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Carla I'm Carla Lally, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Check out Sweets Unwrapped, a podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic. Rethink the Atlantic's creative marketing studio. Together we're celebrating the traditions that make life sweet. Tune in now.
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A
Happy 250th birthday, America. On this momentous occasion, I I've been thinking about how a country should be remembered, which is a fraught question right now in politics, in high school curricula, and possibly at your barbecue, I definitely have at least one relative who will be draping himself in an American flag all day and another who will skip the holiday entirely. Every nation has its good and bad moments. So what do you foreground and what do you lose if anything, if you emphasize one over the other? Sheep is really hairy. Earlier this week, I went down to the national mall in D.C. to go to the Great American State Fair, a place that was literally advertising itself as showcasing the very best of America. All right, where is Florida? I checked out the Florida exhibit at the fair. There are exhibits for all the states and online. Many people said Florida was a standout. I saw a plastic manatee floating in its virtual habitat. Like, look at this moss. Pretty cool. Hello, hello, hello, manatee. And while I was there, I asked people about one of the founding fathers who's a kind of Rorschach test for this idea. Do you foreground or background the bad parts? If I say the name Thomas Jefferson, what comes to your mind?
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C
Declaring some independence.
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A
Like independence America.
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C
What about you, Mom?
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A
That's what I was gonna say. Most of the people we talked to had similar answers. Monticello founding father. One guy told us that Jefferson had a dumbwaiter, which I didn't know. And then usually there was another kind of answer.
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C
Yeah, the second like this is bad, like slavery, because I know he was a big slave owner. And like the controversies between, you know, his child that he had the slave. I know that.
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A
But then how far we've come as a country to hopefully make advances in equality, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, I'm choosing him. Cause he obviously leads people in lots of different places. And so it's interesting to listen to how people, I think, like, well, first
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C
of all, I think it's, we need to, you know, be of our American history. But there's also things that we need to know that that wasn't right. And obviously slavery was a terrible thing and that was horrible. I think it's also important to highlight what was wrong with how he behaved in slavery and how that was a norm and how it shouldn't have been a norm.
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A
Hi, can we ask you all a quick question, which is, if I say Thomas Jefferson, does anything come to mind? Callie Hemings, say more.
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D
Yeah, Founding father. But sometime they got their hands a little dirty and did things they weren't supposed to. And as much as people want to whitewash it, that's part of the history, too, and kind of a stain on his legacy as well.
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E
So,
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C
you know, even though George Washington
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A
had slaves, he treated them very, very good.
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C
Thomas Jefferson had slaves, but he treated
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A
them very, very good. He was not a bad slave owner.
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C
Everybody had slaves back then.
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A
That was the norm. I'm Hanna Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. Fights over history are especially intense in schools because whoever wins over the future wins the past. The state of Florida, of Manatee fame, recently introduced a conservative leaning alternative to the Advanced placement history course for high school students. A pilot program will roll out later this fall. The Florida Advanced Courses and Test, or FACT for short, is heavy on American, except light on slave narratives. It's an approach to history that President Trump had in mind when he signed an executive order to promote patriotic education.
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D
It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.
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A
The only textbook that the Florida FACT curriculum suggests to use is called Land of Hope, An Invitation to the Great American Story. We're not going to talk about the Florida curriculum specifically, but we are going to use the textbook to talk about how history should be taught with its author, Wilfred Maclay, who's a history professor at Hillsdale College, a private Christian school. Do you go by Bill, by the way? I heard people call you Bill.
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D
I do generally go by Bill. Yeah, and I'd be happy if you did.
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A
Okay. Okay, that works. Bill says he wanted Land of Hope to put more of an emphasis on the Founders, on ratification debates, the Constitution, and to be, in his words, more enjoyable to read, and he wanted it to be a counterweight to other textbooks that he thought had an ideological slant. Shortly after publishing Land of hope in 2019, Bill says he had dinner with a lawyer who wanted to meet him.
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D
We had a long conversation. We closed the place down, and we probably talked for five hours about the very kinds of things you and I are talking about. And he came up with this formulation that really stuck in my mind. He said, you know, I believe that if you teach young people that they live under a bad regime, it damages their souls. And I have to admit to you, I've never thought of it in that way that seemed. It was more dramatic, more metaphysical, than anything I would have said up to that point. But I realized it is important that studying American history for an American is not the same, I think, as almost any other subject, because you're teaching them about what it means to be a citizen.
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A
I agree with Bill that it's important to help young people be civically engaged. From there, though, it comes down to the details. When you're teaching history, what's the right line? How much bad, how much good, how much violence, how many soaring speeches? What is the right way to inspire but still inform?
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D
I think that it's justifiable to have the earliest exposures to American history be not fabulistic, not phony, not fairy tales, but grounded in affection for the country as one of the sources of your being. And then as you get older, then to introduce complexity. It's such that you may come to the point where I can't really be friends with this country, as when I know all of these things about it. That's, I think, a legitimate outcome of education. You can't control that. You shouldn't try to control it. But the earliest stages do seem to me to matter a lot. I have a lot of friends in the profession who write critically about early America and the founders and framers. And I say in a nice way, I'm not challenging them, but I say, do you ever worry about the effect on young people that it has to see everything debunked? They will say, always the same thing. And it is. That's not my job. But somebody has to teach that somewhere along the line. So I don't think we can be indifferent to the effects of a, let's say, a 1619 project kind of approach to American history, which I strongly objected to at the time, and it came out and still do object to.
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A
Okay, so you've gotten quickly to the heart of the matter, which is that you think too much criticism is corrosive. I mean, it sounds like what you're
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D
saying, criticism at the wrong time, in the wrong way is corrosive. Yeah, yeah, it can be corrosive. Okay, I want all those qualifiers in there.
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A
Yes, can be corrosive. I mean, I know that your work can be caricatured. There's a fierce debate right now about how to teach history, so we'll just lay out. You know, there are some sources that have a pretty explicitly Christian nationalist telling of history, like the Prager University materials. That is not who you align yourself with.
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D
No, I've done some things with Prager, but I don't align myself with that view at all. I think I would want to talk about it for a while because I think they're not completely wrong, but I don't think America was founded as a Christian nation. I will dispute that fervently.
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A
And at the other end would be Howard Zinn, a People's History of the United States, which is, you know, widely read among teenagers and does have a certain appeal. It's like we're letting you in on secrets about America, its history from the bottom up, labor history, you know, history of rebellion. So that's what you're arguing against, that kind of influence?
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D
Yeah, but not entirely. I want to give Howard Zinn credit for one very big thing that he does. He did extremely well, and that is to present history as a story. He's really very good at telling stories. I think they're not. Well, they're not the right stories. They're not told in a nuanced, fair minded way, but they're very compelling. And I think young people want to read Zinn, so. But I think. I think Zinn did something and, you know, the historians all hate him. The most negative reviews of Howard Zinn were written by Michael Kazin, the longtime editor of Dissent magazine. And they recognized and they wanted historians to acknowledge that he was a bad historian. 5 million copies of the people's history later, I don't know that the message has really gotten through. But as history is not good, as history, as story, it's very good.
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A
So let's put in our minds, let's put before us an American high school student. And so the aim is to get that student to be interested and to have some affection with all the qualifications that you named. And the question is how to do that. So let's get deeper into an example to see what this looks like in its specifics. Thomas Jefferson is a good borsch test. You Point out, as many historians do, that Jefferson's slave owning calls into question the legitimacy of his most resonant words, that all men are created equal. Why did you make the choice to point that out about him in your history?
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D
Well, and I do it early on because he's so connected to the roots of what's distinctive about American civilization, about American political systems. I think it's a crime of omission not to bring up how complicated he is in this way. He owns slaves, but he wrote against slavery. He even wanted to have, as you probably know, in the original draft of the Declaration, he fulminates against the king for being responsible for this institution, which George III can't be blamed for that. And you, you don't have to get into that depth in, say, the fifth grade, which is when most students in most states first encounter US History. But I think you have to acknowledge that slaveholding was a common practice among particularly the Virginians, but not just them. Benjamin Franklin had slaves. He eventually changed his mind dramatically on the subject and became a proponent of abolition. But. And that's a great story, too.
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A
So back to Jefferson. Cause I think it's a good template to understand this in the details, because what we're talking about is how much of this detail do you include on each side? So you do mention the imperfections of Jefferson. You do not, however, mention Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore his children and who is a. You know, it's a story that's captured the imagination. I think we can agree it's.
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D
Oh, sure.
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A
So why not? Why not?
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D
Well, I'm one of the people who is not convinced that he was, in fact, the father. We could have a little debate about that, but maybe leave it at that for now, that there's an indication that there's a. And I can't even remember all the details, but there's a chromosome coming from a male Jefferson, but that's as close to the evidence that he was the father. Ends up being circumstantial, not really deriving from the DNA, and I'm not persuaded by it. So I don't take it as a given. I'm not out there beating the drum for an alternative view, but that's one reason I don't mention it. Is that something I'm not entirely convinced
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A
of, although there is DNA test showing at least her youngest son to be part of the Jefferson line?
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F
Oh, yeah.
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D
No, I think that's right. But not necessarily Thomas Jefferson. Again, that's a separate issue that we could spend 45 minutes or more on. But if it's questionable, then I think the argument for not including it is pretty clear.
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A
Well, my question is not specifically about Sally Hemings. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Annette Gordon Reed.
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And what she attempts to do is bring to actual life the reality rather than just say he was a slave owner, you know, he was ambivalent about it, or he did contradictory things, which is addressing the issue entirely from his point of view. She tries to bring to life the reality of what that word enslaved means. And so my question is, do you not do that because you think it's too negative or would cause someone to be less patriotic, that it would turn them away from their country? Because there's almost in our book, say, what is definitively missing is any accounting of violence. Like, there's no mention of lynchings. There's no mention of sort of the deepest, darkest kind of negativity.
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D
I don't think that's actually true. But on the question, the Jefferson question, I think here's. And we're just going to have to maybe agree to disagree a little bit about this. But I think that one of the difficulties in writing a book like this is that you have to constantly make judgments about what to leave in and what to leave out. And there's many, many things may not matter much to you, but that I would have liked to have said more about. But think about writing an op ed. You can write an effective op ed, it should be 5 to 700 words long if you wrote everything you knew about the subject and laid out all the arguments for the position you were taking about, let's say, birthright citizenship and why the Supreme Court was right in what it decided it would be 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 words long. You have to rule things out. And one of the things I noticed in looking at the newest textbooks is that there's been a tendency to inclusiveness run mad. So that people often, in response to political considerations, I assume they include much, much detail that, while not untrue, hinders the process of reading above all else. We have a generation, high school, fifth grade, whatever, college that doesn't read. And those are the people I was thinking of. And so I try again and again to uncomplicate as much as possible, things that I could delve into with great complexity.
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A
But it seems like you're making an assumption about what a high schooler would find interesting or readable. It seems to me equally possible that a high schooler getting into the ins and outs of Jefferson's actually deepest flaws or what did or didn't happen with Sally Hemings would be eminently readable more than, say, the debates between John William Fletcher and Jefferson. Like, that's what you're interested in, but why make the assumption that an average high schooler would be more interested in that?
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D
Well, look, I could have whole sections of the book that are like sort of page six of early America, you know, and they might be very interesting. But that's the author's job, is to guess what his readers are most interested in. That's my job, to make that judgment. And whether I've been successful or not, that's for you to judge and anybody else who reads the book. But believe me, and anyone who's written David Kennedy, who's written a very widely used textbook, and I talked about this once, the hardest thing is knowing what to throw out. And sometimes that will depend on, you know, for example, I had someone ask me, you know, why don't you have anything about the Tulsa race massacre? And, well, I'm married to a Tulsan, and I know I've been knowing about the Tulsa race riot, as they called it, for a long time. And now it's the race massacre, but for a long time. But it fits into the context of urban riots all over the country at the time. So I didn't. Before it became highlighted as a national issue, there wasn't really a reason to give special attention to it. I might now, in fact, we're doing a second edition. And that's one decision, one of about 500 decisions I have to make about what to include in keeping with the fact this is something that people are now interested in, they would not have been interested in at the time. 2019, when I wrote the first edition.
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A
Yeah, I mean, the difficult. I was thinking about this with the mindset of a teenage high schooler now. So, you know, when you were taught history in high school, there wasn't the Internet, there wasn't Wikipedia. And so people didn't have infinite sources of information where they could look up things for themselves. So you have, for example, a photo of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. You say in the caption, he was compelled to surrender a way of life. And I was thinking, there's nothing inaccurate about that. But if you just Wikipedia Chief Joseph, you see that it was an unbelievable violent campaign, that he was specifically extremely heroic in the speech that he gave, that it was very memorable. And I did wonder whether a high schooler looking up that Wikipedia would think oh, this book is whitewashing the truth. And that's why Howard Zinnis sold 5 million copies, because teenagers sort of like to be in on something they don't want. The whitewashed version, which uses words like, you know, compelled to surrender a way of life, which feels very euphemistic.
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D
I actually disagree with you about that. I think that the symbolism. Well, look, I can't judge whether kids would be more interested in one thing or another. I make the judgment I make. But I think it's much more important to point out that a way of life is at stake and not just a defeat at the field of battle. So I'm very happy with that. It's in a caption, isn't it, that.
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A
Yeah, it's just a caption. But I thought to myself, it's. This question I had about violence is difficult to stomach. It's difficult for everyone. And I think it's a legitimate question to wonder how much true darkness and violence do you want to talk to a teenager about? I think there's a cost to doing too little. It just feels out of touch. Euphemistic whitewashing. And there's obviously a cost to doing too much. So as I was reading your book, I was just thinking about that question and, you know, what a high school ler would find true and palatable and informative about America. And so that caption just stood out to me, as did the one about, for example, Harriet Tubman where you talked about her experience as a slave. But there's nothing in the book which says what anyone's experienced as a slave is.
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D
That's not true. That's just not true. I have a whole chapter about the Old south that goes into considerable detail about that. I mean, it talks more about the experiences of enslavement than it does about the experiences of the master class. So.
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A
Yeah, but did you think about this question of violence? Like, did you think that is not helpful in this case?
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D
It wasn't. I had no process of thinking how. How much should I depict the violence of this? I had to think about this quite a bit with, for example, the Nat Turner Rebellion, which was just really awful. But I toned it down somewhat for various reasons. I wanted to emphasize it enough that students would understand that it was this kind of event and the stories that were told about it that led to the clamping down on slavery that occurs in Virginia and elsewhere in the wake of that one particular slave rebellion. But this one was particularly bloody. And so I had to include some description of what happened. But I did it for the reason of making clear why there would be this reaction, and not just for the sake of depicting violence.
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A
After the break, we discuss can you be a good citizen of a country that does bad things?
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F
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A
I mean, when my youngest son was in middle school, I took him to the lynching museum in Alabama, and I wrestled with that decision. I mean, the lynching museum is very clear about what lynching was, what the history of it was. And you know, there's a legitimate question, at what age would you take a child to the lynching museum?
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D
Yeah, I don't think we disagree about that at all. I took my kids when I lived in Chattanooga. There's a bridge that's been converted into a pedestrian bridge across the Tennessee river, and there's a, a spot where lynchings occurred. A significant number I don't remember now, But I think 1820, something like that. And I made a point of taking my kids there and saying, look, you know, there's all these happy people crossing the bridge, eating their snow cones and all this, but this was a place where these horrendous deeds took place. But in introducing that in the wrong way, you could give them an impression that that's all that America is about, that underneath it all, it's really just a country based on violence and the survival of the stronger over the weaker and so on and so forth. And I certainly didn't want to do that. I don't think you would want to do that either.
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A
Well, so that there is a question, a couple of things. There is a question about whether that is, in fact, that kind of truth is, in fact inspiring. That I've heard the argument that when you present a truth, oh, this is a country sort of with flawed leaders, but they're all well intentioned and they're debating and they're marching towards greatness that creates a passive young citizen. Whereas if you teach a young person, no, this is not. We're not talking about minor flaws. I'm going to highlight these flaws. We're talking about primarily a flawed country, not a little bit flawed, and you can change it. There's an argument that that's actually inspiring and causes young people to be more engaged, to not be passive, and to fight for things that are important to them. So I think it can go either way.
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D
Well, you know, there's a point that. And the late Gordon Wood was here a couple months ago and something like this kind of colloquy was going on, and. And he asked, I was interviewing him. That's the way we set up his visit. And I was tempted, but it wasn't my role to do so, but to ask the question. And then he said the words in my mind. And the words were compared to what? Compared to what? And, you know.
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A
You mean this country is highly flawed compared to what?
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D
Yeah, yeah, compared to what? And of course, the interlocutor didn't really have an answer to that. He didn't mean. He didn't do it in a mean way. I mean, shut down discussion. But you always have to think about,
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A
but why is that an important question? Every country has its sins. And you can love your country just as you love your family with its sins and own them completely and fight for it to be better.
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D
I'm not sure I'm understanding you. I mean, if you're talking about exposing your children to the history of lynching, the fact that lynching occurred, and it really wasn't until the Republican party in the 1920s got on their high horse about it, and of course it was. The south was still solidly Democratic. But to do that at the exclusion of other things is the reverse form of whatever the reverse of sanitization is, is lacking balance.
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A
Although it seems to me just as much of a legitimate question to ask how to be a good citizen of a bad country. That's actually the theme of an essay that Masha Gessen, who writes often about Russia and its many ills, has asked, is it okay to teach a child who feels this way? You can still be a good citizen of a bad country or a country that does bad things.
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D
I think that's pretty hopeless. I think you can write articles in the New Yorker about this to be read by people of education and a certain age. I think teaching of children is just going to be hopelessly confusing.
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F
Now.
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D
There are extreme situations. Growing up in Germany in the 30s or in Soviet Union or Soviet controlled regimes, as I think Masha Gessen did, those are extreme situations, but I think it's in a clearly extreme situation, the notion that your duty as a citizen lies in obedience to an unquestioning obedience to the dictates of your government. It's a very bad thing to be teaching them. You have to give them a version of kind of what's called the talk, you know, about how to make your way with integrity in a system that is being administered by people who are petty, sinful, selfish, malicious commissars. And to not to kind of flame out in a blaze of righteous glory, but also not to submit. And that's an important moral conversation. I don't think it really applies to what we ought to be teaching young people and incorporating an advanced placement history exam in this country.
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A
But many people think about the current administration in exactly the words that you just described. And so could you say to a child in a situation of that family, you owe your allegiance to the idea of America?
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D
No, I don't. I mean, I think that's kind of. Again, that's a very empty abstraction, I think. And look, I know people, I knew people. I know people who felt the same way about Obama's presidency. They're very different people, not the same people. And you know, there is part of citizenship. This may come to a real fundamental difference between us, but I think part of citizenship is learning to live with results that you don't like you maybe even abhorrent, but that your abhorrence of the outcomes of particular elections doesn't justify your saying, well, the hell with that, I'm no longer in the authority of that. This is why January 6th, in case you're thinking of going, there was such an abomination. But there's a concept that I think is lost today. And I often refer people back to Richard Hofstadter, the great American historian at Columbia.
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E
Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen.
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D
In 1968, when the bust occurred, the
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E
very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken.
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D
So he gave this wonderful speech which I think is still applicable today, in which he says that, you know, democracy demands certain kinds of virtues, and one of them is the recognition of a loyal opposition.
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E
The possibility of modern democracy rests upon the willingness of governments to accept the existence of a loyal opposition organized to reverse some of their policies and to replace them in office. Similarly, the possibility.
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A
Just the last couple of things. You know, I read the book and there's hardly any women in it, hardly any mention of suffrage. And I did think, well, I'm trying to imagine, say, you know, a young black high school student in Los Angeles or a Native American student, and what incentive does that person to have to be inspired towards patriotism by a book that really focuses on the accomplishment of political leaders who are mostly white men. So, you know, as opposed to, say, inspiring American leaders of all kinds, like a real explanation of the character of Harriet Tubman or of Chief Joseph or, you know, Americans struggled against real hardships, like reading this book, young high school students who could really empathize, see themselves in it, which is important to high school students in a real visceral way.
- [33:19]
D
Well, I think I can point to my experiences, and I've lectured about the book in urban settings in New York and Chicago and elsewhere. And I think a lot of black students are drawn very much to what I've written. But I take exception to this notion that I only talk about white men. And, you know, I give a lot of attention to Frederick Douglass. And Frederick Douglass is a fantastic role model for. He was, I mean, the quintessential loyal opposition. And his relationship with Lincoln, which I would have loved to have talked about more, but, you know, you just can't do it all. But somebody who was born into slavery and his various autobiographical accounts, the way in which, for example, learning to read is so important in his development. And I emphasize this about Richard Wright, too, and others, and his. I could go on and on, but his emergence as a great orator, you know, and Martin. Martin Luther King. I give a lot of attention to him, of course. Everybody does.
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A
But why so few women? I mean, I can barely remember a woman like a suffragette or anybody who, you know, changed the course of history.
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D
Well, I try not to think in terms of fulfilling certain kinds of quotas, but I do look at people that are exemplary in various ways, and I look, I do talk about Eleanor Roosevelt. I talk about Jane Addams. There was no intent on my part to exclude women, but I also wasn't going to include women just because they were women.
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A
All right, it's the 250th birthday coming up really soon. If you could tell a young American high school student, here's what you should do on July 4th. What would that be?
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D
Oh, gosh, I'd say it's a free country.
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A
Do whatever you want.
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D
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I don't. You know, you touched earlier on, something we should have talked a lot about is that, how do you teach love of country? And that is That's a tough one. I mean, the whole religious tradition that you and I both are parts of different ends of, you know, you shall love the Lord God with all your heart and your mind and so on and so forth. How do you teach that? How do you teach these things? How do you teach? You really don't? I mean, to pound love into people and the way you pound multiplication tables into them, it just can't be done.
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A
Well, I'm a journalist, and I'm afraid that my way is through truth. Like there is no love without truth. I mean, that is obviously why I do the job I do. So for me, the more truth the better. But I know that's not everyone's way.
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D
No, I like that. I also like that there's no truth without love. That's true also, in its own way. But I'm not a journalist.
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A
I really appreciate this conversation. I feel like we got somewhere. Bill. Professor Maclay, thank you so much for joining me.
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D
Thank you, Hannah.
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A
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Sam Fentress fact Checked. Rob Smirciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudina Baid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic@theAtlantic.com listener I'm Hanna Rosen. Thank you for listening and happy.