roundtable: History According to Newt (fwd)

roundtable: History According to Newt (fwd)

History According to Newt (fwd)

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS (fins@access.digex.net)
Wed, 5 Jul 1995 21:53:39 -0400 (EDT) 

Date: Wed, 5 Jul 1995 21:53:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
To: tp roundtable - messages <roundtable@cni.org>
Subject: History According to Newt (fwd)
Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950705213420.28945B-100000@access1.digex.net>


FINS has obtained permission from prof. Allan J. Lichtman to republish the
below article concerning Speaker Newt Gingrich, which appeared in the May
1995 edition of The Washington Monthly.  The Speaker has made significant
proposals and promises with regard to federal information policy, and the
future of the "Knowledge Age." Accordingly, we thought this piece which
challenges the Speaker's competence and integrity as a professional
historian and educator was especially relevant.  Another related piece on
"The Politics of Destruction," espoused by the Speaker was published in
FINS 3.13.  Anyone wishing to obtain a copy may request one from FINS.

Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>



--------------------Forward Original Message------------

History According to Newt: A Report Card on the Speaker's
Renewing American Civilization

Allan J. Lichtman, Professor of History, The American University.
A slightly different version of this article appeared in the May
1995 edition of The Washington Monthly.


     "I knew when I said I'd teach a 20-hour course after
becoming speaker that some idiot would deliberately distort what
I said."

             (Newt Gingrich, "Renewing American Civilization")

     For a group of Reinhardt College students and his cable
television audience, Newt Gingrich is painting a vivid picture
of the consummate American hero, a man who refused to be cowed by
defeat, who persevered through hard work and discipline, who
has endured, survived, and triumphed.

     His name is Newt Gingrich.

     "I was taught very early that persistence defeats all other
characteristics in politics," he tells his class. "I couldn't
guarantee I was smarter. I couldn't guarantee I was prettier. I
couldn't guarantee I was more articulate. I could guarantee I'd
get up earlier. I'd work longer and I'd never stop."

     The self-help homilies Newt offers in his 20-hour course
would make Tony Robbins blush. Work hard. Set goals. Be
persistent and disciplined. Each clich is illustrated with
anecdotes from the Speaker's own life. No one can miss the
teacher's message: American civilization should be just like me.

     Make no mistake: Gingrich is a talented pedagogue. He holds
student interest. He breathes life into his subject. It's just
the history that trips him up.

     The thesis of Gingrich's course is that American history was
an uninterrupted continuity of opportunity and progress from
colonial times until the "breakdown" of 1965. If you read the
papers, you know what comes next: that's when the elite liberal
state, aided by the counterculture, introduced the infections of
dependency, bureaucracy, and failure. He's teaching the course in
part to balance out the liberal's view of the world. Did you
know, for example, that Thomas Edison "is almost never studied in
the counterculture because all his values are exactly wrong? He
was successful, and he was very work-oriented, he was highly
creative."

     Starting in 1994, "we are now beginning to reassert
traditional American Civilization." It's year one of the Age of
Newt.

     Gingrich has a point. In many ways out society did break
apart in the mid-sixties, as individual and group demands
superseded the national interest. But Gingrich barely
acknowledges that his golden age of opportunity
didn't truly shine for anyone but white males before that. He's
even more selective in his description of what's gone wrong
since.

     The counterculture didn't cause Watergate and it certainly
didn't set the national tone from 1980 to 1992, when tax changes
helped increase the real income of the richest one percent by
nearly 74 percent (according to the Economic Policy Institute)
while the bottom fifth suffered a 4.4 percent decline. Policies
that increased inequity contributed far more to social
fragmentation and selfishness than did the liberal movements of
the 1960s.

     Gingrich's fictionalized history makes more sense when you
examine his sources. This professor doesn't waste much time on
books or documents, unless you count novels and films. This is
History Lite (which, admittedly, some students covet). He spends
far less time on The Federalist Papers (an assigned text) than he
does on "The Last of the Mohicans," one of his favorite films:

     "Wonderful scene where the American who was the
deerslayer is standing there and the British officer says,
'aren't you going to Fort William Henry?' And he says, 'no, I'm
going to Kentucky.' And he says, 'how can  you go to Kentucky in
the middle of a war?' And he says, 'you face north, turn left,
and walk. It's west of here.' It's a very American response.
...Now, he ends up going to fight. Why? Because of the girl,
which is also classically American. It's a very romantic
country."

     Of the books he does use, you have to wonder whether he has
read them recently. He devotes an entire class to the work of
Alvin and Heidi Toffler, expounding on Future Shock's theory that
a society's familial and economic patterns are shaped by its
means of production, whether hunter-gatherer or industrial. He
stops there, but according to the Toffler's, the traditional
family is as much a dinosaur of the industrial age as the large
bureaucracy. Among the new family forms they predict will emerge:
group marriage, homosexual marriages, polygamy, and serial
monogamy. Gingrich doesn't mention that part of their work.

     Gingrich's historical selectivity and outright errors are,
well, revealing. He manages to get through the Civil
War without ever mentioning slavery. His two-hour class
specifically devoted to lessons of American history fails to
mention even a single woman. Of the Declaration of Independence,
he says, "They originally wrote. 'We are endowed by our creator
with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of property.'" Property? John Locke, yes. The
drafts of the Declaration of Independence, never.

     Not surprisingly, much of Gingrich's course is preoccupied
with the history of the welfare state -- the "actively
destructive" welfare state, that is. He doesn't balance his
opinions by examining any of the good that government has done
over the past 30 years. Since 1965, many tens of millions of
Americans have bought homes with federal mortgage assistance or
become educated through federal student loan or grant programs.
Americans have a less troubled old age than ever before in
history, thanks to Social Security and Medicare. Federal
investments in education, research, and facilities have
rebuilt Gingrich's modern south.

     Instead Gingrich asserts, "the modern welfare state
basically says to you: tell us what kind of victim you are, and
we'll tell you how big a check you get. ... in the elite culture
model we focus on losers." But does Gingrich number the people he
represents among the losers? According to a Common Cause study,
Cobb County, Georgia (which comprises more than half his
congressional district) is the third largest recipient of federal
funds of any suburban county in the nation. Newt the teacher may
have forgotten this. Newt the politician knows it well.

     A course on renewing American civilization would not be
complete without offering the means to renew it. Gingrich, of
course, has the answers. We already took the first step toward a
new civilization, he says, in the election that made him Speaker.
All that remains is to implement the GOP platform: eliminate
welfare, cut taxes, cut government, reduce regulation.

     But in offering ideas recycled from the Reagan era, Newt
contradicts his own best advice: Judge things by what works. Do
any of his students recall, just to name one example, that the
federal debt climbed from $914 billion in 1980 to $3.27 trillion
in 1990?

     Gingrich may be a hypocrite, but at least he is an
entertaining one. Perhaps the best part of the course is Newt's
performance.

     "What works is what works," he declares with Forrest Gumpian
earnestness. "This goes back to -- remember pragmatism? How can
you tell what works? Because it's working?

     Couldn't have said it better myself.

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