March 23, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 6 of the Nihilism series is the third of four examples of a historical rewrite to reflect a minority viewpoint. To date we have looked Howard Zinn’s The History of the United States, and the controversial essays in Project 1619. In this segment we will look at summarizations of new revisionist beliefs for seven aspects of American history via excerpts from Jarret Stepman’s, The War on History. The seven aspects are:
• Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of the New World
• The Pilgrims and Thanksgiving
• Thomas Jefferson and the Founders
• Andrew Jackson and the American Indians
• Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
• Theodore Roosevelt and the Assimilation of Immigrants
• America’s 20th century including World War II and Communism
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs
Interestingly, the author raises the question of abortion versus slavery. My question is will abortion be viewed in the future (say 150 years from now) as slavery is viewed in the revisionist’s world today?
Next:
Next week’s Segment 7 will be the last segment on revisionist history. It is not exactly a revision, but a new slant on race in America where the author contends that America has a historical caste system in which the aspect of rank is what we call race and the determination and division of humans in the caste is based on appearance. Further, she contends that America’s caste system is similar and every bit as debilitating as the caste systems of India and the Third Reich in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 6 of the Nihilism series is the third of four examples of a historical rewrite to reflect a minority viewpoint. To date we have looked Howard Zinn’s The History of the United States, and the controversial essays in Project 1619. In this segment we will look at summarizations of new revisionist beliefs for seven aspects of American history via excerpts from Jarret Stepman’s, The War on History. The seven aspects are:
• Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of the New World
• The Pilgrims and Thanksgiving
• Thomas Jefferson and the Founders
• Andrew Jackson and the American Indians
• Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
• Theodore Roosevelt and the Assimilation of Immigrants
• America’s 20th century including World War II and Communism
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs
- The men who built this country were oppressive and their values irredeemable.
- We must transform America by wiping out what previous generations celebrated as exceptional, but we know to be damnable.
- Columbus rapaciously plundered the land and abused the native people in a greedy search for gold. He introduced slavery and foreign disease to the Americas, which led to the subjugation and genocide of native peoples. He was the author of a pristine civilization’s doom, and he planted a corrupt, murderous, and oppressive one in its place.
- Pilgrims are an oppressor class who came to America, mindlessly butchered and subjugated its native inhabitants, and constructed a wicked city upon the woes of the downtrodden. The modern celebration of Thanksgiving is a disgusting celebration of capitalism, a crass reveling in material wealth even as oppressed groups suffer.
- America invented slavery and the institution has no history outside of the United States.
- The infamous “Trail of Tears” reveals Andrew Jackson as an irredeemable butcher and a heartless racist for his role in this dark chapter of American history.
- “Cultural imperialism” that demands immigrants assimilate to the country and flag they live under, is offensive.
- The term “melting pot” is a “microaggression” on some college campuses. The idea of assimilation borders on hate speech.
- America is intolerant and xenophobic – a nation devoted to “white supremacy” at its core.
- Unambivalent patriotism is being replaced with moral equivalence, ignorance, and outright hostility toward our country and its history.
Interestingly, the author raises the question of abortion versus slavery. My question is will abortion be viewed in the future (say 150 years from now) as slavery is viewed in the revisionist’s world today?
Next:
Next week’s Segment 7 will be the last segment on revisionist history. It is not exactly a revision, but a new slant on race in America where the author contends that America has a historical caste system in which the aspect of rank is what we call race and the determination and division of humans in the caste is based on appearance. Further, she contends that America’s caste system is similar and every bit as debilitating as the caste systems of India and the Third Reich in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 6
THE WAR ON HISTORY – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from The War on History by Jarrett Stepman (2019).
INTRODUCTION: There is a spreading belief that the men who build this country were oppressive and their values irredeemable. The purveyors of this view argue that we must transcend the ugly ideas, principles, and even people of the past to perfect our society. We must transform America by wiping out what previous generations celebrated as exceptional, but we know to be damnable. These militant and self-righteous activists have instilled in their fellow citizens a fear of being labeled bigots and have cowed the silent majority into action.
Our history, culture, and institutions have been under assault for generations, and the American elite have failed to defend them. In fact, the elite – the masters of Hollywood, the mainstream media, and our education system – are leading the charge. If we recover our history and the traits that have allowed us to succeed so spectacularly in the past, we will rise to the challenges of the 21st century as we have in centuries before. If we fail and the country accepts the narrative that America was rotten to the core from the beginning, we will be lost even if we overcome our external foes and rivals.
WAR ON CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: The national embrace of Columbus held more or less unquestioned until the counterculture forces of the 1960s and 1970s reignited a debate over America’s role in the world and whether or not this country was “good” or “bad.” There are two competing narratives vying for the American soul. For those who value our nation and its history. Columbus is a bold, intrepid explorer to be celebrated for his world-changing discovery of the New World under the banner of the Spanish crown. But the second Columbus narrative goes something like this: The Italian-born navigator set off for what he thought was Asia to find new regions to exploit. Upon arriving in the New World, Columbus rapaciously plundered the land and abused the native people in a greedy search for gold. He introduced slavery and foreign disease to the Americas, which led to the subjugation and genocide of native peoples. He was the author of a pristine civilization’s doom, and he planted a corrupt, murderous, and oppressive one in its place.
Certainly, the indigenous people of America suffered horribly at the hands of conquistadors and colonists. Those times were, by almost any measure, harsher times than ours, and the world was a ways off from legal guarantees regarding cruel and unusual punishments. But there is simply no conclusive evidence that Columbus operated in a particularly cruel manner. On the contrary, there is good evidence that Columbus did his utmost to reign in the cruelty of the Spanish colonists. It is important to remember that Columbus didn’t break a kind of pacifist seal in the Americas. The New World had been an incredibly violent place long before he arrived.
In the 21st century, we have every reason to celebrate the achievements of this great man of the fifteenth. As a man of his time, he would never fit in with the cultural attitudes of today, but that is no reason to treat him as a pariah, unworthy of praise and recognition. For almost all of human history, mankind has lived under the crushing weight of tyranny – or, even more perilously, in a state of barbarism, where life was short and violent. Columbus opened the door to a future, still centuries away, that would see immeasurable benefits for humanity.
THE WAR ON THANKSGIVING: Thanksgiving is deeply woven into American culture. And it’s what the holiday says about America that makes it problematic to its modern assailants. Their line of attack is based on a quasi-Marxist reduction of history to the tale of oppressors versus the oppressed. In a narrative remarkably similar to the attacks on Columbus, Pilgrims are portrayed as an oppressor class who came to America, mindlessly butchered and subjugated its native inhabitants, and constructed a wicked city upon the woes of the downtrodden. The modern celebration of Thanksgiving is written off as a disgusting celebration of capitalism, a crass reveling in material wealth even as oppressed groups suffer.
Initially, the Pilgrims attempted to create a communistic economy, counting on altruistic sharing rather than the profit motive in an effort to appease their British investors. Even on this very small scale, and in a tight-knit religious community of true believers, the collectivist economy broke down. In practice, it was very similar to a socialized economy and the sorry results – starvation and misery – exposed precisely why socialism and communism continually f ail whenever attempted. Those who worked hard received no additional benefit, and those who worked less did no worse. Without private property, the incentive to work hard dissipated. The unfairness of the system created squabbles and conflict even between religious brethren. Far from brotherhood of man, the communal economy created enmity and ultimately scarcity.
Material inequality was seen as natural; to fight it would be to fight the laws of God and nature. People were simply different, as God intended. That some did better or worse materially did not mean that they were better or worse morally; it simply meant that God had different intentions for each. They sought unity, not conformity; they sought charity, not leveling. This was the basis of a strong community.
In the Pequot War, which began in 1636, the Puritan settlers were the underdogs. The Pequot were a powerful tribe. After several English settlers were killed by the Pequot, the Puritans decided to wage a desperate war against a numerically superior foe. The several hundred Puritans that had settled in Connecticut allied with various local tribes and eventually defeated the Pequot who numbered in the thousands. After this bloody incident, there was about four decades of peace. The Pequot simply saw the Puritans as another local tribe, one that had to be dealt with like any other – often with violence.
The chief idea of the Thanksgiving holiday is gratitude: gratitude for the blessing of life and labor. It is with this heathy attitude that Americans have viewed their nation’s past, even as times have not always been good; the fact is they have often been far, far worse elsewhere. Rare has it been in our history that large swaths of Americans, even those who suffered or were treated poorly by fellow citizens or their government, fled to other lands.
THE WAR ON THE FOUNDERS: Today, attacks on the Founders typically start with Jefferson. With the emphasis now on what the Founders didn’t do (abolish slavery) rather than what they did (build the foundation for the freest country in human history). The contrast between Jefferson’s eloquent denunciations of slavery and his failure to put his principles into action make him an easy target for those wanting to paint the Founders as rank hypocrites. The Founders have been criticized in every era, but that criticism used to be made within the framework of understanding that their accomplishments were enormous and worth studying. Now a pernicious dogmatism about the Founders’ failures is obscuring the most important aspects of their legacy. We no longer embrace what made them great while occasionally being disappointed by their all-too-human shortcomings. Instead, their flaws are magnified out of proportion and out of the context of the time they lived in. And, perhaps because of the loftiness of rhetoric, no Founder has suffered more from this way of thinking than Thomas Jefferson.
Author of Liberty: Jefferson’s words articulated the goal of the American Revolution: not to overthrow just one hated king but to overthrow tyranny itself.
The Scourge of Slavery: The issue that most threatens to destroy Jefferson’s legacy is his failure on the issue of slavery, in part because this failure seems to run entirely counter to the claims of the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – and the reality of slavery in early America and specifically in his own life, Jefferson is charged with being a charlatan. This is simply not true. America would eventually make good on that promise. The Declaration ultimately made it impossible for slavery to continue into America’s future. Americans today have a distorted view of slavery. Too commonly it is seen as a uniquely an American problem. But in fact, in the four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 4% of imported slaves came to the British North American colonies and the United States. A growing majority of students now believe that America invented slavery and that the institution had no history outside the U.S. Worse, slave ownership seems to be just about the only thing students know about the Founders. Today’s students have turned the way we see slavery’s history in the U.S. on its head because it was so deeply out of step with a country founded on the concept of liberty and the natural equality of man. At the time of America’s creation, slavery was woven into the cultural and economic fabric of American society, and it could not be so easily removed even by those who deeply hated it.
Jefferson lamented his inability to end the scourge of slavery, and even as he became less hopeful in old age, he never wavered from his belief that America would in the end do away with it forever. The abolishment of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired. In the end, despite Jefferson’s failure to personally ensure that slavery would be abolished, perhaps no single man in the history of the U.S. besides Abraham Lincoln did more to contribute to its extinction. Slavery was wrong, in part, because it violated the notion that all men are created equal. And that same philosophy also has implications for Americans today. If it is wrong to deny the rights and the personhood of individuals of certain races and put them into bondage, thus depriving them of liberty, isn’t it just as bad to deny life to innocent human beings because they have not yet been born? As science has given us a better understanding that life begins long before birth, can we so harshly judge men of Jefferson’s time for failing in the moral cause of abolishing slavery when we today deny life and personhood to the unborn? It is a matter of life and death, right and wrong, and to hide from such questions is every bit as self-serving as the choices of slave owners who couldn’t free their slaves because the institution paid too well.
WAR ON ANDREW JACKSON: The primary charge against Andrew Jackson, the deed that is inevitably brought up in refutation of the “genocide” against the “Five Civilized Tribes” – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians – is the infamous “Trail of Tears.” Thousands of Indians, expelled from the Southeastern states, died as they trudged from the Southeastern states through wild lands to their new home in modern Oklahoma. Jackson is portrayed as an irredeemable butcher and a heartless racist for his role in this dark chapter of American history. Since the Indians wished to preserve their culture, language, and tribal identity Jackson saw only one solution to the problem: removal. Otherwise, they face certain annihilation. Though Jackson spearheaded the final removal of the Cherokee people to the West, he was by no means the originator of the idea. This policy wasn’t created out of pure malice toward native people as is now often believed. To American leaders, Indian removal was a practical solution to a vexing long-term issue, the difficulty of dealing with generally autonomous Indian societies operating within the fast-growing American states that were developing around them. For most American leaders, the ultimate goal was assimilation. But they acknowledged that the outcome wasn’t immediately attainable – or even desired by the tribes.
Many including Jackson, thought that the best solution might be to grant Indians American citizenship, but tribe including the Cherokee, often rejected that idea as antithetical to their traditional life. The second-best solution was therefore adopted: separate the tribes from the frontiersmen with whom they had sometimes openly bloody relations and hope that Indian settlements in the West might remain peaceful, and perhaps eventually join the Union on equal footing through statehood. It has been asserted that Andrew Jackson hated the Indians, and that racial annihilation we his real objective. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jackson neither hated the Indians nor intended genocide. For a slaveowner and Indian fighter he was singularly free of racial bigotry. He killed Indians in battle, but he had not particular appetite for it. He simply performed his duty. Moreover, Jackson befriended many Indians; dozens of chiefs visited him regularly at the Hermitage. He adopted an Indian orphan boy and raised him as a son. He sanctioned marriage between whites and Indians. He believed citizens inevitable for the more civilized Indians, and he argued that Indian life and heritage might be preserved through removal.
WAR ON THE UNION: Lincoln saw that slavery was incompatible with the principles of the Founding. Would the United States be a nation committed to the equal natural rights laid out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration in which slavery would eventually go extinct, or would it be a slaveholders’ republic where natural rights were irrelevant? Lincoln had laid out his anti-slavery philosophy most notably in his debates with Stephan A Douglas. He had put the Founders firmly in the anti-slavery camp. Unlike the radicals of his day, Lincoln believed that slavery could be driven to extinction in America only under the Constitution, and the careful path he trod to that end was the wise statesmanship of principled prudence, not evidence of evolution or flip-flopping on slavery. Absolute moral righteousness, regardless of the actual consequences, is the standard by which the leftist iconoclasts judge historical figures today – rather than wise statecraft, leadership, or even practical results in achieving the goals they claim to care about. Lincoln knew that liberty, for the slaves and everyone else, was not possible without the Union and the Constitution. And Lincoln freed the slaves – while these vandals have done nothing more impressive than tear down statues of great Americans.
WAR ON PATRIOTISM – ASSIMILATION AND NATIONALISM: Teddy Roosevelt offered an inclusive vision of American nationalism. The left sees the “cultural imperialism” that demands immigrants assimilate to the country and flag that they live under as offensive. Until recently, there was a common consensus about immigration, immigrants were allowed in based on what was good for the country. There was the strong expectation that new arrivals would attempt to conform to American culture, learn English and assimilate to their new country. Today, the very term “melting pot,” is considered a “microaggression” on some college campuses. The idea of assimilation borders on hate speech. Roosevelt’s idea of progress was unity, not division. He offered a vision for America to become both a nation of immigrants and a nation of citizens with undivided loyalty – Americanism pure and simple.
Roosevelt had no tolerance for what he called “hyphenated Americans:” “A hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish, or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.” To Roosevelt being an American was about more than asserting your rights. It was about your duty to the country – the burden of citizenship. The ethos of Americanism could provide a healthy alternative to the multiculturalism that is breeding noxious forms of tribal identity politics. Roosevelt loathed the concept of being a “citizen of the world.” “Our business is with our own people,” he wrote.
America has found a way to blend the most diverse assortment of people in a single nation. It has accomplished this by building a unique system of government that divides political power through federalism, protects individual liberties and fosters a welcoming culture that is certainly among the most strongly assimilatory in human history. These factors make America both an unrivaled superpower and a highly desirable place to live. But times have changed. Today, the patriotic spirit of Theodore Roosevelt is being purged from American life. Social commentators denounce America as intolerant and xenophobic – a nation devoted to “white supremacy” at its core. It is telling that 21st century activists condemn America and its immigration laws as racist yet at the same time demand that more people from allegedly oppressed groups be brought into the country through an open border. If they really believed that America was so truly awful, they would be desperately trying to get racial minorities out of this country instead of in. From the time this country was founded, people have risked their lives to get into America. The reason for that is the unique cultural, legal, economic, and constitutional traditions of the U.S., the ones that Roosevelt extolled and attempt to pass on.
THE WAR ON AMERICA’S 20TH CENTURY: The heart of American strength, the reason it leapfrogged over Great Britain and ultimately defeated the twin evils of fascism and communism, is in part the astounding and transformative nature of the American economic system. No people were better able to harness the awesome power of the market economy that Americans. As much as American-style capitalism comes under fire today, there is no question that it has created more wealth for more people than any other system in human history.
The U.S. and Great Britain not only freed the people of Europe they went about giving them protection from the Soviet menace after the war. This included their Axis foes, Germany and Japan, which were occupied after the war but put on a path to independence. The American victors were true liberators, not conquerors. The distinction between them and the Soviets couldn’t be starker. Given what a good international citizen Japan has been of the past 75 years, it’s easy to forget just how malignant the country had become in the 1930s and 1940s. While we remember the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany – the extermination of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” – we tend to forget even the most notorious of Japan’s atrocities the “Rape of Nanking” following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which horrified even Nazi observers. This is not to mention the barbarous acts committed on American, British, and other prisoners of war. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the last chapter of the “terrible 20th century.” It was a victory for capitalism over communism in the rawest sense. But under the surface was something more than a simple contest of raw production. The American system was more moral than the communist one. America was one nation, under God, the Soviet Union was a nation in which the state was God.
We now ruthlessly attack the sins of the past with no context and little understanding of the world previous generations inhabited. Instead. if feeling smug self-righteousness about our superiority and selectively combing through history to find fault, perhaps it is better to take a step back and recognize that the good and the great can exist in a flawed world.
Informed but unambivalent patriotism is being replace with moral equivalence, ignorance, and outright hostility toward our country and its history. American now looks at an uneasy future in which its best men and ideas are being forgotten or maligned. The U.S. is bringing in more immigrants than at any time since the turn of the 20th century, and many of the newcomers are from non-Western environments with little connection to a culture of liberty, civic participation, and free government. It’s a sobering thought, but not all hope is lost. The first stage in American restoration lies in rekindling informed patriotism. Making America great again isn’t about returning to a fanciful past; rather, it’s about restoring a better way of looking to the future. American history is not an unending trail of rosiness, success, and progress. But focus too much on what is unexceptional about America – the flaws in human nature that are universal to mankind – and we can easily miss what is exceptional.
Today, we look at history backwards. Instead of trying to understand why America has produced so much good, we reject the past wholesale because it doesn’t meet an impossible high, ever-evolving standard. Tearing down great Americans isn’t just harmful to our understanding of the past; it is poisoning our bonds of citizenship in the present and threatening to destroy our future.
Source: The War on History by Jarret Stepman, 2019.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE WAR ON HISTORY – EXCERPTS
NOTE: All the excerpts in this segment are from The War on History by Jarrett Stepman (2019).
INTRODUCTION: There is a spreading belief that the men who build this country were oppressive and their values irredeemable. The purveyors of this view argue that we must transcend the ugly ideas, principles, and even people of the past to perfect our society. We must transform America by wiping out what previous generations celebrated as exceptional, but we know to be damnable. These militant and self-righteous activists have instilled in their fellow citizens a fear of being labeled bigots and have cowed the silent majority into action.
Our history, culture, and institutions have been under assault for generations, and the American elite have failed to defend them. In fact, the elite – the masters of Hollywood, the mainstream media, and our education system – are leading the charge. If we recover our history and the traits that have allowed us to succeed so spectacularly in the past, we will rise to the challenges of the 21st century as we have in centuries before. If we fail and the country accepts the narrative that America was rotten to the core from the beginning, we will be lost even if we overcome our external foes and rivals.
WAR ON CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: The national embrace of Columbus held more or less unquestioned until the counterculture forces of the 1960s and 1970s reignited a debate over America’s role in the world and whether or not this country was “good” or “bad.” There are two competing narratives vying for the American soul. For those who value our nation and its history. Columbus is a bold, intrepid explorer to be celebrated for his world-changing discovery of the New World under the banner of the Spanish crown. But the second Columbus narrative goes something like this: The Italian-born navigator set off for what he thought was Asia to find new regions to exploit. Upon arriving in the New World, Columbus rapaciously plundered the land and abused the native people in a greedy search for gold. He introduced slavery and foreign disease to the Americas, which led to the subjugation and genocide of native peoples. He was the author of a pristine civilization’s doom, and he planted a corrupt, murderous, and oppressive one in its place.
Certainly, the indigenous people of America suffered horribly at the hands of conquistadors and colonists. Those times were, by almost any measure, harsher times than ours, and the world was a ways off from legal guarantees regarding cruel and unusual punishments. But there is simply no conclusive evidence that Columbus operated in a particularly cruel manner. On the contrary, there is good evidence that Columbus did his utmost to reign in the cruelty of the Spanish colonists. It is important to remember that Columbus didn’t break a kind of pacifist seal in the Americas. The New World had been an incredibly violent place long before he arrived.
In the 21st century, we have every reason to celebrate the achievements of this great man of the fifteenth. As a man of his time, he would never fit in with the cultural attitudes of today, but that is no reason to treat him as a pariah, unworthy of praise and recognition. For almost all of human history, mankind has lived under the crushing weight of tyranny – or, even more perilously, in a state of barbarism, where life was short and violent. Columbus opened the door to a future, still centuries away, that would see immeasurable benefits for humanity.
THE WAR ON THANKSGIVING: Thanksgiving is deeply woven into American culture. And it’s what the holiday says about America that makes it problematic to its modern assailants. Their line of attack is based on a quasi-Marxist reduction of history to the tale of oppressors versus the oppressed. In a narrative remarkably similar to the attacks on Columbus, Pilgrims are portrayed as an oppressor class who came to America, mindlessly butchered and subjugated its native inhabitants, and constructed a wicked city upon the woes of the downtrodden. The modern celebration of Thanksgiving is written off as a disgusting celebration of capitalism, a crass reveling in material wealth even as oppressed groups suffer.
Initially, the Pilgrims attempted to create a communistic economy, counting on altruistic sharing rather than the profit motive in an effort to appease their British investors. Even on this very small scale, and in a tight-knit religious community of true believers, the collectivist economy broke down. In practice, it was very similar to a socialized economy and the sorry results – starvation and misery – exposed precisely why socialism and communism continually f ail whenever attempted. Those who worked hard received no additional benefit, and those who worked less did no worse. Without private property, the incentive to work hard dissipated. The unfairness of the system created squabbles and conflict even between religious brethren. Far from brotherhood of man, the communal economy created enmity and ultimately scarcity.
Material inequality was seen as natural; to fight it would be to fight the laws of God and nature. People were simply different, as God intended. That some did better or worse materially did not mean that they were better or worse morally; it simply meant that God had different intentions for each. They sought unity, not conformity; they sought charity, not leveling. This was the basis of a strong community.
In the Pequot War, which began in 1636, the Puritan settlers were the underdogs. The Pequot were a powerful tribe. After several English settlers were killed by the Pequot, the Puritans decided to wage a desperate war against a numerically superior foe. The several hundred Puritans that had settled in Connecticut allied with various local tribes and eventually defeated the Pequot who numbered in the thousands. After this bloody incident, there was about four decades of peace. The Pequot simply saw the Puritans as another local tribe, one that had to be dealt with like any other – often with violence.
The chief idea of the Thanksgiving holiday is gratitude: gratitude for the blessing of life and labor. It is with this heathy attitude that Americans have viewed their nation’s past, even as times have not always been good; the fact is they have often been far, far worse elsewhere. Rare has it been in our history that large swaths of Americans, even those who suffered or were treated poorly by fellow citizens or their government, fled to other lands.
THE WAR ON THE FOUNDERS: Today, attacks on the Founders typically start with Jefferson. With the emphasis now on what the Founders didn’t do (abolish slavery) rather than what they did (build the foundation for the freest country in human history). The contrast between Jefferson’s eloquent denunciations of slavery and his failure to put his principles into action make him an easy target for those wanting to paint the Founders as rank hypocrites. The Founders have been criticized in every era, but that criticism used to be made within the framework of understanding that their accomplishments were enormous and worth studying. Now a pernicious dogmatism about the Founders’ failures is obscuring the most important aspects of their legacy. We no longer embrace what made them great while occasionally being disappointed by their all-too-human shortcomings. Instead, their flaws are magnified out of proportion and out of the context of the time they lived in. And, perhaps because of the loftiness of rhetoric, no Founder has suffered more from this way of thinking than Thomas Jefferson.
Author of Liberty: Jefferson’s words articulated the goal of the American Revolution: not to overthrow just one hated king but to overthrow tyranny itself.
The Scourge of Slavery: The issue that most threatens to destroy Jefferson’s legacy is his failure on the issue of slavery, in part because this failure seems to run entirely counter to the claims of the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – and the reality of slavery in early America and specifically in his own life, Jefferson is charged with being a charlatan. This is simply not true. America would eventually make good on that promise. The Declaration ultimately made it impossible for slavery to continue into America’s future. Americans today have a distorted view of slavery. Too commonly it is seen as a uniquely an American problem. But in fact, in the four hundred years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 4% of imported slaves came to the British North American colonies and the United States. A growing majority of students now believe that America invented slavery and that the institution had no history outside the U.S. Worse, slave ownership seems to be just about the only thing students know about the Founders. Today’s students have turned the way we see slavery’s history in the U.S. on its head because it was so deeply out of step with a country founded on the concept of liberty and the natural equality of man. At the time of America’s creation, slavery was woven into the cultural and economic fabric of American society, and it could not be so easily removed even by those who deeply hated it.
Jefferson lamented his inability to end the scourge of slavery, and even as he became less hopeful in old age, he never wavered from his belief that America would in the end do away with it forever. The abolishment of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired. In the end, despite Jefferson’s failure to personally ensure that slavery would be abolished, perhaps no single man in the history of the U.S. besides Abraham Lincoln did more to contribute to its extinction. Slavery was wrong, in part, because it violated the notion that all men are created equal. And that same philosophy also has implications for Americans today. If it is wrong to deny the rights and the personhood of individuals of certain races and put them into bondage, thus depriving them of liberty, isn’t it just as bad to deny life to innocent human beings because they have not yet been born? As science has given us a better understanding that life begins long before birth, can we so harshly judge men of Jefferson’s time for failing in the moral cause of abolishing slavery when we today deny life and personhood to the unborn? It is a matter of life and death, right and wrong, and to hide from such questions is every bit as self-serving as the choices of slave owners who couldn’t free their slaves because the institution paid too well.
WAR ON ANDREW JACKSON: The primary charge against Andrew Jackson, the deed that is inevitably brought up in refutation of the “genocide” against the “Five Civilized Tribes” – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians – is the infamous “Trail of Tears.” Thousands of Indians, expelled from the Southeastern states, died as they trudged from the Southeastern states through wild lands to their new home in modern Oklahoma. Jackson is portrayed as an irredeemable butcher and a heartless racist for his role in this dark chapter of American history. Since the Indians wished to preserve their culture, language, and tribal identity Jackson saw only one solution to the problem: removal. Otherwise, they face certain annihilation. Though Jackson spearheaded the final removal of the Cherokee people to the West, he was by no means the originator of the idea. This policy wasn’t created out of pure malice toward native people as is now often believed. To American leaders, Indian removal was a practical solution to a vexing long-term issue, the difficulty of dealing with generally autonomous Indian societies operating within the fast-growing American states that were developing around them. For most American leaders, the ultimate goal was assimilation. But they acknowledged that the outcome wasn’t immediately attainable – or even desired by the tribes.
Many including Jackson, thought that the best solution might be to grant Indians American citizenship, but tribe including the Cherokee, often rejected that idea as antithetical to their traditional life. The second-best solution was therefore adopted: separate the tribes from the frontiersmen with whom they had sometimes openly bloody relations and hope that Indian settlements in the West might remain peaceful, and perhaps eventually join the Union on equal footing through statehood. It has been asserted that Andrew Jackson hated the Indians, and that racial annihilation we his real objective. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jackson neither hated the Indians nor intended genocide. For a slaveowner and Indian fighter he was singularly free of racial bigotry. He killed Indians in battle, but he had not particular appetite for it. He simply performed his duty. Moreover, Jackson befriended many Indians; dozens of chiefs visited him regularly at the Hermitage. He adopted an Indian orphan boy and raised him as a son. He sanctioned marriage between whites and Indians. He believed citizens inevitable for the more civilized Indians, and he argued that Indian life and heritage might be preserved through removal.
WAR ON THE UNION: Lincoln saw that slavery was incompatible with the principles of the Founding. Would the United States be a nation committed to the equal natural rights laid out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration in which slavery would eventually go extinct, or would it be a slaveholders’ republic where natural rights were irrelevant? Lincoln had laid out his anti-slavery philosophy most notably in his debates with Stephan A Douglas. He had put the Founders firmly in the anti-slavery camp. Unlike the radicals of his day, Lincoln believed that slavery could be driven to extinction in America only under the Constitution, and the careful path he trod to that end was the wise statesmanship of principled prudence, not evidence of evolution or flip-flopping on slavery. Absolute moral righteousness, regardless of the actual consequences, is the standard by which the leftist iconoclasts judge historical figures today – rather than wise statecraft, leadership, or even practical results in achieving the goals they claim to care about. Lincoln knew that liberty, for the slaves and everyone else, was not possible without the Union and the Constitution. And Lincoln freed the slaves – while these vandals have done nothing more impressive than tear down statues of great Americans.
WAR ON PATRIOTISM – ASSIMILATION AND NATIONALISM: Teddy Roosevelt offered an inclusive vision of American nationalism. The left sees the “cultural imperialism” that demands immigrants assimilate to the country and flag that they live under as offensive. Until recently, there was a common consensus about immigration, immigrants were allowed in based on what was good for the country. There was the strong expectation that new arrivals would attempt to conform to American culture, learn English and assimilate to their new country. Today, the very term “melting pot,” is considered a “microaggression” on some college campuses. The idea of assimilation borders on hate speech. Roosevelt’s idea of progress was unity, not division. He offered a vision for America to become both a nation of immigrants and a nation of citizens with undivided loyalty – Americanism pure and simple.
Roosevelt had no tolerance for what he called “hyphenated Americans:” “A hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish, or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.” To Roosevelt being an American was about more than asserting your rights. It was about your duty to the country – the burden of citizenship. The ethos of Americanism could provide a healthy alternative to the multiculturalism that is breeding noxious forms of tribal identity politics. Roosevelt loathed the concept of being a “citizen of the world.” “Our business is with our own people,” he wrote.
America has found a way to blend the most diverse assortment of people in a single nation. It has accomplished this by building a unique system of government that divides political power through federalism, protects individual liberties and fosters a welcoming culture that is certainly among the most strongly assimilatory in human history. These factors make America both an unrivaled superpower and a highly desirable place to live. But times have changed. Today, the patriotic spirit of Theodore Roosevelt is being purged from American life. Social commentators denounce America as intolerant and xenophobic – a nation devoted to “white supremacy” at its core. It is telling that 21st century activists condemn America and its immigration laws as racist yet at the same time demand that more people from allegedly oppressed groups be brought into the country through an open border. If they really believed that America was so truly awful, they would be desperately trying to get racial minorities out of this country instead of in. From the time this country was founded, people have risked their lives to get into America. The reason for that is the unique cultural, legal, economic, and constitutional traditions of the U.S., the ones that Roosevelt extolled and attempt to pass on.
THE WAR ON AMERICA’S 20TH CENTURY: The heart of American strength, the reason it leapfrogged over Great Britain and ultimately defeated the twin evils of fascism and communism, is in part the astounding and transformative nature of the American economic system. No people were better able to harness the awesome power of the market economy that Americans. As much as American-style capitalism comes under fire today, there is no question that it has created more wealth for more people than any other system in human history.
The U.S. and Great Britain not only freed the people of Europe they went about giving them protection from the Soviet menace after the war. This included their Axis foes, Germany and Japan, which were occupied after the war but put on a path to independence. The American victors were true liberators, not conquerors. The distinction between them and the Soviets couldn’t be starker. Given what a good international citizen Japan has been of the past 75 years, it’s easy to forget just how malignant the country had become in the 1930s and 1940s. While we remember the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany – the extermination of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” – we tend to forget even the most notorious of Japan’s atrocities the “Rape of Nanking” following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which horrified even Nazi observers. This is not to mention the barbarous acts committed on American, British, and other prisoners of war. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the last chapter of the “terrible 20th century.” It was a victory for capitalism over communism in the rawest sense. But under the surface was something more than a simple contest of raw production. The American system was more moral than the communist one. America was one nation, under God, the Soviet Union was a nation in which the state was God.
We now ruthlessly attack the sins of the past with no context and little understanding of the world previous generations inhabited. Instead. if feeling smug self-righteousness about our superiority and selectively combing through history to find fault, perhaps it is better to take a step back and recognize that the good and the great can exist in a flawed world.
Informed but unambivalent patriotism is being replace with moral equivalence, ignorance, and outright hostility toward our country and its history. American now looks at an uneasy future in which its best men and ideas are being forgotten or maligned. The U.S. is bringing in more immigrants than at any time since the turn of the 20th century, and many of the newcomers are from non-Western environments with little connection to a culture of liberty, civic participation, and free government. It’s a sobering thought, but not all hope is lost. The first stage in American restoration lies in rekindling informed patriotism. Making America great again isn’t about returning to a fanciful past; rather, it’s about restoring a better way of looking to the future. American history is not an unending trail of rosiness, success, and progress. But focus too much on what is unexceptional about America – the flaws in human nature that are universal to mankind – and we can easily miss what is exceptional.
Today, we look at history backwards. Instead of trying to understand why America has produced so much good, we reject the past wholesale because it doesn’t meet an impossible high, ever-evolving standard. Tearing down great Americans isn’t just harmful to our understanding of the past; it is poisoning our bonds of citizenship in the present and threatening to destroy our future.
Source: The War on History by Jarret Stepman, 2019.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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