Theory 2 Action Podcast
Theory 2 Action Podcast
LM#62--Lovers of Liberty series--Book 5
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Have you ever wondered why American history feels so contentious? As we approach America's 249th birthday, the question of how we understand our past has never been more critical. For too long, we've been caught between competing narratives – one sanitizing our failures, another dwelling exclusively on our sins.
The Dunning School of historical thought dominated 20th century education, portraying Reconstruction as a failure while romanticizing the antebellum South. This perspective, taught in teachers' colleges nationwide, perpetuated "Lost Cause" mythology that obscured slavery's central role in the Civil War and downplayed the systemic violence that undermined Reconstruction. When Howard Zinn's "A People's History" emerged as a counterbalance in 1980, it swung so far toward Marxist critique that it often bred contempt rather than understanding.
Enter Wilford McClay's "The Land of Hope" – a refreshingly balanced approach to American history that speaks truth without abandoning hope. McClay doesn't sanitize our past; he clearly states slavery caused the Civil War and vividly depicts the terrorism that crushed Black political participation during Reconstruction. Through powerful storytelling that weaves emotional and intellectual currents together, he treats history not as dates to memorize but as our collective human journey. The book frames American history as a story of striving toward liberty and equality – acknowledging our failures while celebrating our commitment to these principles.
As Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a nation where children would "be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," so too does McClay's approach honor both our painful truths and our highest aspirations. Join us in exploring this balanced perspective as we prepare to celebrate our nation's birthday and commit to understanding our full, complex story. What book has most shaped your understanding of American history?
Key Points from the Episode:
• US history textbooks have been battlegrounds in culture wars for over a century
• The Dunning School dominated 20th century education with narratives that downplayed slavery and romanticized the South
• Howard Zinn's "A People's History" overcorrected with a Marxist lens focusing almost exclusively on oppression
• "The Land of Hope" by Wilford McClay provides a balanced approach that acknowledges America's failures while celebrating its founding principles
• McClay uses narrative storytelling that weaves emotion with intellectual ideas, making history come alive
• The book offers nuanced treatment of controversial periods like Reconstruction
• America is framed as a nation constantly striving toward ideals of liberty and equality, even when falling short
Keep fighting the good fight.
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Those are the drums of liberty. Us history textbooks for the last 50 to 100 years have been found wanting. But there's a new star on the scene. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.
Speaker 1:Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Liberty Minute. Today we are kicking off a special series five books and five days to celebrate our national birthday Coming up soon 249 years. What a birthday. That's going to be on July 4th. But we're also setting the stage for the big one 250 years as a country, 250 years as our national existence as a country, going back to July 4th 1776. That's a big deal, but more on that later. So this week we are going to release a series titled Lovers of Liberty five books in five days. These five books you should read to appreciate and grow in your love for our country. We're going to give you the Academy Cliff Note versions of these five books over the next five days, but we want you to dive deeply into these books over the next 12 months to make your celebration of our 250th that much sweeter. So with that, let's kick off book five and let's roll.
Speaker 1:For the last 100 years or so US history, textbooks have been part and parcel of the culture. Wars since public education came into the 20th century and it was only exacerbated by a group of historians known as the Dunning School, led by one, william Archibald Dunning, at Columbia University. The Dunning School got so much wrong and taught at many teachers' colleges that many teachers were incorrectly taught, that it's only in the last 10 to 20 years that the real history of our country is finally, finally, breaking through. Some examples of this is the Dunning School argued that reconstruction was a failure due to corruption, mismanagement and the incompetence of black leaders and northern carpetbaggers. You know those opportunistic outsiders and even scallywags, the Southern white collaborators. The Dunning School depicted Reconstruction as a tragic imposition on the South driven by vengeful radical Republicans. Finally the evidence is breaking through. Finally the evidence is breaking through.
Speaker 1:The Dunning School relied heavily on white Southern accounts, as those from former Confederates, while dismissing or ignoring black perspectives, primarily sources from the Freedmen's Bureau Records, which document black contributions and white obstructionism. Second example is the Dunning School idealized the antebellum South with a harmonious, paternalistic society disrupted by northern interference. They celebrated redemption, the return of white democratic rule in the South by 1877 as quote, restoring order. Now the evidence is quite different. The truth is quite different. Contemporary accounts again, such as the Freedmen's Bureau reports and testimonies from black Southerners, document widespread violence by groups like the White League contradicting the Dunning School and its benign view of redemption. So those are just two examples, but much of this can be wrapped up in a title and an umbrella of the myth of the lost cause which was taught in much of the South since the ending of the Civil War and, frankly, was taught almost all throughout the country.
Speaker 1:Now some folks would say that this is a quote conservative view of history. It's holding on to traditional values and narratives of states' rights and the mixing of the races as the reason for the US Civil War. But those have been lies. Those have been many, many lies told in many US history classes down through the years. So in trying to pull all this apart, it has been a quite fascinating research topic.
Speaker 1:Beginning in the radical to late 1960s you had another group of historians come through the teachers' colleges who were very sympathetic to Marxists and their worldview and they wanted to counter this conservative school of thought. They found in their man, mr Howard Zinn, an extremely radical textbook A People's History of the United States, finally written in 1980, and it made very popular, so much so that it was the most popular textbook in high schools and colleges by the mid-1980s. Now we have reviewed Howard Zinn's horrific textbook here many, many times. We'll put those episodes in the show notes We've even featured the great book Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Graybar, which details chapter by chapter in verse. It's terrible analysis of our US history, but as we approach our country's 249th birthday, we thought it best to share, as one of the five books in five days which we are kicking off today, the very balanced and inspirational textbook that most folks should be using, which almost all teachers should be familiar, and that book is the Land of Hope by Wilford MacLean. This US history textbook restores balance in the narrative of our country's story, in the threads of our country's history. Yet it is critical where it needs to be.
Speaker 1:Mcclay doesn't adopt the myth of the lost cause, like the Dunning School adherents, but he does speak directly about the reason for the US Civil War Slavery. Slavery was the reason. There are many sub-points below that main point. There are many sub points below that main point, but there's no reason to whitewash the truth. And that is where McClay restores the balance, while not going off on a Marxist critique of the country which breeds hate and contempt, for which we are seeing many, many young people have for this country nowadays. Mcclay emphasizes America's founding principles, which are good Liberty, equality and self-rule. They're aspirational, while candidly, mcclay addresses the contradictions, like slavery and segregation. Like slavery and segregation, this avoids the Dunning School's sanitation of Reconstruction, and Zinn's near-exclusive focus on oppression aims to inspire civic pride without ignoring the historical wrongs. In that we at the Mojo Academy believe is the right approach Tell the truth of what happened, yet draw on the primary resources to get at the truth.
Speaker 1:And three main areas where this textbook really shines and gets to that aforementioned truth is it's a narrative storytelling prose. It weaves the emotion of the time period with the intellectual ideas of that same time period. That is critical. History is more than just dates and facts to memorize. It's a story. It's our human story, it's our country's story. Those people were living in the times, just as we are living in our times. The second reason this textbook really shines is its balanced treatment of the controversial periods and how it balances it very, very well, reconstruction being a time period that was extremely controversial.
Speaker 1:In fact, let's go to the book to hear from McClay and his writing itself To make our point. This will be a series of long quotations from the book, but the nuances are important. That's where the truth lies. This is where history comes alive and we put ourselves in their shoes to see the world from their eyes. Go on to the book. Leaving aside the names, though, how effective were such governments? And he's speaking about state governments in the previous paragraph. More generally, how effective was the reconstruction program being implemented by the radical Republicans? And here's where McClay shines.
Speaker 1:The record is mixed, as are the opinions of historians, but it is fair to say, first, that there were many accomplishments in areas such as civil rights, internal improvements, hospital building and the spread of corrupt practices in the awarding of state contracts and in the paucity of good and efficient political leadership, a problem that arguably affected the whole nation at the time, particularly in the big cities of the North, just as much as it did in the South of the North, just as much as it did in the South. Under the circumstances, spectacular successes were too much to hope for. Even a minor success was a major achievement, and you see, in one paragraph, very good, nuanced writing, allowing you access to the truth, you understand what was an accomplishment and what was a failure, and sometimes what was a failure was not a failure particularly to the section of the country like the South. It was a failure for the whole country. Big cities in the North were getting entirely corrupt, with big city bosses in the awarding of contracts. That wasn't a reconstruction problem, that was a whole country problem. So you can see the nuances are so important. So it takes very good writing of history to allow you that access to understand what was really going on.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the book for some more nuances and for, frankly, some more truth. What were the conditions like for the freed slaves? A very good question. They had not received the 40 acres and a mule that they had hoped for at the war's end, which meant that for the foreseeable future they would not have their own land and would still have to work for white landowners. And since the landowners needed the ex-slave's labor, eventually systems of land tenancy such as sharecropping and the crop lien system emerged that made this possible. In both systems, farmers received seed, tools and necessities from their landlords, in exchange for which the farmers would agree in advance to turn over a percentage, usually one-third to one-half, of what they produced. On the plus side for the freedmen, sharecropping removed him and the family members from the rigors of gang labor so characteristic of antebellum plantations. But because they were required to turn over so much of their crop to the landowner and the rest of the crop was often committed to debt service. The resulting system often became a form of peonage that resembled slavery in a great many ways. There was no escape from the web of obligations, no way to accumulate capital and work toward independence.
Speaker 1:And again, second paragraph so much density of details and truth there that you can understand why I just love this book. You understand very critically what is going on in the South and why. Reconstruction was both looked on favorably by the radical Republicans in Washington DC and Congress. They believe they're doing the right thing. But when it gets down to the South there's all kinds of details where things get mixed and there's a lot of nuances and what they thought was going well was not going well. Going back to the book schools and independent churches for the newly emancipated ex-slaves, along with unprecedented access to the mainstream political system, there was also palpable rising hostility toward them.
Speaker 1:By the time Grant had assumed the presidency, instances of anti-black sentiment and activity in the South were ever-increasing, including the founding in 1867 of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, whose members roamed the countryside hidden behind masks and robes, issuing threats, scattering rumors and occasionally perpetuating savage acts of violence and terrifying destruction, all measures designed to intimidate and suppress the black population and also any white Republicans who took the quote wrong side of things. Let's keep going. At Grant's insistence, congress passed three enforcement acts in 1870 and 1871, designed to combat these groups and their attacks and protect the suffrage rights of blacks in the South. But the acts suffered from weak and inconsistent enforcement, and the groups they were designed to inhibit did not stay inhibited. In fact, they only seemed to gather strength.
Speaker 1:Under this growing pressure, blacks began to stay home on election days. Little by little, their political influence and their respective southern states waned away and Democrats resumed control. And here's where, again, mcclay is so good. Listen to this. The difference can be illustrated in a single stark example. An overwhelmingly black Yazoo County, mississippi in 1873, overwhelmingly black Yazoo County, mississippi in 1873, republicans cast 2,449 votes and Democrats cast 638. Only two years later, democrats received 4,049 votes and the Republicans received seven. Seven in two years. And the Republicans received seven. Seven In two years. You don't think there's corruption there? That's my own editorial there, going back to the book.
Speaker 1:The terror campaign had succeeded and, state after state, white Southern counter-revolutionaries, who became known as Redeemers, were taking control of a process that was complete by 1877. It was an astonishing fast reversal of what had seemed a profound reality Change. So you can see, I just love this book. It is incredible research, incredible writing. It gets you to the heart of the truth. You understand why things happened. It is not the Dunning school that is virulently racist and it is not the Howard Zinn school that is overwhelmingly Marxist. So that was our second point, where this textbook, land of Hope, really shines.
Speaker 1:And our final and third point is that McClay frames US history as a story of striving towards the ideals of liberty and equality even when our nation falls short.
Speaker 1:And that is the right and proper view of our history.
Speaker 1:We Americans, no matter the color of our skin, celebrate the content of our characters as mattering more, and that's why Martin Luther King got it exactly right when he gave the I have a dream speech, when he said I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Abraham Lincoln would have stood up and applauded that line overwhelmingly, and McClay's US history textbook is a standing ovation that gets our US history correctly right. So in today's Liberty Minute, as we approach our national birthday, this July 4th, our 249th birthday, let us point to the good works that tell the American story as a land of hope, not of oppression, not of racism, but of hope, always working and striving towards the ideals of our country, always working and striving towards the ideals of our country. Join us tomorrow, where we will reveal book four and our countdown to our national birthday, celebrating our great country and the exceptional nature of our national character.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on, thank you.