“FDR made the Depression worse”? “The Marshall Plan didn’t get Europe back on its feet; free markets did”? “American workers prospered without labor unions”? “During the decade of greed,” charitable giving grew at a faster rate than it had during the previous 25 years”? In 2004, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D, shocked the chattering classes when his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History hit the bookstores, and raced up the New York Times bestseller list.
So, who is Woods? Evil cartoon villain or libertarian-minded Catholic? And, why are some academics so jealous of his success?
The Alabama-based author holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia University – but don’t hold that against him. His writings from the colonial origins of American liberty, to the dangerously “centrist” Clinton years are thought-provoking and fascinating. They inform, and entertain – a rare quality.
Wide-ranging and compelling, the history buff’s text is even happy to defend the “racist” Puritans, as liberals choke on their vegan Thanksgiving meals. Yes, “by its second decade Harvard College welcomed Indian students. Colonists could and did receive the death penalty for murdering Indians. Indian converts to Christianity in the ‘praying towns’ of New England enjoyed considerable autonomy,” writes Woods, and they even had the best breweries, according to some other sources I’ve read.
Ben-Peter Terpstra: Thanks for your valuable time. What are you up to?
Thomas E. Woods: I just finished a book on the economic crisis in the United States. The publisher is giving it the title Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.
BT: March 11, 2005: Slate’s David Greenberg, a politically correct historian, points out that “conservatives such as Max Boot, Cathy Young, and the historian Ronald Radosh have attacked you.”
And yet, I for one, laugh at the very idea of the name Cathy “Soft on Drugs” Young and the word “conservative” in the same sentence. What’s your take?
TW: For one thing, none of those three are traditional conservatives by any stretch of the imagination. Boot, who’s just creepy, I answered in the pages of The American Conservative, which kindly offered me a platform from which to level the poor guy. You can read that piece along with all my other replies to critics in the “Replies to Critics” section of
this page. I got the better of all of them, to put it mildly, if I may be permitted one boast.
One more thing about Boot: he’s thrilled with Barack Obama’s appointments.
Boot writes, “Only churlish partisans of both the left and the right can be unhappy with the emerging tenor of our nation’s new leadership.” Normal people don’t talk like that.
Although I don’t support the drug war either, Cathy Young’s problem isn’t that she’s a lousy conservative, since (Greenberg notwithstanding) she’s never claimed to be a conservative, but that she’s a lousy libertarian, adopting the conventional, statist view on the really controversial issues and yet standing in stern judgment of those who are more consistent than she is. I’m supposed to care that someone like this is unhappy with me?
It’s funny: the criticisms of Boot, Young, and Radosh are almost identical to the criticisms the New York Times (to which I also reply at the link above) made of the book. That should tell you something about the state of conservatism in America: its so-called leading lights have thoughtlessly adopted the kind of statist interpretation of American history that conservatives a generation or two ago rejected out of hand.
BT: Greenberg also writes that “it would be tedious to debunk” your book “chapter by chapter” because he, in my view, can’t.
In other words, Left-wing historians don’t have to present facts to substantiate their opinions, because you are "bad," and they are “busy.” So, how do you respond to every teenager’s worst argument?
TW: Of course he can’t debunk it. My critics have been horrified that such an anti-establishment treatment of American history sold so many copies (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History spent 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list), so you’d think it would be worth their while to debunk it chapter by chapter, in order to deliver their fellow Americans from my wickedness and iconoclasm. I’m quite certain a hack like Greenberg, who has never had an unconventional thought in his life and who is quite content to repeat whatever his seventh-grade teacher taught him, has never read or even heard of the relevant literature on most of the topics the book covers. None of these guys will ever debate me, for the same reason.
BT: Greenberg, the politically correct historian, groans about your opening sentence too, because – in his words – “I don’t know any historians who teach that the colonists were ‘paragons of diversity.’” Well, I do. In any case, your book is for a wider audience and there are many anti-Puritan myths out there to debunk, right?
TW: To be sure, there are a few turns of phrase in the finished book that I’m not thrilled with. The point I’m making there, though, is directed less at historians than it is at people today who make claims about the American melting pot, the “universal nation,” etc., that are not compatible with what Americans have said and done from the beginning.
As for the Puritans, I can’t say I’m altogether sympathetic to them, but they at least deserve to be treated fairly. Recent scholarship on the Puritans’ land acquisition from the Indians as well as on their wars with them have tended to improve their image in the eyes of history, but the general public knows nothing about these specialized studies and goes on believing things no specialist believes. That’s all I’m looking to accomplish in my brief treatment of the Puritans.
BT: Speaking of which, Greenberg also scolds you for not writing extensively about African-American slaves in a chapter about the early Puritans. Do liberals also attack you for not writing about kangaroos in your Cold War chapter?
TW: I was held to a strict word count of 80,000 – very few words in which to tell the story of America. That’s why there was no point in trying. Instead, my narrative focuses on aspects of American history that are normally suppressed or mangled. It leaves out the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War altogether, for heaven’s sake, so it is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It’s a punchy introduction to the subject that highlights the kind of information that should be included in any reasonable overview of American history, but hardly ever is.
Greenberg attacks me for not spending more of these limited words on the one subject every semi-conscious American already knows about. Thousands of books have been written on slavery; in the past hundred years one book has been written about the Principles of ’98, an essential aspect of early American history. Although I have no doubt that Greenberg himself could give us a deeply learned disquisition on the Principles of ’98, most Americans do not know about them but should, and that’s why I focus on it along with similarly neglected topics.
If Greenberg would have spent 80,000 words on other topics, he is free to write his own book. Judging from his attack on mine, something tells me it would be the dullest, most predictable book ever written, strictly faithful to the Official Version of History from which it is thoughtcrime to deviate.
BT: What is the historian’s role in America?
TW: The same as it is anywhere else – to record the events of the past without regard for what H.L. Mencken called “the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” That means the regime’s Official Version of its own history is to be held in deep suspicion, not dutifully aped.
BT: How do you balance family life and work?
TW: I’ll be honest: I haven’t always done a good job, though I have resolved to improve. I always play with the kids between the time I come home from work and their bedtime, so we have a lot of time together. I taught our eldest daughter to read when she showed a real interest in learning (not because I’m one of these parents who try to prove something to the world through their kids). By the time she was four she had completed the second-grade level of Hooked on Phonics, a program I can’t recommend highly enough.
Still, once in a while I take on a project that requires me to work beyond normal business hours, and I see them less. I recently wrote a whole book in – I’m not kidding – four weeks in order to meet the most crushing deadline I’ve ever had. I still considered our time together after work to be non-negotiable, but it was still a bad situation all around. I’m not going to do that anymore, period.
I didn’t realize until I got married and my wife pointed it out that I pretty much worked all the time. Sure, I went out with friends, but by and large I carried out my teaching obligations as a professor by day and wrote at night. When I wasn’t writing I was reading. When I was doing neither one, I was impatiently waiting until I could get back to work I’ve become much more normal over the course of my six years of marriage, I’m happy to report.
BT: What are some of the most important “lessons” that history is trying to teach us right now?
This, in part, is the subject of my forthcoming book. History teaches us that governments’ shortsighted policies – particularly their central banks’ interference with market interest rates – create artificial economic booms that end inevitably in busts, and that governments exploit these busts to increase their own power. Governments also pursue the dumbest, most counterproductive programs to lift their countries out of recessions and depressions, and no matter how spectacularly these programs fail, they are exactly the programs they will pursue when the next bust comes.
Thus for all his talk of “change” (which any non-comatose person knew was phony), Obama’s approach to the economic downturn is more of the same: dumb-guy Keynesianism, depletion of the pool of savings by massive “public works” programs, bailouts of the improvident at the expense of the sensible, more inflationary monetary policy – and on and on.
Right now it is essential for Americans to educate themselves about the economy, about how we got into this mess, and how we can get out. As usual, doing the opposite of what the blockheads in Washington call for makes the most sense. In addition to my own book, I recommend, as inoculation against idiocy, America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard and a collection of essays called The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle. These books are available online for free, and are linked on these lists (1, 2), which are very important in their own right.
BT: Thanks again for your time. Finally, what do some young adults believe that makes you say, “What are they teaching them in the public schools”?
TW: Nothing particularly outrageous, just the usual cartoon version of American history in which Great Presidents rescued the U.S. from disaster, capitalism caused the Depression, and the like. Actually, I consider the main problem to be not so much the propaganda they’ve been taught, which either never took in the first place or that most of them have since forgotten, but instead their lack of knowledge one way or the other. Roger Garrison, an economics professor at Auburn University, says that in the old days he’d go into his classroom and have to refute all the economic fallacies the kids had in their heads. Today, on the other hand, he first has to teach them the fallacies and then refute them. That’s how little they know.
Of course, this is just the kind of pliable, easily led population any regime would be delighted to have. They can get away with murder, and the population knows little and cares less about what is going on. As I said in a recent speech, it’s enough to make the non-comatose segment of the population despair. That’s why it’s so rewarding to be a genuine dissenter – it reminds them we haven’t all bought into the propaganda. Frankly, it’s also a lot of fun to attack the array of blockheads who govern us. nyone who could think a fool like Paul Krugman – whose recommendations gave Japan 18 years of the economic doldrums – worth listening to, as almost everyone in Washington does, deserves the contempt of any rational person.
Ben-Peter Terpstra, an Australian-European satirist, is a contributor to a number of websites, from On Line Opinion (Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate) to American Thinker. His pieces are also posted on his blog, Pizza Trays and Beer Bottles Ben-Peter can be reached at: Letters@canadafreepress.com
