When Howard Zinn died in 2010, he had done what few American historians have been capable or willing to do: he had written and published an influential, alternative history of the U. S., namely, A People’s History of the United States (1980). This may seem unremarkable. Are not all histories of the U. S., a “people’s” history? Well, no. Until very recently, most American history was heroic and elitist. Examples include, but are hardly limited to: the exceptionalism of the American Revolution (unsullied by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, or so it is not quite accurately alleged); the energy of the westward movement (of which there were many “movements,” and most not very glamorous or praiseworthy, e. g., the removal of the Cherokees, the seizing of Mexican lands in the southwest, and the attempts by Brigham Young and the Mormons to isolate themselves in some alternate universe in Utah); and, the genius of the founding fathers (the many biographies that fawn praise on the “founders” are enough to form a new land bridge across the Bering Straits). In more recent times, some American historians have turned their attention to the maelstrom of popular culture. But here too, America is presented as the author, and often the ultimate arbiter, of all pop culture subjects.
You might think that I am going to return to my “old saw” about American ethocentricism and exceptionalism. Well, it must be admitted that these elements are central to my proposal for a new American history – something radically beyond Zinn’s “people’s” history -- but recent events remind me that both of these prominent American characteristics might be subsumed in a new American history, under a different subject title. Maybe we need a “History of American Stupidity and Cupidity.” (Well, that will not work; most people do not own a dictionary to look up the word “cupidity.”) Maybe we need to call it: “Self-Isolation and Self-Congratulation: A History of America.” Or, maybe we need something called: “Cultural Lag: America as a Country Always One Step Behind Modern, Progressive Nation States.”
Recent events suggest just how laughable the actions and “ideas” of Americans have become (if only these action and “ideas” did not have such important consequences for the rest of us). They also should encourage some brave soul to write a history of how laggardly Americans have proven to be in their history.
Let me offer some historical reasons for this needed new history:
1. In 1696, a New England Puritan elite succumbed to a popular hysteria over “witches.” Although this “witch-hunt” was begun in the parochial confines of Salem township and Salem village, Massachusetts, many important Puritan “Divines” were implicated. Even the eminent theologian and scholar, Cotton Mather, was convinced (for a time) of the legitimacy of “spectral” evidence in court proceedings against accused person.
All of this might be understandable historically if England and western Europe were of a like mind about the existence of witches. But they were not. They had moved on almost a half-century earlier, passively agreeing that the “witchcraft” threat was unreal, “spectral evidence” ridiculous, and real witches a thing of the “dead” past. But the Puritans knew better, and this would establish a long pattern of old world “wrongness” and new world “rightness” that never seems to have ended.
2. In the 1790s, right-wing Americans (yes, they have almost always been with us; maybe we should construct a statue to American right-wing lunatics on the National Mall, and then be done with them) believed there was a conspiracy of the “Illuminati” (a mysterious and almost entirely fictional European brotherhood) and of French revolutionaries to take over the new United States. Among the conspirators were new immigrants (from Ireland, in particular), anyone who was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, almost all journalists, Thomas Jefferson, and, oh yes, anyone who was not a Hamiltonian Federalist (John Adams’s Federalists, well, they probably were not enemies within, but they certainly were not any help either).
Two hysterias down, many to go. I will not trouble you with most of them.
3. In 1861, the United States and the Southern Confederacy engaged in a “GREAT CIVIL WAR.” The South, you see had gotten a truly idiotic 3/5ths clause into the U. S. Constitution in 1789 (which allowed the South to count the total slave population in any given state as 3/5ths of its total population for establishing the number of representatives that state could send to Congress, or for the apportionment of federal direct taxes in that state -- the latter of which never happened). In addition, the South had constructed a truly Willy Wonka version of its own culture, in which southern culture and manners were superior to culture and manners in the North. To top it off, they had convinced southern poor whites, whom they exploited openly and viciously, that the real problem was the threat of Black slaves. Former Congressman James Louis Petigru of South Carolina had it right when he said on the eve of the “GREAT CIVIL WAR”: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” At least the latter half of his conclusion might be applicable to the current condition in the United States.
“But,” you might protest, “wasn’t the Civil War a noble advance for African-Americans and for American national unity?” Only in the most parochial sense, and American history is nothing if not parochial. Without denigrating Abraham Lincoln and many other noble souls of that period, the fact is that any idea about the validity of chattel slavery had been abandoned by other modern western countries long before the American Civil War. Britain abolished slavery in 1772; Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793; Lower Canada did so in 1803; and, slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 (granted, it was grandfathered in by making free only those slaves who were six years of age or younger as of January 1, 1834). The new French Republic of France abolished slavery in 1794, and ten years later, taking the ideological lead of the “mother country,” Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave uprising that declared Haitian independence and ended slavery in Saint Dominque.
So, what is the point? The point is that the “idea” of slavery was dead long before American’s grandiosely defeated southern slavery. Oh, and by the way, Jim Crow laws and Southern repression kept African-Americans in a state of near bondage until, well, just yesterday.
American history is replete with new, modern ideas being implemented first elsewhere, and then later in the U. S., only to be superceded with great fanfare about American originality and leadership.
4. Take for instance, the matter of Workmen’s Compensation, a small but important part of the modern labor movement. Great Britain, Germany, and, yes, even the United States, had all developed the ideal of workmen’s compensation in the 1880s. But in the United States at that time -- a nation riven by partisan politics, with both parties to the right of many European political parties – the implementation was slow (partly because of highly politicized and often hostile courts). So, Great Britain introduced a real piece of legislation regarding this matter in 1880, and Otto von Bismarck implemented compulsory workmen’s compensation in Germany in 1884. The province of Ontario followed soon after, in 1886, with its own version of workmen’s compensation. It took the U. S. a bit longer, with a few states near the worldwide vanguard, but most far behind.
But to read American textbooks, one would think that the modern labor movement arose in the U. S., and that the U. S. then tutored the rest of the world on how to organize labor.
5. It hardly needs repeating that the U. S. has been most laggardly in regard to health care. To read American newspapers and magazines, one would think that the Obama administration -- in Star Trek fashion -- had ventured into territory that no one had dared enter before. But, of course, we all know this to be embarrassingly false. The Obama health plan guaranteed the profits of pharmaceutical companies and guaranteed a new pool of customers for health care insurers. In fact, if heath care insurers were less political and more practical, they would know that if they added in almost all Americans to private plans, the health of Americans would go up, and, and with fewer claims for chronic or emergency care, their profits would also go up.
Alas, almost every modern country has national, universal health care of one type or another. But, one can be assured that when the U. S. finally implements such a program, they will have long forgotten the efforts of Harry Truman and Hillary Clinton, to introduce such a program, to say nothing of the long “socialistic” health care experience of almost every other country. They will OWN the invention of modern health care, and historians had better get that right.
If anyone thinks I exaggerate in my observation of the American political and cultural landscape, I recommend that they read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. This is not a history of the United States, and it must be admitted that it contains the sometimes haughty, highly “constructed” observations of a twenty-something-year-old European aristocrat. But even discounting that, the rampant parochialism and stupidity of American politics as it was just emerging in the 1830s, is made undisputedly clear. (Doubters should read The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, published around the same time as Democracy in America; and Flush Times was written by an American!)
In reality, it would be useful to have an American history positioned within the context of a larger world. American historians have been moving timidly toward “Atlantic civilization” history, but that is a movement begun long ago by a few Americans, some Canadians, and some British scholars. As it is now, we should have a candid history of American insularity, stupidity and laggardness. But, hey, try to find a publisher.
