Re-writing the Constitution

There are quite a few Right Wing watch groups these days, but one of the blogs I enjoy is that of Warren Throckmorton, who has gone after David Barton and others attempting to inculcate their perverted interpretations of history on unsuspecting Americans. One of the more recent examples is the so-called Institute on the Constitution, which presents a very Puritanical interpretation of the Constitution, audaciously claiming that the Founding Fathers were influenced by early Puritan ministers, not the Age of Enlightenment.

The Institute of the Constitution is offering a 12-part lecture series over the Internet, as well as taking their show on the road to anyone who will host them, and apparently there are many willing hosts. While it seems organizations such as this one are working primarily through the conservative Evangelical community, the so-called scholars behind these tracts are getting wide spread attention through conservative media outlets, and their work appears to have influenced much of the Conservative view of history as espoused by GOP legislators at both the state and federal level.

The numerous books, which are being published through Thomas Nelson and other conservative printing presses, are making their way into school curriculi around the country. Barton is particularly active in Texas in promoting new statewide curriculum reading, and as the New York Review of Books reported sometime back, as Texas goes so goes the nation when it comes to high school textbooks.

Not since the Dunning School has there been such an orchestrated attempt to reshape history, only William Archibald Dunning was actually a respected professor at Columbia University, whereas the current conservative crop of so-called historians hail from such universities as Oral Roberts with degrees in religious education, not history.

David Whitney, who heads up the Institute of the Constitution makes no bones about his conservative religious agenda, as active as Barton in promulgating these "American views" anywhere he can, oblivious to the criticism.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

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Dispatches from Vilnius

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