WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The credentialed radicals who run higher education wanted to erase America’s memory of its past.

Real Clear Education     Public Domain

The Lost History of Western Civilization

By David Randall
January 27, 2020

The prevailing opinion in our universities is that “Western Civilization” was essentially a wartime propaganda effort, invented during World War I. Stanley Kurtz’s excellent new report, The Lost History of Western Civilization, proves this notion is nonsense on stilts.

The credentialed radicals who run higher education wanted to erase America’s memory of its past. So they set out to delegitimize the standard Western Civilization survey course that was offered at many of our nation’s colleges at the time. Their effort was based on tendentious research by scholars such as Gilbert Allardyce and Lawrence Levine, who argued that before World War I Americans thought the United States was exceptional and distinct from Europe and never studied Europe and America as a civilizational unity. Allardyce and Levine argued that the Western Civ course was invented during World War I as a form of war propaganda, manufacturing a cultural connection, so our gallant doughboys would willingly sail to France to fight the Boche.

Therefore—and the therefore was always the point—who cares if you get rid of the Western Civilization course? “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Jesse Jackson and his cadre of activists chanted in 1987, “Western Culture’s got to go!” And why not? Hadn’t it been created in living memory? A professor of 70 was older than the Western Civ course! Why shouldn’t the universities dispense with it?

So Western Civ did go. Stanford got rid of the course in 1988. In 1964 the Western Civ course had been required in virtually every American university, but the requirement had almost vanished by 2010. Some universities kept the course for students to take voluntarily—but increasing numbers replaced it entirely with a World Civilization course. Three times as many students take the College Board’s World History Advanced Placement examination as take European History. Our students never have the chance to learn about the sequence linking Athens and Jerusalem to America, the continuous history from Plato to NATO.

Of course, Western Civilization exists. It’s not just that we read the Bible and Homer, that Rome bequeathed us its republican government and its law, that our jury system is Anglo-Saxon, our common law medieval, and our greatest playwright one William Shakespeare. It’s that every generation from Rome to the present has continuously added to the same culture—the copyist monks in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance gentlemen who transformed the rediscovered classics into a new humanism, the Bacons and Galileos and Harveys who built a new scientific method and body of knowledge upon Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. In America, our Founding Fathers built a new republic upon foundations two thousand years deep.

All that’s true of course, but Kurtz also provides chapter and verse to prove that American colleges taught a version of the Western Civ course long before World War One. 

Christendom, Europe, Western Civilization—whatever the name, the idea of a historically coherent European civilization was present at least from the Enlightenment writings of Scots historian William Robertson, and eighteenth-century American college students read their Robertson. The sophisticated nineteenth-century histories of François Guizot and his peers served as textbooks for Western Civilization’s long narrative—textbooks that swiftly formed the backbone of the American college curriculum. The Western Civ course of the 1920s owes more to Harvard’s History I of the 1890s than to Columbia’s War and Peace Issues of 1919.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century Americans surely thought they were exceptional— and with good reason. But they took America to be exceptional as the culminating perfection of the European tradition, not as its antithesis. George Berkeley, bishop and philosopher, phrased the notion neatly as early as 1726: “Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”

The destruction of the Western Civ course was not trivial. It was the erasure of a body of knowledge that constituted the American identity. To remove Western Civ was a body-blow against America’s civilizational memory—brain damage deliberately inflicted. It would be easier to subject America to revolutionary transformation if Americans forgot who they were.

Consider the Pledge of Allegiance: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You need the Western Civ course to understand the three-thousand-year history of the words allegiance, republic, nation, God, liberty, and justice. You need the Western Civ course to understand why we pledge ourselves to them, and what we lose when they are taken away from us. The Pledge means nothing if we forget our history.
 
Alas, the academic radicals have proved all too successful. The nation’s brain damage has increased for generations. Ever fewer Americans remember the sacred and humane letters that formed our moral consciousness, that provided the ethical arguments for liberty, that told why and how we must preserve free institutions. This brain damage makes it possible for Americans to be molded by woke tyranny’s euphemisms of social justice, multiculturalism, and global citizenship.

Higher education’s radical establishment won’t care about Kurtz’s report. They’ve already moved on to new rationales to explain why the Western Civ course must be destroyed. The Western Civ course can only be reinstated by the tenacious efforts of alumni and taxpayers, citizens and state legislators—the Americans who foot the bill for higher education. They, at least, can read The Lost History of Western Civilization and learn that we must reinstate the Western Civ course, and now. It isn’t just a matter of academic politics, but of the survival of our exceptional Republic. America lobotomized will die. 

We know practical ways to restore America’s memory. States such as California and Texas already require public universities to teach courses in American history and civics; new laws should add requirements to teach Western Civ courses. State legislatures should also dedicate money to autonomous schools dedicated to passing on knowledge of Western Civilization, such as Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. States such as Arizona and Wyoming require teachers to acquire minimum knowledge about the federal and state Constitutions; teaching licensure requirements should be reformed to include a Western Civ course. Parents everywhere should send their children to colleges with required Western Civ courses—or, at the very least, with Western Civ courses instead of World Civ.

The history of Western Civilization indeed has been lost. But it can be found. Stanley Kurtz has told us what we possessed, and what we must strive to possess again.

David Randall is Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.

GRACE LU

April 3, 2019

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Hello! I just wanted to let you know that as of last week, I have been accepted into Harvard, Yale, UPenn Wharton, Stanford, University of Southern California (on a full tuition scholarship), and University of Virginia (as an Echols Scholar). I am still deciding on which institution I will attend next year, but the one thing thing that I know for a fact is that all of these options would not have been made possible to me if it were not for The Concord Review.

I just wanted to thank you for creating The Concord Review as an opportunity and encouragement for high schoolers like myself to delve into the world of research and history. The UPenn admissions officer who reviewed my application specifically complimented my caliber of writing and research in The Concord Review—something that I could have not accomplished if it were not for not only the summer program, [TCR History Camp], but also something that would not have been possible without the existence of TCR. Thanks again for everything, and hope to speak soon.

Best,
Grace

[Grace Lu, Class of 2019, Douglas S. Freeman High School,
Henrico, Virginia. Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2018.
Her paper on The Great Leap Forward was published in
the Summer 2018 issue of The Concord Review.]
[She chose Stanford—Class of 2023]

HENRY KNOX

Good news, very good news, reached Washington’s headquarters on Thursday, January 18, [1776] when a bulky, bowlegged man with brilliant gray eyes rode into Cambridge after a two-month absence. Only twenty-five, he habitually wrapped his left hand in a silk handkerchief to conceal the stumps of two fingers amputated after the barrel of his fowling piece exploded in a hunting mishap on Noddle’s Island two years earlier. Even as a boy working in a Boston book bindery, he had impressed John Adams with “his pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind.” He was, the writer Washington Irving would observe, “one of those providential characters which spring up in emergencies as if formed by and for the occasion.”

This surely was an emergency, and here was young Henry Knox to announce that against stiff odds he had transported, in midwinter by boat and by sled, fifty-eight fine guns from Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point—cannons and mortars, brass and iron. Those guns, momentarily parked twenty miles to the west on a muddy roadside in Framingham, were now his, and he was ready and eager to blow the British out of his hometown. But first he had to have a uniform tailored—no simple task for a man who eventually weighed almost three hundred pounds—since he had just learned of his new commission as a colonel in command of all Continental artillery.

In an era of improbable ascents, Henry Knox’s rise was among the least likely. At age nine, he had been forced to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School when his father abandoned the family for the West Indies after his shipbuilding business collapsed. The boy went to work, both in the bindery and as an autodidact, teaching himself passable French and studying Plutarch’s Lives and Caesar’s Commentaries. At eighteen he joined a militia artillery company, training on brass 3-pounders under British tutelage and firing salutes for the king’s birthday. As a witness to the Boston Massacre, he testified at the subsequent trials and soon after opened his London Book-Store, peddling Bibles, law books, and almanacs in an effort, as he advertised, “to exterminate ignorance and darkness.” Knox himself was an attraction. “He was affable without familiarity, dignified without parade, imposing without arrogance,” one admirer wrote.

Within three years the shop had become “a fashionable morning lounge” for browsing British officers and well-heeled Bostonians alike, an emporium offering stationery, wallpaper, quills, flutes, Keyser’s pills, telescopes, “cordial cephalic snuff,” reading glasses, and Hill’s “never-failing cure for the bite of a mad dog.” And books: twenty volumes of Voltaire, ecclesiastical histories, the eleven-volume Complete History of England, treatises on shoeing horses and how to treat venereal disease with mercury, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and various pirated Irish editions, which were cheaper than books published in England. A few weeks before the British marched to Lexington, Knox offered a shilling pamphlet on “the dispute between Great Britain and the colonies” by a precocious New York college student named Alexander Hamilton….

…Knox had covered more than seven hundred miles since leaving Cambridge, nearly half of it lugging 120,000 pounds of dead metal. The return trip from Ticonderoga had taken forty days, rather than the fifteen he’d anticipated. The journey was a feat of endurance and pluck comparable to Arnold’s anabasis through Maine, and his was a hero’s welcome at Vassall House. As he prepared for a uniform fitting and to take command of the six hundred gunners in his regiment, he tallied his expedition expenses in an account book: £521, 15 shillings, and a few pence. One day Washington would say of Harry Knox: there was “no one whom I have loved more sincerely.”

Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming (234-237). Henry Holt and Co.. [2019] Kindle Edition.

WINTER SURPRISE

Winter always seemed to catch the U.S. Army by surprise. The Americans had been unprepared for winter campaigning in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia in 1942 and in the Apennines of Italy in 1943, and they were just as unready in 1944. Even before OVERLORD, War Department queries about cold-weather preparations had been mostly dismissed with a resentful scowl by Eisenhower’s provisioners. Arctic clothing tested at Anzio was offered to SHAEF but rejected as unnecessary. The Army’s quartermaster general in mid-August had predicted that “the war would not go into another winter,” and Major General Robert M. Littlejohn, the chief quartermaster in Europe, agreed that “the serious fighting cannot long continue.” In mid-September, Hodges assured his uneasy medical officers, “Don’t you know that this war is going to be over in a few weeks?” A late requisition for winter clothing was submitted to the War Department “as a precautionary measure,” but it included only enough to outfit one army of 350,000 soldiers at a time when four American armies were fighting in western Europe.

The alarming German resilience of late October had inspired Littlejohn to urge Bradley to expedite shipments of cold-weather kit to the battlefront. “General, the weather is getting cold. Soon you will need some winter clothing,” the quartermaster told him in Luxembourg City. Bradley waved off the warning, saying, in Littlejohn’s recollection, “The men are tough and can take it.” Supply-line sclerosis and delays in opening Antwerp aggravated matters, as did the severe wear on all uniforms and equipment: even as theater commanders in late September belatedly requested 850,000 heavy overcoats—double the number contemplated just a month earlier—plus five million sets of wool undershirts and drawers, quartermasters faced a need to reclothe a million ragged U.S. soldiers, as well as 100,000 French troops and throngs of German prisoners. “We can’t fight a winter war in the same clothes that we use in the summer,” Captain Jack Golden wrote his family. “We should have learned a little last winter in Italy.”

Instead, as the Army official history conceded, “front-line troops fought through a large part of the winter inadequately clothed.” Far less than half of the requested underwear reached the theater, despite Littlejohn’s contention that “wool is essential to combat, as much as ammunition.” Shortages of wool socks in medium sizes forced Army laundries to try shrinking size 12 pairs, even as unintended shrinkage remained a galling problem, with a “high failure rate in all woolens.” Three field launderings were typically enough to ruin a pair of socks, so the Army had to buy seven million new pairs a month.
 
Rick Atkinson, (2013-10-22). The Liberation Trilogy (Kindle Locations 41076-41096). Henry Holt and Co...2013 Kindle Edition.