Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

by Kevin M. Kruse

two large-scale changes that have in recent years given right-wing myths a huge platform and an accordingly large impact on American life.

The first major development was the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, which ranges today from cable news networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News to websites such as Breitbart.

The second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth.

In their classic work Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt explored the ways in which clumsy misapplications of history can create catastrophes in public policy as the “lessons” of the past become limitations on the present, or worse.

With the Republican Party echoing its claims and right-wing media voices amplifying them, the Trump White House represented a concerted effort to rewrite history in real time.

A history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda.

Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point.

The public, as a result, is inundated with wild claims about history that don’t match what any legitimate historian—on the right, left, or center—would deem to be true.

The lies and legends addressed in the twenty essays in this edited collection are by no means the only ones prevalent in public discourse today, but they represent some of the most pressing distortions of the past in the present moment.

They were both ardent radicals, albeit of rather different sorts: Joseph Stalin and Newt Gingrich.

If Gingrich had power comparable to Stalin's, they might not appear to be such different sorts.

Is America in fact “exceptional”? To address the question concisely, consider these three propositions.

First, most nations can be considered exceptional in one...

Second, very few of the copious contemporary discussions of “American exceptionalism” have come close to showing that America really does represent a deviation from a significant international norm.

Finally, modern nationalism by its nature has led virtually every nation to strive to distinguish itself from others: to highlight and even to exaggerate its own unique qualities and to proclaim its own unique destiny.

Taken together, these three propositions strongly suggest that the term American exceptionalism makes very little analytical sense.

those Americans who considered slavery the “sole cause” of civilization (William Harper) identified the country with this horrific institution and believed that America had a special mission to promote human bondage throughout the world.

The sad experience of the United States in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the country proved “exceptional” only in the incompetence of its government on many levels and the bizarre resistance of much of the population to basic public health measures, made the myth harder to sustain than ever.

The very vacuity of the notion has been its strength, for it can be filled with whatever content is desired, even as it flatters US audiences by assuring them of their membership in the elect. There is little reason, then, to think that it will pass away in the new season of despair that we are living through today. But the mere notion of being exceptional can do very little to inspire Americans actually to be exceptional and to aspire to become a better people.

The new document additionally promised that federal lawmakers would draw salaries, so that even middling men, and not merely the idle rich, could serve.

statehood wasn’t guaranteed: federal legislators decided if and when territories could be states, and history’s annals are full of proposed states (Lincoln, Sequoyah, West Dakota, Deseret, Montezuma) that Congress swatted down.

In 1959 William Appleman Williams’s extraordinarily influential book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

Guillermo Gómez-Peña,

The New World Border

Where did the belief in the magic of the marketplace come from? Certainly not Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century economist whom those same conservatives consider to be the founding father of capitalism. Smith recognized the need for taxation, for government provision of public goods, and for regulation in cases where self-interest failed to serve the greater good.

Why then have so many educated people accepted the assertion of market omnipotence, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of market failure and the obvious limits of self-interest?

The myth of the magic of the marketplace was invented to defend the prerogatives of business leaders while denying many prerogatives of workers and consumers. It centered on a false claim about the historic significance of “free enterprise.”

Economic freedom makes some people rich and enhances their freedom, to be sure. But it leaves others sleeping under bridges. Political and economic freedom are not indivisible, and markets are not magic.

if you consider the benefits of the New Deal—among them, saving Americans from starvation and idleness; rescuing banks and the currency; bringing electricity to people who never had it; building a national road network; controlling flooding; eradicating diseases in much of the nation; and establishing the right to join a union, secure an old-age pension, obtain unemployment insurance, and earn a minimum wage; and in doing so, renewing Americans’ faith in democracy because they could see that their government would work for them and attend to their needs—then you can say Americans were able to enjoy all those gains without forgoing a robust economic recovery.

If federally created jobs building tanks and airplanes could wipe out the Depression, so could federally created jobs building schools and roads.

once recovery seemed well under way, Roosevelt again cut relief spending—again in response to political pressure. For many economists—including Keynes—that premature reduction in fiscal stimulus was the cause of the 1937‒1938 recession.

In 1866 Pollard, a native Virginian, wrote a tome he titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. A “new” southern history immediately suggested that this was intended as a partisan assessment of the war even before the first volumes of history about the war were ever produced. Over the course of 752 pages, Pollard laid out a Confederate history of the war, as well as a narrative that proved useful to white southerners reeling from defeat and the devastation of their world. Not only did he coin the term Lost Cause, but he also provided former Confederates with a rhetorical balm to soothe their psychological wounds. In doing so, he helped to lay the foundation of a mythology that reassured them that their cause was just and their values were worth fighting for even in the face of a thoroughly crushing defeat.

“only fools would want to glorify men who fought in defense of human slavery.”

The legacy of monuments within the Confederate tradition is a legacy of historical distortion. As a revisionist narrative, the Lost Cause has not only damaged Americans’ ability to determine fact from fiction; it has also served as a bulwark against racial progress and is its most insidious legacy.

Longtime Republican Jackie Robinson left the convention deeply shaken: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

More accurately understood as persistent, not episodic, backlashes are the continuous—long-term and ongoing—attempt by white conservative reactionaries to stand in the way of Black people’s demands for equality.

In what became a characteristic way of framing backlashes, opponents of Reconstruction also used passive language to elide their responsibility for participating in an extralegal campaign of violence.

In the process, the motivations and actions of backlashers have sometimes gone unexplored, and their reactionary movements understudied, though deemed to be important. They are treated as inevitable rather than a conscious political effort aimed to stifle change.

“How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?”

One can't help but recall Trump's claim that we were doing too much testing for COVID.

“Equipping civil police with automatic rifles, machine guns, and other weapons of massive and indiscriminate lethality is not warranted by evidence,” the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known popularly as the Kerner Commission) wrote in its 1968 report. “Weapons which are designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.”

Tear gas had been banned under international law in 1925, but the United States and many other nations consistently relied on it as a weapon of domestic law enforcement and a riot-control measure for the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond.

Women who refused to marry faced the possibility of lynching in the American West,