Forty percent of our nation’s young people—those born between 1997 and 2012; Gen Z— believe that the founders of the United States are better described as villains than heroes.1 Clearly, they haven’t attended a production of the musical, Hamilton. I am being only somewhat facetious. I think this 40% statistic is a canary in a coal mine. It is important. It matters.
I recently read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, published in 2004. What genius! Three of them, actually: Ron Chernow, Lin Manuel Miranda, and Hamilton. Chernow’s years of research, combing through innumerable books, letters, diaries, articles, scraps of paper, and government archives in the United States, across the Caribbean, and in Europe, culminated in a 730-page story supported by nearly 3000 footnotes and a bibliography of 300 sources. And, it was a fascinating read! So fascinating that in 2008, 28-year-old songwriter and playwright, Miranda, read it while on vacation, and was inspired to create—of all things—a Broadway musical. One of my pleasures while reading the book was to come across the phrases or scenes that Miranda had plucked to include in his musical creation.
But the towering genius was Alexander Hamilton. He had a superhuman capacity for mental work. “He wrote with the speed of a beautifully organized mind that digested ideas thoroughly, slotted them into appropriate pigeonholes, and regurgitated them at will.”2 He was well-studied in the classics, the ancients, the Bible; he drew upon European history, political theory, and economics; he worked from a deep and broad foundation of knowledge. He confronted opposition at every turn; he envisioned and then created institutions, many of which still exist today; he could see and understand, as if from a great height, how political and cultural currents would mix like tributaries into a mighty river. He was arrogant, but kind; unfaithful, but loving; prickly with pride, but inflexible with integrity. I found him, flawed though he was, worthy of not only our country’s admiration, but our gratitude.
Remarkable to me were the parallels of the Revolutionary and Founding eras to our current life in the United States. The founders slandered each other to an extreme degree. The newspapers were wildly partisan. The political parties were based on personality cults. States toyed with the idea of ignoring federal legislation. The party of Jefferson was incensed about the dominance of the Supreme Court by judges from the party of Adams. One of Hamilton’s personal fears “was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”3 There was even a considerable dispute about the best way to mitigate an epidemic! I could relate.
This relatability of history—the feeling of resonance I experienced as I read about Alexander Hamilton—should not be surprising, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th century essayist and philosopher. In his essay, History, Emerson makes the case that all of history is felt personally by each of us. “All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, in the great resistances, the great prosperities of men;—because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.”4 If Emerson is right, then the history we study is important. It matters a great deal, because those stories vibrate in our very souls.
What history has Gen Z studied? What people or moments are resonating in their very souls? Were our founders villains? And what happens to a society who believes its origin was villainous?
Let’s begin with the first question: what history is being taught and studied in our public schools? Since school districts are primarily under state and local control, we have no national curriculum, aside from the AP courses taught in high schools. But one history book has permeated the national landscape like crabgrass. Since its original publication in 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has influenced middle school, high school and undergraduate students to an immeasurable degree. It has sold more than 3 million copies. It is on reading lists for numerous college courses. Its contents permeate the College Board’s AP US History curriculum. The Zinn Education Project promotes the book, and has a network of more than 30,000 teachers from every state in the union. The book has been characterized as the story of our history through the eyes of the common person—the slave, the maid, the factory worker, the sharecropper. But Zinn himself described his book as a radical view of history, and claims he was radicalized when knocked unconscious at a rally in Times Square. “From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. . .”
Upon reading A People’s History for myself, I found numerous contextual errors, non sequiturs, critical omissions, and unsubstantiated allegations just within the first 100 pages. The book has no footnotes. Zinn reportedly didn’t want to intimidate readers. (Really? Contrast that, for example, with the 3000 footnotes in Chernow’s Hamilton. I’m willing to consider a radical perspective on history, but by god, it better have footnotes…) I am not alone in my skepticism of A People’s History as a scholarly work of history, radical or otherwise. Many professional historians debunk the book for falsities, plagiarism, and, as I noted, a complete lack of documentation.
The other history book grabbing a foothold across the country is The 1619 Project. Conceived originally as a collection of essays written to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves landing at Jamestown, it was published by the New York Times. Both the Times and the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, came under immediate and intense criticism from professional historians. The compilation suffered from many of the same flaws found in A People’s History—contextual errors, critical omissions, outright falsehoods. Hannah-Jones’ essays, in particular, also suffered from tunnel vision. In her telling, everything that ever happened in the United States is due to the history of slavery and racism. Everything. (Which probably surprised Chinese, Jewish, Japanese or Native American readers.)
The project was lightly edited, in part in response to these criticisms, and is now a book. (At least it has footnotes, although most are secondary or dubious sources.) I read The 1619 Project, and found it extremely misleading, primarily due to the omission of major historical facts and events that didn’t fit Hannah-Jones’ pre-conceived thesis. Her thesis is the most controversial element of the project/book: America was not founded with the ideal of freedom in 1776, but was founded on the institution of slavery in 1619. While I agree that the cumulative effect of 150 years of slavery in North America prior to the colonies’ separation from Great Britain had enormous consequences at the founding, and those consequences reverberate today, it is simply incorrect that America was founded in 1619. Period. Nevertheless, flaws and all, this work is being actively promoted and disseminated to classrooms across America in new curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center. To date, more than 4500 schools have adopted The 1619 Project in some manner.
Of course these two texts are not taught exclusively to our youth. But they are representative of the tone and content of history curriculum going back 40-plus years. Remember Jesse Jackson and his supporters in the 1980’s chanting at Stanford, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western Civ has got to go!” Or the concerns about historical illiteracy, made evident by the surveys of the late 1990’s?
As to the second question, which I posed earlier, were our founders villains? Were our founders scoundrels, cheats, and crooks? When our young students read history, should they recoil in horror at the depravity of Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington—as, say, a young German student might shudder to read of Hitler, or a young Russian to read of Stalin? You must answer that for yourself, I guess. But I do not think any fair reading of substantiated history would label our founders as anything worse than flawed. My sense is that as more research has been justifiably focused on the lives of the slaves owned by some of our founders, people like Zinn and Hannah-Jones have elevated that aspect of the founders’ lives to such a height that it obscures their noble and worthy accomplishments, as well as casts a long and unfair shadow across those founders who did not own slaves. Grace is lacking; perspective is lacking; honesty is lacking.
Which brings me to the third and final question: what happens to a society who believes its origin was villainous? This is an existential question. Our country exists only as an idea on a big chunk of land. Our people do not descend from a particular tribe, race, or monarch. We come from all over the world, live our lives inside this idea, die, and are replaced by others who come to play their part in the always-unfolding story. The story is important. It matters. As Emerson observes, we sympathize with the other characters in our history; what is true of them, we believe true of us.
Therefore, if our story starts with a contemptible purpose, a purpose that is never redeemed through, for instance, the bloody Civil War, the 14th amendment, the Civil Rights Act, and the countless sacrifices of innumerable anonymous individuals striving for a more perfect union—and make no mistake, this is exactly what Zinn, Hannah-Jones, and others like Ibram X. Kendi insist—then we will believe we, too, are contemptible. If the idea of our nation is rot, then there is no reason to join together in a story bigger than ourselves. Why volunteer for the military? Why engage in our civic institutions? Why run for office? Why vote? If we keep teaching our young people that their country was founded by vile people for an abhorrent reason, pretty soon they’ll believe it. And then society will reap a harvest of cynicism and nihilism.
On the other hand, if our story begins with a noble idea imperfectly launched, then might we believe that although we, too, are imperfect, we could strive toward the noble idea? If the idea is worthwhile—the idea that each individual, by virtue of being born, has the right to live with the freedom to flourish—then maybe there is value in expending some energy to write a few more sentences in the bigger story.
Maybe we can applaud the members of the Constitutional Convention, who created the world’s longest surviving charter of government, even as we recognize the perhaps unforgiveable, or perhaps unavoidable, compromises they made to do so.
Maybe we can agonize with Lincoln as he wrestles through his changing beliefs about slavery and the Constitution, and quake in our bones as he declares, “Yet, if God wills that (the war) continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”5
Maybe we can feel the frustration of Martin Luther King, Jr. as he sits in the Birmingham jail and writes, “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”6 We can seek a deeper understanding, while marveling that a year later the Civil Rights Act ended legalized discrimination.
Look, our young people don’t need gods, but maybe they do need heroes. They need a reason to contribute a sentence or a paragraph to the American story, and society needs them to contribute.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was right about a lot of things, but I disagree with his declaration that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.7 There is no arc. There is no guaranteed pot of justice at the end of some long, metaphorical rainbow. There is only what we do now, followed by the consequences of those actions, which will be followed by the actions of the people who come after us. History is littered with societies that degraded and then failed. No arc of the moral universe is going to save us from ourselves. We are writing the American story, and soon it will be written by our youth. It is important that they believe the story is worth writing—and that it matters.
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1Jean M. Twenge, “The Mental Health Crisis Has Hit Millennials”, posted April 25, 2023, https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-mental-illness-crisis-millenials?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
2 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, NY: Penguin Group, Inc., 2004) 250
3Chernow, Hamilton, 221
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, published during his lifetime 1803-1882, exact date unknown
5Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (Washington, D.C., March 4, 1865)
6Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail (Birmingham, AL, April 16, 1963)
7King, numerous uses, borrowed from Theodore Parker, circa 1850
