A Break in the (American) Story
This is the third of three installments of something I’m working on. Hope you like it. —Jim
Once upon a time, teaching American history was, in its broadest outlines, a fairly simple task: you told a story of progress. At first—and for a long time afterwards—this was principally a matter of moral progress. It could be summed up with a passage from William Bradford’s 1651 account those religious dissidents known as the Pilgrims in Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford’s tale is literally one of redemption: “They fell upon their knees & blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils & miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.” There are an estimated 10 million Americans today who are descended from these Pilgrims, who did indeed go forth and multiply. But there are hundreds of millions more immigrants from elsewhere on the planet who subsequently made the journey and would affirm this sentiment, as they too fled persecution, religious and otherwise, and found a haven from a heartless world in this promised land. Three centuries later, the ongoing validity of this moral fable would be affirmed in classrooms as an implicit or explicit contrast with totalitarian regimes like those of the Nazis or (godless) Communists. Americans were better than that.
Of course, the story was also more complicated than that, and had been from the beginning. The “perils & miseries” of which Bradford spoke could also be those imposed by the arrivals on themselves, by those who resisted them, and those they displaced. Thirteen years before the Pilgrims’ arrival, the first permanent English settlement in North America had been established at Jamestown, Virginia, an utterly brutal experience for all involved, its survival largely the result of the tyrannical leadership of the mercenary John Smith. In 1619, the first slaves—captive, not voluntary, immigrants—were imported to Virginia, and they too went forth and multiplied, accomplishing amazing things in the face of stunning adversity.
A complication in the plot doesn’t necessarily derail it. For one thing, progress doesn’t always move in a straight line. For another, there was always a parallel narrative to the tale of moral progress that dovetailed with it: political progress. The storytelling started early here, too, with Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in 1805. The “termination” of the Revolution that Warren spoke of was British recognition of American independence, but the notion of the Revolution as a usable past to be deployed in the service of subsequent struggles was central to a series social movements, including women’s rights (“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams famously told her husband months before he helped draft the Declaration of Independence) the quest to end slavery (fueled in large measure by the heirs of those New England dissidents), and the struggle to organize labor. Here too there were complications, among them flawed people who happened to be on the right side of history alongside some decent ones on the wrong side (which is what makes most stories interesting). Still, the narrative has had tremendous staying power, animating contemporary social movements like Civil Rights and gay marriage.
There’s one more strand in this braid worth noting here: economic progress, which might be the most potent storyline of all. Americans were a people of plenty from the very beginning, when the Pilgrims were surprised to discover planted fields when they arrived on Cape Cod, the work of vanished Wampanoag who had perished in a plague (naturally, the Pilgrims concluded God was looking out for them). Even slaves in North America ate better and lived longer than their counterparts elsewhere. But the important thing about this baseline of prosperity was what the innovations it fueled over the centuries that followed. And, crucially, how widely the resulting largesse was distributed over time. Again: not without struggle. But widely enough, in circles that could plausibly be viewed as concentric. As a teacher, you could tell the story—this grand, multi-faceted story of Progress—in good faith.
No more.
It’s not altogether clear why this happened. Some of it has to do with changes in the nature of History—I’m using a capital H here to indicate the institutionalization of a profession—itself. It became less about stories and more about arguments. The colleges that had once turned out ministers became universities that turned out scholars, some of whom were historians who chased the prestige of the (social) sciences rather than the uncertain prospects of (liberal) arts. Experts are easier to manufacture and distribute than storytellers. Narratives segmented, even fractured. Scholars started talking more to each other than anyone else, in large measure because their jobs depended on doing so, even as the market for their services became increasingly tenuous. Indeed, it’s on the verge of collapse, and this little project represents an effort to imagine a past, and future, outside it.
But these people have worked hard in good faith, and over the course of recent generations that work filtered downward, imitated and adopted by teachers and students down the line. Here too narratives fractured; taking stories apart became more important than considering how and why they were constructed in the first place, and whether they might have any logic or cohesion beyond the self-interest of the people who made them. Which is how we got that “think like a historian” logic.
But the loss of the Progress narrative can’t be laid solely at the feet of historians. It was more societally broad than that, and reflected changes in the culture at large in twenty-first century. The decline in religious affiliation, indicative of a loss of faith and social cohesion. Political gridlock that stymied reforms that even clear majorities wanted. Economic stagnation that rendered expectations of upward mobility moot. None of these developments were catastrophic. But they sapped the storyline. They fostered a sense of unease. Which, at bottom, is what brings you here.
The question now is what I can do for you. More on that next time.