Making the click-through worthwhile: What we’re learning about American history, whether the pendulum is swinging too far on the crime issue and is due to swing back, and a well-covered Democratic presidential candidate isn’t as well known as his fans in the media may think.
Those Who Do Not Learn from History Are Doomed to Chaperone School Field Trips
However you’re ending your week, I hope it’s been a good one. As you read this, I’m on my way to Gettysburg National Military Park, chaperoning a school trip. Last time I did this, chaperoning a school trip to Jamestown, three kids barfed on the bus on the way there.
This class trip to a Civil War battlefield is apparently an increasingly rare experience for America’s youth:
The National Park Service’s five major Civil War battlefield parks—Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga and Vicksburg—had a combined 3.1 million visitors in 2018, down from about 10.2 million in 1970, according to park-service data. Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, the most famous battle site, had about 950,000 visitors last year, just 14% of its draw in 1970 and the lowest annual number of visitors since 1959. Only one of these parks, Antietam, in Maryland, has seen an increase from 1970.
John Daniel Davidson writes over at The Federalist:
. . . in a country where large numbers of college graduates do not even know the half-century in which the Civil War occurred, but are convinced that Confederate monuments should come down, we should expect genuine interest in the Civil War to wane if not to disappear entirely, except perhaps as an object for political activism.
The argument that modern Americans aren’t interested in history doesn’t quite mesh with certain cultural trends. If you look at the nonfiction bestseller list at any given moment, a good chunk of the top titles will be history books. At this moment, there’s David McCullough’s The Pioneers, Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming, Jared Diamond’s Upheaval, Tony Horwitz’s Spying on the South, Dan Abram’s Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense, and Tom Cotton’s Sacred Duty, about the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment. The major book-review sections of American newspapers — to the extent they still exist — are heavily focused on history books.
Our pop culture is bursting with depictions of past eras — documentaries, docudramas, and historical fiction. More than $500 million has been spent on tickets for a musical about Alexander Hamilton, with roughly two million seats sold, an amazing sum for a live performance show. Historical dramas dominate the Oscar nominations. American audiences seem to have a persistent interest in British history. A few years back, folks went nuts for Downton Abbey, and now it’s Peaky Blinders, The Crown, The Tudors, and Victoria. Beyond the British Isles, there are series about Marco Polo, the Medicis, and the Vikings.
I realize not everybody is into history, and perhaps popular interest focuses heavily on particular chapters of American history. Judging by the bookstore shelves, it’s easy to believe American history began with the Revolutionary War, moved on to the Civil War, then on to World War II, and that led up to today. Back in 2003, I watched the sketch comedy play The Complete History of America (Abridged) in London. The first act covered from the Revolutionary War up to the Civil War. The Second Act began with World War I. Apparently, nothing significant happened between 1865 and 1917.
You do wonder if part of our intense polarization comes from Americans learning and choosing to see two different versions of American history. John Daniel Davidson worries about the kids learning the Howard Zinn version. I wonder if those who learned the old-school version of American history realize just how many different groups shaped America from its earliest days. (The negative and in some cases furious reactions to that piece always surprised and baffled me. Who gets angry over discussion of Crispus Attucks, Maximiliano Luna, the Manilamen who fought alongside Andrew Jackson, Haym Salomon, Hadji Ali, or the Harlem Hellfighters? Why is there this perception that history is a zero-sum game, and that discussion of the achievements and bravery of nonwhite Americans somehow takes away from the discussion of the achievements and bravery of white Americans?) You know I’ll be telling the kids today about Canton-born Joseph Pierce fighting at Pickett’s Charge.
Your understanding of what made America is going to have an enormous impact on how you see the country today, and how you think it should be in the future. The slogan “Make America Great Again” assumes a certain understanding of history — that in some past era America was great, that it lost that greatness, and that electing a particular president is the right step to restore that greatness.
Is the Stage Getting Set for a ‘Law and Order’ Comeback?
By and large, crime is a second-tier issue at the national level — certainly compared to the 1980s and 1990s. Advocates of criminal-justice reform have scored significant policy victories at the federal and state level. But Michael Graham wonders if the pendulum might be swinging too far in that direction, and we may be headed towards a correction.
The 2020 field is committed to cutting America’s “highest in the western world” incarceration rate, but in order to bring numbers down significantly, criminals convicted of violent offenses would have to be released — an idea that even the leftwing website Vox.com admits is a non-starter.
“Even the majority of liberals oppose reducing prison sentences for violent criminals with a low risk of reoffending: 55 percent oppose it, versus 42 percent who support it,” Vox writes.
“There is a large misunderstanding across America that a significant number of people in prison are low-level, nonviolent offenders serving time for drug offenses or petty theft, etc.,” Mangual says. “That’s just not true. More than half of all prisoners are in for one of a very few violent offenses.”
Nonetheless, Sen. Cory Booker’s backing something called the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act that would hand out money to states for reducing their incarceration rates by 7 percent over a three-year period, but without increasing their crime rates by more than 3 percent.
I think Americans are a merciful group that is quite willing to give a nonviolent felon a second chance. But the moment a criminal’s actions include physical harm to someone, they’re much more wary. In Democratic and mainstream media circles — some would say I repeat myself — there’s an adamant belief that the 1988 Willie Horton ad of the George H.W. Bush campaign was shameless demagoguery and race-baiting. But weekend furloughs for violent criminals was an asinine idea that endangered public safety, and Michael Dukakis vetoed a bill that would have excluded first-degree murderers from the weekend-furlough program. Two people were murdered as a result of this policy, separately from Willie Horton’s raping and stabbing rampage. The policy was absolutely fair game for a national debate.
So is any candidate who proposes restoring voting rights to violent felons who are still serving their sentences.
Mayor Who?
John McCormack illuminates just how many Democratic voters aren’t really paying attention to the coverage of the Democratic presidential primary so far:
The latest Morning Consult poll, conducted from May 20 to May 26, continues to show a race dominated by Joe Biden (at 38 percent) and followed by Bernie Sanders (at 20 percent) with three candidates vying for third place: Elizabeth Warren at 9 percent, Pete Buttigieg at 7 percent, and Kamala Harris at 7 percent. While Biden and Sanders enjoy nearly universal name recognition among Democrats, 35 percent say they have “never heard of” Pete Buttigieg, while only 11 percent say they haven’t heard of Warren and 21 percent say the same of Harris. Other recent polls have shown similar results: The latest Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Democrats had “never heard of” Buttigieg.
Twitter may be a uniquely small and unrepresentative bubble, but these poll numbers are a reminder that there is a large chunk of voters who don’t regularly follow political news at all. You may be tired of the media’s fawning coverage of Mayor Pete, but a lot of Democratic voters don’t know the first thing about him. What does this mean for the primary? Perhaps Buttigieg hasn’t yet had his moment. If he can impress the much larger audiences who will tune into the Democratic debates the way he has impressed Democrats watching his cable news appearances, his support will likely continue to grow.
Then again, maybe these voters haven’t learned more about him because they’re just not that interested in a guy who’s “just” the mayor of South Bend, or so young, or some other factor. If these voters wanted to know more about lesser-known presidential candidates, they would seek out that information. It’s not like coverage of Buttigieg is hidden or hard to find; he and his husband are on the cover of Time magazine, for Pete’s sake.
ADDENDUM: Yeah, you can guess what I’m hoping you’ll do today.