Congress Flunks History

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According to the Institute for Intercollegiate Studies (ISI) 2008 Report on Civic Literacy, the average American gets a failing grade (49%) when asked sixty multiple-choice questions about American government, economics and history. “Fewer than half of all Americans can name all three branches of government, a minimal requirement for understanding America’s constitutional system,” write the ISI authors.

The new Capitol Visitors Center (CVC) Exhibition Hall does educate visitors about how a bill is passed, methods of debate in Congress, and key issues that Congress has addressed in the past—but on the issues of federalism, faith, and strict constitutionality the CVC’s critics give it a failing grade.

“As an expert in the U.S. Constitution and America’s founding, I thought I had lost the ability to be shocked by politically correct distortions of our history,” wrote Dr. Matthew Spalding, director of Heritage’s Center for American Studies. “Then I visited the new Capitol Visitor Center.”

Among Spalding’s complaints were how the Exhibit Hall

• omits “religion, morality and knowledge” from the 1787 Northwest Ordinance,

• replaces limitations on Congressional power with six “aspirations,”
• furthers a liberal, administrative government perspective, and
• incorrectly cited the nation’s motto as “E Pluribus Unum.”

The United States official motto is “In God We Trust,” which Spalding noted was “notably absent, along with other references to faith” in his December 2 column. Current visitors to the CVC will find this phrase displayed in raised letters in the left-side theater (E Pluribus Unum is etched into several places).

Under the “Unity” aspiration, the reference to E Pluribus Unum as the national motto has been plastered over, with the section now stating

“E Pluribus Unum—Out of many, one—expresses the ideals of our Union: many states, one nation. Representing all of the states, Congress has promoted national unity through a process of inquiry, debate, compromise, and consensus.”

Christopher Freund, Vice President of Policy and Communications at The Family Foundation (TFF), told this correspondent that TFF would like “In God We Trust” to be placed in a more prominent place than where it is now and for the exhibit to acknowledge America’s religious heritage.

Back in October, Victoria Cobb, President of TFF, pointed to other deliberate omissions of faith, including,

• “A picture of the Speaker in the House Chamber crops out the marble-engraved words ‘In God We Trust;’”
• “many historical errors in the information presented” in the Bill of Rights and the War of 1812, among others; and
• depicting Earth Day rallies but not the National Day of Prayer or March for Life.

Also notably absent from the exhibit: states rights, federalism, and limited government principles.

“[John] Randolph was impossible to ignore, appearing on the House floor with riding whip and hunting dogs. Brutal in debate, Randolph championed agrarian interests and limited government,” reads the plaque below a portrait of the famous Virginian Senator. “‘I am an aristocrat,’ he proclaimed, ‘I love liberty, I hate equality.’ But the country soon passed Randolph by as manufacturing interests grew and politics became more democratic,” it states (emphasis added).

According to author Russell Kirk, Randolph was a famous southern slaveholder and Senator inspired by Edmund Burke and dedicated to states rights and limited government. “The most singular great man in American history” Randolph “passionately denounced the democratic proclivity to enlarge the sphere of positive law,” and set himself against both Federalists and Jeffersonian-Republicans, Kirk writes in The Conservative Mind. “For [Randolph], prescriptive right, common law, and custom afford the real guarantees of justice and liberty. Once men commence tinkering with the body of government, lopping and adding and stimulating and new-modeling, they imperil those old prerogatives and immunities which are the fruit of many generations of growth,” he writes.

The majority of the themes within the exhibit reinforce the opposite philosophy: that Congress’ mission is to expand positive rights. Under the 1877-1913 “Coming of Age” section, visitors are told that “By the turn of the century, reformers in Congress were pressing for new ways to make government more responsive to the needs of poor farmers, laborers, and urban dwellers.”

In “Expanding Missions” (1913-1945), viewers learn that “At home, Congress addressed the crisis of the Great Depression, beginning with an outpouring of economic recovery legislation in the first 100 days of its 1933 session.” They do not learn, however, that some scholars posit that legislative policies actually harmed America’s ability to recover from the Great Depression nor that New Deal policies, later compounded by the Great Society, have caused a massive increase in entitlement spending.

The federal liability of $52 trillion for Medicare and Social Security was overlooked when discussing all the additional civil liberties, entitlements, and “responsive” laws provided by the legislature.

The exhibit devotes four sentences to the Cold War (a number of photographs depict the Berlin Wall) and one sentence to the death toll of the Civil War. “At the cost of 600,000 lives, the war ended slavery and strengthened the federal government,” reads the section “Preserving the Union” (1851-1877).

“As if to symbolize Washington’s growing role, the Capitol was enlarged during the war and topped with a massive new dome.”

This section has glaring inaccuracies, claiming that “the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed residents of each of these new territories, rather than Congress, to decide whether to permit slavery. While intending to keep the nation together, this act inflamed sectional tensions, producing open warfare between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas, and led directly to the Civil War” (emphasis added).

Actually, the Civil War resulted directly from Abraham Lincoln’s decision to send troops to hold Fort Sumter, a fort within secessionist South Carolina. “[The attack on Fort Sumter] was the visible symbol that the war had begun…yet when the guns were fired they merely ratified decisions which Lincoln and [Jefferson] Davis had already made,” wrote Bruce Catton and James McPherson in The Civil War.

“Both men had made up their minds to fight rather than to yield, and each man had come to see Fort Sumter as the place for the showdown.”

The display earlier noted that “The addition of each new state to the Union rattled the delicate political balance carved out by compromises in Congress.” One such Congressional agreement was the Missouri Compromise, later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Without this ruling, the Kansas-Nebraska Act would not have been necessary.

“A visit to the U.S. Capitol is a study in U.S. history, government, and civics,” states the CVC website. “This learning experience also parallels students’ learning in the classroom about their immediate community and local and state history and government.” (E.D. Unfortunately, this may be true).

The site details the national standards in each of these subjects, but it seems unlikely that the CVC, with its $621 million price tag—more than double the original estimate— actually meets them.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.