Academics & Independence Day

This 1862 painting, 3rd Kentucky Infantry Regiment Recovers after Shiloh, near Corinth,
by Conrad Wise Chapman, depicts Confederate soldiers activities in camp.

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Old Virginia Blog

VERBATIM POST
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Last week, I posted about a recent Harvard study which claims that most 4th of July celebrations are "politically biased" events which serve to "socialize children into Republicans." Yes, this is how the elites in academia view your flag waving 4th of July celebrations. I suppose its just a matter of time before they recommend warning labels on apple pie.

Now comes another blog post at BigGovernment.com which echoes what I postulated in my post:

The general tone of the 40-page paper is that understanding the puffery and “public rituals” associated with Independence Day in America is best left to the professional social scientists who truly know such things. For example, just in case their readers might be unaware, the co-authors helpfully remind them that the academic literature defines the Fourth of July as a “day that provides a context for the celebration of an American civic religion organized around flags, parades, and the Constitution.” What a strange tribe of constitutionally-minded, Republican-leaning celebrants!

Besides offering up tendentious conclusions, an overall confusion of causation and correlation, and a strange reliance upon parade-day precipitation as an important factor in their study, the co-authors miss what much of academia today misunderstands about American patriotism. Less than preference of one political party over another, or a penchant for political pomp and circumstance, American patriotism is about the love of a country whose achievement is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “Liberty to all.”

Besides the obvious agenda in "studies" like this, what truly amazes me is academics making the ridiculous assumption that they themselves believe their cloak of "scholarship" actually hides their agenda when they put out these silly studies. Of course, this agenda hiding is obvious to most and also extends into many other areas - Civil War studies for example. As Eugene Genovese so aptly put it:

. . . American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues . . . Our times call for a correct ideological line, which at its increasingly popular extreme regards the Old South as a rehearsal for Nazi Germany and calls for eradication of all traces of the conservative voices that have loomed so large in Southern history.

It is quite easy to connect the dots. The attitude is systemic. Case in point: let us not forget Professor David Blight's Freudian slip last year when writing about Virginia Governor McDonnell's Confederate History Month proclamation. Blight lamented:

Why doesn't the Confederacy just fade away? Is it because we are irresistibly fascinated by catastrophic loss? Or is it something else? Is it because the Confederacy is to this day the greatest conservative resistance to federal authority in American history?

As Genovese points out, the "canting ideologues" of historical interpretation today are really more about using their "analysis" to eradicate conservative voices. (Same issue with the ongoing criticism leveled at the Tea Party.) Just as the Harvard study wrings its hands over 4th of July celebrations ostensibly promoting conservative Republican values in children, others in academia would have conservative resistance, and its Southern voices to, "just fade away."