I like Peggy Noonan. I am a wordsmith. She is a
tremendous speech writer. I appreciate her abilities.
Recently, she wrote a response in The Wall Street Journal
to the Netflix series The Crown and Steven Spielberg's movie on The
Washington Post, appropriately called The Post. She pointed out
historical inaccuracies in both dramas. In both cases, these inaccuracies had
to do with politics. She is an expert on politics. Here's how she ended her
column:
Why
does all this matter? Because we are losing history. It is not the fault of
Hollywood, as they used to call it, but Hollywood is a contributor to it.
When people care enough about history to
study and read it, it’s a small sin to lie and mislead in dramas. But when
people get their history through entertainment, when they absorb the story of
their times only through screens, then the tendency to fabricate is more
damaging.
Those who make movies and television dramas
should start caring about this.
It is wrong in an age of lies to add to
their sum total. It’s not right. It will do harm.
Why should people who make movies and television start
caring about all this at this late date? They never have before.
The main problem is
not the people who make television series and movies. The main problem is the
history professors who write textbooks for public high schools and the mostly
tax-funded universities. The liberal mindset that has dominated Hollywood since
1960 has dominated American academia since at least 1900.
When it comes to historical accuracy, there isn't much of
it when it comes to a discussion of civil government. Those who write today's
textbooks have been trained in institutions that have been funded by the state.
Even in the institutions that have not been funded by the state, they are
licensed and regulated by the state, especially in the area of accreditation.
Keynesianism and the foreign-policy of the Council on Foreign Relations have
dominated academia for as long as they have dominated policy-making in
Washington.
Yet even this is understating the case. The victors write
the textbooks. American books on the American Revolution began to be written in
1789. The textbooks written on the Constitutional Convention began to be
written around 1800. Readers
were not given the facts regarding either the American Revolution or the
Constitutional Convention. They still are not. Textbooks continue to repeat the
party line of the victors.
If you look at the
textbooks' accounts of every American war since 1775, you will find few
discussions of the following: (1) how a small minority of political organizers
favoring a war did their work to pull the American people into the war; (2)
financing the war, especially by fractional reserve banks; (3) the aftermath of
the war in which the level of both taxation and government debt increased
dramatically, leading to the next war. We need a minimum of a 350-page
monograph, divided into three parts, for every American war since 1775. We do
not have even one such volume.
We need detailed discussions of why the United States,
and Massachusetts as early as 1690, invaded Canada. Why did America keep going
to war against Canada? This topic is rarely discussed in monographs, let alone
textbooks.
We live in a world in which Alexander Hamilton, the
bastard from Nevis, gained favor with George Washington by becoming a
Freemason, as did every senior commander under Washington's generalship. We
need a discussion of the appalling economic policies that Hamilton implemented
as Secretary of the Treasury under Washington. Here is a man who is lauded in a
wildly popular hip-hop Broadway musical, yet he was one of the most successful
scoundrels in the history of American politics. He was worse than Jefferson
said he was, and Jefferson thought he was corrupt. He suffered the most rapid
fall from political grace in American history in 1801 because he undermined the
presidential candidacy of John Adams in 1800, and then he helped swing the tie
vote in the House of Representatives from his old enemy Aaron Burr to his old
enemy Thomas Jefferson. The Federalist Party never forgave him. He did more to
destroy it than any other politician in his day.
Hamilton has been the beneficiary of a reconstruction of
his reputation in 1801. Statists love him. He was the founder of the
pro-central bank, pro-tariff, pro-federal debt mercantilist tradition that
extended through Senator Henry Clay to Clay's disciple Abraham Lincoln, and to
the Republican Party that Lincoln's election empowered after 1860.
I do not blame the script writer of a hip-hop Broadway
musical for the veneration awarded to Hamilton. I blame the authors of the
history textbooks that have praised Hamilton for well over a century.
"YOU CAN'T BEAT SOMETHING WITH NOTHING!"
I also blame the entrenched laziness of conservative
historians who have yet to produce a single revisionist history textbook of the
United States. If I had not been busy in my attempt to reconstruct economic
theory in terms of the Bible, I would have written that textbook.
I have waited my
entire adult life for a conservative to write a detailed history of
constitutional law, focusing on politics, philosophy, and religion as the
sources of legal theories that have shaped the decisions, not just of the
Supreme Court, but also of a majority of the lawyers who are elected to
Congress, and who pass the laws that the court system passes judgment on.
I have waited my
entire adult life for a revisionist history of the New Deal that is critical of
both Roosevelt's foreign policy and his domestic economic policies. There are
histories that criticize his foreign-policy. There are histories that criticize
his centralizing domestic economic policies. But we have no scholarly book that
does both. I have been waiting for this since 1958.
It does no good to
curse the darkness if you are not willing to light a candle. The conservative
movement has not lit a sufficient number of candles. College-level textbooks
reflect this. This is not something new. This extends back to 1789: David Ramsey's History of the American Revolution.
In conclusion, the main problem is not creative
dramatists who re-write bits and pieces of the Establishment's party line in
college-level history textbooks. The main problem is the professors who write
the textbooks.
