A Small Lie

I am finding quite informative the book The Flag + The Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022) by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. However, the authors repeat one lie that I’ve seen elsewhere.

In October 2020, shortly before losing his bid for re-election, then President Trump assembled a “1776 Commission” that included no professional historians, but was led by executives at the conservative Hilsdale College, as well as Charlie Kirk and other intellectual, politicians, and pundits. (46)

Almost all of this assertion is correct, but there are two errors. Hillsdale College is misspelled. The lie: there was one professional historian.

Victor Davis Hanson was on the commission and is a professional historian. His work on ancient Greece is highly regarded. I have read his book, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (1994) and recommend it. Less good is Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Culture (2001). That book attempts to extend the insights of The Western Way of War, but departs significantly from reliance on primary sources. As it gets closer to our time, the narrative becomes more highly partisan and the sources less credible. See my “Carnage and Culture: An Overview” (2008) for more on this book.

The 1776 Commission had a single professional historian. Saying it did not is a lie. However, that historian has spent the past several decades creating right-wing propaganda. His credentials as a historian of American history are as weak as my credentials as a historian of ancient Greece. Hanson had no legitimate place on a commission concerned with US history. None of the other commission members did either.

Gorski and Perry correctly assess the political nature of Trump’s effort to put out a statement concerning US history, a statement that had multiple problems historically, not least that historians had almost nothing to do with creating it. But, they overstate their assertion with a lie.