Nov 6, 2016

Scholars Steeped In Dead Politicians Take On A Live One

by Jim Dwyer

No one could mistake the voice of David McCullough, either in the books that have made him one of the most influential United States historians of his era, or in the documentaries he has narrated for the “American Experience” television series.

Authoritative and measured, Mr. McCullough typically strikes a tone of determined neutrality. In public appearances, he said, he deliberately avoids commentary on contemporary politics.

“Very often, during question-and-answer sessions, people ask me some question about the president or other would-be candidates,” he said in an interview this week. “I’ve always said, ‘My specialty is dead politicians.’ In that way, I could sidestep the question without getting myself involved.

“But this time around, I don’t feel that way any more.”

Now Mr. McCullough and Ken Burns, the filmmaker and author, have assembled a group of distinguished American historians to speak about the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in videos being posted to a Facebook page, Historians on Donald Trump.

It is a diverse, honored group — including, among others, Robert A. Caro, Ron Chernow, David Levering Lewis, William E. Leuchtenburg, Vicki Lynn Ruiz — that speaks with alarm about Mr. Trump’s candidacy and his place in the march of American history.

Mr. McCullough, raised in a Republican home and now aligned with no party, said the prospect of a Trump presidency so distressed him that he felt he could not remain publicly detached. “When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way — it’s just crazy,” he said. “We can’t stand by and let it happen. The Republican Party shouldn’t stand by and let it happen.”

“I should say, I’m a registered independent,” he added. “I’m strongly in favor of a number of Republicans both past and in our own time. It’s not as though I’m doing this from lifelong ideology against Republicans. By no means.”

Mr. McCullough said he contacted Mr. Burns after seeing him tell this year’s graduating class at Stanford University that despite 40 years of avoiding advocacy in his work, he no longer had “the luxury of neutrality or ‘balance’ or even of bemused disdain.” After a few conversations, Mr. McCullough said, the two men came up with a plan: “Why don’t we see if we can round up some other people who care about the American story, and who have given so much of their life’s work to it, see if they are willing to step out and make themselves heard.”

The videos are mostly homemade, smartphone productions. None of the historians asked to weigh in have declined, Mr. Burns said.

Like many of the others, Mr. Burns said he heard echoes of dangerous populist demagogues in Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. Among the issues that were cited were his calls to ban all Muslims, his characterization of many Mexicans as criminals and his mockery of veterans and people with disabilities. Mr. Trump has said that the country faces crises that require strong action to protect its borders, and that his role as an outsider has cost him the approval of elites and entrenched interests, including in his own party.

In the 1920s, fear of immigrants fueled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and exclusionary laws aimed at European Catholics and Asians, said Ms. Ruiz, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the American Historical Association. Also, about one-third of the Mexican population in this country was pushed out, more than half of them United States citizens by birth, she said.

“Playing with hate has had tragic consequences throughout our history,” she said.

Mr. Chernow, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Alexander Hamilton” was a principal source for the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” said he had been struck by Mr. Trump’s lack of reference to the founding documents of American history, or to presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The only historical movement that Mr. Trump alludes to is a shameful one — ‘America First,’” Mr. Chernow said, recalling an isolationist political organization at the time Nazi Germany was taking power across Europe.

Mr. Lewis, a professor at New York University and biographer of W. E. B. DuBois, recalled Wendell Willkie, a presidential candidate with a superficial resemblance to Mr. Trump, in that he was a wealthy businessman who had held no prior electoral office and became a Republican just shortly before the 1940 campaign against Roosevelt. But after the election, Willkie distinguished himself by calling for a loyal opposition, Professor Lewis said. (Willkie served as Roosevelt’s informal emissary to Britain, in a sign of bipartisanship.) “For Donald Trump, Willkie’s loyal opposition concept is surely anathema,” Professor Lewis said.

Mr. Leuchtenburg, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of the American presidency, said Mr. Trump was essentially ahistorical. “He has no sense of the American past,” Professor Leuchtenburg said. “He doesn’t understand the achievements of this country.” -NY Times

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