Posted on 02/25/2002 10:50:03 AM PST by NormsRevenge
William Manchester, described by the Palm Beach Post as "a historian with [a) giant reputation for impeccable research and clear thinking" sounds a lot like Rush Limbaugh these days instead of the author notorious for his ultra liberal views.
Interviewed by the Post about the current ACLU and allied leftist campaigns to banish George Washington's portrait from school rooms, Manchester thunders "Oh, God, hang the portrait." during a phone interview.
Responding to the news that the American Civil Liberties Union says hanging the portrait amounts to forced patriotism the old liberal revealed that "I ceased my affiliation with them a few years ago. "It's all about guilt now. Guilt. Victims and guilt."
Asked to explain, Manchester said he didn't know why that's so. "But we're supposed to feel guilt about things that happened or are said to have happened in the faraway past. Do you know what George Washington's real sin is for these people? He was a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Period. He doesn't fit in with today's prescribed correctness. Hang the portrait. Maybe some child will see it and ask a teacher, `Who's that?' And then that child might just get a history lesson."
When asked how important history is he said "A fundamental premise for a functioning democracy is that the citizens will be literate enough, educated enough to see through the bull, know what's good for the democracy and what's dangerous. Washington embodied that premise, championed it.
"If you let education slide in schools and in the home, if your citizens are not aware of their own history, you open the door for self-appointed arbiters of truth," he warned. "And their so-called truths may not be true at all. It's a bad thing. The real question here is: Are our children learning enough history in school? I think not.
"But," he added "it must be good history, real history. Bad enough we don't teach more about World War II in our schools, for 55 years the Japanese have gotten away with teaching a false history of the war in their schools." Manchester, an ex-Marine wounded in action by the Japanese on Guadalcanal in WW II added "To catch the lie you have to be educated."
Noting that "Manchester is an old FDR liberal, adviser to the Kennedys, loather of Richard Nixon," the Post said that he has never ducked controversy, and "actually wrote a book of essays titled Controversy. His other works included almost 20 other books about JFK, Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, the Krupp family, the Pacific theater in World War II, H.L. Mencken.
"But, wrote the obviously shocked and notriously liberal Post, "he's sounding as if maybe Rush Limbaugh sneaked into his house and purloined the phone."
"Truth trumps politics, or should," he says. "Some who call themselves liberals are not liberal thinkers. History has been appropriated, stolen. Hanging a portrait of George Washington shouldn't involve politics, guilt, revisionism. You look at the man and judge him worthy or not. Who's more worthy than Washington? Who else was there? Hang the portrait."
And while you're at it, he seems to be saying, hang PC liberalism along with it.
I don't think so. I think he's making an accurate description of "liberal" or "left" thought in America. It is essentially these days corporate liberal (Clintons, corporate globalism) or the moral posture of third worldism. Domestic middle classes, workers, etc. have rejected their self-appointed roles as arbiters of correctness and secular morality. To paraphrase michael Moore, they love humanity but hate humans - their exercise in alienated compassions and faux-altruism. In the old days they made a pretense of caring about the economic well-being people of the country, now there is little care, except when it can be channeled into some kind of pork-barrel program of the victimology lobby.
He says: "It's all about guilt now. Guilt. Victims and guilt."
He's right on target. Imagine what Hubert Humphrey of Johnson would think of today's narcissistic version of liberals.
I doubt he'd be pleased as punch.
Manchester is of course correct about this. But what would Manchester suggest if a self-appointed arbiter of the truth got elected president, lied to the face of the people, the people knew that he was lying, but millions of those people stood up ... and defended the lies. What then Manchester?
You can over-educate people all you want, if they want to be lied to, there's not a whole lot left to say.
Where lays the Washington Post, should also be found The Washington Times; to the extent we are able.
Desperately seeking George By Paul Reid,
Palm Beach Post StaffThursday, February 21, 2002
Happy birthday, George. Sort of.
Seems some folks have a serious hang-up about hanging George Washington's portrait in public schoolrooms.
They don't like the idea at all. So much for birthday salutations (George's birthday is Friday). What's next, a campaign to take his mug off the dollar bill?
Do you remember when Washington's portrait hung high upon the walls of schoolrooms, post offices, banks and barber shops throughout this great land? No? Well, then, you must be under 40.
If you remember, you recall the burled mahogany frames, old-fashioned-looking they were. George was somber, his portrait a copy of the the famed Gilbert Stuart rendition. Back in 1932, on the 200th anniversary of Washington's birth, Congress said hang the portraits, and America hung the portraits.
Sometimes, George and Abe Lincoln would hang side-by-side, a little American banner connecting the frames. Sometimes, they'd hang alone. Often, a portrait of the current president would hang nearby or alongside -- FDR, Ike, JFK.
But that was yesteryear.
Last week, an informal search of Palm Beach County public schools, banks and post offices turned up a paucity of Washington portraits.
Jupiter Middle School has one up for Presidents' Day, one student reported. Norma Smith, a first-grade teacher at North Palm Beach Elementary School, told us about her annual George Washington breakfast and colonial program. George's portrait is on the wall at the "little red schoolhouse," the area's oldest schoolhouse, built in 1886, which is now used to teach fourth-graders about Florida history.
But the days of George on every classroom wall are long gone. And a clerk at the post office in West Palm Beach wondered if we were nuts when we asked whether Washington hung on their walls. They've got pictures of the 10 Most Wanted -- but not Washington.
So where'd the portraits go? And why? And why are some people getting all wrathy over proposals to put George Washington back up on the schoolroom wall?
The latest imbroglio began about a year ago when William Sanders, a New Jersey businessman, started copying and framing the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington. Sanders' goal: to convince schools in New Jersey and nationwide to hang the portraits, which cost him $250 each to produce. The response from schools has been tepid -- 60 of New Jersey's 2,400 schools said yes.
The opposition mounts
The response from opponents of Sanders' plan has been hot and heavy-handed. It's a controversy George could sink his wooden teeth into.
The New Jersey Education Association said hanging a portrait of one person excludes all others who helped win the Revolution. The association also objected to a legislative recommendation that experts from Mount Vernon help create a new history curriculum for New Jersey schools. Then, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said it's wary of forcing patriotism by hanging portraits.
Then, a historian from Oklahoma said blacks had a bad time of it back in George's day, so the portrait might not be appropriate. Then, the Organization of American Historians said Americans of all walks of life helped create our nation, so maybe a portrait of just one does disservice to all the others.
Even if that one is George Washington?
George was our first president, after all. He was the hero of the Revolution.
A USA Today article about this debate lines up numerous opponents on one side against poor Mr. Sanders alone on the other. Mr. Sanders comes across as a well-intentioned . . . nut.
Could political correctness be at play here?
We asked two historians with opinions honed by decades of dedication to rational, value-free thought and skeptical inquiry.
David McCullough, a historian's historian, recently told a Palm Beach breakfast audience that his admiration for Washington grew as he did six years of research for his biography of John Adams. McCullough saw Washington as far more than just the fellow who crossed the Delaware or camped out in the discontenting snows of Pennsylvania. He saw a general with enough political and military savvy -- a rare breed -- to take an amateur army underpaid by divisive, often greedy and frequently incompetent politicians all the way to victory over the world's greatest power.
Then, he presided over and nurtured the first democracy since the Golden Age of Greece, a fragile experiment detested by the rest of the world.
Washington kept the dream alive.
"George Washington was a great man, a classic case of the right man in the right place at the right time," said McCullough.
The first rule of good history, said McCullough, is for the historian to leave behind all 20th-century assumptions and prejudices before commenting on previous ages or historical figures. You can't judge Washington and Adams in terms of our world, but only in terms of their world. You make a mistake if you bring 20th-century race relations into an examination of blacks in the 18th century or into a study of Washington or Jefferson. If you look at John Adams through the eyes of 1990s feminism or judge labor conditions back then in terms of today's conditions, you're committing an error in method.
The way to avoid those errors, said McCullough, is to learn history, and learn to love learning history.
"When I did the Adams research," he says, "I lived with John and Abigail for six years. I studied the art, literature and theater of their time, food, travel conditions, politics, read their letters. What a wonderful opportunity it was."
But it's an opportunity not available to all the children all the time.
"Too many of our schools deny too many children even an introduction to history," said McCullough.
Manchester: 'It's all about guilt now'
William Manchester, a historian with so giant a reputation for impeccable research and clear thinking that even McCullough stands willingly in his shadow, has a lot to say about teaching -- or not teaching -- history in schools, and the thinking that lurks behind seemingly reasonable rhetoric. He hadn't heard of the Washington portrait dust-up but was apprised of the criticism by phone at his Connecticut home.
"Oh, God," he says. "Hang the portrait."
The American Civil Liberties Union says it's forced patriotism.
"I ceased my affiliation with them a few years ago," he says. "It's all about guilt now. Guilt. Victims and guilt."
How so?
"I don't know why. But we're supposed to feel guilt about things that happened or are said to have happened in the faraway past. Do you know what George Washington's real sin is for these people? He was a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Period. He doesn't fit in with today's prescribed correctness. Hang the portrait. Maybe some child will see it and ask a teacher, `Who's that?' And then that child might just get a history lesson."
How important is history?
"A fundamental premise for a functioning democracy is that the citizens will be literate enough, educated enough to see through the bull, know what's good for the democracy and what's dangerous. Washington embodied that premise, championed it. If you let education slide in schools and in the home, if your citizens are not aware of their own history, you open the door for self-appointed arbiters of truth. And their so-called truths may not be true at all. It's a bad thing. The real question here is: Are our children learning enough history in school? I think not.
"But it must be good history, real history. Bad enough we don't teach more about World War II in our schools, for 55 years the Japanese have gotten away with teaching a false history of the war in their schools. To catch the lie you have to be educated."
Manchester is an old FDR liberal, adviser to the Kennedys, loather of Richard Nixon. He has never avoided controversy, actually wrote a book of essays titled Controversy. And almost 20 other books about JFK, Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, the Krupp family, the Pacific theater in World War II, H.L. Mencken.
But he's sounding as if maybe Rush Limbaugh sneaked into his house and purloined the phone.
"Truth trumps politics, or should," he says. "Some who call themselves liberals are not liberal thinkers. History has been appropriated, stolen. Hanging a portrait of George Washington shouldn't involve politics, guilt, revisionism. You look at the man and judge him worthy or not. Who's more worthy than Washington? Who else was there? Hang the portrait."
Happy birthday, George, wherever you are.
paul_reid@pbpost.com
I think that the answer is that Manchesters father, though poorly paid, never suffered through the depression, he was a socal worker and from a difunctional family, but he never really felt want, he saw it and he hated it but he never felt it.
I was amazed at the paralls in our family history that he discribed in his Marine Corps book, but the difference that I noticed was my family was in the west, from 1928 to the dy he died my grandfather never practiced his profession, Engineer, my father went to College on an athletic scholarship.
He's always had that courage. The difference is that he somehow is a better person to some of you now because you agree with him on this issue.
A. Cricket
I missed this one...anyone have a link to this story?
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