If you�re old enough to remember the Soviet Union,
writes
Naomi Schaefer Riley in her
Wall Street Journal interview of
Wilfred McClay,
you�ve probably wondered why so many young people today seem attracted to socialism. One influence is Howard Zinn, who published �A People�s History of the United States� in 1980, the year before the first millennials were born.
The book �continues to be assigned in countless college and high-school courses, but its commercial sales have remained strong as well� [which is nothing less than an outrage].
� Historian Wilfred McClay aspires to be the antidote to Zinn, whom 
he accuses of �greatly oversimplifying the past and turning American history into a comic-book melodrama in which �the people� are constantly being abused by �the rulers.� � Mr. McClay�s counterpoint, which comes out next week, is titled �Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.�
He says he doesn�t mean his new book as �some saccharine whitewash of American history.� But he�s seen too many students drawn to Zinn because the standard textbooks are visionless and tedious. �Just as nature abhors a vacuum,� Mr. McClay says, �so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.�
A lousy story is better than no story at all: �We historians have for years been supplying an account of the American past that is so unedifying and lacking in larger perspective that Zinn�s sweeping melodrama looks good by comparison. Zinn�s success is indicative of our failure. We have to do better.�
� in the new book he observes that it�s �hard to read about� early-19th-century America �without thinking of the series of events culminating in the coming of the Civil War as if they were predictable stages in a preordained outcome. Like the audience for a Greek tragedy, we come to this great American drama already knowing the general plot,� and susceptible to the illusion that it was written in advance. He urges readers to resist �that habit of mind� and remember that people at the time had no foresight to match our hindsight.
What gets him most riled up is what he sees as an abdication. �When you teach an introductory course in American history,� he says, �you really have a responsibility . . . to reflect in some way the national story, in a way that is conducive to the development of the outlook and skills of a citizen�of an engaged, patriotic, serious citizen.� Most professional historians don�t �take that mandate very seriously at all,� and instead provide �a basically negative understanding of American history.�
He says proudly that they reciprocate his aversion. When he meets colleagues at conventions and tells them the name of his book, �they just kind of look at me and say, �Oh my God, what have you been smoking?� . . . When I say it has the word �Great,� in �the Great American Story,� then they�re even more dubious.�
Mr. McClay�s objective in �Land of Hope� is to help readers develop a sense of perspective and �a mastery of the detail� of American history. The Zinn approach allows them to be lazy: �Why learn what the Wilmot Proviso was, or what exactly went into the Compromise of 1850, when you could just say we had this original sin of slavery?�
By contrast, �Land of Hope� delves into the complexity of the Founders� debates over slavery. Many expected it would eventually end on its own, or believed the alternative to accepting it�abandoning the union�was worse. Some were conflicted. The book describes George Mason as �a slaveholder but also a Christian who labeled the trade an �infernal traffic,� � and adds: �Mason feared the corrupting spread of slavery through the nation, which would bring the �judgement of Heaven� down severely upon any country in which bondage was widespread and blandly accepted.� The Founders had to weigh what was possible, not just what was ideal�and Mr. McClay thinks it�s unfair to denounce them for failing to meet today�s standards.
Similarly, he says that when he talks about the wise and loving letters between John and Abigail Adams, �students will say, �Yeah, but you know, women couldn�t own property and couldn�t vote.� � True enough, but Mr. McClay responds with a challenge: �Well, compared to what? Were things better for women in sub-Saharan Africa? Were they better in France? And generally they can�t answer the question. What they do is they measure the country�s history against an abstract standard of perfection, against which it�s always going to fall short.�
Mr. McClay decries the impulse to �condescend toward history��and tear down monuments or withdraw honors from historical figures who offend today�s sensibilities. He says he isn�t trying to �reduce everything to context,� only to acknowledge that leaders from Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King were complicated, and that their flaws are �no reason to rob them� of recognition for the �truly heroic things that they accomplished.�
Take Woodrow Wilson, recently the subject of controversy at Princeton University, where he was president from 1902-10. Critics want to remove his name from the School of Public and International Affairs because of his bad record on race. Mr. McClay isn�t a fan of President Wilson�s diplomatic efforts and criticizes his suppression of dissent during World War I. But when the U.S. entered that war, Mr. McClay says, �it was a moment for all hands on deck, and Wilson proved to be an excellent wartime leader.� The professor praises the 28th president as �acutely attuned . . . to the maintenance of public morale.�
Ideological bias in history textbooks is bad enough when the events occurred a century or more ago. �Especially once you get past, say, 1960 or 1964,� Mr. McClay says, �it just gets awful.� When examining the recent past, �it�s very, very, very hard to have any kind of perspective, other than whatever your own partisan persuasion is.�
He adds that some recent history books are �somewhat disfigured� by the way in which the understanding of recent history is �projected back on to the past.�
� Mr. McClay is even harsher on history textbooks: �They�re completely unreadable because they�re assembled by committee, by graduate students who write little bits and pieces of them. I�m not convinced that most of the textbooks that have the names of very eminent historians on the cover were actually read by them, let alone written by them.�
There are also the committees that approve them�state and local school boards, which answer to a variety of �stakeholders.� Members of every racial, cultural and religious group want a say in how they and events important to them are described. Mr. McClay opted to dispense with that process, and �Land of Hope� is being published by a conservative house, Encounter Books. He probably won�t sell many copies to public schools, but he hopes there are enough private and religious and charter schools, not to mention home-schoolers, that it will find a market.
� Unlike many modern textbooks, �Land of Hope� has no sidebars or charts; a 
few maps and portraits provide the only distractions from the text. Mr. McClay writes with a literary quality, as when he likens Lincoln to Moses, �cruelly denied entry into the promised land of a restored Union, denied the satisfaction of seeing that new birth of freedom he had labored so long to achieve.�
� In the classroom, he endeavors to cultivate a longer view. When he explains the Constitution, he reminds students�or lets them know for the first time�that �conflict is part of the human condition and can never be eliminated. Neither can the desire for power and the tendency to abuse it.�
� When he taught at Tulane in the late 1980s and early �90s, he recalls, �almost every applicant for graduate study wanted to work on the civil-rights movement�even though we didn�t have a single person on the faculty at that time who was an expert on the subject.� It�s easy to see the attraction, but he worries about the expectation that history will �provide an agenda for a moral crusade.�
�Very few moments of conflict have the moral clarity of that particular historical moment,� Mr. McClay cautions, �and we fall into error when we try to repeat it again and again.� Instead, he encourages students to appreciate the nobility all around them. �Gosh,� he says, �as Americans, you are part of what is arguably the most exciting enterprise in human history.�
On the
Seth Leibsohn show:
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