Result: same old liberal domination of American history education.
Wall Street money men Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman established the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in 1994 in order to promote
the study and love of American history. The Institute serves
teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create
history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators,
produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions,
sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History
Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with
Preserve America.
The latest edition of the Institute’s online journal History Now features articles by six leading historans on the Great Depression. Here is a sample of the lead article by Stanford University Professor David Kennedy:
Though economists and historians
continue to this day to debate the proximate causes
of the Great Depression, there can be little doubt that
the deepest roots of the crisis lay in the several chronic
infirmities that afflicted the post-World War I international
economic order and touched every country on the planet.
The fighting had taken a cruel toll on key economies
like those of Britain, France, and Germany, the core
societies of the advanced industrialized world. The
lingering distortions in trade, capital flows, and exchange
rates occasioned by the heedlessly punitive Treaty of
Versailles, as the economist John Maynard Keynes observed
at the time, managed to perpetuate in peacetime the
economic disruptions that had wrought so much hardship
in wartime. What was more, memories of the war?s
bitter fighting and vengeful conclusion rendered the
post-war international atmosphere toxic, poisoning the
wells of traditional diplomacy and dooming any efforts
at concerted multi-lateral action to deal with the gathering
crisis. To those abundant physical and institutional
ills might be added the psychological maladies of near-religious
faith in laissez-faire and the gold standard as the
most sacred of orthodoxies, the economic equivalents
of the Nicene Creed. All of this added up to a witches?
brew of economic illness, ideological paralysis, and
consequent political incapacity.
In other words, the millions that Gilder and Lehrman earned in free financial markets are being used to teach students that the science of free market economics is a religious faith and that anyone who espouses free market ideas including the gold standard should be locked up because they are suffering from mental illness.
