Not Worth a Continentalby
Vin Suprynowicz During the Revolutionary War, a Continental Congress bereft of hard money was reduced to buying supplies for Washington’s army by issuing fiat paper money, notes that became known as “Continentals.” Because these pieces of paper could not be redeemed for gold or silver, their value eroded quickly. By war’s end hardly anyone would accept them, and the phrase “not worth a Continental” was widespread in the land. It was widely reported Washington’s men found the only use of the paper money (other than, um … sanitary purposes) was to line well-worn boot to keep out the rain and snow: for decades thereafter a worthless piece of fiat paper money not redeemable in silver or gold was called a “shin plaster.” If this part of our history was as well known as it used to be, would Americans have been as complacent when FDR seized Americans’ gold and substituted paper money not redeemable in gold in 1934; when Lyndon Johnson finished this insidious process by switching America from silver coinage to nearly worthless cupro-nickel and Federal Reserve ‘“notes” no longer “redeemable in silver” in the mid-1960s? If the reasons the founding generation were so adamant about having Congress “set the value of the dollar” in gold or silver were well remembered, would we find it as hard to believe, today, that the prices of oil and gasoline and milk and eggs are not really up, if priced in 1908 20-dollar gold pieces of 1928 silver dollars – what’s really changed is that today’s paper “dollar” has the buying power of the “nickel” of yesteryear? The SEC just barred speculative trading in oil futures that tend to push the price of oil or gasoline “too high.” The Senate wants to follow suit by making this the law. Have such “price controls” been tried before? Did they lead to shortages, rationing, and black markets? Did criminal enterprises that got started feeding those government-induced black markets go on to create any more mischief, later on? Those who do not know their history, as Mr. Santayana warned, are doomed to repeat it. All of the above lessons – and many more – should come tripping off the tongue of any American who has studied his or her nation’s history in public school, along with a hearty “Let’s not try THAT again!” But they don’t. As comedian Jay Leno has great fun demonstrating by taking his “Tonight Show” cameras out on the sidewalk from time to time, the typical young American on the street today has trouble remembering against whom we fought the American Revolution, who bombed Pearl Harbor, and why better use wasn’t made of the aeroplane during the Civil War. Our unionized schoolmarms explain that kids find history “boring,” a mere parade of names and dates, that we must shift away from “dry and dusty chronologies” to teach “thematic” history. In real life, this devolves as often as not into a depressing catalogue of oppression of various “victim” groups – oppression both real and imagined – by the “dead white slave-owners” of yesteryear. Yes, history should be taught “warts and all” – none of our forebears were paragons. (Well, except Washington, until he took the army into Pennsylvania.) But it would be naïve not to note it’s now way out of style to insist there’s something special – something exceptional – about America and our legacy of liberty, to teach that some happy coincidences of history made this nation not only great, but the unique bearer of the torch of freedom. Do our public school graduates understand that, today? Can they explain it? Why not? To understand and be able to explain American exceptionalism, like it or not, it may be necessary to at least understand why aeroplanes were not used in the Civil War, why the British couldn’t use the train to get back and forth between New York and Philadelphia in 1788, why no one seemed concerned that opium and marijuana and machine guns were perfectly legal in 1905 (an era so safe that Americans didn’t even lock their doors), and why the Jackson Democrats kept making such a fuss about the National Bank. American schoolchildren used to be expected to memorize Washington’s farewell address or Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, or both. Now we’re told this is far too much to expect of 15-year-olds who spend hundreds of hours devotedly mastering strategy for complex interactive video games. Nevada’s Council to Establish Academic Standards was scheduled to meet July 21 to adopt new public-school history standards. When some attention was drawn to what they’re up to, they promptly postponed their meeting for “lack of a quorum.”
Extrapolating “themes” from history is great. But a young person cannot possibly judge – let alone generate – a useful interpretation of any facet of American history if he or she cannot locate the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Bunker Hill, Guadalcanal, Normandy, and Yorktown on a globe … place them in their proper chronological order … and name a commanding officer from at least three. Go ahead, ask them. Write in to let me know how they do – whether our kids have this basic stuff down so cold by the ninth grade that our standards can now afford to be “softened up,” even more. August 1, 2008 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz
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