Why the College Board Demoted the Founders
What is the core of the American story? What is American history about? For a long time, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was thought to offer the most succinct and profound reply to these questions. The heart of the American story was said to be the Founding, with its principles of liberty and equality. American history was thus a study of our efforts to more fully realize republican principles, often in the face of our own flaws and failings. American history was also about the defense in peace and war of a unique experiment—a nation bound by democratic norms, rather than by ties of blood.
More recently, revisionist historians have developed a different answer to the question of what America's story is about. From their perspective, at the heart of our country's history—like the history of any other powerful nation—lies the pursuit of empire, of dominion over others. In this view, the formative American moment was the colonial assault on the Indians. At its core, say the revisionists, America's history is about our capacity for self-delusion, our endless attempts to justify raw power grabs with pretty fairy-tales about democracy.
The growing dispute over the College Board's new Framework for AP U.S. History (APUSH) turns around these clashing views of the American story. The creators and defenders of the new APUSH Framework are adherents of a radically revisionist approach to American history. That is why the Framers and the principles of our Constitutional system receive short shrift in the new AP guidelines, and why the conflict between settlers and Indians has taken center stage instead.
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The College Board claims that teachers are perfectly free to illustrate the new Framework's themes by citing great figures of American history. The problem with this is that the Framework's core concepts have been thoroughly shaped by the revisionist perspective. There is plenty of room for the Founders as exemplars of prejudice or blinkered ambition, yet far less opportunity to present them as architects of a principled republicanism.
The College Board's defenders have hinted at the revisionist perspective that inspired the redesigned APUSH Framework, yet they have not properly explained that perspective to the public. A more complete explanation would be controversial, even shocking. To see why, let us turn to the fulcrum of the revisionist view, the topic of Native Americans.
Defending the new APUSH Framework in The New York Times, James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, emphasizes the importance and legitimacy of historical revisionism. Grossman speaks as if recent trends in historical study were as objective and verifiable as the latest medical research, citing the debunked myth of the "vanishing Indian" as an example.
Responding to critics at the History News Network, University of Colorado historian Fred Anderson offers a first-hand account of his role in the initial meetings out of which the new APUSH Framework emerged. Anderson, a scholar of Native Americans, recounts his efforts to expand the AP course's "scanty treatment of pre-Columbian and colonial history." Indeed the greatly expanded treatment of these periods at the expense of the Founding has proven to be one of the most controversial aspects of the redesigned Framework. Anderson insists that this change has nothing to do with portraying America "as a nation founded on oppression, privilege, and racism," but is simply "a more rigorous reflection of the current state of knowledge and practice in our discipline."
What Anderson does not say is that "current practice" in early American history is to indict the Founders for oppression, privilege, and racism. Nor does he add that he himself has offered a sweeping and dramatic inversion of the traditional American narrative, turning virtually the whole of U.S. History into a tale of imperialists-in-denial, all based on his so-called debunking of "the myth of the vanishing Indian."
Anderson's proposed new narrative of American history vacillates between ignoring core events of our political history and dismissing them as delusional window-dressing for America's imperialist ambitions. He aims to show us ourselves through the eyes of our enemies, narrating the story of the Alamo, for example, through the eyes of Santa Anna, the Mexican commander who besieged and then executed its surviving defenders, with the goal of persuading us of the justice of the Mexican view.
Anderson explicitly rejects Lincoln's framing of the American narrative. In Anderson's view, the significance of the Founding has been overblown, whereas our encroachments on the Indians are the true paradigm of the American story. His purpose in shaping this new narrative is clearly to stir opposition to a forward-leaning defense of American interests abroad. He also hopes to dampen our ardor for American heroes like George Washington, Sam Houston, and Teddy Roosevelt.
In other words, Anderson's proposed new narrative of American history closely matches the narrative of the new APUSH Framework, and is clearly political in character. Anderson's ambitious new account of American history is fair game for interpretive debate and discussion, of course, but it is hardly verifiable and proven on the model of experimental findings in medicine, chemistry, or physics. While Anderson himself participated in early deliberations over the new APUSH course, he has also directly influenced key members of the committee that actually wrote the redesigned Framework. So to understand the fallacies of the framework, we'll need to take a closer look at the sources, content, and influence of Anderson's perspective on American history.
In 2008, just after Anderson's role in the initial phase of the APUSH redesign ended, the College Board published a "Curriculum Module" recommending new approaches to the teaching of "White-Native American Contact in Early American History." Anderson wrote an account of revisionist approaches to Native American history at the head of the booklet, while several teachers followed with lesson plans designed to incorporate Anderson's perspective.
The booklet was introduced by Jason George, of the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, MD, and one of the lesson plans was drawn up by Geri Hastings, of Catonsville High School in Catonsville, MD. Both George and Hastings went on to become members of the committee that actually drafted the new APUSH Framework. Hastings, in fact, was one of only two people to sit on both the first and second committees in charge of the redesign. Since Anderson, by his own account, had managed to expand coverage of the colonial and pre-Columbian periods at the initial redesign meetings, it made sense for the College Board to prepare guidelines for teaching the newly expanded sections of the course.
Anderson's contribution to the new Curriculum Module highlights the work of Francis Jennings, the most famous critic of "the myth of the vanishing Indian." Jennings' goal, says Anderson, was to "rewrite early American history with native people at its center." Jennings argued, "the Colonial period, not the American Revolution, had determined the fundamental character of the United States. That character was not republican, but imperial."
How did Jennings place the Indians at the center of American history? He did it by arguing that patterns of Indian resistance to white encroachment essentially dictated patterns of colonial and American settlement. Whether this means that Indians determined "the most important historical outcomes in North America from the beginnings of colonization through the early 19th century," depends on what you deem "most important" about America. Both Jennings' and Anderson's judgments on that score are questionable, as we'll see.
Jennings was crudely polemical in his attacks on the traditional American historical narrative. His goal was to turn America's Founders into the villains of their own story. The New York Times review of Jennings' final book was actually titled The Founding Villains. Deeply shaped by the War in Vietnam, Jennings dismissed America's democratic pretensions as a "fairy tale," a propagandistic trick designed to marshal public support for imperialist ventures. The idea that American Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, exhibited "civic virtue" was, for Jennings, little more than a joke.
