The Clare Spark Blog

Since one of my Facebook friends thought that Commager was an “unbiased” historian, I thought that I should spell out his liberalism. (I assume that many know about the leftist and social democratic takeover of academe.)

Commager also wrote about Charles Beard and admired Vernon Parrington, Thorstein Veblin, coopted Walter Lippmann (!, in The Good Society– left out Lippmann’s reading and current admiration for von Mises ), pushed pragmatism–especially William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce–, and the whole roster of liberal figures (particularly FDR, and including writers, assuming he actually read all those books), but he trashed the Constitution all except for  Founder and agrarian Thomas Jefferson, and very occasionally Alexander Hamilton, I assume that he masqueraded as a moderate.  He also claimed the contemporary American was “vulgar.” a word he deployed several times, though he admired the fighting men of the recent war. Never mentioned “the Bomb.”

But most shocking to me was his attitude toward women, asserting that the women of the 1920’s were [harridans]. and of course denigrated the Jazz Age and urbanization.

Commager was part of the New Deal coalition, which like all Big Government types, was disconcerting, even painful to read. Liberals took up identity politics during the 1960’s. But he  was au courant with the condition of blacks, in fact, used the phrase “white supremacy” at least once.  Of course he was down on Reconstruction. 

The 19th Century was comparatively good (unlike the 1920s), until industrialism spawned its horrid crop of magnates. Tell that to the Indians or to those who dissented from the Mexican War.

I doubt that many young (or older) people appreciate the gravity of our country’s founding, for it was an  innovation in many respects: for instance in the Constitution, but especially in the freedom of religion,  popular sovereignty, and free speech. This blog mentions two leftish books, one by John C. Miller, The American Revolution (1943) and the other by Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible (1979).  Nash is one of two formulators of the US History Standards, is a noted professor of History at UCLA,  and a specialist in the colonial period. (I studied with Nash in graduate school.)

I start with Professor Nash, who obviously was much affected by the 1960s New Left, with its emphasis on race, class and gender. Nash chose to emphasize class conflict and the focus on the class unrest in the northern cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. One would think that the working class was largely responsible for the Revolution and that the w-c  (the working class is abbreviated as “w-c” here and below) played a large part. Moreover, Nash’s History Standards did not share the same emphasis on the w-c but, rather, eliminated it. The US History Standards expected grade and high school students to master details that left out the w-c bias of his earlier work.. Is Nash a moderate, yet expecting much more of his projected grade and high school history students than even the graduate work that I accomplished at UCLA, or that media treatments of the appalling ignorance of young persons would expect?

By contrast, Miller, also a left-liberal (who else gets published these days?)Miller probably wrote his seemingly exhaustive study during the Red Decade, but looked at mostly the rising middle-class and upper classes. Miller, unlike Nash, treated the South, especially the upper-class planters. Miller also devoted much space to  the English side.  Miller was more favorable to Puritanism and to trade in general. In his  version of the Revolution, Tories in England and America played a bigger part, although he obviously was a student of the American Revolution in most of its facets.

I apologize for this blog, for it possibly features my own preoccupations, being a maven for the amazing and startling American Revolution, its dynamics,  a quality education and, above all, freedom of speech and expression (crucial items that seem to be disappearing from our public life). 

The Cold War, liberal version I have just finished Louis J. Halle’s infuriating accounting of the Cold War As History (1967), a book that was assigned to me at the UCLA graduate program in US History, a book that I had avoided until now, possibly because of “The Bomb.” I was only 9 years old when the threat of nuclear warfare commenced, and I still remember the headlines. But Halle minimized our trauma (shared by many, I surmise), by initially claiming that the USA had a virtual monopoly of nuclear secrets (ignoring the historical record, where the Soviet Union had been working on physics since early in the 20th Century, and certainly during World War II (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project.) So there was no question about the importance of nuclear warfare early in the Cold War. Although the moderate man Halle changed his line in later pages, this blatant error changed my estimation of this historian, and I began to see Halle’s rendition as a liberal apologist, whose emphasis on “globalism” and other values was characteristic of the UCLA history department.

This blog is about his other claims, some of which were similarly startling, for instance that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, but not a communist (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh.) Similarly, Chairman Mao is not a regular Red, but a unique figure, because the Chinese Revolution in 1949 pitted peasants, not workers, against Chiang Kai-shek. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong, also my review of Moreira’s book https://clarespark.com/2011/06/30/links-to-review-essay-on-hemingway-spy-mission-to-china/)

But the most egregious error was the typical liberal emphasis on McCarthyism as a factor in the Cold War, as if the Venona Project had never existed (though it may not have been declassified at Halle’s time of composition, so I can’t finger Halle for this error, though liberal historians blame McCarthy for messing up US history, see https://clarespark.com/2014/02/05/joe-mccarthy-and-the-warrior-spirit/).

Then there is the elevation of “white supremacy”, a typical liberal trope from the late 1960s. Finally, Halle came out against science and Enlightenment in his elevation of myth. (I have had this argument before, in a public fight with another liberal.)

https://www.hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-69-issue-2/herbooknote/history-on-trial_160. The culture war over the teaching of US History or World History has been much worse than anything in the art world. This blog tries to tease out the major issues in that still heated war.

First, the history wars polarized liberals and conservatives, although “soft Marxist” Gary Nash (with whom I studied at UCLA) was probably pushed to “moderation” by his collaborators.

Nash knew about antisemitism but limited it to “the Holocaust” and “The Emergence of the Jews” as a relic of the classical period (World History) As a social democrat (which incorporates populism) he avoided all talk about “the money power, as did his Stalinist colleague (my advisor Alexander Saxton).”

As expected, Nash, a veteran of the 1960s, emphasized class, race and gender (see https://clarespark.com/2011/03/26/race-class-and-gender/.) His book, Red, White and Black, but both Standards were focused on globalism, racial minorities, particularly blacks, Indians, and Latin Americans, Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans. In general, the Standards were way too advanced for most young folks and advanced students, even me. Like many other leftists, Nash’s book deploys a discourse of melodrama and multiculturalism throughout. (See https://clarespark.com/2013/08/09/melodrama-and-its-appeal/.)

Finally, throughout his book (History On Trial, 1997), Nash (along with Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn) emphasizes that he will not elevate Western civilization above other cultures. This too is globalism.