Education: Self-taught Historian

At school I was given a good course in ancient Greek history, in Roman history . . . and in English history.. . . In college there was an excellent course on modern European history. . . . But of American history . . . in school and college there was not one page.

It was after I graduated from college that I heard of the expedition of George Rogers Clark in a political speech. . . .

This confession appeared last week in the foreword to a slim volume titled The American Revolution and Its Influence on World History, published by the Chicago Tribune at $1. Its author: the Tribune’s xenophobic editor & publisher, Colonel Robert Rutherford (“Bertie”) McCormick, Groton ’99, Yale ’03.

Author McCormick believes he has repaired his academic deficiency by reading “many, many books” in his post-college years. In 50 McCosmic pages which the publisher recommends in the cover blurb as “powerful, closely-reasoned . . .sound in scholarship, plenary in concept and exhaustively documented,” Colonel McCormick sets forth some of his self-taught discoveries and conclusions. Samples:

¶”The American Revolution was the turning point in the history of the world. There had been political philosophers before the Americans, but they did not get beyond essay writing.”

¶”It is one of the pleasant ironies of history that the Federalists built the government so strongly that when they lost control of it they were unable to tear it down in order to return to their former allegiance.”

¶ “[After the Revolution] the [British] empire adopted a policy similar to that of the last years of the war. Territory to be ceded under the terms of the Treaty of Paris was held and used as headquarters for Indian raids against the northern and western populations.. . . The Indian raids . . . raised such great bitterness in the distressed populations as to bring on the War of 1812, which finally destroyed the Indian power. . . .”

¶ “Czar Alexander II, in consequence of our abolition movement, emancipated the serfs in Russia.”

¶”[British] titles are presumably and often are, conferred for services to the state. . . . Recently John Maynard Keynes has been created a baron for his dominance in American affairs.”

¶ “Editorial opinion [in British newspapers] is thoroly regimented. . . . News. in our sense of the word, does not exist.”

¶ “[British aristocracy] has left … a great, humiliated lower class, whose reaction to the system is shown in its feeble efforts in war production and in warfare.

¶ “On instructions from London [many rich Americans are] not only pro-Royalist but pro-Communist.”

¶ “The infamous Cecil Rhodes conceived the plan to give free education to Americansin Oxford and make them into English Cells, boring from within.” “The foreign ambassadors in Washing ton have worked assiduously to break down republican customs . . . so that life in official Washington has become a one-horse, german silver, royal court. From the psychosis this created has arisen its irresponsible and contemptuous treatment of the American people.”