Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

Thanks to a series of Teagle Teaching Workshops at Northwestern, the executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, gave a lecture on “Historical Thinking and Public Culture.” Much of what he said hearkened to conversations I had at the Historical Society’s 2012 conference "Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils." As Jim said, we know people like history. The History Channel, thousands of reenactors, and millions of genealogists indicate a thirst for knowledge of the past. Derision of such historical fancy keeps doctoral candidates clothed in a veil of superiority while their bank balances dwindle. Grossman suggested a revolutionary shift in academic historical thought: dispense with the patronizing judgment and listen to what people want to learn.

The lesson holds for the undergraduate classroom. Faculty ask one another, “what are you teaching?” Grossman suggests we end the obsession with our own performances at the front of class and focus upon what the students at the back learned. While teaching and learning have a symbiotic relationship, the shift of emphasis from professor to listener signals a broader embrace of history’s public value. The nuances of Foucauldian analysis may help the professor frame his or her argument, but if every iPhone in the lecture hall sends out a frantic  “wtf?” we have lost the pedagogical point.

Few undergraduates seek to join the professoriate. All but a few desire paid employment. Grossman would not suggest that we shut our doors and send our students across campus to become computer programmers. However, we owe our history majors the language with which to market themselves upon graduation. Messiah College’s John Fea makes a noble effort in his blog series, “So What CAN You Do With a History Major?” Until every historian commits to explain the value of historical thinking, parents and politicians will direct students away from the classes possessed of the power to make them empathic progeny and conscientious citizens.

So then, what does Jim Grossman think history has to offer John and Jane Q. Public? The contingency and complexity of the human experience. Every medical professional takes a patient history, but how many understand the art of the open-ended question or the capacity for a written document to contain multiple truths? Academic historians sneer at biographers, but nothing sells better than a book with a president (or his wife) on the cover. The myths that undermine popular conceptions of the past emerge from these tomes. What if history classes taught students to compose biographies based upon a messy past in which the subject is but one actor with limited agency and tackled the linear hagiographies lining airport shelves within ivy-covered halls?

History doctoral programs posit law schools as their perpetual rivals. Grossman confronted a paneled room filled with professors and would-be-professors with a painful truth. Historians slander law schools as “vocational,” but law graduates take their skills and apply them in myriad occupations outside the law. Doctoral programs in history train their students to become one thing, professors. Who looks vocational now? 

Historians also like to slander lawyers as unethical, but Grossman argues that Ph.D. programs have become intellectual ponzi schemes. Universities constantly expand the number of graduate student TAs who “sell” history to undergraduates although they will never reap the rewards of tenure, because the removal of a retirement age depleted the lines available. Ethics demand early, repeated, reality checks. Tell graduate students that tenured jobs at R1 universities are as rare as positions in the NBA. We know that every child with a great playground jump shot cannot become Michael Jordan; neither can every brilliant young scholar become Natalie Zemon Davis. 

Furthermore, that brilliant young scholar might prefer to avoid the life of multiple moves and long-distance relationships nigh-on inherent to a lofty academic career. Grossman shared a study that concluded that historians outside the academy are happier than those within it. Commitment to a life of the mind ought not be mutually exclusive with commitment to a physical community. Early introduction to the options that may resolve the tensions between such commitments would remove the secrecy and shame associated with the pursuit of positions off the tenure track. Because I work outside a given department, my office often serves as the “safe space” in which to discuss the desire to stay with another person or in a particular geographic region rather than to travel wherever a tenure line might take an end-stage dissertator. The anxiety associated with such decisions undermines students’ job searches in all arenas. 

I suspect if we could borrow Rawls’s veil of ignorance and place it over the tenured and chaired advisers who direct dissertations, they would offer greater empathy toward their advisees’ plight. Those who won the academic lottery sometimes forget that their success came from luck in addition to ability. Grossman reminded skeptics from his audience of a friend who got an offer from an illustrious Ivy on the same day he received a rejection from a regional university. Now, what if that friend had no desire to live in New Haven, because a spouse, ailing parents, or children loved their environs elsewhere? 

Proper pedagogy prepares people to make difficult personal and professional decisions. Historical thinking helps in that task. To my mind, we cannot take Grossman's advice and move our ideas and ourselves beyond the cloister known as tenure too soon.

[This post originally appeared on November 20, 2013, on the Faith and History blog, and is reposted here with the permission of the author]
Robert Tracy McKenzie

As I promised in my last post, I want to share some thoughts about Rush Limbaugh’s recent book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans. Released just three weeks ago, the book by the popular conservative radio host is now the second best-selling work on Amazon and has already elicited 470 reader reviews, nearly 90% of which are five-star raves. They praise it as a “factually correct,” “unbiased,” “true history” that will help to combat the “liberal propaganda that the children are being fed today.” (These are all comments that appear within the last twenty-four hours.)

What strikes me about these responses is how utterly confident the reviewers are in the historical accuracy of a work of children’s literature that centers on the adventures of a time-traveling talking horse. There are no footnotes. No bibliography. No list of suggested readings. No evidence of any kind.

Historical evidence, for most of us, is sort of like the foundation of a house. I remember when my wife and I were ready to buy our first home. In the back of my mind, I knew that the structure needed to rest on a firm foundation, but I didn’t waste much time thinking about it. I was a lot more concerned about floor plans and color schemes and square footage, and I remember being irritated when someone suggested that I should look underneath our dream home before buying it. (“You want me to crawl where?”) I think we tend to shop for history in much the same way. If a particular history book reinforces convictions that we already hold, it rarely enters our mind to investigate the underlying evidence. No need to go down in the crawl space when the rest of the house is so appealing.

When it comes to the use of evidence, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is simply a train wreck. I don’t say this gleefully, or with a sneer of condescension. Indeed, I say this as a political conservative who shares the author’s appreciation for the wisdom of our founders. I just wish he hadn’t botched the job so badly. The book may be entertaining–it may even inspire some young readers to want to learn more about their national heritage–but it fundamentally misrepresents the “Brave Pilgrims” it purports to honor.

As Christian historian Beth Schweiger puts it so eloquently, “in history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead.” The figures we study from the past were image bearers like us. They had their own way of looking at life–their own hopes, dreams, values, and aspirations–and when we ignore the complexity of their world to further neat-and-tidy answers in our own, we treat them as cardboard props rather than dealing with them seriously as human beings. Put simply, we are not loving them but using them. Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims does this in spades. I could offer numerous examples of what I have in mind, but for now I’ll just concentrate on one: Limbaugh’s characterization of the Pilgrim’s economic values.

First, some background. Four centuries ago, the proposal to relocate a hundred people across an ocean to an uncharted continent was almost recklessly audacious. It was also prohibitively expensive, and most of the Leiden Separatists who were committed to the venture were also as poor as church mice. To succeed, it was imperative that they find financial backers who would bankroll the undertaking, and the company of London merchants who agreed to do so were no philanthropists. They were hard-headed businessmen who drove a hard bargain. And so, in exchange for the considerable cost of transporting the Pilgrims to North America and supplying them until they could provide for themselves, the Pilgrims agreed to work for the London financiers for seven years. During that time, under the terms of their agreement, everything they produced and everything they constructed (even including the houses they slept in) would belong to the company, not to them individually. At the end of the seven years, any revenue that had been generated in excess of their debts was to be divided among the London investors and the Pilgrim settlers.

Next comes a crucial plot twist: According to governor William Bradford’s history Of Plymouth Plantation, in the spring of 1623 the surviving Pilgrim colonists began to debate among themselves whether there was anything they could do to improve the next year’s crop. The answer, after considerable debate, was to allocate to every household a small quantity of land (initially, one acre per person) to cultivate as their own during the coming season. Because the land varied considerably in quality, the plots were assigned by lot, with the understanding that there would be a drawing the next year and the next after that, etc., so that the land each family was assigned would change annually.

While under the old scheme individual workers had minimal incentive to put forth extra effort (since the fruit of that effort would be divided among all, including the slackers), the new plan, according to Bradford, “made all hands very industrious.” The only flaw was the decision to reallocate household plots annually, for this discouraged families from making long-term improvements to their assigned tracts. To rectify that, Bradford explains, in the spring of 1624 it was decided to make the allocations permanent. The success of the new plan, the governor ruminated, demonstrated “the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”

This shift in economic organization looms large in how Limbaugh remembers the Pilgrims’ story, and he has been struck by it for at least two decades. I can say this with confidence because the talk show host also paid attention to the Pilgrims in his 1993 polemic See, I Told You So. In a chapter tellingly titled “Dead White Guys or What Your History Books Never Told You,” Limbaugh explained how “long before Karl Marx was even born” the Pilgrims had experimented with socialism and it hadn’t worked! “So what did Bradford’s community try next?” Limbaugh asks. “They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.” And what was the result? “In no time the Pilgrims . . . had more food than they could eat themselves.” They began trading their surplus with the surrounding Indians, and “the profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.” In sum, the free market had triumphed.

See, I Told You So never refers to the first Thanksgiving, but twenty years later, in Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims, Limbaugh claims that the Pilgrims’ celebration would never have occurred had they not abandoned their socialistic experiment. As a literary device, Limbaugh has Rush Revere and his talking horse, Liberty, time-travel repeatedly between the present and the winter of 1620-1621. (They are accompanied by two of Revere’s middle-school students–a trouble-making boy named Tommy and a Native American girl named Freedom.) In late December 1620, the time travelers pay a visit to the Pilgrims shortly after their arrival in New England and are surprised to learn that they plan on holding all property in common. “We are trying to create a fair and equal society,” William Bradford explains to them. “But is that freedom?” Rush Revere muses to himself.

They return three months later, in March 1621, and are discouraged to see that the settlement is not prospering. William Bradford is perplexed; he had thought that centralized economic controls “should guarantee our prosperity and success. . . . But recently I’m beginning to doubt whether everyone will work their hardest on something that is not their own.” At this point, young Tommy relates to Bradford how hard his mother works to win prizes at the county fair, prompting the Pilgrim governor to speculate whether giving each family their own plot of land might motivate the Pilgrims to work harder and be more creative. In an epiphany, Bradford realizes that “a little competition could be healthy!” “Brilliant!” Rush Revere responds. The rest, as they say, is history. 

When the time travelers return that autumn–having received a personal invitation to the “First Annual Plimoth Plantation Harvest Festival”–everything is changed. “Everyone seems so joyous,” Rush Revere observes, “far different than a short while ago.” Governor Bradford explains that “we all have so much to be grateful for.“ The turning point “came when every family was assigned its own plot of land to work.” Underscoring the point, the Pilgrims’ Native American friend, Squanto, explains, “William is a smart man. . . . He gave people their own land. He made people free.” Not only that, Bradford adds, but the profits they are now generating will “soon allow us to pay back the people that sponsored our voyage to America.” Yes, there was a great deal to be thankful for. But as Rush Revere notes as the time travelers are preparing to leave, “It was obvious that this first Thanksgiving wouldn’t be possible if William Bradford hadn’t boldly changed the way the Pilgrims worked and lived.”

The history lesson in Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims is clear: The Pilgrims’ First Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the Lord’s granting of a bounteous harvest after a cruel and heart-wrenching winter. Instead, they celebrated because God had delivered them from the futility of socialism. As Limbaugh put it two decades ago, “Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the Pilgrim experience?”

There is just one problem: it’s not true. Oh, the Pilgrims undoubtedly moved toward the private ownership of property, but they did so in 1624, according to William Bradford, three crop years AFTER their autumn celebration in 1621. To make the movement toward private property the necessary precondition for the First Thanksgiving is, historically speaking, a real whopper. To use a pejorative label that the radio personality is fond of wielding, this is revisionist history with a vengeance!

But there is more amiss here than a chronological gaffe. When the Pilgrims did move toward the private ownership of property, the shift was not quite the unbridled endorsement of free market competition that Limbaugh would have us believe. Nearly two centuries ago, the brilliant conservative Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.” Limbaugh’s characterization of the Pilgrims’ economic shift is clear, precise . . . and false. The reality is complex.

On a visit to Plymouth at the very end of 1621, deacon Robert Cushman (a church official in the Leiden congregation) was invited to preach to the Pilgrims and chose for his text I Corinthians 10:24: “Let no man seek his own: but every man another’s wealth.” The decision to allow each household to work its own individual plot represented a movement away from this ideal–but only partially. Both Bradford and his assistant Edward Winslow described the shift not as a good thing, in and of itself, but as a concession to human weakness. It was an acknowledgment, in Winslow’s words, of “that self-love wherewith every man, in a measure more or less, loveth and preferreth his own good before his neighbor’s.” Because “all men have this corruption in them,” as Bradford put it, it was prudent to take this aspect of human nature into account.

This was still a century and a half, however, before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations would celebrate the enlightened pursuit of self-interest as the surest way to promote the general welfare. In countless ways, the Pilgrims showed that they still belonged to an earlier age. In economics, as in all of life, they viewed liberty as the freedom to do unto others only as they would be done by. The golden rule meant that there were numerous instances in which producers must deny themselves rather than seek to maximize profit, and if they were unwilling to police their behavior voluntarily, the colony’s legislature was willing to coerce them.

Examples abound. The Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth reveal that producers were prohibited from selling to distant customers if doing so created a shortage among their neighbors. Under the laws of Plymouth, it was illegal to export finished lumber under any conditions, and farmers could only sell scarce foodstuffs (corn, peas, and beans) outside of the colony with the express permission of the colonial government. Similarly, one of the very first laws recorded in Plymouth’s records prohibited skilled craftsmen from working for “foreigners or strangers till such time as the necessity of the colony be served.”

Nor was it acceptable to gouge their neighbors by selling products or services for more than they were intrinsically worth. The colonial government passed laws regulating the price that millers charged, the fares ferrymen imposed, the wage rate of daily laborers, and the ever-important price of beer. Pilgrim Stephen Hopkins ran afoul of the latter, and was called before a grand jury for selling one-penny beer at twice the going rate. A few years later, a colonist named John Barnes was charged with buying grain at four shillings a bushel which he then sold at five, “without adventure or long forbearance.” He had not assumed a significant risk in the transaction, in other words, nor held the grain for a considerable period of time, and under the circumstances he had no right to a 25 percent profit, even if a buyer was willing to meet his price. In sum, there was nothing intrinsically moral about what the market would bear.

And what of Limbaugh’s claim that the Pilgrims’ shift toward free enterprise would enable them “soon” to repay the company that had sponsored them? This assertion, at least, is correct, if by “soon” Limbaugh meant twenty-eight years, which, according to William Bradford is how long it took the Pilgrims to erase their debts. In truth, the assertion is misleading in the extreme.

So where does this leave us? Before anyone concludes that I am a closet communist, I will say again that I am politically conservative. What is more, the fact that Limbaugh is badly in error about the Pilgrims does not, in itself, discredit his economic views. We don’t automatically have to follow the Pilgrims’ lead in this or any other area of life; God has granted them no authority over us. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, wear jewelry, or believe in church weddings, and I have no qualms whatsoever in choosing not to follow their example in such matters.

But I do feel compelled to call Limbaugh to account for such an egregious misrepresentation. As a historian, I think no good cause is ever served by distorting the past, whether intentionally or accidentally. And as a Christian historian, I am grieved that the Pilgrims’ timeless example of perseverance and heavenly hope amidst unspeakable hardship has been obscured, their faith in God overshadowed by their purported faith in the free market.

Robert Tracy McKenzie is professor and chair of the department of history at Wheaton College. His most recent book is The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History (InterVarsity Press, 2013).

Jonathan Rees

As a good liberal, I’ve always claimed that my favorite President ever is/was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  After all, his legacy STILL defines what liberalism means and what government does down to this day.  However, as I’ve gotten older, my opinion of Franklin Roosevelt has grown steadily worse.  First, there’s how he treated Eleanor.  Second, there’s the fact that the New Deal didn’t go further.  Lastly, like making batches of wine, some bits of the New Deal have aged better than others.

As a historian, I’ve been drawn to an entirely different, somewhat less liberal President—Franklin Roosevelt’s distant relation, Theodore.  Sure, there’s the whole warmonger thing.  That’s not too appealing.  And as a liberal, Teddy’s presidency was not nearly as charged as his unsuccessful campaign’s platform in 1912.  But as a personality, Teddy Roosevelt has every other President beaten hands down (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, but I’d still give the nod to Teddy there by a smidge).

Let’s look at the biographies.  When I read biographies, the part I usually hate comes right the beginning.  How many historical figures are more interesting in their youth than they are when they’re adults?  If you’ve ever read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback you’ll know he stopped that book in Roosevelt’s early twenties and it still made me cry.  (I’m not telling why if you don’t already know.  You should read the book.)  I’m not a huge fan of Edmund Morris’ three-part TR biography, but unlike say Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, where the research is the best trait it’s Morris’ subject that makes all three of those books worth reading.

Now, there’s even a subgenre of books that cover only short periods of Teddy’s life.  Candace Millard’s River of Doubt is one of the best books that I’ve ever read, and it only spans a very short period of the man’s life AFTER he left office as President, namely his trip to Brazil.  Other than John Quincy Adams, which President deserves a book-length treatment for any part of his post-presidential career?  A few months ago, I read Richard Zacks’ Island of Vice.  The book only covers TR’s two years as New York City’s Police Commissioner, but it’s absolutely superb—not just because of the

Robin Williams as TR in Night at the Museum (2006)

vice, but because the prude who wanted to stop it was just so darned interesting.  I hope nobody does the inevitable “TR in the Badlands” book before I can get around to it, because I want a good excuse to visit Harvard and rummage through his papers someday.  They must be marvelous to read.

While I think I’m still closer to FDR politically, Theodore Roosevelt would definitely now be my answer to the old chestnut, “Which historical figure would you like to eat dinner with if you had the chance?”  Barring that, he’s also the President whose biography I’d most like to see come to the screen.  Even now, I’d pick Robin Williams in “Night at the Museum” over Bill Murray in “Hyde Park on Hudson” any day of the week.  Williams can be serious and funny at the same time, while Murray just looks uncomfortable.