The Cold War Mentality of "A Nation at Risk"

Steven Cromack

“Our nation is at risk,” declared a 1983 report released by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.   The fallout from this simple, short report was astounding.  Its lucid words indicted the American education system and sparked national panic.  Schools across the country scrambled to assess their own standards, revised them, and implemented standardized tests.  Twenty-nine years later, as far as the state of American education is concerned, not all hope is lost.  This document was a product of Cold War mentality.  The Commission examined America’s schools under a microscope of fear. Was the United States losing the Cold War?  Only through education—advancement in math, science, and literacy—could the Land of the Free defeat the Communist threat.  “A Nation at Risk,” its language, and its implications reflect Cold War dogma—in examining this document in the era of globalization, it is evident that the Commission’s Cold War mindset failed to recognize that in the midst of the conflict, America’s schools were not failing; instead, they were shaping the future competition in which the United States finds itself in 2012.

Many Americans believed, as did the Commission, that the United States was not the great giant of innovation it once was.  The Commission asserted, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.”  Like most Americans, the members of the Commission believed that America was falling far behind the lurking Communists.  America’s greatness, in their eyes, was drowning in its own falling standards.  The Commission echoed national fears: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”  Furthermore, they captured the cynicism of the American public with the declaration, “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”  It seemed to the Commission, and many others, that America was losing the Cold War. 

The language used in the subsequent paragraphs continued to examine the American educational system through the Cold War lens.  “We have squandered the gains in achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge,” the Commission avowed, reaffirming the idea that America had fallen behind the Soviets.  The United States failed to maintain a competitive edge in science and industry.  Ultimately, the Commission argued that the underlying cause of this loss was the faltering education system.  Its members claimed, “We have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible.  We have, in effect, committed an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”  Here, the Commission dropped the phrase that no politician during President Reagan’s first term dared use: “disarmament.”  Many fretted that disarmament would lead to defeat.  Dismantling armaments meant weakening the state.  In using disarmament as a metaphor for not stimulating education, the Commission highlighted its Cold War ideology.  It was a metaphor that reflected the period.
   
With ending of the Cold War came a new way to view the increasingly globalizing world.  The economic boom of the 1990s, albeit an illusion of boom, led to a rise in per capita income.  How was it possible that this boom came on the heels as a “functionally illiterate” generation entered the workforce?  In his book Catching Up or Leading the Way, Yong Zhao asked the question: If America is indeed a nation at risk, and if education is always on the decline, how does the United States maintain its competitiveness?   The Global Competitive Index rates nations on the level of prosperity brought to their citizens.  In 2007, the United States ranked number one of 131 countries (41).  Furthermore, the years between 1993 and 2003 saw a 40 percent increase in college graduation.  That decade also saw a 1 percent increase in the number of graduates who hold science and engineering jobs (42).

In 2011, David von Drehle published an article in Time Magazine titled, “Don’t Bet against the United States.”  Like Zhao, Drehle examined the concept of a “Nation at Risk” in the era of globalization and saw what the Commission could not see with their Cold War mentality.  He argued that throughout the Cold War self doubt drove the United States: from Nixon declaring that America was worse off since Eisenhower left office, to the “crisis of confidence” exuded by Carter.  It was easy to blame schools.   But, Drehle asserts, “fallen trees don’t prove the forest is dying” (35).  Yes, reform is necessary, but America is not on the decline, it just needs to refocus itself in the world it has created.  Drehle concluded, “When more people in more countries are free to rise, to invent, to communicate, to dissent, it’s not the doom of U.S. leadership.  It is the triumph of the American way.”

This Cold War mindset meant that the Commission could not view America’s education and uncertainty as one of its greatest strengths.  The American education system is nowhere near perfect.  The United States must now refocus upon its education system in order to maintain a competitive edge, and drive the competition that the future holds. 

American Pre-history

Dan Allosso
.

I thought I’d try something different this fall, to add an element of perspective and Big History to the beginning of my US History survey.

So I pulled some of the latest ideas from genetics-enhanced archaeology from books I’ve read recently, including Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and How We Survived, Colin Tudge’s Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, and David J. Meltzer’s First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Although most textbooks nowadays briefly mention pre-Columbian America, the impression you get is of a pre-history that is vaguely understood, remote, and largely irrelevant to American history. By starting my syllabus at 36,000 BP rather than 1492 and devoting my first lecture to “Pre-history,” I tried to suggest to the students that the pre-Columbian American past is interesting and relevant.

Of course, you’d be interested in pre-Columbian Americans if you carried their blood, and I thought my students might be interested to know that outside the U.S., the majority of Americans are partly descended from the people who were here when the Europeans arrived. Norteamericanos are unique in the degree to which we didn’t mix, although the Mexicans and even the Canadians did much better than those of us living in the middle third of our continent. And I thought my students ought to understand that three out of the five most important staple crops in the modern world (maize, potatoes, and cassava – the other two are rice and wheat) were developed by early American farmers. Even the 2010 textbook I’m using fails to escape the gravity-well of the master narrative, repeating the myth that Indians were poor farmers and that agriculture was invented in the eastern Mediterranean and later in China.

Finally, I was really fascinated (and I hope some of my students were as well) by the recent developments in theories of migration. Although anthropologists are not yet unanimous on the issue, there is growing support for the theory that most of the people alive today are principally descended from an ancestral population of plains hunter-gatherers who migrated from Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago and settled on the steppe north of the Black Sea. When the last ice age began, steppe and tundra environments spread across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and these people followed the herds of caribou, mammoth, and wooly rhinoceros. The plains hunters prospered as earlier human populations and their temperate forest habitats dwindled. By about 30,000 to 26,000 years ago, some of these plains hunters had spread westward into Europe (where based on genetic evidence they mixed with some older groups, including Neanderthals), while others had covered the entire breadth of Siberian and arrived at Beringia, their gateway to the Americas.

Most of my students seemed vaguely aware that the first Americans migrated from Asia across a “land bridge.” I tried to impress on them that Beringia, which lasted for 16,000 years and was 1,100 kilometers wide, was really not a “bridge,” and the people who crossed it weren’t “migrating.” They were living in Beringia and northwestern Alaska, just as they had done for hundreds of generations. But I think the most important element of this story is that it helps the students recognize that Native Americans and the Europeans they encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 were cousins who had expanded in different directions from the same ancestor population. The differences between them were extremely recent – as is recorded history.

As a final example of this recent rapid change, I talked a little about milk. Most people in the world cannot digest milk after childhood. The ability of Europeans to synthesize lactase and digest lactose is a recent mutation, dating to about 10,000 years ago. It corresponds with the domestication of the aurochs into the modern cow (several African groups like the Masai share this trait, but scientists believe they developed it and domesticated cattle independently), and the mutation probably spread rapidly because it gave its bearers a tremendous nutritional advantage in times of famine. This rapid spread of a biological change, I hope, will suggest other ways that Europeans and Native Americans diverged from their shared ancestry, while at the same time reminding my students of this shared heritage.

History and America's Most Wanted

Randall Stephens

"The United States adheres to its own theory of history," writes Paul Berman in the New Republic. He weighs in on the country's peculiar view of the past and American ideas of progress and looks at the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound and the larger meaning of his death. History, in the view of many citizens, has a clear direction, an identifieable purpose. "In our own liberal and democratic theory of history," says Berman, "doctrines like Al Qaeda’s are doomed to defeat. This is because, in our estimation, the mad and fantastical doctrine about resurrecting an ancient caliphate is comparable to other such doctrines that we have encountered during the last century—e.g., the doctrine about resurrecting the Roman Reich in an Aryan version, or the doctrine about resurrecting the ancient Russian peasant communes in the form of a proletarian Soviet civilization." Here's the sort of inevitability that historians find so out of whack.

"But let us also recognize that, beyond the details of an efficient operation," Berman remarks, "the symbolism is hard to mistake."

And, since the present war is ultimately a war of ideas, let us not fail to recognize that symbolism is ultimately crucial. The symbolism of this present raid says: Relentlessness expresses history. History is not on bin Laden’s side. History is on the side of democracy and freedom. History will not be deterred. Yes, we should ask ourselves: Does it make sense to speak about abstractions like “history”? Does the relentlessness of a manhunt contain any deeper meanings at all? There is an answer to these questions. The abstractions express a meaning if we choose to endow them with meaning. Ten years of man-hunting suggest that we have chosen to do so.>>>

What is the larger meaning of bin Laden's demise? How will it shape America's relation with the world? After shouts of "USA, USA, USA" have died down and revelers have put away their gigantic flags, will we see what the larger significance or symbolism of his death is? Perhaps it will take many years for the implications to play out.

In the meantime it might be interesting to consider other "most wanted" figures who have plagued the government and struck fear in the hearts of citizens. (Caveat: I don't intend any sort of moral equivalency with bin Laden.) The list below could include many more, but here's a partial who's who:

* Geronimo, mid to late 19th century

* Billy the Kid, 1860s-1880

* Frank and Jesse James, late 19th century

* Pancho Villa, nineteen-teens

* John Dillinger, 1930s

* Al Capone, 1920s-1930s

* Ted Kaczynski, 1970s-1990s

* Timothy McVeigh, 1990s

* Mohammed Farah Aidid, 1990s

* Eric Robert Rudolph, 1990s-2000s

Take Pancho Villa. The Mexican revolutionary and guerilla fighter brought Americans to new heights of anxiety. This feared bandit killed 34 Americans in 1916 and became, for Americans at least, one of the most reviled figures of the day. Villa--a liberator in the eyes of many of his countrymen--was thought to be a murderous blackguard, a villainous butcher, a subhuman thug. President Woodrow Wilson sent General John J. Pershing to hunt down Villa in Mexico. But, because of the outlaw's widespread support and the unfamiliar, hostile terrain, Pershing failed.

In 1916 the Atlanta Constitution excitedly reported what proved to be a false account of Villa's death: "Villa's body has been dug up out of a two weeks' old grave by Carlos Carranza, nephew of General Carranza" (April 17). He "Died in Agony" so went the report. The writer, at the end of the piece, did mention that some doubted the claims.

Villa did finally meet his end in 1923. He had received a pardon and was retired to a ranch. Villa, said Will Rogers in what passed for humor back then, died of Mexican natural causes. He was shot in the back. Americans let their rage melt into laughter.

Historians now can read from the Villa trouble something about American culture and diplomacy in the Wilson years. What did he symbolize? What did his menacing presence on the U.S. southern border mean for Americans? For that matter, what have so many other criminals, arch-villains, terrorists, and "blackguards" at home and abroad meant to Americans over the decades, centuries?

American Exceptionalism

Bruce Mazlish

Today's post comes from Bruce Mazlish, professor emeritus of history at MIT. A distinguished historian, he is the author or editor of a variety of books and articles, including: The Global History Reader (Routledge, 2005), ed. by Mazlish and Akira Iriye; The New Global History (Routledge, 2006); and The Uncertain Sciences (Yale, 1998; paper Transaction Press, 2007) .

All peoples think of themselves as special, their way of life as exceptional. The USA certainly thinks of itself as exceptional, elevating the claim to a national shibboleth. This claim guides the country in its thinking and behavior in international affairs. Though all are exceptional, America sees itself as more exceptional than others. The implications of this conviction are profound and fundamental. Inquiry into this belief system, given the power, economic and military of the country, appears necessary.1

Its roots are deep and tangled. In Ian Tyrrell's definition, "The idea of the United States as a unique and indeed superior civilization outside the normal historically determined path of human history lies at the heart of American exceptionalism."2 With this provisional definition, we can proceed to examine the origins of the experience and its phases.

Apparently, one of the earliest formulations comes from a Marxist analysis claiming that America is exceptional in not having a true class system. Hence socialism does not flourish in America as it does elsewhere. This was a theory advanced by Werner Sombart, a Marxist influenced historian. However, before Sombart, Alexis de Tocqueville had used the term "exceptional" in his Democracy in America. One aspect of America for him was that as a nation it had been born in the light of day i.e., its origins not lost in the forests of the past but visible to contemporary observers. Even before the Frenchman's classic analysis, a general European view of the continent stressed both the unparalleled possibility of abundance in the New World as well as its dark barbarianism, seeing them as exceptional. The encounter with the Indians seemed to be unique (very different from that in South America).

The original colonists of New England had faith that the New World was liberated from the dead hand of the past and no longer subject to the strictures of what we would now call historical determinism. It had a special mission, to spread its creed of freedom to the rest of the world (a latent contradiction to exceptionalism?) In the process, the carriers of this creed were experiencing a rebirth. In the view of Richard Slotkin, this belief had a dark side. "The first colonists," he writes, "saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."3

In his article on American exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset quotes G.K. Chesterton to the effect that "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed."4 That creed was to be a light to the world; the nation had a divine mission to spread the blessings of freedom and liberty to the rest of the world (even by violence, if necessary).

Clearly, the concept is a fundamental part of the American belief system. Its implications are extremely important. I want to argue that we must see the concept historically, as a dynamic part of the American experience. In doing so, we can discern two major phases. The first is a more or less benign expression. It has led the US into seeking to support freedom of dissent and human rights in many parts of the world. Alas, the country has been hypocritical in the way it does this. All too often, it says one thing and does another. For example, it proclaims freedom and democracy and then supports autocratic countries such as Saudi Arabia. It behaves occasionally according to a double standard. Opposing torture elsewhere, it has practiced it within its own borders. This becomes increasingly clear as we look at more recent history.

I want to suggest that there are variants on American exceptionalism: benign and malignant. The benign is most marked in the 18th and 19th centuries as America sought to fulfill Winthrop's prophesy of its being a city on a hill that would serve as a light for the rest of mankind. With all its deep-rooted faults at home—slavery being the “blackest”—ranging from its treatment of the Indians to its continental and then overseas imperialism, America, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, the port through which so many of its immigrants arrived, seemed to beckon all peoples to the freedom and liberty of the country. Abroad, it strove to spread its message as widely as possible.

Though proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, thus announcing its dominion over both the North and South continents, along with its existing appropriation of the name "America" for itself, the nation exhibited a mix of isolationism and participation in international affairs. The benign aspect would appear especially after WW II, when America was in the foremost rank of those seeking to establish institutions and codes that would seek to punish not only war crimes but also crimes against humanity. The UN, with America providing a home for it in New York City, in 1948 issued a Declaration of Human Rights. A few years earlier in the Nuremberg trials the US was among the foremost in seeking justice on an international scale. The Yugoslav and Rwanda trials following confirmed this trend, culminating in the International Criminal Court. Elsewhere I have called this a "Judicial Revolution."5 Here was reached the sticking point for the US. It became increasingly clear, especially in the Bush administration, that America was not prepared to be held to the same justice and laws that it had so prominently helped establish.

Now emerged the malignant side of American exceptionalism. It served as one of the banners under which the US felt that it was exempt from conforming to international law except where and when it suited its own purposes. President Obama rightly takes exception to this assertion—America is a nation like all others, and subject to the same laws of history and judgment—and has been roundly criticized by Tea Party members for this statement of equality. Frequently invoked in the present, Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are reported as "denouncing Obama for denying 'American exceptionalism.'"6

There are many founding myths in America. In its malignant form, that of American exceptionalism is one of the most potently damaging, to America itself and to the world. It is time that it is dug up by the roots and placed in the trash bin. We can do this easily on the computer; it is time that we matched this action in our minds as well.

___________

1. The literature on "American exceptionalism" is extremely full. Rather than trying to list various titles, I refer the reader to that rubric in Google, where numerous examples are given.

2. Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism and Uneven Global Integration: Resistance to the Global Society," in The Paradox of a Global USA, ed. by Bruce Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode (Stanford, 2007).

3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan, 1973), 5.

4. Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, "American Exceptionalism," Washington Post, 1991.

5 . See Bruce Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2009), especially Chapter 4.

6. Quoted in Thomas Friedman, "From WikiChina," New York Times, November 30, 2010.