All of our history is now “indoctrination by historical example.” The academicians who write the officially approved, politically correct distortions of it have failed history, and us. They are of two types: the courtiers, smiling sycophants such as “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss and the insufferable Doris Kearns Goodwin; and their envious colleagues, politically correct pedants, whose books crowd the shelves of university libraries but are otherwise ignored. Jack Beatty, an editor at the Atlantic and a news analyst for NPR’s On Point, writes better than all of them and proves a better historian. That is no surprise. We must look to our men of letters, and to dissidents and rebels, for real history now.
“This book tells the saddest story: How, having redeemed democracy in the Civil War, America betrayed it in the Gilded Age.” The tale is all too true: the selling-off of the republic to the highest bidder, a crime which modern Americans should recognize, as it is happening again—through the agency, not coincidentally, of the same political party, with the active cooperation of the other. “The corporations have the law on their side,” “own the Legislatures,” and “control most of the newspapers and manufacture public opinion.” That was the opinion of a Pennsylvania newspaper...