Whose history is it? - National Standards for History

Given what went into the project to create National Standards for History, that is, guidelines for the teaching of history in America's schools, one might have expected that it would be as appreciatively received as the National Standards prepared for the other officially designated subjects (the arts, civics, geography, science, and foreign languages).

First of all, there was widespread recognition of the need to address what came to be known as the "crisis of historical education." Originally recognized as a problem by and for historians themselves in the 1970s, in the 1980s there was increasing public acknowledgment of, and a sense that something had to be done about, the fragmentation and marginalization of historical studies in schools and the accumulating evidence from tests and surveys that the nation's young people were growing ever more ignorant of American and world history. The idea of National Standards seemed to offer a way of composing a coherent narrative of American development and of establishing clear expectations of the historical knowledge to be acquired by students.

Second, encouraged and applauded by the nation's governors - Republicans and Democrats alike - the National Standards for History project, like the other such projects, was commissioned by the Bush Administration as part of its highly-vaunted educational initiative, AMERICA 2000, and then renewed by the Clinton Administration as part of its own GOALS 2000. Moreover, although it represented a significant break with tradition - for the setting of American educational standards and requirements had historically been the prerogative of the respective states - the idea of creating national standards incited little controversy.

Third, composed at UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools under the direction of the highly esteemed professors of education and history Charlotte Crabtree and Gary Nash, the three-volumes of the National Standards - United States History, World History, and History: Grades K-4, respectively - were made possible by a $1.6 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education.

And, finally, to ensure that the Standards would both reflect the finest historical scholarship and be appropriate for their intended grade levels, the almost three-year development process was supervised by a supposedly pluralistic National Council, and entailed repeated reviews by panels and focus groups from all of the major professional organizations - from the American Historical Association, to the Council of Chief State School Officers, to the Organization of History Teachers. (And, to be up front about it, I was myself a member of the first Organization of American Historians' review panel).

Nevertheless, the fall 1994 publication of the National Standards for History unleashed, almost immediately, a torrent of rancor and accusation: From the op-ed pages of newspapers and the studios of AM talk-radio shows to the very floors of Congress, the Standards were besieged. Overwhelmingly, the attacks emanated from the political right. The authors of the Standards were charged not just with "political correctness" (the latter day version of calling someone a "red," "pinko," or "fellow-traveler"), but also with being "thieves," "hijackers," and "balkanizers" of America's past.

And it was not only demagogues and reactionaries like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh who took shots at the Standards and their authors. They were joined by Lynne Cheney, the former chair of the NEH who, along with the then-Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, had promoted and inaugurated the project, and also Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader and leading Republican Presidential candidate.

Dole's speechifying was truly remarkable. Before a gathering of the American Legion, he said that "The purpose of the National History Standards seems not to be to teach our children certain essential facts about our history, but to denigrate America's story while sanitizing and glorifying other cultures." In fact, Dole essentially declared the Standards' authors to be traitors, claiming that their approach "threatens us as surely as any foreign power ever has."

The attackers weren't even just Republicans. By a vote of 99-to-1 the U.S. Senate rejected the Standards because they did not exhibit, quote, "a decent respect for United States history's roots in Western Civilization." Adding insult to injury, Clinton's Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, reminded everyone that the Standards actually had been commissioned by the Bush Administration and he added flatly that "The President does not believe and I do not believe that these Standards should form the basis for a history curriculum in our schools."

How are we to understand the controversy? How are we to construe the anger and venom directed at the Standards and their authors? I can tell you that many of my fellow historians were shocked by the virulence of the reaction. Given the persistent crisis of history and historical education, their own sense of isolation and marginalization from public debate and their eagerness to be taken seriously, the broad public agreement about the need for standards; the bipartisan support for establishing them; the appointment of the respected social historian, Gary Nash, as a co-director and author; and the review process to which they were to be subjected; too many of my colleagues naively and foolishly had allowed themselves to forget the history and ignore the politics which had led both to their creation and, ironically, to their later vilification.

However, to make sense of the furor we must think historically and politically. We must recognize the experience and the agency behind the demand to create national standards for historical education - the most formal and official statement of American and word history ever possibly to be licensed by the Federal government. If nothing else, we must see it in terms of the "culture wars" currently being pursued so avidly by conservative politicians and pundits. But, even more fundamentally, we should comprehend it in terms of the renewed class war from above waged for a generation now against both New-Deal liberalism and the progressive changes wrought in the course of the 1960s - a class war clearly resulting in the rich getting richer and working people and the poor poorer.

Indeed, we need to realize that the initiative to establish national standards expressed the hegemonic ambitions of the corporately-endowed New Right to reshape popular historical memory and imagination, and to articulate a grand-governing narrative of American and world development favoring the creation of a new conservative political consensus.

Grasping that, we will also be able to understand that what is ultimately at stake is not just a set of pedagogical guidelines, but the very purpose and promise of historical education and, even beyond that, the vision we hope to pass on to our children of America's past, present, and possible futures.

Historically-speaking, we need to go back a bit. Contrary to the images you might get from watching TV, listening to talk-radio figures such as Rush Limbaugh, or reading best-selling books like Newt Gingrich's To Renew America, the sixties were not a "destructive" decade. Undeniably, it was a time of dissent. Truly a generation challenged the powers that be on questions domestic and foreign. Definitely great changes were effected. And, admittedly, violence occasionally ensued (though it was as often instigated from above as from below).

However, if one looks closely at the aspirations and accomplishments of those who sought the changes - whether political, economic or cultural - one comes to understand that, for all the anger, far from trying to destroy the old order, the struggles of what came to be called the "New Left" were actually efforts to transform America according to the very ideals being espoused from platform, pulpit, and lectern.

America was proclaimed to be the embodiment of justice, freedom, equality, and democracy. Though the reality was all too often otherwise, the ideals themselves were powerful and motivating, and a generation of citizens raised in the wake of the Second World War were determined to realize them. Black Americans and their white allies marched and fought for racial justice and equality. Students and young people opposed imperial wars in Southeast Asia. Women once again began to question their subordination and confront the determinism of gender. Workers - contrary to media and social-science propagated myths about blue collar conservatism and authoritarianism - grew increasingly insurgent and demanded workplace reforms. And a fresh generation of historians - social historians, intent upon contributing to these new and resurgent democratic movements - set out to recover the experiences and struggles of previous generations at home and abroad and to revise the grand narratives of American and world history accordingly.

In fact, for all of the tragedies and defeats, much was achieved - far more than we often recall. Civil and voting rights laws were enacted. Social and economic development programs were instituted. Medicaid and Medicare were enacted. Educational and employment opportunities were expanded. A war was resisted and a president declined to seek re-election. Workers' wages and benefits rose. The Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration were established. The historical discipline was reinvigorated, and little by little the story of America was made more interesting and progressive than had been allowed by the consensus historians of the 1950s.

Of course, not everyone welcomed the struggles to enhance liberty, equality, and democracy and reinvigorate historical consciousness. Conservatives gathered around the Republican Party; and though Goldwater suffered massive defeat and Nixon was forced out of office, the nervous forces of political reaction did not wait long to regroup.

Unfortunately, the several New-Left movements of the 1960s had failed to join together and articulate a political vision capable of appealing broadly to their fellow citizens. And their failings allowed for the relatively uncontested emergence in the 1970s of a reactionary politics of the Right, a "New Right," eager to exploit the popular anxieties engendered by a series of severe political and economic crises: Watergate; retreat from Vietnam; Arab oil embargo; global industrial competition; impending municipal bankruptcies; and recession, stagflation, and deepening unemployment (all of which were coming to be thought of as the "twilight of capitalism" or "twilight of authority," depending on your politics).

Driven forward economically by a tightening profits squeeze and politically by the real and persistent fear of the coming together of a broad radical-democratic coalition, the corporate powers-that-be began to mobilize. They first announced themselves via the Trilateral Commission. Sponsored by rich and famous figures like David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank - with the assistance of policy intellectuals like Zbigniew Brzezinski and the enlistment of political folk like Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican George Bush (among others) - the Trilateral Commission was an exclusive organization of American, Japanese, and West European corporate and political elites.

Concerned about national and international changes and developments, and the threats they posed to expanding global capitalist enterprise, the Trilateralists' anxieties were publicly announced in their 1975 report, rifled The Crisis of Democracy. The authors of the report unreservedly stated that the Western polities were facing "governmental overload" - more specifically a "crisis" in which the problems of governance stemmed from "an excess of democracy."

Furthermore, the threat was clearly acknowledged as coming from below - from minorities, women, public interest groups, and labor unions - though, notably, the most dangerous culprits were identified as university and other "value-oriented" intellectuals (that is, historians and their kin). In short, they were saying that "if we can quiet the intellectuals, the masses should eventually fall silent too."

The Trilateralists themselves were far too elitist and multinationalist to be popular at the grassroots level. But they did not go away - in fact, they filled important posts in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Administrations. In any case, the Carter Presidency hardly satisfied those who were eager to reverse the reforms of the sixties, undermine the foundations of the modern welfare state, break the backs of organized labor and the environmental movement, halt the advance of feminism, and silence the critical voices emanating from academe and the public media.

To accomplish these things required resources, organization, ideas, and popular support.... Enter the New Right - and, honestly, one can only but admire its making, for it involved getting a most diverse lot to lie down together in the bed of Reagan Republicanism. Who could have imagined a gathering of such strange bedfellows as big corporate executives, small business owners, farmers, old conservatives, libertarians, ethnic neo-conservatives (many of whom were former socialists, social-democrats, and/or liberals), free marketeers (Hayekians and Friedmanites), cold warriors, single-interest groups (Like the NRA), and Christian fundamentalists who had traditionally been either apolitical or Democratic voters.

Though it was not sufficient, money was absolutely essential to the making of the New Right. Fortune-500 CEOs on their own could pay for lobbying and legal campaigns against unions, environmentalists, and community organizations; they could endow think-tanks, periodicals, and public affairs programs; and they could underwrite conservative conferences and Republican candidates. But how was the grand conservative coalition actually to be accomplished? And beyond that, how was the longed-for conservative consensus to be achieved? That is, how was a new post-liberal hegemonic order to be secured?

There is too much to fully recount here but, significantly, the making and ascent of the New Right entailed, from the very start, the use and abuse of the past: The Reagan Republicans - no one more effectively than the Gipper himself - became masters at mobilizing historic and legendary American figures, events and values in order to rhetorically transcend particular interests and draw together their powerful axis.

Addressing Americans' growing anxieties and declining optimism, confidence and hope, Reagan and his cohorts nostalgically harkened back - depending on the occasion and the audience - to some illusive and elusive time before the 1960s or the 1930s. Offering mythical renditions of American experience free of high taxes, government regulations, social welfare, family breakdown, legalized abortions, gun control, rebellious students, affirmative action, critical intellectuals, drugs and violent crime, and racial and cultural diversity, they cleverly gathered their wondrous coalition with promises of restoring "the past."

The past they articulated functioned as the ideological glue of their alliance and, in the absence of a liberal or left alternative, served to attract to their electoral banner voters frustrated by the more moderate conservatism of the disgraced Carter Administration. But the use and abuse of the past was not merely a coalition-building and ballot-garnering weapon. It remained a central feature of Reaganism in office.

I will not recite Reagan's many, incessant, and gross distortions of history directed against liberals, labor, feminists, the poor, and minorities. I will merely note that while he spoke of the past as a time of "shared values" and of the need to restore them, his rhetoric of patriotism and consensus actually bolstered a politics of social division and oppression and a political economy of greed and class inequality.

Moreover, the cadres of the New Right politicized historical study and education (even more effectively than had the New Left) by placing them directly on the public agenda. Notable here is the strategic role played by William Simon, prominent Republican Wall Street investor and former Secretary of the Treasury. In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, and at appearances across the country, Simon sounded the alarm that the United States was, "careening with frightening speed towards collectivism and a statist-dictatorial system," and he implored corporate executives and conservative politicians to fight what he called the "New Despotism."

Again, foremost among the culprits he identified were university academics. According to Simon, historians, humanism, and social scientists were single-mindedly teaching students and young people to hate capitalism and support anti-business causes. Thus, he called for a "culture war" and "battle of ideas" against and within academe, starting with the cutting off of funds to critical scholarship and pedagogy in favor of financially underwriting the creation of a conservative and pro-corporate counter-intelligentsia in colleges and the media.

As we have witnessed (for almost 20 years now), Simon's proposed culture war has been aggressively pursued both in and out of government Most importantly, the Reagan and Bush victories of 1980, 1984, and 1988, placed the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education directly into the hands of New Right appointees like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney. And they readily turned their offices into culture-war encampments.

As head of the NEH and, then, as Secretary of Education, Bennett used his posts as bully pulpits, not simply to promote the humanities and historical education but, quite emphatically, to wage campaigns against critical scholars of American and world history and literature. Over and over again, in official pamphlets and speeches such as the 1984 NEH report, To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett charged history and humanities professors with trashing the great works and accomplishments of Western Civilization and subordinating history and literature to their own ideological and political ends. In fact, Bennett's several NEH reports register that for him and his colleagues the teaching of history and the humanities was to be reduced to "transmitting a tradition" and cultivating a one-dimensional view of past and present in which the United States is seen to be both the heir of Western Civilization and the final fruition of its development.

Moving up to the Department of Education, Bennett and his lieutenants called for the teaching of "cultural literacy" for the purpose of "fostering social cohesion and national pride." And, warning of the dangers of failing to transmit the nation's supposedly shared "social and political values," they championed historical education as a kind of "defense initiative" and a means of "legitimizing the political system." In fact, it was Chester Finn, one of Bennett's most prominent subalterns, who launched the campaign for National Standards.

Succeeding Bennett at the NEH, Lynne Cheney continued his ideological and political campaigns. She packed the Endowment's Advisory Council with conservative scholars; personally intervened in the grantmaking process to block or limit awards to left-leaning academics; and publicly went on the attack against social historians and critical humanists.

In her first major broadside, American Memory: A report on the humanities in our nation's schools, Cheney warned of national decline and collapse, implying that schoolteachers and professors of history were essentially subversives. A year later, in 1988, in yet another NEH report, Humanities in America, she sustained her offensive by portraying critical scholars as disaffected and alienated from their fellow citizens and guilty of "reducing the study of the humanities to the study of politics." At the same time, like her predecessor, she promoted a one-dimensional narrative of American history and Western Civilization.

The culture-wars against academe were also to be vigorously pursued beyond the offices of the NEH and Department of Education. Indeed, with the lucrative support of multi-million dollar conservative foundations - most notably, the Bradley and Olin Foundations, the latter headed by William Simon himself - New Right extra-official efforts to marginalize the left and promote a conservative counter-intelligentsia have been truly impressive. I will note just the highlights of the Bradley and Olin Foundations' funding activities (and, I assure you, I am not exaggerating): To empower conservative public intellectuals against their adversaries, they endowed "chairs" and fellowships at inside-the-Beltway, Fortune-500 sponsored think-tanks and outreach operations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (where, it should be noted, their work would not be subjected to critical academic peer review).

To get their New Right's messages out and about, they bankrolled public affairs and humanities journals and magazines like The Public Interest, The National Interest, First Things, The New Criterion, and The American Spectator to operate alongside the pre-existing conservative and neoconservative periodicals like The National Review, The New Republic, and Commentary. And, as we know, the New-Right public intellectuals themselves became regular celebrities on McNeill-Lehrer and other current-affairs TV shows like Capitol Gang, Crossfire, and the McLaughlin Group.

To create an image of the nation's universities - history and literature departments in particular - as dens of "political correctness, intellectual corruption, and anti-Americanism," they grubstaked and underwrote the promotion of books like Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, Charles Sykes' Profscam, Christine Hoff Simmers' Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple (which actually honors me with an attack); and Peter Collier and David Horowitz' Destructive Generation. And the corporately-owned popular media quickly picked up their anti-academic tune.

To secure on-campus New-Right beachheads and stir up local controversies, they put up the money for conservative student newspapers like the infamous Dartmouth Review, made substantial grants to a number of prestigious higher-education institutions for the founding of conservatively-oriented Law and Economy programs and professorial chairs; and subsidized the formation of the conservative National Association of Scholars.

Finally, in this vein, I cannot help but note in particular two works which have been highly-touted in the media and quite revealing of the Right's ambitions for history. I refer to Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (I will spare you reference to Murray and Herrnstein's even more scurrilous book, The Bell Curve). In The Disuniting of America (recruited by the Whittle Foundation Channel-One folks), the supposedly-liberal Schlesinger attacks as almost un-American the work of critical historians, and shamelessly and wrongly equates multiculturalist approaches to history writing and teaching with the truly questionable and separatist Afro-centrist approach. Whatever the problems with multiculturalism, Schlesinger's hostility effectively denies the possibility of a dialogue in favor of developing a truly unifying history of American diversity.

Even more indicative of the Right's ambition to fashion a new grand-governing narrative is Fukuyama's book, The End of History and the Last Man (paid for by the Olin Foundation). In it, Fukuyama, the former Bush State Department official and Rand Corporation functionary, argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union represents not simply the victory of Western liberalism over Soviet communism but, even more epochally, the final stage of History. In other words, we are to believe that the apparent global triumph of capitalism has brought us to the terminus of a world-historical development - the culmination of universal history. There are and will be no grander alternatives - the age of capital is forever.

On reflection, wasn't this essentially the very same vision of history concurrently being advanced for historical study and thought by Bennett and Cheney? One could easily assume that the Right's purpose for historical education was to attest to and celebrate the end of history.

Meanwhile, back at the NEH and Department of Education, the very same cohort was proceeding with plans to establish the National Standards for History project. Remember that when they actually commissioned the project, Cheney and Alexander had every reason to believe that they would be in position to oversee its development. Bush had triumphed in the Gulf War; surely, they must have thought he would be re-elected. In fact, in 1992, Lynne Cheney - not to be mistaken for her husband, Dick, who was running things over at the Defense Department - gave her approval to what she understood to be the first draft of the Standards, a volume entitled Lessons from History.

The problem, for a variety of very solid reasons, is that the many professional groups which also reviewed Lessons did not give their approval. I well recall the original OAH panel's deliberations over the American chapters of Lessons. My own criticisms - many of which were shared by my colleagues - included: 1) that Lessons from History was composed in such away as to present an economic and technological-determinist rendition of history (bizarrely enough, it was so deterministic in character, you could imagine it had been written by an old-fashioned Orthodox Marxist); 2) that Lessons offered a boring evolutionary narrative of American political life and failed to capture the dramatic political, ideological and social struggles which have propelled the nation's development; 3) that, while it did significantly attend to matters of race and gender (though not to anyone's real satisfaction), its treatment of that traditionally taboo subject, class, was spotty, weak and mishandled, especially regarding the politics of the working classes and their labor unions; and 4) that its references to the history of the American radical tradition were inadequate and unacceptable (in fact, American socialism was all but ignored except as the subject of "red scares," and Eugene Debs was nowhere referred to).

Moreover, we were all shocked to find that the Second World War and the Cold War had been lumped together as one historical era, giving the misleading impression that the two sets of events were a single struggle against what cold warriors preferred to call "totalitarianism" or, even worse, that the war against fascism was merely a prelude to, or first phase of the confrontation with communism.

Lessons from History was so bad that a couple of the professional organizations, including the powerful American Historical Association, threatened to pull out of the project entirely. I cannot help but note here conversations had at the time with a few of the more progressive members of the authorial and editorial team responsible for composing the National Standards. They revealed that Lessons from History had entailed certain key compromises with and, occasionally, even deference to the more conservative members of the writing team. However, those with whom I spoke also assumed or, at least, hoped that their professional colleagues on the respective review boards would insist on significant changes and revisions, compelling - or better, enabling - them to construct a far more critical version of the Standards. Thus, the whole thing went back to UCLA and its authors eagerly set to work dramatically reconstructing it - again, subject to repeated reviews by the prescribed professional panels.

Of course, in the wake of the 1992 elections, Cheney and her ilk were themselves no longer able to control or, even, oversee developments. As a consequence, the National Standards for History project proceeded in an apparently much more pluralistic and critical fashion than it would have if Bush had been re-elected and Cheney had continued to run the NEH.

Though far from perfect, the National Standards which emerged two years later were - as they were supposed to be - far, far more reflective of the latest and finest historical scholarship than the Cheney-approved but professionally-rejected Lessons from History. Ironically, what originally had been so ardently desired by the Right ended up becoming just what they had feared to begin with: That is, standards for historical education which - referring to the U.S. volume - reflect the nation's diversity; appreciate the struggles that have been so central to its development; articulate the tragedy, irony and progress of American life; and challenge students to critically approach the connection between past and present - thereby, proposing that the making of history is far from over.

Having looked at the controversy in historical and political perspective, we should now be able to understand why all hell broke loose on the Right when the Standards actually appeared. We should now be able to appreciate the outrage of the out-of-office New Right politicians and conservative talk-radio showmen. Nevertheless, I cannot resist pausing to note how upset Lynne Cheney herself was with the Standards project. From her new post as Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and in the pages of her newly-released and well-publicized book, Telling the Truth, Cheney not only called for the rejection of the Standards themselves, she also called for the elimination, or privatization, of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the very institution she herself had headed.

"Fair enough," you will say, "but how do we explain the response of the Democratic Senators and the Clinton Administration?" One might instantly reply by asking, first, how many members of either party in the Senate do you think even looked at the three volumes; and, second, since when did the Clinton Administration not defer to its Republican antagonists?

But such answers are just avoiding the harsher reality that, after twenty years, the New Right has indeed succeeded all too well in dominating and reshaping American public discourse. And here critical historians also have themselves partially to blame, for we have evidently not lived up to all of our expectations and aspirations.

We came into this discipline to recover the past and connect it to the struggles of the day. We can proudly say that we have recovered the past more substantially and magnificently than any previous generation - just consider the scholarship we have accomplished on relations of exploitation and oppression and the historically diverse struggles of resistance, rebellion, and revolution opposing them. Moreover, we have significantly transformed historical pedagogy and curricula at all levels of education and schooling.

Yet we must admit that we have not sufficiently connected our labors to the lives, labors, and concerns of our fellow citizens. And, truly, in this respect there is much to be done. Not only must we find ways to more effectively answer abuses, fabrications, and corruptions of the past with historical truths and insights; we must also find ways to more effectively articulate and communicate our historiographical accomplishments so as to better engage and activate the historical memory, consciousness, and imagination of working people.

Most immediately, I hope the Standards controversy serves to awaken us to what is at stake - not just the Standards themselves but also, as I said at the outset, the very purpose and promise of historical education and the vision of past, present, and possible futures we hope to teach our children. This cannot be stressed enough, for the Standards themselves are being revised and elections are upcoming.

Therefore, we must ask, and make it an issue on the public political agenda: Are historical study and thought to promulgate an end-of-history narrative in favor of securing the status quo and the hegemony of corporate capital? Or, are they to cultivate a more active and critical historical memory, consciousness, and imagination, in favor of extending and deepening liberty, equality, and democracy? In other words, "whose history is it?"

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Co-editor with Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle of The American Radical (1994), he is the author of The British Marxist Historians (1984, 1995), The Powers of the Past (1991), The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History (awarded the 1993 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize), and "Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?" and Other Questions (1996). This talk was delivered at a symposium on the National Standards for History, held at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in March 1996.

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