After Nationalism by Samuel Goldman

Author:Samuel Goldman [Goldman, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Memory, Nostalgia, Narrative

In 1989, the State of New York began the process of revising its social studies curriculum. Under its commissioner of education, Thomas Sobol, a panel of scholars, teachers, and administrators considered existing standards and offered recommendations for improvement. To address dissatisfaction about the appointment of Sobol, who earned degrees at Harvard and served as superintendent in affluent Scarsdale, a “task force on minorities” was empaneled.1

The task force released its report in July. Despite chairman Harry Hamilton’s announcement stating, “We’re on the brink of something very important for New York and the nation,” the document attracted little immediate attention. Yet Hamilton was right, if not in the way he expected. By November, “A Curriculum of Inclusion” was the focus of national debate.

The bulk of “A Curriculum of Inclusion” was anodyne. Among other proposals, the committee recommended increased attention to the large migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland US after World War II, when they became an important “immigrant” community despite their technical citizenship. Rather than matters of detail, the controversy revolved around the report’s extraordinary judgment of traditional scholarship, “European Americans,” and the United States in general. According to the first sentence: “African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.”2

This indictment made “A Curriculum of Inclusion” a symbol of the “culture war.” Originating in the campaign against the Roman Catholic Church by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the term culture war was revived by the American sociologist James Davison Hunter. Unlike contests for territory, wealth, or political authority, the culture war was, according to Hunter, a “competition to define social reality.”3

Hunter contended that the twentieth century left Americans unprepared for culture war. The succession of the First World War, Second World War, and Cold War created an expectation for political unity and moral consensus. But the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the pressure from an external adversary that was such a powerful source of internal solidarity. In the aftermath, the nation turned its energies inward—and often against itself. In his address to the 1992 Republican National Convention, commentator and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan pronounced, “This election … is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”4 Liberal columnist Molly Ivins quipped that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”5

As historian Andrew Hartman has documented in his study A War for the Soul of America, which takes Buchanan’s speech as its point of departure, the culture war was fought on fronts including crime, sexual morality, and environmental policy. To a striking degree, however, it revolved around education. For culture warriors on the right and left, college curricula and high school textbooks were the means for making or breaking the social order. “History is to the nation rather as memory is to the individual,” wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

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