Neutrality Theater
The Gist: Where mainstream history goes wrong.
Part one of a two part series. Find part two here.
The fundamental flaw of mainstream American history is neutrality theater: it claims to present “just the facts” while in fact indulging a contemporary academic elite shading of history, which for the last several decades has practically meant providing (at least) soft leftism masquerading as objectivity. People who would never let a “consensus of experts” pick their president bizarrely defer to them in interpretations of past presidents (and the rest of the past).1
The fundamental flaw of leftist American history is that it is a rap sheet - and a leftist historian can never be sure of any lasting judgment because trends alter the scope of indictments continuously, even if the ultimate verdict is always guilty. To be a leftist is to be always open-minded to the idea that our predecessors may be more wrong and wrong in new ways than one previously imagined.
Figure 1. “In the latest documentary from the Government Broadcasting Service, we tell the story of how the government saved Americans yet again, except for LGBTQ+++ Americans, who, as ever, were viciously left behind. (Viewer discretion advised: this program contains depictions of cis-heteronormative infrastructure that may trigger sensitive watchers)”
I was attending the nation’s largest homeschooling conference, perusing the books offered by one of the education vendors which actually enjoys a reputation for high standards, when a representative wandered over to ask if I had any questions. I asked, what were their prevailing takes on American history? She immediately insisted there were none, that they were above all committed to teaching children history without bias and “just the facts.” I told her that was literally impossible.2
Facts are infinite - I presumed the curriculum did not cover the names of every horse who ever ran a race in the United States, nor the details of my personal family from the time Jeremiah Starrett got off a boat, nor the rainfall on every Fourth of July in Philadelphia. What facts one chooses to teach - and emphasize - reflects judgment - and, to use a more controversial but true word, bias. “George Washington, a slavemaster, was the first president of the United States” is a completely factual statement that, if it was the only thing known about the man, would be a disservice to readers. Significant facts are disputed, sometimes credibly, sometimes incredibly: what’s significant and how much dispute to explore reflects bias. How many Indians were there in North America when Europeans arrived and when Americans expanded west? How many people died in various massacres, riots, etc? What proportion of Americans were unemployed in different downturns, and do we count those receiving taxpayer money? Is GDP, a “fact,” and its changes even calculable for this era?
Most obviously, summary, framing, and analysis reflect bias, even if they use neutral-sounding language. Who was better vindicated, Federalists or Anti-Federalists? Did the New Deal contribute to or subtract from recovery? Was Joseph McCarthy’s charge of communists in the U.S. government baseless? (Do you know about Democrat Congressman Frank Buchanan’s intimidating investigation of conservative and libertarian businessmen and nonprofits for the dark crime of free market education just the year before McCarthy got started?)3
Noah Webster gave the example in his dictionary that “education gives a bias to the mind” - by which he meant an endorsement - that what and how you learn shapes what you notice, what you find credible, and above all what you value. Mainstream history is not free of bias, it presents approved bias, some of which is great - like “slavery is bad” - and some of which is not - like “markets mysteriously crash so we need government intervention and yet somehow markets keep crashing so we need more government intervention.” (The true market failure is how well leftist books sell, comparatively). Importantly, without reading more broadly, it’s not even obvious what the biases are; for example, most formal education through the mid 19th century was conducted through Protestant institutions - and their “American” history began with extended, extraordinary emphasis on religious conflict in Europe as the basis for our country, trusting that if pupils knew all about that, they’d know enough to get by, and only so much that actually happened in the U.S. was relevant.4
What makes history “mainstream” is what draws the least objection. Most history books, like most books, don’t sell very many copies (“96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies… 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies”)5 and can hardly be even called mainstream (that makes some of them gems, and lots of others horrific academic gibberish or schlock); most bestsellers catch on through support from the media, which is hardly renowned for its conservative impulses. Even those have pretty small penetration - you can get on the New York Times bestseller list for selling as little as 5,000 copies - which is a good thing, since they’re rarely opening eyes to alternative, more conservative reads of history. Even a mega-bestseller - selling 1 million copies - is bought by 0.3% of Americans, with some copies read by multiple people but plenty read by none.
I’d say that what saves most Americans from consistently bad takes is our historical ignorance and noncuriosity, but the media makes lefty books status symbols and they undergird what Americans watch. And, of course, what also may not get read but does get bought and taught are textbooks. Textbooks are written by committees and bought by committees all engaged in a systematic effort to eliminate anything that might cause controversy - though, ironically, withdrawing textbooks can be good for publishers because it means that they get to resell every textbook again with the latest fashionable takes. Over time, textbooks have assumed less and less of their readers, and reading levels have become simpler and simpler.6 Textbooks purchased by the big market of Texas (and other red states) sand their edges to be a little more respectful of Republican voters’ sympathies; those purchased by the big market of California (and other blue states) put Democrat voters’ sympathies in neon lights.7
At their best (which is not terribly often these days), textbooks can reflect an aspiration toward what E.D. Hirsch called “cultural literacy,” an attempt to teach children about things that are commonly recognized by educated people, so as to ease communication if one makes a reference to Washington’s cherry tree, remembering the Alamo, or Sputnik. While that kind of thing helps with standardized tests and processing newspaper references, there are plenty of things important in history that are not known to the typical educated person and there are plenty of unimportant or wrong things in history “known” to the typical educated person. Hirsch, himself a liberal though admired and upheld by conservatives since the Reagan administration, has even altered his recommendations over time to include teaching things to children that no adult would recognize a reference to, like African folk tales.
Figure 2. It’s sort of like the time the hyena did the moon-swallow and burped out a thousand upside-down stars, turning the night sky into a giggling puddle; the rain forgot how to fall straight, drenching only the left side of every baobab. Man, did the pythons dance that day!
The most obvious prevailing, approved bias is that the past is narrated as a steady convergence upon today’s mainstream norms.8 In particular: We judge the past without letting the past judge us. Indeed, people can have a hard time understanding why anything was controversial in the past because opponents to the mainstream are so often presented as limited caricatures, self-interested in a negative way, or irrational, or subject to now evil headline ideologies that are not given satisfying explanations why anyone would believe them, much less sacrifice for them. We pity the prohibitionists rather than feel their fury. We assume that civil service reform eliminated corruption without discussing the implications of a bureaucracy unaccountable to democracy. How many people can even articulate what arguments were made against the 19th amendment that eliminated gender-based voting? (Did you know that property-owning women in New Jersey voted as far back as the 1790s? Or that Swiss women didn’t vote until the 1970s?) We should not be agnostic in teaching history, but our arguments should stand up against the best arguments of the past and present - and we should acknowledge that America has gotten better in some ways and worse in others. Instead, mainstream history has evolving standards of decency, and the only counter-factuals mainstream history entertains is if only we had gotten to the present sooner. One of the more interesting implications of this is that if today’s historians were “in charge” at nearly any given point in American history, we may never have evolved toward our current standards because there would have been such massive popular resistance to the nation we’ve become. Indeed, mainstream history is fundamentally anachronistic, judging yesterday by today’s moral vocabulary.
For all of mainstream history’s commitment to “neutrality,” there’s also a weird lack of consideration of trade-offs. Thomas Sowell has said there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. When we consider “accomplishments,” especially in the political space, what was on the other side of the equation? What, for example, were the drawbacks (and opportunity costs) of adopting a universal, mandatory public school regime? Or an income tax? Or zoning? Or the GI Bill? Survey histories tend to either go from political triumph to political triumph or only list the ways in which each political advance was actually racist, sexist, etc. while not digging into losses that may draw right-coded sympathies.
As one veers further left than what the mainstream currently tolerates but may soon, American history is a litany of wrongs, sometimes corrected, but with America never (still not) in the right. Leftist history began in the early 20th century as a socialist critique against economic inequality which, very frankly, is a completely bizarre focus in American history because poverty is the natural state of man and the United States has been a gigantic dynamo of wealth creation that has made the material living conditions of even the bottom 25% of today’s Americans the envy of most human beings who have ever lived. But even self-identified conservative history will talk about the poor working conditions of the late 19th century - which indeed were not ones that most anyone would want to work today - without acknowledging just how much richer the median person was getting and that, in the freest labor market on the planet, people could just move to new jobs - and indeed did, en masse, from the farms that were supposedly so much better. This version of leftist history also tends to be especially hostile to “great men” altering events, preferring an eternal class struggle that simply does not fit the American experience all that well.
The second leftist preferred lens of American history emerged in the 1960s and asked: how did any and every event or person victimize a favored minority, or several favored minorities? As a practical matter, in mainstream history, this has meant increasing the representation of “under-represented” voices regardless of whether they are representative of the time and place and whatever is being discussed. This can be a problem when it misleads readers into thinking that minorities made greater contributions to society than they did - a somewhat ironic takeaway, given that one of the reasons they were not able to do so were the social and legal strictures of their time. To use a prominent example offered by the Hillsdale professor David Azerrad, today everyone recognizes the name George Washington Carver. But Carver “never won any scientific prizes. Nor did he ever publish articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals… Carver also did not leave behind any scientific manuscripts or laboratory notebooks… He obtained three patents in his lifetime: two for paints and stains, and one for a cosmetic containing peanut oil… None of Carver’s purported inventions were commercially successful.” Azerrad notes that “Carver was by all accounts a good man who sincerely wanted to help the lot of Southern farmers [but] None of this, however, warrants his inclusion in the pantheon of great American scientists. It is simply true that, had Carver been white, he would have sunk into obscurity. Instead, he is better known today than John Bardeen, the American physicist who is the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in Physics.”9
Another problem with this leftist approach is that it treats each person as if her minority status is the most significant thing about her when it may have been secondary or tertiary to the person herself (rather than first being a Christian, or a mother, or an American, or a marine, or whatever). Frances Fitzgerald noted “the message of the texts [is] that Americans have no common history, no common culture, and no common values, and that membership in a racial or cultural group constitutes the most fundamental experience of each individual.”10 One way this is justified is because “Historians say the exclusion of women and minority narratives from these books can leave children who don’t seem themselves reflected in the history less interested in the material”11 -- as if only the ethnically Japanese have ever been interested in samurai. Even the liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr in his 1991 book the Disuniting of America said “Instead of a transformative nature all its own, America in this new light is seen as a preservation of diverse alien identities…It belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”12 And, notably, not all minorities or disadvantaged get sustained attention, if ever getting any at all: In the 1970s, publishers literally used to go over their math textbooks to ask: “Does this… have enough Polish-sounding people buying oranges?”13 To the degree modern histories bother to cover originalism - a rather important idea in shaping America! - how many deeply profile Clarence Thomas?
Figure 3. Short men get little systematic historical attention but experience real discrimination on an immutable characteristic.
None of which is to suggest that the United States has been a perfect country that has treated everyone as well as they deserved - but what is missing from leftist history (and its mainstream variety) is important context that shows that the United States is indeed a special place, a force for good, and that at its core are certain ideas that guided us to a better future, even if we did not always live up to them in the present. Without broader knowledge, with only the American present to compare against, it’s no wonder that students lack a patriotic enthusiasm for their inheritance. Slavery is extremely significant to American history but existed far before and beyond its existence in the U.S. (which, let’s never forget, ended in a very bloody war). How many Americans know that more slaves went east into the Islamic world than west across the Atlantic, or that the U.S. received a small fraction of those slaves that crossed the ocean, or that slavery continued decades after we ended it in the Americas, and still exists in significant form elsewhere? Or that when black men received the vote in 1870, maybe 3 in 100 people in the globe could vote for their national leaders? The American Revolution should be compared and contrasted with the far deeper and bloodier French Revolution and the far more chaotic Latin American revolutions. The peak of the civil rights struggle should be compared and contrasted with the contemporaneous Chinese Cultural Revolution and the effects of decolonization.14 The only time we may get an international comparison is if America is just not leftist enough - not as generous welfare programs as Scandinavia, still retaining the death penalty, etc.
Here we might wince and remember that there are infinite facts and a problem with all history, whatever its bias, is how to weave together what’s significant. With direct international comparisons, I actually think it’s fairly straightforward, though one can only go into so much depth - it’s an invitation for those interested to dig deeper. But there are also events that unfold internationally that have huge impacts on the United States. When you get to the typical 20th century history, you naturally learn about the Nazis and the Communists, two enemies we righteously defeated. But how many of us have clear pictures of the histories of our largest trading partners and nearest neighbors - Mexico and Canada? (Do you know about how the U.S. government aided the determinedly secular Mexican government in killing tens of thousands of Christian resisters in the 1920s?) For early Americans, perhaps the most dramatic news of the future would be the dramatic collapse in infant mortality - much of whose work came from abroad - isn’t that a rather important story in American history? Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud dramatically affected American life, and way beyond their lifetimes, and yet how many American histories dig into their biographies, and refute their theories where appropriate?
A couple more takes before concluding: If you were to tell a history of your family, would you first begin with a history of every person who lived in your current house? And, beyond that, the history of your house’s construction, as well as the ecology of your lawn? Leftist history often oddly starts with geology and the (sometimes speculative) history of people who came from Siberia to the land the United States currently governs rather than the more obvious origins of the country in Europe. Relations with Indians did affect the development of the United States - but the constitutional DNA came from across the pond. If the Roman empire had not been a thing, or if Christianity had been overtaken by Islam, or if the Reformation had not happened, etc. the U.S. would be much more dramatically different than most realistic hypotheticals we could conjure about Indians. Obviously, when the U.S. interacts with various Indian tribes, it is appropriate to comment upon them - but just as the history of the U.S. does not begin with the history of Mexico in anticipation of the Mexican American War, nor should it begin with Indians. Similarly, geography, especially America’s relative isolation from Europe and Asia and its large amount of fertile land, is important to the American story, but it should be weaved in at the appropriate points of interaction with Americans, rather than forming the beginning.
Sometimes art history is covered in a survey but while art can tell us certain things about a time, it’s of course also true that most people did not see most art. There are occasionally pieces of literature that have huge impacts - Uncle Tom’s Cabin - but mass visual art that shapes the country does not become really a thing until the rise of cinema, and then it’s arguably for the worse, a take that is not often explored in history books (another example of unexplored tradeoffs).
Ultimately, there are probably two potential points to studying history: the first is to string together a national identity that gives Americans a sense of self and what is important. To that end, it’d be awful nice to agree on a past - but, alas, I contend that conservatives have agreed to too much of the left’s historical narrative, even in the reddest of states. God bless the parents and conservative activists who have fought textbook craziness for years and years, in the woke era and well before it, but they are always little Davids fighting mighty Goliaths, trying to make a controversy with only so much success. If and when textbooks (or libraries, or whoever) take more conservative stands, they immediately attract full media attention - and in absurd framing, with indictments of book-banning if not book-burning, when libraries inherently have only so many volumes and they regularly purge books in the course of business (this is in fact part of the secret: the constantly increasing average publication date in libraries, especially in children’s sections, helps ensure a complete smuggling of the latest lefty ideas while the right hardly gets in the door). Let’s not forget that we’re constantly shaping young minds.
The second point is the advanced, elective version - a genuine interrogation of how things came to be and might have been different. The good news here is that, especially with American history (rather than more thinly documented older times), one can always go deeper and wider and contest the standard interpretations that miss important truths - but it’s the obligation of conservatives to be curious about those truths. Notably, much like how conservatives typically understand the liberal view of events because it’s blasted from the cultural heights but liberals rarely understand the conservative point of view because they don’t pick up National Review or any conservative source, conservatives need to dig into our own interpretation of historical events. And, for anyone, once one accumulates enough facts, opinionated histories of all varieties, so long as they at least attempt to footnote to real facts, are actually far more interesting than the determinedly uncontroversial mainstream, because they are sharply argued.
What does sharply covering American history from the right look like? More on that in my next email.
How many surveys of historians in the last few decades have found that the current or most recent Republican president was among the worst ever while the current or most recent Democrat president ranks rather well? In Wikipedia’s sum up, even Dwight Eisenhower’s worst performance is the one poll of historians conducted around his presidency (1962).
Eventually, after I asked some questions about particular historical figures and events, she conceded that she was Canadian and didn’t know much American history and had deferred to her husband in homeschooling their children on the subject. Glancing through the history book, it was written in rich language, but had some seriously questionable analysis, like describing Woodrow Wilson as a classical liberal of the 19th century variety when he really offered a decisive break from the great Grover Cleveland. The most disturbing thing about the conference, in fact, was just how little heterodox historical takes were available, given that the audience of consumers was totally disproportionately conservative.
See David Beito and Marcus Witcher’s New Deal Witch Hunt in the Independent Journal: https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_21_01_03_beito-witcher.pdf
See America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century by Frances FitzGerald
Lots of evidence came out about how ludicrous the publishing industry is in a 2022 antitrust case: No One Buys Books -- but Claude cautions: “these statistics are distorted by methodology—they count each ISBN separately (hardcover, paperback, and e-book as different ‘books’), include all books throughout history still in print, exclude e-book sales, and measure single-year sales rather than lifetime performance. Industry sources confirm these figures were strategically presented to portray publishing as imperiled, not as representative of how traditionally-published books actually perform.”
America Revised, in the late 1970s: “Since few historians can contrive to write by these [reading level] rules, the editors usually have to rewrite the final draft. In the process, they may or may not change the essential meaning of the original, but, almost necessarily, they remove all individuality from the writing, homogenizing it so that it is in fact nearly unreadable.”
“California’s curriculum materials, by contrast [to Texas’], sometimes read like a brief from a Bernie Sanders rally. “The yawning gap between the haves and have-nots and what is to be done about it is one of the great questions of this time,” says the state’s 2016 social studies framework.” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html If a school district wants to be clever, it tries to avoid teaching kids values so much as asking kids their values - but along the way, tends to ask such leading questions and without enough background information to ensure a superficial answer. America Revised notes real textbook examples like asking kids what they’d advise Nixon in 1973 or what to do if their Japanese-American friends were shipped off to a concentration camp - but those are examples that don’t really invite debate
This is sometimes called Whig history, though the first versions of Whig history were not necessarily wrong in the positive development of liberty to the then present.
America Revised notes that, amidst the 1960s civil rights fight, George Washington Carver was “canonized” by publishers very keen to find historical black heroes.
America Revised by Frances Fitzgerald
America Revised by Frances Fitzgerald
This context can sometimes be dismissed as “whataboutism” - but, again, the intention here is not to acquit the U.S. of ever having had any problem whatsoever - but to produce a global, historical context to gauge scale, causality, and trade-offs and properly attune our moral outrage - such that, for example, we don’t come to believe that “words are literal violence”