Back in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop song called “What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the Delaware?” Sung to the tarantella beat of an Italian wedding song, the answer went something like “Martha, Martha, there’ll be no pizza tonight.”
Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington ate only cherry pie.
On that December night in 1776, George might have told himself that this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, better work. Or else he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy Delaware, one of his actual comments was far more amusing than those fanciful lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington—the plainspoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod—nudged 280-pound General Henry “Ox” Knox with the tip of his boot and said, “Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you’ll swamp the damned boat.”
According to Patriots, A. J. Langguth’s fascinating history of the Revolution, that is how Knox himself reported the story after the war. I certainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school. And that’s too bad, because it reveals more of Washington’s true, earthy nature than all the hokey tales about cherry trees and nonexistent prayer vigils in Valley Forge. And that’s the point of this book: much of what we remember about our history is either mistaken or fabricated. That is, if we remember it at all.
For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101, the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car. Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants. And the Louisiana Purchase means eating out at a Cajun restaurant. When the first edition of this book appeared more than twenty years ago, several writers had just enjoyed remarkable success by lambasting Americans’ failure to know our past. Americans were shown to be know-nothings in the books Cultural Literacy and The Closing of the American Mind.
Well, we’re probably not as dumb as those books would have us. But the sad truth is clear: we are no nation of scholars when it comes to history. Just as I was writing the first edition of this book, a highly publicized example of our “historical illiteracy” appeared. It was a 1987 survey of high school juniors that exposed astonishing gaps in what these seventeen-year-olds knew about American history and literature. A third of the students couldn’t identify the Declaration of Independence as the document that marked the formal separation of the thirteen colonies from Great Britain. Only 32 percent of the students surveyed could place the American Civil War in the correct half century.
Sadly, I must say that things have not improved much—if at all—in the past twenty years. Every few years, it seems, another survey comes along that blasts the historical ineptness of American students. Part of the problem may be that those juniors who didn’t do so well in 1987 may be teachers now!
But why dump on the kids? While there are constant warnings issued about the yawning gaps in the education of American students, another question looms larger. Would most of their parents or older brothers and sisters do any better? Most thirty-seven-year-olds or forty-seven-year-olds might not pass a similar pop quiz. Comedian Jay Leno routinely proves this on Tonight with his “Jaywalk” segments in which adults demonstrate that they are incapable of answering the simplest questions about history. When Bill Clinton went to Normandy as president for a D-Day observance, even he had to be tutored on what had happened there. So don’t ask for whom the gap yawns. The gap yawns for thee.
The reason for these historical shortcomings is simple. For most of us, history was boring, and a great many Americans were taught by a football coach who got dropped into the history class to give him something to fill out his day. Many of us also learned about the past from textbooks that served up the past as if it were a Hollywood costume drama. In schoolbooks of an earlier era, the warts on our Founding Fathers’ noses were neatly retouched. Slavery also got the glossy makeover—it was merely the misguided practice of the rebellious folks down South until the “progressives” of the North showed them the light. American Indians were portrayed in textbooks in the same way they were in Hollywood Westerns. Women were pretty much left out of the picture entirely with the exception of a mythical Betsy Ross or a lovely Dolley Madison rescuing the White House china.
Truth isn’t so cosmetically perfect. Our historical sense is frequently skewed, skewered, or plain screwed up by myths and misconceptions. Schools that packaged a tidy set of simplistic historical images are largely responsible for fostering these American myths. There has always been a tendency to hide the less savory moments from our past, the way a mad aunt’s photo gets pulled from the family album.
On top of that, the gaping chasms in our historical literacy have been reinforced by images from pop culture. Unfortunately, highly fictionalized films, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK or Disney’s Pocahontas, or the 2004 release Pearl Harbor make a much greater impression on millions of people than a carefully researched, historically accurate, but numbingly dull documentary. Occasionally there are films like Glory or Saving Private Ryan or Charlie Wilson’s War that can stimulate interest in history they way few textbooks or teachers can. Documentary films such as Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara can illuminate controversies in unique ways. But for the most part, mainstream movies and network television have magnified the myths and makeovers. It is important to understand that looking past these myths is revealing. The real picture is far more interesting than the historical tummy tuck. And truth is always more interesting than propaganda.
Somebody will surely read this and say, “So what?”
Why bother with history anyway? What difference does it make if our kids know what the Declaration says—or doesn’t say? Why does it matter if most people think Watergate is just old news?
The answer is simple because history is really about the consequences of our actions—large and small. And that has never been more apparent than in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. If the terror attacks haven’t changed anything else, they certainly changed many Americans’ appreciation of the past and what it has to do with the present.
History explains how we got where we are. We can use it to connect the dots from past to present. Take the Versailles Treaty. (Please!) I know. The very words sound BORING. I can see your eyes grow heavy as you read the words “Versailles” and “Treaty.” But consider what that treaty, which supposedly settled World War I back in 1919, actually did. In one very clear and obvious sense, it laid the groundwork for another world war only twenty years later.
But look past that. You can draw a straight line from the Treaty of Versailles to the modern Middle East, Iran and Iraq, the Balkan countries of Europe, and even Vietnam. All these hot spots of the past few decades were created in the aftermath of Versailles, when the European powers carved up the world into colonies that they thought they could rule as they pleased.
When the CIA overthrew the government of Iran in 1953 during the Eisenhower administration, nobody thought about what it might mean in 25 years. At the time, Americans were worried about Russia and the oil companies. What did it matter what the Iranians thought? Restoring the shah to the Iranian throne in place of a government hostile to America seemed like a good idea. Until the Iranian people thought otherwise in 1979 and began the first wave of Islamic revolutions that have altered recent history.
Another example closer to home is COINTELPRO, a largely forgotten FBI program of illegal wiretaps, dirty tricks, and smears of individuals first aimed at suspected Communists and later at members of the antiwar and civil rights movements. Today, as America debates the future of its intelligence agencies and domestic spying, it is important to remember FBI operations like COINTELPRO and other abuses by America’s intelligence agencies in the past. People in the American government, some of them with the absolute best intentions, have trampled rights and destroyed lives in pursuit of short-term goals.
As George Kennan, the American diplomat and architect of America’s Cold War “containment” policy, once said, “The worst thing the Communists could do to us and the thing we have most to fear from their activities is that we should become like them.” This is the essence of learning from history. But if we all have those enormous gaps in our understanding of the past, how can we possibly learn from it?
This book’s intent is to fill those gaps in our historical knowledge with some simple, accessible answers to basic questions about American history. This single volume is obviously not an encyclopedic history of America. For simplicity, I use a question-and-answer approach, and there are literally shelves of books about each of the questions I have included. My intent is to refresh the shaky recollection, remove the old myths, or reshape the misconceptions with some simple answers. Or, in some cases, to point the way to longer answers. I like to consider a Don’t Know Much About book the first word on the subject rather than the last.
What’s different about this version? First, there is an entire new chapter that includes a review of the events that have taken place since I completed the original edition in 1989, including some of the most remarkable events in American history. Like the original, this new edition is organized along chronological lines, moving from America’s “discovery” by Europe to more recent events, including the Gulf War, the end of the cold war, and the events leading up to the enormous national tragedy of September 11, 2001. At this writing, we are still trying to uncover the “truth” about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, what the American government knew beforehand, what it did—and didn’t do. The answers to those questions are still very much in the air, and as a historian, I find it difficult to assess some of these issues yet. But we can try to figure out how we got to that awful moment in history.
In addition to the new material covering events since the late 1980s, I have included a host of new questions in every chapter. Some of these are stimulated by discoveries made in recent years, such as the archaeological dig that uncovered the original fort at Jamestown, Virginia. In other places, I answer questions that readers have asked me over the past twelve years. Often, when I speak on the radio or in lectures, I get a question that was not in the original edition, and I have included some of these “audience participation” questions. Among them are “Did Columbus’s men bring syphilis back to Europe?” Or “Why is there a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot?” And “What was the difference between the Confederate and U.S. constitutions?
The media also create new questions—and mythologies—when a historic revelation gets the attention of news media for a brief time, and the facts are often left a little shaky. Many people, for instance, now accept as proven fact that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser, because that is how the headlines reported it. However, that account was based on the accusation of a single witness who had been paid for the story. No other source could confirm or substantiate the story, but that subtlety of fact gets missed in the shallow coverage by the general news media. There is plenty that we do know about J. Edgar Hoover and his methods in running the FBI as a personal fiefdom for half a century. And it is far, far more important to understand Hoover’s abuse of power than whether he wore strappy high heels or not. Another example of oversimplification is the widespread presumption that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children by a slave, Sally Hemings. The widely reported story that DNA tests had confirmed this as a fact didn’t look past the headlines. The DNA testing showed that any of several of the Jefferson males might also have been the father of those children, but those complexities get lost in the eagerness for a snappy tabloid headline. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence, and oral history, to support that idea, and the subject of Jefferson and his slaves is fascinating—and deserves honest but accurate exploration.
Also from the arena of audience questions I have found enormous interest in issues pertaining to religion, gun control, and a number of other hot-button controversies. I have addressed these both in the text—with questions such as “What three-letter word is not in the Constitution?” (Hint: it begins with “G” and ends with “d.”)—and in a new appendix that examines constitutional amendments and the role they play in important current political and social debates on such topics as the death penalty, gun control, and school prayer.
In writing the first edition of this book, I attempted to focus on the sort of basic questions that the average person might have, emphasizing names, places, and events that we vaguely recall as being important, but forget exactly why. These are what I call the household names of history. The reader is welcome to read the book straight through as a narrative history, or to use it as a reference book by dipping into a particular question or period. Because wars have been central, shaping events in our history, and because many people lack a sense of what actually happened during these wars, I have included a series of chronologies called “Milestones” that condense the events of the major conflicts in American history. Also scattered throughout the book are “American Voices”—selected quotes, passages from letters, books, speeches, and court decisions that reflect the spirit of the times. While many of these “American Voices” include some of the most famous Americans, others are the voices of Americans whose names you do not know—but should.
Following the seeming ambivalence of the American public toward recent elections and the chaotic events following Election Day 2000, it also seemed appropriate to include an election primer that explains some of the more mysterious elements of the process, from caucuses and delegate counts to the nearly mystical Electoral College. Another appendix presents a quick guide to the American presidents.
One encouraging indication that Americans are really interested in history but just want to learn it in a way that is more appealing than it was in high school is the success of a number of fine works of history that have become major best-sellers in the past few years, whether the World War II works of Stephen Ambrose, Mark Kurlansky’s intriguing combination of history and natural science in Cod, the reworking of American myths such as Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, or masterpieces of biography such as Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton or David McCullough’s John Adams—later transformed into an admirable HBO miniseries. I have tried to highlight many of these books with an annotated list of sources for each chapter. The books I cite are either widely accepted standards or recent works that offer fresh insights or update accepted wisdom. I have also tried to single out those critically well received books written for the general reader rather than the specialist, such as James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, a masterful single-volume history of the Civil War, or Thomas Fleming’s Liberty, a companion book to a PBS history of the American Revolution, and a gem of regional history like Russell Shorto’s history of early Manhattan, Island at the Center of the World. Many of these books are cited in the text as “Must Reads,” while the Selected Readings in the back lists books that are valuable resources covering broader periods and themes.
In some cases, these sources take very specific political viewpoints. While I have attempted to present a spectrum of opinions on those issues where there is no broad consensus, I have tried to avoid any particular stance. It is interesting to me that my work was sometimes described as “liberal.” What I hoped to do in the first edition, and continue to strive for in this revision and update, is truth and accuracy, about Democrats as well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives. If I have a bias, I hope it is for telling the side of the story that the history books and mainstream media often overlook. And if “liberal” means believing in the ideas of America as laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—ideas like “All men are created equal,” “We, the people,” “a more perfect union” (you get the idea)—then I plead guilty to the charge. But I like to think of myself as an equal opportunity basher, eager to reveal the failures on both sides of the political aisle.
Another occasional critic has called this book “anticorporation.” Admittedly, the book details the corruption and criminality of big business throughout the country’s history. But the Enron scandal is as American as apple pie. So I find myself in complete agreement with the American critic of businessmen who once attacked “men of wealth, who find the purchased politician the most efficient instrument of corruption”; men who were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminal of great wealth.” The man who spoke those words, long before Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and convicted swindler Bernie Madoff existed, was that flaming liberal President Theodore Roosevelt. (By the way, Republican Teddy Roosevelt also attempted to get the words “In God We Trust” off American currency. He not only thought they were unconstitutional, but as a devout Christian, he considered them a sacrilege.)
It is comforting perhaps to pay lip service to a country that is supposedly dedicated to “government of the people, for the people and by the people,” but throughout American history, and certainly under our existing corporate-sponsored democracy, a good case can be made that America is and has been a government of, for, and by the special interests. A grassroots backlash to that reality was the motivating force behind the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century, the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, and the Reform Party movement of Ross Perot in the 1980s. The excesses of corporate America in the era of “too big to fail,” and the response of official Washington to those excesses, have helped create the angry mood of America in 2010 as the nation struggles out of the “Great Recession.” This conflict was underscored in 2010, when a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled that the government could not ban contributions by corporations, unions, or other organizations in elections, sweeping aside restrictions on campaign-finance laws.
If there is an underlying theme here, it is that the essence of history is the constant struggle for power. The battle between those holding power—whether it be the power of money, church, land, or votes—and the have-nots—the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised, the rebellious—is one main thread in the fabric of American history. The great disparity in wealth in America, a historical fact, has only increased during the past decade, according to census reports. The “haves” have more and there are more “have-nots.” How to correct that great chasm is a matter of constant debate.
With that in mind, it is also important to realize that few social movements or other major developments in American history come from the top down. We like to think of elected officials as leaders, but in fact they often follow where the country is going. Most of the great reform movements in American history, from abolition to temperance, suffrage and the civil rights movement, usually came from the grassroots level, with politicians often dragged reluctantly to catch up with the people as they moved forward. That is a story that is all too often overlooked in our history books. And it is another important reason to study history. Far too many people believe that they have no power, and that is a dangerous idea. The power of one can be a mighty force of change.
A second thread running through this and all Don’t Know Much About books is one that our schools and textbooks sadly bury. This is the impact of real people on history. At many turning points, it was the commanding presence of an individual—Washington, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Roosevelts, and Susan B. Anthony, to name a few—that determined events, rather than the force of any idea or movement. Great ideals and noble causes have died for lack of a champion. At other times, the absence of a strong personality has had the reverse effect. For example, if a dominant president had emerged in the years before the Civil War, instead of the string of mediocrities who were elected, Lincoln’s emergence might have been stillborn and that deadly war averted.
When I was in the sixth grade, I remember standing in front of the classroom to deliver a current events report about an election in New York City. Although I don’t remember much of what I said, I do remember that as soon as I was finished, my teacher humiliated me. I can’t recall her exact words, but she dressed me down in front of my classmates. She told me that I had taken an important news story and made it dull and unimportant. I don’t know why she picked on me. But I was red-faced and ashamed.
I learned two important lessons that day that I have tried never to forget. The first is that teachers should never humiliate children who stand in front of a classroom. Embarrassment is no way to get kids to learn. And the second lesson? She was probably right. If I was going to talk about an important news story, I had better make it interesting.
And that is what I attempt to do in Don’t Know Much About History. The only way to make history and politics interesting, I have long believed, is by telling stories of real people doing real things. Over the years, as I have spoken to people around the country on talk radio, in bookstores, and lecture halls and classrooms, the overwhelming response of far too many Americans to history is a single word—“BORING!” For years, we have sent students to school and burdened them with the most tedious textbooks imaginable—deadly dull books written by one set of professors to be read by another set of professors—which completely suck the life out of this most human of subjects.
There is very often an underside, or at least a human side, to the story. Traditionally, we have wanted our heroes to be pure and unsullied. We want to tell a national story that is filled with pride and enthusiasm. But the greatest heroes of the American epic are still people—often flawed people with deep contradictions. The simple view of men like Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt as beatified heroes of the American epic doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. The American story is not that simple. There are moments in our past that can breed feelings of cynicism and disgust. Yet there are other moments that evoke pride and admiration. But to me, it is the humanity of these people, and the fact that they accomplished great things in spite of their flaws and contradictions, that makes them so fascinating.
Generally speaking, Americans have behaved worse than our proudest boosters proclaim. America did not write the book on “ethnic cleansing,” but we did contribute some horrific chapters. That is why this history focuses on such moments as the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, My Lai, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, among many others. On the other hand, Americans have also shown a capacity to be better than the worst claims of their detractors. America has no monopoly on virtue or villainy. Every country has its share of nightmarish moments it would like to forget or erase. But the job of this historian is to keep these unpleasant memories alive.
A bit more than two hundred years old now, America is still young in the broad sense of history, even though the pace of history has accelerated radically as the twentieth-century techno-revolution has transformed media, travel, and communications. (It boggles my mind to consider that when this book was first written, fax machines, cell phones, and the Internet barely existed for most Americans—including me!) The history of this country is not necessarily a smooth continuum moving toward a perfectly realized republic. More accurately, history has acted like a pendulum with long swings creating a flux in one direction or another. America remains shockingly divided along racial and economic lines. One can look at that rift and feel pessimism. But the optimist points to the distance America has come in a relatively brief time. Of course, that is small consolation to those who have always been on the short end of the stick.
Perhaps what is more important is the commitment to an acknowledgment of the true American dream. Not the one about the house with two cars in the driveway and a barbecue in the backyard. But the dream Jefferson voiced more than two hundred years ago. Even though his vision of “all men created equal” was probably different from our modern understanding, it remains the noblest of dreams and the greatest of aspirations. The struggle to fulfill that dream has been a long, strange trip. And it is never over.