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by Phyllis Schlafly
A survey of British teenagers recently reported that a fifth of
under-twenties kids believe Winston Churchill, Richard the Lionheart and
Florence Nightingale were fictional characters, but that Robin Hood,
Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur were real people.
We hope American students are more knowledgeable, but evidence is not
reassuring. They scored an F, or just 53.7 percent, in a new survey by
the Intercollegiate Studies Institute of 14,000 freshmen at 50 U.S.
colleges and universities. Students were asked 60 questions to test
their knowledge of American history and government. And, after four
years of college, their knowledge didn’t improve much. In general, the
higher a college ranked on the widely publicized U.S. News & World
Report list, the lower it ranked on civic learning.
Another just-released survey found that a significant proportion of U.S.
teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature. That
survey was conducted by a new research organization called Common Core.
An earlier survey of college seniors at 50 top colleges conducted by the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that more than half didn’t
know that George Washington was the commanding general of the
Continental Army during the American Revolution who accepted
Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Some 36% thought it was Ulysses S.
Grant, and 6% said it was Douglas MacArthur.
According to Pulitzer-prize-winning author and historian David
McCullough, ignorance of American history among U.S. students and
teachers is so widespread that it is a threat to national security. He
told a Senate panel that only three U.S. colleges require a course on
the U.S. Constitution: West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. “For a free, self-governing people,” he said, “something more than a
vague familiarity with history is essential if we are to hold onto and
sustain our freedom.”
Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police: How Pressure Groups
Restrict What Children Learn,
contends that “students who learn about the world” from today’s history
textbooks “are unlikely to understand why some civilized nations
flourished and others languished, or why people vote with their feet to
leave some places and go to others.”
In 1995, the Federal Government gave $2 million to leftwing professors
at UCLA to write National Standards for United States History. The
Standards were filled with so many attacks on Western civilization that
American Federation of Teachers chairman Al Shanker said this is the
first time a government has tried to teach children to “feel negative
about their own country.” The U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate the
Standards, but that didn’t stop the book from being distributed
nationwide and having a profound effect in rewriting American history
textbooks to comport with liberal revisionism and feminist ideology.
Fortunately, two important new books now tell 20th century history the
way it really happened, instead of the way the liberals and feminists
wish it had happened. Here are two new books that every college student
ought to read in order to learn the history that colleges don’t teach.
Both describe how Reagan-style conservatism replaced New Deal liberalism
during the half century following World War II, an event of great
magnitude and good fortune for America. Students should read both books:
the first written by a historian, the second from the view of
participants in historic events.
The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History by the distinguished historian Donald T. Critchlow (Harvard University Press, 2007) is the indispensable account of one of the most exciting political events in modern history. A small unorganized band of writers and an equally unorganized collection of grassroots activists launched a counteroffensive against the prevailing economic and political order of the 1930s and 1940s, and by the 1980s became the dominant force in American politics.
Long after Franklin D. Roosevelt was gone, conventional wisdom still considered his New Deal liberalism to be the wave of the future, while conservatives were believed to be an ineffective remnant waging a holding action against the inevitable socialism.
The first cannon ball of the half-century battle was fired by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, but that would have been just a shot in the dark if grassroots citizens hadn’t joined the action. The Soviet threat and Communist infiltration of our government and other institutions motivated small groups to educate themselves and enter the political arena.
Critchlow traces the travails of the conservative movement through the political battles of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Those who lived through those years will delight in the extraordinary detail and more than 500 footnotes produced by Professor Critchlow’s extensive research, and those too young to remember will gain a look at history they cannot get anywhere else.
Conservatives found their leader in Ronald Reagan, who fortified their resolve with his faith that the tide of history is moving in our direction and that it is morning in America. Liberalism was bankrupt of ideas and no match for the vibrancy of conservative writers and speakers.
Critchlow skillfully shows how the Reagan coalition that produced the victories of the 1980s depended on the grassroots activism of disparate groups: the fiscal conservatives still standing after the Goldwater campaign of 1964, the alumni of the anti-Communist groups who were well educated about external and internal threats to our country, and the social conservatives who newly came into the political process in the campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe v. Wade.
Professor Critchlow’s important book should be essential reading in college courses in history and political science.
Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism by Alfred S. Regnery (Simon & Schuster, 2008) is a fascinating account of how conservative authors combined with conservative activists to shake off New Deal socialism of the 1930s and become the dominant ideology in America. As the author boasts, “We are all conservatives now.”
Regnery’s book leads us to know and understand dozens of conservative leaders from various walks of life, voluntary organizations that played a role in the movement, mail-order fundraising, and foundations. He puts the broad scope of the conservative movement in focus, including the importance that the courts play in our culture. He deftly explains the fundamental differences between conservatives and big business, and between conservatives and neoconservatives. Conservatives want limited government, but those two latter groups seek an activist government to promote their particular agendas.
Al Regnery’s father, Henry Regnery, was an essential player in the nurturing of the conservative movement in the late 1940s and 1950s. He was a patriotic businessman who put his fortune on the line to publish conservative books when we had no other sources of reliable information. Regnery’s books gave us the truth about Communist strategy and tactics (William Henry Chamberlin, Louis Budenz, Freda Utley, Anthony Bouscaren), Soviet slave labor camps (Elinor Lipper), U.S.-Soviet agreements (George Crocker), the United Nations (Chesly Manly), and education (William F. Buckley, M. Stanton Evans).
Al Regnery, the author of this new book, carries on the tradition of telling us the history we need to know in order to be fortified in our work. His book is based not only on his first-hand involvement with many icons of the conservative movement, but his face-to-face interviews with many who are still living and able to tell their stories.
Regnery ends his book by describing the unexpected conservative uprising (all the way from Bill Kristol to Pat Buchanan) against President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. The success of that revolt augurs well for conservatives’ ability to maintain their identity apart from Republican mistakes. No doubt the author hopes that readers will absorb the hopeful message that conservatives are still on the way up. That’s why the book is titled Upstream.
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