Historians tackle the biggest myths about America’s past

Some American myths date back to the founding of the nation, such as the one that as a child, the first president of the United States, George Washington, felt compelled to tell the truth about sticking an ax in the cherry tree. from his father because he couldn’t tell a lie.

“There are a lot of lies, which are white lies, that have a positive spin,” says Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University. “And what’s the harm there? It teaches children the value of honesty.”

The real damage comes, Kruse says, when lies or myths impact US government policy. Kruse and fellow Princeton historian Julian Zelizer put together a collection of essays for their book ‘Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past’.

In the anthology, 20 mostly liberal historians tackle what they see as conservative distortions of the history behind hot-button issues like border security, voter fraud, police brutality and the backlash against civil rights protests.following the 2020 police murder of George Floyda black man.

Glenda Gilmore of Yale University writes that a sanitized and somewhat one-dimensional image of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, leader of the “good protests,” obscures his relevance to the Black Lives Matter protesters who took to the streets after of Floyd’s death.

“[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was much more scathing in his denunciations of capitalism [y] militaristic,” says Kruse. “King has been stripped of all that controversy and complications, reduced to this non-offensive figure who just stood up and said, ‘Well, racism is bad and everyone agrees.’

“As a result, that cuts him off from any connection to the present. That example of the good civil rights protest is constantly presented in contrast to the bad civil rights protests to shame people involved in Black Lives Matter for not being like King when, in fact, they actually look a lot like King. ”.

Northwestern University historian Geraldo Cadava writes that Americans who are concerned about policing the southern border with Mexico have “displaced anxieties about imperial and national decline, economic fragility, and demographic change.”

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Professor of History at The New School, challenges the notion that feminism embraces anti-family values ​​by exploring how feminists have historically defended the traditional family.

Eric Rauchway, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, has studied the New Deal, a series of programs, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s to help the United States recover from the great Depression. In the book, Rauchway challenges the claim by some conservative politicians that the New Deal was ineffective.

“If we mistakenly believe that the New Deal was a failure, that discourages us from any kind of economic action along those lines. You constantly see historical tropes brought up in ways that shut down the options. Our sense of what happened in the past deepens our understanding of what is possible in the future,” says Kruse.

“If we strongly believe that this type of approach failed, or got us nowhere, we are much less likely to try it again. So we need to understand where we’ve been if we want to understand where we’re going to go.”

The book and its claims have been rejected by some conservatives who say “highly partisan” analysis is hampered by “left-wing myths.”

An essay in National Review suggests: “The book does not debunk any myths; it simply enacts different, radically progressive ones.”

Writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, Michael J. Douma argues that history is an ongoing discussion that historians often disagree on.

“When you view your opponents’ views as pure lies, myths, and legends, it may say more about the way you deal with your opposition than the content of your arguments,” writes Douma, a research associate professor at the University of from Georgetown.

Kruse responds to such criticism by stating that he and his collaborators are responding on the fly.

“I understand that we live in an era where there will be kind of a thoughtful desire to create equivalence on both sides at this point.” Kruse values. “No. The real challenges to American history come from the right, and that’s where we direct our attention.”

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