American History 101

Don't know much about history? Do your kids only know America as an imperialist, warmongering nation? A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror might be the book for you.

A Patriot's History is just short of 1,000 pages written by two conservative history professors, Larry Schweikart (University of Dayton) and Michael Allen (University of Washington, Tacoma). It's not only a primer on American history, but a friendly primer — sometimes a rarity among such books.

Professor Schweikart spoke to NRO's Kathryn Lopez this week about the book, and since it's Presidents' Day time, he hails a few chiefs.

National Review Online:So how different is your history of the United States from, say, Howard Zinn's?

Larry Schweikart: They are as different as night and day. We assume that people usually mean what they say; that they don't always have hidden motivations; and that ideas are more important than "class" or "race" or "gender." Under more normal times, our book would simply be entitled, A History of the United States, because it is accurate.

Schweikart: Absolutely not. As we say in the intro/jacket flap, we reject "My Country, Right or Wrong," but we equally reject "My Country, Always Wrong." I think you'll find us quite critical of such aspects of our past-such as the Founders' unwillingness to actually act on slavery on at least three separate occasions; or about Teddy Roosevelt's paternalistic regulations and his anti-business policies. On the other hand, as conservatives, we nevertheless destroy the myth that FDR "knew" about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Instead, we try to always put the past in the context of the time — why did people act then as they did, and was that typical?

Schweikart: First, as a military leader, there was simply no other general in the Revolution who could have kept the northern colonial armies together under those conditions and simultaneously maintained the support of the Continental Congress. People forget that he not only had to inspire soldiers, conduct a war, acquire rations, but on a daily basis deal with the political demands of the Congress. That's no small feat.

Second, he was indispensable as the first president: It's hard to imagine, say, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson setting the same kinds of incredible precedents that Washington set, both for decorum and for efficiency. Adams would have (as he later did) alienated half the country, and Jefferson would have lacked the diplomacy to pull the Federalists along.

Schweikart: Of course, everyone "knows" any story or we wouldn't know it, but I'd say one of the most impressive untold stories in the American past is that of the buffalo. Everyone "knows" that whites nearly exterminated the herds. That's true. What few people know — although these views are starting to gain a wider circulation — is that the Indians were on a trajectory to wipe out the bison herds had whites never been interfered. Shepard Kretch and Andrew Isenberg, in separate studies, have shown that the Indians were already killing buffalo slightly faster than herds could repopulate. But what is most fascinating is that it was white ranchers and businessmen who recognized that the herds were shrinking, and who acted to save them by breeding them on private ranches. Eventually it was these private herds that made up the stock of the famous Yellowstone herd.

NRO: What are some of the biggest lies in American history textbooks, in your estimation?

Schweikart: The two that stand out are that the New Deal "got us out of the Depression," which few texts say explicitly but which almost all strongly imply; and that it was reforms under Michael Gorbachev, not the efforts of Ronald Reagan, that ended the Cold War. We provide a chart that I have not seen anywhere else, which is a 50-year look at the New Deal: What did these programs look like 50 years down the road? Of course, they were all disasters. Social Security is in crisis; the farm subsidies had to be repealed; the FSLIC probably contributed to the S&L crash of the late 1970s and early 1980s; and so on.

NRO: Walter Matthau won six [battle] stars in World War II? Was he Walter Matthau then? Was this typical of Hollywood?

Schweikart: You got me as to how much of a leading man he was. He, like many, was early in his career — -their ages alone dictated that. But many already were established stars, and, yes, it was typical of Hollywood. Virtually all of the males in the movie industry went to war (many volunteered), and many saw severe combat. We recount how Lee Marvin's unit lost all but five of almost 250 men (and, of course, Marvin survived). Telly Savalas was badly wounded. And on and on. John Wayne got an exemption for his large family, but he still made war propaganda movies. John Ford shot documentaries; Disney made propaganda cartoons. In short, all of Hollywood contributed to beat the Nazis. Look, today, at how far away from that model they've drifted, except for some welcome lights like Ron Silver and James Woods.

NRO: Who's the most rewritten/misunderstood/misremembered figure in our history?

Schweikart: This would have to be Silent Cal Coolidge. He was a president who had unparalleled prosperity and five years of peace and who had an unemployment rate of 1.4 percent, yet the history of his administration was largely written by liberals and New Dealers who hated him. As we see today with President Bush, they especially didn't like the fact that he wasn't a "party animal," and that he went to bed at a normal hour. Worse, he didn't talk to the press much — they really hate you for that!

NRO: How do you hope the history books tell the Ronald Reagan story? Let's say you have a paragraph to relay his place in American history.

Schweikart: Ronald Reagan was a brilliant communicator who taught himself politics. During his years at GE, then later on the "rubber chicken" circuit, Reagan learned how to condense sophisticated political issues into language that average Americans could understand. This constantly left his political enemies baffled, convinced he was a simpleton. He perceptively cut through the two most pressing problems of the day — a bloated federal government with high taxation levels and the threat of the Soviet Union. In eight years, he had drastically reduced taxes (though failed to do much about the size of government) and he defeated the "Evil Empire" without firing a shot.

NRO: On lists of stand-out presidents — "the best" — is there anyone typically missing?

Schweikart: Besides Coolidge, historians almost always leave Grover Cleveland off these lists, and he was a great president. He was the last true "small government" Democrat...ever. He fought the Army's pension funding (which had gotten completely out of control) and clung to the gold standard, to the chagrin of his leftward-moving party. Mike and I put Cleveland in the top six or seven presidents.

NRO: If you had one day to spend in a high-school history class, with probably at shot at making only one point stick, what would it be?

Schweikart: That regardless of America's faults, it has always aspired to be a "city on a hill" and, more often than not, has attained that goal. It remains a beacon of liberty throughout the world, so much so that people still risk their lives just to come here and, despite threats to do so by the Hollywood elites after every election, they do not leave. I only need ask these students, "Can you think of any other country, really, where you'd rather live today?"

History may be correct in stating that we failed to address Slavery on three occasions, this is no reason for the manner that Slavery is taught in the United States schools.

History taught in the American schools would have the student believe that the United States was responsible for the selling and transportation of all the African slaves.

Correct history would inform the American students that the Muslims were among the first slave traders, walking the Africans West to East. The seafaring nations were next. Portugal, Spain, France, England, Holland, were the buyers and transporters of the majority of the slaves moved from Africa to the New World. The United States did very little in the way of buying slaves in Africa and their transportation to the New World. 5% of all the slaves that landed in the Americas landed in what now is the United States, the balance to the Caribbean and South America to work in the sugar cane fields. History taught as it occured would help greatly in racial relation problem we have in this country.

I am always amazed at ethnic groups assuming Muslim names El this and Al that when you consider the part the Muslims had in the practice of slavery then and now.

The REAL and FACTUAL info on the beginning of the Viet Nam war.

26 Sep 1945 - The first death of an American serviceman in Vietnam occurred.
OSS (Office of Special Operations) Major (Lieutenant Colonel) A. Peter Dewey
was killed in action by the Communist Vietminh near Hanoi.
May 1950 President Harry S Truman authorised $10 million in aid to the French for their war in Viet Nam.
By January 1951, $150 million had been given in aid.
1953-61 Dwight D. Eisenhower 34th US President
1953-61 Richard M. Nixon Vice President
1953 - The US is supporting the French in the amount of $1 billion per year--
33% of all US foreign aid--which is 80% of the total cost to the
. US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (under Eisenhower) first voices the 'Domino Theory':
if one country in Southeast Asia falls to the Communists, they will all fall, one by one.
12 Feb 55 - President Eisenhower's administration sends 1st 350 U.S. advisers to South Vietnam
to train the South Vietnamese Army
8 Jun 56 - The first American of record to die in Vietnam
was Air Force Tech Sergeant Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr.
His son, Richard B. Fitzgibbon III, died in Vietnam Sep 7, 1965.
8 Jun 56 Has been formally recognized by the Pentagon as the first American officially to die in that war.
5 Sep 56 - President Eisenhower tells a news conference that the French are
"involved in a hopelessly losing war in Indochina" 1956 The US believed in that Ho Chi Minh would have won any election held in Viet Nam and used their influence over the government of the State of Viet Nam to ensure that the election was not held

From a Must Visit Site
Vipers Vietnam Veterans Page, A Vietnam Veteran & Proud Web Site
About Vietnam

The Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history.
1st American advisor was killed on June 08, 1956,
and the last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled. Officially there are still 1,991 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia.

Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said: "ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran. For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win. They were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, most neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they'd tasked their soldiers. And the war was reported by a self serving Media who penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations because they were more interested in a story than the truth! It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.

I think it might be useful for my kids to read both your book and A People's History of the United States, so that they can earn a powerful understanding of the left in university "mentality," as regards Orwell's famous dystopian aphorism, "Who controls the present, controls the past..."

I have some questions for you in that regard: This year, the girls have finished a Roman History reading that included Plutarch, Tacitus, Cicero, Bourne, Caesar, and Gibbon. They are now ages 11 and 12. My goal is to spend the next couple of years on the development of Western Civ and then at least two years on American history, emphasizing the political/economic philosophical foundation of the American Revolution. Will your book serve as an adequate exposition of the Enlightenment toward an understanding of the American Revolution, or should we rely upon original source material and use yours as a framework? Do you have a supplementary syllibus to recommend, especially as regards pre-revolutionary settlements and European colonial operations in the rest of the Americas? Can you recommend a supplementary text that places that history in global context?

Our book should be ok for explaining the Enlightenment concepts in relation to U.S. intellectual development. Rather than re-list everything here, just check our notes for ch. 1-3, which are quite extensive. Edmond Wright, "Search for Liberty" is a good secondary source on the colonial era. Middlekauf's "Glorious Cause," recently re-released, is still the best on the Revolution, along with Fisher's "Paul Revere" and a little book called "The Minutemen and their World." Check my "Entrepreneurial Adventure" for economic/business-related colonial-era sources. I don't have a syllabus, because I don't teach colonial/Revolution. You might check "The European Miracle" for "putting the U.S. developments in a broader context. But watch out that you don't get into too much "west and the world" PC crap, which is the trend these days, diminishing the European accomplishments and elevating other cultures (many of which did not even have the wheel).

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