Reading history is not a favorite pastime of young people these days. Historian David McCullough writes best sellers, such as the current The Pioneers, but he’s an exception.
Wilfred McClay has all the makings of becoming a historian who matches McCullough. He writes beautifully and doesn’t bore readers or offend them with left-wing political slant. McClay, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.
The McClay book was envisioned as an antidote to a popular textbook, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. The Zinn text has been assigned to millions of college and high school students over several decades. And many of them have imbibed his tale of America as a land of oppression.
But Land of Hope isn’t the flip side of Zinn. It’s not a conservative response that whitewashes or ignores the darker sides of American history such as slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. Quite the contrary. It offers a full, fair, and intellectually honest account of the past 400 years of life in America. At times, McClay is even conversational.
If McClay’s version strikes one as sharply conservative, it may be simply because it’s not dominated by the progressive interpretation of America and an inclination to stress our failings over our successes. He tried to “be as objective as I could, while being fair and generous to all legitimate positions,” McClay writes. In that, he succeeds.
In telling America’s story, McClay makes comparisons, draws dividing lines, contrasts rivals and opposing ideas, explains why Congress and the White House have fought from the beginning, and spells out differences. And he does this with great skill.
“If Jefferson had believed that education could raise the commonest man to the same station as the well born, then Jackson believed that the commonest man was already where he needed to be and needed no raising — that his innate capacity for deciding questions of politics and economy on his own was sufficient, the hallmark of democracy.”
McClay contrasts colonial Virginia and New England: “In Virginia, the motives for settlement were largely material ones, while in Massachusetts Bay, they were frankly religious ones.”
He takes up the tricky question of whether the revolution was essentially conservative in its objectives, merely to “separate America from Britain” or “was it something radical, in the sense of wishing to shake things up, dramatically and fundamentally upending the entrenched inequalities and hierarchies in society?”
McClay sides with historian Carl Becker, who favored the more conservative view. “The war was not about home rule, but about who would rule at home,” Becker wrote.
On slavery and the Constitution, McClay doesn’t duck. “The ambivalences regarding slavery that had been built into the structure of the Constitution were almost unavoidable in the short term in order to achieve an effective political union of the nation,” he writes. But “the original compromise no longer became acceptable to increasing numbers of Americans [and] a ubiquitous institution in human history came to be seen not merely as an unfortunate evil but as a sinful impediment to human progress, a stain upon the whole nation.”
“We live today on the other side of a great transformation in moral sensibility, a transformation that was taking place, but was not yet completed, in the very years that the United States was being formed.”
McClay writes, “It is no exaggeration to say the Civil War marks the boundary between early America and modern America.” In fact, the change came during the four years of war.
“What a contrast that sight must have seemed to anyone who remembered the motley garb of those first regiments responding to Lincoln’s recruitment calls at the beginning of the war” in 1861. “Not so the Grand Review, which still the laughter and replaced it with awe, suitable for the installation of a new political order” in 1865.
Raymond Moley was an influential aide of President Franklin Roosevelt who soured on the New Deal and left the White House. McClay quotes Moley’s evaluation of FDR:
“His knowledge of political and constitutional history and theory is distinctly limited. During all the time I was associated with him I never knew him to read a serious book … [or to show] any appreciation of the basic philosophical distinctions in the history of American political thought.”
Sounds familiar today.
Fred Barnes, a Washington Examiner senior columnist, was a founder and executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
