By practicing the craft of tracing history that they themselves reject, we can see how we get the revisionist historians who, for better or worse, mostly the latter, now dominate academia.
“Most of the work of academic historians today can portray the American story in no other terms except those of oppressor and oppressed,” Professor Clyde Wilson notes. “No society has ever had more professional historians and devoted more resources to historical work of all kinds—or produced more useless, irrelevant and downright pernicious products—than modern America.”
“I know an historian who teaches that the great Virginians of the American Revolution were like the Taliban—presumably because they carried weapons and were not feminists,” Professor Wilson said when accepting The Rockford Institute’s John Randolph award. “This is to reduce human experience to a paltry and partial perspective, to remove from it everything that is worthwhile and ennobling, usable and true.”
“But his is what academic historians mostly do these days.” Professor Wilson, who obviously rejects this approach, is a distinguished professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He went on to give the audience at the San Antonio event Exhibit A of the modern historical approach—Eric Foner.
“Professor Foner, at the time of the Fall of the Soviet Union, was organizing public statements urging Russian leaders to save the noble communist experiment by crushing the Baltic Peoples with the same ruthlessness, as he put it, with which Lincoln crushed the South,” Professor Wilson noted. “Foner has been elected president of the two most important academic historians’ organizations in the United States and is retained by the Disney Corporation as a consultant.”
Professor Foner teaches at Columbia, as did one of the formative influences in his life—Professor Richard Hofstadter.
A professor at Columbia, Hofstadter, who died in 1970, is the author of The American Political Tradition and The Men Who Made It. A seminal work of revisionist history, the book has gone through four editions. Interestingly, given Foner’s Cold War-Civil War analogy, Hofstadter manages to present a 44-page chapter on Lincoln in that book which never mentions the Gettysburg Address.
What are the consequences of the type of academic inbreeding in which the Hofstadters of yesterday give us the Foners of today? “Such historianship constitutes neither a contribution to knowledge nor a useful teaching for society’s young,” Professor Wilson concludes. “Such, however, is the educational regime that is being dispersed today with immense resources and the prestige of the supposedly learned.”
“Such malicious word games destroy the chance that we, or the rest of humanity, might gain wisdom from the stories of our forefathers.” What he said!
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
