Assumptions

This message came in an email titled "New from an author you love."

Since you've bought something by Larry Schweikart in the past, we thought you might enjoy this new release: Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, available June 1, 2010. Get it at a Borders store near you, or pre-order it now at Borders.com and enjoy it in no time!

It might be worth noting that Schweikart's writing interests me principally because it offers a study in shoddy scholarship, logical and factual errors, distortions, propaganda, ...

Howard Zinn's work offers numerous gaps, omissions, and exaggerations to serve his political ideology. But egregious factual errors and gross misrepresentations of source material are rare. I purchased Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States (co-written with Michael Allen) from Borders a few years ago. When I browse in my local store, I look at other works by Schweikart and then re-shelve them and buy something else (or leave without making a purchase).

A Patriot's History of the United States clearly aims to counter Zinn's A People's History of the United States, but the real model adversary for Schweikart is Ward Churchill. Schweikart even says so, "I hope Ward Churchill is on TV every night. Every time he talks we sell another hundred books" (Patriot's History, xiii).

Practicing Objectivity

The Truth in History

"Objectivity" and "subjectivity" animate tensions in the dialogue of memory and imagination: they are not poles on a linear spectrum so much as two postures, or masks, in the drama of history.
James Stripes, "Spring Wind Rising" (1994), 210.

Neither Howard Zinn, on the one hand, nor Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, on the other, offer their texts as objective histories. A People's History of the United States has a clear and explicit liberal agenda; A Patriot's History of the United States has a clear and specific conservative agenda. I do not take issue with this aspect of either text because I favor honesty and balance, not objectivity. Neither text intends to offer balance aside from challenging what each of the authors views as the status quo. That is, Zinn sees the writing, teaching, and collective memory of the history of the United States as inherently conservative, and he challenges these standard stories. For their part, Schweikart and Allen believe that liberals have taken over America's schools, colleges, and universities; they intend to rectify that bias.

Most students learn their history from textbooks and lectures (both of which are often horribly dull). Neither A Patriot's History nor A People's History are textbooks in the usual sense of the term, but both are employed as such by students and teachers looking for a general introduction beyond the standard textbooks marketed only for schools and their captive audiences. Both texts are readily available at big box book distributors and independent bookstores all over America. The publishers mean to sell these books.


Depopulation Synthesis

The long sidebar and footnote on depopulation in A Patriot's History merits detailed examination on several counts. First, it calls attention to itself because there are relatively few such asides through this long text. A quick glance through the text turned up another: "Did Roosevelt Have Advance Knowledge About the Pearl Harbor Attack?" It has a much shorter sources list. Second, the question heading the depopulation sidebar is a red herring. Not even Ward Churchill suggests that Columbus killed most of the Indians, and little that Churchill says is taken any more seriously by liberals than are the rantings of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter by conservatives. These polemicists have value when they are on our side, or when we gain points attacking their dispatches from the other side, but believing that their statements represent serious analysis is a mark of ignorance. Third, as noted already in this blog, Schweikart and Allen offer a synthesis significantly at odds with other scholars that have examined the literature.

Schweikart and Allen cite Alfred W. Crosby "[a]mong those who cite higher numbers" (9). They reference his Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986). This book is an important contribution to a broader field of inquiry of which pre-Columbian demography is a part, but it offers little more than one dozen pages concerned with disease in North America. Crosby's earlier The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972) contains far more detailed discussion of the effects of European introduced diseases upon aboriginal depopulation of the Americas. Ecological Imperialism is global rather than hemispheric in focus, and emphasizes animals and plants more than pathogens. Citing The Columbian Exchange would send diligent readers toward a better representation of Crosby's point of view on the matter before us. Moreover, the indispensable citation in any depopulation bibliography is Crosby's "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly (April 1976). This article is mentioned in many of the texts they cite, but not in their own footnote. In contrast, even William Bennett offers an oblique reference to the thesis of Crosby's seminal article:

The Indians ... contracted smallpox and measles from the Spaniards; these diseases devastated populations with no previous exposure and built-up immunity.
William Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope, vol I (2006), 6.

Virgin soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless. The importance of virgin soil epidemics in American history is strongly indicated by evidence that a number of dangerous maladies-smallpox, measles, malaria, yellow fever, and undoubtedly several more-were unknown in the pre-Columbian New World. In theory, the initial appearance of these diseases is as certain to have set off deadly epidemics as dropping lighted matches into tinder is certain to cause fires.
Alfred W. Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics" (1976), 289.

Crosby explains the importance of epidemics in The Columbian Exchange: not only did many succumb to disease, "but it also affected their power structures, striking down the leaders and disrupting the processes by which they were normally replaced" (54). My effort to synthesize scholarship on this topic was published in an Encyclopedia a few years ago:

Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.

Crosby offers his assessment of the significance of disease against the leading prior explanations for the success of Europeans in the New World: 1) technology, 2) mobility and psychological advantages of mounted soldiers, 3) lack of Indian unity, and 4) Indian prophesies concerning white gods. Schweikart and Allen offer an explanation of the success of Cortés, and by extension all Europeans, that emphasizes mobility (horses and ships), the economic power of Europe ("wealth made possible the shipping and equipping of large, trained, well-armed forces" [7]), and social organization. This third factor, "the glue that held it all together" (7), they argue is novel and interesting, and of central importance to their conservative ideology. It merits a separate post.

Columbus and the Flat Earth

Many of us were taught in elementary school that Columbus sailed west to reach the East because he understood the earth to be a sphere in contrast to many others of his day. In this version of the story, the near mutiny that Columbus had to quell a few weeks into the voyage was rooted in the belief of his sailors that they would soon sail off the edge of the earth. This notion is easily disputed--even for those with bad textbooks and worse teachers--as soon as students gain access to Google, Ask.com, and a few of the sites to which they offer a portal of access. Google "Columbus and flat earth" and nearly every site in the first page of hits affirms that such assertions are nonsense. A few of these sites blame "liberals," "evolutionists," and "the modern mind" for using the notion to present a caricature of faith-based knowledge and of religious adherents.

Patriot's and People's Histories

It thus comes as no surprise that Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, authors of A Patriot's History of the United States, assert, "He [Columbus] did not, as is popularly believed, originate the idea that the earth is round" (4). Unfortunately, they do not stop there. The two sentences that follow this clear declaration seem to undermine its truth:

As early as 1480, for example, he read works proclaiming the sphericity of the planet. But knowing intellectually that the earth is round and demonstrating it physically are two different things.
Schweikart and Allen, 4.

Was Columbus seeking to demonstrate the proposition of a spherical earth to skeptics back in Spain? Readers might easily get that impression from Schweikart and Allen. The next paragraph mentions Columbus's "managerial skill" in quelling mutiny after they "passed the point where the sailors expected to find Japan" (4). On the other hand, at least the alleged fear of falling off the edge of the earth finds no support in their text. Their weak effort to contest the myth come closer to its perpetuation than most other survey texts.

Although the authors of A Patriot's History are a bit circumspect when commenting on the relationship between their text and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, their title stimulates the urge to make comparisons. How does Zinn address the flat earth myth?

...like other informed people of his time, he [Columbus] knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.
...
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of sea. But he was lucky.
Zinn, A People's History, 2.

A Question of Bias

Schweikart and Allen are clear and honest with respect to their agenda:

...we remain convinced that if the story of America's past is told fairly, the result cannot be anything but a deepened patriotism, a sense of awe at the obstacles overcome, the passion invested, the blood and tears spilled, and the nation that was built.
...
The reason so many academics miss the real history of America is that they assume that ideas don't matter and that there is no such thing as virtue.
...
It is not surprising, then, that so many left-wing historians miss the boat (and miss it, and miss it, and miss it to the point that they need a ferry schedule). They fail to understand what every colonial settler and every western pioneer understood: character was tied to liberty, and liberty to property. All three were needed for success, but character was the prerequisite because it put the law behind property agreements, and it set responsibility right next to liberty. And the surest way to ensure the presence of good character was to keep God at the center of one's life, community, and ultimately, nation.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot's History, xi-xxiii.

Who is more fair in their treatment of Columbus, Zinn or Schweikart and Allen? Which account is more accurate? Does a fair account prove to be an accurate one?

A Liberal Artifact (circa 1992)

Schweikart and Allen call to memory the Quincentennial celebrations and protests:

The five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's discovery was marked by unusual and strident controversy. Rising up to challenge the intrepid voyager's courage and vision--as well as the establishment of European civilization in the New World--was a crescendo of damnation, which posited that the Genoese navigator was a mass murderer akin to Adolf Hitler.
Schweikart and Allen, 7.

Ward Churchill might have made a comparison along these lines, but he is hardly representative of the academy as a whole. Of course, in the early 1990s lots of things were said regarding Columbus and the impact of his journeys. In the cacophony of utterances were the ramblings of a graduate student at Obscure U:

Christopher Columbus was a tolerable geographer who knew, as did most educated people in his day, that the earth was round. He was also intensely interested in a particular academic debate (although his interest in the pursuit of gold was at least as important as his interest in the pursuit of knowledge; it is often argued that he was equally interested in the pursuit of souls). Experts disagreed as to the size of the earth. Columbus was among those who agreed with the smaller estimates; in fact, his estimate was almost the smallest anyone had ventured. As it turns out, his opponents were right. Because of his inaccurate calculations, when Columbus made landfall in what became known later as the Caribbean (another misnomer, resulting from a fear of cannibalism) approximately where he expected, he thought he was just east of India, Thus the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas have been labeled Indians ever since.
James Stripes, "An Introduction to the Cultural Word Wars," in Introduction to American Indian Studies Course Packet (Kinkos, 1992), 101.

This liberal artifact clearly puts forth a point of view at odds with the one in A Patriot's History, but consistent with A People's History. But it also bears striking consistency with the points made in the conservative Practical Homeschooling Magazine by Rob and Cyndy Shearer in 1998, available online. I hardly think that Schweikart and Allen include the likes of Practical Homeschooling Magazine in their lists of evidence of liberal bias in education.