A Critical User's Guide to the ServiceNation Forum

Last Thursday many of us watched Senators McCain and Obama answer questions about the past, present and future of national service. Unsurprisingly, they both selectively appropriated common representations of the past. In 1961, American historian William Appleman Williams observed that Americans were highly susceptible to politicians’ manipulation of history through platitudes about the past. “Instead of being treated as the study of the past and present in which thinking, reasoning, and reflection might lead to insights and perception,” wrote Williams, “history appeared more often to be viewed as a grab bag from which to snatch footnotes for an a priori opinion.” In this spirit, this is a user’s guide to the Sept. 11 forum on national service where the statements of both candidates in light of the historical record will be scrutinized.

American Exceptionalism: McCain said he believed in American exceptionalism. This concept had its origins in debates within the U.S. Communist Party in the 1920s and ’30s regarding the absence of a radical working-class movement in the U.S. compared to Europe. The “founding fathers,” on the other hand, didn’t believe America was exceptional in this modern sense, insofar as they believed it was (or should be more) different from Europe by representing a republican form of government, a state without a monarchy. In fact, Thomas Jefferson and other republicans were often quite pessimistic about the nation’s potential trajectories of development, and worried that the new America would become as hierarchical, autocratic, and despotic as old Europe.

According to McCain, only the U.S. adheres “to the principle that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creators with certain rights,” and has promoted this primarily by economics, not military force. Westward expansion animated by ideas of “Manifest Destiny” expanded slavery, decimated indigenous populations, and forcibly annexed Spanish territories and portions of Mexico. At the same time an equally, if not more, republican France spread its empire of liberty and equality via Napoleon and other imperial ventures in North Africa and Asia. That is just the 19th century.
McCain said that Americans have “shed our blood in all four corners of the earth many times in defense of someone else’s freedom and have tried to further the principles of freedom and democracy everywhere in the world.” It would be more accurate to say that the U.S. shed a little of its blood and much more of other people’s blood in all four corners of the earth, mostly (with some notable exceptions) in defense of “our” freedoms to secure markets, resources, and preponderant strategic power.

Neighborhood Watches: McCain argued that if he had been president after Sept. 11, he would have enhanced national security by creating citizens’ organizations to conduct neighborhood watches and guard nuclear power plants. Both McCain and Obama praised the way Americans come together after tragedies such as Sept. 11. In times of war and tragedy, some Americans have come together. But they have also often repressed people they regarded as political enemies and ethnic outsiders. The vigilante violence against Germans, Russians, socialists, and anarchists, instigated in part by the pronouncements of federal and state officials and employers, and policies like the Alien and Sedition Acts during and after World War I, comes to mind. So does the seizure of Japanese-Americans and their land after Pearl Harbor, which preceded their internment in concentration camps for the duration of World War II. National crises has mobilized citizens for the common good, but it has often intentionally (and unintentionally) eroded civil liberties that supposedly make America exceptional.

GI Bill: Obama praised the GI bill that rewarded World War II veterans for their service by paying their college tuition and granting Federal Housing Authority loans. While the GI bill allowed millions of veterans to get an education and own homes that would have been otherwise unattainable, the GI bill, like the Social Security and Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wages, maximum hours) before it, was racially skewed according to the whims of a critical block of anti-black, anti-labor Dixie Democrats in Congress. As Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History Ira Katznelson and others have shown, the administration of GI bill benefits was purposefully devolved to the states. This allowed state and local benefits administrators to discriminate in housing loans, and made education for African-American veterans in a highly segregated system of higher education in the South virtually impossible.

The Draft: McCain was right about one thing. When asked why there is no draft—even though military enlistments are declining, qualifications have been lowered, and the highest percentage ever of recruits without high school diplomas (30 percent) have been accepted into the ranks—McCain reminded viewers that the Vietnam-era draft was unfair. But he also contended that wealthier Americans “found ways of avoiding the draft.” It’s true that many middle- and upper-class men avoided the draft—mostly because it was structured that way. Military manpower experts in the 1940s and ’50s designed conscription to “channel” men into higher education or the military by using, in historian Christian Appy’s words, “the club of induction and the carrot of student deferments (along with a host of special exemptions).” When draftee numbers dropped, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, instituted “Project 100,000” to introduce many cognitively unqualified recruits, with predictably disastrous results.

Parties, Movements and Voting: The ServiceNation Forum was heralded as a Sept. 11 anniversary festival of citizenship and anti-partisanship, and the moderators reminded McCain that Washington and his fellow framers disdained parties as factions unnatural to government. This is true, even though the republican language inherently obscured “natural” party-formation in the young republic, and was later employed by Federalists and Jeffersonians to cover-up partisan agendas. But this period, and the Jacksonian period of intense partisanship which followed, was the most democratic era in American history, with unsurpassed rates of voter participation and activism—despite the limitations of the franchise to mostly white males (with property in a few states until the 1840s).

The Progressive-era reformers whom Senators Obama and McCain praised when they applauded Theodore Roosevelt for mobilizing citizens and fighting corruption actually helped to dismantle the imperfect but vibrant party structures which under-girded democracy’s golden age. Furthermore, while Obama rightly identified the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the product of government, he should have wedded that acknowledgment to his savvy understanding that “change happens from the bottom up. It doesn’t happen from the top down.” Obama’s campaign itself reaffirms a historical pattern: significant shifts in America’s politics and political development occur as a result of social movements linking up with energized parties. If President Lyndon Johnson was able to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, it was due largely to the considerable pressures placed on him and Congress by the civil rights activisms of the late 1950s and early 1960s—often carried out against the indifference or outright opposition of federal agencies.

As William Appleman Williams warned us in 1961, our capacities to participate meaningfully in American society and the world depends to a great degree on our ability to critically receive and interrogate the statements of those who hold, or wish to hold, power over our lives and our common future. “History,” Williams warned us, “is one of the most misleading—and hence dangerous—approaches to knowledge if viewed, or practiced, as a process of reaching back into the past for answers sufficient unto the present and the future. For although historical consciousness can be a powerful tool with which to improve our lives and our world, it is little more than a demonic sorcerer’s apprentice unless the history of which we become conscious is something more than a brief in defense of some particular proposal.”

The historical record, approached with the caution and critical mind it deserves, defies gross generalization and is not so easily reduced to convenient platitudes. For perceptive minds primed for intellectual self-defense, history will not so easily be prostituted to the preconceived opinions of any politician. No matter your opinion of their respective platforms, arm yourselves.

The author is a graduate student in the School of Arts and Sciences studying history.