The Giving Review: Gordon S. Wood, the work of philanthropy, and what we owe our forebears

This article first appeared in the Giving Review

Last weekend’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix, a race through the historic heart of the nation’s capital, was something special for the American people—and, for that matter, for the world. It was kind of fun. It was, however, perhaps not entirely unprecedented.

On July 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson marked the nation’s 25^th birthday with festivities in Washington that included a horse race, horseback riding, and even cockfighting. After the races and other civic events, President Jefferson received guests at a grand White House reception, continuing an Independence Day tradition that would endure nearly to the dawn of the 20^th Century. Must have all been sort of fun, too.

There is something fitting about the Grand Prix in D.C., then, and the occasion invites historically informed reflection as well as enjoyment. It brings to mind the recent passing of a man who spent much of his life trying to understand the American founding and to help succeeding generations understand it, too—historian Gordon S. Wood.

Wood left behind an extraordinary record of scholarship on the American revolution, the founding, and the early republic. His work sought to explain not merely what happened during those formative decades, but the ideas and institutions that emerged from them—and the political culture that made the American experiment possible.

In the September issue of The New Criterion, James Piereson—formerly president of the John M. Olin Foundation, which made its final grants and closed its doors in 2005—well-memorializes Wood’s life, scholarship, and contribution to our understanding of that experiment.

The author of 10 books and innumerable articles on the revolution and early republic, Wood helped generations of students, scholars, teachers, and ordinary readers take seriously the ideas that animated the founding. That contribution seems especially worth considering during a period of considerable political, social, and cultural disagreement—not least disagreement over how American history itself should be understood and taught.

Taking a demanding discipline seriously

For my fellow Giving Review co-editors and me, Wood’s passing recalls another, less-celebrated part of his legacy. He was one of the members of the 1987–88 Bradley Commission on History in Schools, an undertaking supported by Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to address the declining place of history in American elementary and secondary education.

The Bradley Commission brought together historians, university professors, and classroom teachers. Its concern was not simply that students commit more dates, names, and battles to memory. It was that young Americans encounter history as a serious discipline.

History is not some oversimplified choice between celebration or indictment. Properly taught, it asks much more of students.Wood’s scholarship suggests an alternative more demanding of them, and more satisfying to our nation and its future. Our founders inhabited a world different from ours, but the political problems with which they wrestled—power, liberty, property, representation, institutional restraint, majority rule, minority rights, the common good of all—have hardly disappeared.

That was also an important insight behind the Bradley Commission. Education worthy of a self-governing citizenry should enable young people to enter into an informed conversation with the generations that preceded them. Such a conversation should include the nation’s failures and contradictions, of course—its “warts and all”—but it also requires realizing and recognizing the achievements, principles, and institutions that have proved durable enough to be handed down.

What we owe

There is a philanthropic lesson here, as well. Foundations frequently speak of seeking measurable results and systemic change. The Bradley Commission represented a different sort of philanthropic ambition—bringing serious scholars and experienced teachers together to think about what knowledge should be transmitted from one generation to another, and then attempting to influence the institutions responsible for transmitting it.

Its final report, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, was published in 1988. The next year, it produced Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education.

The works provided an intellectually grounded, but practically implementable roadmap for teaching how America came to be, what works best in preserving what we have today, warts and all, and most importantly, fully respecting the challenges facing and contributions of those who came before us—so that we too can be remembered, as members in good standing, as part of the American experience.

There should be something of a secular equivalent to the “communion of saints.” We have forebears, and they are owed much—including our memory of them, our respect for them and their courage and intelligence, and our gratitude for that which they have given. In the great Saving Private Ryan film, recall, mortally wounded U.S. Army Ranger Cpt. Thomas Miller (played by Tom Hanks) tells Army Pvt. James Ryan (Matt Damon) to earn the sacrifices made to send him home. Decades later, an elderly Ryan and his family visit Miller’s grave at the Normandy Cemetery.

Nearly four decades after the Bradley Commission report, controversies over the teaching of American history continue. Persistence is warranted—yet another lesson, in philanthropy as in so many other contexts. But perhaps that makes the example more, rather than less, relevant as the country turns 250.

We should all celebrate anniversaries, stage races, and recall the festivities of the capital in Jefferson’s time. And philanthropy should help inform and sustain the conversation between generations upon which self-government ultimately depends, including with a developed understanding on our part of the debates the founding generation had among itself. (We didn’t invent serious dispute.)

Gordon Wood spent a lifetime doing and improving that informing, and contributing to that conversation himself. The Bradley Commission tried, in its own way, to ensure that rising Americans would be equipped to join it. As another race has passed through Washington on another great American anniversary, those may be legacies worth remembering.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-gordon-s-wood-the-work-of-philanthropy-and-what-we-owe-our-forebears/