Rev. 7 January 2003
Multiculturalism is a particularly divisive issue -- "a sweet or bitter mouthful, depending on your sympathies" -- and, in the late 1980s, it fuelled the cannons facing each other in the culture wars, especially the explosive debate on history in the public schools. Multiculturalism was already a regular talk-show topic on television and radio (where caricature often wins over equanimity), when the very popular Rush Limbaugh told listeners (24 October 1994) that the history standards, "worked on in secret", were part of the anti-American multicultural agenda and should be flushed "down the sewer of multiculturalism". Those particular words only flowed forth after months of diatribe against historians who, Limbaugh had informed his audiences, indoctrinate students with a satanic vision of the country. On 28 October 1994, television viewers got an especially succinct statement from Limbaugh about the standards: "a bunch of p.c. crap". More serious, and before the great battle over history standards had begun, was the position of former Secretary of Education, William Bennett. On television with Lynne Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza in a symposium on higher education under the sponsorship of the American Enterprise Institute, viewers watched Bennett explain his perspective on the teaching of race-related issues: black students should not be reminded of past oppression (slavery/segregation) because such focus only humiliates. Hear no evil, see no evil.
In addition to a widespread attachment to a celebratory narrative about the nation's past and the role of the United States in the world, the Christian Right, +as previously indicated, assertively defends traditional values. A noteworthy and highly publicized example is the position a local school board in Lake County, Florida, (an inland county northwest of Orlando) took in 1994. All local school boards are composed of elected members and most of those elected to this one happened to identify with the Christian Right. They challenged a 1991 Florida state law that had been passed to encourage students to appreciate other cultures and to understand that "a specific culture is not intrinsically superior or inferior to another". This local school board rebuked the law and insisted, instead, that instruction "include and instill in our students an appreciation of our American heritage and culture such as: our republican form of government, capitalism, a free-enterprise system, patriotism, strong family values, freedom of religion and other basic values that are superior to other foreign or historic cultures". This statement stimulated considerable opposition but Cheney, a severe critic of multiculturalism, while admitting that in many ways "we are not superior to other cultures" wrote that "there are many [ways] in which we are the light of the world; and one of them is that we have created a single nation out of people from every part of the world". The term "single nation" -- the "melting-pot" version of successful assimilation or "Americanization" -- is that "common culture" so many anti-multiculturalists defend. Both neoconservatives and many who do not belong to the Right resent what the late C. Vann Woodward decried as "the cult of ethnicity" because, echoing Bennett, it "exacerbates racial tension by calling attention to divisiveness and difference", as if, Joan Scott retorts, "such divisiveness and difference existed only because people called attention to it. And in reference to being "the light of the world", it is worth pointing out, as Todd Gitlin does, that not long ago, "it would have been taken for granted that America was the pinnacle of civilizations". Denting, or questioning, such traditional nationalist complacency owes something to multiculturalism but many citizens balk at any probing of patriotic faith in the status quo and are not even willing to consider the need to recognize shortcomings in order to endorse a patriotic hope for a better, more just country that philosopher Richard Rorty envisions.+
Multiculturalism is hydra-headed. Just to unravel it, without even beginning to do "justice to the concept's variety", would require Herculean efforts. In the U.S., the term is a relatively recent one, in fact there is no reference to multiculturalism in the country's major newspapers in 1988 and only 33 in 1989, but four years later there are over a thousand -- 1,200 in 1993. The same pattern can be observed for the term "politically correct": 7 times in 1988, 15 in 1989, but 4,643 times in 1993.
Multiculturalism has had a more developed evolution in Canada and Australia. Quebec, First Nations (indigenous peoples) and other immigrant groups were and are major constituents in the continuing Canadian effort to work out a "politics of recognition". Australia has been, according to one writer on this topic, a pioneer in the use of multiculturalism in school programs. And in the opinion of the editors of Mapping Multiculturalism, a 1996 anthology, to reach a better understanding of multiculturalism, people in the United States need to gain a fuller picture of such international varieties. In the United States itself multiculturalism arose from a concern with schoolchildren. In response to an increase in palpable differences (following desegregation and from immigration) in the elementary and secondary public schools, educators began to address ways of affirming diversity, hoping to help young people feel more comfortable with themselves and with others as they dealt with the specific stories of one another. While not, obviously, simple issues, they are indeed important ones. In the opinion of Marc Ferro, "Our image of other peoples, or of ourselves for that matter, reflects the history we are taught as children. This history marks us for life". That may be an exaggeration but storytelling - narrative/history - is certainly part and parcel of socialization.
Discussions of multiculturalism for primary and secondary schools apparently caused little anguish and produced extensive work; the bibliography from the 1970s only is enormous. But multiculturalism could be a thorny issue when a particular state embarked upon curriculum reform, as in the case of New York (+mentioned here early on), in California, and in a few other states as well, but, generally speaking, it remained "a largely benign ideal in American education", until the late 1980s when, "suddenly", it "became a slogan in the culture wars". The media, which traditionally paid little attention to the cultural and curricular life of universities, went "into full panic". At first, the primary target was not history but departments of literature, ethnic studies, African-American studies, programs in women's studies and any course looking like "political correctness". Or as John Wilson puts it: "A casual observer of the conservatives' attacks on diversity might conclude that the universities are swarming with leftists who ruthlessly inculcate students with deconstructionist philosophy [or relativism], pop culture [cultural studies], feminist theory, and Marxist proclamations" all "masquerading as multiculturalism". Although departments of literature got hit quite hard, the Right also felt "wary of the influence of the new social and cultural history, as well as innovative methods and concepts in the discipline". In other words, not only deconstruction or literary theory, but new historical scholarship seemed a serious threat to the nation. "Battle lines formed over the question of the purpose of history and history education in a democratic society"; history itself, in other words, became "a subject of grave national dispute".
Surprisingly enough, those critical of "the presumed decomposition of the humanities and social sciences in the universities" were among those who actually "provided the initial inspiration to restore" the teaching of history to the public classrooms where contemporary social studies had displaced history long before. Private schools, though, continued to teach history courses. I should point out that not everyone is surprised about the apparent irony of critics initiating reform. Harvey J. Kaye, for one, believes that such initiative actually reflects (and not only in Ronald Reagan's government but in that of Margaret Thatcher as well) "hegemonic ambitions" of the "New Right to reshape popular historical memory and imagination, and to articulate a grand-governing narrative" in order to create and sustain "a new conservative political consensus". Perhaps the authors - Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn - of History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (my basic source here) are too sanguine but they were closest to this whole process. On the other hand, Kaye may have the advantage of seeing the forest instead of just the trees and his analysis need not be dismissed, even though concern about the quality of public education occurs periodically in many countries. In the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, questions about the purpose of history and the teaching of history were particularly abrasive. The language used by federal officials to address well-documented deficiencies in public classrooms does, though, seem more appropriate to a defense department but that may be no more than the cold-war mentality, kept very much alive, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education, created in Reagan's first administration, issued a report on public education entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform (1983). The document warned that the many failures of public education put the United States in danger: "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves" and have, thus, "been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament". Certainly, there was plenty of evidence of low-level performances from the many tests administered to students in various parts of the country -- and even a recent (1998) comprehensive test in the state of Virginia showed a 97% failure rate among high school students. Given such widespread, poor performances, a call for "educational excellence" in mathematics, science, English, history, and geography does seem quite earnest. Yet, this all coincides with William Bennett: his To Reclaim a Legacy (1984), +mentioned above, and his talk, when Secretary of Education the following year, at a "neoconservative gathering", about "defenseless" public schools under the dominance of "radical" teachers. And although I do not have the exact dates, the Reagan administration gave D'Souza and others connected with the Dartmouth Review, a publication with a record of racial slander, positions in the White House. Even the authors of History on Trial distinguish between academics, "for the most part political conservatives", who had doubts about the new history and those "outside the schools and universities" who "charged that much of the new scholarship was left-wing, nihilistic, divisive, and 'politically correct'". The second description suggests some support for Kaye's view.
Lynne Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1992, under both Reagan and Bush, believed like other traditionalists, for example E. D. Hirsch and his Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, that "all Americans should carry a shared backpack of knowledge" but she also endorsed "recent scholarship about women, minorities, and non-Western societies" as long as they passed the test of "telling the truth", a code for that consensual "common culture" perhaps. According to Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, several articulate and energetic individuals endorsed a back-to-history movement. They included Diane Ravitch, a prominent educator (labeled "neoconservative" by some) and assistant secretary of education, from 1991 to 1992, during the latter part of President Bush's administration. Ravitch worked closely in the late 1980s with Chester Finn, who had been an assistant secretary of education under Reagan. Together, they founded the Educational Excellence Network and established the Bradley Commission to study the question of history in the schools. When, in 1987, the Board of Education of the State of California called for three years of US history and another three of World history in its public schools, Cheney celebrated the California reform as a model for the nation. Diane Ravitch, always an assertive advocate of history over social studies in school curricula, "had helped to write the new history-centered curriculum" adopted by the state of California in 1988. Not surprisingly, academics on the political left, like Kaye, worried about the support of such traditionalists. Leftists had their own particular fears, namely, that the production and control of knowledge would be in the hands of the wrong people and all in the name of educational excellence. In spite of those fears the back-to-history movement gained momentum - several other states, large and small, soon organized reform projects of their own. In California itself, a National Center for History in the Schools was created at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to further history education in the schools and in 1988 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) decided to provide funding. The National Center for History in the Schools was co-directed by Charlotte Crabtree, professor of education, and Gary Nash, professor of colonial and antebellum history. This center received the endorsement of both the history profession and leading traditionalists.
In 1988, candidate George Bush had told voters he was eager to be the "education president" and once in the executive office, President Bush quickly and successfully launched what was called AMERICA 2000, a major bipartisan, educational initiative -- he had met with all 50 of the nation's governors about this -- calling for national education standards, that is, national guidelines for teaching in the public schools of the United States. That commitment to improve education throughout the country was subsequently renewed by GOALS 2000, the Educate America Act, President Clinton signed in March 1994. Even though the idea of national standards went against the traditional prerogatives of local government in questions of education, the idea of creating national standards did not cause major controversy; they were to be voluntary guidelines, models with no authority unless states or local school boards wanted to adopt them or make some use of them; their purpose, shared by all, was to inject new ideas and promote quality in public schools throughout the country. National standards for mathematics and science were adopted quickly, without contention. In sharp contrast, the proposed national standards for history will be remembered as one of the most acrimonious moments in the culture wars. But there were no signs of any potential confrontation when, after initial meetings in the fall of 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities, under Cheney, and the Office of Educational Research and Innovation of the Department of Education, headed by Ravitch, awarded funding, over $2 million, for the history standards' project to the National Center for History in Schools at UCLA with the agreement that the National Endowment for the Humanities would have the authority to review and approve all of the center's products before they were published. The UCLA center enlisted the support of every significant organization with an interest in history and social studies to participate. Hundreds of scholars and teachers collaborated in this effort to establish standards for history in the nation's public schools. Advice was sought from the major historical organizations, school administrators, and some twenty-four parent and community groups.
After some thirty-two months of extraordinary organization, widespread consultation, and consensus building, drafts of the history standards was ready for official publication. But just before their actual appearance, Cheney attacked them in The Wall Street Journal (20 October 1994) with an article entitled "The End of History". Obviously, she was no longer at NEH, given the failure of President Bush to gain re-election in 1992, but when Cheney had left that office two years before (1 December 1992), she spoke of the National Center for History in the Schools as one of her accomplishments. We should keep in mind that Cheney did not expect the Republicans to loose the White House in 1992 and that under the original agreement to fund the National Center for History in the Schools, the NEH had the right to review any and all drafts. On the heels of Cheney's diatribe came a steady flow of accusations - "a torrent of rancor". So powerful was the critique of the proposed history standards that within just three months, on 18 January 1995, the US Senate adopted a resolution condemning them. The vote was ninety-nine to one. Bennett Johnson, Democrat from Louisiana, the lone dissenter, refused to support the Senate resolution because it was not aggressive enough.
What went wrong? or "How are we to understand this reaction?" Of course, the issue centers on other questions - Why History? Whose History? History, as we all know, is often considered crucial to national identity. Is history supposed to instill patriotism or, in milder but equally significant terms, is history supposed to be a kind of "civic glue", as Bennett and Cheney sincerely believe, to help keep the nation together? The proposed standards for US history reflected recent scholarship, that is greater attention to social history or that other label, "history from below", and much less attention to political history or the so-called "great man theory of history". Indigenous peoples of the New World, ancestors to today's Native Americans and, in part, to Hispanic Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Women received considerable attention. The proposed history standards were, indeed, multiculturalist, an explicit calling for inclusion and an effort to recognize contributions from each group.
The historian, John Patrick Diggins, attacked Gary Nash for presenting "the Indian as sinless" and the "paleface as acquisitive predator" a kind of "Dances-with-Wolves" history where Native Americans live in peaceful tribal solidarity, at one with nature, uncontaminated by possessiveness or competitiveness. Diggins's critique refers to Nash's Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, first published in 1974, a 4th edition was published in 2000. In some ways one might include Nash among those of us who have made a "countercultural use" of the Indian's otherness. And some future commentators may consider that countercultural perception and appreciation of Indian lifestyles as more humane and ecological than mainstream American capitalism one more manifestation "of the recurrent effort of Whites to understand themselves". To address Diggins specifically and to fall, thus, into a non-debate, I can point out the fact that Nash mentions "staggering blood sacrifices" and "government by terror" on the part of the Aztecs "the century before Spanish arrival". Nash himself recently described what he tried to do in the early 1970s:
I made the first attempt to synthesize a growing literature that showed the severe limitations of traditional accounts of the colonial period that employed arguments about historical inevitability and implicitly justified their inattention to Africans and Indians by characterizing these immensely varied and changing peoples as if they had been frozen for centuries in a kind of primitive amber. Relying on historically informed anthropological studies as much as on the still inchoate scholarship in Indian and African history, I attempted to show that it mattered a great deal who the Indians were, how they had evolved for centuries before 1492, how they varied in the Americas, and how their own histories were part of the equation when Europeans invaded their lands and encountered them continuously for several centuries. ... The book urged students to understand the shared history of Europeans, Africans, and native Americans.
Certainly, many of us who teach this period have chosen textbooks that do emphasis "the richness and variety of human encounters in early America" and reflect "the new worlds that Indians and Europeans created together in early America". According to Nash, it was not until the 1990s that textbooks overcame "inevitabilist and deeply Eurocentric formulations". For neoconservatives, he argues, "this represents an attempt to be politically correct" when the textbooks actually do no more than incorporate "sound scholarship derived from closely argued monographs", thus, allowing the displacement of the dichotomy between civilization and savagery - "the incubator of inevitablist thinking" - and the emergence of "a meeting of cultures where almost nothing was inexorably determined and almost everything was contingent....". This claim of "sound scholarship" seems to collide with Keith Windschuttle's criticism of the designers of the National History Standards for their dismissal of "history-as-facts" or "disinterested scholarship". For Nash, in contrast, the claim that "facts, traditions, and heroic personalities, all untainted by 'interpretation", represent the 'true' and 'objective' history that citizens ought to know" is "an ideological position of traditionalists and the political Right". He believes, instead, "that historians can never fully detach their scholarly work from their own education, attitudes, ideological dispositions, and culture". The authors of History on Trial endorse both Lawrence Levin in his claim that we are unable to avoid seeing history "through the prism of a changing present" and Joan Scott's idea that "the meanings attributed to events of the past always vary, that the knowledge we produce is contextual, relative, open to revision and debate, and never absolute". But, while history is, for the authors of the standards, an "interpretative practice", a commitment to accuracy, verification, and a balanced reconstruction of events remains strong. Comments from the Right that link the standards with "radical trends in postmodernism", the work of a small band "deeply dedicated to deconstructionism", are wrong since the moderate positioning of these scholars does not engage the challenge of the so-called "linguistic turn". Their work does overthrow any totalizing national narrative, that is, as Nash puts it, "the rise of social history has ended forever any single interpretation or completely unified picture of American history - or, for that matter, of any national history". He is, though, remarkably silent about the serious rethinking of social history among historians. The deconstruction epithet is meant to discredit Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, with what the largest number of those inside higher education and outside despise most. Woodward suggests the depth of concern among historians when he expresses a need, "here and abroad", to check the "radicals in cultural studies and their postmodern precursors" if historians expect their discipline to survive and if there is to be a "system of education we can respect". (This position is very similar to that of Harold Bloom who refuses to allow cultural studies to contaminate literature.)
The proposed history standards highlighted contradictions between aspirations and historical realities -- a gap between "lofty political principles and shabby practices". The standards also encouraged awareness of "the brutality of slavery, the genocidal displacement of indigenous people[s], the exploitation of children, the frailty of national leaders", and the greed of others. One critic complained about too much attention to "the mistreatment of Japanese Americans" during World War II, a quite blatant, and, whether one likes it or not, a striking contradiction between almost sacred political principle and actual practice. Some moderate critics expressed concern about what they considered "negativism" and about the failure of the standards to place democratic ideals at the center of the nation's history even though they expressed appreciation for the standards' call for substantive and demanding history in the schools. While others admitted that American history could no longer be taught without attention to the experiences and achievements of previously neglected groups or individuals, the emphasis on pluribus dangerously demoted the unum.
The motto e pluribus unum ("From Many, One" is the usual English rendering although some like the translation "United We Stand"), found on US coins, is from the late 18th century when, two centuries ago, avoiding division among the several, various states seemed crucial to the new republic's very survival. When the drafts for history standards first appeared, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. worried about their embracing the pluribus at the expense of the unum, as did Diane Ravitch. But instead of outright condemnation, both of them encouraged revision, a task that was carried out by the Council for Basic Education. This organization convened two panels of historians to reviews the drafts. Recommendations were made and accepted. When the revised history standards were released in April 1996, the so-called Basic Edition, Ravitch and Schlesinger endorsed them in the Wall Street Journal (3 April 1996). Disagreement continued and still does. In fact, very renowned historians, Eugene Genovese called an embryonic group of ten of them "almost-dead white males", have created a new historical organization - New Historical Society - due to dissatisfaction with the traditional organizations and, most likely, the positions of the latter on this controversy over standards, as recent publications suggest. Some still felt that many of today's social historians disdain American and belittle its traditional heroes. The guidelines, responded the defenders, aimed to help students understand the principles the Founding Fathers had first set forth in an initial attempt to organize a national life for thirteen ex-colonies, and that there was nothing dismal or dreary to say that the struggle to attain and sustain those ideals has been painful, even sometimes a bloody travesty. Not everybody has been included in the nation's founding promises. Why should it be unacceptable to suggest that the best of the agenda set two centuries ago remains unfinished. Does one banish The Grapes of Wrath from literature classes because it's not upbeat enough.
The authors of History on Trial ask those who worry about the disuniting of the United States to "reflect on whether groups that have been ignored, demeaned, or marginalized can be expected to feel part of the unum when they are not counted among the pluribus" to begin with. And Gary Nash, on PBS's McNeill-Lehrer Report News Hour in a debate with Cheney on 26 October 1994, reiterated the need to recognize that the concept of unity depended on historical amnesia: "Ms. Cheney thinks we will disunite America by paying attention to these groups [American women, Black Americans and American Indians]. But we have been disunited, and we're more likely to be united if we take proper and due account of the contributions and the struggles of these forgotten groups". Even more recently, he insisted that "basic fairness to all peoples involved in the national story requires abandoning a univocal American story and the unum cannot be produced out of the pluribus if many elements of the latter are ignored or demeaned".
But Nash has also argued, on an earlier occasion, that "pluribus can flourish ... only if unum is preserved at the heart of the polity - in a common commitment to core political and moral values". And Nash and the other two authors of History on Trial also refer to the danger of viewing African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans as self-contained groups, each with a separate and different ethos, outlook, and history. As the past generation's research has shown, they argue, America's social, cultural, and economic life has been far too complex and interactive for that to be possible. Among the criteria for the development of standards was a call for diversity and mention, at least, of commonalities:
Standards for the United States history should reflect both the nation's diversity, exemplified by race, ethnicity, social and economic status, gender, region, politics, and religion and the nation's commonalities.
The latter were to include "our common civic identity and shared political values", "democratic political system", and the "struggle to narrow the gap between ideals and practices". Walter A. McDougall believes a curriculum that goes out of its way to mention the struggles of "marginalized" groups rejects the central narrative of American history, the conflict between equality and liberty. What, exactly, McDougall means is not clear to me. As all of us know, it is often the case that where one wins, the other loses. I suspect some people would respond to McDougall saying he had captured a major dilemma in the history of his country: liberty herded many and some remain corralled on reservations and in ghettoes today.