“As we get to know the history of our society and hear the voices of those who created our energetic, complicated, pluralistic, and humane culture,” Ravitch writes sensibly in her introduction, “we will understand ourselves and our times better.” But Ravitch’s goals are better understood not so much by her book’s vast inclusiveness but by the surprising group that she neglects to include: the people on top. Nowhere in Ravitch’s book will you find mention of the American Legion, which lynched Joe Hill’s colleagues, the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized African Americans, or the National Association of Manufacturers, which coordinated countrywide campaigns against unionization. Powerful and influential worthies like Dulles, A. Mitchell Palmer, and J. Edgar Hoover, great persecutors of revolutionaries all, simply don’t exist. Nor, needless to say, is there a whisper from modern-day captains of the culture trust like Murdoch. While the underdogs are everywhere triumphant, the overlords have disappeared.
Nowhere is this omission from The American Reader more glaring than in Ravitch’s presentation of Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court decision regarding the right of the state of Louisiana to segregate rail passengers by race. As it happens, the Supreme Court voted seven-to-one to uphold the Louisiana law, endorsing the myth of “separate but equal,” and ushering in the era of Jim Crow in the South. But what does The American Reader include? The lone dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, and not a word from the decision that was to stand for the next sixty years.
This tendency to ignore the forces that our new heroes fought against is not something Ravitch invented. On the contrary, it’s a failing repeated throughout the social-history genre. But while the leftist scholars who invented the new history turned their attention to the powerless because they assumed the powerful would always have their hagiographers, one senses that Ravitch just saw a golden cultural-strategic opportunity: By making a tiny concession to trendy methodology she could score an enormous ideological victory. The people get to be noisily affirmed, sure, but power gets something much, much better: invisibility.
