The problem of democratic history
Keith Windschuttle
The New Criterion
June 1998

Historians who write in aristocratic ages are inclined to refer all occurrences to the particular will and character of certain individuals; and they are apt to attribute the most important revolutions to slight accidents. They trace out the smallest causes with sagacity, and frequently leave the greatest unperceived.
Historians who live in democratic ages exhibit precisely opposite characteristics. Most of them attribute hardly any influence to the individual over the destiny of the race, or to citizens over the fate of a people; but, on the other hand, they assign great general causes to all petty incidents.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (1835-40)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservative governments in both the United States and the United Kingdom invested heavily in programs to redefine the study of history and to redraft the curriculum for teaching history at high school. They did this for three reasons: surveys had demonstrated young people had an appalling level of ignorance about their societies' major historical events; the proportion of students studying history had declined in recent decades from a large majority to a small minority; and they were concerned about the rise of political correctness in history teaching, especially the denigration of the achievements of Western culture and an overemphasis on claims about the oppression of the lower classes, women and ethnic groups.

The governments of both countries thought they were canvassing a broad body of opinion when they filled their curriculum revision programs with a cross-section of teachers from public, religious and private schools, as well as representatives of parent-teacher groups, academic bodies, and scholarly and public interest associations. However, they were horrified at the outcome. Not only did the new syllabuses enshrine an even greater degree of political correctness than their sponsors had imagined possible, but they omitted the teaching of a significant number of those great landmarks of history upon whose paucity of public recognition the whole reform process had been predicated. In Britain, the first draft of the new curriculum left out the Protestant Reformation, Elizabeth the First, World War One and the history of Ireland.

In the USA, Lynne Cheney, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Bush administration and the chief initiator of the National History Standards, denounced the outcome for its "grim and gloomy" portrayal of American history and for reserving unqualified admiration for the representatives of multiculturalism and identity group politics: "Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history," she complained, "in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president. Or in which the founding of the Sierra Club and the National Organisation for Women are considered noteworthy events but the first gathering of the US Congress is not." She noted that a black woman, Harriet Tubman, who assisted slaves to escape, was given six references while Ulysses S. Grant was referred to only once and other notable white males such as Robert E. Lee, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk and the Wright Brothers were mentioned not at all.

This conservative dismay at the product of its own initiative was soon transposed to the media where, for the first time in decades, the high school history syllabus became a matter of intense public debate. Radio talk-back hosts and newspaper columnists weighed in with a largely critical expression of opinion. University professors, both for and against, signed letters to the editors of the leading newspapers. Political action quickly followed. In November 1994, the Republican-dominated US Senate made an unprecedented intervention into the debate by voting to prevent two government educational bodies from certifying the National History Standards that Cheney had originated. Soon after, the US standards were submitted to review by a small group of university historians. In the end, a great deal of the more contentious material was eliminated from both the British and American syllabuses and a more conservatively-palatable approach was accepted by the drafting committees, albeit reluctantly.

Three of the members of the body that wrote the American National History Standards, Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, have now produced a book describing these events, History On Trial. [1] They trace the project from the brief given by Lynne Cheney, to the formation and deliberations of the drafting committees, and to what they describe as "the Right Wing assault" on the finished product. They also include a chapter on attempts at the same thing in other countries including Germany, Japan, South Africa and, in most detail, Britain. Theirs is not a disinterested account. Nash, Crabtree and Dunn write from an openly Leftist position: "We make no claim to being nonpartisan academic observers of the history war." Nonetheless, they produce enough detail about the events, and sufficient verbatim quotations from the participants, to enable an observer who does not share their politics to come to his own conclusions.

Nash, Crabtree and Dunn see the contest for the curriculum in terms of a fairly simplistic Left versus Right political stoush. The Left supported multiculturalism and feminism and tried to use the history syllabus to enshrine these principles in the education system. The Right supported a traditionalist curriculum. The authors regard their own position not so much as politically loaded but as up-to-date, popular with students, justified by current theories of historical method, and, above all, inherently democratic. As one might expect, they regard their opposition as old fashioned, theoretically naïve, boring and elitist. One might well ask what the Bush administration thought it was doing when it recruited people with such predilections, but it is highly likely that any broadly representative recruiting process would have produced much the same result. For it is plain that the views of these authors represent a consensus not only among the Left but among the history teaching profession as a whole. Their own evidence for this is convincing. "Altogether," they argue, "the participants [on the drafting committee] probably spanned the central part of the political spectrum; ideologues of either the Right or the Left were not to be found." Some members were active Republicans; others regarded themselves as apolitical and were astonished at the condemnation they received. Two of the latter commented:

All of the classroom teachers who wrote the standards and developed the activities are mainstream educators with long experience in the classroom and are highly regarded by their colleagues, by students, and by parents. To be labelled as some sort of left-wing radicals by critics such as Mrs Cheney is an injustice to classroom teachers everywhere.

In other words, the concepts embodied in what conservatives have seen as political correctness, identity group politics and multiculturalism represent not merely the dominance of the Left within the education system but how the mainstream of classroom instructors now conceive the writing and teaching of history today. How did such a state of affairs come to pass?

One of the major appeals of the multiculturalist platform is the way its proponents have identified it with democratic ideals. Nash, Crabtree and Dunn talk about the creation of "a history education that is fit for a democratic society" which at the same time "represents a commitment to multiculturalism." They note that the last few decades have witnessed "a remarkable effort to broaden the scope of history education to ensure that the experiences of all classes, regions and ethnoracial groups, as well as both genders, are included in it." A glance at current textbooks, syllabuses and teacher-training programs, they observe, will confirm the growth of this movement which "expresses an allegiance to the democratic notion that our history should reflect the experiences, contributions, aspirations and travails of all the nation's people." They want to overturn Thomas Carlyle's definition, inscribed in the rotunda of the Library of Congress, that "History is the biography of great men", or as they put it, of "great white Protestant men". Instead, they say, history should become:

an examination of vast dimensions of the human experience hertofore unnoticed. Why should a democratic people dedicated to equality not applaud the attention now given to the roles in history of women, African Americans, working people, religious denominations, and other groups relatively powerless in the formal political sense? … Is this the voice of 'political correctness' or a recognition of the link between a democratic society and a more historically complete and accurate rendering of the past? … That American history textbooks until recently left out the record of common folk seems extraordinary in a democratic society where we live by the motto 'of, for, and by the people'.

Extraordinary though it might seem to these authors, there are very good reasons why history once paid only a small degree of attention to many of these worthy groups, and why it focused so much attention on white Protestants of the male gender. Until the last thirty years, most of the history that had been written was in the form of a narrative of causes. Most people who read history books did so because they wanted to know why their society took the form it did and how it responded to its major challenges. Historians usually answered this demand in terms of how authority had been determined and deployed, and they invoked causes of a political, military and legal nature. The "common folk" and most of the now familiar sexual and ethnic identity groups played only intermittent roles in this account, usually in periods of civil unrest or in spasmodic mass phenomena such as migration. This was because for most of the time most of the people were not causally effective: they were the objects rather than the agents of history; they were on the receiving end of major historic events, not their instigators.

Nash, Crabtree and Dunn unwittingly confirm this very point themselves. In discussing recent attempts by feminist historians to argue for an important role for American women in the Revolution of 1776, they list the following contributions: women provided food for armies on the march, they were fund raisers for the war effort, they acted as nurses for the wounded and as 'companions' for soldiers in the campgrounds and the battlefields. Surely it is obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with these events that all this is clutching at straws and is special pleading of a pathetic kind. While there were no doubt women who undertook all these activities, their efforts were insignificant compared to the commercial supply of provisions, fund raising by political associations and the treatment of the wounded by male surgeons. It is true that every army that has ever fought on its own soil has thereby gained some advantage from its domestic supporters, but it beggars all credulity to claim that the role of women in 1776 was in any way decisive to the outcome.

The American War of Independence was initiated and won almost entirely by the efforts of those great white Protestant men who are now so much of an anathema to the multiculturalists. Moreover, the contribution made by two other currently revered identity groups, blacks and American Indians, is even more of a multicultural embarrassment, because those of them who expressed any opinion about the Revolution at the time all supported the British.

I should emphasise that none of this means it is impossible to write acceptable scholarly histories of women and ethnic groups. It is perfectly legitimate, for instance, to write an account of the history of the domestic activities of women at the time of the Revolution, or at any other period, or to describe the condition of indigenous peoples before or after their contact with Europeans, even though neither group may have had a causal impact on mainstream political history. Works of this kind can be of considerable interest to readers, especially those who are members of the groups concerned, and largely for this reason they have provided the impetus for the emergence of social history as a major field within the discipline since the 1960s. However, this approach has at least four drawbacks that render it far less suitable than the traditional version to form the basis of an educational program.

First, accounts of this kind are never, in themselves, sufficient to provide a complete explanation of the circumstances of the lives of the people discussed. Their intelligibility is invariably dependent upon a familiarity with the chief historical events, landmarks and structures of authority provided by more orthodox accounts, and which would still need to be taught. No proper explanation of the position of women, for instance, should omit their relationships with men or with public affairs; nor can the condition of the industrial working classes be understood separate from the role of the middle and upper classes, especially those who were their employers, or from the political connections between all three.

Second, these accounts normally take the form of a relatively static descriptive analysis of their chosen groups rather than a sequential narrative. This means that the crucial historical dimension of change over time is either played down or omitted entirely, thus depriving the work of chronological and causal explanation.

Third, despite G. M. Trevelyan's famous dictum that social history is "history with the politics left out", many of these works have hidden political agendas which, while it may not be apparent to the student reader, nonetheless determine their whole rationale. More on this below.

The fourth problem with the authors' notion of democratic history is its lack of coherence. If one abandoned the traditional approach based on a narrative of major events and their causes in favour of equal time for every identifiable sexual and ethnic group, history would lose its explanatory power and degenerate into a tasteless blancmange of worthy sentiment. There would be no integrated story to be told that could link political, economic, military and technological events into an intelligible framework. Hence, it would be impossible to achieve the goals of explaining either national development or, as both the American and British curriculum committees were commissioned to define, the nation's place in world affairs. Nash, Crabtree and Dunn are aware of this last objection and offer a reply to it. It is worth quoting at some length because it demonstrates much of the rhetorical appeal of their case:

Can a plurality of stories and jarring perspectives fit into a coherent understanding of the American past? Quite simply, the particularities of social history can be mainstreamed readily enough by changing the governing narrative from the rise of democracy, defined in terms of electoral politics, to the struggle to fulfil the American ideals of liberty, equal justice and equality. This new narrative, arising out of a democratised historical practice, would speak to contests and conflicts over power and how such contests reflect the long struggles among various groups to elbow their way under the canopy of the nation's founding promises… Can there be any grand narrative more powerful, coherent, democratic, and inspiring than the struggles of groups that have suffered discrimination, exploitation, and hostility but have overcome passivity and resignation to challenge their exploiters, fight for legal rights, resist and cross racial boundaries, and hence embrace and advance the American credo that 'all men are created equal'?

This reply deserves to set alarm bells ringing among all those non-political classroom teachers who have so far welcomed the National History Standards. To teach history as fundamentally a story of struggle against discrimination, exploitation and hostility is to commit a great unpardonable sin. The story is false. The idea that the history of the United States or of Britain, or indeed of the majority of Western countries, could be described this way should be convincing only to the most hardened ideologue. For example, the feminist claim that the history of women is essentially one of conflict with authoritarian patriarchs is belied not only by the everyday experience of the vast majority of ordinary people but by the feminists' own writings. What, for instance, did all those women imagine they were doing when they supplied food, companionship and nursing care to their purported oppressors, the American revolutionaries? Similarly, the claim that the history of non-white and non-English speaking ethnic groups is essentially one of exploitation is belied by the extraordinary degree of social mobility achieved, often in one generation, by those same ethnic groups in every English-speaking country in the world. One would, of course, have to be blind not to recognise that some ethnic groups suffer long-term and deeply entrenched problems, but to blow these up to the point where they define the whole of the history of either the nation or the "common folk" is a wilfully dishonest exaggeration.

Alexis de Tocqueville, as the opening quotation records, made a useful differentiation between the tendencies found in history writing in different eras. Soon after he wrote these words, however, historians began the attempt to rise above these distinctions. While preserving the prominence given by aristocratic culture to the influence wielded by the actions of great men, they also tried to incorporate the emphasis that a democratic age placed on social structures, mass movements, and the influence of economic and demographic pressures on the course of events. Through methods of scholarship they regarded as objective - by which they meant their arguments were based entirely on openly cited evidence that could be corroborated or challenged by others - they hoped to produce a disinterested history that transcended the ideologies of their times. Nash, Crabtree and Dunn dismiss this notion as both out-of-date and politically contaminated. "Modern historiography," they assure us, "has taught us that historians can never fully detach their scholarly work from their own education, attitudes, ideological dispositions and culture." Disinterested scholarship "is not simply an uneducated view. It is also an ideological position of traditionalists and the political Right that particular facts, traditions, and heroic personalities, all untainted by 'interpretation', represent the 'true' and 'objective' history that citizens ought to know."

However, the version of history they offer in its place not only repeats the faults Tocqueville ascribes to the democratic era, but is as ideologically polluted as any ever devised. Beneath its rhetoric lies a perspective that has a long and disreputable track record and which has produced some notoriously anti-democratic conclusions. It is, in fact, a marginally modified restatement of the Marxist theory that the history of all previous generations is the history of class struggle. The approach to historical research endorsed by Nash, Crabtree and Dunn was born in the 1960s under the names of 'social history' and 'history from below'. Its most celebrated creators were the British Marxist historians Edward Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, and Eric Hobsbawm, at the time best-known for his history of European revolutions and the British labour movement.

For Marxist theory, the study of the history of "common folk" is an important issue, for many are members of what Marxism defines as the proletariat, the industrial workers destined to lead the revolution that will replace capitalism with communism. Hence the first book by Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). However, Thompson and Hobsbawm brought far more than the usual Marxist theoretical dogma to their work, displaying considerable sensitivity to the lives of ordinary people, discovering some genuine working class heroes, and colouring their work in warm romantic hues. Although in the 1990s Marxism and communism have lost all intellectual credibility and political appeal, the style and methodologies pioneered by these two authors have nonetheless now permeated a far wider range of historical topics, research and writing. History from below has become mainstream. Politically, this has allowed the Left to change horses, to abandon the blue collar workforce and to pin its hopes for social change on the constituents of the now familiar identity groups. By defining people into such groups and presenting them with their own social histories that show them to be victims of an unconscionable oppression, radical politics has enjoyed a conspicuous rejuvenation.

There are at least two prominent examples of the political success won through this approach. The first is in the United Kingdom where in 1997 the plebiscites for devolution demonstrated that there are now majorities in Scotland and Wales who have been persuaded they should emulate the Irish and seek their independence from the burden of English imperialism. The second is the example of the indigenous peoples of the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand who are using the history of their maltreatment as moral justification for demanding their own territory be carved out of the existing nations and they be given self-government with their own custom-based legal systems. While there are no signs at present that the governments of the latter countries will cede these demands, given several present and future cohorts of high school students taught nothing but the downside of the relationship with indigenes, there may well emerge a whole younger generation of non-indigenous voters willing to support them.

The logical consequence of these developments is ethnic separatism, or what some US critics have described as 'the Balkanisation of America'. Samuel Huntington Jr has argued: "The American multiculturalists reject their country's cultural heritage … They wish to create a country of many civilisations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilisation and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society."

Nash, Crabtree and Dunn dismiss these concerns as alarmist. To display their impartiality, they offer some criticisms of claims by American Afrocentrist propagandists that African society is superior to European and was, via ancient Egypt's influence on Greece, the true founder of Western civilisation. But even after they have jettisoned such discredited notions, their conflict model of history remains profoundly depressing. It is predicated upon a framework of heroes and villains in which the truth is nowhere to be found. The villains are the originators and upholders of Western culture in whose hands Western history becomes little more than a chronicle of Western crimes. The heroes are those alleged victims of the same culture who, in reality, have played the smallest roles, and in some cases no role at all, in its development. Within such parameters, the true cultural heritage of Europe and its offspring are totally silenced. It is hard to imagine a creed more demoralising or more destructive of Western values.

Ironically, conflict models of history reflect one of the great strengths of Western culture. The self-criticism on which they are based was built into the culture from the start and, arguably, has been the source of much of its innovation and dynamism ever since. Moreover, the freedom to express such criticism has been one of the most cherished possessions of those who have inherited the culture. Most of the radical movements of the past two hundred years, while highly critical of many aspects of Western culture, have nonetheless seen themselves (however deluded they might have been) as fulfilling that culture, or taking it to a higher plane, or at least saving it from itself. The multiculturalist movement is qualitatively different. It is self-criticism without redemptive features: self-criticism turned to self-hatred. It is a total critique of the West that derides many of the West's greatest achievements as its greatest failings. Some older, one-time radicals saw this very clearly when the National History Standards were published. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observed:

Nowhere in those standards … will you find any mention of the fact that it was the Western tradition that first produced the idea of individual freedom. Nowhere will you find that it was in Christianity that the concept of individual freedom originated. That slavery is evil is a Western idea. Because the bias of the standards is so weighted against the United States and the West, you will find no acknowledgment of the fact that we have produced what no other country and tradition has.

It is worth adding that no other culture, either now or in the past, would ever have been so foolish as to contemplate, let alone advocate, the education of its children on principles so lacking in self-awareness, so unrelentingly self-critical and so potentially self-destructive.

1. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, Alfred A. Knopff, New York, 1997, $26.00