The social books website Goodreads has an incredibly handy user-generated list of The New York Times’s best-selling fiction and nonfiction books of 2013. Most notable was just how many of 2013’s nonfiction bestsellers were written by conservative television and radio personalities.
Bill O’Reilly was most prolific: three books of his, Killing Kennedy, Killing Lincoln, and Killing Jesus, all showed up on the Times’s list at one point or another, in all cases for multiple weeks. Other VIPs join O’Reilly on the list with their own efforts: Glenn Beck with Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America, Brian Kilmeade with George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution, and Mark Levin with The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic.
Besides the astounding fact that these books were written at all amid the media personalities’ hectic schedules (though some professed to the help of “co-authors”), it is even more interesting to look into the works’ subject matter. With only two exceptions, Glenn Beck’s Control and Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter, all of the books on the 2013 conservative-pundit-nonfiction-bestseller list are historical in nature.
This is affirming, not surprising: conservatives have always couched their arguments firmly in the past. The Tea Party is only the most visible recent example of the right appropriating historical imagery. We all remember Sarah Palin telling us that Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms,” a reminder that “we were going to be secure and we were going to be free,” and Mike Huckabee’s enthusiastic, though inaccurate, reminder that 56 delegates signed the Declaration of Independence, “most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.” Indeed, conservatism almost by definition is historical. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains that conservatives value “traditional institutions and practices,” and that they prefer “the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal.”
Appropriating the past for political gain—that is, retelling history to suit one’s own ideological position—is a tradition that goes back to James Madison and his quest for a more centralized federal government. He, Alexander Hamilton, and others won that battle in no small part due to using historical propaganda as a talking point.
This is the fun part about studying historical appropriation: it itself has a history. Madison at some points was just as downright Machiavellian in his use of history as many of today’s conservative authors. But this comparison might raise questions that are yet unanswered: who has the right to tell the American story? Does history have rules at all?
Madison as Machiavelli
It’s 1786. We are independent, but flailing: the Articles of Confederation have left the federal government without much control over the states. Tax revenue is dwindling, coordination of interstate trade policy is ineffective, and foreign policy is a hodgepodge of local merchant and farming interests.
James Madison is disappointed with the government as it stands. He calls in a favor from his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister to the French Court, asking for a shipment to be made of 200 French textbooks, journals, and pamphlets on everything from botany to political philosophy to, yes, history. The specific request is for rare and valuable books, most only available in Europe, which would “throw light on the general Constitution & droit public [public law] of the several confederacies which have existed.”
In a letter home to his father, he explains why he wants to study the past: “The existing embarrassments and mortal diseases of the Confederacy form the only ground of hope, that a Spirit of concession on all sides may be produced by the general chaos or at least partition of the Union which offers itself as the alternative.” In other words, he needs to convince other Americans of just how badly things are going, in order to persuade them to ratify a stronger national constitution at the approaching convention in Philadelphia.
Instead of solely proclaiming the Articles of Confederation a failed document in the political present, Madison turns to the past: to Philip of Macedon. Strangely enough, Alexander the Great’s father may have had a much bigger impact on the American Constitution than many of us realize. He is the primary subject of Madison’s study.
In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison uses this historical example. The weakness of the American confederacy is like the weakness of the Amphyctionic League, which Philip corrupted over time until he ruled over it: “The danger [is] of having the same game played on our confederacy by which Philip managed that of the Grecian state [the Amphyctionic League]. I saw during the late assembly of the influence of the desperate circumstances of individuals on their public conduct to admonish me of the possibility of finding in the council of some one of the states fit instruments of foreign machinations.” Translation: if we’re too weak, foreign (and domestic) saboteurs might influence our government to its own demise.
Madison uses this argument everywhere: the newly independent Americans present at the Constitutional Convention worry most of all of the vulnerability of their new government: what if it isn’t strong enough to withstand an attack? What if monarchists take over the government? What if, as Benjamin Franklin had warned, the “Society of the Cincinnati” (a group of Revolutionary War officers) creates a new American aristocracy?
These questions nibble on the conscience of every elected representative in America, and Madison knows it. In a floor speech at the convention, he spells out the consequences of ending up like the Amphyctionic League: “Philip [of Macedon] at length taking advantage of their disunion, and insinuating himself into their Councils, made himself master of their fortunes.” And in a letter to Jefferson in October 1787, “[The weak centralized government] of the Amphyctions is well known to have been rendered of little use whilst it lasted, and in the end to have been destroyed by the predominance of the local over the federal authority.”
Our first national campaign wasn’t for a candidate, but for an idea: that our government ought to be strong enough to sustain itself.
Politics as History
Today, our treatment of history isn’t so different. Often, it’s a prop meant to hold up our own beliefs about politics. For Glenn Beck, slavery serves as a warning against authoritarianism (“It’s not a white condition or a black condition, it’s a human condition: man will enslave man when he can. This is a warning sign.”), and the Holocaust serves as a warning for the persecution of Christians (“How did [the Nazis] make them wear prison uniforms?! A purple triangle … stood for being a Bible scholar.”).
Even though there were strains of white supremacy in early (and modern) America, evident in documents such as Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, and even though the purple triangle really identified pacifist German Jehovah’s Witnesses, often mistranslated from Bibelforscher, these statements fulfill their purpose: they are political, not historical.
Bill O’Reilly represents a similar trend. In an interview, he explains that he wrote Killing Lincoln not because of the historical appeal of the era itself, but because “America’s in bad shape right now” (emphasis the author’s). In speaking with Pastor Robert Jeffress about Killing Jesus, Pastor Jeffress articulated the presentism of the book well: “Your book fits a bigger narrative you’ve been telling for a long time: that secularists are out to destroy Christianity.” Again, O’Reilly wrote the book in large part because of the contemporary debate it substantiated.
But the appropriation of history is more than a tool: it itself is a battleground. Just as in Madison’s case, conservatives today see a new class of people chipping away at the integrity of American government. This time, instead of leftover loyalists or rebellious state legislatures, Glenn Beck and his colleagues see the “establishment” media at work. In the introduction to a “crash course” on American history, Beck urgently asks, “[a]m I the only one appalled that history is being written and re-written right in front of us? If you want to restore the country, you must take it upon yourself to learn and re-learn history. Restore our history, restore our country.” The political battleground has expanded to our past; American history is being re-written.
History as Politics
This claim that we need to “restore our history” is a not-so-subtle shot at the supposed liberal bias amongst the media and academic historians, and it reflects the panic of modern conservatism: that the American narrative is being crammed into a liberal mold. Efforts to counter this perceived shift form the basis of many conservative media personalities. In one marathon episode, Glenn Beck describes a theme park he plans to build, “Independence, USA,” which will hold at its center his private collection of American History: “This is my National Archives,” he explains, “[w]e will keep the things and the ideas and the books and the papers that tell the truth. Nobody is going to tell me ‘that’s not the truth.’ Really? Let me go to the archives and get it for you. Let me go and show you what they used when they built America.”
This hysteria over the sanctity of history affects our politics, even outside of the New York Times bestseller list. In 2010, Texas, one of the largest textbook purchasers in the world, changed its education standards to meet a more conservative bent. The New York Times quoted a school board member saying that “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” Another member asserted, “[t]here seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.” According to the Times, “[t]here were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”
A year later, and again in 2012, the Tea Party in Tennessee textbook standards in the state, listing as a demand that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens…” A spokesman for the group added that there had been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
Here are where the parallels to James Madison end, and where Jefferson’s shipment of 200 books of history, politics, and philosophy to Madison in 1786 becomes very important. History, then and now, is meant to inform our decisions and our political speech, not alter reality according to present bias. And history misused towards political ends is often more damaging than no history at all.
Whose History?
Remember how the Tea Party (the Koch brothers one) got started—on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. After listening to reports of government housing bailouts, television correspondent Rick Santelli asked the traders on the floor if they “really want[ed] to subsidize the losers’ mortgages.” The group of white, property-owning, merchant elites cried in unison, “Nooo!” Then Santelli yelled the rant heard ‘round the world: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July! All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing!” Cue raucous cheering.
Despite his impassioned plea, Santelli was on the blunt end of poor history, the kind that might be in Texas textbooks or Glenn Beck bestsellers right now. He mistook the Tea Party that fought against taxation without representation with one that fought for the kind of Randian free market objectivism which celebrates those with the means to preserve their own economic power: the Tea Party that never existed.
Santelli, himself a white, property-owning, merchant elite, as well, looked around the room: “These guys are pretty straightforward. And my guess is, they’re a pretty good statistical cross-section of America: the Silent Majority.”
They might have been a pretty good statistical cross-section of the eligible voting members at the 18th century Constitutional Convention. They might have even shared those delegates’ political values. But they weren’t representative. And that’s really my point: we shouldn’t forget, no matter how hard Madison or Bill O’Reilly try to make us forget this year or any year, that history is written by those with voices loud enough to write it, and so, far too often, are our politics. To use history as the foundation of political ideology, one should listen for the voices too quiet to be heard, then and now: those marginalized by their economic condition, their gender, their race, their religion, or any other number of factors. Their history is not a “made-up criticism” of the “mainstream,” it is the unheard reality, a reality waiting to be incorporated.
As it stands, American conservatives aren’t listening. History has an odd way of repeating itself.
© 2024 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved.