To the Victor Go the Myths and Monuments

What if the American past you were taught — in school, in museums, in monuments — was engineered to deceive? In To the Victor Go the Myths and Monuments, Arthur R. Thompson argues that it was, documenting how organized movements, not mere political parties, controlled what generations came to believe. The title itself is the theme: victors do not just win wars, they write the myths and raise the monuments that define memory.

Thompson shows how Hamilton and Hancock were discredited through forgeries and propaganda, while Jefferson’s contradictions were downplayed. He tracks how schoolbooks altered the text of the First and Second Amendments, teaching false versions for decades. He indicts the use of monuments and textbooks to vilify figures such as Joseph McCarthy, while elevating radicals with collectivist agendas. Behind these shifts stood movements — Illuminati, Jacobins, Carbonari, and their American allies — that organized where conservatives too often stood alone.

Across chapters that move from the French Revolution’s influence on Jeffersonian politics through the Civil War and into Reconstruction, Thompson documents how organizations shaped belief and erased heritage. He names the European revolutionaries whose ideas and networks burrowed into American society, exposing the collectivist drive to dismantle Christianity, family, and limited government.

The lesson presses forward: without reclaiming history, constitutional restoration is impossible. Thompson insists that recovering the truth about America’s past — its founders, its documents, its battles for independence of mind — is the key to resisting manipulation now. For readers who suspect that monuments, curricula, and politics are connected, this book provides the evidence. It is a map of how memory was stolen, and a call to take it back. (2025, pb, 494pp)