As a historian who likes to read (from real books that I can pick up and feel, not digital versions that make true understanding and absorption difficult), I am routinely reading at least two histories about America’s past at any one time.

For example, I previously had read two great biographies of T.H. Lawrence (of Lawrence of Arabia fame) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (who dominated the American transportation industry in the first half of the 1800s). More about each in future essays, as I think I will start reviewing these books as I finish them.

Believe it or not, this is actually an amazingly
accurate rendering of the first Thanksgiving

Today’s essay however is about two books I finished yesterday, both about two very different periods in American history. Both however had the exact same flaws, typical of the early 2000s when they were written, despite being very detailed and accurate efforts. The books:

• Mayflower: a story of courage, community, and war, by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Flyboys: a true story of courage, by James Bradley

The first was published in 2006, and was an attempt to describe in detail the arrival and settlement of Pilgrims in New England in first half century after they arrived in 1620.

The second was published in 2003, and was an attempt to tell the story of the defeat of Japan in World War II, achieved mostly because of the advent of the airplane in reshaping warfare. While ground troops took island after island in the Pacific, in the end it was the air war against Japan itself that eventually forced its surrender. Bradley focuses on telling us the story of the pilots and crews in that air war.

As I already noted, both books do excellent jobs detailing very accurately in vivid terms the events involved. For anyone who wishes to learn something about these significant events of our nation’s history, I recommend them highly.

However, that recommendation comes with one major caveat. In both cases, the authors were handicapped by certain modern academic paradigms that crippled their ability to see the larger context of events. Those paradigms demanded that both historians treat all the cultures involved as morally equivalent, and because of this both writers miss entirely the greater moral fundamentals that moved the Western side of both stories.

For example, let’s take Philbrick’s fascinating history of the Pilgrims.

Throughout the book he tries very hard to make us think there was no difference between the Indians and the Pilgrims. Both waged war. Both killed and enslaved their enemies. Both saw their enemies in racist terms. Both attempted to dominate and control the territory of New England.

Yet this is amazingly simplistic thinking that is largely false. It was quickly obvious to me that Philbrick was completely unaware of the influence of the Old and New Testaments on the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were modern Protestants, their faith deeply grounded in the Old Testament and its family-oriented rules that make child-rearing and family life fundamental to everything a person does. They came to New England because they wanted a place to raise their children properly, according to the Ten Commandments and the basics of Judeo-Christian values. These ideas were much more nuanced than the tribal, non-literate, and war-fighting cultures of the various Indian tribes that surrounded them.

In fact, as I read Mayflower I soon wondered if Philbrick had ever himself even read the Bible. He seemed so unaware of its impact and influence on all the Pilgrims actions. For example, in the war that eventually broke out between the British settlers and the Indians, it was the Indians who started it, with the sole goal of committing a brutal racial genocide against the British. The response from the Pilgrims was to fight back, and in the end do what they could to avoid any genocide at all. For example, Philbrick couldn’t help noting that it was the alliance between the British and the Indians who had converted to Christianity that won the war.

As far as Philbrick was concerned, however, war is war, and because the Pilgrims fought back against an attempted genocide that had already massacred many of its women and children, they were no different than the Indians. His lack of large context makes his book less worthwhile, even though if you want to learn something about the Pilgrims’ first years in America the book it an excellent resource.

James Bradley’s book suffers from the same flaw. He tells the courageous and sometimes tragic story of these fighter pilots with sympathy and honor. At the same time, he repeatedly tries to argue there was no difference between Japan’s war actions and those of America. We both killed civilians. We both wages merciless war against our enemies. And on both sides, racial hate was a component fueling the conflict.

Morally we were both the same.

Once again however Bradley’s effort to push this simplistic idea of moral equivalency fails, because his intellectual honesty required him to document at length the barbarity of the Japanese (which included mass murder of POWs as well as cannibalism), things that were so far removed from America’s actions that the difference becomes quite evident. While the Japanese executed P.O.W.s (and sometimes even ate their bodies), the U.S. treated its P.O.W.s with mercy and care. Japan meanwhile had attacked without provocation its neighbors, both in China and the United States. The U.S. however were merely responding to that attack, similar in savagery to that which had faced the Pilgrims.

If anything, Bradley’s work inadvertently illustrated the astonishing cultural change that Japan underwent after World War II. Before, it was a violent, militaristic culture ruled by the samurai warrior mentality. After, it is largely Americanized, focused on family, capitalism, and good will to all. I even had trouble imagining how these two so very different cultures had come from the same island nation.

As a result, while trying desperately to make believe that there was no difference between these cultures, both books couldn’t help illustrating throughout how utterly different the cultures were, with the American/British side always coming off far better.

These historians however simply couldn’t see this, because the academic paradigms they lived under said they must not.

In the early 2000s DEI, critical race theory, and “wokism” were only beginning to make major inroads in academia. These ideas had become pervasive, but were not yet dominant. Thus, with both books, the authors were not so consumed with these idiotic ideologies that they were unable to report events accurately, as they happened. Thus, if a reader knows enough background about these events (as I do as a historian myself), you can look past the silly effort to assign moral equivalency and see the real story.

Later less educated readers however don’t have my advantages. They could very easily be taken in by these shallow arguments. And it appears this is exactly what has happened to academia since the 2000s. Today, all that academia teaches is the evil of America. They now see the Pilgrims only as “white supremacists” whose only goal was to kill “Native Americans,” those noble indigenous populations who understood nature totally and would never hurt a fly. They now see America in World War II as an evil conqueror, raining nuclear death on innocent Japanese civilians in an effort to conquer and destroy.

Thus, I doubt either of these books could be published today. Despite their flaws, they are too honest, an honesty that makes selling this leftist anti-American ideology untenable. Today, the goal is that anti-American ideology, and the facts be damned.