Texas & Identity Politics

On March 19, 2010, The New York Times published an article entitled: “In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right,” a reproduction of which was sent to me by Albert Nekimken of Vienna, Virginia. I sent it back with my comments interjected in bold text. I set forth below the article with my interjections, but urge you to read the full article first.

  Frankly, my reaction to the article was that it was a presentation cheering for the Right, thinly disguised as neutral, and my comments reflect that. However, in preparing this for posting on my blog I belatedly decided to find out more about the author, Sam Tanenhaus. It turns out that he is “the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's ‘Week in Review’ section.” I refer you to Newsweek here for more on the author, who it appears recently wrote “a new, short book, entitled “The Death of Conservatism." In any case I reproduce the article below with my interjections and would welcome the readers reactions.

------

The social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas Board of Education, which will put a conservative stamp on textbooks, was received less as a pedagogical document than as the latest provocation in America’s seemingly endless culture wars.

“Why Is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?” the History News Network asked, referring to the board’s recommendation that Jefferson, who coined the expression “separation of church and state,” be struck from the list of world thinkers who inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions.

Other critics were more direct: “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History,” was the headline of an online column for The San Francisco Chronicle.

This reaction wasn’t altogether surprising. The board’s wrangling over the curriculum had been a spectacle for months, not least because its disputes mirrored those taking place across the nation. In mid-September, citizens showed up with firearms at tumultuous town hall meetings on health care reform, and the Tea Party movement emerged as the vehicle of conservative insurgents. While this appears to be a national phenomenon, I believe it is primarily inspired by what is generally referred to as "rednecks" and is driven by such unreconstructed Southerners.

The majority on the Texas board, who are also conservatives, seemed to be filtering these protests into their deliberations — in the proposal, for instance, that students be instructed in “the individual right to keep and bear arms; and an individual’s protection of private property from government takings.”

Liberals — on the Texas board and beyond — detected an attempt to force-feed children conservative dogma, whether it was the putative religiosity of the nation’s founders, the historic contribution of the Moral Majority and Rush Limbaugh, or the elevation of John Wayne into the pantheon of patriotic heroes.

In reality, this controversy is the latest version of a debate that reaches back many decades and is perhaps essential in a heterogeneous democracy whose identity has long been in flux.

More than many decades and is most definitely not essential. I think it finds its roots in the pre-civil war South and reflects the views of the unreconstructed South, or as this group is sometimes referred to "rednecks". It was certainly empowered in the 60s as a result of the Civil Rights era, which embittered these groups and promoted them to hate the federal government, which was destroying their beloved feudal society - their essentially continuing slave society of sharecroppers.

It was very evident a while ago when the controversy over honoring pre-civil war symbols erupted. I find it outrageous that this would be permitted. They claim it is part of their heritage and indeed it is. To me it is like the heritage of the Nazis in Germany. Can anybody envision Germany allowing honoring the Nazis because it is part of their heritage?

In the 18th century, the American writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, himself an immigrant from France, catalogued the continent’s bewildering mix of “English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.” He wondered, “What then is the American, this new man?”

He concluded that in America, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”

This of course is the mythical melting pot which Moynihan & Glazer debunked in their book "Beyond the Melting Pot" published in 1963 and again debunked by the Washington Post in a series of articles in 1998.

That idea was later fortified by Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of American exceptionalism, which suggested that the country was exempt from the bitter conflicts — class, religion, imperial ambition — that had convulsed Europe. This was wishful thinking and a misreading. De Tocqueville died on the eve of the Civil War. To be sure the US was for most of its existence less class stratified than Europe but in recent years the US has moved to a more class society with income being re-distributed upward, while Europe has moved in the opposite direction.

Long afterward, amid America’s own convulsions in the 1960s and ’70s, the concept of a single “race of men” looked outmoded. Didn’t race mean “white race”? And didn’t “men” exclude women? American exceptionalism might really be a form of cultural insularity. Of course this is true!!!

So, universities and colleges devised new programs that prompted objections as fierce as those now being made to the Texas curriculum. These objections were a movement to preserve the status quo and the Texas case is a movement to achieve the status quo-ante.

In 1968, when Harvard students demanded a black studies program, “Faculty hawks warned of the fall of Harvard, and even civilization, as they knew it,” as Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller note in “Making Harvard Modern.”

Soon an ever widening range of subjects, from gay studies to feminist legal theory and anthropology, were added, in keeping with the dictates of identity politics. Some of this thinking eventually filtered to grade schools, with children now celebrating Kwanzaa and composing essays, year after year, on the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Many of the changes were liberating, but some were narrowing and erroneous — for instance the theories espoused by Leonard Jeffries Jr., who, as head of City College’s black studies department in the 1980s, lectured on the differences between African “sun people” and European “ice people.” It is unfortunate but every movement will breed its own excesses, and even reverse racism, as was the case with Jeffries.

Meanwhile, conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney defended syllabuses limited to the Western classics, and the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that attacks on the “Eurocentric curriculum,” as some called it, were giving rise to “the notion that history and literature should be taught not as disciplines but as therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.” With all due respect to Schlesinger it was time to recognize that there was history and culture in other parts of the world besides the West. Of course in some respects the balance went too far in the other direction, but that is inevitable in any new movement.

In fact, Mr. Schlesinger maintained, these new courses of study might actually disserve minority students. “If a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to use the schools to disable and handicap black Americans, he could hardly come up with anything more effective than the ‘Afrocentric’ curriculum,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote. I don't understand the logic!

Though its authors say the Texas curriculum reinforces American traditions, It does - the unreconstructed South!! it may instead reflect the conservative variant of identity politics, and this could invite a similar backlash.

To be fair, some of the board’s recommendations aren’t controversial. Most scholars of the cold war, left and right, think that the Venona documents — communications that record the activities of Americans who secretly spied for the Soviet Union — illuminate the anti-Communist investigations of the McCarthy period. This is a very disturbing comment!! The Venoma documents have been used primarily to defend and justify the outrages of McCarthy and the House UN-AMERICAN committee, which not only ruined countless American lives, but did untold damage to American security. See "The Best and the Brightest" pp. 115-120 of 1992 edition.  And historians of the conservative movement will agree that Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly are worth learning about, as are the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association. That depends on the grade and how it is taught. If they are held up as role models it is right wing propaganda. If they are denounced, it is liberal propaganda. If they are discussed as a phenomenon, it may be all right, but it is very difficult to do this in an unbiased way, and not likely too succeed.

Even the Texas curriculum’s most disputed item — its assertion that the Founders envisioned America as a divinely inspired Christian nation — is not as radical as it sounds. I don't know whether it is radical, but it is not accurate. Most of the founders did not consider themselves Christians. They thought of themselves as deists and rejected revealed truths. In the Declaration of Independence, the reference is to "Nature's God.” That is definitely not a Christian God, and the Constitution makes no reference to God.

In 1964, in a series of lectures on America’s founding documents, starting with the Mayflower Compact, the political scientist Willmoore Kendall theorized that “the nascent society that interprets itself in the Compact is in some sense a religious, more specifically a Christian, society, which calls God in as witness to its act of founding.” If you go back to 1620, the date of the Compact, that is undoubtedly true. The early settlers were mostly devout Christians and very intolerant of deviation. They wanted religious liberty for themselves but not for others. But by the late 18th century the thinking in vogue was the enlightenment, and that inspired the founding fathers.

Mr. Kendall teased out the implications through close readings of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. But his analysis stressed the “symbolic” aspects of those texts, and his nuanced discussion drew on counterarguments by other scholars. I don't understand what this means.

In contrast, the Texas board’s description of America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation treats ideas and events that have been under continual reinterpretation and revision for decades as literal and settled truth. I don't understand what this means.

It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children — not, as in the past, college students — whose minds are being fought over today on such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of increasingly bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy. No longer? We haven't since the founding of the Republic. That is why the Civil War was fought and it wasn't just about secession. In fact secession showed the deep division. As did all that followed and the progressive eras of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Johnson did not put things to rest.

In “The American Political Tradition,” published in 1948, the historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that the fad for popular history at the time was evidence of “national nostalgia” — an effort not to understand the past, but rather to evade the present. “This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis,” he surmised. This I can agree with.

As it happens, a good deal of contemporary popular history is more critical than in Mr. Hofstadter’s day. But it is presented through an ever-narrowing aperture.

The late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” depicts the United States as an epic of oppression in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden. Conversely, “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, describes the New Deal as a calamity that wreaked havoc on the American economy. Both views are exaggerations, but to me the first is closer to the truth than the second.

The two books seem to have captured the spirit of the moment; both are on The New York Times best-seller list. Both are also, in effect, counternarratives. They seek not to revise but to displace more familiar histories and are utterly different in tone from older popular histories like the Daniel Boorstin trilogy “The Americans,” and William Manchester’s two-volume work, “The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America.” Yes, it shows that extremes are ascendant, but they have been ascendant over and over again throughout history. On the Right stands the whole Republican Party with Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Palin and the Tea-Partiers - on the left we have had the large following of Naom Chomsky. Clearly, the extreme Right is larger and more powerful than the extreme left.

For all their dissimilarities, Mr. Boorstin and Mr. Manchester convey the impression that America, despite its diversity, is a nation whose citizens share the same essential values, at once democratic and aspirational. But to read these newer books is to inhabit two utterly different Americas that have almost nothing to say to each other. Both are conceived in a spirit of protest, and this explains their appeal at a time when protest seems the most dynamic force in politics. Just as in the 50's with McCarthy & the Dixiecrats, and the 60’s, which upset the status quo, the clash becomes inevitable.

Half a century ago, in his essay, “The Search for Southern Identity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward explored a parallel phenomenon, the confusion that overtook the South after the Supreme Court had invalidated segregation and the region become more urban and industrial, losing its distinctive agrarian flavor. This is where the unrest is the greatest and where the Republican party draws its greatest strength. It is interesting to note that Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. True, but were they wrong to do it? Besides it doesn't follow- they are very different issues. But the country is changing as the right wing columnist George Will recognized, saying, "Almost half of House and Senate Republicans are from those 13 states, a higher proportion than ever before. Ronald Brownstein of National Journal notes that it was in 1992 that GOP fortunes in the South and the rest of the nation began to diverge. Since then, those 13 states have provided from 59 to 69 percent of all Republican electoral votes. Obama beat McCain by 14 points in the other 37 states, the third-largest margin ever, after LBJ's and FDR's victories in 1964 and 1936, respectively. McCain actually got more Southern votes than Bush did—but Obama got 2.3 million more votes than Kerry did in states McCain carried."

Republican problems outside the South are compounded by and related to the increasing proportion of minorities in the electorate.

What Southerners should do, Mr. Woodward urged, is subordinate their regional attachment to the country’s “national myths,” for instance the American “success story” that had inspired so many others, like the European immigrants who had “sought and found identity in them.”

Southerners might do this, too, if they gave up “the romantic dreams of the South’s past.” Yes, indeed!!

Today it is not regional or ethnic identity, but ideological commitment that threatens to submerge larger “national myths.” But one thing remains unchanged from 50 or 60 years ago. As Americans struggle to see where they are going, they continue to gaze fondly at the past — and to see in it what they like. Yes, but fortunately, not all!!