The Education Wars continue. Conservatives continue to push anti-Critical Race Theory laws and tried to stop The 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones from getting tenure in North Carolina. And online, conservatives continue to complain about attempts to make history education more critical of the founders of the country. Some liberals (including many liberal historians) defend the founders as well.
Why does it bother so many people that the founders of the country might not have been great people? When it was proven with DNA that Thomas Jefferson had raped his slave Sally Hemings, it upset a lot of people, because Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence and a key figure in the revolutionary period. Some even continued to deny it, speculating that maybe some relative of Jefferson contributed the DNA (even though Jefferson cavorted openly with Hemings and even transported her to Paris when he served as Ambassador there).
For the answer to that question, look no further than college football.
Joe Paterno was the wildly successful coach of Penn State University for 46 years. His teams won two national championships and he coached five undefeated teams. He became a hero in State College, PA, where the university is located, and among Penn State’s widely dispersed, wealthy donor base.
And he also retained on his staff an assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, who was raping children, including at-risk children who were located by a charity that Sandusky founded and which was closely associated with the athletic program. At least some of the rapes occurred in on campus facilities managed by the Penn State athletic department. Paterno knew what Sandusky was doing, and did little to stop him. Paterno, and his superiors at the university, made the implicit decision that it was more important to protect the image of the football program than to stop Sandusky, let alone put him in prison.
And that image brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. Paterno, like many big time college coaches, cultivated an image of himself as a teacher, educator, and molder of men. A big time power conference college football program runs on donations, and Paterno gave speeches to donor groups in which, rather than talking about football, he talked incessantly about education and leadership. Donors who honestly just like sitting on the 45 yard line at football games each Saturday like to flatter themselves that their donations are helping to educate young men.
The speech-and-donation cycle is worthy of a fair amount of mockery, but in the Paterno case it took a more sinister term. You see, all those donors, as well as the journalists who covered the events and the Penn State fan base, started believing all the BS. Late in his career, Penn State erected a statue of Paterno in front of Beaver Stadium, the Nittany Lions’ home field. The stone wall behind the statue was embossed “Joseph Vincent Paterno, Educator, Coach, Humanitarian”. Note the order of the words- Paterno was obviously a football coach first. Indeed, that’s literally all he did with himself his entire adult life. (He died months after being fired by Penn State after the scandal came to light.) But the statue started with “Educator” and included “Humanitarian”. Because people believed the BS.
And after the Paterno scandal, when you would think and hope Penn State’s boosters and fan base would engage in some soul searching, or at the very least say “OK, we need to move on and put Paterno in the past”, that hasn’t happened. Penn State tore down that statue, but fans have demanded it be put back up, and fans have made or commissioned replicas of the statue! Journalists have discovered that lots of PSU students, even years later, still support Paterno and swear that he did not know what happened. On message boards where Penn State football is discussed, there is still enormous denial about the whole scandal.
The reason, of course, is that again, people believed the BS. Their personal identities were bound up in their support of a college football team, which carefully cultivated an image (in order to separate them from their money) of a program that was committed to the highest ideals of education and led by a moral exemplar. The truth was that Penn State was just like any other football factory- a big business built on the backs of free labor, which engaged in all the same sorts of moral compromises in order to win football games that programs around the country did.
Now what does all this have to do with the founders of this country? Well, put simply, the same “fan club” dynamic attends to them. The founders were trying to win a war, against long odds, against the British. They needed support. So they wrote a bunch of texts and tracts full of Enlightenment bromides about liberty and equality and government by consent of the governed. They didn’t believe any of it- Thomas Jefferson enjoyed raping Sally Hemings and was not going to free her! All of the slaveholding founders enjoyed the life of leisure their slaves provided for them. None of them believed that Indians had any right of self-determination. None of them believed that women should vote; few believed people who owned no property should participate. Many of them- most notably John Adams- did not believe in free speech for their political opponents.
But the problem is “come join our revolution. We want to slash taxes that Britain doesn’t even collect from you ordinary people, but which we rich people hate paying. We want to get rid of the King, but replace it with an intrusive government that regulates people’s personal lives and is chosen by rich people to protect their interests” is not likely to attract people to the revolution. All revolutionaries use BS in their rhetoric. Fidel Castro and Vladimir Lenin told their supporters of bright futures of liberty and equality and plenty.
But the problem comes when the people believe it. Or, to put it another way, people believing it can be both good and bad. It’s definitely very good that a lot of Americans viewed the founders’ rhetoric as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously did- as an uncashed check that needed to be taken to the bank and enforced. We got better as a country because later generations fight to turn the founders’ statements from empty rhetoric to real rights for the public.
But the Education Wars are the downside of it. Like the Penn State fans who were in thrall to Joe Paterno and who convinced themselves that he really believed all that stuff he was telling them and was an Educator first and a Humanitarian as well as a Coach, many Americans read the Declaration of Independence and the various statements of the founders and think that the people who founded our country were really committed to the stuff that they said, and then get very upset when someone tells them the truth.
But it is the truth. No reasonable person would advocate that, to appease Penn State fans, we ought to just forget about the Sandusky scandal and remember Joe Paterno for his supposedly high ideals. Nor should we appease Americans who want to believe this land came fully formed as a bastion of liberty. It’s not true, and it devalues the work of the heroes who actually fought for American liberty later in our history.
Straight talk about JoePa
This article is to "fake news" what Niagara Falls is to my urine steam in the middle of the night.