History and memory are not one and the same but are often mistaken for one another.  History is often victimized by our natural tendency to impose a cultural narrative on the past, one that usually supports the prevailing societal norms of the present.  In 1919 statues of Nicholas the II were toppled throughout Russia, today they are being restored.  The past is not retrievable in any absolute sense.  They most we can do is to reassemble the remains as best we can without imposing preconceived notions of some narrative story that history is supposed to portray.  It is in that spirit that this course will examine two competing demands that have dominated the historical narratives of our nation's political development: the right to liberty with minimal governmental restraint and the competing demands for government to support a just and equitable society.  Many historians of the late twentieth century were convinced that there existed a continuity to the growth of liberal values which culminated in the triumph of liberal capitalism in the post World War II world.  But is that the case?

Teacher:  David Moore taught in the History Department at Newton North High School.  He received his master’s degree from Boston College.  He received the Charles Dana Meserve outstanding teacher award in 1993.  His particular historical interests include classical Greece, American Studies and the Holocaust. 

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Session One:  The Non-Election of 1877 ~ The Promise Broken

Session Two:  The Progressive Movement ~ Elitism by Another Name?

Session Three:  Woodrow Wilson at Versailles ~ Idealism:  Rhetoric and Reality

Session Four: The Twenties ~ Return to Normalcy

Session Five:  FDR ~ The Survival of Liberal Democracy

Session  Six:  JFK ~ The Legacy of Camelot

Session Seven: Reagan: The Un-Revolution

Session Eight:  The Selection of 2000

Session Nine:  Obama ~ A Fragile Legacy

Session 10:  Trump ~ The Great Undoing

Session One: The Non Election of 1877 ~ The Promise Broken

The American narrative has been and continues to be a long argument between the competing demands of personal liberty and the requirement for equal justice and equality of opportunity. The argument exhibits an almost cyclical dimension as first one and then the other defines the nation's consciousness.  The Civil war and the period of Reconstruction that followed reflected the first full throated attempt by the national government to give life to "the proposition that all men are created equal."  In 1877 the government and nation turned its back on this effort as if exhausted from the effort.  The South was allowed to turn inward and develop its own Jim Crow solution to enforce white supremacy while the rest of the nation got down to the business of extending, well, just that.....business.

Compromise-Indeed! Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly Magazine, January 27, 1877

It was "...widespread violence, coupled with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown American terrorism. Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society.
One by one, the Reconstruction governments fell. As a result of a bargain after the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Oval Office and disavowed further national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, while white Democrats controlled the South.
By the turn of the century, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, a comprehensive system of racial, political and economic inequality, summarized in the phrase Jim Crow, had come into being across the South"

Eric Foner, Why Reconstruction Matters,  New York Times, March 28, 2015 

The hung election of 1876  and the "compromise" that followed  are a fascinating study in and of themselves, but their historical significance lies more in that they finalized the end to what Eric Foner has called a "noble, if failed" attempt to bring interracial democracy to our nation. The white Jim Crow narrative castigated Reconstruction as a  failure on an epic scale and thus justified their resumption of racial dominance in the South.  The reality of Reconstruction, while it lasted, was more mixed and varied over time and from state to state.  Though the gains in black voting and government participation were largely lost throughout the South, the gains made  in family life, religious organization and education endured while the legal inheritance  embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments would provide the framework for the Second Reconstruction of the 1960's.  In reality, one might say that we are still living in the Reconstruction Era.

First Assignment
The folks at Facing History and Ourselves in Brookline MA have put together an extensive curriculum on race in United States History.  The first film will provide you an overview of the changing historical interpretations of this period and the political agendas which informed them.  The second creates an awareness of the connectedness between Reconstruction and the politics of race today.

Introduction: A Contested History

Session Two:  The Progressive Movement ~ Elitism by Another Name?

I can still recall first opening my high school history text, The American Nation, and  leafing with pleasure through the maps, charts and photographs which greeted my eye.  Think back to a similar day in your own high school experience and try recalling the chapter on the Progressive Era.  You'll probably remember a picture of Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago, or perhaps on a facing page there is one of Jacob Riis's photographs of an East-Side tenement. Further on you will also probably find an insert with a selection from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and of course there will be the ubiquitous  cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt as Trust Buster.

Session Four: The Twenties ~ "Return to Normalcy"

Americans were tired of the years of chaos and uncertainty, the labour strikes and race riots, the bomb threats and progressive agitators, the muckrakers and constant wars, from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War and then the Great War, which they had been assured would end all wars. They wanted stability and security. . .1

                                                                                                                                                             Sarah Churchwell. Behold, America.

That longing for sursease would find its outlet in 1920 with the nomination and election of Warren Harding, perhaps the handsomest and least qualified man ever to occupy the White House.  Unwittingly or not, Warren Gamaliel Harding, life long Ohioan, former newspaper editor, lieutenant Governor and now Senator, captured the unvoiced, inchoate mood of America. Twenty years of populist revolt and progressive reform culminating in the war to end all wars had exhausted the collective psyche of a nation.  A return to "normalcy," a nostalgia for a romanticized past became a siren song.  Harding won 60.2 percent of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes ushering in twelve years of what historian John D. Hicks has called the Republican Ascendancy.1

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
                                                                  Warren G. Harding, Home Market Club of Boston on May 14, 1920.

First Assignment
Wikiwand: Warren G. Harding, www.wikiwand.com/en/Warren_G._Harding
A thorough overview of the man, the candidate and his administration.  A good first stop to familiarize yourself with the period.

Second Assignment
"Prologue" from Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 by​ William E. Leuchtenburg.
Download Here

"Beginning with Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I and closing with the Great Depression, The Perils of Prosperity traces the transformation of America from an agrarian, moralistic, isolationist nation into a liberal, industrialized power involved in foreign affairs in spite of itself. William E. Leuchtenburg’s lively yet balanced account of this hotly debated era in American history has been a standard text for many years. This substantial revision gives greater weight to the roles of women and minorities in the great changes of the era and adds new insights into literature, the arts, and technology in daily life. He has also updated the lists of important dates and resources for further reading."1

"William Edward Leuchtenburg (born 1922) is the William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He received his BA degree in 1943 from Cornell University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He later received his PhD from Columbia University in 1951.  He won the 2007 North Carolina Award for Literature.  He is a past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians. Eric Foner is the only other historian to claim that distinction."1

Talking Points

• At several points Leuchtenburg's discussion references the role that nostalgia has played in our historical memory.“In retrospect, the years before World War I seemed like a lost Arcadia.”  How does this help us understand our own present historical moment?  Is Trump's Make American Great Again a variant of Harding's return to "normalcy?"
• Leuchtenburg characterizes the 20's as the "“first serious attempt of Americans to make their peace with the twentieth century.”  To what extent do the same issues still resonate in our contemporary society?

Third Assignment
"The American Dream 1924–1929: A Willingness of the Heart," from Behold America, Sarah Churchill, New York: Basic Books, 2018.
Download Here

"In Behold America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans’ fierce battle for the nation’s soul. It follows the stories of two phrases–the “American dream” and “America First”–that once embodied opposing visions for America.  Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. At a time when many ask what America’s future holds, Behold, America is a revelatory, unvarnished portrait of where we have been."1

"Sarah Churchwell (born 1970) is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century fiction. Churchwell lectured at the University of East Anglia from 1999 until 2015, when she became Professor at the School of Advanced Study of the London University. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Observer. Her books include The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004); and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2013) about F. Scott Fitzgerald."1

Talking Points

• Fitzgerald's Gatsby is in many ways the personification of his age.  “The concept of the American dream of individual aspiration and its diminution into materialism could be said to emerge alast here, in Fitzgerald’s novel–many have argued that it does.”
• The Man Nobody Knows published a month after Gatsby, was a major commercial success.

Fourth Assignment
"The Republican Trump:  Donald Trump, meet Calvin Coolidge."  by Charles R. Kesler, Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2016/17 
Link Here

"Charles Kesler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of Claremont’s The American Mind video series, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.
Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows Program and Lincoln Fellows Program. He received his B.A. in Social Studies and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of CMC’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.  Dr. Kesler is the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism."1. Kesler is a leading conservative political philosopher once described as the "presiding chieftain of an obscure. . . tribe of political philosophers known as the "West Coast Straussians."2

Talking Points

• Kesler is a major conservative thinker who has attempted to anchor Trump's policies in the traditional Republican framework of the 1920's.  Setting aside Kesler's conclusion that Trump has returned the party to ..."popular self-government based on American standards," has he unwittingly provided a context within which to understand Trump's mass appeal?
• To what extent does our own era represent "unfinished business" from the 20's [ Leuchtenburg], and the narrowing of the "American Dream" [Churchwell] to a mythologized past which never existed?