Tag Archives: history

By John Stang

Luke posted earlier about Newt Gingrich’s problematic lessons from history or even having correct historical facts.  Since Newt Gingrich has a doctorate, many have wondered about his doctoral dissertation.  He published one at Tulane University in 1971.  The topic?  Turns out Gingrich wrote about Belgian colonial education policy in the Congo.  Congo expert Adam Hochschild analyzed the piece:

A curious document it is — but not in ways that Mr. Gingrich’s enemies might hope for, since the dissertation is not filled with racism or drum-beating for colonialism’s glories. At the start he asks, “Did the colonial powers perform a painful but positive function in disrupting traditional society and so paving the way for more rapid modernization? Even if they did, was the price of colonial exploitation too high?” Good questions, but he never answers them. Instead, he surveys his subject in a highly pedantic way, dutifully covering rural and urban schools, church and state schools, white and black schools, Protestant and Catholic schools, and education for men and for women. Footnotes, statistics and quotes from eminent authorities abound. The writer who emerges from the text is not the fire-breathing, slash-and-burn partisan attacker Mr. Gingrich’s critics portrayed from his time as House speaker, nor the profound, big-picture thinker Mr. Gingrich the candidate presents himself as. It’s the desk-bound policy wonk.

Also notes:

Beyond education, Mr. Gingrich has a shrewd politician’s sense of how the colonial system worked. Power was held by a “triumvirate”: an all-white senior civil service, a powerful cartel of corporations and the Catholic Church. The first wanted power, the second profits, the third converts. Could this astute description reflect a hitherto unknown radical phase in Newt’s youth?

Alas, no: his beef is not that there might be anything immoral about one country’s owning and exploiting another, but that the Belgians didn’t create a class of Congolese who could keep the economy functioning efficiently — for whose profit, he never asks. “The Belgians get very low marks for their efforts to develop a political elite and much of the country’s post-independence chaos is due to this Belgian failure.”

Surprisingly, or maybe not, Gingrich never traveled to the Congo for any field research, as a good historian might do.  Other than that, his dissertation seems pretty bland and not surprising.  Then again, no one expected Gingrich to come out and be an Afrocentrist.  In a sense, Gingrich was not entirely wrong.  There was not an effective government set up when the Belgians left the Congo in 1960, which they understood. There were also ethnic splits to complicate matters more.  As a result, a civil war broke out and one of the longest U.N. peacekeeping missions (often termed the U.N.’s Vietnam) ran through the late 1960s. It would have been more correct for Gingrich to assert that the whole colonial system relied on governing elites to run the country, creating inequality and authoritarian leadership.  Of course, Gingrich did not, but no one in African studies really made that point in academia in the 1970s.

Beyond looking at Gingrich’s dissertation, it is important to understand Gingrich’s purpose as “the historian.”  The lens with which he looks at history is a conservative one.  For him, the structures of the U.S. were set in place long ago by the founders and repairing what the founders originally put together will unravel the whole system.  Unlike a normal, academic historian that sees history with a critical eye to link together events, the Tea Party and conservative look on history with reverence rather than finding truth.