THE RISE TO power of Donald Trump and his minions has sanctified and energized a campaign to revive the kind of triumphalist, exceptionalist version of U.S. history that reigned over both academia and public culture from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.
To drive that campaign forward, the Trump regime has now launched simultaneous assaults against schools, libraries, museums, the National Parks Service, and even the National Archives.
The conservatives’ favored Cold War narrative celebrated America’s “exceptionalism” — its alleged freedom from European ills like social conflict. It extolled this country’s inexorable march from birth towards its glorious, enlightened present and future, a march along a path mapped out by destiny, God, or both.
As the prominent historian Daniel Boorstin put it, “It is not surprising that we have no enthusiasm for plans to make society over…. Why should we make a five-year plan for ourselves when God seems to have had a thousand-year plan ready-made for us?”
But the democratic movements of the 1960s and 1970s — the civil rights movement, the fight against the neo-colonialist Viet-Nam war, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement — raised challenges to this image, beginning to change the way people thought about U.S. history.
Veterans of those movements and others influenced by them earned advanced degrees, obtained jobs in public schools and universities, and many of the latter began to publish. Over time, the old, simplistic, triumphalist version of the nation’s past went into at least partial eclipse.
Classroom teaching, essays and books now more often explored the manifold forms of exploitation and oppression that existed in U.S. society from its birth as well as the various struggles waged to overcome them — some of those struggles successful, some unsuccessful, and many unfinished.
Other such people became librarians, museum curators, and historians and guides at the National Parks Service (NPS). They, too, helped bring this new history to the general public.
The political right despised and railed against this new history from the start.
Thirty years ago, then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich complained that while “from the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims … up to the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940’s and 1950’s,” a common set of values had prevailed, that was no longer true — because “since 1965, … there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit the [U.S.’s] civilization.”
House majority leader and soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole elaborated, telling a receptive American Legion convention that the country’s “language, history and values” were “under attack from our government and from intellectual elites who seem embarrassed by America. What we see as an opportunity, they see as oppression.