “
the first great American historian of America
,” as Hofstadter called him, was inflected with his Jacksonian partisanship. Bancroft saw all history, as one of his admirers put it, as representing “
the progress of the democratic principle
.” For Bancroft, Hofstadter
said, “
history taught a lesson, the inevitable movement of human affairs
toward the goal of liberty under providential guidance.” It was Bancroft who contributed one of the great refrains of American populism, decades before populism was born. “
The popular voice is all powerful with us
,” Bancroft wrote; “this, we acknowledge, is the voice of God.”

In 1945, roughly a century after Bancroft, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published his landmark account
The Age of Jackson
, which viewed Old Hickory as a prototype for Franklin Roosevelt. He saw Jackson, like FDR, as giving voice to the discontents of the working class. “
History can contribute nothing in the way of panaceas
,” the young Schlesinger wrote in his foreword. “But it can assist vitally in that sense of what is democratic, of what is in line with our republican traditions, which alone can save us.” It was a heroic view of the role played by the study of history. Yet as Sean Wilentz has noted, Schlesinger, an honest self-critic, was later willing to concede the merit of the observation that he had voted for Roosevelt on every page of his book about Jackson.

In one sense, the notion that historians are influenced by their views is a truism. All historians make choices as to which subjects they deem important and which themes they see as worthy of their energies. It is thus not surprising that one of the best recent histories of conservatism,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
, was written by George H. Nash, himself a conservative. Some of the most compelling recent historical work on American trade unions has come from Nelson Lichtenstein, Steve Fraser, and Gary Gerstle, all of them sympathizers with the contemporary labor movement. Nor is it surprising that individual historians with a strong commitment to the causes of gender and racial equality—scholars such as Meredith Tax, Elaine Tyler May, and Manning Marable—have produced a series of innovative studies of the role played by women and African Americans in our national story.

Differences in the outlooks of individual historians working in the same field have produced some of our most revealing intellectual discussions. In recent years, Sean Wilentz and Daniel Walker Howe have written dueling, monumental, and hugely valuable accounts of American democracy in the period before the Civil War. Both accounts are true and accurate. Neither historian manufactures evidence. Both tell moving stories.
Yet Wilentz and Howe differ sharply in their assessments of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs. Wilentz, like Schlesinger before him, offers a largely positive assessment of the role of the Jacksonians. He sees their warts but highlights their role in making the United States more democratic. Howe has rehabilitated the Whigs in historical memory. A few years ago, their argument commanded the attention of the
New Yorker
. It is the sort of notice that disagreements among historians receive only rarely, yet the magazine was right to see that their work and their differences mattered far beyond the realm of the academy.

Morton White, whose book on historical knowledge was published in 1965, long before the rise of deconstruction, observed flatly that “
some of our apparently logical statements turn out to be moral and relative in character
.” White acknowledged this even as he strongly defended the role of fact and logic in the writing of history. Foner, citing the work of Herbert Gutman, argued that history “
is not simply a collection of facts, not a politically sanctioned listing
of indisputable ‘truths,’ but an ongoing means of collective self-understanding about the nature of our society.”
As the
New Yorker
recognized in calling attention to the Wilentz-Howe debate
, their argument mattered not just for what it said about our past, but also for the light it shed on how we view the present.

But the politics of history cannot be explained simply by the personal predilections of individual historians. Our historical understanding is also enriched by the interplay between current political and civic struggles and our efforts to arrive at new and better understandings of what came before.

Nowhere has this been more evident recently than in the response of a group of younger historians to the emergence of a new conservative movement that arose in the 1960s and took power with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The habit of historians and social scientists in the period after World War II was to dismiss conservatism. This attitude came naturally to writers convinced that a liberal consensus characterized American reality, a view captured famously by the literary critic Lionel Trilling, who observed in 1954 that “
in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant
but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Such conservative impulses that did exist, he wrote, manifested themselves not “in ideas but only in action or irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble
ideas.” Hofstadter broadly shared this view and was inclined to use clinical psychology to explain the radical right. The ideas these movements put forward seemed secondary. In explaining this new right, Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset all stressed that an older, non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class felt displaced by newly mobile children of immigrants and were using politics as an outlet for their “
status anxieties
.” (These theories have come around again to explain opposition to Obama.)

But with Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, a creative group of historians (many of them younger and left-leaning in their own politics) began suspecting that the right could not be reduced to a collection of “irritable mental gestures.” A raft of new histories—among them Rick Perlstein’s
Before the Storm
: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
, Lisa McGirr’s
Suburban Warriors
: The Origins of the New American Right
, and Mary Brennan’s
Turning Right in the Sixties
: The Conservative Capture of the GOP
—chose to take American conservatism seriously. More recently,
Patrick Allitt’s
The Conservatives
traced a conservative tradition through the entirety of American history. The new historians of conservatism cast a skeptical eye on assertions that the subjects of their studies were only anxious, backward-looking, and paranoid. McGirr, who focused on conservatism’s heartland in California’s Orange County, conceded that “
a segment of the Right appealed to traditional ideas
, [and] embraced a fundamentalist religious worldview and apocalyptic strands of thought.” But conservative ideas also “
took hold among a highly educated and thoroughly modern group
of men and women.” Their mobilization, she argued, was “
not a rural ‘remnant’ of the displaced and maladapted
but a gathering around principles that were found to be relevant in the most modern of communities.” These new historians are correct to take conservatism seriously. But it’s worth asking if this trove of good historical work would have been undertaken had Ronald Reagan lost the 1980 election.