More than two centuries ago, patriots reacted to levies from the British Crown by, literally, throwing the Boston Tea Party. Now, in the new millennium, at least one professor is trying to reverse the inevitable result of that insurrection—in the very state in which the original rebellion occurred.
“In particular, we need to counteract the affirming, celebratory, and misleading message of nationalistic history,” Peter Vickery, who teaches at Westfield State College, declares. “For example, we can introduce students to the opinion that the founders of the United States, far from turning a blind eye to slavery, used it ‘as a propaganda vehicle [that] encouraged, and even legitimized, white American prejudices toward black Americans’ and ‘manipulated the issue…in the American colonies to advance the separation of the colonies from Great Britain’ [Bradley, xix, 69].”
“We can point students toward the possibility that U. S. history has been one of warfare punctuated by brief outbreaks of peace, rather than vice versa.” Three points about Mr. Vickery:
1. He is a Briton more in the mold of fellow countryman and Soviet apologist Charlie Chaplin than anti-communist national hero Winston Churchill; and
2. Beyond favorably quoting the conclusions of another author, he offers no evidence to support these charges.
Actually, slavery may have had a shorter life span in the U. S. than in any country on earth. Naturally, Vickery does not discuss the number and nature of the governments which still practice enslavement.
As you might expect, Vickery takes exception to the very idea of American exceptionalism.
“And we can challenge the egomaniacal notion that the history of the United States is the most important, most central and most special history of all,” he writes in the latest issue of Radical Teacher.
Radical Teacher is “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” Like many radical teachers, Vickery is chagrined that students take his course because they have to rather than out of a desire to ingest the material he offers.
“When I asked how many students were taking the class of their own volition, not one hand went up,” Vickery reveals. “They were there because they had to be there.”
Nonetheless, this progressive did make some progress over the duration of the semester. “One of the questions on my (optional) questionnaire asked whether the respondent would have taken the class if it had not been mandatory,” Vickery reports. “Only one of the few who responded said that they would have voluntarily opted for history,” although not necessarily Vickery’s.
Ultimately, it is rather surprising that, according to Vickery’s own narrative, in a state known for its liberalism and with students mostly drawn from the local community, his version of America’s past is inspiring more skepticism than solidarity.
“The previous semester I had assigned Frank Cassell’s ‘Slaves in the Chesapeake Bay Area,’” Vickery remembers. “It describes the self-emancipation of many African-Americans during the War of 1812 by siding with Great Britain, which had abolished the slave trade and was actively engaged in its suppression.”
“In response, one student wrote: ‘That was their right, I guess, but I think it was immoral.’” Of course, Vickery does not mention that British merchants traded with the South during the American Civil War, although her majesty’s government did not provide the military aid that the Confederacy pleaded for.
Similarly, imagine Vickery’s consternation when another of his charges refused to see America’s conflict with American Indians through something other than the lens of the class struggle. “And on an early mid-term exam, another student wrote: ‘The Native-Americans were a society based around war and battle, so when the opportunities arose to fight and rebuild their sense of veracity on the battlefield, they were more than willing.”
“In spite of hours of class time spent discussing the diverse indigenous cultures of pre-Columbian North and South America, what remained embedded in this student’s mind was the stereotype of the noble savage,” Vickery reflects. Maybe if Vickery had actually offered some verifiable evidence from a primary source by way of rebuttal…
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
