“I Hope You’re Not Politically Correct”: A Reflection on a Much-Used but Utterly Useless Term

Some years ago, while I was attending the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, I got into a chat in the hotel bar with a husband and wife, who asked me what the big convention was. When I replied that it was a gathering of American history scholars, the man then asked me, “Now, is this real history, or politically correct rewritten history?” Another time, in the course of making small talk in a hospital waiting area, a really sweet lady asked me what I do. After I told her that I teach American history, she said to me—still very sweetly—“I hope you’re not politically correct.” Way back in 1994, when Lynne Cheney embarked on her crusade against the National Standards for United States History, an NEH-funded resource for elementary and high school teachers, she called the work “politically correct to a fare-thee-well.” More recently, when I was working a temporary college teaching job, a colleague from another department told me that he was reading a book about some of the nineteenth-century Indian wars. As part of describing it, he said, “It’s not PC.”

It would appear, then, that many people think there is a politically correct versus a politically incorrect way to write, teach, and understand American history. Moreover, judging from the way I keep hearing the term used, I get the impression that the opposite of being “politically correct” in their minds is “telling it like it is.”

But there is a further dimension to the way that the term gets used, about American history as well as in other contexts. While people talk about certain ideas or opinions as being “politically correct” versus otherwise, they also talk about a force that they call “political correctness.” As they use the term, it refers not just to the presence of certain ideas, but to a tendency for the holders of such ideas to silence debate over them, and to demand rigid orthodox conformity. Using the term that way, people would seem to be standing up, not for a set of ideas, but for the principle of open dialogue and mutual listening. Thus does Clyde N. Wilson, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, write that American historians once engaged in “lively and stimulating debate about the big issues of our history—the meaning of the Constitution, the causes of the Civil War, the good and bad of capitalism, the responsibility for World War I and the Cold War, and so on.” This has ceased, he goes on to assert, with “the descent of the Iron Curtain of political correctness”: history now has “more to do with theory than with evidence, with enforcing predetermined orthodoxy rather than with debate.”

These words appear in Prof. Wilson’s endorsement of a book by Thomas E. Woods., Jr., titled The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Based on how Wilson seems to think history should be written and taught, one might expect that the book he is praising lives up to that ideal, that it responds to simplistic orthodoxies by showing how complex and multifaceted the questions are, and encouraging expansive debate. I’ll come back in a minute to whether Woods’s book actually does anything like this, but I need to get a few other points out on the table first.

Much of the discourse that I hear about the notion of “political correctness” and “indoctrination” in the U.S. history classrooms has to do with several beliefs, all of which I consider to be fallacies: (1) that American history is either pro-American or anti-American, and that historical debate is about trying to draw up a scorecard to show America as being either a good country or a bad one; (2) that people should study the history of their country to decide how to feel personally about it, and about themselves as citizens of it; (3) that the question of how much federal social welfare and business regulation there should be could be easily answered just by looking at some plain facts in the past that speak for themselves, if only biased scholars would stop distorting them, and that (4) there was once a time when historians kept their political biases out of their scholarship but now historical scholarship is all about the biases of its authors, to the point that facts don’t matter anymore.

But one might possibly sense an internal contradiction in some people’s thinking on the subject: if the opposite of being “politically correct” is being both more patriotic and unbiased, or “objective,” is there no danger that those two ideals might clash? Or are patriotism and objectivity synonymous terms? In other words, is the truth so edifying to the glory of the American nation, and to free-market capitalism, that all one has to do is refrain from trying to be “politically correct” and let the glorious truth shine forth? It actually gets more complicated when we look at Woods’s book, because his version of being “politically incorrect” has as much to do with giving glory to the American South as it does to the American nation. Thus, he has a section that attempts to prove Abraham Lincoln was a racist. (He quotes Lincoln’s speeches in his 1858 U.S. Senate campaign and remarks early in his presidency, completely ignoring the well-documented later shift in Lincoln’s racial attitudes.) Indeed, Woods apparently understands “politically correct” history as demonizing the white South and making the North look heroic. There are, of course, others who think “politically  correct” historians demonize white males across the board and therefore don’t make Lincoln look heroic enough. But again, I’ll come back to Woods’s book shortly.

Because I also have a PhD in history, I can offer a few insights into the subject that have absolutely nothing to do with ideology. In the words of our friends at Facebook, “It’s complicated.” It’s very complicated, in fact. At the graduate level, a huge part of the study of history is termed historiography, the study of how historians’ interpretations of events and ideas about the field itself have changed over time. When I was studying for both written and oral comprehensive exams, I was often up all night poring over hundreds of books, trying to bring highly complex events and theories into focus, including the subtle differences between this and that historian’s interpretation of this and that event, and conflicting theories on how events fit together and on what ultimately causes change. Little if any of it had to do with how anyone wanted me to feel personally about it, certainly not whether this or that president should be praised or vilified, or whether I should get a lump in my throat when I heard the national anthem played. If American history were as two-dimensional as the so-called “anti-PC” authors makes it out to be, graduate school would have been a whole lot less work.

Moreover, on any given topic, there are always new books coming out that students of history have to know about. An enlightening exercise for anyone interested in seeing what I mean would be to thumb through the lengthy book review section of either the Journal of American History (which comes out four times a year) or the American Historical Review (five times a year!). Most of the books being reviewed are brand new specialized monographs which put some aspect of a well-known episode of history under the microscope and explain how a new way of examining the documentary evidence (or in some cases some newly discovered documentary evidence) can put something into a new light. For example, in recent years there have been new books published reexamining the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, challenging the old understandings of where he stood on both civil rights (he cared more about it than previously thought) and foreign policy (he had a more coherent vision and was more directly involved in it than previously thought).

One of the things we learn early on in graduate school is that, in history, there is no last word. Now, let me be clear: this has nothing to do with the idea that there’s no such thing as truth and no such thing as a fact, as we’ve been accused of thinking. (Nothing is more tiring for me than hearing two pedants engage in the “yes but what is a fact” debate, probably heard more often in bars than in seminar rooms.) When I say there’s no last word, I mean that there is always new information to be dug up and there are always new ways of looking at what is known. It’s like a principle in mathematics: between any two numbers, there is always another number (an infinite number of other numbers, in fact).

This brings me to the writing of textbooks. An instructor of the standard college survey course has numerous textbooks to choose from, many written by well-recognized historians. They are typically revised every few years, not just to add chapters chronicling new events, but to take into account new research on old events. The authors, most likely with the help of graduate research assistants, have to keep up with the latest scholarship, and have the daunting challenge of weaving together the old and new findings of thousands of different specialists into a coherent-sounding narrative. And it is usual for textbooks to have sidebars that spotlight issues that historians disagree on, and summarize the points of their disagreement for student readers.

Now, the $64,000 question: where does political bias come in? It would be a lie to say that it doesn’t, and I have no intention of lying. I think most historians, and thus most history textbook authors and college professors, think the U.S. government should provide social services and regulate business, and will show a fair amount of approval of the creation of the Social Security Act while pointing out its limitations. I also think it’s a fair generalization that, in their depictions of the civil rights movement, their sympathies lie with the marchers rather than with the police commissioners who turned police dogs loose on them, and that they will treat federal intervention on behalf of racial equality as a good thing that should have gone farther. They are also more likely to be sympathetic to the labor union organizers than to the union busters, and to be unimpressed with the creation of “company unions” in the 1920s and thereabouts. Do modern historians ever romanticize the actions and qualities of the players whose side they’re on? When writing about groups whose experiences got short shrift from earlier historians–African Americans, American Indians, women, etc.–do recent and current authors sometimes go overboard in giving them glory and making them look heroic?  Sure.  Have historians become less triumphal than before about the nation as a whole? I would have to say yes on that one as well.  However, before you try to interrupt and tell me that I’ve just proven your point, please keep reading. Historians are still constrained by the facts, they still critique each other for getting facts wrong, and, most importantly of all, they do not try to pretend that reality is so simple and the facts so clear-cut as to prove their political biases to be right 100% of the time.  (Writers of American Indian history absolutely do not deny that Indian tribes made war against each other, sometimes brutally, and in some instances practiced slavery.)  And again, good academic history is not about making a scorecard and calling America a good country or a bad one, or calling any ethnic group a good group or a bad one.  Good historians understand this principle.

It is time to return to the Woods book. The short answer to the question suggested above, that of whether he responds to simplistic orthodoxies by showing the vast complexities of the reality, is no. He does quite the opposite, in fact. In 18 chapters, Woods walks the reader through the major periods and events of American history, with a running commentary built around a number of premises. One is the orthodox economic conservative view that expansions of the functions of the federal government (like the Social Security Act) do more harm than good. Another is that, in interpreting the Constitution, original intent must be held sacrosanct. His idea of proving that premise is equating the idea that the Constitution has some interpretive flex to it over time (“living Constitution” theory) with the absence of a written constitution during the years of British colonial rule which led, he asserts, directly to the whole taxation crisis that made a revolution necessary. (Flexibility with written constitutions appears to be an all-or-nothing proposition for him.) He also takes care to paint twentieth-century Democratic presidents in the worst possible light, such as where he makes a case in the chapter on World War I that Woodrow Wilson purposefully maneuvered the country into the international conflict in order to gain a seat for himself at the postwar peace table. Be clear: he does not present this as being one possible argument that could be made, or even as the argument that he himself would like to make, but rather, as the plain truth that the history teachers are suppressing.  I would actually expect many patriots who like to think they are “politically incorrect” to take issue with many of his interpretations, because he seems to regard not only World War I, but World War II as well, as a foreign conflict that the president maneuvered the country into when it could more easily, and fruitfully, have stayed out.

As noted, though, the book has a white southern bias as well as an economically and constitutionally conservative one. In fact, rather than The Politically Incorrect Guide, a more accurate title would be An Economic Conservative, Unreconstructed Southern Rebel Interpretation of American History. Where slavery, the Civil War, and race are concerned, his book is a defense brief for the white South and a countersuit against northern pretensions to moral superiority and, of course, federal interventions in most civil rights matters. For example, on the subject of the Black Codes—those laws concerning African Americans that all-white southern state legislatures drew up in the fall of 1865 when the national Congress was not in session and President Andrew Johnson was giving them a free hand to reconstitute their postwar governments—Woods spotlights those portions that actually granted rights and legal protections to the formerly enslaved population, as evidence that the intentions of the former slaveholders were not really so bad. He likewise depicts both Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as unnecessary federal intrusions on state prerogative, when southern states were supposedly moving of their own volition toward going the right thing where blacks were concerned.

On a number of points, Woods’s inaccuracy lies not in his telling of the events but in his implication that he is saying anything different from what mainstream historians already know and teach. We know, for example, that the three-fifths clause was not about reducing an African American to three-fifth of a human but to limit (or to puff up, depending on one’s point of view) the representation of southern slave states in Congress. We know that many white northerners opposed slavery in the western territories for reasons that had nothing to do with viewing blacks as their equals, and that there was more to the causes of the Civil War than a fight over slavery. Where he writes things that are accurate, he does so with the clear implication that his book, and the books he recommends in the marginal notes, are the only place where the truth can be found, because the mainstream of the historical profession is lying so as to be “politically correct.”

Speaking of the books he recommends, there’s a noteworthy idiosyncrasy there: he typically heads such a recommendation with the words “A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read.” The clear implication in each such instance is that (1) the book he is recommending disproves the assertions of all the other books on the subject, and that (2) the typical history professor today would attempt to discourage a student from reading it for fear that student might learn the truth. He is wrong on both counts. No book can legitimately claim to have the complete absolute truth about anything; the most any author can claim a book does is offer some facts and some perspectives on a topic. Thus, if a professor knew that a student was planning to read, say, Alden Vaughan’s New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965, reprinted in 1995), which depicts the New England Puritans as having had codes of honor and honesty in dealing with Indians, the professor would probably not say “Oh no, don’t read that book.” Rather, the professor would be likely to say, “Yes, read that book, but there’s more to the story, so here are some other books you should also look at.”

Though there is much in it that I can and do take issue with, for both ideology and historical interpretation, I would not be taking the time to attack this book if Woods had packaged it as one historian’s view of American history. Nor would I have bothered if the book had only sold a few hundred or even a few thousand copies. What I find alarming is the combination of how well this book has sold and the pernicious beliefs that he panders to. He falsely depicts today’s historians as suppressing the truth, stifling debate, discouraging expansive explorations of issues, and telling lies. The implication that the typical American history professor today would try to steer students away from reading certain books for fear that they might discover the truth is outrageous. With that falsehood comes another: the idea that any book, whether by himself or by anyone else, can “set the record straight” just by walking through the chronology event by event, and implying in effect that the other historians are lying while he’s nobly telling the truth. Those are the words, not of a professional historian, but of a demagogue.

While this book sold big and made it to the New York Times best sellers list (with no help from the review it got from the Times), many of the “anti-PC” persuasion undoubtedly prefer A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. It’s been through a few revisions; the latest one is subtitled “From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement” (a loaded phrase on both ends, of course). This book actually has more scholarly rigor than does Woods’s, starting with the fact that it has source citations. Unlike Woods, these two authors make a point of praising Lincoln, as when they argue that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was not just a measure to increase the manpower of the Union Army with black soldiers. (Like Woods, they do distort the claims of other historians where they suggest that everyone else is saying that was Lincoln’s sole motive.) But the big issue I want to raise is in the packaging: the back cover announces that the authors “set out to correct the doctrinaire biases that have distorted the way America’s past is taught,” and in so doing they grossly distort the way that others are teaching and writing America’s past, and imply that their book corrects it rather than merely offering one way of looking at events.

The real reason this is of concern to me, besides seeing my own profession slighted (I could live with that if it were the biggest problem here), is that it fits in with a much larger picture: apart from the interpretation of history, there are countless other themes and topics that many Americans think they can reduce to moralistic binaries, to claim that their society has been usurped from them by sinister and conspiratorial forces and to view the existence of this entity they call “political correctness” as the most sinister dark force of them all. Demagogues play to people’s perceptions that their society is under siege and depict themselves as having come to the rescue, and this is exactly what Woods does in this book. Given that such a book as Woods’s so-called Politically Incorrect Guide could be on best seller lists and seen by so many as rescuing the truth from that dark force, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that a man who depicted America as being in desperate shape and declared “I alone can fix it” in a July 2016 convention speech could go on to be elected president of the United States.

There is still much more to be said about the way people imagine themselves to be under siege by “political correctness.” My next blog post will continue the exploration, and the theme will surely be coming up many more times after that.