Cognitive Dissonance

The lines between autobiography and fiction are often permeable. Often a fiction writer's early work is grounded in the writer's own lived experiences. Nick Adams is not Ernest Hemingway, but they shared many of the same experiences. When Nick Adams returns to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan for some fly fishing after the horrors of World War I, the fictional character is following the footsteps of the author. Writers of autobiography, on the other hand, must deal with partial memories. We remember what we want about our past, and we remember some of the things that we would prefer to forget. Whether our pain or our success, we tend to forget certain details and may invent others.

After a Catholic childhood, I became a born again Christian in spring 1980. Over the next several years, my testimony--an account of my conversion--was something I was encouraged to develop as a compelling story and often asked to share in groups. The first real test of my new faith after I made a commitment to follow Jesus is easily recalled. It was only a few days or weeks after my conversion that Mount St. Helens erupted. The resulting ash fall led to many days of cancelled classes. I was in college at Washington State University. I had become something of an expert at drinking game of caps--throwing a beer cap into a glass several feet away--and so there was a lot of peer pressure to perform during the massive amount of drinking that took place in the dorm that week. But, I needed to bring my grades up and was spending my time in study. I resisted the temptations (see "May 18, 1980").

This morning I read an article that I tracked down after it was referenced in a few places. Then I walked my dog. As we walked, my reflections on that article provoked a memory of fall 1980. In Political Science 300 (Constitutional Law) one morning, the woman who sat in front of me turned around to look at someone behind me who was asking the professor a question, saw the political button that I was wearing, and looked at my face with an expression of stern disapproval. It would have hurt less had I not already developed a great deal of respect for her. I assumed from her expression that she despised Ronald Reagan.

I wore this button

How much of this memory is imagined and how much recalled? I do not know where the lines cross from memory to imagination. I know with certainty that I was wearing a campaign button promoting Reagan for President and I remember a look on the woman's face that I read as disapproval. Why she had cause to turn around, however, is less clear in my memory. Maybe I had asked the professor a question. Maybe someone behind or beside me was arguing with the professor. Maybe someone dropped a bottle of water on the floor and it made some noise.

The past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my life in the 1980s. My early support of Reagan before and after my conversion from Catholic to evangelical Protestant led to a great deal of  disillusionment by the end of his administration. In fall 1980, I attended meetings, put up campaign posters, wore political buttons (I had one on my backpack in addition to the one on my shirt). I labored to convince friends that Reagan was a godly man, a Christian who would lead this nation in a direction that was good.

I do not recall what I thought about Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in 1980, but I'm fairly certain that I did not read the magazine article from 1 February 1981 that I looked at this morning. My home town newspaper carried Parade Magazine and I always read it in high school. But, I did not maintain a subscription in college. Instead, I spent several mornings per week in the periodicals room of Holland Library getting my news by reading Time, Newsweek, and other magazines and newspapers. During this time I started seeking a contrasting balance by reading the National Review on the right and the Nation on the left. Sometimes I tried to read Der Spiegel to get an international perspective and to practice my German.

This morning, I was attempting to check the accuracy of a quote that has appeared several times in my reading the past few days. The source is Marguerite Michaels, "Billy Graham: America Is Not God's Only Kingdom," Parade Magazine (1 February 1981), 6. Only the first page of the article is accessible without getting behind a paywall, but that is enough not only to verify the quote, but also to reveal a tension that caused me considerable cognitive dissonance several years later.

Michaels describes the political priorities of Falwell's Moral Majority as, "pro-family, pro-life, and against the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], gay rights, pornography, SALT II [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and defense cuts." She then quotes Graham, "It would be unfortunate if people got the impression all evangelists belong to that group. The majority do not. I don't wish to be identified with them."

The next paragraph struck a cord with me, quoting Graham, Michaels offers:

I'm for morality. But morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice. We as clergy know so very little to speak out with such authority on the Panama Canal or superiority of armaments. Evangelists can't be closely identified with any particular party of person. We have to stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left. I haven't been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will be in the future.

In the 1960s and 1970s, social justice was central to Catholic teaching. One consistency for me between my Catholic upbringing and my life as an evangelical was a commitment to social justice. In the summer of 1981, I took a bus trip with a group of fellow college evangelicals from San Diego, California to Ensenada, Mexico. Seeing the poverty in Tijuana as we passed through that city provoked tears. Others, seeing the tears, consoled me, empathized with my pain, and engaged me in conversation about causes and consequences of inequality.

Nothing in that trip in 1981 dampened my enthusiasm for President Reagan. But, as the 1980s wore on, I finished college with a degree in history, got married, worked a variety of jobs as I sought full-time teaching work, and eventually returned to school for an MA to make myself more competitive in a difficult job market that favored football coaches as history teachers (I had run cross country in high school).

The more I learned of history and the more I listened to President Reagan and watched the policies he promoted, the less I believed that he and I shared the same Christian conviction that social justice was something one should work towards. In 1984, I voted for Reagan again, but with less enthusiasm than I had in 1980. It was the last time that I voted for a Republican candidate for President. In 1988, I favored Jesse Jackson.

The quote I sought to source: "The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it" (credited to Billy Graham). It appears in the first paragraph of the second column of the article. Here's the whole paragraph:

Billy Graham has talked with Jerry Falwell. "I told him to preach the Gospel. That's our calling. I want to preserve the purity of the Gospel and the freedom of religion in America. I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. Liberals organized in the '60s, and conservatives certainly have a right to organize in the '80s, but it would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."
Michaels, "Billy Graham: America Is Not God's Only Kingdom"

Reading Graham's words today, my curiosity is aroused. Surely he understood in 1981 how folks associated with the Moral Majority were using the phrase "religious freedom" to advocate for tax-exempt status for racially segregated Christian schools and colleges. But, the context suggests that Graham had a different notion of religious freedom.

In my view, the 1980s turned the Republican party sharply against policies that favored social justice. That Christians facilitated that shift, or tolerated it, became a growing problem for me. Billy Graham's words strike me today as prophetic.

What is Ignorance?

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Josh Billings

I am reflecting on a statement I recall from the Reagan years while watching friends and acquaintances broadcast what they "know" about why Donald Trump should or should not concede that Joe Biden will be the next President. 

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.
Ronald Reagan, "A Time for Choosing" 

Reagan's words were deployed against him in the presidential debate with Walter Mondale in October 1984.

Well, I guess I'm reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said about Hoover. He said, "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so."
Walter Mondale, Presidential Debate

The New York Times attempted to source the quote, determining that it did not emanate from Will Rogers.

More often, the quote gets attributed to Mark Twain, such as in the epigraph to The Big Short (2015), a film about the 2008 financial crisis. The Center for Mark Twain Studies has a short article about it, "The Apocryphal Twain: 'Things we Know that Just Ain't So'". They note Al Gore's frequent attribution of the idea to Twain.

It is a remarkable concept that resonates in our age of misinformation. Garson O'Toole, Quote Investigator has chased down the origins at least twice: "It Is Better to Know Nothing than to Know What Ain’t So" (May 2015) and "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So" (November 2018). In both cases, Josh Billings seems to be the leading candidate for introducing the phrase to American discourse.

In the 2015 article. O'Toole locates the precursor in vol. 11 of An Universal History: From the Earliest Account of Time (1747) by John Swinton and others. He highlights the expression, "it is better to know nothing, than to apprehend we know what we know not." A digital version of the pages of the book is available from the University of Michigan, accessible via HathiTrust.

I offer a screenshot of the relevant paragraph on the right.

How do my friends "know" that Trump should not concede? They do not trust the mass media, which is too liberal. One conservative friend even told me that FOX News is not conservative enough. Where do they get their news, then? 

Certainly there are legal challenges in the courts, some of which were dismissed last week. But, even if they all succeed, will it be enough to turn the election Trump's way? The Wall Street Journal does not appear to think so. See "Election 2020: What are the Trump Legal Claims?" (8 November 2020).

Elections are not final until certified, and the next President is selected when the Electoral College meets in mid-December. In the meantime, every major news outlet has declared former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris the projected President and Vice President. Even after Biden and Harris are inaugurated in January, the divisions in this nation remain deep. Those divisions are fueled by significant disagreement concerning the nature of credible information. How much do we know that is not so?

Most of us can see ignorance in those with whom we disagree, but rarely note it in ourselves. It has been the mission of Patriots and Peoples (clicking on the banner takes you to the home screen--the latest article) from the beginning to look to original sources, to determine their credibility using the methods developed since the nineteenth century for the practice of history. Fact checkers utilize similar methods when evaluating claims by politicians. Mondale and Gore got it wrong when they sourced their quote. 

Crowd Sourcing vs. Expertise

For so long as opinions are counted, not weighed, the better part had often to be overcome by the greater.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2

A student paper that I was grading about 2007 put me onto a source that was new to me. The student was making a claim that I had seen in dozens of college papers over the previous two decades, and that was discussed and dismissed in several books on my shelf. The student sourced the claim. I went to the source and found it there. I found other errors in the source.

Within the hour, or perhaps five minutes later, or maybe the next day, I discovered that I could correct the error. The "source" was the Wikipedia entry on the Nez Perce. It repeated a common myth that Chief Joseph was a military genius who led Nez Perce warriors in battle. Lucullus V. McWhorter (1860-1944) addressed this myth in two books that were the culmination of decades of interviews with survivors of the Nez Perce War of 1877, but it was still being pushed in documentaries about the war in the 1970s. Wikipedia also asserted that Nez Perce should have an accent mark. I corrected both errors.

Over the next few days or weeks, I repeatedly corrected these errors. I was quickly joined by a librarian at Washington State University,* where McWhorter's papers are housed in the archives. I had to join Wikipedia as a registered user in order to stop bots from automatically reverting my corrections back to the errors that preceded them. But, even as a registered user, it was a battle to remove the accent mark. Through reason, evidence, and persistence, the librarian and I ultimately won the battle and the Nez Perce entry has offered the correct spelling of Nez Perce for 13 years. The Chief Joseph myth, too, has been largely absent from the entry. Other users made other edits, and the article became a credible encyclopedia entry.

During my first months as a registered user of Wikipedia, I made many contributions. Another battle with other users ensued when I attempted to correct agreement with Ronald Reagan's faulty memory (or lies) about his student days. I did not then have access to the not yet published The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014) by Rick Perlstein, but offered some of the work of Lou Cannon refuting Reagan's claims. The battle between Reagan partisans, on the one hand, and partisans for accurate history, on the other, grew so fierce that eventually the entire section was removed from the article. Then, a few years later, Reagan's lie reappeared in the article in another briefer section with a footnote to Cannon's book that refutes the claim.

When students ask about Wikipedia as a source for the past few years, I have told them about the Nez Perce spelling war and the dangers of correcting the memory of a President who died of Alzheimer's. Sometimes they would ask whether I might try to correct the error in the Reagan article again. It should not be too difficult to recover my password, or create a new one. In December 2019, I restored Reagan's "leadership" of student protests his freshman year to his "participation". My previous Wikipedia edits had been in 2014. The truth about Reagan's participation still stands today. How long before a mob tears it down again?

My own memory could be faulty, however, or at least short on details.** A search through my own Wikipedia edits this morning confirms that I added Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (2003) on 12 March 2007, but the context appears to be the narrative about him making up facts during his broadcasts of baseball games, not his false claims about student leadership. I also added Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (1987) that day, and many other small edits.

For a few months in spring 2007, I made many edits to articles about US history and literature, and to chess, as well as a few other topics. At least once, I was corrected for adding what appeared to be original research. The insights of experts on a topic are welcome only insofar as they accord with general knowledge. Sometimes that will favor error when truth is elusive.

Wikipedia editing proved to be a form of social media with its own network of personal relationships and friendships with people I have never met. In spring 2007, a new chess website came online and I joined that fall. It had active forums that helped pull me away from Wikipedia. For a time, at least, the truth of checkmate offered better grounding for arguments than the evidence of primary sources that counter the memories of a dead president. If I am not mistaken, I also joined Facebook about that time. In fall 2007, I started Patriots and Peoples.


*The Nez Perce talk page shows that she had made edits two years before I joined.
**I may have made a lot of edits while not logged in, and then logged in to try to protect these edits from bots and well-meaning fools.

Understanding Politics

Want to understand how American politics became so dysfunctional that people who disagree can no longer communicate with one another? This trilogy of books is worth reading for a good start.

"Mistakes have been made"

President Nixon's Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, may have been the politician most notable for deploying what has become a clichéd understatement in politics: "mistakes were made." Following the resignations of John Dean, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman, Ziegler held a press conference. This conference was remembered in his obituary.

"I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein. ... We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was overenthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place," he said at the time. "When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case."
"Watergate Press Secretary Dead at 63," CBS News

Later, President Reagan would use the phrase to brush off Iran-Contra misdeeds. President Clinton would do the same in the wake of a Democratic fund raising scandal, and Senator John McCain would describe missteps in the conduct of the Iraq War with the phrase.

The phrase is used as the title of a Broadway satire, a book about self-deception by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, and a recent novel about the 1990s Seattle Grunge scene: Tyler McMahon, How the Mistakes were Made (2011).

Near the end of eight years in office as President, Ulysses S. Grant used a variation of the phrase in his last State of the Union Address. He admits error, denies intent, and shifts the blame to the advice he received from members of Congress. What else would one want to extract from a non-apologetic apology?

The third paragraph:

Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit, but it seems to me oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid in carrying out the various duties of administering the Government--in nearly every case selected without a personal acquaintance with the appointee, but upon recommendations of the representatives chosen directly by the people. It is impossible, where so many trusts are to be allotted, that the right parties should be chosen in every instance. History shows that no Administration from the time of Washington to the present has been free from these mistakes. But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent. (emphasis added)
Grant, State of the Union Address, 5 December 1876

Every political speech should begin thus. It may be worth suggesting, that the phrase "history shows" always leads to a self-serving fabrication, and one that often defies the evidence. Even so, in this instance, who can argue with Grant that every administration has made errors? But, historians have often suggested that Grant's administration was particularly riddled with corruption. It's not the presence of errors that Grant must defend, but their scale. The same might be said concerning how we entered the Iraq War.

Reagan Mythology

Paul Rosenberg offers an assessment of President Reagan's legacy far more realistic than the one driving Tea Partiers and even President Obama, whom Rosenberg opines, "is as drunk on Reagan's kool-aid as anyone else in Washington today."

He explains,

Reagan was a disaster for the American economy in at least four fundamental ways:

... Under Ronald Reagan, the US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years

... the number of unionised jobs and the number of jobs with American companies declined even further.

... The income stagnation that began under Reagan has had a devastating impact on personal savings.

... Before Reagan, debt really wasn't a problem for America.

The article begins:

As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections.

Read the rest at Reagan mythology is leading US off a cliff - Opinion - Al Jazeera English


Hat tip to Millard Fillmore's Bathtub for bringing this editorial to my attention.

Patriotic Logic (or Lack Thereof)

When I am reading, I frequently go back and reread a passage. Most often I have missed something due to inattention or interruption, as when my wife whispers sweet nothings in my ear. Many times I go back because I find it difficult to understand a text. With some writers--William Faulkner, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Proust,--expectations of comprehension begin with the second reading. Occasionally, rereading a passage is necessary because I have some expertise in the subject, but the authors that I am reading most clearly do not. This last was my experience this morning while reading A Patriot's History of the United States (2004).

Several alternative policies had been attempted by the United States government in its dealings with the Indians. One emphasized the "nationhood" of the tribe, and sought to conduct foreign policy with the Indian tribes the way the United States would deal with a European power. Another, more frequent, process involved exchanging treaty promises and goods for Indian land in an attempt to keep the races separate.
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot's History, 207

How are treaties an alternative to dealing with Indian nations in ways comparable to dealing with foreign powers? Perhaps the authors of A Patriot's History imagine some distinction here that they fail to explain, but it defies logic. Quite simply, they offer incomprehensible nonsense to confuse the fundamental relationship between Indian tribes and the United States. Consider, for example, President Reagan's recognition of a government-to-government relationship between the U.S. and Indian tribes (for some reason the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library links to the text on the Environmental Protection Agency's website). The four-page policy statement begins:

On January 24, 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued an American Indian policy statement which reaffirmed the government-to-government relationship of Indian tribes with the United States.
http://www.epa.gov/tp/pdf/president-reagan83.pdf

Schweikart and Allen feel a need to put the word nationhood in quotes to generate some distance from what they fail to understand. Their favorite President's policy, however, explicitly states, "President Reagan’s policy supports: ... Specific acknowledgment of the governmental status of Indian tribes."

These days many of Reagan's most ideologically committed followers call themselves Constitutionalists. As they gain power, we can hope that they have read the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.
U.S. Constitution, Article VI (emphasis added)

Does the supremacy clause apply to treaties with American Indian nations?

The U.S. Supreme Court thinks so. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which A Patriot's History mentions on the next page, the U.S. Supreme Court found actions of the state of Georgia "repugnant to the Constitution" because these actions violated treaties with the Cherokee and laws of Congress. In discussing the first treaty the United States made with an Indian nation: the treaty with the Delawares, 1778, the Court noted, "[t]his treaty, in its language, and in its provisions, is formed, as near as may be, on the model of treaties between the Crowned heads of Europe" (31 U.S. 515, at 550). That Indian tribes had become dependent upon the U.S., does not diminish their sovereignty:

The very fact of repeated treaties with them recognizes it, and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is that a weaker power does not surrender its independence -- its right to self-government -- by associating with a stronger and taking its protection. A weak State, in order to provide for its safety, may place itself under the protection of one more powerful without stripping itself of the right of government and ceasing to be a State.
Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515, at 560-561

A Patriot's History offers a view at odds with the Constitution, with the Supreme Court's interpretation of our Supreme Law, and even with the formal declaration of Indian policy by the patron saint of the Conservative Revolution. Schweikart and Allen seem quite alone in their reading of history.

My Journey to Medieval Spain

When I began reading A Patriot’s History of the United States eight months ago, perusing the footnotes quickly carried me astray. I’ve mentioned repeatedly that a long footnote embedded as a two and one-half page sidebar was the critical prompt the motivated my purchase of this text and the beginning of this blogging project (See especially “Patriot’s and People’s Histories” and “Depopulation and Demography”). Footnotes are central to my focus, but the text itself also beckons. I’ve been neglecting the text during my blogging holiday, but have been reading.

This morning’s coffee went down with a narrative lauding the intellectual contributions of Moses Maimonides, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd (known in European literature as Averroes). Wikipedia describes Ibn Rushd as “the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe.” I’m reading a celebration of the development of Western secular thought in a book written by a former Jesuit seminarian whose book on Medieval Spain has much of prescriptive value for the twenty-first century: Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Earlier in this book Lowney delves into two classic European texts, Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) c.1100 and Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of My Cid, or commonly called El Cid) c.1201-1207. Lowney writes, “the confrontation between Christianity and Islam forms a overriding preoccupation of both these semi-legendary tales” (119). His narrative offers brief summaries of these texts, including discussion of how their legends square with history. His chief concern through this section, however, highlights the complexity of El Cid in contrast to the simplistic ideology of Roland.

Roland painted a global struggle between Christian right and Muslim wrong as Charlemagne squared off against Baligant, emir of Babylon. Roland’s universal struggle between good and evil contrasts with El Cid’s personalized study of the noble person. What makes the Cid, or anyone, honorable is neither station in life nor religious beliefs but deeds. … In Roland, honor includes religious creed. Some of Roland’s Christian characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Muslims fail the same standard simply by virtue of their pagan beliefs. … El Cid’s very different outlook is personified in the Muslim Abengalbón, El Cid’s vassal and friend. In a remarkable gesture, the Cid confides his daughters to this Muslim’s care as they journey through Spain’s frontier. Abengalbón serves the Cid’s family “for the love he bore to the Campeador.” In the Cid’s world, so profound a bond as love can even bind Muslim to Christian.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 137.

The more nuanced relationship between Christians and Muslims in El Cid, Lowney argues, reflects the realities of multicultural Spain. But he warns against oversimplification of this point.

It is gross oversimplification to pluck Barbastro and Toledo from the Reconquest’s long history as Exhibit A demonstrating that El Cid offers a more enlightened vision of a multifaith Spain because its authors hailed from Spain, whereas Roland reflects the outsider’s harsher viewpoint. A century separates the epics and three centuries the historical events on which they are based; both bear many authorial fingerprints, from chroniclers determined to advance particular religious or political views to entertainers determined only to tell a good story.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 141.

He goes on to note some practical realities of our world today vis-à-vis Charlemagne’s perspective as depicted in Roland. The notion of a Frankish king invading Spain, driving out the Muslims, and then returning home “is an elegantly simple worldview,” but not one embraced by twelfth- or thirteenth century Spanish monarchs. Yet, “Ferdinand and Isabella’s counselors would goad them into just such a policy and devise ways to make it eminently (if tragically) practical by banishing Jews and Muslims who refused to embrace Christianity” (141).

One is tempted to think that Lowney had the current American adventures in Iraq in mind as he crafted those sentences, and this presumption is borne out on the next page.

[One cannot] forcibly reorder another community’s lives and affairs, then assume, as Charlemagne did, that it will be possible to separate oneself from the consequences and repercussions. To assume the posture of the outsider is as naïve as to imagine that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can today carve out completely separate futures in a world that will continue to grow smaller with each passing generation.
Lowney, A Vanished World, 142.

The Route to Spain from A Patriot’s History

Schweikart and Allen’s A Patriot’s History relies upon Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture for its account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. Hanson’s depiction of Cortés’s Spain as exemplar of Western Reason was the source for Schweikart and Allen’s image of Spanish proto-republicans. Their views caught me by surprise, which led to my preliminary assessment in “Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images.” There I noted that my own knowledge of Spanish history was shamefully deficient, and I alleged that such deficiency was characteristic of Americanist historians as a group with a handful of exceptions. A Patriot’s History drove me to Hanson; Hanson drove me to Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico and other texts, including Lowney’s A Vanished World. I’ve mentioned a few tidbits from Thomas, including his demythologizing of the story that Cortés burned his boats. Lowney adds a piece of information that further contextualizes this legend. The Muslim conqueror of Spain in 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, allegedly burned his boats after landing at Gibraltar—a rock named for him, Jabal Tariq, Tariq’s Mountain.

Chroniclers credit Tariq with the gutsy gesture of burning his ships on the spot and weaving his soldiers’ resulting dilemma into a stirring oratorical exhortation: “Whither can you fly,—the enemy is in your front, the sea at your back. By Allah! There is no salvation for you but in your courage and perseverance.”
Lowney, A Vanished World, 30.

The legend of Cortés in Mexico reveals his debt to legends of the Muslim conquest of his native Spain eight centuries earlier. This legacy is not surprising when we contemplate the degree to which Renaissance Europe, and all that is civilized on that continent, to the extent that it can be traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, also must be traced through Muslim civilization. During the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, science and reason continued its development in Muslim society. It may be simplistic to assert that Europe’s Crusaders that sought to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims brought home the seeds of the Renaissance, but it is far closer to the truth than to assert that Petrarch reinvented classic learning from sources wholly European.

Roland’s Patriots

In response to my “The Sixties: A Patriot’s History,” Historiann quipped regarding Schweikart and Allen, “They want to mislead their readers into believing that Democrats are all bad, and Republicans are all (or mostly) good (if they are "true conservatives," anyway.)” As she understands A Patriot’s History—and I suspect she’s close to the mark, if not right on,—Schweikart and Allen’s narrative resembles a modern day Chanson de Roland. Paraphrasing Lowney, some of Schweikart and Allen’s Republican characters may fail the standards expected of honorable men, but all Democrats fail the same standard simply by virtue of their misguided beliefs. Their simplistic moral tale that distinguishes the true Republicans—Reagan and Bush—from the fallen ones—Nixon and McCain, and all Republicans from Democrats, who can never be right is less nuanced than even that of some of their ideologically driven sources. Hanson, for example, was once a Democrat, and may still be so on paper.

All I can tell you is I'm still a registered Democrat. I have a liberal twin brother who disagrees with everything I write. And I have a far more liberal older brother who not only disagrees with what I write, but I imagine is really bothered by it. I had two conservative Democratic parents who were in the Populist tradition of farmers, sort of William Jennings Bryan types.
Interview with Victor Davis Hanson, The Naval Institute: Proceedings

I will show in blog entries still to come how some of the nuances of Hanson’s history in Carnage and Culture morph into something far more simplistic in the hands of Schweikart and Allen.

Fundamental Questions: Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson’s majestic A History of the American People (1997) purports to address three fundamental questions. These questions concern expiation of national sins, the balance of moral ideals and practical needs, and a sense of national mission. Rooted in these questions are fundamental assumptions.

Expiation of Sins

Johnson assumes that taking possession of the North American continent proceeded through injustice to its indigenous inhabitants. He also assumes that American self-sufficiency was rendered possible through the suffering of enslaved labor. These assumptions are well-supported historical generalizations, although some balk at their expression. In a dissenting opinion, for example, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist deployed the moniker “revisionist history” as a pejorative description of specific allegations of injustice towards the Lakota and other Native peoples of the northern Plains.

I think the Court today rejects that conclusion largely on the basis of a view of the settlement of the American West which is not universally shared. There were undoubtedly greed, cupidity, and other less-than-admirable tactics employed by the Government … but the Indians did not lack their share of villainy either. It seems to me quite unfair to judge by the light of “revisionist” historians or the mores of another era actions that were taken under pressure of time more than a century ago.
U.S. v. Sioux Nation 448 U. S. 371, at 435

More recently, Michael Medved has suggested that there was little out of the ordinary in the American institution of slavery, expiating the sins (as Johnson would have it) by noting that all have sinned. Medved’s distortions are well enough exposed by Timothy Burke that there is no need to rehash them here.

The point is that such exceptions as Rehnquist and Medved stem from a handful of ideologues that cling to a peculiar conservatism; these do not negate Johnson’s assumption in his first question. Has the United States “expiated its organic sins” (3)?

Moral Ideals and Practical Realities

Johnson’s first question, he suggests, logically leads to the second. Has the United States found the correct mix of “ideals and altruism” with “acquisitiveness and ambition” (3)? Despite origins in “sin,” the United States is steeped in the eighteenth century ideals of liberty and equality. It is true that it was formed by merchants and planters that intended their government to protect property and commerce. Competing self-interest was the necessary “hidden hand” behind healthy economic growth, according to a leading theory of the day. But, did the society created by these American colonials become one in which “righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest” (3)?

Johnson seems to suggest that if the balance is right, the sins of dispossession and slavery are expiated.

Sense of Mission

The third question ties together the first two. Has the “republic of the people,” rooted in “an other worldly ‘City on a Hill’,” proven “to be a model for the entire planet” (3)? The notion of racism as a national sin reveals a secular application of religious themes. The third question reveals the heart of this trope. From its origins in Puritan New England, as expressed by Cotton Mather (quoted in “From Chiasmus to Columbus”) and his predecessors, the sense of divine mission became secularized.

The Puritan settlers that debarked from the Arbella in 1630 began in congregation as hearers of John Winthrop’s seminal sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In this sermon, Winthrop referenced Matthew 5:14 in a line that has become one of the most frequently repeated sentiments in American rhetoric. The twin notions that America is an example to the world, and that God is the protector of this nation get invoked with regularity in public discourse. An old book sitting on my shelf explains the theme.

Every President, from George Washington to Lyndon B. Johnson, has included in his inaugural address one or more references to his and the nation’s dependence upon God. These statements have become the documented and lasting records of the religious expressions of our presidents.
Benjamin Weiss, God in American History, 47.

Johnson was President when Weiss published his book in 1966, but subsequent Presidents have not deviated from the pattern. Some, to be certain, sound more like preachers than others. Historiann pointed out in reply to my article “A City on Hill” in January that Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech must be remembered in this context.

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

Of course, Winthrop was a Puritan, not one of the early Pilgrims that came ten years earlier. One benefit of living through the Eighties with a keen ear and a sense of the past is freedom from all expectations that President Reagan would ever be correct in his summary of historical particulars. Nevertheless, the larger sentiments he expressed were shared by enough shakers and movers that the erroneous details are insignificant.

Despite the omnipresence of God in such rhetoric, the question Johnson asks assumes that this sense of mission became secular. It has not become thus without considerable resistance from true believers, so some confusion remains. Earlier in his address, Reagan emphasized the core values.

Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.
Reagan, “Farewell Address”

One gets the impression from Paul Johnson’s beginning that his final answers to all three questions are affirmative.