Wanted: Histories for the Publics

There appears to be a common belief that our country suffers from a lack of brief single volumes on US History written for general audiences and young students.  Normal textbooks that contain subdivisions, stock illustrations, and quiz questions, constructed by committee, do not count.  Since I started teaching US History in the classroom, I have run across several low-cost narrative histories, some with primary source readers as companion volumes. The best were crafted by a single historian who specialized in US History and wrote this as a capstone to a long teaching career.

Wilfred M. McClay wrote Land of Hope to fill this publishing need.  McClay has taught for many years and written other histories including a student guide to the study of US History.  Marketing and promotional material detailed on the publisher’s page, Amazon, and the book’s back cover documented its purposes.  The endorsement for this book on Amazon expressed the need for an inexpensive book that was both up to date and authoritative, but that will also provide a “coherent, persuasive, and inspiring narrative of their own country”.[1]  Promotions repeated accusations against professional histories for being fragmented and failing to “convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own country.”[2]  The (hopefully soon-to-be defunct) 1776 Commission recently announced by President Trump promoted this book for their patriotic education plans.  Land of Hope is intended to teach a patriotic history.  Dr. McClay either is now or shortly will be teaching at Hillsdale College whose president, Dr. Larry P. Arnn has been appointed to head the 1776 Commission.

Abraham Lincoln delivering his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865.

I approached this book as a public historian with nearly forty years’ experience in museum education, leadership, and teaching at both secondary and college levels.  This book was of interest to me both because I work with public history projects and because I taught middle school and high school.  This is the primary target audience for this book as it has a Teacher’s Guide companion volume written by Wilfred McClay and John McBride.  The Guide parallels the textbook with essay questions, discussion prompts, quizzes, and short primary sources.  It is a helpful companion to a history not written as a textbook but a clean narrative survey of American history.

Before launching into the strengths and weaknesses of this work let me announce what this book is thankfully not.  It is not a work of Christian Nationalism.  Though McClay favorably views Christian influences in American history he does not promote a view of God’s direct covenant with the United States like many other texts within the Christian Homeschool Movement.  Abeka Publishers and activist groups like Wall Builders publish texts that are simply unusable for any honest study of history.

I found the reading of Land of Hope comfortable and flowing, and on the face it meets the need for a public narrative of the United States.  However, the accusation that historians never write for the public is simply not true anymore and has not been for some years.  The charge that the fragmented histories are not useful for the public is also not true.  As a public historian, I craved those micro studies into detailed subjects.  The deep work of those books and articles allowed me solid material to weave details into exhibits or living history programs.  Studies in race, gender, and a host of other subjects are not wasted but integrated over time into public works.

My key disagreement with McClay was with the claim that with few exceptions American history is “otherwise admirable”.  This is intended to shore up the readers’ patriotic views while narrating a particularly difficult subject.  McClay uses this phrase after a paragraph on Japanese Internment by concluding this event was a “stain on the nation’s otherwise admirable conduct during the war”.[3]  A similar observation was made during his discussion of slavery, the Philippine Insurrection, Jim Crow, the violence of the Southern planter class, Native American genocide, racism, and the McCarthy Hearings during the Red Scare.  The dark elements were not ignored but considered mere stains and not part of the American character.  This was an obvious attempt to bury the 1619 project by crafting a “warts and all” history. It should be more obvious that US history has more problems than a few warts.

The chronology of Land of Hope started with a very brief overview of the colonial occupation of America. McClay creates a brief section to contextualize why Spain, Portugal, and other European powers were rivals of England.  The destruction of Native populations by colonizers was noted but qualified with the acknowledgment that it was the diseases that killed most Native groups, not European violence.  McClay argued that “This spread of deadly diseases was not intentional.”[4] What he neglected to say was that it eventually became intentional, and was a part of a larger exploitive purpose.

The chapter on British colonialism lapsed into the classic division between New England and Virginia with insufficient attention on the Caribbean colonies as the economic center of their colonial empire.  Newer research into Jamestown appeared to be missing in the colonial narratives and the Puritan emphasis on the covenant community was described without the obvious consideration that religious freedom was not their point but religious dominance. The section on New England history touched on the shift from Puritanism to Yankee culture, but without any reference to the Witch trials in Salem Massachusetts.  Land of Hope provides a very superficial discussion of colonial rivalries and conflicts as well as relations with Native peoples and the growing slave economy.  McClay approached these conditions as aberrant and unfortunate to the American founding as opposed to integral to it.

McClay pointed out that the exploitation of indentures was as bad as slavery.  His point was that slavery was not intended but occurred gradually without direction.  He postulated that the Dutch ship delivering Africans in 1619 were not slaves but indentures.  This missed the whole point Edmund Morgan and others spelled out decades ago: the English practiced exploitation from the start to make profits.  This established scholarship flies in the face of McClay’s claim that the United States was founded on the “principles of Liberty and self-rule.”[5]  It took little time for the English colonists to evolve race-based slavery and the Americans who came later were well trained in this practice.

The chapter on the founding generation demonstrated that McClay intended this book as a counterpoint to the 1619 project and similar critical positions on US History.  The book promoted a progressive, patriotic image.  This is the practice of heritage and not history.

The book claims the founding was flawed because there was no other way to proceed. After all, American society was so enmeshed with slavery and accepted it on a global level.  Like the Second Coming, greater liberty was expected at a later time.[6] This claim grows weak when we look at the other anti-slave movements at that time and letters from many of the Constitutional generation who were unsure of their experiment’s future.  McClay quoted Samuel Johnson’s accusation during the American Revolution: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”[7]  This quote itself should point out that our founding was not just flawed in some ways, but systemically wrong.

McClay wrote well about the Transcendental movement, social reforms, Second Great Awakening, Civil War, and growth of a more democratic system. I liked his use of period literature to express the culture and thinking of this antebellum age.  Once past the Civil War, the issues with race relations and immigration are again glossed over.  He does cite Turner and Dunning to illustrate different historical schools of thought but misses the original problems.  The western wars with Native groups and the response to immigrants were given a short and questionable interpretation.  Land of Hope put immigration in a positive light with Americans as always welcoming.  However, McClay did not recognize extreme political and social hostility towards some immigrants.

Modern history to McClay became a bit problematic because of the need for more time to review materials and gain distance for emotional events.  McClay does a respectable job with a controversial person like FDR but somehow fails to hit the issue of Japanese Internment well.  The post-war narrative starts to expose the partisan positions.  Problematic for me was his treatment of the Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy. More recent research has increased the blame for McCarthy’s persecution of innocent persons inside and outside of government.  By contrast, McClay’s section on Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era honestly marked the President’s violations and political damage.  McClay concluded this section with a brief review of The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The author tells the story of the Trump administration through the eyes of a Conservative perspective but without obvious elements of propaganda.  McClay credited the Administration with the current (2019) economic growth, the weakening of international agencies such as NAFTA and NATO, and a growing nationalism that was also seen in other parts of the world.  McClay treated the reaction against global initiatives and the move to less government oversight in the expected positive manner.

His Epilogue essay supports a form of modest patriotism and a strike against anyone who might claim patriotism a social or cultural hazard.  He divided different forms of American identity into shared two sections: shared memories and shared consent.  McClay felt there must be a shared history or story of the country.  The issue against this is that U.S. history is thick with different stories and experiences.  Different views cannot be simply told in a single shared, patriotic narrative.  There will be no simple story of America because so many had different experiences and viewpoints in conflict with others.

Shared Consent, the other division of identity, countered the nation as fatherland and claimed we are a land of equal opportunity and status under the law.  We are not Americans by birth, but by the process.  This was the point where McClay pointed to a long history of welcoming immigrants who would become Americans, but adds, “Converts are always welcome.”  There seemed to be a long ambivalent status an immigrant must experience.  I would have liked to have seen better treatment of this theme – perhaps focusing on Ellis Island and the political infighting around its policies toward different immigrant groups not directly from Western or English-speaking Europe.

The Land of Hope is a major effort to create a missing universal history, but like other efforts at national heritage, everyone will not be included or placed in the national story.  This condition cannot be excused any more in either a museum, a documentary, or a book. McClay repeated Lincoln’s famous phrase calling everyone to think back to a unifying past (shared memory) or “mystic chords of memory.”[8]  Many of those mystic chords convey very bad memories, and excusing or minimizing them is unjust to our history and to those who lived it.

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[1] The quote was taken from Amazon’s promotional for this book. Amazon.com (Encounter Books), accessed December 20, 2020, https://www.amazon.com/Land-Hope-Invitation-Great-American/dp/1594039372.

[2] Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope (New York: Encounter Books, 2020) back cover.

[3] Ibid., 329.

[4] Ibid., 21.

[5] Ibid., 73.

[6] Ibid., 71-72

[7] Ibid., 71.

[8] Ibid., 428.