pennsylvania at war, 1754-1765 || which way, history? the history of a war, and a war against...

Which Way, History? The History of a War, and a War Against HistoryAuthor(s): Francis JenningsSource: Pennsylvania History, Vol. 62, No. 2, Pennsylvania At War, 1754-1765 (Spring 1995),pp. 160-170Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27773799 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 20:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toPennsylvania History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.121 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 20:08:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=psup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/27773799?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


160 Pennsylvania History

Which Way, History? The History of a War, and a War Against History

Francis Jennings

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

intervals, historians get to fretting about whether their work is worthwhile or whether it should take a new direction. Each new generation of professionals is like each new generation of young people generally, determined to save the world from the awful mess made by their elders. For several years now, we have been ago nizing in one of these intermittent crises of conscience, and I propose now to add my own two cents to the deep thinking.

This article may seem at first merely an ego trip because I use a personal expe rience as a springboard into larger issues. Admittedly, I pay off an overdue score, but

only as an example of widespread fault. If thinking is not based ultimately in personal experience, what good is it? A hut on solid ground is better shelter than a castle in the air.

Let us first dispose of some fantasies. The current situation is marked by fren zied appeals of young writers heavily influenced by the kind of literary critics who

pay more attention to theories?especially their own theories?than to events. We have had raids into history from professors of English determined to show us the

enlightenment of deconstruction, reconstruction, neoconstruction, etc., ad nause am.1 Their theories genuflect to French psychoanalytical philosophers like Michel Foucault. (There is no fashion like one from Paris.) It was bad enough with the Viennese variety of myth handlers. Myth, instead of empirically based history, assails us now from several directions. I shall return to it later in this piece.

Notably, none of the neo-gurus has ever done the drudgery of sifting data from

significance, organizing them into credible patterns, and portraying the findings in

ways that make sense. Ordinarily they would arouse the same interest as phrenolo gists, but they have captured the attention of sensation-hungry media that ought to

know better (and perhaps do) and their influence now greatly outstrips their merit.

They are wrong and misleading in a great many ways.2 The gurus understand the techniques of salesmanship. They get heads nodding

by assertions that history, as now written, is sick. Many in the profession have been

uneasily aware of problems with its health, but the gurus' diagnoses and remedies go off in an entirely wrong direction. They blame objectivity (like blaming women for

motherhood), yet one of the genuine triumphs of professional historians has been the

painstaking development of methods for making statements about factual events

confirmable. In that regard, we no longer rely on authority; we demand evidence. The gurus insist that this is all smoke and mirrors, that no one can know what real

ly happened, and therefore their own dreamed-up versions of what did not happen are as legitimate as those of the scholar who searches for the evidence. Contemptible on its face, this nonsense is a sort of voodoo.



Which Way, History: The History of a War and a War Against History 161

Curiously, the gurus compound their offense by accepting a false basic premise that "mainstream" history pretends to be objective in another sense?that is, free of

historians bias. This, too, is nonsense, but it requires exposure of facts and practices. For instance, many Pennsylvanians will be aware that the Quakers of Bucks

County have insisted consistently that their ancestors cooperated with the chicanery of Thomas Penn to cheat Delaware Indians in the so-called Walking Purchase of

lands along the Delaware River; in an odd reversal of the usual situation, national his

torians insisted in contradiction that the Walking Purchase had been fair and honest.

I proved the local people right with documentation beyond reasonable dispute, and

thereby gained the hostility of some of the national omniscients.3

Historian John Shy has produced a hatchet review of my book Empire of Fortune with the comment, "We do not have to accept Jennings questionable opin ion."4 Shy is good at semantics: all my evidence has become merely a "questionable

opinion" though he presents not a scintilla of evidence for his contrary opinion. Given such trickery, how can one accept Shy's sanctimonious avowal that "few of us

condone the attitudes and behavior that outrage Jennings?" His condoning is right there on the same page. Oddly, though Shy presents himself as a traditional histori

an, his dismissal of evidence in this instance puts him squarely among the gurus.

Shy's review implied that I had depended heavily "on a limited range of sec

ondary work once outside of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley." He had before him

my bibliography of "Materials Cited in the Notes" which included manuscripts con

sulted at the Huntington Library, the Public Record Office of Great Britain, the

British Library, the Newberry Library, the Moravian Archives, the John Carter Brown

Library, the Virginia State Library, as well as what he slurs as "most" of my sources in

the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Besides what I had found in that great repos

itory, my sources included manuscripts from the Pennsylvania Historical and

Museum Commission, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, the American

Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the City's Archives

Division, and the Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.5 Repeat, sources from all these institutions were cited in the notes. In addition to these source manuscripts, twenty-one pages of printed materials were cited, eight of which originated before

1800. All this was Shy's "limited range of secondary work."6

In responding thus, rather belatedly because I had hoped the trickery would

expose itself (and because my wife's terminal illness distracted attention), I have more in mind than personalities. As noted above, a great deal is wrong with the prac tices and results of American history today, and Shy's techniques of distortion demonstrate part of what is wrong. He did not misrepresent casually; his review

breathes of a purpose irrelevant to objectivity. Slurs were needed to mask the nature

of his attack which started with this sentence: "'Slanted trash' are the words Francis

Jennings chooses to dismiss a useful monograph with which he disagrees, and his

choice of words in this case fairly represents the tone of his new book." The "use

ful" monograph in question has demonstrated by its descent into virtual oblivion




that it was just what I called it, but it was indeed useful for Shy because it was slant

ed his way.7 The main purpose of Shy?a graduate of West Point?was to suppress

my expose of the evils of militarism and racism. He wanted me to depend on works

that omitted attention to the ineptitude, poltroonery, and political aggressiveness of

Britain's generals and colonels in the Seven Years' War?a condition that led colonials to begin thinking of independence. (Any moderately well-informed person could see

the relevance of that to our own era.) I showed instead that pacifist Quakers had negotiated hostile Indians off

Pennsylvanians' backs after the generals had made a literally bloody mess of the fron tiers. But Shy was very careful not to mention the word Quakers in a review that

appeared in a Pennsylvania journal ordinarily sympathetic toward Quakers. Neat. A rather different verdict on my book was given by Denys Delage of Ottawa's

Laval University. "Virtually exhaustive research was done into the archives," he wrote; "this is a magnificent book, and Jennings' best work yet."8

One more word about John Shy: he expressed horror that I called the much

praised classical historian Francis Parkman a lying racist. Shy made no effort to dis

prove the charge, nor has anyone else. My sin consisted of saying plainly what had

been smothered under slobber. (C. Vann Woodward waved aside "fashionable" criti

cism of Parkman on the grounds that despite his strong biases he was "touched with

greatness. So were his writings.")9 After struggling with Parkman more than thirty years, and having to rewrite his work throughout, I felt entitled, indeed duty-bound, to say what the evidence showed him to be?and I gave the evidence.10 My evidence has been refuted by no one. Surely, the task of dealing with mere polemic should be

easy. Instead, Parkman's idolaters, who share his biases, coped with my charges by rushing into print new mass editions of his fictions called histories.

Like those others, Shy paid no attention to evidence. His review of Empire of Fortune exemplifies the rhetorical trick of attacking tone and style while avoiding consideration of factual content except to invoke Authority.

In this respect, Shy has faithfully followed the example set by Harvard's Bernard

Bailyn who responded to my first book, The Invasion of America, with silence as to

its contents and denunciation of its style as "boiling."11 What made it so hot was its

disproof of myths about Puritan Massachusetts that had been sedulously propagated by Harvard's Olympians. However, despite the efforts of Bailyn and his cohorts to

maintain their myths by suppressing Invasion, the book has survived and prospered. "It has been Jennings more than anyone," writes Neal Salisbury, "who has moved Indians out of romantic, racist melodrama and into history."12

When Bailyn, rather later, got around to acknowledging the "disarray" of

American history?a condition for which he bears much responsibility?he pro

posed to describe the "early history of the American population" by starting in

1773!13 Not only Indians and Blacks have almost entirely vanished from his "peo pling," but the Irish, Germans, and French as well. French Canada was part of North America and under British rule, but it vanished from Bailyn's pages except as a desti




nation for Englishmen; his geography is as erratic as his demography. The books raz

zle dazzle rhetoric won a Pulitizer prize, so the committee may have agreed that style is more important than substance in history; but if my style is boiling, Bailyn's in the

Voyagers book is fireworks.

In the course of large dicta about historians, Bailyn once again takes a sideswipe at me as "boilingly polemical" while expressing hope for some younger men who

(unacknowledged by him) have worked with me.14 Maybe he did not know; his igno rance of ethnohistory is immense. Unlike his "peopling," my books do take account

of Indians, Blacks, Irish, Germans, Spaniards, and French, as well as English people, and they start the peopling of North America at about 40,000 years ago. This, I sup

pose, is what makes them boil.15

As of this writing, it is now twenty years since The Invasion of America was pub lished, and Harvard's bombasts, despite their attacks on it, have never even tried to

refute its documented statements of fact. (They?Bailyn, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and

Edmund S. Morgan?have sponsored several pathetic efforts about Pequot Indians

and King Philip's War in the New England Quarterly, too inadequate to be worth

serious rejoinder.)16 Yet Shy's and Bailyn's biases seem almost tepid compared to Daniel J. Boorstin's.

Once a Communist briefly, Boorstin appeared in 1953 as a "friendly witness" before

the U.S. House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee where he

promptly betrayed his former roommates and assured the committee members that

his outlook on history was like theirs. This was a truthful statement. "This

Committee," he declared, "has not in any way impinged on my academic freedom."17 As to other scholars, he was silent, but he later assisted in ousting his colleague Jesse Lemisch from the University of Chicago's history faculty. Lemisch's freedom was dif

ferent from Boorstin's.

Later, in partial demonstration of his philosophy and methods of work

Boorstin attacked Quaker conduct in the Seven Years' War in Pennsylvania. He

wrote, "The minority of die-hard Quakers which controlled the [Pennsylvania]

Assembly would not budge from its traditional pacifism though the whole border

might burn for it."18 This bit of bigotry was absolutely contradictory to documented fact. The pacifist Quakers resigned from the Assembly which thereafter was domi

nated by Benjamin Franklin, who organized the province's defense against the

Indians and was chosen by the militias vote to be their colonel. At every step, the

greatest obstructions to Franklin's work were created by Proprietor Thomas Penn and his henchmen.19

For effusions similar to this, Boorstin was bucked up the right-wing patronage ladder to be Librarian of Congress in which position he posed as one of Americas

most eminent intellectuals.20 Boorstin's books, like Bailyn's, are on the open shelves in most bookstores across the country. My exposures of their fallacies and falsehoods

appear rarely. This situation, it seems to me, is opposed to objectivity in both the

writings of texts and the means of distributing them. Boorstin's falsehoods are




acclaimed as history, written by an eminent practitioner; the proofs of their falsity are

dismissed as "controversial" revisionism. Here is truly history with smoke and mir

rors, but its remedy is not psychoanalytical raving; rather it calls for more attention

to available evidence and a more equitable system for bringing it to public attention.

Beyond my personal involvement, I have given these examples to demonstrate

that strong bias, amounting to mythology, permeates much or most of the accepted histories of the United States. Racism, nationalism, and religious bigotry are

omnipresent. Underlying them all are the assumptions of Social Darwinism, the

direct, secularized descendant of the Chosen People concept. This theory has come

down to us from Olympus on the Charles, and is fiercely perpetuated there to the

present day.21

Among other examples of such biases, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., mentions "such

critically-acclaimed works as Perry Millers two volumes on the New England mind

in the seventeenth century, with scarcely a mention that Indians were present to

influence the Puritans, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning The

Age of Jackson, which included not a single word on the removal of the Southeastern

tribes, the Trail of Tears, or John Marshall's Worcester case decision."22

As an unexamined assumption, Social Darwinism closes the minds of standard

historians so that they not only refuse to read contradictory evidence, but actively try to suppress it. Let James H. Merrell testify regarding the refusal to read.

Those studies published in recent years that should have included native Americans too often neglected to do so, apparently because their authors had not read (or had not profited from reading) the scholarship on Indians . . . the research on Indians, far from overturning long-held notions about Americas colonial age, has done little to change the cast of mind that frames?and, by framing, limits?our view.23

In 1984, Frederick E. Hoxie surveyed thirteen college history textbooks and

found that they "simply ignore new information."24 In 1993, Daniel K. Richter

mourned that "apparently the perspectives on native peoples and their relationships with European colonizers developed since the 1970s belong only to a tiny sect with in the already small scholarly priesthood of early Americanists."25

Bernard Bailyn has remarked (in 1985) that "we know as yet relatively little"

about the movements "of either of the two non-Caucasian peoples?the Native

Americans and the Africans."26 It is a revealing phrase. He should have said non

European peoples, and he should have said also that he knows almost nothing about them. That ignorance, however, is not because of his excuse that information is

unavailable.27 There is far more than Bailyn has bothered to read.

Bailyn seems to have become uncomfortable with what he sees as history's state

of "disarray," and to have embarked on a crash course to set all to rights. It will be harder than he thinks, but his new awareness is to be welcomed. In this respect he is ahead of John Higham, the retired eminent historian of Johns Hopkins University,




who has published "The Future of American History" without an Indian in it in

March 1994.28

Authorities with particular casts of mind quite naturally resist challengers with

other orientations. The methods by which they defend their turfs distinguish totally authoritarian countries from those that permit more freedom of discussion. Unlike

the hamhanded techniques of former Soviets and Nazis, American authorities gener

ally use subtler methods to suppress dissent. Generally does not mean always. As Jonathan M. Wiener has observed, "The history profession as a community

of scholars draws the line separating history from non-history and exercises sanctions over those who do not conform to its definition."29 [Emphasis added.] Though every member of the profession is well aware of this fact, overt mention of it is one of our

taboos, the weight of which is especially heavy in regard to Social Darwinism. Yes, much-esteemed Richard Hofstadter wrote the important book Social Darwinism in

American Thought, but one must look rather closely at how he wrote it. He had much to say about the blatherings of lightweight John Fiske, but he carefully stopped short

of mentioning Francis Parkman who had taught Fiske all he knew. Parkman demon

strated all the Social Darwinian racial concepts and some of the phrases (such as sur

vival of the fittest). Hofstadter s omission of Parkman from his book on Social

Darwinism seems on its surface to have been a matter of prudence at least, perhaps pressure also. Hofstadter's book originally was published by the American Historical

Association for which Fiske was expendable but Parkman untouchable.30

How well such an incident demonstrates democratic institutions may be open to question, but it pales into insignificance when compared with the times not long ago when the nations power elite stepped in to draw the line separating history from

non-history and made its sanctions painfully clear.

During the great witch hunts of the 1950s, the year 1952 saw 100 firings of academics in California alone through close cooperation between university officials and the FBI, with something like 200 new appointments prevented.31 This was the decade when Richard M. Nixon drew the line between history and non-history. If not for the chance occurrence of Watergate, where would the line be now?

There is no way even to estimate how many careers were blasted and how many ideas were aborted by the secret blacklisting conducted by philosopher Sidney Hook

and his rabidly anti-Communist associates. Trial was impossible in their court; sus

picion guaranteed conviction.32

This activity had to be secret, not only because of its contemptibility, but

because the New Deal had outlawed blacklisting by private persons and institutions.

Such kangaroo courts were illegal. But government blacklists were omitted from the

ban; and, as a consequence of "loyalty" proceedings and the published listings of

"hostile witnesses" by Congressional and State committees?not to speak of the Red

Squads established by police in every large city?historians who dissented from offi

cial myth were hounded and suppressed. What omnipresent machinery of oppression this all amounted to! We are not entirely free of it yet. Those blacklists still exist and




are still consulted, though not as powerfully as during the Cold War. Quite natural

ly, writers, including historians, look over their shoulders before dissenting from the

"line" laid down from on high. In these circumstances, standard mythology is imper vious to challenge, no matter how false to fact.33

It cannot be doubted that scholarship in all fields must be disciplined, and the

proper persons to do this are the scholars' peers. Is it legitimate, however, to conduct

peer review secretly? This method of anonymous reviewing of manuscripts offers too

many opportunities for the stab in the back. (My files show it.) "Anonymous" means

that the referee's identity is kept secret from the author being critiqued. Thus the

author cannot tell when a critique has emanated from a personal or professional enemy, and is disabled from exposing its bias.

A small step forward has been made in recent years by also keeping the manu

script author's identity secret, but an experienced critic understands the ideological

tendency of the paper before him, and he can sometimes guess who wrote it because

specialists in a field become acquainted with each other. In any case, the critic cer

tainly knows what the manuscript says, and he praises or disparages it?secretly. Since editors cannot possibly have a background in all the subjects submitted to

them, they usually accept a referee's recommendation to publish or reject. Sometimes

they consult several critics.

This system is favored by most editors because they think it assures a referee's

candor. They are apt to gloss over its encouragement of secrecy for hatchet work. An

unstated assumption is that history is a gentleman's vocation, and gentlemen are hon

orable. But history has become a profession, a means of making a living rather than a dignified way for gentlemen with independent incomes to spend time. Professionals

protect their sources of income by whatever means seem necessary. (As we have seen

above.) In any case, it is hardly news that gentlemen have been known to stray from

the path of honor.

On the positive side, the secrecy system is alleviated by our usually free market

which contains many publishers of both books and periodicals. If a writer is stubborn

enough, he can sometimes drudge along from one rejection to another until a favor

able response is met. Usually, not invariably. The outstanding exception that comes

to mind was historical novelist Howard Fast. Tainted as a Communist, he was forced to publish privately because J. Edgar Hoover sent emissaries to threaten publishers and film makers. After Fast left the Communists publicly, commercial publishers

accepted his work again.34 I have benefited personally from the opportunity to struggle from one rejection

to another, but I can testify that it is hard on morale and wasting of much time. The

three publishers who rejected my first book, The Invasion of America, made me won

der seriously whether it was really any good. No question intruded of pro Communism or any modern political philosophy; The Invasion stuck to historical sources and themes, but it took the wrong sides and got some secret critiques of the

manuscript from persons who thought I should not have exposed Puritan misdoings




that Harvard's faculty regarded as the epitome of virtue. The rejections hurt. Morale

depleted, I was almost ready to give up. I wonder how many writers have indeed

given up after being rebuffed by secret critics. (The merit of those secret rejections is

demonstrated by Invasions sale figures, now approaching 40,000 copies and still sell

ing 1,500 to 2,000 copies per year, twenty years after publication, despite being defied shelf room in bookshops.)35

Americans have little cause for complacency in regard to the practices and

effects of censorship. On the one hand, as shown above, we have both subtle and

rough means of suppression. They do not create a vacuum. Rushing in to supplant works of critical intelligence is the tidal wave of "tumultuous romances" that now

dominate commercial publishing as soap opera and game shows dominate television.

(Compare the ads and reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.) Gresham s

Law has never been clearer. Contemporary history's "serious books" are overshad

owed by blockbusters from Henry Kissinger, Richard M. Nixon, and their like. The

implications are appalling. Romantic and political fantasies direct attention away from the clear and pre

sent necessity of subjecting American history's mythology to a stem-to-stern over

hauling. It will be a hard task because the ship's officers are opposed. At Stanford

University, Professor Carl N. Degler insists "that Americans are different from other

people, that their culture is unique," a position that he buttresses by strategic omis

sions of large chunks of history; e.g., robber barons, American Indians, seventeenth

century colonization.36 Degler reminds me of the lecture I once heard given by a

judge at Allen town, Pennsylvania, who proved that American history was marked

throughout by consensus. As the Civil War might have been a little awkward, he

omitted it from his discourse.

Degler is confident that all is right with the historical world. It is interesting,

considering what has been reported in this article, that Degler has asked, "Is opposi tion to new ideas, then, a serious problem among historians? I rather doubt it."37

The situation is not wholly hopeless. Here and there, one of the Establishment

types shows signs of unease. But the majority seems obdurate against considering the

findings of scholars not certified as orthodox, no matter the evidence. That evidence

is still piling up and sooner or later it must reach critical mass. Meantime, we shall

do well to follow the guidance of Daniel K. Richter "to construct a larger vision of

both native and Euro-American experiences (and, indeed, of the experiences of all the

peoples who have shaped North American society) that is inclusive and empowering, rather than imperialistic and dominating."38




Notes 1. For example: Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous

Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 2. Joyce O. Appleby, Telling the Truth about

History (New York: Norton, 1994).

3. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois

Empire (New York: Norton, 1984), chs. 16-18,

appendix B; Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies

and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), chs. 12, 15, 17-18, and arti

cles cited in both bibliographies. Two were in

Pennsylvania History: "Incident at Tulpehocken," 35 (1968), 335-355 and "The Scandalous Indian

Policy of William Penn's Sons: Deeds and

Documents of the Walking Purchase," 37 (1970) 19-39.

4. John Shy, Review of Empire of Fortune, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113 (Jan. 1989), 455. 5. See n.3 above.

6. Empire of Fortune, pp. 487-509.

7. Shy, Review, p. 454; William S. Hanna,

Benjamin Franklin and Pennsylvania Politics

(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

1964). Comment, p. 84, n. 37.

8. Denys Delage, "Bookwatch," Meeting Ground

20 (Winter 1989), 5-6. 9. "Obsessed with the Conquest of a Continent,"

New York Times Book Review, 3 July 1983, 3, 18.

Woodward's article was condensed from a speech he made at the Smithsonian Institution.

10. Jennings, "Francis Parkman: A Brahmin

among Untouchables," William and Mary

Quarterly, 3d. ser. 42 (1985), 305-328.

11. Bernard Bailyn, et al., The Great Republic: A

History of the American People, 2 vols., 3d ed.

(Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1985), 1:59.

12. Salisbury, "Francis Jennings and the State of

American Indian History," Reviews in American

History 17 (1989), p. 383. 13. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North

America; An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986), 3, 6; idem, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the

Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986). A proper title would have been something less jazzy, like

"Late Eighteenth Century English Emigration to

North America."

14. Bailyn, Peopling, 140, n. 15. Further in the same note, he remarks that "only recently

. . . has

there been a systematic errort to correct the old

and entirely misleading estimates of the size of the New England native population made originally

by James Mooney and updated by A. L. Kroeber."

He does not acknowledge that this is one of the

things that my "boiling" sought to "stand every

thing assumed to be true about the subject on its

head." See Jennings, Invasion of America: Indians,

Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), ch. 2.

15. Jennings, The Founders of America (New York:

Norton, 1993). 16. The New England Quarterly (hereafter NEQ) articles are as follows: Philip Ranlet, "Another

Look at the Causes of King Philip's War," NEQ 61 (1988), 79-100. Ranlet accuses me of being "the leading New Left scholar in the field whose bias has been pointed out by Bernard Bailyn, et

al" (79n.2). Leftists, Old and New, will affirm that I go my own way regardless of theirs, but

Ranlet has picked up the neat way to curse a

writer as beyond the pale. Rather precocious for a

graduate student. Surprisingly, he concludes, as I

had done, that King Philip did not launch the war as accused by Puritan propagandists: "Some cir

cumstances suggest that the timing of the war was

not Philip's" (p. 100). Mealy-mouthed, but did he know what he was saying?

Steven T. Katz, "The Pequot War

Reconsidered," NEQ 64 (1991), 206-224. Katz,

oddly, was professor of Near Eastern Studies

(Judaica) at Cornell University. See his way with

statistics: "Before the Pequots capitulated, many of their tribe had died, but the number killed

probably totaled less than half the entire tribe" (p. 222). Imagine his comment if Indians had mere

ly killed "less than half" of Boston's people. Alfred A. Cave, "The Pequot Invasion of

Southern New England: A Reassessment of the

Evidence," NEQ 62 (1989), 27-44. Cave accused

me of accepting the Rev. William Hubbard's fab

rication that the Pequots had invaded New

England from the west. Mea culpa. That should

teach me to trust a Puritan source. Cave remarked

that "the Pequot invasion story was a belated

embellishment to the Puritan propaganda of the

Pequot War" (p. 43). Actually he strengthens my book's indictment of "Puritan propaganda." 17. Thirty Years of Treason; Excerpts from Hearings

before the House Committee on Un-American




Activities, 1938-1968, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 601-611. Emphasis added.

18. Quoted from Daniel Boorstin, The Americans:

The Colonial Experience (New York: Random

House, 1958), 55. Boorstin s closely paraphrased source was Rev. William Smith, provost of the

College of Philadelphia, covert operative for

Proprietor Thomas Penn, and poison penman

extraordinary. Anonymously as always, Smith

proposed that the best way to deal with Quakers was to "cut their throats." See Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 226-237.

19. Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 240-243, 86-87, 255-257.

20. Jon Wiener, "The Odyssey of Daniel Boorstin," The Nation 245 (26 Sept. 1987), 305 307. As Librarian, Boorstin ordered demonstra

tors banned from using the Library; his action

was denounced and rescinded by Judge Harold

Greene as "utterly unconstitutional."

21. See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in

American Thought, 1860-1915, published for the

American Historical Association (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945). 22. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., "The Impacts of Recent

American Indian History," Occasional Papers in

Curriculum Series 3, DArcy McNickle Center for

the History of the American Indian (Chicago:

Newberry Library, 1984), 21.

23. James M. Merrell, "Some Thoughts on

Colonial Historians and American Indians,"

William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 46 (1989), 96.

24. Frederick E. Hoxie, "The Indian Versus the

Textbooks: Is There Any Way Out?" Occasional

Papers in Curriculum Series 1, D'Arcy McNickle

Center for the History of the American Indian

(Chicago, Newberry Library, 1984), 2. 25. Daniel K. Richter, "Whose Indian History?" William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 50(1993), 380.

26. Bailyn, Peopling, 20. In 1965, Bailyn noticed that political factions in New York were based

respectively on Indian trade retailers in tribal ter

ritories, and wholesalers between Albany and

Montreal. Only colonials, no Indians, were men

tioned; and except for this, no issues concerning Indians or Indian affairs were noticed in The

Origins of American Politics, orig. pub. in

Perspectives in American History by the Charles

Warren Center for Studies in American History 1,

Harvard University, 1967. I have used the paper back reprint (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 110-112. From this Delphic book, one would not

know that Indian affairs were involved even in the

Seven Years War in America. That war has van

ished from the pages of Bailyns Voyagers to the West. Indian issues and affairs were not part of

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1967). 27. The American Society for Ethnohistory was

founded in 1954, and has published a Quarterly Journal. The Smithsonian Institution is produc

ing a 20-volume Handbook of North American

Indians (since 1978). Fellows of the Newberry Library and university centers have produced a

flood tide of books. 28. John Higham, "The Future of American

History," Journal of American History 80 (March

1994), 1289-1307. Higham deplores "the

unquestioning rejection of American myths in

recent scholarship" because this "perpetuates their

intellectual tyranny" (p. 1307). This logic escapes me.

29. Jonathan M. Wiener, "Radical Historians and

the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980,"

Journal of American History 76 (1989), 400. 30. Cited n. 21 above.

31. Wiener, "Radical Historians," 402-403.

32. Hook's sleazily casuistical autobiography tries

to justify his backstabbing on high moral

grounds, but through the fog of self-righteous rhetoric one learns that "one source of funds" for

Hook's American Committee for Cultural

Freedom was the Farfield Foundation, "a conduit

for CIA funds." On one occasion when the

Committee ran low on funds, its then president, Norman Thomas, "said he would telephone 'Allen' for a contribution." This was "indiscreet of

him" writes Hook, because Allen was Allen

Dulles, head of the CIA. Hook believed that academics identified as

Communists "had no moral right to continue in

their posts." Such a person "forfeits the right to

academic freedom." This book should be read in

comparison to Howard Fast's, cited n. 34, below.

Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987),

425-426, 502, 499-500.

33. For examples, see It Did Happen Here:

Recollections of Political Repression in America, eds.

Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz (Berkeley:




University of California Press); and Loch K.

Johnson, Americas Secret Power: The CIA in a

Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. ch. 8, "The CIA in the Groves

of Academe." After the death of J. Edgar Hoover

and some scandals in the CIA, many more

exposes have become available.

34. Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990), chs. 14, 18, and passim. No

publisher dared challenge the edict of J. Edgar Hoover. I recommend reading this book in com

parison with Sidney Hooks, cited n. 32.

35. Cited n. 14 above. I here pay tribute to

Norman Fiering and Wilcomb E. Washburn for

their support of the book.

36. Carl N. Degier, Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), pp. xi-xii.

37. Degier, "What Crisis, Jon?" Journal of American History 76 (1989), 470. 38. Richter, "Whose Indian History?" cited n. 25,

p. 389.

