Teaching American History in an Age of Woke-ism*

The Wall Street Journal recently had a review of a new book about Berlin after World War II – and especially the Airlift.¹  It looks fascinating.  I have read other books about the Airlift and have been to Berlin to see the sights of it – more than once.  It is a great story: How we turned a former enemy into an enduring friend, while defending freedom in the heart of Europe.² 

But I wonder how the Airlift is taught in school today.  Well, it probably isn’t.  But I wonder how it would be taught, if it was.  Would it be taught as a triumph of American policy and determination.  As a success story in the early days of the Cold War.  Something for Americans to be proud of.

Or would teachers, in an effort to put it into today’s new context, talk more about race discrimination in the armed forces at the time?³  About how Black soldiers were in Europe and Germany to, inter alia, protect the freedom of West Berlin, while they and their families back home did not have that same freedom in the United States.

The history of slavery, and discrimination against Blacks (as well as other minorities), must be taught.  What I am wondering, however, is how the rest of American history is taught.  Because there is, at least to me, more to American history than slavery, discrimination, and oppression.

Is the American Revolution about the Declaration of Independence, Saratoga and Yorktown, or just the hypocrisy of slaveholders talking about all men being created equal?  Is westward expansion about the transcontinental railroad and the Homestead Act or just how badly we treated the Native Americans.⁴  

Obviously, the way history is taught reflects the values and understandings of the time when it is taught.  It has always been that way.  But how history is taught also affects the values and understanding of those who are being taught, and this can affect the future.  Let me give an example

When I took American history in high school in the mid-60s, American history was still being taught, at least to some extent, through the lens of the “Lost Cause” view of the Civil War.  In places in the south, the Lost Cause theory taught that the Confederacy’s fight was just and was based on protection of states’ rights.  Even in the north, the Lost Cause theory affected what we were taught.  Southern leaders, like Robert E. Lee, were seen as almost noble, torn between loyalty to their state and loyalty to their country.⁵  The North only won because it was bigger and could use its industrial power to crush the South.

This view emphasized Lincoln’s desire to reconcile with the southerners after the war, as he said in the last paragraph of his Second Inaugural:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

But Lincoln was assassinated, and reconciliation didn’t happen.  I was taught this was fault of the Radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted to treat the South like a conquered territory.  Instead of reconciliation, northern carpetbaggers and speculators went south to rule over the southerners, to exploit the south economically and gain political power.  If only Lincoln had lived, things would have been different. 

Except, the more I read, the more I realized this wasn’t what happened.  Yes, Abraham Lincoln wanted reconciliation.  But he didn’t live long enough to see that southerners weren’t interested in reconciliation if it meant treating the freed slaves as people having rights and votes.  The southerners were willing to give up independence and slavery, but they weren’t willing to accept Blacks as their equal.

We don’t know what Abraham Lincoln would have done once he was faced with a stubbornly recalcitrant South.  But I think we can make a pretty good guess based on how the views and attitudes of his best general, Ulysses S. Grant, changed.  Brooks D. Simpson’s book, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868, tells the story of Grant from the beginning of the war in 1861 until he was elected president in 1868.  Grant started out like Lincoln, focusing on saving the Union.  But his views changed during the four years of war and then in the post-war period as it became clear that the southerners would not reconcile to Black freedom and equality.  In the introduction to his book, Simpson described how Grant changed:

“If the Civil War was politics by other means, then Reconstruction was in some sense a continuation of the struggle to achieve through political means the aims for which the war was fought. …

Whatever Grant’s early interest in maintaining order and keeping the war within certain conventional and limited bounds to enhance reconciliation, he accepted the broadening of war aims to include emancipation and social change because of the persistence of Southern resistance.  A similar process characterized Grants’ attitude toward postwar reconstruction.  His initial interest in promoting reunification between Northern and Southern whites as the best way to restore order eroded when obdurate former Confederates, encouraged by Andrew Johnson’s acquiescence and apathy, turned to discriminatory statutes and terrorism to fight emancipation and its consequences – demonstrating that they did not accept the verdict of Appomattox.  Once again, escalating resistance bred revolution.  Grant concluded that changes in the Constitution and in the postwar status of the freedmen were essential to preserve and protect the victory of the Union.”

I think Lincoln would have changed much the same way.  Lincoln wanted to reunite the country, and he wanted to reconcile the north and the south.  But just as he would not accept expansion of slavery to avoid war in 1861, he would not have accepted subjugation of the freed slaves as the price for reconciliation after the war.  The Radical Republicans weren’t thwarting what Lincoln would have done.  They were trying to accomplish what Lincoln would have wanted.

But that is not what I was taught.  I wasn’t taught that Reconstruction was about securing the rights of greed slaves and stopping the terrorism of groups like the Ku Klux Klan against them.  While I knew Plessy v. Ferguson was morally wrong, I didn’t fully understand why it was legally wrong.⁶

Obviously, the racism after the Civil War and into the 1900s was the main reason Blacks were discriminated against (and those Amendments were misread).  But a proper understanding of Reconstruction and of the purpose and meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments might have helped us address that racism sooner. 

In a blog post a long time ago, I talked about a song in the musical “South Pacific”: “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”  Many students of my generation and before were “carefully taught” a view of American history that was wrong.  I wonder if America might have been able to do something about ideas like “separate but equal” earlier if the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction had been properly taught.

Which is what I worry about with respect to woke-ism, or critical race theory or whatever you call it, and how it affects the way American history is taught today.  The Lost Cause theory was wrong.  But so is the idea that United States history is just about slavery: that slavery is the principle on which America was founded; that maintaining slavery is the reason we declared independence; and that slavery and what followed is the basis on which everything today should be viewed.

The effects of the Lost Cause theory lasted from Plessy to Brown v. Board of Education and beyond.  I worry that the woke-ism approach to American history is wrong in much the same way, focusing on group identity as opposed to what people can do themselves.

I understand the United States isn’t perfect.  We never have been.  But our founding principle was not slavery.  Our Founders set a goal that “All men are created equal,”⁷ even if they didn’t live up to it.  But that goal has been the guiding star for our better angels, and for better angels all over the world, for almost 250 years.  We haven’t gotten there yet, and we may never get there, because human beings aren’t perfect.  But we have gotten as close as we have, closer than anybody else has, because our guiding star has been “all men are created equal,” not that it is about what group you belong to.

It seems too many people today think American history should be taught on a basis of a woke-ism that talks only about what we have done wrong and sees our history as being about what group people are in, a history that tells people that their future is not determined by what they do but is set by what group they are part of.  I worry that such an approach will lead people to think that, if their future is already and there is nothing they can do to make it better, there is no reason to try.

For the country as a whole, such an approach could lead to a similar giving up.  Or it could lead to an overreaction leading people to think the only thing to do is to tear down the whole system and start anew.  Which may be the greater danger.  The United States is not perfect, but we are better than any other system anybody has come up with.  The Lost Cause theory led us down the wrong road for too long.  We need to make sure that a woke-ism approach to American history does not do the same thing.
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* I say “Woke-ism,” instead of Critical Race Theory, because I don’t want to get into a discussion on what Critical Race Theory means or doesn’t mean.  I’m talking about a general concept, not a specific legal theory.
¹ I say “Airlift,” instead of “Berlin Airlift,” because to me there was only one Airlift.
² For more on the Airlift, see here. 
³ Harry Truman issued an order to end segregation in the Armed Forces on July 26, 1948.  The Airlift started a month earlier.
⁴ I am not sure how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 fits into this view of history.
⁵ I never understood why Robert E. Lee, a traitor to the United States and a man who violated his oath to serve his country, was considered a hero while Ulysses S. Grant was not.  In the early 2000s, the University of Virginia had a program where students could borrow money and were on their honor to pay it back.  Somehow, UVa thought it appropriate to call these “Lee Loans.”  (I assume the name has been changed by now.)  I was also appalled by the fact streets and roads in Virginia, even the suburbs of Washington, D.C., were named after Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, etc.  The effects of the Lost Cause theory lasted a long time.
⁶ See this post about how the Supreme Court in Plessy misread the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
⁷ For those who complain that this is discrimination because it doesn’t say “women,” I say two things.  First, that’s not the way language was used then.  There were plenty of instances when “men” meant all people.  Second, it is true that men and women were treated differently then, but we’ve changed, and if you don’t think that “All men are created equal” doesn’t include women today, that’s your choice; it’s not what the language says.