"Land of Hope" by Wilfred McClay

If there was a subject I loved in school as much as literature, it was history. I had good teachers for both subjects, but one history teacher really stood out – my high school American history teacher. A graduate of Purdue, she faced down her classes in an all-boys public high school with wit and iron. All American history classes were required to spend six weeks on communism (this was the Cold war period), and the text most history teachers used was Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and Hot to Fight It by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. It was the strongly suggested but not mandatory text. 

My teacher said if we wanted to understand communism, we had to go to the source. Our class used Das Kapital by Karl Marx. After the first few pages, we understood that before it did anything else, communism was likely to bore you to death, or at least reading about it would. But the teacher supplemented our readings with lectures that explained the differences between capitalism, communism and socialism. It may not have been as exciting as the Hoover book, but we learned what the systems were and why they clashed.

 

In college, I took the two required semesters of American history. We had large lecture classes, with the professor utilizing several graduate students as graders and essay readers. Our textbook was the two-volume History of the United States edited by T. Harry Williams (1909-1979), the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Huey Long, chairman of my university’s history department, a renowned Civil War historian, and the professor who taught the most highly sought after course on the entire campus – “The History of the Civil War.” During my four years there, the university was known for its football team and its history department. 

 

Wilfred McClay

In 1980, Howard Zinn (1922-2010) published A People’s History of the United States, likely the most influential history textbook of the part 40 years. A young people’s version was published in 2007. Forty years after publication, it remains a bestseller, used in many universities and high schools. It is also a Marxist interpretation of American history. More recently, The New York Times began to promote another alternative (and controversial) view of American history, the 1619 Project. (It should be noted that both the Times and the project’s author have dialed back some of the earlier statements they made about it.) 

 

More than a few of us are wondering what happened to American history. And some are asking, is it possible to write and publish an American history textbook that addresses controversial aspects of U.S. history yet still retains a sense of why and how this country was founded?

 

Wilfred McClay, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, has answered that question in the affirmative. His Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story shows that it is indeed possible to tell the remarkable story of the United States and fairly address the failures, shortcomings, and tragedies that people experienced during the colonial period, the founding of the new republic, and the history of the country since that founding as a federal republic in 1787.

 

McClay doesn’t gloss over the “difficult subjects.” He’s telling a story, perhaps the story, of the United States, and that story includes barbaric treatment of native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and an often-rapacious capitalist economy whose excesses had (and have) to reined in. His point is that, with all of its failures and shortcomings, the United States has remained a “land of hope” for the world at large. He doesn’t paint a rose-colored view; instead, he tells a story that is both familiar and scrupulously fair. 

 

As he says in the boo’s epilogue, McClay sees this history as “a contribution to the making of American citizens. As such, it is a patriotic endeavor as well as a scholarly one.” There is much to cherish and celebrate in American history, he says, but that doesn’t mean it’s an uncritical celebration of the good and the best and the ignoring of the bad and the worst. Both conditions exist in U.S. history and America today; to ignore either is to fall prey to a false, shallow patriotism or a destructive (and unfounded) Jacobin sentiment to “tear it all down.” 

 

Land of Hope is a much-needed book at a time when reasoned thought and understanding have been reduced to caricatures at the extremes. My high school American history teacher would have liked it.

Saturday Good Reads: Reading Southern

I grew up in the South at a time when change had arrived, and was overtaking nearly a century of a particular way of life, a particular kind of culture. Many people outside the South associated it with backwardness, ignorance, and racism, and all there were certainly there. But so were major academic scholarship and a distinct and world-recognized literature.

I attended LSU at what was likely the zenith of its highly regarded history department, led by T. Harry Williams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography Huey Long (I read the fat paperback version in 1969, the year I entered LSU). What Williams was known on campus for, however, was his class on the history of the Civil War. It was one of the few classes that always had a waiting list; he kept it small and it was almost always inhabited by seniors (rank mattered in class selection).

Not all outstanding biographies and histories were written by Southerners; A.J. Leibling, a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1960, published a biography of Huey Long’s brother, Earl Long, that was published in its entirety in the New Yorker in 1960. It was called The Earl of Louisiana.

Earl was governor, and while he was never indicted, convicted and imprisoned like a governor before him in the early 1940s and one after him (Edwin Edwards), he did have one dubious distinction held by no other Louisiana governor. I was 8 when I saw on television the men in the white coats removing the governor from the state capital, and taking him to an asylum in Texas. He did manage to talk his way out, and he got even. One of the actions that convinced his wife Blancher and some cronies to have him “put away” was his well publicized national tour accompanied by Blaze Starr, a stripper in New Orleans.

Today, politics in Louisiana seems rather tame. The state now elects governors like Bobby Jindal. For entertainment purposes, we now have to go to the state capital in Illinois to find something comparable to what Louisiana was in its heyday.

In fiction, too, the South has produced some distinctive writers. William Faulkner is still hard to read, but he changed literature forever. Flannery O’Connor is still widely read and admired today.

Three Southern authors that I’ve always enjoyed reading are Walker Percy, Fred Chappell and Donald Harington.

Walker Percy (another native Louisianian; he grew up in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, the setting for his novel The Moviegoer, write a number of novels, the most memorable for me being Love in the Ruins. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Southern city (obviously New Orleans), and part of the story is about a sniper who gets on the roof of a Holiday Inn and starts indiscriminately shooting people. Almost exactly the same thing happened in downtown New Orleans in 1972 – and the hotel was a Holiday Inn. A copy of Love in the Ruins was found in the sniper’s apartment in Oklahoma.

Fred Chappell, a North Carolinian, is another distinctly Southern writer. I was introduced to his fiction in the early 1990s by a friend a work. My two favorites are Farewell I’m Bound to Leave You and I Am One of You Forever.

And then there’s Donald Harington, who lived and taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas until his death not long ago. He’s written several novels, but his most famous one is The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. In the early 1980s, a speechwriting colleague of mine urged everyone she met to read it. But it was out of print and hard to find. While attending a seminar in New York, I actually discovered a copy in a used bookstore and bought it. It is one of the most naturally funny novels I’ve ever read.

There are other writers, too, but these are the ones that stand out. And these are the ones who helped me understand and make sense of my own region and history.