The Adventures of "But-Man"

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the November 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The President's chronology of protectionism is slightly defective: Smoot-Hawley passed in 1930. And leaving unanswered the question of how racial prejudice help trigger the Depression, he also implies that this prejudice represented a backsliding from the Progressive Era. This is piffle. As C. Vann Woodward explained in The Strange Career of Jim Crow , national Progressives had a blind spot for blacks. "In fact," Woodward said, "the typical progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement." The Klan gained enormous power during the administration of Woodrow Wilson--himself a 200-proof racist--but by the end of the 1920s, it was actually declining.

The president is rewriting history for his own purposes. He sees evil Republicanism as a cyclical phenomenon, so he adapts a faulty analysis of the 1980s ("decade of neglect") to the period of GOP ascendancy in the 1920s. He identifies himself with Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, so he overlooks their sins, imputing them instead to the wicked Republicans. Curiously, the book's acknowledgments do not list Oliver Stone as an historical adviser.

A more benign whopper comes when Clinton quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying that democracy depended on the "yeoman farmer." So far, so good. Then he claims that "although Jefferson was a farmer himself, he wasn't making a pitch for agriculture." Today's "yeoman farmers," he says, are American families, whether they live on the farm or in the cities. That's a very inspiring image, Mr. President, but it's not what Jefferson meant. Calling farmers "the chosen people of God," Jefferson said that urban occupations corrupted morals: "The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body." Clinton probably would not want to quote that line while campaigning in New York or Los Angeles. And in the industrial Midwest, he should probably forget about Jefferson's comments on manufacturing: "[L]et our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles."

Clinton is no more accurate about his own history than he is about the country's. When he was growing up, he says, the only unpaved streets in Hope, Arkansas, were in the black neighborhood near his grandfather's store. He uses this observation to bring a personal dimension to his pitch for affirmative action--but there's just this one small problem. "I don't know what the hell he's talking about," one of the president's distant relatives told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette when he first spun this yarn in 1995. "These streets were paved back then, sure to God. I know it was in '60--more than 30 years ago." Between Hope and History has some significant omissions. There's no mention of the need to prevent the political abuse of confidential FBI files. Why not? He says that he has supported "expanding school choice and charter schools." Why does he forget to add that he only means choice among government-run schools? Why doesn't he discuss the fine private schools that he and the vice president have chosen for their own children? These are serious questions, but Between Hope and History is not a serious work. It is a recycling bin with hard covers.

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