Part 9

American history is being rewritten; the legendary and sentimental method of writing it is growing in disfavor; a scientific age demands the truth, and under its insistence new data are coming to light and old myths are passing away. It is beginning to dawn on American minds that this republic is the child of Europe and not of England; that old man of buckram—the Anglo-Saxon—is having a hard time with that new man of straw—the Scotch-Irishman; and when science gets the latter on the dissecting table there won’t be much left of him but rags and papier-maché.

To-night I will try to direct your attention to “Some Ways in which American History is Falsified”; and by falsification I do not mean so much the deliberate perversion of facts as I do the false effects produced by evasion, distortion, wrong point of view, and the physical and mental limitations and defects of writers, which in their results are quite as mischievous as those produced by perversion and design.

I will for my purposes group my object lessons under four heads, illustrating each with a writer passing current as an historian.

1. _Mental Invalidism._ The disease of certain literary doctrinaires whose natural defects have been aggravated by education and fixed by training. Prof. John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, is a fine type of this arrogant school of dogmatism.

2. _Legend and Sentiment._ The exploitation of legends, inherited ideas, race and family myths, made current and passing into literature by the efforts of those whose faith in folklore as historical data is profound, and to whom facts and documentary evidence are unimportant. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an amateur historian, is the high priest of this cult; he is the custodian and incense swinger of the deified Puritan, the marvel and fountain of the graces of the modern age.

3. _Imagination._ The school of writers who add to the gayety of nations, who make history from their own inner consciousness, and who record it as they imagine it ought to be, not as it is. Under this head comes that humorless horde of scribblers, the Scotch-Irish littérateurs, and the intellectual giant of Tennessee, Judge Temple, author of _Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan_.

4. _Carelessness and Credulity._ Writers who accept any evidence stated with solemnity and the air of authority, but who subject it to no tests to ascertain its verity and genuineness. Under this head I take exceptions to the statements made by Prof. John Fiske in a recent work, a writer hitherto regarded as safe and reliable.

I will now devote a few minutes to a work entitled _Political Science and Constitutional Law_, written by Prof. John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, and designed to be a text-book for that and other educational institutions.

Mr. Burgess is a rampant type of what a coldly critical and remorselessly correct writer, John M. Robertson, of London, calls a Celtophobe—a Celt hater. The learned Professor asserts dogmatically that the Celt never has, never can, and never will amount to anything nationally or politically; and that all law, order, and scientific government have sprung from and are due to what he calls the Teutonic races. Professor Burgess is a product of German training and education, and his views have received the cordial endorsement of such a calm and dispassionate authority as the London _Times_. The careful writer in stating his theory will fortify it with facts and figures and marshal his authorities before proceeding to erect a fabric on it; but Professor Burgess isn’t that kind of a man. He states his theory with an air of profound conviction and authority and goes ahead. His theory, like a good many other fabrics “made in Germany,” looks well, is calculated to deceive the unwary and unthinking, but under very ordinary scrutiny proves to be very commonplace, shoddy.

Let me show you a few of the gems from his treasury:

“Only the Teutonic races have produced national states.... The National State is thus the most modern and most complete solution of the whole problem of political organization which the world has as yet produced; and the fact that it is the creation of the Teutonic political genius stamps the Teutonic races as the political nations _par excellence_, and authorizes them in the economy of the world to assume the leadership in the establishment and administration of states.”

This brilliant outburst winds up a series of equally impressive statements. Just what the Professor means by National States and political nations I do not know, nor am I sure he knows himself. At any rate, he appears to lay down a doctrine very delightful to these governments which bully nations and steal territories, if not quite so agreeable to those bullied and plundered.

Now listen to his views on the unfortunate Celt; they have the old familiar ring of anti-Irish hysteria, for which familiarity has bred Irish contempt.

“Personal attachment in small bodies to a chosen Chief is the peculiar political trait of the Celtic nations.... The effect of such a political character has always been the organization of the Celtic nations into numberless petty military States, in each of which individual rights have been ignored; between all of which civil war has been the permanent status; and against which foreign force has been continually successful.... Violence and Corruption have always marked the politics of Celtic nations.”

Let us stop for a moment to analyze this tremendous blast from Columbia University, remembering that Germany and England are Professor Burgess’s ideal Teutonic nations.

From the time of the Roman retrocession from England until the landing of William the Norman at Hastings, that unfortunate land was in the hands of one of the dullest, most unimaginative, worst-governed, and worst-governing races history mentions—the Saxons—for six hundred years; it had become a congeries of warring, military chieftainship, in which civilization was almost obliterated, learning had disappeared, religion was at its lowest ebb, life and property had no safety, the people were enslaved, and the coast harried by foreign and victorious foes. The advent of a strong conqueror—a mixed Celt and Norseman—changed all this, hammered England into a strong military kingdom, connected her with the civilization that has made the world what it is—the Latin—and did in six years what the pure Teutonic race had signally failed to do in as many centuries.

Prior to the historic event known as the Reformation, Germany had as much peace as her neighbors—which wasn’t much—and all she had she owed to her intercourse with the Latin South, to her touch with the civilization and religion of Rome. After that event Germany was torn into factions, military chiefs sprang up, petty military states were made, violence and corruption were the rule, civilization retrogressed, the people were degraded and the land devastated. Germany was without unity; her mercenaries were for sale to the highest bidder; she was terrible only to her children, the prey of foreign forces, with civil war a permanent status. The advent of Napoleon was a blessing; he hammered a lot of petty principalities out of existence and formed two or three monarchies out of the bewildering many. The fall of Napoleon saw Germany a confederation, much after the fashion of pre-Reformation days, with Austria on top. Again came wars and dissensions, and finally the strong conqueror who united Germany against a common foe and made her what she is to-day. Germany, I take it, is the highest political expression of the Teutonic race, according to the dictum of Professor Burgess. What is it?

A military despotism of the most mediæval type, governed by an autocrat of doubtful sanity, whose person is more sacred apparently than that of the Deity; a land whence the people fly to seek safety, peace, liberty; a government that is a constant threat to the peace and civilization of the earth and that embodies all the reactionary principles a free people hate.

One does not expect the German professor, his disciple, or the mole in the earth to see what is going on in the sunlight.

If we turn to Ireland we see nothing but violence, corruption, and plunder in the methods of the Teutonic race ruling there; and we observe improvement in Irish affairs only with the decrease of English influences and the increase of Irishmen in Irish affairs.

It is a favorite axiom of the Teutonic writer of the Burgess type, wherever English and German rule is a failure, that the people ruled are unfit for government. Did it ever occur to them that the shoe is on the other foot—they are unfit to govern?

The unfitness of the English to govern Ireland is historic; it was exhibited in America, as some may recall; it is notorious in India and round the earth. The best-governed possessions of England are the lands where Englishmen are least in evidence. Germany in Africa is producing the usual harvest of Teutonic “genius”—depopulation and devastation.

But Mr. Burgess has a theory, and he does not propose to hamper it with facts. He asserts that the government—the political organization—of Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the results of Teutonic genius. This will probably be news to the world; but if the debility, decay, and general rottenness of those kingdoms are the result of Teutonic genius, the sooner they try the genius of the negro and the Chinaman the better for them. He covers whatever political good may exist in Greece, Bulgaria, and Roumania by attributing it to the impecunious German princes now adorning the rickety thrones in those lands. The idea is original, but not impressive. Why not attribute the political condition of Scandinavia to the presence on its throne for ninety years of Bernadotte, the French (Celtic) military adventurer, and his wife, the daughter of the Irish merchant Cleary, and their children? The logic is as good, or as bad, in one case as the other.

But why go on with this tissue of professional rubbish?

Nations are made what they are by climate, environment, peace, war, and economic and industrial conditions. Groups of men learn as does the individual, in the school of experience. Nations have no genius for anything; the botch work we call government to-day at its best is hardly a manifestation of genius. Nations may have temperaments, the product of experience, but only the individual has character.

Professor Burgess is merely a mental invalid, an hysterical Celtophobe. He either forgets the existence of Rome and Greece, or he fails to understand the value of civilization and human experience; he is a kind of literary phonograph, repeating the slanders and absurdities which a school of race egotists have raised to a cult. He is a decidedly unsafe man to educate a coming generation of Americans, for the writer of solemn and dogmatic nonsense is unfit to train the American youth. Certainly no self-respecting man of Irish-Celtic blood should permit his children to attend a university where they are taught that the perpetrators of ages of outrage and wrong are divinely selected beings, chosen “to assume leadership in the establishment and administration of States.”

If we desire that sort of rubbish taught, it is just as easy to secure professors at Bloomingdale as it is at Columbia.

The legendary and sentimental makers of history seem to thrive best in New England; and a fine type of the cult is the so-called “scholar in politics,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts and Nahant. There is in China a religion whose principal tenet is the worship of ancestors, the placation of ancestral manes. This religion is called Tavism; and possibly the purest type of Tavist, outside of China, is the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. Lodge is firmly convinced that the Puritan represents the perfect type of man; that the history of the world began in 1620; that the Puritan derived most of his excellence from being of English blood; and that, while Puritans were Dutch, French, Scotch, and even Irish, the lack of English blood somehow made them incomplete. While the ordinary English Puritan was a wonderful personage, the one who landed in Massachusetts was a genuine marvel, but when he settled around Boston and Nahant, he began to ooze genius and take on wings and halo. To this legend is added, sometimes by direct statement and sometimes by implication, the intelligence that all the great and good things that make this republic different from and superior to other lands are due to the miraculous powers of the Puritan. He is the creator of human freedom, the father of religion, liberty, and tolerance, the founder and originator of free schools, and the reputed author of so many ideas totally at variance with his narrow creed that were he to rise from his bed of clay in New England into the sunlight of to-day, he wouldn’t know himself.

This is the school of historical incubation of which Mr. Lodge is the high priest. Mr. Lodge has many admirable qualities; but his mental vision is defective, strabismal, and his ancestral credulity amazing. I am satisfied that Mr. Lodge would not _knowingly_ do an unjust, intolerable, or dishonorable thing; but he is so en-webbed in tradition and so steeped in myth and legend that his rôle of historian is a decided misfit. How else can we account for the absurd theories he has exploited and the conception of historic events he has fathered in literature?

Anybody who has even read his history of the _Thirteen Colonies_ will learn that the success achieved in building them up was due to the Puritans; and one is convinced that had some wandering vagabond from Massachusetts been cast away on the coast of Spanish-America, the Latin Republics south of us would now be the model governments of the earth and probably be called “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Everything that makes for success he attributes to the Puritan; and he does it with such a solemn, awe-stricken lack of humor that the irreverent are moved to Homeric mirth.

Now, as a matter of fact, the Puritan was a hard and fast bigot, who hated and persecuted everybody who differed from him religiously, and tolerated nobody; he was as priest-ridden as a Scotch Presbyterian, and he set up a system of Church and State that amounted almost to a theocracy. The climate and soil of New England made him a hard worker; his environment and neighbors, a stout fighter; but if his laws and records tell us any story, they say his morals and practices were no better than they ought to have been.

New England in colonial days produced some shrewd and levelheaded men, but if she ever produced a great one, I have failed to catch his name. When the hour of her struggle came the same phenomenon was exhibited in New England as elsewhere in the Colonies; her natural leaders, the people of education and wealth, followed the fortunes of the oppressor, and the common people took up the cause of freedom. New England in the Revolution did her whole duty, but the other Colonies did not shirk, and furnished not only men and money, but the theater of war.

Mr. Lodge is now furnishing “The Story of the Revolution” for _Scribner’s Magazine_, and already we can see his peculiar defects of historical vision in what he has written. Here is a hint of his ideas: “He [Washington] entered on the war with an army composed wholly of New England men. He ended the Revolution with an army, after seven years’ fighting, largely made up from the same New England people.” He does not say so in so many words, but he leads us to infer that the army between those two periods was made up of New England men. This sort of writing is as absurd as it would be to say New England did nothing. Has Mr. Lodge never heard of the 40,000 men on the Revolutionary rolls of New York? Has it ever occurred to him that Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other Colonies furnished some men, money, and leaders? Have his historical researches ever led him far enough to learn that Yorktown might have been a waste of blood but for the armies and navies of France? Does he know that the soldiers of America’s ally were the regiments of a brigade immortalized on every battlefield of Europe,—the Irish Brigade?

It is very doubtful. I sometimes wonder if Mr. Lodge knew what an Irishman was before he went into politics.

In his account of Bunker Hill he hasn’t a word to say of Sullivan, whose capture of Fort William and Mary with its supplies of precious gunpowder made Bunker Hill possible; yet he has much to say of the lack of powder during the siege of Boston.

He says the American soldiers engaged at Bunker Hill were “of almost pure English blood, with a slight mingling of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry.” I note among the dead killed there the following “Scotch-Irish” names: Broderick, Collins, Dalton, Dillon, Doyle, French, Haggett, McGrath; and Washington, desirous of recognizing this “Scotch” element in his army made St. Patrick the countersign on a certain evening during the siege. I recall that it was this same class of Irishmen with the Scotch prefix, from the New Hampshire town of Londonderry, called after an Irish town of that name, and which was originally planted by English and Irish, who insisted upon double rations of whiskey to celebrate St. Patrick’s day before Ticonderoga.

Mr. Lodge should learn to call a spade a spade, an Irishman an Irishman, for we will. The desire of a certain class of people to call themselves “Scotch-Irish” may be passed by with a smile; ignorance and weakness deserve pity rather than censure; but we must insist that the dead of our race shall be neither miscalled nor misrepresented, and that their laurels shall not be filched nor their glory stolen by those who have neither pride nor scruples.

Whatever Irish came from New Hampshire—and the hills were full of them—it would be a grave mistake to imagine that Massachusetts, so English and so Puritan, did not have her share. The Puritan Alva—Cromwell—and his villainous understrappers sent many a thousand Irish victims to Massachusetts Bay as bondmen and women; and voluntary immigration brought thousands of others. The town records show this; and whole districts in western Massachusetts were settled by them; and yet we are asked to believe that when men cease to be Catholic Irishmen they become Scotch-Irishmen. I can find no other excuse for the absurd title. Here are a few of the “Scotch-Irish” names on the rolls of the minute men of the day:

Joseph Burke, Richard Burke, Daniel Carey, Joseph Carey, Peter Carey, Patrick Carroll, Joseph Carroll, Cornelius Cockran, Daniel Connors, William Connors, James Dempsey, Philip Donahue, Joseph Donnell, John Donnelly, Andrew Dunnigan, John Farley, Michael Farley, John Flood, William Flood, John Foley, Matthew Gilligen, Richard Gilpatrick, James Gleason, Daniel Griffin, Joseph Griffin, John Hacket, Joseph Hacket, John Haley, John Kelly, Patrick Kelly, Peter Kelly, Richard Kelly, Stephen Kelly, Daniel Lary, Michael McDonnell, Henry McGonegal, John McGrah, Daniel McGuire, Patrick McKeen, John McMullen, John Mullin, John Madden, Daniel Mahon, James Mallone, John Mahoney, John Murphy, Patrick Newjent, Patrick O’Brien, Richard O’Brien, Daniel Shay, John Shea, John Walsh, Joseph Walsh.

It is well to note that the English parliament of that day was looking keenly at the causes that cost England her mighty empire on this continent; and apparently they underrated the influence of Mr. Lodge’s Puritan in that struggle, and bitterly blamed the plain Irish without any Scotchery.

Mr. Lodge means well; but folklore and history are two distinct affairs.

The imaginative school of history finds its best exemplar in a gentleman from Tennessee, the home of the Cardiff giant, the Giascutus, and the Scotch-Irishman. He is known as Judge Temple, and has written a volume called _Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan_,—a work which has shaken the earth and spoiled the apple crop. The Judge is original; he honors the Scotch-Irishman as he does all ghost dancers, but he has discovered that all the might of the republic sprang from the Covenanter. I know what a Covenanter used to be, but I can’t solve this covenanter of Judge Temple. I can explain him as he appears in this literary offspring of this intellectual Cardiff giant. If an Irishman a few years ago did anything extraordinary, wonderful, or notorious, he would have been a Scotch-Irishman; in the Temple history he is a Covenanter; if he breaks a bank, or a man’s head, or the Decalogue, he is merely an Irishman. Apply that rule to all men and you have history as it is hatched out in Tennessee. The Covenanter germ was born in Scotland and spread over America, creating miracles. As the natives of North Britain are not remarkable for national modesty and self-effacement, I am puzzled to learn how this conversion of the world to freedom and civilization has escaped the shrinking writers of Scotland. If Judge Temple is not restrained by an injunction at an early date, Professor Burgess and Senator Lodge will be compelled sorrowfully to march on Washington, there to deposit in the National Museum the Teutonic Genius and the Puritan Marvel; or they might be turned over to some of the Yellow Sundays which specialize the exploitation of freaks.

Meantime we should keep our eye on Judge Temple, the young Lochinvar of history, who has come out of the South.