Books, Arts & Manners November 10, 1997

H I S T O R YA N DI T S
E N E M I E S

JOHN FONTE

Mr. Fonte is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

FIRST, a disclaimer. I appear in this book about a half a dozen times as a minor villain -- a rather unpleasant and abrasive fellow who assists the chief villain, Lynne Cheney, in her opposition to the National History Standards. Now that my cards are on the table let us proceed.
The authors of this book -- Gary B. Nash, a history professor at UCLA; Charlotte Crabtree, an education professor emeritus at UCLA; and Ross E. Dunn, a history professor at California State University, San Diego -- are the principal architects of the National History Standards, which were condemned by the U.S. Senate, 99 to 1, for ideological bias.
History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past,
by Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn (Knopf, 352 pp., $26)

Professor Nash, an advocate of the new social history since the 1960s, the organizer of the Angela Davis defense committee in the 1970s, and a major influence on high-school curricula and textbooks during the past decade, is undoubtedly the principal author of History on Trial. The book is a memoir of one battle in the culture war that also makes some generalizations about ``history wars'' in America's past and in other countries today.
History on Trial develops the following major themes. Americans have always argued about their history. Revisionism is what historians do; they constantly reinterpret the past. The new historical scholarship and methodology of the last thirty years, with its emphasis on minorities, women, ordinary people, and non-Western cultures, has resulted, as Lawrence Levine puts it, in the ``opening of the American mind.'' It is more ``democratic'' than traditional scholarship because through it students are able to ``see themselves'' in history. It is not relativist, but forms a new ``grand narrative'': the story of the ``struggles of groups'' that have ``suffered'' exploitation against ``their exploiters.'' Critics of the National Standards object because they are against ``including'' more women and minorities in history. The Right is harming ``democratic values of open inquiry'' by ``muzzling'' museums, ``censoring'' curricula, and attempting to ``instill patriotism'' in students.
Thus, the book mixes truisms with ideological axe-grinding. Most opponents of the Standards do not object to more minorities and women in history; they do object to bias, distortion, and romanticizing the ``Other'' (e.g., the Aztecs' accomplishments are extolled, but their practice of human sacrifice is ignored). The Standards portray the Cold War as ``swordplay'' between morally equivalent opponents; describe the radical feminism of Ms. magazine as ``compelling''; and declare that American civilization is the result of a ``convergence'' of three cultures, Mesoamerican, West African, and European, rather than a product of Western civilization.
Moreover, this bias is not confined to a few examples in the original version of the Standards, but is systemic throughout both the original and the revised Standards. For example, in a content analysis of both documents, social scientists Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai found that issues of race, ethnicity, and gender were emphasized nearly three times more often than issues of political liberty.
Nor do the Standards represent a more ``democratic'' history. Quota history, ensuring that every group is proportionally represented in every story of the past regardless of the evidence, subverts objectivity and truth in the interests of current ideological politics.
Finally, the dichotomy posed by the authors between the ``democratic values of open inquiry'' and ``instilling patriotism'' is ironic, because both in the National History Standards and in History on Trial Nash et al. do not merely call for ``inquiry,'' but also advocate a definite political stance: support for the ``unfinished agendas'' of egalitarian social reform. The social ``agendas'' they endorse are not, of course, the programs of tax limiters or right-to-lifers but the utopian visions of the radical feminists and multiculturalists. Thus, while condemning their opponents as seeking to ``instill'' what they mockingly call ``Ozzie and Harriet patriotism,'' Nash et al. clearly hope to instill their own set of ideological values in young Americans.
The authors presume to speak for the ``professional community'' of historians, but their book often mischaracterizes or ignores the views of leading historians who either deviate from prevailing orthodoxies in general or oppose the History Standards in particular. Thus, the work of the former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin in American history is decried as ``flamboyant boosterism.'' And, while the authors admit that Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Disuniting of America ``exposes Afrocentric excess,'' they criticize the work for ``lapses into Eurocentric triumphalism.''
Both John Patrick Diggins and Paul Gagnon are unfairly condemned as ``cultural essentialists'' who adhere to the ``anachronistic'' and ``ahistorical'' idea that civilizations contain unchanging ``essential attributes'' or ``culturally genetic traits such as love of freedom.'' Of course, neither Diggins nor Gagnon argues any such thing. What both do argue, in different scholarly works, is that it is more important for American students to study the roots of liberal democracy in Western civilization than the origins of pre-democratic ideas in non-Western societies. Moreover, neither scholar ever suggests that civilizations are incapable of change over time. Thus, History on Trial recklessly distorts their views.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes that ``nowhere in those [history] standards . . . will you find any mention of that fact that it was the Western tradition that first produced the idea of individual freedom.'' For that, the authors accuse her of ``project[ing] identity politics onto the globe,'' because national standards in world history should not ``take on the task of ranking peoples and civilizations'' in order to ``rhapsodize over Western moral success.'' Although Pulitzer Prize - winning historian Walter McDougall wrote two major articles in Commentary critical of the Standards, neither his name nor his critique is mentioned. Likewise, the criticism by historian Forrest McDonald, chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver its prestigious Jefferson Lecture, is ignored.
The book makes many statements that range from the sloppy to the bizarre. Sloppy: the assertion that President Clinton's GOALS 2000 legislation had strong bi-partisan support. (A quick check of the Congressional Record would have revealed overwhelming Republican opposition to the legislation.) Bizarre: ``Limbaugh's millions of listeners could not know that Lynne Cheney, talking from Congressman Newt Gingrich's limousine by car phone, had prepped Rush for his tirade.'' In fact, Mrs. Cheney never prepped Limbaugh while riding in Gingrich's limo, any more than she prepped Martians in Roswell, New Mexico, on the intricacies of teacher training.
In a particularly revealing passage, Nash et al. argue that a historian is much like a lawyer. Historical ``interpretation,'' the authors tell us, is ``little different from the work of a lawyer who gathers evidence and builds a case to present to a jury. . . . As lawyers write briefs, so do historians.'' This analogy is clumsy at best, wildly inaccurate at worst. Attorneys are advocates who serve clients; they do not present evidence contrary to their client's interests unless forced to do so. Historians are not advocates; they do not have clients whose interests they are obliged to serve. If they find evidence contrary to their theories, they are expected to bring this information to light and either refute it or change their position.
It is not surprising that Nash et al. draw the analogy between historians and lawyers. The authors operate like attorneys for the ``agendas'' of the 1960s. Their clients are the historians, museum curators, and activists who advocate the ideas of that decade; and History on Trial is a brief, worthy of William Kunstler, for their clients' viewpoints.