ARE GILDER AND LEHRMAN TILTING AMERICAN
HISTORY TO THE RIGHT? A Case in Point
BY JESSE LEMISCH
November 11, 2004
Mr. Lemisch is the author of many books including, On Active
Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American
Historical Profession.
Having had a busy autumn, I've only just seen the New-York
Historical Society's Alexander Hamilton exhibit (it runs September
10-February 28; U.S. tour, 2005-2008). As we would expect
from Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the two rich right-wingers
who have in effect taken over the N-YHS, the exhibit leads
inexorably to the re-election of George Bush, the rejection
of the last thirty-five years of social history, and a paean
to triumphalist capitalism. Richard Brookhiser, Hamilton biographer
and senior editor of the National Review, is Historian Curator
of the Hamilton exhibit. My purpose now is to get down some
of my raw thoughts and to kick off discussion about this exhibit
and the larger issues around penetration of the historical
profession by Gilder & Lehrman and their Gilder Lehrman
Institute of American History.
The central themes of the Hamilton exhibit announce themselves
fairly garishly even before you enter. A huge, multi-colored
banner stretching a full block along Central Park West reproduces
the ten dollar bill (take a look in your wallet). Leaving
a small space for entry, the banner otherwise covers the entire
four-story facade: standing at the corner of Central Park
West and 77th, I found it impossible to get the whole thing
in a picture. (Let's hope that, like the characters in Macys'
Thanksgiving Parade that assembles nearby, it's well anchored
against the wind.) The exhibit is entitled "The Man who
Made Modern America," reflecting a theory of how history
happens, an archaically hagiographic approach (which is coming
back into style in Bush's America), and a certain political
partisanship.
An opening high-tech slide show ridicules those contemporaries
who dared to utter critical words about Hamilton. Actor's
voices represent Jefferson as haughty and aristocratic; John
Adams is whiny, kvetchy, failing to recognize Hamilton's greatness.
Gilder Lehrman has decided to pursue a popular audience by
presenting Hamilton as somewhat populist, anti-slavery (unlike
that bad Jefferson), a humble immigrant, illegitimate at that,
who acted out the American dream and rose to the heights:
a Great Man who rose from the people. (In the "Time Line"
section, there is one mention of Hamilton's role in putting
down the Whiskey Rebellion by armed force, but no effort to
square this with the otherwise benign picture of him.)
Gilder and Lehrman must have spent millions on this high-tech
exhibit. (Overall, the New York Times reports, the exhibit
cost the Society $5 million: "Shift at Historical Society
Raises Concerns"; the article quotes historian Mike Wallace
as fearing that the Historical Society could "wind up
as a subsidiary of the Gilder Lehrman Institute.") As
we enter the main hall, we see, straight out of 1984, several
gigantic video screens showing modern scenes: the floor of
the NY Stock Exchange, commuters at Grand Central Terminal,
high rises under construction, and -- no kidding -- military
paratroopers jumping out of planes. This is the exhibit's
idea of Hamilton's heritage today, and it leaves no doubt
as to the heroic quality of that heritage. So that we can
see the video images, the items in the exhibit are mainly
in semi-darkness, with many displayed almost at floor level
and with illumination that makes them almost impossible to
make sense of. A forty-minute theatre presentation, "Alexander
Hamilton in Worlds Unknown," well acted on stage by a
man and a woman (a little Oedipally, she plays Hamilton's
mother, his wife, and Mrs. Reynolds, with whom Hamilton had
an affair) is nicely integrated with large video images. We
move from the opening to the strains of "Yankee Doodle,"
through Hamilton's life, and on to The Duel, with his life
poignantly and sympathetically presented partly as a search
for his absent father, with Washington and others as surrogates.
G and L's notorious takeover and purge at the N-YHS (the
July New York Times article mentioned above caught only the
tip of the iceberg, with more to come) is part of their larger
penetration of American history. These two wealthy Yalies
('60), supporters of the right-wing Manhattan Institute (Gilder
is founder and a former chair), have a clear ideological program.
To me, the strategy seems reminiscent of the CIA's suppport
for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, including the funding
of Encounter (see Christopher Lasch's classic article on this
in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past, 1968). Gilder
and Lehrman are buying legitimacy by buying historians, giving
money to Yale and to the Organization of American Historians,
constructing a board with some stellar left-liberal types
on it (what is with this, guys?). Put this together with the
horrors at NEH and we have a clear picture of the theft of
history for ideological purposes. But the N-YHS exhibit has
neither subtlety nor historiographical sophistication: the
codpiece slips, and the right-wing agenda comes right out
in your face, starting with that huge $10 bill, hanging over
Central Park West.
URL: http://hnn.us/
