Newt Gingrich’s serious run for the Republican presidential nomination may have been the shortest in U.S. history.
For those who blinked and missed the self-destruction of his campaign, Gingrich had just declared his candidacy two days earlier when he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Asked his view of the Paul Ryan Medicare-reform plan that all but four Republican House members had voted for, Gingrich said he opposed it because it was “social engineering from the right,” which he went on to say, as if to clarify himself, he regarded as just as bad as social engineering from the left.
In addition to the fact that the social engineering isn’t even a relevant criticism of the Ryan plan and that the comment immediately alienated Gingrich from the majority of likely Republican primary voters, the remark will undoubtedly haunt the Republicans in next year’s elections as every Democratic candidate for Congress plays it incessantly as a way to drive home the unpopularity of the main Republican plan to reduce the deficit.
But that comment wasn’t the only less-than-intelligent thing Gingrich had to say in his amazingly short-lived legitimate candidacy. In a speech in Georgia that same weekend, the former Speaker of the House went off on immigrants, saying that any immigrant who wants to be a citizen should have to pass a U.S. history test.
He apparently wasn’t aware that U.S. history is tested of all immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship, but that ignorance paled in comparison to the lack of knowledge about U.S. history Gingrich then revealed he had.
“And,” he added, “we probably ought to require that voters pass a U.S. history test, too.”
Oh, really. Let’s see, so that would be a poll test, as in the kind of Jim Crow requirement (then called “literacy tests”) that was used to keep black Americans from voting in the South for almost one hundred years after the Civil War?
Obviously, Mr. Gingrich’s test idea would run up against current U.S. law (starting with the Voting Rights Act) and so would most likely be a non-starter, kind of like his candidacy. Or maybe he would distinguish his test from the racist ones of that unpleasant period in U.S. history by claiming that it would be the same test for all Americans and therefore could not be deemed prejudicial.
Ah, but then the question would arise as to just what history the test would cover?
Would it include, for example, the racist extermination of the Native Americans who were either killed or forced into rural ghettos in the “manifest destiny” that Mr. Gingrich is undoubtedly so proud of in the America he loves?
Would it cover the lengthy period of slavery in the Southern states, and the recognition of slavery in the original U.S. Constitution? Would it ask the test takers to describe how families were torn apart by slave trade or to explain the infamous Supreme Court decisions of Dred Scott (requiring the return of an escaped slave to his “master”) and Plessy v. Ferguson (declaring that segregated “separate-but-equal” education was constitutional)? Would it include the de facto and de jure segregation that existed throughout the nation until well into the 1960s or the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan for much of the twentieth century?
Would it cover the internment of American citizens during World War II, when native-born Americans who happened to have Japanese ancestors, were, under force of law, taken from their homes, forced to give up all of their personal property, and placed in concentration camps at the same time that the country was fighting a Fascist state that also featured concentration camps.
Would it include the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians when the only atomic bombs ever detonated on humans were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II? Would it include the current, and well-founded, historical view that the bombs were not necessary to end the war, and that, contrary to the claim that was sold to a war-weary nation at the time, Japan was ready to surrender and would have if a reasonable peace treaty had been presented to it?
Would it cover the grotesque reign in the early years of the Cold War of the House Committee on Un-American Activities that featured the blackballing of noted and distinguished Hollywood artists who had toyed with communism during the Great Depression? Would it include the witch-hunting demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy, who destroyed the lives of many good Americans by merely claiming they were communist sympathizers?
Would the test cover the CIA’s overthrow of the administration of a democratically-elected Marxist president (Salvadore Allende) in Chile in 1973? Would it include the tacit support for the coup d’état in Iran in 1954 that overturned another democratically-elected leader in favor of the Shah (thereby setting the stage for the current long-standing enmity between the U.S. and that Muslim state)?
Would it include the social upheaval that the Viet Nam War caused, with Americans marching against the war in their nation’s capital and being subjected to tear gas and police brutality for asserting their constitutional rights?
Would it include the killing of college students at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi when students protested peacefully on each of those campuses? Would it cover the cold-blooded murder by U.S. military forces of an entire village of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968?
And would it include the truth about the “preventive war” that the country initiated in Iraq in 2003, in complete violation of international law, there being no threat to American interests from that country at the time of attack? Would it cover the torture engaged in by the United States in Abu Ghraib and at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?
These are some aspects of the country’s history that might appear on the test Mr. Gingrich wants to require of all voters. He is undoubtedly a proud American. I just wonder if he could pass his own test.