Making History Great Again

April 29, 2025

By Brandan P. Buck

Gems of American History: The Lecturer's Art, by Walter McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025, 336 pages, $32.99.

It is a common observation that we Americans do not know our history. Nevertheless, we are awash in historical argument, usually of the clumsily inaccurate and politically motivated variety. Be it the comparisons to Philadelphia 1776, Munich 1938, or Selma 1965, talking heads and popular historians seek to make sense of the present or advocate for their vision of the future through hackneyed analogies that read events backward, remove context, simplify motives, and advocate a vaguely Whiggish understanding of “the arc of history”. Given our era of political and social transformation, historians have all too often succumbed to the temptation of asserting their relevance by means of exaggerated metaphors. Veteran historian Dr. Walter A. McDougall is not such a scholar.

McDougall's The Lecturer's Art: Gems of American History is not merely a work of historical scholarship in the form of a collected volume. It is also an effort to restore historicism to the practice of thinking about and writing history, that is the study of past events and human affairs that analyzes them within their cultural context and values the explanatory power of contingency over universalistic and transhistorical arguments

Throughout his book, which spans the birth of the United States as an independent republic to the recent past, McDougall argues for the importance of contingency in determining the course of events while asserting that America's political and social development was firmly rooted in its European origins. While it focuses on the national past, the book is infused with historiographical insights and semi-autobiographical content, particularly in its preface and chapter on the Vietnam War, told largely through McDougall’s combat experience as an artilleryman. These methodological asides offer readers, especially those unfamiliar with the historian's art, insights into how history is written, fought over, and used in the public square. 

McDougall’s two intellectual goals are both arrayed against an exceptionalist narrative that presents the birth and life of the nation as unconstrained from the past and providential in its pursuit of the future. Such theories of history, if one can even call it that, are not merely academic. As McDougall argues in his later chapters, this Whig theory of history, or prolepsis, what he defines as "reading history backward," is still used by policymakers and their academic muses.

Against this error, McDougall derives a narrative arc from his seminal work, Promised Land, Crusader State, which argues for the Progressive movement as a domestic and foreign policy turning point that changed how Americans, at least those who held political and social power, viewed America's place in the world. The final three chapters of The Lecturer’s Art are works of synthesis that combine McDougall’s historiographic arguments with their implications for modern policy. These chapters illustrate how his scholarship butted up against interventionist perspectives informed by historical orthodoxies and paralleled the work of like-minded scholars who reassessed the past considering recent foreign policy failures. McDougall cites the work of neoconservative pundits such as Robert Kagan, whose book Dangerous Nation, argues that the U.S. displayed foreign policy continuity from its founding until the present. McDougall refutes theses such as Kagan’s and argues that such efforts are designed to retconned "Global Meliorism" into America's past as a means of supporting the Wilsonian model and tightened its hold on the reins of American statecraft.

McDougall began his academic career as a historian of Europe and brought this perspective to his command of American history. In the opening chapters, therefore, he seeks to reconnect American history to its ideological and political antecedents in the Old World. McDougall's periodization is not an afterthought but was instead a choice meant to begin the American story before the rupture of independence and thereby to undermine the ahistorical tendency of Americans to think of their forebears as always American. This tendency is an essential component of “American exceptionalism”, at least in versions that see the United States as a completely novel kind of society. As a corrective, McDougall asserts that the origins of the American founding “lay in the core beliefs of European civilization,” cites the numerous influences from Hebrew republicanism, the various flavors of Enlightenment thinking, and the historical experiences of the Venetian republic, and the political philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli.   

He presents a similar analysis when examining individual figures of the revolution. Chapter 2, is dedicated to Benjamin Franklin. McDougall explicitly writes against hagiographies of the sage of Philadelphia that present him as a "proto-American," who assumed a place in an inescapable American revolution and frames his chapter with a reminder that the Declaration of Independence "was by no means inevitable." McDougall presents Franklin as a Pennsylvanian, a product of a distinctive colonial culture, and an individual with a deep affinity and respect for the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Rather than starting his diplomatic career as a staunch patriot, Franklin sought to maintain the bonds between the colonies and their mother country. Speaking of Great Britain, Franklin, in a letter to an acquaintance in Scotland, remarked, "I love it" and "therefore wish to see the Union on which I alone think it can be secur'd and establish'd." McDougall notes that from his earliest work as an agent for the colony of Pennsylvania until as late as 1774, Franklin engaged in a "fourteen year mission for imperial unity." McDougall's treatment of Franklin presents the path toward American independence from the 1760s until 1776, not as determined but as contingent.

McDougall applies his methodology of reading history forward, inverting the fallacy of prolepsis to America's most neglected war, the War of 1812. He wryly observes that the war is typically presented as "so devoid of meaning that it deserved to be named for nothing but the year in which it began." However, McDougall rightly notes that for both the U.S. and Great Britain, the war had high stakes, with the former seeking to exert its primacy over the continent and international independence, the latter seeking to contain a potential rival and ally of its European adversaries. He similarly recovers the importance of war by arguing for the strategic importance of the Battle of New Orleans, which famously occurred after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. Often remembered as primarily necessary for Andrew Jackson's eventual rise to national prominence, McDougall argues that the battle soothed doubts in Washington about the circumstances of war's end, thereby ensuring the treaty's ratification. 

McDougall again argues for the importance of contingency during the book's historical hinge, the Progressive Era, specifically President Woodrow Wilson's decision to enter World War I. In Chapter Seven, provocatively titled "The Madness of Saint Woodrow," McDougall argues that Wilson's presidency was a turning point in which the United States jettisoned its past as the promised land and embraced its future as a crusader state. McDougall argues that Wilson normalized a "Progressive civil religion" that undid "the perspective of George Washington's classical creed" and established intervention in conflicts around the world as the "default position' of U.S. foreign policy," one that has remained a near constant in the decades since.

While Wilson spoke of America's mission as one of providence, McDougall again sees contingency. Regarding American entry into the war, McDougall cites Niall Ferguson's edited volume, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, as a method for interrogating Wilson's historical agency. McDougall notes that despite Wilson's early rhetoric of neutrality, his "policies were neutral in name only". He also argues that once American entry into the war was inescapable, Wilson still had numerous avenues open to him. Among them were less messianic and idealistic flavors of belligerency, a limited naval war to secure neutrality rights or commitment to full entry but for the comparatively limited aim of restoring the old balance of power. Instead, Wilson chose to conduct the war for idealistic reasons, "presumably because he had persuaded himself that God was calling America to redeem the horrible war by turning it into a 'war for righteousness.’"

This history as a contingency continues with McDougall’s treatment of the Treaty of Versailles and its ratification failure in the Senate. He argues against an account known to any high school freshman who managed to stay awake in history class: Wilson's farsighted vision for a lasting peace was scuttled by a myopic and petty Congress, particularly by a set of blinkered and partisan Republicans.

This narrative is, of course, a simple morality tale that historians have chipped away at in the decades since. Still, it remains politically salient, a useful bludgeon against ostensible "isolationism". Arguing against the mythos of Wilson, McDougall runs through a list of excessive treaty demands and unwise administrative decisions that proved fatal to his lofty vision and lasting peace. Among them was insistence on regime change in the German empire, which helped set up the subsequent "stab in the back myth." Another was Wilson's insistence on attending the negotiations in person, which "fritted away his prestige," and his refusal to bring along Republican representation, which looked petty and partisan (especially considering the outcome of the earlier 1918 midterms, which awarded the GOP control of Congress). For a man who sought to unify the world in peace, Wilson refused to first do so at home. 

Finally, McDougall argues what emerged from Versailles hardly matched Wilson's idealistic rhetoric and was instead a compromise between competing imperial interests on the Allied side. McDougall asserts while Wilson was "forced to make serial concessions to British, French, Italian, and Japanese nationalists," he refused to "accommodate American nationalists" and their concerns about the treaty. McDougall's narrative of the treaty's defeat is not one of the Senate betraying Wilson but Wilson succumbing to his own stubbornness.

Despite Wilson's inglorious political end, McDougall argues that his idealistic template survived, kept aloft by postwar scholars like the University of North Carolina historian Arthur Link, "who devoted his whole career to the sanctification and beatification" of Wilson. McDougall argues that Wilson's "Progressive civil religion" became the "default position" of American foreign policy. He cites the jubilance of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall as breathing new life into Wilsonian idealism that led to the hubris of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush's "wildly ambitious policies" in post-Cold War Europe and the latter's prosecution of the Global War on Terror.

The Lecturer's Art builds on these arguments in its final three chapters. Chapters 10 through 12 argue that the turn facilitated by the Progressive Era installed a regime of "profligacy, adventurism, amnesia, and civic vice." A misplaced sense of American exceptionalism made this turn in America's self-conception possible and led to consistently poor foreign policy decisions. McDougall sums up this morass in Chapter 10: "Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?" In this largely historiographical chapter, McDougall argues that the Wilsonian turn has led the nation down the path of "Global Meliorism," a belief that the United States is uniquely suited to serve as a global power for good.

In these final chapters, McDougall reiterates his argument that the country's founding was firmly rooted in its historical experience and that its foreign policy conduct in the 20th century was aberrant to that historical tradition. Despite modern reinterpretations, McDougall argues that the nation geared its foreign policy during the first century of its existence to protecting its political heritage and founding principles from "Old World empires [corrupting] the American experiment so it might prove the self-governing peoples can survive and prosper." While he concedes that the early republic made war, McDougall argues their aims were comparatively limited and elastic compared to what came after.

The final chapters of The Lecturer's Art are admittedly bleak. One could also take issue with McDougall's sweeping scope, which overlooks moments of genuine opportunity for substantive political change. Then again, it is hard to argue against his thesis, as even the post-Vietnam era's most significant attempt to rein in the presidency's "Global Meliorism," the War Powers Resolution, was, in actuality, quite toothless. In McDougall’s judgment, Congress is inherently on the defensive, trailing an assertive President while the judiciary hesitates to interfere.

Where does this leave the interested and motivated reader? McDougall's book begins with contingency, yet by the end it feels constricted and almost deterministic. Decades of political choices in the past ultimately limited their historical agency in the present. Seeing these trends, he asks, "Who or what can serve as [the] rudder of the American ship of state?" His answer: "The American people themselves." While he concedes that "public opinion is a crude instrument subject to all sorts of manipulation," it nevertheless is the last rung of sovereignty in our democratic system, for now at least, allows elections as an avenue for voters to display their will. As daunting as such a prospect may sound, its burden ought to be made a little lighter by the knowledge that it is we who make history.

Dr. Brandan P. Buck is a Foreign Policy Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and regularly writes on the history of American noninterventionism and its implications upon modern policy debate.