An America Where Everyone Meant Well

Considering the rhetorical environment of 2019 and 2020—including Wilfred McClay’s own repeatedoverwrought attacks on the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” and his show of support for the Trump administration’s notions about patriotic education—Land of Hope could have been a far more obstreperous contribution to the culture war than it is.

Designed to serve as a high school textbook, and now furnished with a full teacher’s guide (co-written with John McBride), Land of Hope has been marketed as a corrective to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. An advertisement on the publisher’s website promises it contains “The History They Don’t Teach in Schools: A Perfect Gift for Graduates.”

Forbidden knowledge! A repulse to the barbarians at the gates! Worldview inoculation for your younger relatives! How … new.

However, once you open it, McClay’s textbook is largely irenic, moderate, and reflective. For the most part, it is also a retread of mid-20^th-century liberal school curricula. Its tone has more in common with the rhetoric of John F. Kennedy (or, more the point, Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, both of whom are listed in the back as recommended reading) than with the fulminations of a Donald J. Trump or even a David Barton.

And for me—raised, like hundreds of thousands of other Americans my age, on history books that wereobstreperous contributions to the culture war—Land of Hope seems less a rebuttal to Howard Zinn’s decades-old work than a right-leaning fellow traveler to Jill Lepore’s recent These Truths.

Unfortunately, Land of Hope’s vision of the United States is too limited, both ideologically and methodologically, either to achieve its own goals or to help explain the United States we have experienced this week.

What are its goals? In this book, McClay sets himself three tasks. First, Land of Hope is supposed to offer a coherent narrative, which many textbooks allegedly do not. Second, it is supposed to help readers understand themselves as responsible citizens of an American political community, bound together by that common story. Relatedly, this narrative should stir readers as American patriots, giving them a feeling of “membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history” (xi)—but not inviting them to sit in judgment on their ancestors.

McClay insists that the third goal does not require suspending one’s critical faculties, nor rejecting America’s cultural and ethnic diversity. Land of Hope will be full of flawed characters, frustrated plans, and all-too-human moral failures, as well as people whose ancestors came from around the world. Nevertheless, running through the book will be a sense of hope and love for country based on the “great story” that Americans share.

To be drawn into this story and thus lay hold of this hope, McClay writes, the reader must simply be content to judge past Americans by the standards of their own times, avoiding the “tendency to condescend toward the past” (xiv).

This is presumably a conscious echo of E.P. Thompson’s celebrated dictum against the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In any case, a blurb from the Brown University professor emeritus Gordon S. Wood, printed inside the cover of the teacher’s guide, uses similar language, declaring Land of Hope“accurate, honest, and free of the unhistorical condescension so often paid to the people of America’s past.”

What does non-condescension mean to McClay? One thing in particular, it seems: Land of Hope constantly reassures us that Americans meant well.

Yet “unhistorical condescension” would be a fitting name for the book’s evident conviction that people whose lives do not fit into the resulting national hopefulness story don’t quite count—and that the people who ignored their protests for justice could not really have been expected to do otherwise.

Take the people who lived in the Americas millennia before European arrival, for one example: McClay explains that “they are only in the most remote sense a part of American history” (5). Later, their nineteenth-century descendants’ treatment by the U.S. government is presented as regrettable, an indecency reflecting “a failure of imagination” by white people with good intentions (116). Yet in this book, Native Americans are, ultimately, a sort of temporary blockage in the national story, “tragic victims of the relentless drive toward national consolidation” (222).

Indeed, in Land of Hope, Native nations barely figure even in the most obvious ways; a reader could miss their relevance to the so-called French and Indian War. Eventually, the reader sees three pages on Cherokee and Choctaw removal, but no mention of Wounded Knee, let alone any sign of Native existence in the 20^th century.

If the nation’s treatment of Native Americans in the 19^th century did involve a “failure of imagination,” therefore, this book supports no imaginative alternative. Instead, what it offers is unhistorical condescension at scale—and damnation by faint sympathy. Far from being a new revelation for young people previously taught by left-wing radicals to hate their country, this is the same inevitable-victimhood narrative for Native American nations that has been dominant in many U.S. school curricula and popular culture alike for generations.

Other examples of such condescension are more subtle. To be sure, Land of Hope offers no apologetic for slavery or secession; McClay’s abhorrence for America’s great sin is real, and he offers cold comfort to latter-day Confederate sympathizers in the American right. Yet this book portrays enslavers, whether in the 1780s or in the 1850s, as men who can hardly be expected to reject their own economic interests. Slaveholders and proslavery ideologues are presented as tragic figures, sometimes misled by “crackpot realism” into defenses of barbarity (160); meanwhile, the moral clarity of contemporary antislavery activists—say, a David Walker (unmentioned), a Grimké sister (ditto), or a Frederick Douglass (barely mentioned)—or the testimony of any enslaved person at all—rarely appears in the text.

Land of Hope’s lectures on the importance of judging past Americans according to their own contexts ring hollow, I think, when the most vital of their own contexts (not to mention many of their fellow Americans) are missing.

It may not be a surprise, at this point, that few women are mentioned by name in Land of Hope. But it might be a surprise that the woman suffrage movement merits only a single sentence (290). The labor movement is all but invisible, too, but then again, the same could be said of people like Carnegie and Rockefeller. Japanese American internment during the Second World War was “a bitter injustice,” but it is mentioned as “a stain on the nation’s otherwise admirable conduct during this war” (329). Joseph McCarthy gets three sentences; you won’t be surprised that his behavior was harmful but basically, yes, understandable (356). On the other hand, conservatives as well as liberals might wonder whether Land of Hope’s penultimate chapter, covering the 1970s and 1980s, would be more intelligible if it included more than a sentence on the so-called Religious Right (401)—let alone any exploration of the public career of, say, Phyllis Schlafly.

My aim here is not to catalogue specific omissions; every narrative must have them. It is to illustrate a larger silence.

In all of these cases and many others, Land of Hope is missing not present-day moral judgment—McClay’s moralizing is actually relentless—but a sense of real stakes, of divergent possibilities, of the weight of choices and conflicts in their own moments. As a series of absolutions and deferrals, the book provides no sense of any actual basis for hope beyond a metaphysical belief in some yet-unrealized national eschaton that well-intentioned Americans, eventually, may blunder into.

In the end, Land of Hope fails in its task because its vision is far too small to support a “great American story.” Unwilling to examine evil except as a sort of unfortunate but contextually inevitable mistake, it has little room for real goodness either. Its American narrative does not have room for most of our ancestors at all, and its imagination shrinks from the sharp conflicts that have created everything that is praiseworthy about the United States. Our students need stories with more space for people to matter.