My American History Course
Remnant Review.
Sometime early next year, I will begin writing the scripts for my history of the United States. I will produce a course for the Ron Paul Curriculum. It will be a combination of PowerPoint screencasts, lectures, and primary source documents.
This will be the culmination of a half century of work. I have a particular view of how American history should be taught, but that is not the same as saying that I am confident at this point that I will be able to stick to my theoretical preference for teaching American history. When somebody is trying to communicate a lifetime of work to 14-year-olds, he has to cut corners.
My course will parallel a course taught by Tom Woods on the history of American constitutions. The chronological periods will overlap. He will begin with the constitutions that started it all, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641). He will give considerable space to the Articles of Confederation. He will also discuss the Constitutional Convention, and the history of Constitutional interpretation from that point on. It is not possible to understand American history unless you also understand the development of American constitutionalism. In this sense, the United States really is unique, or some people say, exceptional. There has never been a country like it in this regard. The evolution of the constitutions really does mark the major changes in American life.
HOW TO TEACH AMERICAN HISTORY
From the time of the ratification of the second U.S. Constitution, meaning the one that was crafted in 1787 in Philadelphia, the chronological tyranny of presidential elections takes over. American history from that point on has to be written in terms of the four-year presidential cycle. It shows how powerful the presidency is, because it really does reflect fundamental changes that are taking place in the nation. This is especially true of turning-point elections. The election of 1860 is the model.
The next factor that is convenient is to use decades, with zeros at the end. Technically speaking, a decade that begins with a zero at the end is the final year of the previous decade, not the beginning. But, psychologically, we cannot accept this. We think of a turn of the century as 1800, 1900, and 2000. Technically, the turn of the century was 1801, 1901, and 2001. In American history, this corresponds to the inauguration of a President. But the decade approach is more a matter of memory than anything else. We like to think of certain decades in terms of a particular trend. This is easy to do with the 1920s, the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, the 1960s, and maybe the 1970s. But the closer I look at it, the more I am convinced that this pattern was abrogated after the 1960s. You can speak of the 1960s as a turning point, but I do not think you can speak of the 1970s, the 1980s, in the 1990s as turning points. Yes, 2001 was a turning point, but that was because of 9/11, George W. Bush, the Patriot Act. If it had not been for 9/11, I do not think we would pay much attention to the first decade of the 21st century.
It is also easy to teach history in terms of certain events. There is no question my mind that 9/11 was such an event. Another such event was the presidential election of 1860. The Spanish-American War (1898) was such a turning point, because that launched the American Empire. We took over the Philippines from the Spanish, but we enforced this transfer of power only by means of one of the most repressive imperial wars ever recorded. That event is not covered in American history textbooks. It was probably the biggest event in American history that was deliberately dropped down the memory hole, and has stayed down. The minimum estimate of the number of people killed by American troops is 25,000. The more common estimate ranges up to 250,000. That is why it has been dropped down the memory hole.
Any good history book or course has to be a mixture of traditional interpretations and revisionism. If it is strictly textbook history, it is boring beyond belief. It is also the product of the establishment guild of historians. In our day, this means the liberal Establishment vs. radical criticism from the left of the American Establishment. It is kind of a right brain-left brain dichotomy. Left out are the free market, decentralization, and resistance to the central state. The only form of decentralization that we can hear of these days is some form of multiculturalism, which really is a form of decentralization, but closely associated with race and government intervention on the side of race. It is about power blocs.
Ryan McMaken has written an excellent essay that is critical of Pat Buchanan's assumption that 1960 was the high water mark of American history. McMaken sees this as a defense of the WASP Establishment and its incarnation in the national state.
I would date this symbolically with the death of John D. Rockefeller Junior in 1960. If there was one man who was the incarnation of the WASP Establishment, it was Rockefeller. He bankrolled many of the ventures that were run by the Protestant Establishment. His death came in the final full year of the Eisenhower administration. That surely was the high water mark of American political Protestantism.
In a decentralized social order, there are competing views of what ought to be. This includes politics. In the United States, this competition began in 1635. That was the year that the Puritan oligarchs of Massachusetts warned Roger Williams that he was about to be arrested for heresy, and they recommended that he flee the province. He did so in the middle of the winter, and he founded Rhode Island about 40 miles south of Boston. Between the Puritan oligarchs and Williams, there was a political confrontation that had enormous long-term implications. Williams set up the first secular civil government in the history of the West. It was not associated with Christianity or any other religion. Puritanism was associated with Calvinism and Congregationalism in Massachusetts. From a political standpoint, Williams won that battle with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. It took over a century and a half for the implications of this to reach down to the lowest level of civil government, but it finally did in the early 1960s.
The best history of this confrontation and its implications was written by an economist, Murray Rothbard. His four-volume series, Conceived in Liberty, is basically a defense of the Rhode Island experiment. I regard it as the best piece of revisionist writing in American history. There are more new interpretations per page in that series than in any book I can think of. It is really a shame that he never finished the fifth volume, which was to have been on the Constitution.
For history to be readable, it needs to be structured in such a way that the reader can hang his hat on certain events. That is the only way people will remember what happened. This used to be a technique of the ancient world. They literally did memorize things by means of conceiving rooms filled with information. There is an amazing book on this, written by an amazing but obscure scholar, Frances Yates: The Art of Memory. I knew a man 40 years ago who had earned his PhD in chemistry. He told me that he had remembered the material for his written exams by memorizing formulas, and mentally tying them to pickets along a picket fence. I cannot imagine how this worked, because one picket looks just the same as any other, as far as I am concerned, but he said that was how he memorized formulas and passed his examinations.
The historian has to pick certain documents, certain events, certain dates, certain trends, certain personalities, and combine all this into a coherent series of stories. People remember stories. They do not remember much else. So, the stories have to tell a longer story, and the specific personalities, dates, and documents must help the student remember the key events. It is up to the historian to select these key events. It is the heart of his task as an historian to do this. If he picks one set, he cannot pick another set. The students will remember little of anything the historian writes or lectures about, but bits and pieces will be remembered, and every establishment has to make sure that these events, and the official explanation of these events, are retained by the readers. Even if they are not retained by the readers, the important thing is this: no other series of events, personalities, dates, and documents replaces the official version.
In the United States, one book more than any other told this official story. That book was the most widely used public high school history textbook in American history: David Seville Muzzey's textbook, The United States of America. It was first published in 1911, and from the beginning it became the dominant public school history textbook. It was still in use in the mid-1950s, when I was in school. It continued through the 1960s. Muzzey is a forgotten figure today, but his influence in telling tens of millions of Americans what the American Protestant Establishment wanted them to learn cannot be overestimated. I have a 1922 addition of the two-volume set. It is 1400 pages, and it is all text. Today, only Ivy League universities would dare to assign this book to lower-division students. But in 1922, it was the dominant American history textbook.
He was a nationalist. He was also a liberal Protestant. He was a Presbyterian. He hated Calvinism, and he loved nationalism. There is only one chapter on all of American history prior to the American Revolution. He had no use for colonial American history. Yet it was in this period that the roots of American civilization were established. These roots were intensely religious, and Muzzey did what he could to eliminate this history, root and branch.
The great difficulty in teaching American history, and almost any other history of the Western society, is that it is focused on national politics. A national event such as a major election becomes the focus of the textbook. It may not be because of what the newly elected President did over the remainder of his career. It may be only because of the fact that the electorate seemed to change its mind. I suppose the key election like this was the election of 1840. That was the year the Whigs won their first election. It turned out not to be a major event for the Whigs, because William Henry Harrison gave too long an inaugural address, caught pneumonia, and died in 30 days. That elevated John Tyler to the presidency, the first Vice President to assume the office of President. He was a Jacksonian Democrat (limited government), not a Whig. It was under Tyler that Texas came into the union. So, with respect to the Whig Party, which won the election of 1840 by means of new political techniques, not much came of the election, but it was an important election, merely because the new political techniques elected Harrison.
There were other crucial elections. The most important was election of 1860, which led to secession within a matter of weeks. South Carolina pulled out, and the rest of the South followed over the next six months. The election of 1932 was not crucial with respect to the issues, because Roosevelt campaigned as a Cleveland Democrat, calling for budget cuts, and blaming Hoover as a spendthrift. But his inaugural address of March 4, 1933, clearly articulated the biggest single change in American political history since the election of Lincoln in 1860.
The battle for the minds of Americans is the battle over the interpretation of the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains an icon in American history, second only to Lincoln and possibly George Washington. The two presidents who made the biggest difference were Lincoln and Roosevelt. The rival interpretations of Lincoln and Roosevelt constitute the essence of revisionism versus establishment historiography in American history. This is where the real battle over what constitutes good civil government always has to go back to. As you might expect, I am hostile to both Lincoln and Roosevelt. I regard these two men as the most successful centralizers of political power in American history. This is why the Establishment loves them, and this is why revisionists do not love them.
Lincoln remains untouchable. There was always hostility to Roosevelt, and this hostility extended from the Republican Party of 1933 until today. But there remains no textbook or even monograph on Franklin Roosevelt that is equally hostile to both his domestic economic policies and his foreign policy. There are books critical of his economic policies; there are books critical of his foreign policies; but there is no single book, written by a scholar, that tells the story of Roosevelt as the great centralizer, by means of economic intervention at home and foreign policy abroad. Indeed, the major critics of his foreign policy from the beginning, at least within academia, were old leftists. There were critics of his foreign policy on the Right, but they did not have a large following.
There are almost no critics of Lincoln. The old South was hostile to him, but the old South was defeated, and it never produced a comprehensive book against Lincoln's wartime policies. The major critic of Lincoln in our day is Thomas DiLorenzo, and he is an economist. So, strangely, the two major books of American revisionism that really go to the heart of the matter were written by a couple of Austrian school economists.
To tell the story of America accurately, you have to describe the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a coup d'état. That was understood in the late 19th century, but it is no longer understood. The transition from the Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution, which was done illegally, is the heart of the matter domestically.
That takes us back one step to the American Revolution. The real revisionists in American history in the Establishment world have been historians who have been favorable to the British Empire. They were connected personally to what is sometimes called the Anglo-American alliance. They were taken seriously within the academic community, but they never gained a major foothold. Always, the defenders of the revolution have been dominant.
The problem with this interpretation is simple: December 1773 was when the centralization of the American social order began. That was the Tea Party. We never returned to the low tax era that prevailed prior to 1774. We never returned to the low debt era, which prevailed during that period. Worse, we got a central bank in 1791, which replaced the best currency we ever had in the history of this country, which was a currency system that was outside the jurisdiction of North America. That was the Spanish silver piece known as the "piece of eight." There were almost no fractional reserve banks in the country, and silver coinage was the basis of the entire economic system. The great irony today that we find people who call for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and a return to specie metal coinage, and yet they are all good patriots in favor of the original Tea Party.
What they never tell you about the Tea Party it is that it was a tax revolt against a reduction of taxes. Colonial era historians know this, but the public does not. I will be telling that story to the students, as well as the story of the pre-revolution American currency. We went from the pieces of eight, which was a stable currency based on silver, to the Continental system, which is a totally fiat money system, and which produced the worst inflation in the history of North America. Nothing else comes close to the hyperinflation of the continentals. Yet that was the price we paid for the revolt against incredibly limited government, and a currency system based on silver. The fact that anybody the Tea Party movement would defend the American Revolution is one of those odd facts based on a complete misunderstanding of both economics and American history. It is the misunderstanding promoted for half a century by David Saville Muzzey.
The obvious answer to the person who claims that the American Revolution was necessary for sustaining freedom in North America is to take a closer look at Canada. Canada is a welfare state, but not much advanced beyond the United States. Canada looks so much like the United States when you cross the border that you do not know that you have crossed the border, other than the check point. I lived in a border town, and I used to go into Canada. Except for the prices of gasoline (liters), you could not tell that you had crossed into a new country.
Every day, people cross the border at the oceanfront town of Blaine, Washington, drive northwest through British Columbia, turn south, and drive across the border again into the little town of Point Roberts. The cultural differences seen along that route are invisible to any tourist.
There is a huge difference between the Canadian border and the Mexican border. That difference is based on religion, politics, language, and culture. Nobody is calling for a fence between Canada and the United States. That border is the least defended border in the world. Canadians are not rushing to get in the United States, except when they need to get medical care rapidly, and then they cross one by one legally.
I am waiting for the ACLU to bring a court case against the fence, based on its racial profiling.
If you really want to know the difference between Canada and the United States, study the career of the famous Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. He was a Rockefeller agent. So, what was the difference? Only the currency in which he was paid off.
In the summer of 1957, I took an American history class in high school. We used Muzzey's textbook. The only thing that I remember about that textbook is this: he described the major transformation that was achieved by the United States Constitution. He said that, for the first time, the national government could impose its will directly on individual citizens, especially through taxation. That insight was originally provided by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist papers, and it was accurate. There is a reason why Hamilton is by far the favorite of establishment historians today. There is a reason why Ron Chernow wrote his hagiography of Hamilton, and why he is also the official historian of the Morgan bank, Rockefeller, Sr., the Warburgs, and George Washington.
You can explain much of American history after 1800 as the battle intellectually between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Then it became the battle among the three sections of the country, ass represented by Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C Calhoun. This is fairly standard historiography. The problem with it is this: it is not clear in the textbooks how important Clay was, for he was the spiritual mentor of Abraham Lincoln. His economics was mercantilist economics. The outcome of that three-way confrontation was the creation of the American nation-state. It was marked by a change in grammar: from "the United States are" to "the United States is."
By doubling the size of the country through massive increase in debt, Jefferson in 1803 delivered the nation into the hands of Madison, and Madison had already delivered the nation into the hands of Hamilton. Madison began his presidency as an opponent of the Bank of the United States, but at the end, he favored the creation of the Second Bank of the United States. He sold out. But he had done that in 1787. If anyone says this, he is considered a radical revisionist historian.
Three men wrote the Federalist papers: Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. Jay is barely remembered today. He wrote very few of the essays. Yet Jay was the crucial figure. Why? Because he was the representative of American Protestantism. He was a serious Protestant, what we would call an evangelical today. In 1787, he sided with Madison, a functional Unitarian, and Hamilton, a nominal Episcopalian and operational skeptic. We know what Hamilton was in 1787, because in 1801 he experienced a religious conversion to something resembling John Jay's version of Protestantism. But, at that point, Hamilton was the most hated man in American politics, and had zero political influence.
Jay represented the transfer of politics from the Protestants to the Unitarians. When I say Unitarians, I mean people who held Unitarian theology. The movement had barely begun in 1787. But Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were self-consciously not a part of the Christian political tradition. They all rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, they all rejected any kind of Christian influence in politics. Hamilton changed his mind in 1801, but by then it was too late.
The Protestant tradition had been far more decentralist than any other tradition. In America, Protestantism in 1787 was intensely local. This was self-conscious. It was less true of the Episcopalians, but because the Episcopalians did not have a Bishop in the colonies, every young man who wanted to be ordained had to go to London to be ordained. This dramatically restricted the expansion of Episcopalianis, is in North America. Again, this story does not get into the textbooks, either. What really does not get into the story is this: one of the major factors in the coming of the American Revolution was resistance against what was believed to be a plan by the Anglican church to send a Bishop to the colonies, where he could ordain far more parish priests. That story has been known to specialists in colonial history for half a century because of the book by a major American historian of the colonial era, Carl Bridenbaugh: Mitre and Sceptre. The public has not been told.
If we see the heart of the political battle is decentralization versus centralization. John Jay was the great representative sellout of the decentralist tradition. Yet most Americans of never heard of him.
We have lived so long under what has become an American empire, that we no longer sense the tremendous difference between the world of 1773 and today. It is not just a difference of technology. It is a fundamental difference in how people regard the legitimacy of the nation-state. There was no nation-state in North America in 1773. There was an Empire, but there was no nation-state. There were state governments. These were under tight control of the state legislatures, which put up the money. This was the issue of the Tea Party, because money that was collected from the sale of the tea would go to the governor's office. The major taxes had been dropped on the tea when it came in to London, and the tax savings were passed on to consumers in North America. The total taxes collected from colonial consumers was far less in 1773 than it had been in 1770. The price spread in 1770 was high between legal tea sent to North America by the British East India Company and competing teas. This made profitable the smuggling empire of John Hancock. But, when the taxes were cut on the tea that was exported by the British East India Company, Hancock found his profits shredded. He became a great proponent of resistance to the consumption of British tea. The political issue: Could the governor of Massachusetts collect taxes, irrespective of the approval of the colonial legislature? The patriots said yes, and the rebels said no. The outcome of that confrontation was the redefinition of who constituted a patriot.
This eventually led to the Patriot Act.
The story of America can be encapsulated in this question: "Who is the patriot, and who is the rebel?"
My point is this: revolutions centralize political power. There is no such thing as a revolution that does not centralize political power. It also increases taxes, and it always increases debt.
This is not a story beloved of the tea party movement. This is not a story beloved of the American Establishment. It is not a story that has ever gotten space in American textbooks. The victors write the textbooks.
CONCLUSION
I believe the world is about to revert to something like what existed politically under the Articles of Confederation. I do not think that we will see the culmination of the breakdown of the nation-state as the prelude to the creation of a one-world state, and then a one-state world. The international Establishment is working hard to move the various nation-states in that direction, but they will not be successful. Economics will block this attempt. But what is clear is this: the existing system will not be maintained after the Great Default. There will be pressure to create an international New World Order, as there has been since at least 1919. But I think we are headed back in the direction of a world without empires. I think we are headed back in the direction of political decentralization. I think the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 is the wave of the future, not the creation of the German Empire in 1871.
The legal forms will be retained. There will be revolution within the form. The Establishment will make it look as though nothing really has changed, but the Great Default will change a great deal. The expansion of centralized state has always rested on high taxation and central banking. When these two trends are reversed by the effects of monetary disruption, the world will have an opportunity to throw off the baggage.