NATIONAL REVIEW
MARCH 28, 2005 VOL. LVII, NO. 5

A Sense of Awe

A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery
to the War on Terror, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (Sentinel, 944 pp., $29.95) $20 from Amazon.com

Review by MATTHEW SPALDING


The most influential historian among today’s college students isn’t David
McCullough, despite the wide public appeal of his several books. It’s

likely an obscure writer named Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the
United States has gone through five editions and several printings, and sold well
over a million copies. It should come as no surprise that the book has been
successful mostly because college professors and high-school teachers
require the book in their classes.

A People’s History, as the title might suggest, is written from a

neo-Marxist perspective. The book is, in Zinn’s words, a “history
disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of
resistance,” portraying states and statesmen as pawns of bourgeois elites
standing in the way of the proletarian revolution. One comment about the
movement from the Old World to the New sums up the thesis: “Behind the
English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their
deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in
civilizations based on private profit.” All history, in the end, is the
history of class struggle.

The more basic problem is that A People’s History is not all that extreme
by today’s academic standards. Variations on the argument, seen through the
prisms of class, race, and gender studies, dominate almost any mainstream
U.S. history textbook. Indeed, Zinn’s radical history is but part of the
intellectual transformation wrought by progressive historians (starting
with Carl Becker, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Charles Beard) who, over the
course of the 20th century, declared American ideas and institutions
outdated and oppressive, a barrier to change and reform. The result has
been a constant deconstruction of the past according to the latest take on
> societal evolution.

 

Hearkening back to the histories and historians of the more distant past,
A Patriot’s History of the United States is a new book that takes a very
different approach to the course of human events. Rather than viewing
those events as mere steps in an ever-advancing march of liberal history, it
sees individuals and their ideas, and by extension nations and their
principles, as the motivating force. And so it takes seriously the thoughts and
actions of political figures: It demonstrates that qualities of deliberation and
decision, character and virtue, matter deeply. Flaws and mistakes are
there, too, but they are just that, which is to say they are exceptions and not
the rule. The book doesn’t reinterpret history according to the academic
fashion but seeks to present history as it happened, trying to understand the
intentions of the main actors and the movement of events.

A Patriot’s History has its idiosyncrasies, to be sure; like any sweeping
epic, it isn’t perfect. But as an antidote to A People’s History and its
comrades, the book succeeds mightily. Consider how the two books treat the
American Founding. In A People’s History, the American Founders are said
to have “created the most effective system of national control devised in
modern times” in order to “take over land, profits, and political power
from the favorites of the British Empire . . . and create a consensus of
popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” It’s a modern
adaptation of the Beard thesis that our greedy forefathers plotted for
their own economic interest. At best, the American Revolution is a misstep in
the sweeping struggle for democracy on the part of disenfranchised and
underprivileged groups searching for social justice.

In contrast, A Patriot’s History rejects the economic determinism of
Beard, Zinn, and others who “wrongly assume that people were (and are) incapable
of acting outside of self-interest.” Instead, the book lets history tell a
different story, of a concern for the common good and equal rights, the
public interest and popular self-government under the rule of law. And so
it spends considerable time developing the ideas of the American Revolution,
the theory of republican government, the importance of religion and the
concept of religious liberty, the lessons of the early state constitutions
and the Articles of Confederation, the arguments of the Federalists and
the Anti-Federalists, and the extensive debates about the Constitution. “No
matter how Beard and his successors torture the statistics, they cannot
make the Constitutional Convention scream ‘class struggle,’” the authors
conclude. “The debate was genuine; it was about important ideas, and men
took positions not for what they gained financially but for what they saw
as the truth.”

A Patriot’s History is biased in its own way, of course, for it assumes
that “if the story of America’s past is told fairly, the result cannot be
anything but a deepened patriotism, a sense of awe at the obstacles
overcome, the passions invested, the blood and tears spilled, and the
nation that was built.” Anything that has to do with patriotism has long been
controversial in academic circles. The idea that the teaching of American
history might actually foster patriotism is to some deeply problematic.
The rejected assumption, which is the foundation of A Patriot’s History, is
that there are principles and purposes reflected in American history that make
this imperfect country worthy of our affection, and that honest history
should explain those principles and illustrate those purposes as the
centerpiece of our nation’s story.

”Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country,” Noah
Webster wrote in 1788. “As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse
the history of his own country.” Not for the sake of a national myth meant to
create blind affection, but to prompt an enlightened love of country — or,
as Webster put it, to “implant in the minds of the American youth the
principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal
ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own
country.”

As study after study shows that our students know less and less about our
history, and at a time when our deepest principles and national
convictions are — sometimes literally — under attack at home and abroad, A Patriot’s
History is a welcome, refreshing, and solid contribution to relearning
what we have forgotten and remembering why this nation is good, and worth
defending.

Mr. Spalding directs the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at
the Heritage Foundation.