America 250: Patriotism, History and the Battle Over America’s Story

WALTER ISAACSON: Yoni Appelbaum, welcome back to the show.

YONI APPELBAUM: Thank you.

ISAACSON: We’re about to celebrate our 250th. Why is it important that we have a narrative, a narrative of our history in order to celebrate our birthday?

APPELBAUM: You know, this was a country built on an idea that we are each equal to each other and that we are committed to a common project. And in a nation that is built around an idea, not to be able to tell that story, not to be able to call back to that common past a past that even new arrivals to this country are able to adopt as their own leaves us unable to come together in any kind of national celebration and leaves the future of that project, I think, uncertain in itself.

ISAACSON: Well, you talk about us having a narrative that’s sort of based on values, rather than being a nation that’s based on land and heritage and common backgrounds. Let me read you a sentence from the piece you wrote In The Atlantic. You say, “A nation defined by blood and soil – built around a shared religion or ethnicity – can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.” I mean, fatal, that’s a punch of a word. You know, why could it be the death of us all?

APPELBAUM: I think that you can look back at previous crises in American history, most notably the decades leading up to the Civil War, where there was a radical disjunction in the stories that Americans told themselves about what the country was and what it stood for. Those can be really hard to resolve. I think a lot of Americans, and I number myself among them, are worried about where the country is at present, concerned that increasing number of Americans no longer believe in this nation’s promise, no longer see themselves as part of a single common project, but instead are concerned that there may be more than one narrative that has taken root that they may be at odds with each other. And that’s an incredibly difficult thing to resolve.

ISAACSON: Well wait, wait, let me, let me go back to that. What if there are indeed lots of different narratives in our nation’s history, and what if they are hard to resolve? What then?

APPELBAUM: Well, I think that there are in fact lots of narratives, right? Like Americans think of themselves as parts of many communities. Very few of us have only a single identity to which we’d subscribe. And it’s possible to tell those stories as common threads that are braided together. But they need to braid, right? They need to intertwine and to make out of the rich diversity of American pasts some sort of coherent national project. In the absence of that, if you get, say, two braids that diverge from each other then the thing pulls apart.

ISAACSON: So tell me, what is in your mind, the national narrative? How do things become coherent?

APPELBAUM: You know, I think that there are three narratives that are out there at the moment. The one that I think most Americans still subscribe to is one that has emerges over the last 50 years. And it says, look, America is a country founded on a set of ideals. Those were good ideals. They’re timeless ideals. It’s also the case that we have seldom lived up to them, that the 250 years of the American past or a continual struggle in which we measure ourselves against those ideals. On the whole, we’ve moved forward and sometimes we have moved backwards. We’ve applied those ideals unequally to different groups at different times. But the project, the Grand American experiment remains worth pursuing even if, like most aspirational ideals, we don’t always live up to the founding vision.

ISAACSON: And that was what I think was taught in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Why did that unravel?

APPELBAUM: You know, it’s come under attack from both flanks at once. On the left there’s a revolution that happens in the study of history. The doors to the academy widen. Women are able to enter the historical profession in large numbers, members of various minority groups enter this is a wonderful advance for the country. This set about telling many of the forgotten and neglected stories they said about weaving in to, to, to the fabric of American history many of the darker episodes that had received insufficient attention. That’s a positive development. But as time goes on instead of those being the contrapuntal notes in, in sort of a national tune, they become dominant, they become the only things that are pursued and talked by some scholars.

ISAACSON: Are you referring in some ways to the 1619 project then? Because I know you write about it quite a bit in this piece.

APPELBAUM: That is an element of the 1619 project, that it looks back and says, you know, the defining moment in American history is the start of slavery, not the Declaration of Independence. And it comes out of a scholarly tradition that has flourished in the previous 30, 40 years that says, the things that are distinctive about America are its wrongs, its sins. That these are the things that differentiate America from other lands and other nations.

ISAACSON: So when you talk about the 1619 project, let’s make sure people understand that it was a project done by the New York Times and others, a whole group of people that had a big impact in the past five or 10 years, right? Explain who did it and what she now says about it.

APPELBAUM: Well, it was put together by, by a journalist at the Times named Nikole Hannah-Jones. What she did was put together an assemblage of scholars to contribute essays that wouldn’t just be about the black experience in America, but would try to rewrite the American narrative, centering the black experience. Not telling a separate story, but retelling the national story from that perspective in many ways it reflected the fruits of this new flourishing of scholarship that we get as the diversity of the historians who are telling the American story increases. There’s lots of really good history in that project. But on the whole, the frame is that America starts in a dark place and remains a country defined by its injustices. That is the overall thrust of the project.

And it provokes a furious backlash from the right, which has in any case been pushing back against this sort of history for decades. And which says, no, you know, you’re getting America all wrong. This is a nation that was conceived with godly purpose and to the extent that we have sometimes deviated from our high ideals, that’s a matter for the footnotes. You know, that the key notes to sound about American history are only the triumphal ones. If we have deviated from our ideals, it’s not to say that those conceptions, wherever flawed, or you know, that the men who made those mistakes shouldn’t be taken to be representative of the American project. We should focus on the things we’ve done right. And that triumphalist narrative sort of a hyper-American narrative comes to take root on the right. And President Trump in his first term, in response to the 1619 project, launches a 1776 commission that will try to advance a patriotic history. Instead of emphasizing only the bad in American history, it will try to look only at the good.

And so you get this, this sort of downward spiral as the right and the left put forward two diametrically opposed versions of history. And neither one looks anything like what Americans tell us they believe about the past, or want to learn about the past. Overwhelmingly, Americans say, our country is complicated. I want to know the bad and the good. I want to grapple with the complexity. I want the full picture. I want the honest truth. That’s where most Americans are. It’s not the narrative that you can find on either extreme at the moment.

ISAACSON: Well, if you say most Americans want the complexity of American history, are you worried about President Trump now – not just in his first term – trying to take things out of everything from the Smithsonian to the National Parks and make the history a little bit more sanitized?

APPELBAUM: I am extremely worried that the man is not a real patriot. If you really love your country, if you believe in the power of the American story, then you don’t need to censor it. Then you believe that Americans can know the truth about their country and still love it. And so there’s a curious lack of confidence that is on display whenever the President orders an explanatory, placard taken down, a textbook excised from the curriculum. What is happening there is a sort of curious and fragile approach to the past. One which says Americans aren’t capable of holding multiple ideas in their head at the same time. They can’t understand that we have sometimes fallen short of our ideals. It’s dangerous to tell the truth. I don’t believe it’s ever dangerous to tell the truth.

When I talked to Nikole Hannah-Jones at the Times, one of the things that she told me was that patriotism was always a word that she had treated with jaundice suspicion. She hadn’t really understood her father’s commitment to raising the American flag until she really started researching the 1619 project and came across the narratives and statements made by freed people who she would’ve expected to say, you know, to heck with America. I’m going someplace else, and I’m gonna leave the land that oppressed me. And instead, what she found them saying was this is my country and I want to make sure that it lives up to its ideals. And that actually fired the first sparks of patriotism within her. I think that’s often the case, that looking back at these darker chapters can be discouraging. But it is also a source of continued inspiration, because even in the darkest moments in our history, there are many people who chose to stand up for the American ideal, chose to fight for it, chose to try to make this country come closer to the vision that it had set.

ISAACSON: You talk about how both sides of the far left, the far right have tried to grab the narrative and make it their own in different ways, and that that’s caused part of this problem. But you also write about another cause of this problem, which is we quit teaching history. Why did we do that?

APPELBAUM: You know, it was one of the remarkable things I found researching this was sort of an unexpected downside of the educational reforms in the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind reforms. These were intended to make sure that schools throughout the country were not failing their students by imposing national standards and testing rigorously to make sure that schools met them. They agreed on standards for math. They agreed on standards for English. They shoved history to one side, not because they thought it was unimportant, but because it was so fiercely contested that threatened to sink the entire endeavor. And the, I suppose, predictable result was that schools that started struggling on math or English to meet the standards would cut the classroom time devoted to history and social studies on average by a third in the years right after NCLB passed, that high schools which had often athletic coaches who it needed to find full-time jobs for you know, move them out of English and math classrooms and into history classrooms where their performance wasn’t going to be evaluated in the same way the school’s funding wouldn’t be tied to it. History became sort of the neglected stepchild of our K to 12 educational system.

And that’s not to say that there aren’t fine history teachers out there that there are many who are laboring mightily in America’s classrooms. But it is sort of the ironic result of history having been so important to everyone that they couldn’t agree on what we should teach is that history has received fewer resources, history instructors are much less likely to have a degree in the subject that they’re teaching than teachers and other subjects. It has become something that really gets short shrift in the educational system.

ISAACSON: And so now, as we go into the 250th, give me some examples of where you see the abandonment – these are your words – “the abandonment of the effort to tell the American story.” And could we have used, I think we missed the chance, could we have used this anniversary celebration to restore that?

APPELBAUM: You know, we’ve had two presidential administrations involved in planning the 250th and a heavy way. The Biden administration failed in one direction. Rather than create tentpole, unifying events or really try to put any kind of narrative behind the celebration, it leaned in, in sort of an almost caricature of the progressive approach to these things. It launched a big oral history initiative to ask every American to tell their own story. It created sort of downloadable kits that local organizations, museums, historical societies could use to brand the things that they were going to be doing anyway. Every individual, every community was encouraged to tell the story for itself. But there was really no ability to pull together anything common for fear of what would be excluded, who would be offended and, and so there was a total abdication.

On the other hand, the Trump administration has come in and it very much loves spectacle. It has wanted to create big events. What it has not had any desire to do is to create unifying events that these events that we’ve seen so far, like the UFC match on the South Lawn have been semi partisan spectacles that put the president right at the heart of it. He’s now scheduled to kick off a big state fair here in Washington, DC with a speech putting again a more partisan valence. It’s a group he personally controls which has taken over much of the celebrations. A group called Freedom 250 has really seized the funding and the mantle from the congressionally chartered America 250 Commission. And so if the Democrats couldn’t think of any unifying story for the country to tell itself the Trump administration has tacked hard on the opposite direction. It has a story it wants to tell, but it is a narrowly partisan vision, and one that excludes many Americans. And so we’re left with really an absence of the kind of unifying spectacle. And that’s really strange. It’s often been the case that these anniversary years have come about in really difficult moments. It’s not as if this is a unique challenge. It is a unique failure.

ISAACSON: One of the expressions of the partisan forces ripping apart history came with the monument removals and then the backlash to the monument removals. Why did that all occur? And what effect did that have?

APPELBAUM: You know, the protest movements that began by targeting the Confederate memorials took the classic tack of the left through most of American history, and said, there are things that are not living up to American ideals. Erecting a statue of somebody who took up arms against this country is a betrayal of basic patriotism. That was the initial argument. And it garnered broad public support for the removal of those confederate memorials, but very quickly spun well beyond those bounds. And instead of leveling that same critique it resulted in the removal of many other statues of historical figures for various sins they were said to have committed. And at that point it sort of jumped over into the kind of narrative of the American past that stresses the sins above the triumphs that says to the extent that, that any particular historical character can be tied to wrongdoing that then that person is no saint and shouldn’t be memorialized.

But all of our founders were not saints. Very few of us are saints either. And so the holding down in the spasm of iconoclasm of many, many statues left, I think, a great many Americans feeling as if their own understanding of themselves and their country was being threatened. And we saw a sudden and dramatic ebbing of support for that movement and a backlash against it. And now Donald Trump is promising a statuary park with 250 great Americans, including statues of many folks who were removed in that spasm of iconoclasm. So you know, again and again we see the cycle of action and counter reaction instead of an effort to bridge the chasm and to find the common things that we can rally around.

ISAACSON: Yoni Appelbaum, thanks so much for joining us.

APPELBAUM: Thank you.