The American people can never forget the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence—for the simple reason that if they ever do forget, they will no longer be Americans.
Thus spoke Daniel McCarthy in a 250th anniversary speech at Hillsdale College called The Fight Over America’s Public History. (Related: Here is the reaction to the mid-terms of another historian: "The United States did not come into the world because of people who were mostly concerned about gas prices" — Historian Eric Metaxas Compares Donald Trump with George Washington (so have I): POTUS47 "is our leader against the forces of madness"; "Everyone blaming Trump is missing the point and should be ashamed of themselves"). But back to the Hillsdale speech of
Daniel McCarthy:
But just as no one would discard his or her personal history—memories of family and friends, of love nurtured and adversity overcome—for anything less than the most dire of reasons, a nation cannot erase or tamper with its own history unless it has decided to become something else: a new country, unattached to its old founding principles and formative experiences.
A man would only give up his personal past if he believed it was irredeemably wicked and that he must become a wholly new man to be a good man. The same is true for our nation: any case for forgetting or rewriting our national story must assume that our past is thoroughly wicked—that to be good and worthy in the future, we must become something other than the America that was founded in 1776.
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Our Founding Fathers were not morally unblemished, and they had no illusions about their failings. They knew, for instance, that slavery was iniquitous. Yet they were confident that the cause of the United States was just and that its institutions—which they devised through much struggle and disagreement—would provide an effective means to pursue justice in practice. Washington deserves to be honored in our nation’s memory because what he advanced, in total, was not oppression, not slavery or wickedness, but justice.
Our historic sites must, by their nature, do more than supply accurate factual information. They must also be places of moral education, where the justice of the American story is presented to the public. Americans long to understand themselves better by understanding their history. They are searching for more than just the facts—they want to know what our story means for who we are as a people.
… In 1838, in one of his most important early speeches, Abraham Lincoln taught his audience at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois—as well as future generations of Americans who would read his speech—that memory had sustained our republican institutions and our freedom in the perilous infancy of the nation. Americans knew who they were as a people because they remembered what they had fought for in the Revolution. The memory was fresh because the men who did the fighting were still to be found in the public square and the family home: veterans of the Revolutionary War kept alive the feeling that had animated the struggle. The scenes of the Revolution were still almost before the eyes of the succeeding generation. …
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… American history is not just a history of philosophy, but it is unavoidably philosophical just as it is unavoidably moral. Lincoln knew this, and American historians for the better part of 200 years knew it, too. But beginning in the 20th century, a new anti-American counter history started to develop. This revisionist history was moral by its own lights, but it was short on sound reason. Its moral starting point was that our national story had its roots not in the pursuit of justice through self-government but rather in injustice and oppression.
The spirit of revisionism took advantage of the great idealism and capacity for self-criticism that remain genuine traits of our national character. But it took its inspiration from a source contrary to America’s philosophy: the thought of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others who followed him, including Karl Marx. This new philosophy held that freedom and prosperity had been the original or natural condition of mankind before the introduction of private property, which was the source of selfish pride, violence, and inequality. By this way of thinking, Western Civilization became the most prosperous civilization in history only because it was the most unjust.
In both the classical philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian theological tradition, human nature is understood to be imperfect or sinful. As inheritors of those traditions, the historical understanding of America’s Founders and of most Americans down through time was that our less imperfect civilization came into contact with, and ultimately replaced, more imperfect civilizations. And what is more, that our civilization has shown an exceptional capacity to become more perfect over time through the exertion of reason and virtue, as seen in such events as the American Revolution, the adoption of the Constitution, the Civil War and abolition of slavery, the civil rights advances of the 1950s and ’60s, the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War Two, and the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
For adherents of the philosophy of Rousseau and Marx, by contrast, sinfulness and imperfection are unnatural, the product of circumstances and the wickedness of specific classes and individuals that have exploited those circumstances. They focus single-mindedly on the imperfections of our history, condemning Christopher Columbus and the Englishmen who subsequently established colonies here as if America’s coming to be destroyed a historical Eden.
According to this ideological corruption of historical scholarship, America’s story is only the culminating chapter in the book of Western Civilization’s injustices. Real history, from this point of view, is the story of how constant oppression kept everyone who was not bourgeois or Christian or white or “cishet”—a word recently invented by leftists to describe a heterosexual whose gender coincides with the “gender assigned at birth” (i.e., biological gender)—from living perfectly prosperous and happy lives.
This new moral philosophy placed history in the service of a political myth that required the establishment of a new political order through a revolution against America. Yet this revolution did not have to be violent—at least not in its early stages. It could largely be brought about through re-education and the rewriting of history.
Understanding this, we can understand what is happening with public history in America today.
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America’s capacity to become more perfect over time through the exertion of reason and virtue was most clearly evident at the moment of its creation, with the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence. This year marks the Declaration’s 250th anniversary. Yet our institutions of public history have, in all too many instances, failed to celebrate this anniversary as they did the Declaration’s bicentennial 50 years ago in 1976. The reason for this is that they have adopted, whether openly or covertly, the moral philosophy descended from Rousseau and Marx that is incompatible with the American Founding and therefore with America itself.
… The Smithsonian’s own history gives it tremendous prestige, which is now being conscripted into the service of racial and gender ideologies. Although those ideologies originate in the hothouses of higher education, our institutions of public history now popularize and disseminate them, often in rather more moderate—and therefore in fact more subversive—forms.
… The American public is not easily persuaded that our republic’s old heroes were in fact knaves or monsters, yet they do not have to be persuaded—it suffices if they are merely repulsed, or if the way our past is presented is so dull and tawdry that fewer and fewer Americans pursue their natural curiosity about who we are as a people in the first place. Alienation is a weapon of radicalism, and to the extent that Americans are made to turn away from their history, to become indifferent to the greatest Americans of the past, patriotism will inevitably wither. And once a people has lost its patriotism, it ceases to be a people. It becomes a mass—at best an aggregate of individuals who have lost the confidence required for self-government, at worst the seedbed of new revolutionary movements intent upon creating a new state from the ruins of the old.
If one truly believes that America was morally wrong from the beginning—that what our Founding Fathers achieved was only to devise new systems to keep men and women from returning to their natural self-fulfillment and material equality—then it is entirely logical to do the opposite of what Lincoln called for: not to shore up our memories and institutions with reason, but to stoke feelings of resentment and hatred toward our past in order to build a radically different future.
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