The right-wing has been opposing Jefferson since the election of 1800. They may finally have their say with Texas history books, writing him out of the picture entirely. This whole affair is quite disturbing, though one can hardly find it surprising. Americans have, on a whole, never been overly interested in history (particularly their own that did not reiterate certain popular national mythos). And now, in our hyper-ideological, fact-free political landscape, we’re descending to this.
The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.
The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.
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The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.
Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.
Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.
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While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens.
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Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.
“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.
It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.
It was not, however, true.
The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.
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A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, who the questioner said “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government.”
Armey ridiculed the very suggestion.
“Widely regarded by whom?” he asked. “Today’s modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton.”
Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt.
In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia, others at the constitutional convention “thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government.”
Many more interesting points of reference made within this article. Read it in full Here