Gordon Wood And The Battle Over American History
The late historian countered the anti-American view. His side may have lost in academia
One of the greatest American historians died last week. Gordon Wood, most famous for The Radicalism of the American Revolution and a reference in Good Will Hunting, was killed in a car accident at the age of 92. Tributes poured in from all corners of American life, including from your humble author. As most readers should know, I rate Radicalism as one of the best books for learning about our national character.
Often overlooked in the Wood tributes is his last great effort against the 1619 Project. Wood joined with four other preeminent American historians to challenge the anti-white endeavor as bad history. It made him controversial within his own profession, but his reputation lent immense credibility to the anti-1619 side. While Wood’s view aligned more with popular opinion, it lost the debate within American academia. That will impact how future generations view America
There’s a long-running debate, primarily among conservative commentators, about American identity. Both sides in the debate positively view America. They disagree over whether it’s defined by a “creedal” or an ethno-cultural identity. While this inspires a deluge of discourse, it seems to have a limited impact on the general public. There isn’t a resurgence in Anglo-Saxon identity and few call themselves Heritage Americans in real life. This conversation is primarily relegated to the Right and liberals who engage with this sphere. It’s still an interesting debate, and I’ve engaged in it plenty, but it’s not reaching the public in the way many right-wingers believe.
The historical debate that’s shaping school curriculums and public monuments is a battle between pro-American and anti-American frameworks. The pro-American view is usually creedal. The anti-American view is ostensibly creedal, but condemns the nation for failing to uphold these values due to its white supremacy. It also places minorities at the center of American history and casts whites as the villains. The 1619 Project declared that it “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Other works depict Amerindians, Asians, immigrants, gays, and other “outsiders” as the real America.
Wood represented the pro-America view. He wasn’t really a conservative. In a rare trait for a historian, he didn’t really expound on his political views, but it was widely assumed he was a moderate liberal. What he did make clear is that he loved America and his scholarship celebrated this nation’s history. He didn’t downplay slavery or any other misdeed. He simply felt the country’s virtues outweighed its vices and was more worthy of attention.
His view wouldn’t please many right-wingers, as he depicted America as more of an idea based on the “actual behavior of plain ordinary people–in the everyday desire for the freedom to make money and pursue happiness in the here and now.” But it made him love this country.
That’s why he opposed the 1619 Project. It imagined the Revolution was fought to protect slavery and denounced Abraham Lincoln, of all people, as a villainous white supremacist. Wood, along with four other prominent historians, penned a letter challenging the Project’s assertions.
“I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways,” he said in a 2019 interview.
Unfortunately for Wood, that view now predominates in academia. Most works now focus on non-whites, women, and gays. White men are cast as the villains, and America itself is heavily criticized. One can just look at what works now win the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Bancroft Prize (the profession’s other most distinguished award).
Here are some recent Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists:
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America
Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
Here are some recent Bancroft Prize winners:
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States
John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
The majority of U.S. history jobs are now slated for those who focus on minority studies. Even white male leftists struggle to get hired, as can be attested by the story of David Austin Walsh. Despite Walsh writing an entire book on the racism of the Trump movement and his Yale Ph.D, no department wanted to give him a tenure track job. Just imagine how well a Gordon Wood would fare in today’s environment.
A friend in academia described to me in detail the horrible state of American history:
I would say the reason that there will be fewer Gordon Woods in the future is that Wood, despite being fairly left wing in relation to the national median man, was still a progressive with a fundamentally positive outlook on “America” and genuinely believed that America had a national culture that the American people produced social and technical innovations that were beneficial to the entire world. The reality in almost every history department in the United States today is that this view is simply too positive to be permissible for prospective new hires in US History.
For modern academic history, America, as a nation, is “stamped from the beginning” by white supremacy, the moral burden of multiple genocides, the idea of whiteness, and social slavishness to heteronormativity. For almost every historian employed by an institution of higher learning in the United States, the only history worth talking about is the history of the subaltern, a word more Americans on the right should be familiar with. What this means is that only subjects on the correct side of the Foucauldian power dynamic carry the moral weight required to be a teachable subject or the topic of a dissertation or monograph. America and the majority of the American population can never appear in a positive way with academia’s current anti-essentialist priors.
The 1619 project, which Wood, to his credit, felt affronted enough by to explicitly write against, nevertheless only constitutes one aspect in the complete capture of academic US history by the subalternists. In practice, something similar to the 1619 outlook is present in every domestic topic with the field, from the revolution being rewritten as a revolt defending the rights of slavers and slave owners to the restructuring of western expansion around the imagined “indigenous continent” or “native grounds”.
The convention of anti-essentialist “1619” style in history departments dominates US history so completely, that almost every thesis and dissertation is warped around the need to fit that style. If, for example, you initially want to write about military pensions in prior wars, your superiors, who are all 1-3 generations younger than Wood, will push you to write about black pensioners or discover pensioners that were subsequently homosexuals.
More grimly, were Wood still alive, and in his late 30’s with the same political and historiographical outlook, but without his later accolades, the departments that are now dominated by his opponents on the left would almost certainly exclude him from Tenure Track. If he found employment at all, it would have to be at an institution greatly beneath Harvard, U Mich, Brown, Cambridge, or Northwestern.
This is a grim picture of American historiography. The one upside is that it’s not shared by the general public. The vast majority of Americans are still proud of this country, even though it’s a smaller number in the past. Fifty-six percent of Americans reject the 1619 idea that the revolution was fought to preserve slavery and 53 percent of the country sees the Founding Fathers as heroes. The excesses of wokeness were rejected by the public. People don’t want to feel bad about our nation’s history or atone for ancestral sins. They still view American identity in a way similar to that of Gordon Wood.
But that could change. Patriotism is most notably declining among the young. These are the ones who ingested the negative view of their country in history class. They were the ones who learned more about slavery, Indian “genocide,” and other misdeeds rather than the greatness of our Founders. Academic historians determine what goes into the textbooks read by the young. If they all fixate on minorities and alleged white crimes, it’s no wonder why the youth are less patriotic.
Battles over creedal vs. ethno-culturalist interpretations miss the big picture. We’re losing the youth because they’re learning to hate the country, not because they believe America is an “idea.” Correcting that is imperative to our nation’s future. People should at least like the country they live in and be proud of the men who made it. We can resolve disputes over whether the creed or Anglo-Saxons made it a great country once patriotism is ascendant again.
Conservatives must take historical education seriously. Red states should create scholarships to ensure America-loving students go into history. It should ensure America haters don’t take over faculties. And it should champion textbooks that inculcate patriotism rather than white guilt.
This isn’t something that can be left to our enemies. It will require a generational effort to change, but it’s worth it. We can only make America great again if its people love it again. That starts with how we teach our past.
You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.