One Sided History Is Bad History

 Erik Loomis does Erik Loomis things by highlighting an essay by Stephen Hahn on America's illiberal past. It's a litany of things that America and Americans have done since their founding that are not part of the Fox News-type history.

Loomis concludes:

I suppose their is still room for the kind of happy, celebratory histories of this nation that many people want, I guess if people want to lie to themselves, that’s their right.

The problem with this, is that it's quite easy to read this as any history that celebrates America's very real accomplishments and ability to change is Pollyanna-ish whitewashing of America's sordid past. This reading of history - Hahn's and Loomis's - erases the broader context of America in the world at large. Europe and almost every other major culture was highly hierarchical. America tried to build a similar class structure, but it failed because land was so available for poorer classes to move into. Instead, America built its hierarchies on race.

Hahn mentions anti-Catholic bigotry, and I do to in my classes. It's a hugely important and underrated force in American history. The fact that we have a Catholic president - and no one really knows he's Catholic - is a fairly interesting development. Kennedy's Catholicism was a huge liability for him in 1960; Biden's and even John Kerry's is completely unremarkable.

The problem with America-As-Great-Satan history is that it becomes just as flat and opaque as hagiography. If the point of history is to understand the complicated relationship between cause and effect, then reading Howard Zinn and only Howard Zinn is overcompensating, to put it mildly. 

There's a direct line between this presentist view of history that leads to Princeton removing the name Woodrow Wilson from their school of international relations, because Wilson was, indeed, a very racist person. He was not, however, unusually racist for his time and especially his place. What's more, until recently, he was not primarily known for his racism; he was known for articulating a new vision of international relations. John C. Calhoun of Yale, on the other hand, was known primarily for his defense of slavery. Same goes for just about every Confederate officer and official.

Once you flatten Wilson to just his racism, then you aren't learning history - you're proving your bona fides and uttering the shibboleths that open doors in academia. It's less important that Jefferson was a racist that it is in understanding how an otherwise admirably person could be so seduced by so toxic a form of illiberality.