It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.
Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)
The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.
The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.
But back to that last chapter.
It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…
(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.
(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)
Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:
Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?
Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?
Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.
In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.
How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?
Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?
It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Let me hear a big American –Amen!
19 Cent Notebook 