By MICHAEL LIND NOV. 2, 2017, New York Times
[Original article contains more links]
From the NYT (Pamela Paul Editor of The New York Times Book Review
@PamelaPaulNYT) via email: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was arguably the most prominent historian of the 20th century [JB -- I would less "nationalistically" say, "prominent American historian]", between his foundational work “The Age of Jackson,” his still relevant “The Vital Center” and his books documenting the Kennedy years. This week, we review Richard Aldous’s new biography, “Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian,” and Michael Lind reconsiders Schlesinger’s book “The Disuniting of America.”
Image from article, with caption: The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who
tackled the cannon wars a generation ago.
In contemporary debates that involve history and historical symbols like the
controversies over the removal of Confederate statues from public parks or the place
of Andrew Jackson and Alexander Hamilton on United States currency, it may seem
impossible to find middle ground. But a generation ago in the 1990s the search for
common ground in the history wars was undertaken by the leading liberal historian
of his era, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a
Multicultural Society,” published in 1991 and in a revised edition in 1998. From
1949, when he published “The Vital Center,” Schlesinger, one of the founders of
Americans for Democratic Action and a confidant of the Kennedys, sought to defend
his conception of centrist liberalism against the radical left as well as the right.
The title of “The Disuniting of America” might mislead contemporary readers
into assuming that the book is about social polarization in general, which is the
subject of more recent publications like Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the
Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.” Instead, Schlesinger’s
polemic is an intervention in the “canon wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, when
curriculums in history and literature courses became the source of passionate
national debate. One defining event in that discussion was the publication in 1987 of
“The Closing of the American Mind” by the philosopher Allan Bloom. Another
occurred with the Jan. 18, 1995, vote by the United States Senate (99 to 1)
condemning proposed “national history standards” promulgated by the National
Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles, for not
showing “a decent respect for United States history’s roots in Western civilization,”
in the words of the Senate resolution.
Amid what was becoming a debate among left-leaning academics and populist
tribunes like Rush Limbaugh and Lynne Cheney, Schlesinger sought to define a
liberal alternative to what he described as militant multiculturalism on the left and
bigoted monoculturalism on the right: “The monoculturalists are hyperpatriots,
fundamentalists, evangelicals, laissez-faire doctrinaires, homophobes, antiabortionists,
pro-assault-gun people.” Of the two groups, Schlesinger considered the
monoculturalists a greater threat: “Left-wing political correctness is an irritation and
a nuisance. It becomes a threat to the young only when it invades the public
schools.” In contrast: “Right-wing political correctness catches kids before they are
old enough to take care of themselves and in environments where they are rarely
exposed to clashes of opinion. It is a weapon with which small-town bigots,
conducting pogroms against Darwin, Marx, J.D. Salinger, Judy Blume and other
villains, seize control of school committees and library boards.”
According to Schlesinger, “Monoculturalists abuse history as flagrantly as
multiculturalists. They sanitize the past and install their own set of patriotic heroes
and myths.” In a chapter titled “History the Weapon,” Schlesinger acknowledges
what he sees as the valid complaints of multiculturalists: “American history was long
written in the interests of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males. My father, growing
up in the 1890s in Xenia, a small Ohio town containing large contingents of
Germans, Irish and blacks, one day asked his father, who had come from Germany
as a child and whose hero was Carl Schurz, the American general, politician and
reformer, why the schoolbooks portrayed England as the one and only mother
country. My grandfather’s wry comment was that apparently the only Germans
worth mentioning were ‘the Hessians who had fought on the wrong side in the War
for Independence.’ Irish and blacks fared even less well in schoolbooks, and the only
good Indians were dead Indians. Non-WASPs were the invisible men (and women)
in the American past.”
Schlesinger notes one predictable response by minorities to their exclusion from
mainstream historical texts and commemorations: “The ethnic enclaves thus
developed a compensatory literature.” To illustrate this, he quotes from the Irish-American
scholar John V. Kelleher about articles claiming “that the Continental
Army was 76 percent Irish, or that many of George Washington’s closest friends
were nuns or priests.” However badly the “white ethnics” suffered from Anglo-Saxon
Protestant condescension, Schlesinger notes, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans
suffered far worse: “The situation is radically different for non-white minorities facing
not snobbism but racism.”
But Schlesinger maintains that what he calls “compensatory history” is bad history,
whether it takes the form of Afrocentrism, or the claim that other regions have
falsely taken credit for inventions that originated in Africa, or what he, following
Kelleher, calls “the there’s-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-of-it-doing-the-real-work
approach to American history.” These views ceased to be harmless folly when
their holders enlisted the support of federal, state or local governments to impose
them as official versions of history, Schlesinger argues: “ ‘Who controls the past
controls the future,’ runs the Party slogan in George Orwell’s ‘1984’; ‘who controls
the present controls the past.’ ”
At worst, Schlesinger writes, the sanctioning of state ethnonational ideologues
could Balkanize American society further. [JB emphasis] He denounces the federal 1974 Ethnic
Heritage Studies Program Act because it “ignored those millions of Americans —
surely a majority — who refused identification with any particular ethnic group.”
Schlesinger may have seen himself in the latter group. His paternal ancestors
included Prussian Jews and Austrian Catholics, while his mother was a descendant
of the Mayflower colonists and supposedly related to the 19th-century American
historian George Bancroft.
“I don’t want to sound too apocalyptic about these developments,” Schlesinger
writes. Indeed, unlike many of his contemporaries who criticized multiculturalism,
he did not see Latino immigration as either a linguistic or a social challenge to
American national unity. Schlesinger noted: “As for Hispanic-Americans, first-generation
Hispanics born in the United States speak English fluently, according to a
Rand Corporation study; more than half of second-generation Hispanics give up
Spanish altogether.” Subsequent social science studies by Stephen Trejo, Richard
Alba and others have confirmed that marriage outside of the group and erosion of
ethnic identity tends to increase with each generation of Latinos, as it did in the case
of European immigrant diasporas in the United States in the past.
Like other memorable tracts for the times, “The Disuniting of America” blends
passages of enduring relevance with much that has become obsolete. Today, what is
most striking about this book and other entries in the late-20th-century battle of the
books is the assumption shared by all sides in the canon wars that the fate of the
nation might depend on the content of the curriculum, as determined by academic
experts.
Since Schlesinger wrote, there has been a collapse in the authority of
establishments of all kinds, not just academics. In the age of Twitter and Facebook
and 24-hour cable news, public intellectuals like Schlesinger, based in the academy
or in journalism, have lost influence over public opinion to movie stars, cable
commentators, pop musicians and late-night comedians.
Perhaps the greatest change has involved the declining status of liberal arts
education and the historical studies at its core. In response to decades of slower-than-expected
growth and heightened foreign competition, students deserted the
humanities for more practical degrees like business. Meanwhile, in the 2000s and
2010s the bipartisan elite shared a new consensus that national success depended
not on widespread liberal arts education but on student proficiency in science,
technology, engineering and math. The debate over federal “no child left behind”
standards that aimed to increase the number of Americans who go into engineering
or science eclipsed the debates over the content of the American historical pantheon.
The only academics who seem to find audiences among today’s elite are economists
and social scientists who claim to know how to boost gross domestic product or
manipulate human behavior.
Today the canon wars have given way to the icon wars. Although the focus of
controversy has shifted from the contents of undergraduate education to the
historical figures commemorated by statues and currency, debates over America’s
past continue to mirror debates over America’s present and future. To the challenges
of teaching history in a way that is at once accurate and inclusive, Schlesinger
remains an insightful guide.
Michael Lind, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the
University of Texas, is the author of “Land of Promise: An Economic History of the
United States.”
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