A History of the American People.

Conservatives seem to believe that left-wing "revisionists" are winning the historical culture wars. If so, the revolutionary consequences are surprisingly hard to identify. Most of my students flock to places like Wall Street, Amgen, and Hewlett Packard, and very few are demanding workplace democracy or joining radical history book clubs during their hours of leisure. In the public arena, left-wing dominance is equally difficult to document. Witness the 1995 decision by the Smithsonian Institute to abandon an exhibit that raised historical questions about the necessity and morality of dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Editorials raged against the museum for "dishonoring" U.S. veterans "whose lives were saved by the bomb," an ironclad faith the exhibit would have questioned. The Senate voted unanimously to condemn the proposal and the museum caved in, at the same time pulling the plug on another potentially controversial exhibit about the Vietnam War.

An analogous debate surfaced in 1994 regarding National History Standards. The idea of creating a voluntary set of outlines for historical instruction in American schools had received strong support from President George Bush, and the work was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities under Lynne Cheney. Cheney was appalled by the outcome, describing the guidelines in a Wall Street Journal review as a "grim and gloomy" portrayal written by left-wing ideologues with a "hatred of traditional history." Rush Limbaugh called the standards "a bunch of p.c. crap." And once again the Senate voted to condemn a history that was not sufficiently celebratory.

With the publication of Paul Johnson's A History of the American People, it's time for the right wing to declare victory and withdraw. For here is celebration galore and you won't have to defer your gratification. The title page epigraph sets the tone: "Be not afraid of greatness." If that's not ingratiating enough, turn to the dedication: "To the people of America - strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched." To spice things up along the way Johnson has included many gratuitous observations on that new mainstay of right-wing inquiry - the presidential sex life (Wilson was "highly sexed," LBJ had a "voracious sexual appetite," and Eisenhower may have been "impotent" during an adulterous affair).

Johnson is a prolific and erudite British journalist (Modern Times, A History of Christianity, Intellectuals) whose interest in American history began in earnest during the 1950s, and it may occur to the reader that most of this volume was conceived in that dawn of the American Century. Not only does Johnson blithely ignore much of the scholarship written since about 1968, he shares the '50s' penchant for national history written from the top, about the top. Here is a history of generals, diplomats, inventors, industrialists, and every single president. "Great events in history are determined by all kinds of factors, but the most important single one is always the quality of the people in charge." How tidy. No need to muck around in the flotsam and jetsam of ordinary lives.

It would be less exasperating if Johnson offered a more penetrating analysis of the "quality" of those leaders. Despite some glancing jabs at Jefferson, the "humorless" "hypochondriac," the nation was founded by the "Enlightenment made flesh" and it passed the torch to the real heroes of the story - the capitalist system and the men who provided it legal, technical, financial, and political maintenance, men like John Marshall, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Calvin Coolidge. The villains are those who lack faith in the marketplace. Here's a quiz. In the nineteenth century what was "the one mortal sin America committed against the virtuous creed of laissez-faire?" Slavery? No. Government bankrolling of railroads? No. Answer: high tariffs! And had it not been for the "meddlesome activism" of both Herbert Hoover and FDR, the Great Depression would have been solved by a "natural recovery."

Apparently the great contribution of women in American history has been provocative party chatter. Johnson gleefully treats us to a half dozen of Dorothy Parker's bons mots (for example, "If all the girls at a Yale prom were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be at all surprised"). But there are still a few really serious women to deal with, so he offers three derisive pages on the suffragists under the heading "Women Stroll onto the Scene." Then they stroll off for three hundred pages and reappear miraculously on the final two - "The Triumph of Women."

Oh, perhaps I'm not being fair. We do get a few kind words about that great American Margaret Thatcher, and there's Harriet Beecher Stowe who writes "to make ends meet and give her children a few treats" (I guess that business about slavery was just a plot device). And don't forget Julia Morgan who designed William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle. Johnson regards this as a truly major contribution and I'm sure he's sincere given his special fondness for the country homes of the obscenely rich. Eventually they become museums - one of the many ways "the American plurocracy ultimately benefits the American democracy." Why, then, did he have to spoil it all by calling Morgan "the epitome of fierce proto-lesbianism"? This is particularly objectionable because Johnson promised at the outset that he would not "acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans." Red, yellow, black, and white, we're all precious in his sight ("I love them and salute them"). But there you have it, a whole new category of hyphenated Americans: proto-lesbians.

Professions of multiracial love aside, white folks do all the talking. In 1956 it was a small sign of racial progress that Kenneth Stampp ended his book on slavery by actually quoting a former slave. Now, more than forty years later, this history of the "American people" grants not a single sentence to one of the millions who experienced enslavement. Frederick Douglass does not even stroll onto the scene.

It is no surprise by now to learn that Johnson finds little to criticize in the white conquest of the continent. He documents some examples of white brutality against Indians (especially Andrew Jackson's), but believes Francis Parkman "shows the Indians as they were: improvident, unreliable, sometimes treacherous, vacillating, above all lazy." There's no p.c. crap in this history; only ample doses of the real thing.

Nor do Johnson's sympathies enlarge as he moves to the twentieth century. Far from extolling the nonviolent convictions of the early civil rights movement, Johnson makes the ludicrous claim that sit-ins and freedom rides "almost inevitably involved the use or threat of force, or provoked it." As for Malcolm X, he warrants just two words - "black racist." And what about the poor who are always with us? Not to worry. They suffered for approximately one paragraph at the turn of the century and then moved to the burbs.

I'm not primarily troubled by Johnson's uncritical celebration of capitalism and authority. It is probably preferable to the mind-numbing neutrality of many textbooks. At least readers can identify a point of view. What's more disturbing is the fatuous claim that this is a history of "the American people" that honors a "passion for justice." It is nothing of the sort and that is unfortunate because we still need books that have the power to inspire us toward more daring conceptions of our common past and possibilities.

Chris Appy teaches history at MIT and is the author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).