Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

Violence meant to seize and shore up power—a claim to sovereignty through the violence of the mob—is fundamentally American.

From the colonial era to the Trump era, the “They Keep Coming” immigration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonize immigrants and lobby for immigration restriction. It has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and exploitation. At the same time, it has promoted a false and incomplete narrative of how immigration works. No part of the myth is actually true. Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses. Only by fully understanding the origins, endurance, and contemporary relevance of the “They Keep Coming” myth can we begin to dismantle it and the xenophobia and racism that it fuels.

Although in this case it is an understandable, emotional reaction meant to decry antidemocratic violence, the notion that January 6 is 'not who we are' is one manifestation of what has become a regularly deployed Republican Party and right-wing media strategy: to deny the workings of overt and violent racist activism even when those actions threaten American citizens and democracy itself.

People may hear ‘white nationalism’ and assume it to be adjacent with patriotism, or at the very least consider it as pro-American. But after 1983 the nation at the heart of white nationalism was not the United States but rather the Aryan nation, imagined as a transnational polity of white people who would need to be saved from extermination through race war and violence. This is a fundamentally more violent and radical position than that implied by ‘nationalism.

Research studies have found that the vast majority of whites who hold implicit and explicit racial biases against African Americans strongly support voter ID laws, which are the purported legislative answer to massive, rampant voter fraud. However, researchers have also found that whites who hold implicit biases are convinced that their advocacy for voter ID is not based on racism but rather on ensuring election integrity. Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post-civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage.

Democrats rallied around Barack Obama, the first African American candidate from a major party and the first to serve as president, Republicans retreated from the racial outreach of the Bush years and returned to the politics of resentment. During the reign of President Donald Trump, who pandered to white nationalists and promised to protect monuments to the Confederacy, the GOP reverted to its earlier form with a vengeance. Due to the success of the southern strategy, Republicans are now unrecognizable as the party of Lincoln.

Ultimately, party realignment over civil rights stands as one of the central arcs of 20th century political history. The Democratic Party's evolution from being a defender of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to a champion of civil rights represented a massive revolution in the political scheme, one that prompted an equally significant reaction, as the Republican Party retreated from its roots in racial liberalism to embrace and exploit the politics of white grievance.

The legacy of monuments within the Confederate tradition is the legacy of historical distortion. As a revisionist narrative, the Lost Cause has not only damaged Americans’ ability to determine fact from fiction; It has also served as a bulwark against racial progress and is its most insidious legacy.

Market fundamentalism is not restricted to the United States, but that is where it finds its fullest expression and most wide-ranging support. This is not historical contingency. Rather, it is the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign to persuade the American people of the efficacy and benevolence of markets, the inefficacy and malevolence of ‘big government,’ and the centrality of economic freedom in American life.

The sad experience of the United States in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the country proved exceptional only in the incompetence of its government on many levels and the bizarre resistance of much of the population to basic public health measures, made the myth harder to sustain than ever. As one much-cited article put it in August of 2020, 'In the dark season of pestilence, Covid has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.

Not long ago, during the time of George H.W. Bush, the GOP worked aggressively to confront past incidents of racism, with its leaders even going so far as to offer formal apologies for past practices like the ‘southern strategy.’ However, that push for reckoning and reconciliation was abruptly abandoned in the Trump era and replaced by outright denialism. Rather than apologize for the southern strategy, new voices on the right simply asserted that there had never been a southern strategy and that as a result there was nothing to apologize for (Kevin M. Kruse and Julien M. Zelizer, "Introduction")

On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capitol, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capitol in that novel. This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold. Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.

In 1962 a survey asking whether Democrats or Republicans were “more likely to see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing” showed Americans evenly split: 23 percent said Democrats, and 21 percent said Republicans, but a solid majority of 56 percent saw the two parties as basically the same. Just two years later, public opinion had shifted dramatically. In 1964, 60 percent said Democrats were likelier to back civil rights measures in employment, 33 percent said the parties were little different, and only 7 percent said Republicans had the edge. Likewise, on the question of which party was likelier to support school desegregation, 56 percent picked Democrats, 37 percent said neither had an edge, and, once again, only 7 percent said Republicans.

That the New Deal should have been bigger, sooner, is a conclusion of long standing: John Maynard Keynes told Roosevelt he needed to approximately double the rate of “direct stimulus to production deliberately applied by the administration” in 1934, at a time when Roosevelt had reduced such expenditures in response to political pressure just like the kind that later came from Grassley or King.29 Roosevelt soon moved in the direction that Keynes suggested, getting the so-called big bill—amounting to nearly $5 billion—from Congress and allowing him to create the WPA to employ Americans nationwide under the direction of Harry Hopkins. But a few years afterward, once recovery seemed well under way, Roosevelt again cut relief spending—again in response to political pressure. For many economists—including Keynes—that premature reduction in fiscal stimulus was the cause of the 1937‒1938 recession.30 Only after making that fiscally cautious error did the Roosevelt administration adopt a deliberately Keynesian budget. Soon afterward, mobilization for war began.31 In 1941 Hopkins took a new job, directing Lend-Lease operations; Congress approved nearly $50 billion for the program—an order of magnitude more than the “big bill” that created the WPA.32 So when Grassley says the war ended the Depression, he is not stating an argument against the New Deal: he is stating an argument for a bigger New Deal, an argument that New Dealer Harry Hopkins at WPA should have had a budget more like World War II–era Harry Hopkins at Lend-Lease.

And nearly all socialists, like most other Oklahomans, were devout Christians. They flocked to yearly encampments that blended a faith in Jesus with a belief in socialism. At one gathering, a preacher proclaimed, “Christ’s church was a working class church” and cited the verse from Ecclesiastes that decrees “the Profit of the Earth is for all.

Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post–civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive, rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage. There was Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was based on his 2016 claims that he would have won the popular vote if three to five million illegal votes had not been cast. That commission collapsed with nothing but blank pages in the section on voter fraud.

However, researchers have also found that whites who hold implicit biases are convinced that their advocacy for voter IDs is not based on racism but rather on ensuring election integrity.

Indeed, as if channeling Paul Weyrich’s mantra, a Texas Republican explained that while there might not be widespread voter fraud, “‘an article of religious faith’ among Republicans… was that an ID law ‘could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.’

But with a DOJ-launched nationwide hunt for voter fraud and numerous congressional hearings telling a sordid tale, the mystique was so powerful that when Indiana used the excuse of stopping voter fraud to pass the nation’s first strict voter ID law, the Seventh Circuit and the US Supreme Court, though acknowledging that there had not been one documented case of voter-impersonation fraud in the state’s history, ruled that the supposed burdens on minority voters to obtain those IDs could not outweigh Indiana’s vested interest in thwarting voter fraud.

During the Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko challenged long-standing legends about the workings of US foreign policy. Social and cultural historians in the 1970s and 1980s wrote new histories of the nation from the bottom up, expanding our view to include long-overlooked perspectives on gender, race, and ethnic identities and, in the process, showing that narrow narratives focused solely on political leaders at the top obscured more than they revealed. Despite the fact that the term revisionist history is often thrown around by nonhistorians as an insult, in truth all good historical work is at heart “revisionist” in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect—and, yes, to revise—our understanding of the past. Today, yet another generation of historians is working once again to bring historical scholarship out of academic circles, this time to push back against misinformation in the public sphere. Writing op-eds and essays for general audiences; engaging the public through appearances on television, radio, and podcasts; and being active on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Substack, hundreds if not thousands of historians have been working to provide a counterbalance and corrections to the misinformation distorting our national dialogue. Such work has incredible value, yet historians still do their best work in the longer written forms of books, articles, and edited collections that allow us both to express our thoughts with precision in the text and provide ample evidence in the endnotes. This volume has brought together historians who have been actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media and has provided them a platform where they might expand those engagements into fuller essays that reflect the best scholarly traditions of the profession.

As Sarah Maza has echoed in her own work, “Trying to fit a scenario from the past onto one in the present can be disastrous: ‘We will liberate Iraq, as we did Europe!’ ‘Don’t go for a diplomatic solution—remember Munich!’

During the reign of President Donald Trump, who pandered to white nationalists and promised to protect monuments to the Confederacy, the GOP reverted to its earlier form with a vengeance. Due to the success of the Southern Strategy, Republicans are now unrecognizable as the party of Lincoln.

Nevertheless, some believed a Republican revival could be forged through concerted appeals to the disaffected Dixiecrats. J. Harvie Williams, a North Carolinian, spent 1949 fund-raising for a “Citizens’ Political Committee” that would spark “political realignment” by strengthening the coalition of conservatives. A more “formal alliance between Republicans and Southern Democrats,” he noted, would inspire “white,

Despite segregationists’ strength in Democratic circles, a majority of African Americans switched parties in the 1930s. Black voters had remained loyal to “the party of Lincoln,” even through Hoover’s reelection campaign, but once they benefited from FDR’s New Deal, many voted accordingly.7 The switch here was abrupt. In 1932 Roosevelt received only 23 percent of the Black vote; in 1936 he received 71 percent. Regardless of their votes for a Democratic president, many still formally remained Republicans. In 1936, 44 percent of Black voters registered as Democrats and 37 percent as Republicans. In 1940 and 1944, Black registrations were evenly split.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Republicans and Democrats each had made peace with white supremacy. Notably, when the Klan revived in the 1920s, the second version found supporters in both parties: Democrats in the South, Republicans in the Midwest.

This bright line soon blurred. Republicans, who sent nearly two dozen African Americans to Congress in the late nineteenth century, relaxed their commitment to racial equality as the twentieth century began. Southern Democrats still led the way in entrenching disfranchisement and discrimination, but northern Republicans now offered tacit acceptance or explicit approval.

Despite such claims, the record is clear. There was, indeed, a long-term transformation in the two parties—first at the national level and then subsequently at the state and local levels—a process that stands at the core of twentieth-century political history. Over several decades, Democrats abandoned their role as the party of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to champion civil rights; in response, Republicans retreated from their original racial liberalism and courted white resentment. The southern strategy—well documented in manuscript archives, public speeches, party platforms, contemporary reporting, polling data, oral interviews, memoirs, and elsewhere—has long been accepted as a wholly uncontroversial fact.

A letter from Scott Boydston of Birmingham, Alabama, began by calling out the Confederate cause, saying, “The dirtiest blot on the pages of American History was written by rebel statesmen of the South. Why honor them?” Boydston suggested that Confederate monuments were the equivalent of erecting a monument “to the memory of Benedict Arnold.” He believed that the South held the nation back and concluded that “only fools would want to glorify men who fought in defense of human slavery.

The UDC’s monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause. These monuments also reflected the beliefs held by the Jim Crow generation—whites who regarded African Americans as second-class citizens and whose leaders sought to preserve the racial status quo through both legal and extralegal means. And if there were any doubts about the larger meaning and purpose of Confederate monuments within the context of the Lost Cause, the Daughters made it clear in the minutes of their meetings, in the essays they wrote, in the speeches they gave, and in the actions they took. Moreover, the men they selected to give speeches at monument unveilings or on Confederate Memorial Day, as they reiterated the message of honor and sacrifice, also furthered the Lost Cause narrative about slavery, the war, and Confederate soldiers as valiant heroes who not only fought to defend the South against an invading North but who withstood Reconstruction and became stalwart defenders of white supremacy, sometimes as members of the Ku Klux Klan.