University of Michigan Political Implications of Lack of Historical Knowledge Essay

ANSWER ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS. THERE ARE NO
“CORRECT” ANSWERS PER SE. EFFECTIVE, WELL-SUPPORTED, CLEARLY
WRITTEN ESSAYS MAY BE CONSTRUCTED FROM A VARIETY OF
PERSPECTIVES. THE QUESTIONS RELATE TO BUT ALSO GO BEYOND THE
SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL IN ORDER TO STIMULATE BROADER AND DEEPER
ANALYSIS AND APPLICATION RATHER THAN MERE FACTUAL RECALL. THE
OBJECTIVE IS TO ANALYZE THE PROBLEM CAREFULLY, SYNTHESIZE
MATERIALS EFFECTIVELY, AND EXPRESS YOUR VIEWS AND CONCLUSIONS
COHERENTLY. BE SURE TO MAKE APPROPRIATE REFERENCES TO COURSE
READINGS AND DISCUSSIONS WHERE APPROPRIATE. THESE CAN BE USED FOR
EXAMPLES FOR WHATEVER VIEWPOINT YOU EXPRESS. THIS ESSAY DOES NOT
REQUIRE OUTSIDE RESEARCH AND NO SPECIAL CREDIT IS AVAILABLE FOR
SUCH OUTSIDE RESEARCH; IN ANY CASE, CITE SPECIFICALLY ANY SOURCES
YOU CHOOSE TO USE. THE ESSAY SHOULD BE TYPED AND BE APPROXIMATELY
6-7 PAGES IN LENGTH.
IT’S YOUR PAPER; THEREFORE, IT’S PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE TO USE THE
FIRST PERSON “I” AND TO INCORPORATE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES WHERE
THEY ARE APPROPRIATE TO THE SPECIFIC TOPIC.
WRITING MATTERS: AS NOTED IN CLASS, ESSAYS SHOULD ADHERE TO
HIGH STANDARDS OF ORGANIZATION, GRAMMAR, AND PUNCTUATION.
FOR THIS CLASS, CONTRACTIONS ARE ACCEPTABLE: DON’T, CAN’T, ISN’T,
WON’T, ETC. BE SURE TO PROOFREAD YOUR PAPERS CAREFULLY.
1. Agitational issues occur in personal as well as political life. Imagine the following
hypothetical scenario: the UCLA Dean of Students Office has decided to sponsor a welcoming
dinner in Fall Quarter, 2022 and has invited about 60 students from diverse religious, ethnic,
and racial backgrounds. It has also asked these students if they would like to bring one parent
or close relative to the dinner. You are one of the students invited and you decide to bring your
mother. She knows that one of your friends, who was also invited, will bring her father, whom
she knows to be “a bit of a racist and sexist, especially if he drinks a little too much.” She asks
you to be civil and remain quiet if that man makes some unpleasant remarks at the dinner. “I’d
really like this event to be pleasant. You know I have high blood pressure and a heart
condition and I don’t think this is the time and place to argue about politics. So, please, please
don’t spoil anything!”
At the dinner, there are about 120 people, including students and various parents. As it
happens, you, your mother, and your friend, and her father are at the same table. Predictably,
her father, Clyde, starts talking about current events in a loud voice, which just about everyone
in the room can hear. He says, “What’s all this nonsense about so-called sexism. I’m tired of
hearing all these girls whining about so-called sexual assault! I just heard what someone said
at a rally for our real president! It should be printed in the school newspaper: ladies should
button their blouses, cross their legs, and quit acting like they want something. Look at what
some of the girls are wearing right here! If I had another couple of beers, I’d probably go after
them myself! And I’ll tell you, UCLA is full of all these minorities and homosexuals. I can’t
even tell if they’re boys or girls! I don’t know what our universities are coming to! And, my
God, it looks like your campus has a bunch of Muslim terrorists pretending to be students. You
probably have one of those politically correct professors who gets paid just to talk, talk, talk!”
Appalled, you must quickly decide whether or how to respond. What, if anything, will you
do? Will you respond to Clyde’s tirade or remain silent? Sympathetic to your mother’s
concern for calm and quiet, you nevertheless remember Socrates’ statement in The Apology:
“Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, but
whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.”
You feel conflicted. You appreciate your mother’s concern, but you know that uncompromising
agitation has been historically valuable even as it causes some chaos and distress. Whom do
you want to affect? In composing your answer, you should link your actions (or lack of
actions) to the broader themes of the course. Specifically, you should address the political
implications of your response. Whatever you choose to do or not to do has consequences.
That should be a significant part of your answer.
2. In class thus far, we have observed that many of the agitational organizations and leaders we
have mentioned and discussed are not well known even to highly educated residents of the
United States. During our discussions, most of the students have not recognized the major
agitational figures or organizations we have discussed so far. For example, few students in this
class could identify such prominent agitators as Joe Hill, Saul Alinsky, Dorothy Day, Paul
Robeson, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Harry Hay, A. Philip Randolph, or even the broader
story of Helen Keller. among many others. Many, probably most, students had not heard of
such significant events as the Homestead strike, the Bonus March, the Memorial Day
Massacre, and various other prominent events in U.S. history. And in some informal
discussions after class and in the office, several class members acknowledged that they hadn’t
heard of these people and events previously. This general lack of knowledge results primarily
from their minimal exposure in history books, in educational institutions of all levels, and in
the mass media. As James Loewen suggests in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, many
history texts romanticize American history, placing a positive “spin” on key events and
historical figures and omitting more troubling features of our history and avoiding extensive
treatment of people who agitated for major social and political change.
In this prompt, you should formulate and develop a thesis about the political implications of
the lack of historical knowledge. You should give appropriate emphasis to what is included
and emphasized and what is excluded and de-emphasized in historical presentations
(textbooks, classroom presentations, mass media tendencies, etc.) in the United States. Deal
with the implications of most Americans having some kinds of historical knowledge and not
having other kinds, especially about the history of political and social protest. Discuss the
consequences of these realities for agitation and social protest in this country. Feel free to use
examples from course readings, class discussions, personal experiences, or other sources.
3. As revealed in class discussions on October 12 when we discussed Homestead, one of the
most controversial issues in agitational politics involves the use of violence. In American
history, for example, many social protest movements have advocated or even employed
violence as a means to achieving their particular political objectives. This has also been the
case in many other countries throughout the world. The outcome has frequently involved riots,
injuries, and even deaths (see, for a comprehensive view, the book mentioned in class entitled
AMERICAN VIOLENCE by Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace; not required, of
course).
Imagine the following discussion among three students after class:
Student 1: “We can never justify or condone violence. I understand and totally sympathize
with the striking workers at Homestead and I condemn the violence against them by the
Pinkertons. But they and everyone else attacked in America must resist these assaults attacks as
vigorously as possible, but they need to do must do so with increased boycotts, strikes, sit-ins,
and other collective actions. The nonviolent civil rights movement years later showed the way!
As hard as it may be, they must refrain from hating their enemies. If they use guns or other
violent means, they only lower themselves to the state of their oppressors. Violence only leads
to greater violence!”
Student 2: “Violence is regrettable, but sometimes people have no choice. They must
reluctantly arm themselves in case of violent attacks, as in the case of the Pinkertons in
Homestead. But they must never initiate the violence, but only use weapons or other physical
force in self-defense when their lives or personal safety is in jeopardy. Violence is only
justifiable as a last resort. Homestead was the perfect example. It was no time for utopian talk
about love and nonviolence!”
Student 3: “The workers at Homestead and everyone else who is oppressed should not be
afraid to fight back with the same weapons that their vicious adversaries use. Why should they
put themselves at a major disadvantage? They should even initiate the violence if they know
that attacks are coming. Let them strike first for a change. This will finally show that they are
deadly serious about their goal to eliminate oppression and industrial injustice in this nation.
So, my view goes beyond self-defense. If absolutely necessary, victims of deep oppression
should be encouraged to use preemptive violence.”
Which specific student (or any combination you desire) do you support? Why? In
expressing your response, you need to develop a substantial argument defending your
particular position. The essays by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in The Sixties Papers
are relevant sources for this prompt. If you use sources or examples from outside course
materials, be sure to describe them adequately. As in all the prompts, you should state a
specific thesis at the outset of your answer.
4. Various agitational movements have organized protests involving civil disobedience and
other provocative actions. Taking their cue from the agitational activities of earlier decades,
especially the labor protests of the 30s and civil rights protests of the 60s, they have sponsored
demonstrations that have generated enormous publicity and controversy. Many come to mind:
(1) ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), which blocked bridges, interfered with
governmental meetings, and distributed condoms at major league baseball games and public
high schools to call attention to the AIDS crisis; (2) Greenpeace, which has occupied ships and
hoisted banners on downtown buildings and public monuments to mobilize environmental
awareness; (3) PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which has disrupted
scientific laboratories and major department stores to protest animal experimentation and the
sale of fur products and which has occasionally used nudity in its protests; (4); The Los
Angeles Catholic Worker, which disrupted the groundbreaking ceremony for the Los Angeles
Catholic cathedral to protest the unequal distribution of wealth and resources in America; and
(6); Justice for Janitors, which a few years ago stopped traffic in Westwood and elsewhere to
generate consciousness about low pay and poor working conditions for custodial workers.
Such actions have regularly and deliberately caused inconvenience to and some outrage among
many members of the general public, especially from those whose daily routines have been
temporarily disrupted.
Just last week, protesters calling for action against climate change blocked traffic on the
Capital Beltway in Silver Spring, Maryland, causing several miles of delays. Some of
them held up signs to demand that President Biden declare an emergency to address
climate change.
In recent years, this issue of climate change and global warming has come to the forefront of
national and international attention. On October 8, 2018 the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change reported that it has become increasingly clear that the world is already
experiencing “more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice” and that
if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster than we have ever done before, we can
expect more devastating storms, flooding, extreme heat, drought, water shortages, and deaths
from infectious diseases, heat, and smog. This year, we have seen more devastating wildfires,
hurricanes, heat waves and other natural disaster for a very long time. Of course, some
politicians, even at very high levels, deny the existence of global warming and climate change
despite the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community. And many people in the U.S.
appear relatively unconcerned about this problem because it is gradual rather than immediate.
Imagine the following hypothetical agitational action: Monday Night Football is very popular
among millions of American viewers. Imagine that an environmental group, ACTION NOW ,
breaks into the halftime show during a highly popular NFL game in November 2022.
ACTION NOW’s highly effective guerrilla technicians insert their magnificently produced
ten-minute dramatic video of glaciers melting, polar bears dying, Pacific islands disappearing,
and also people dying in Florida and Puerto Rico and other probable horrific scenarios in
America if nothing is done soon. This guerilla video is directed to an extremely large TV
Monday night audience. Discuss this nonviolent but dramatic agitational tactic in light of the
themes and discussions of the class thus far, especially the underlying principles of social
protest movements throughout history. Consider the motivations of ACTION NOW’s protest,
its political and moral goals, and the response of the public. In your view, is this guerilla
action on Monday Night Football likely to be a positive or negative force in the struggle
against global warming and climate change? Whatever your view, give your reasons. (This
question is NOT about your personal view of climate change/global warming currently being
debated throughout the country).
PAGE
PAGE 4
Dedicated to all American history teachers
who teach against their textbooks
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Something Has Gone Very Wrong
1 • Handicapped by History; The Process of Hero-making 9
2 * 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus 29
3 • The Truth about the First Thanksgiving 67
4 • Red Eyes 91
5 • “Gone with the Wind”:
The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks 131
6 • John Brown and Abraham Lincoln:
The Invisibility of Anti-racism in American History Textbooks 165
7 • The Land of Opportunity 195
8 • Watching Big Brother:
What Textbooks Teach about the Federal Government 209
9 • Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past 233
10 • Progress Is Our Most Important Product 249
11 * Why Is History Taught Like This? 265
12 • What Is the Result of Teaching History Like This? 293
Afterword: The Future Lies Ahead—and What to Do about Them 307
Notes 313
Appendix 365
Index 366
VII
Acknowledgments
The people listed below, in alphabetical order, talked with me, commented on
chapters, suggested sources, corrected my mistakes, or provided other moral or
material aid. I thank them very much. They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude,
Stephen Aron, Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill
Bigelow, Michael Blakey, James Baker, Linda Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown,
Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N. Current, Pete Daniel,
Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon, Ariel Dorfman,
Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul
Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch,
Mel Gabler, James Gardiner, John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick
Hagopian, William Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Richard Hill, Mark Hilgendorf, Mark Hirsch, Dean Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David
Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart
Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J. Morgan Kousser,
Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Caret Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis
Meadows, Donella Meadows, Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer,
Deborah Menkart, Donna Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Jeff
Nygaard, Jim O’Brien, Roger Norland, Wardell Payne, Mark Pendergrast, Larry
Pizer, Bernice Reagan, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy Roy Rozensweig, Harry Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter, John Anthony Scott, Saul Schniderman,
Barry Schwartz, Louis Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David
Shiman, Beatrice Siegel, Barabara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr,
Mark Stoler, Bill Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan von
Sertima, Herman Viola, Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara Woods, Nancy
Wright, and John Yewell.
Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution awarded
me two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its staff provided lively
IX
intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows at the National Museum of
American History. Interns at the Smithsonian from the University of Michigan,
Johns Hopkins, and especially Portland State University chased down errant
facts. Second, the flexible University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to
work on this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New
Press, Andre Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane Wachtell, provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that
are not so.
—Felix Okoye1
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible
than anything anyone has ever said about It.
—James Baldwin2
Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.
—Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko, samizdat letter
to a history journal, c. 1975, USSR3
Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.
—James W. Loewen
Introduction:
Something Has Gone Very Wrong
H
igh school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant”
of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-rtng is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English.4 Even when
they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every
year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know.5
African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with
a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do
only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my
grammar, non-white students do more worse in English and most worse in
history.6 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they
are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.
Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they
have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks
and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not
requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their
energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions,
staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will
appear on the next test.
College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have
had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history.
History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A
colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,”
because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high
school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance,
know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they
don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mis taught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school.
Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the
stupider they become.
Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present
society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point.
Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the
world around us. We need to know our history, and according to C. Wright
Mills, we know we da7
Outside of school, Americans show great interest in history. Historical
novels, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!,
Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri.’, and on! and on!) often become bestsellers.
The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the
Smithsonian Institution. The series “The Civil War” attracted new audiences to
public television. Movies based on historical incidents or themes are a continuing source of fascination, from Birth of a Nation through Gone with the Wind to
Dances with Wolves and JFK.
Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important
stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of
difficult seventh-graders. These same stories show what America has been about
and are directly relevant to our present society. American audiences, even young
ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through
the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that the teaching of
history, more than any other discipline, is dominated by textbooks.8 And students are right: the books are boring.” The stories that history textbooks tell are
predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved.
Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might
reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve
only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out fine in the
end. “Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges,” in the
words of one textbook. Most authors of history textbooks don’t even try for
melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described
as “mumbling lecturer.” No wonder students lose interest.
2 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
Textbooks almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might
ask students to consider gender roles in contemporary society as a means of
prompting students to think about what women did and did not achieve in the
suffrage movement or in the more recent women’s movement. They might ask
students to prepare household budgets for the families of a janitor and a stockbroker as a means of prompting thinking about labor unions and social classes
in the past and present. They might, but they don’t. The present is not a source
of information for writers of history textbooks.
Conversely, textbooks seldom use the past to illuminate the present. They
portray the past as a simple-minded morality play. “Be a good citizen” is the
message that textbooks extract from the past. “You have a proud heritage. Be all
that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has accomplished.”
While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it can become something of a
burden for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who notice
the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group that has not
achieved socio-economic success. The optimistic approach prevents any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color
are alienated. Even for male children from affluent white families, bland optimism gets pretty boring after eight hundred pages.
Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching
materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits.
Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and
to indoctrinate blind patriotism. “Take a look in your history book, and you’ll
see why we should be proud,” goes an anthem often sung by high school glee
clubs. But we need not even look inside.10 The titles themselves tell the story:
The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise the American Nation.11
Such titles differ from the titles of all other textbooks students read in high
school or college. Chemistry books, for example, are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule. And you can tell history textbooks just
from their covers, graced as they are with American flags, bald eagles, the Statue
of Liberty.
Between the glossy covers, American history textbooks are full of information—-overly full. These books are huge. The specimens in my collection of a
dozen of the most popular textbooks average four and a half pounds in weight
and 888 pages in length. No publisher wants to lose an adoption because a book
has left out a detail of concern to a particular geographical area or a particular
group. Textbook authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every U.S.
president, even Chester A. Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the
INTRODUCTION
-3
review pages at the end of each chapter. Land of Promise, to take one example,
enumerates 444 chapter-closing “Main Ideas.” In addition, the book lists literally
thousands of “Skill Activities,” “Key Terms,” “Matching” items, “Fill in the
Blanks,” “Thinking Critically” questions, and “Review Identifications,” as well as
still more “Main Ideas” at the ends of the various sections within each chapter. At
year’s end, no student can remember 444 main ideas, not to mention 624 key
terms and countless other “factoids.” So students and teachers fall back on one
main idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget
them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder so many high school
graduates cannot remember in which century the Civil War was fought!12
None of the facts is remembered, because they are presented simply as
one damn thing after another. While textbook authors tend to include most of
the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of
what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning by suppressing causation. Students exit history textbooks without having developed
the ability to think coherently about social Life.
Even though the books bulge with detail, even though the courses are so
busy they rarely reach I960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out most
of what we need to know about the American past. Some of the factoids they
present are flatly wrong or unverifiable. In sum, startling errors of omission and
distortion mar American histories.
Errors in history textbooks often go uncorrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review textbooks. Occasionally outsiders do:
Frances FitzGerald’s 1979 study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but it made no
impact on the industry. In pointing out how textbooks ignored or distorted the
Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States, FitzGerald predicted, “Text publishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history.” But she
was wrong—the books have not changed.13
History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources—the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters that document times past. Based
on these primary materials, historians write secondary works—books and articles on subjects ranging from daftness on Martha’s Vineyard to Grant’s tactics at
Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of
them splendid. In theory, a few historians, working individually or in teams,
then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works—textbooks covering
all phases of U.S. history.
LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME
In practice, however, it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new
authors is to send them a half-dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is written not by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions
deep in the bowels of the publisher’s offices. When historians do write textbooks, they risk snickers from their colleagues—-tinged with envy, but snickers
nonetheless: “Why are you devoting time to pedagogy rather than original
research?”
The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks
list up-to-the-minute secondary sources in their bibliographies, yet the narratives
remain totally traditional—unaffected by recent research.’4
What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read
a poem? The editors’ voice in an English literature textbook might be as dull as
the voice in a history textbook, but at lease in the English textbook the voice
stills when the book presents original works of literature. The omniscient narrator’s voice of history textbooks insulates students from the raw materials of
history. Rarely do authors quote speeches, songs, diaries, or letters. Students
need not be protected from this material. They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech as read American
Adventures’s two paragraphs about it.
Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage
students to believe that history is facts to be learned. “We have not avoided controversial issues,” announces one set of textbook authors; “instead, we have tried
to offer reasoned judgments” on them—thus removing the controversy! Because
textbooks employ such a godlike tone, it never occurs to most students to question them. “In retrospect I ask myself, why didn’t I think to ask, for example,
who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and
how did it change when Columbus arrived,” wrote a student of mine in 1991.
“However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture,” she
continued, “so ] never thought to doubt that it was.”
As a result of all this, most high school seniors are hamstrung in their
efforts to analyze controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter
these students the next year as college freshmen.) We’ve got to do better. Fivesixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high
school. What our citizens “learn” in high school forms much of what they know
about our past.
INTRODUCTION
This book includes ten chapters of amazing stories—some wonderful,
some ghastly—in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order,
these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes with important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or distort these events and
processes. 1 know, because for several years I have been lugging around twelve
textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying
what they say and don’t say, and trying to figure out why. I chose the twelve
as representing the range of textbooks available for American history courses.
Two of the books, Discovering American History and The American Adventure, are
“inquiry textbooks” composed of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources such as diaries and laws, all woven together by an overarching
narrative. These books are supposed to invite students to “do” history themselves. The American Way, Land of Promise, The Untied Sta
Republic, American History, and The American Tradition are traditional high
school narrative history textbooks. American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and The
Challenge of Freedom are intended for junior high students but are often used by
“slow” senior high classes. Triumph of the American Nation and The American
Pageant are used on college campuses as well as in high schools.’^ These
twelve textbooks, which are listed (with full citations) in the appendix, have
been my window into the world of what high school students carry home,
read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent many hours observing
high school history classes in Mississippi, Vermont, and the Washington,
D.C., metropolitan area, and more hours interviewing high school history
teachers.
Chapter Eleven analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption in
an attempt to explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must
confess an interest here: 1 once co-wrote a history textbook. Mississippi: Conflict
and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although
the book won the Lillian Smith Award for “best non-fiction about the South” in
1975, Mississippi rejected it for use in public schools. In turn, three local school
systems, my coauthor, and 1 sued the state textbook board. In April 1980 Loewn
et a/, v. Turnip seed el al. resulted in a sweeping victory on the basis of the First
and Fourteenth Amendments. The experience taught me firsthand more than
most writers or publishers would ever want to know about the textbook adoption process. I also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of
the adoption agencies.
Chapter Twelve looks at the effects of using standard American history
textbooks. It shows that the books actually make students stupid. Finally, an
LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
afterword cites distortions and omissions undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history
more honestly. It is offered as an inoculation program of sorts against the future
lies we are otherwise sure to encounter.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic
ancestors.
—James Baldwin1
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil
must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel
Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional
lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply
remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty. Of
course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and
example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
—W. E. 6. Du Bois2
By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. … We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.
—Charles V. Willie3
1. Handicapped by History:
The Process of Hero-making
T
his chapter is about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures
without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.
Many American history textbooks are studded with biographical vignettes
of the very famous (Land of Promise devotes a box to each president) and the
famous (The Challenge of Freedom provides “Did You Know?” boxes about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United
States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, among many
others). In themselves, vignettes are not a bad idea. They instruct by human
example. They show diverse ways that people can make a difference. They allow
textbooks to give space to characters such as Blackwell and Hansberry, who
relieve what would otherwise be a monolithic parade of white male political
leaders. Biographical vignettes also provoke reflection as to our purpose in
teaching history: Is Chester A. Arthur more deserving of space than, say, Frank
Lloyd Wright? Who influences us more today—Wright, who invented the carport and transformed domestic architectural spaces, or Arthur, who, um, signed
the first Civil Service Act? Whose rise to prominence provides more drama—
Blackwell’s or George Bush’s (the latter born with a silver Senate seat in his
mouth)? The choices are debatable, but surely textbooks should include some
people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.
We could go on to third- and fourth-guess the list of heroes in textbook
pantheons. My concern here, however, is not who gets chosen, but rather what
happens to the heroes when they are introduced into our history textbooks and
our classrooms. Two twentieth-century Americans provide case studies of heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson was unarguably an important president, and he receives extensive textbook coverage. Keller, on the other
hand, was a “little person” who pushed through no legislation, changed the
course of no scientific discipline, declared no war. Only one of the twelve history textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. But teachers love to talk
about Keller and often show audiovisual materials or recommend biographies
that present her life as exemplary. All this attention ensures that students retain
something about both of these historical figures, but they may be no better off
for it. Heroification so distorts the lives of Keller and Wilson (and many others)
that we cannot think straight about them.
Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame
her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every
fifth-grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young
Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been
made on Keller’s life. Each yields its version of the same cliche. A McGraw-Hill
educational film concludes; “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the
world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how
much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is
unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can
make us is to help another reach true potential.”4
To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and
filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she
specifically asked us to learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn
to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don’t know
much about her.
Over the past ten years, 1 have asked dozens of college students who
Helen Keller was and what she did. They all know that she was a blind and deaf
girl. Most of them know that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan,
and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some students can recall rather
minute details of Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was
unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few
know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about
the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller
became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or
deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke”—conjectures without content.
Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in
1968. To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them
with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.
The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the
Socialist parry of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even
before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any
10 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of
the new communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and
anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a manchild is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of
Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!”‘ Keller hung a red flag over the desk in
her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist party and became a
Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.
Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by
working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to
deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research
she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be
blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who
became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus
Always a voice for the voiceless. Helen Keller championed women’s suffrage. Her position at the head of this 1912 demonstration shows her celebrity status as well as her
commitment to the cause. The shields are all from Western states, where women were
already voting.
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• I I
Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life,
sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just
book-learn Ing; “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could
not see it, I could smell i t . ” A t the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous
women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to
socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged. Newspapers that
had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap.
Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall
to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle,
who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her
development.”
Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that time the compliments he
paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have
come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf
and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years
since I met him.” She went on, “Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind
and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of
the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”‘
Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society
needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found
the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent
$100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The
Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the
presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Curley Flynn, leader of
the American Communist party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the
McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn May the sense
of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!
One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions. Her praise of the USSR
now seems naive, embarrassing, to some even treasonous. But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling& and our mass media
left it out.9
What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable.
When 1 ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President
Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country
12 – L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
Among the progressive-era reforms with which students often credit Woodrow Wilson is
women’s suffrage. Although women did receive the right to vote during Wilson’s administration, the president was at first unsympathetic. He had suffragists arrested; his
wife detested them. Public pressure, aroused by hunger strikes and other actions of
the movement, convinced Wilson that to oppose women’s suffrage was politically
unwise. Textbooks typically fail to show the interrelationship between the hero and the
people. By giving the credit to the hero, authors tell less than half of the story.
reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and
internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with
progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson
administration’s Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom
know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his
racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in
foreign countries.
Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often
than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914,
Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and
nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and
Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in
Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua’s president and to force passage
of a treaty preferential to the United States.
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In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started
sending secret monetary aid to the “White” side of the Russian civil war. In the
summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blockade of the Soviet Union and sent
expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of Britain and France, and in a
joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward
from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces
that had declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk, After
briefly maintaining front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian forces
disintegrated by the end of 1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on
April 1, 1920.’°
Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our
“unknown war with Russia,” to quote the title of Robert Maddox’s book on this
fiasco. Not one of the twelve American history textbooks in my sample even mentions it. Russian history textbooks, on the other hand, give the episode considerable coverage. According to Maddox: “The immediate effect of the intervention
was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives
and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society. And there
were longer-range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof . . . that the
Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance.”1′
This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during
the Cold War, and until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.
Wilson’s invasions of Latin America are better known than his Russian
adventure. Textbooks do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayal of the
invasions could not possibly show Wilson or the United States in a favorable
light. With hindsight we know that Wilson’s interventions in Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista,
Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.12 Even
in the 1910s, most of the invasions were unpopular in this country and provoked a torrent of criticism abroad. By the mid-1920s, Wilson’s successors
reversed his policies in Latin America. The authors of history textbooks know
this, for a chapter or two after Wilson they laud our “Good Neighbor Policy,”
the renunciation of force in Latin America by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover,
which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Textbooks might (but don’t) call Wilson’s Latin American actions a “Bad
Neighbor Policy” by comparison. Instead, faced with pleasantries, textbooks
14 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
wriggle to get the hero off the hook, as in this example from The Challenge of
Freedom: “President Wilson wanted the United States to build friendships with
the countries of Latin America. However, he found this difficult. . . .” Some textbooks blame the invasions on the countries invaded: “Necessity was the mother
of armed Caribbean intervention,” states The American Pageant. Land of Promise is
vague as to who caused the invasions but seems certain they were not Wilson’s
doing: “He soon discovered that because of forces he could not control, his
ideas of morality and idealism had to give way to practical action.” Promise goes
on to assert Wilson’s innocence: “Thus, though he believed it morally undesirable to send Marines into the Caribbean, he saw no way to avoid it,” This passage is sheer invention. Unlike his secretary of the navy, who later complained
that what Wilson “forced [me] to do in Haiti was a bitter pill for me,” no documentary evidence suggests that Wilson suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops to the Caribbean.15
All twelve of the textbooks I surveyed mention Wilson’s 1914 invasion of
Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson’s fault. “President
Wilson was urged to send military forces into Mexico to protect American
investments and to restore law and order,” according to Triumph of the American
Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene. But “as the months passed, even President Wilson began to lose patience.”
Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the facts—the invasion was
Wilson’s idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American
people.14 According to Karp, Wilson’s intervention was so outrageous that
leaders of both sides of Mexico’s ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S.
forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the
world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.
Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our
Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw,
but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information in a
passive voice helps to insulate historical figures from their own unheroic or
unethical deeds.
Some books go beyond omitting the actor and leave out the act itself.
Half of the twelve textbooks do not even mention Wilson’s takeover of Haiti.
After U.S. marines invaded the country in 1915, they forced the Haitian legislature to select our preferred candidate as president. When Haiti refused to
declare war on Germany after the United States did, we dissolved the Haitian
legislature. Then the United States supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve
a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the constitution it replaced;
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the referendum passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768. As Piero Gleijesus has
noted, “It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to
these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not
democracy.”15 The United States also attacked Haiti’s proud tradition of indi-
vidual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated hack to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantat
forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919
Haitian citizens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war
that cost more than 3,000 lives, most of them Haitian. Students who read Triumph of tbe American Nation learn this about Wilson’s intervention in Haiti:
“Neither the treaty nor the continued presence of American troops restored
order completely. During the nest four or five years, nearly 2,000 Haitians
were killed in riots and other outbreaks of violence.” This passive construction
veils the circumstances about which George Barnett, a U.S. marine general,
complained to his commander in Haiti: “Practically indiscriminate killing of
natives has gone on for some time.” Barnett termed this violent episode “the
most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine
Corps.”16
During the first two decades of this century, the United States effectively
made colonies of Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and several
other countries. Wilson’s reaction to the Russian Revolution solidified the
alignment of the United States with Europe’s colonial powers. His was the first
administration to be obsessed with the specter of communism, abroad and at
home. Wilson was blunt about it. In Billings, Montana, stumping the West to
seek support for the League of Nations, he warned, “There are apostles of
Lenin in our own midst. I can not imagine what it means to be an apostle of
Lenin, It means to be an apostle of the night, of chaos, of disorder.”17 Even
after the White Russian alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, He participated in barring Russia from
the peace negotiations after World War 1 and helped oust Bela Kun, the communist leader who had risen to power in Hungary. Wilson’s sentiment for selfdetermination and democracy never had a chance against his three bedrock
“ism”s: colonialism, racism, and anticommunism. A young Ho Chi Minh
appealed to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles for self-determination for Vietnam,
but Ho had all three strikes against him. Wilson refused to listen, and France
retained control of Indochina.16 It seems that Wilson regarded self-determination as all right for, say, Belgium, but not for the likes of Latin America or
Southeast Asia.
16 • LIES MY TEACHER T O L D ME
At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the office he held. His
Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices,
including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia
and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans
as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations.
African Americans took part in the Republican Party’s national conventions
and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom
many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson
had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that
refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist—his wife was
even worse—and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings. His administration
submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African
Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as
chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern
whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a
clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one
occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White
House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his
office. Wilson’s legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic
Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal
government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond.” In 1916 the
Colored Advisory Committee of the Republican National Committee issued a
statement on Wilson that, though partisan, was accurate: “No sooner had the
Democratic Administration come into power than Mr. Wilson and his advisors
entered upon a policy to eliminate all colored citizens from representation in
the Federal Government.”20
Of the twelve history textbooks I reviewed, only four accurately describe
Wilson’s racial policies. Land of Promise does the best job:
Woodrow Wilson’s administration was openly hostile to black people.
Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed thai black
people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson
promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his
promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first
time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction I When black
federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had
the protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black delegation asked the
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• 17
President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and
refused their demands.
Unfortunately, except for one other textbook, The United Slates—A History
of the Republic, Promise stands alone. Most of the textbooks that treat Wilson’s
racism give it only a sentence or two Five of the books never even mention this
“black mark” on Wilson’s presidency. One that does. The American Way, does
something even more astonishing: it invents a happy ending! “Those in favor of
segregation finally lost support in the administration. Their policies gradually
were ended.” This is simply not true.
Omitting or absolving Wilson’s racism goes beyond concealing a character blemish. It is overtly racist. No black person could ever consider Woodrow
Wilson a hero. Textbooks that present him as a hero are written from a white
perspective. The coverup denies all students the chance to learn something
important about the interrelationship between the leader and the led. White
Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately
after Wilson’s presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause.
Another was the release of America’s first epic motion picture.21
The filmmaker David W. Griffith quoted Wilson’s two-volume history of
the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his
infamous masterpiece The Clansman, a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in
putting down “black-dominated” Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson’s former classmate,
Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was “unrivaled until Mein Kampf.” At
a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled Birth of a
Nation, and returned Griffith’s compliment: “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.” Griffith would go on to use this
quotation in successfully defending his film against NAACP charges that it was
racially inflammatory.22
This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time.
Dixon intended “to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . .
And make no mistake about it—we are doing just that.”2’ Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia
reestablished the Ku Klux Klan. The racism seeping down from the White
House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state
18 • LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME
(South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly
became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in
many southern states, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. During
Wilson’s second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites
lynched blacks as far north as Duluth.24
If Americans had learned from the Wilson era the connection between
racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response, they might not
have put up with a reprise on a far smaller scale during the Reagan-Bush years.”
To accomplish such education, however, textbooks would have to make plain
the relationship between cause and effect, between hero and followers. Instead,
they reflexively ascribe noble intentions to the hero and invoke “the people” to
excuse questionable actions and policies. According to Triumph of the American
Nation: “As President, Wilson seemed to agree with most white Americans that
segregation was in the best interests of black as well as white Americans.”
Wilson was not only antiblack; he was also far and away our most nativist
president, repeatedly questioning the loyalty of those he called “hyphenated
Americans,” “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” said Wilson, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever
he gets ready.”26 The American people responded to Wilson’s lead with a wave
of repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people,
not Wilson. The American Tradition admits that “President Wilson set up” the
Creel Committee on Public Information, which saturated the United States with
propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield
Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: “Although President Wilson had been
careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent
were ‘true and loyal citizens,’ the anti-German propaganda often caused them
suffering.”
Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing.
“Congress,” not Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of June
1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious
attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition
Acts of 1798. In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with
Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way
might, in his view, have threatened the war effort. Robert Goldstein served ten
years in prison for producing The Spirit of ’76, a film about the Revolutionary War
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To oppose America’s participation in World War I. or even to be pessimistic about ft, was
dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to “report the man who . . . cries
for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.” Send their names to the Justice Department in Washington, it exhorted. After World War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks
on civil liberties increased, now with anticommunisrn as the excuse. Neither before nor
since these campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.
20 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably.27 Textbook
authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson’s suppression of civil liberties, but in 1920, when World War 1 was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that
would have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts.26 Textbook authors blame
the anticomrnutist and anti—labor union witch hunts of Wilson’s second term on
his illness and on an attorney general run amok. No evidence supports this view
Indeed, Attorney General Palmer asked Wilson in his last days as president to
pardon Eugene V. Debs, who was serving time for a speech attributing World
War I to economic interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic,” The president replied, “Never!” and Debs languished in prison until
Warren Harding pardoned him.30 The American Way adopts perhaps the most
innovative approach to absolving Wilson of wrongdoing; Way simply moves the
“red scare” to the 1920s, after Wilson had left office!
Because hero ideation prevents textbooks from showing Wilson’s shortcomings, textbooks are hard pressed to explain the results of the 1920 election.
James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be successor,
was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned,
In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding
got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just warned a “return to normalcy.” The possibility that the
electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our
authors.51 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest
individual disappointment the world has ever known!”
It isn’t only high school history courses that heroify Wilson. Textbooks
such as Land of Promise, which discusses Wilson’s racism, have to battle uphill,
for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so
many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.
For some years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an experiment
in social archetypes at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He asks his
first-year college students for “the first ten names that you think of” in American history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students listed the
same political and military figures year after year, replicating the privileged positions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the proviso, “excluding
presidents, generals, statesmen, etc” Frisch still gets a stable list, but one less predictable on the basis of history textbooks. Seven years out of eight, Betsy Ross
has led the list. (Paul Revere usually comes in second.)
What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything. Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever in the actual creation of
H A N D I C A P P E D BY H I S T O R Y • 21
any actual first flag.” Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her
descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely
invented the myth of the first flag. With justice, high school textbooks universally ignore Betsy Ross; not one of my twelve books lists her in its index. So
how and why does her story get transmitted? Frisch offers a hilarious explanation: If George Washington is the Father of Our Country, then Betsy Ross is our
Blessed Virgin Mary! Frisch describes the pageants reenacted (or did we only
imagine them?) in our elementary school years: “Washington [the god] calls on
the humble seamstress Betsy Ross in her tiny home and asks her if she will
make the nation’s flag, to his design. And Betsy promptly brings forth—from
her lap!—the nation itself, and the promise of freedom and natural rights for all
mankind.”12
[ think Frisch is onto something, but maybe he is merely on something.
Whether or not one buys his explanation, Betsy Ross’s ranking among students
surely proves the power of the social archetype. In the case of Woodrow Wilson,
textbooks actually participate in creating the social archetype. Wilson is portrayed as “good,” “idealist,” “for self-determination, not colonial intervention,”
“foiled by an isolationist Senate,” and “ahead of his time.” We name institutions
after him, from the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian Institution to
Woodrow Wilson Junior High School in Decatur, Illinois, where I misspent my
adolescence. If a fifth face were to be chiseled into Mount Rushmore, many
Americans would propose that it should be Wilson’s.” Against such archetypal
goodness, even the unusually forthright treatment of Wilson’s racism in Land of
Promise cannot but fail to stick in students’ minds.
Curators of history museums know that their visitors bring archetypes in
with them. Some curators consciously design exhibits to confront these archetypes when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors, teachers, and moviemakers
would better fulfill their educational mission if they also taught against inaccurate archetypes. Surely Woodrow Wilson does not need their flattering omissions, after all. His progressive legislative accomplishments in just his first two
years, including tariff reform, an income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, and the
Workingmen’s Compensation Act, are almost unparalleled, Wilson’s speeches on
behalf of self-determination stirred the world, even if his actions did not live up
to his words.
Why do textbooks promote wartless stereotypes? The authors’ omissions
and errors can hardly be accidental. The producers of the filmstrips, movies, and
other educational materials on Helen Keller surely know she was a socialist; no
one can read Keller’s writings without becoming aware of her political and
22 • LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
This statue of George Washington, now
in the Smithsonian Institution, exemplifies the manner in which textbooks
would portray every American hero; ten
feet tall, blemish-free, with the body of a
Greek god.
social philosophy. At least one textbook author. Thomas Bailey, senior author of
The American Pageant, clearly knew of the 1918 U.S. invasion of Russia, for he
wrote in a different venue in 1973, “American troops shot it out with Russian
armed forces on Russian soil in two theatres from 1918 to 1920.”‘* Probably
several other authors knew of it, too. Wilson’s racism is also well known to professional historians. Why don’t they let the public in on these matters?
Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most
Americans. So are racism and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that
authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures
sympathetic to as many people as possible.55 The textbook critic Norma Gabler
has testified that textbooks should “present our nation’s patriots in a way that
would honor and respect them”; in her eyes, admitting Keller’s socialism and
Wilson’s racism would hardly do that,” In the early 1920s the American
Legion said that authors of textbooks “are at fault in placing before immature
pupils the blunders, foibles and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our
Nation.”J7 The Legion would hardly be able to fault today’s history textbooks
on this count.
Perhaps we can go further. I began with Helen Keller because omitting
the last sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of culture-serving distortion that will be discussed later in this book. We teach Keller as an ideal, not a
real person, to inspire our young people to emulate her. Keller becomes a
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mythic figure, the “woman who overcame”—but for what? There is no content!
Jus[ look what she accomplished, we’re exhorted—yet we haven’t a clue as to
what that really was.
Keller did not want to be frozen in childhood. She herself stressed that
the meaning of her life lay in what she did once she overcame her disability. In
1929, when she was nearing fifty, she wrote a second volume of autobiography,
entitled Midstream, that described her social philosophy in some detail. Keller
wrote about visiting mill towns, mining towns, and packing towns where
workers were on strike. She intended that we learn of these experiences and of
the conclusions to which they led her. Consistent with our American ideology
of individualism, the truncated version of Helen Keller’s story sanitizes a hero,
leaving only the virtues of self-help and hard work. Keller herself, while
scarcely opposing hard work, explicitly rejected this ideology.
I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate—that we could
mould our lives into any form we pleased. . . . I had overcome deafness
and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone
could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s
struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that
I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. 1 forgot
that I owed my success partly 10 the advantages of my birth and environment. . . . Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the
world is not within the reach of everyone.38
Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea. “There are three great taboos in
textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third
floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all.
Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right,
however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not
everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors,
and to many teachers as well. Educators would much rather present Keller as a
bland source of encouragement and inspiration to our young—if she can do it,
you can do it! So they leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over
into a vague “up by the bootstraps” operation. In the process, they make this
passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.
Woodrow Wilson gets similarly whitewashed. Although some history
textbooks disclose more than others about the seamy underside of Wilson’s
24 • LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
presidency, all twelve books reviewed share a common tone; respectful, patriotic, even adulatory. Ironically, Wilson was widely despised in the 1920s, and it
was only after World War II that he came to be viewed kindly by policymakers
and historians. Our postwar bipartisan foreign policy, one of far-reaching interventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations, was “shaped decisively by the
ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson Administration,” according to N. Gordon Levin, Jr.” Textbook authors are thus motivated
to underplay or excuse Wilson’s foreign interventions, many of which were
counterproductive blunders, as well as other unsatisfactory aspects of his
administration.
A host of other reasons—-pressure from the “ruling class,” pressure from
textbook adoption committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield
children from harm or conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid
classroom disharmony, pressure to provide answers—may help explain why
textbooks omit troublesome facts, A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking
in respectful tones about the past, especially when we’re passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don’t wait to think badly of Woodrow
Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration
only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don’t want
complicated icons. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach
conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant,”^
Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We
particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are
so accustomed to bland ness that the textbook or teacher who brought real intellectual controversy into the classroom would strike us as a violation of polite
rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to speak well of the deceased,
after all. Probably we are supposed to maintain the same attitude of awe, reverence, and respect when we read about our national heroes as when we visit our
National Cathedral and view the final resting places of Helen Keller and
Woodrow Wilson, as close physically in death as they were distant ideologically
in life.
Whatever the causes, the results of Heroification are potentially crippling
to students. Helen Keller is not the only person this approach treats like a child.
Denying students the humanness of Keller, Wilson, and others keeps students in
intellectual immaturity. It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of
history: The Hall of Presidents at Disneyland similarly presents our leaders as
heroic statesmen, not imperfect human beings.41 Our children end up without
realistic role models to inspire them. Students also develop no understanding of
H A N D I C A P P E D BY H I S T O R Y ‘ 25
causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for
instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that
country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should
show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals.
Instead, they present history as a “done deal.”
Do textbooks, filmstrips, and American history courses achieve the results
they seek with regard to our heroes? Surely textbook authors want us to think
well of the historical figures they treat with such sympathy. And, on a superficial
level at least, we do. Almost no recent high school graduates have anything
“bad” to say about either Keller or Wilson. But are these two considered heroes?
I have asked hundreds of {mostly white) college students on the first day of 7 class
to tell me who their heroes in American history are. As a rule, they do not pick
Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, Miles Standish or
anyone else in Plymouth, John Smith or anyone else in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, or indeed anyone else in American history whom the textbooks implore
them to choose.42 Our post-Watergate students view all such “establishment”
heroes cynically. They’re bor-r-ring.
Some students choose “none”—that is, they say they have no heroes in
American history. Other students display the characteristically American sympathy for the underdog by choosing African Americans: Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Malcolm X, perhaps Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, or Frederick Douglass. Or
they choose men and women from other countries: Gandhi, Mother Teresa,
Nelson Mandela, or (now fading fast) Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin.
In one sense this is a healthy development. Surely we want students to be
skeptical. Probably we want them to challenge being told whom to believe in.
But replying “none” is too glib, too nihilistic, for my taste. It is, however, an
understandable response to heroification. For when textbook authors leave out
the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas,
they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures.
Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good.
Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by passing on Helen
Keller jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled
person, they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real.
Nonetheless, our loss of Helen Keller as anything but a source of jokes is distressing. Knowing the reality of her quite amazing life might empower not only
deaf or blind students, but any schoolgirl, and perhaps boys as well. For like
other peoples around the world, we Americans need heroes. Statements such as
“If Martin Luther King were alive, he’d . . .” suggest one function of historical
26 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
figures in our contemporary society. Most of us tend to think well of ourselves
when we have acted as we imagine our heroes might have done. Who our
heroes are and whether they are presented in a way that makes them lifelike,
hence usable as role models, could have a significant bearing on our conduct in
the world.
We now turn to our first hero, Christopher Columbus. “Care should be
taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition,” wrote Washington
Irving, defending heroification.4′ Irving’s three-volume biography of Columbus,
published in 1828, still influences what high school teachers and textbooks say
about the Great Navigator. Therefore it will come as no surprise that heroification has stolen from us the important facets of his life, leaving only melodramatic minutiae.
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Columbus is above all the figure with whom the Modern Age—the age by which we
may delineate these past 500 years—properly begins, and in his character as in
his exploits we are given an extraordinary insight into the patterns that shaped
the age at its start and still for trie most part shape it today.
—Kirkpatrick Sale1
As a subject for research, the possibility of African discovery of America has never
been a tempting one for American historians. In a sense, we choose our own history, or more accurately, we select those vistas of history for our examinations
which promise us the greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to
explore the possibility that our founding father was a black man.
—Samuel D. Marble2
History is the polemics of the victor.
—William F. Buckley, Jr.
What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable
offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian
slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.
—Bartolome de las Casas3
In fourteen hundred and ninety-three,
Columbus stole all he could see.
—Traditional verse, updated
2. 1493: The True Importance of
Christopher Columbus
I
n fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Christopher Columbus sailed in from the
blue. American history books present Columbus pretty much without precedent, and they portray him as America’s first great hero. In so canonizing him,
they reflect our national culture. Indeed, now that President’s Day has combined
Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, Columbus is one of only two people the
United States honors by name in a national holiday. The one date that every
school child remembers is 1492, and sure enough, all twelve textbooks I surveyed include it. But they leave out virtually everything that is important to
know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize
Columbus so that readers will identify with him.
Columbus, like Christ, was so pivotal that historians use him to divide the
past into epochs, making the Americas before 1492 “pre-Columbian.” American
history textbooks recognize Columbus’s importance by granting him an average
of eight hundred words—two and a half pages including a picture and a map—
a lot of space, considering all the material these books must cover. Their heroic
collective account goes something like this:
Born in Genoa, Italy, of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew
up to become an experienced seafarer. He sailed the Atlantic as far as
Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world
must be round. Therefore the fabled riches of the East—spices, silk,
and gold—could be had by sailing west, superseding the overland
route through the Middle East, which the Turks had closed off to
commerce.
To get funding for his enterprise, Columbus beseeched monarch
after monarch in western Europe, After at first being dismissed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when
Queen Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition.
An early draft of this chapter formed the basis of The Truth about Columbus, a “poster hook” for high school students
and teachers (New York: The New Press, 1992).
29
Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Nina, the Pinto,
and the Santa Maria, and set forth from Spain. The journey was difficult. The ships sailed west into the unknown Atlantic for more than
two months. The crew almost mutinied and threatened to throw
Columbus overboard. Finally they reached the West Indies on October
12, 1492.
Although Columbus made three more voyages to America, he never
really knew he had discovered a New World. He died in obscurity,
unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring American history
would have been very different, for in a sense Columbus made it all
possible.
Unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional account is either wrong
or unverifiable. The authors of history textbooks have taken us on a trip of their
own, away from the facts of history, into the realm of myth. They and we have
been duped by an outrageous concoction of lies, half-truths, truths, and omissions, that is in large part traceable to the first half of the nineteenth century.
The textbooks’ first mistake is to underplay previous explorers. People
from other continents had reached the Americas many times before 1492. Even
if Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the
Americas. Indeed, Europeans may already have been fishing off Newfoundland
in the 1480s.4 In a sense Columbus’s voyage was not the first but the last “discovery” of the Americas. It was epoch-making because of the way in which
Europe responded. Columbus’s importance is therefore primarily attributable to
changing conditions in Europe, not to his having reached a “new” continent.
American history textbooks seem to understand the need to cover social
changes in Europe in the years leading up to 1492. They point out that history
passed the Vikings by and devote several pages to the reasons Europe was ready
this time “to take advantage of the discovery” of America, as one textbook puts
it. Unfortunately, none of the textbooks provides substantive analysis of the
major changes that prompted the new response.
All but one of the twelve books I examined begin the Columbus story
with Marco Polo and the Crusades. (American Adventures starts simply with
Columbus.) Here Is their composite account of what was happening in Europe:
“Life in Europe was slow paced.” “Curiosity about the rest of the world
was at a low point.” Then, “many changes took place in Europe during
the 500 years before Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492,”
30 • LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
“People’s horizons gradually widened, and they became more curious
about the world beyond their own localities.” “Europe was stirring with
new ideas. Many Europeans were filled with burning curiosity. They
were living in a period called the Renaissance.” “What started Europeans thinking new thoughts and dreaming new dreams? A series of
wars called the Crusades were partly responsible.” “The Crusades
caused great changes in the ways that Europeans thought and acted.”
“The desire for more trade quickly spread.” “The old trade routes to
Asia had always been very difficult.”
The accounts resemble each other closely. Sometimes different textbooks even
use the same phrases. Overall, the level of scholarship is discouragingly low, perhaps because their authors are more at home in American history than European
history. They provide no real causal explanations for the age of European conquest. Instead, they argue for Europe’s greatness in transparently psychological
terms—”people grew more curious.” Such arguments make sociologists smile:
we know that nobody measured the curiosity level in Spain in 1492 or can with
authority compare it to the curiosity level in, say, Norway or Iceland in 1005.
Here is the account in The American Way.
What made these Europeans so daring was their belief in themselves.
The people of Europe believed that human beings were the highest
form of life on earth. This was the philosophy, or belief, of humanism. It
was combined with a growing interest in technology or tools and their
uses. The Europeans believed that by using their intelligence, they
could develop new ways to do things.
This is not the place to debate the precepts or significance of humanism, a
philosophical movement that clashed with orthodox Catholicism. In any case,
humanism can hardly explain Columbus, since he and his royal sponsors were
devout orthodox Catholics, not humanists. The American Way tells us, nonetheless, that Columbus “had the humanist’s belief that people could do anything if
they knew enough and tried hard enough.” This is Columbus as the Little
Engine That Could!
Several textbooks claim that Europe was becoming richer and that the
new wealth led to more trade. Actually, as the historian Angus Calder has
pointed out, “Europe was smaller and poorer in the fifteenth century than it had
been in the thirteenth,” owing in part to the bubonic plague.5
THE TRUE
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. 31
Some teachers still teach what their predecessors taught me forty years
ago: that Europe needed spices to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the bad
Turks cut off the spice trade. Three books—The American Tradition, Land of
Promise, and The American Way—repeat this falsehood. In the words of Land of
Promise, “Then, after 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, trade with
the East all but stopped.” But A. H. Lybyer disproved this statement in 1915!
Turkey had nothing to do with the development of new routes to the Indies. On
the contrary, the Turks had every reason to keep the old Eastern Mediterranean
route open, since they made money from it.6
In 1957 Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff published a book that has
become a standard treatise for graduate students of history, The Modem
Researcher, in which they pointed out how since 1915 textbooks have perpetuated this particular error. Probably several of the half-dozen authors of the
offending textbooks encountered The Modern Researcher in graduate school.
Somehow the information did not stick, though. This may be because blaming
Turks fits with the West’s archetypal conviction that followers of” Islam are likely
to behave irrationally or nastily. In proposing that Congress declare Columbus
Day a national holiday in 1963, Rep. Roland Libonati put it this way: “His
Christian faith gave to him a religious incentive to thwart the piratical activities
of the Turkish marauders preying upon the trading ships of the Christian
world.” The American Tradition, Land of Promise, and The American Way continue to
reinforce this archetype of a vaguely threatening Islam. College students today
are therefore astonished to learn that Turks and Moors allowed Jews and Christians freedom of worship at a time when European Christians tortured or
expelled |ews and Muslims. Not a single textbook tells that the Portuguese fleet in
1507 blocked the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to stop trade along the old route,
because Portugal controlled the new route, around Africa.7
Most textbooks note the increase in international trade and commerce,
and some relate the rise of nation-states under monarchies. Otherwise, they do a
poor job of describing the changes in Europe that led to the Age of Exploration.
Some textbooks even invoke the Protestant Reformation, although it didn’t
begin until twenty-five years after 1492!
What is going on here? We must pay attention to what the textbooks are
telling us and what they are riot telling us. The changes in Europe not only
prompted Columbus’s voyages and the probable contemporaneous trips to
America by Portuguese, Basque, and Bristol fishermen, but they also paved the
way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years.
Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential
development in human history. Our history books ought to discuss seriously
what happened and why, instead of supplying vague, nearly circular pronouncements such as this, from The American Tradition: “Interest in practical matters and
the world outside Europe led to advances in shipbuilding and navigation.”
Perhaps foremost among the significant factors the textbooks leave out
are advances in military technology. Around 1400, European rulers began to
commission ever bigger guns and learned to mount them on ships. Europe’s
incessant wars gave rise to this arms race, which also ushered in refinements in
archery, drill, and siege warfare, China, the Ottoman Empire, and other nations
in Asia and Africa now fell prey to European arms, and in 1493 the Americas
began to succumb as well.3
We live with this arms race still. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the
nuclear arms race may have come to a temporary resting point. But the West’s
advantage in military technology over the test of the world, jealously maintained
from the 1400s on, remains very much contested. Western nations continue to
try to keep non-Western nations disadvantaged in military technology. Just as
the thirteen British colonies tried to outlaw the sale of guns to Native Americans, the United States now tries to outlaw the sale of nuclear technology to
Third World countries. Since money is to be made in the arms trade, however,
and since all nations need military allies, the arms trade with non-Western
nations persists. The Western advantage in military technology is still a burning
issue. Nonetheless, not a single textbook mentions arms as a cause of European
world domination.
In the years before Columbus’s voyages, Europe also expanded the use of
new forms of social technology—bureaucracy, double-entry bookkeeping, and
mechanical printing. Bureaucracy, which today has negative connotations, was
actually a practical innovation that allowed rulers and merchants to manage farflung enterprises efficiently. So did double-entry bookkeeping, based on the
decimal system, which Europeans first picked up from Arab traders. The printing
press and increased literacy allowed news of Columbus’s findings to travel across
Europe much farther and faster than news of the Vikings’ expeditions.
IK
A third important development was ideological or even theological:
amassing wealth and dominating other people came to be positively valued as
the key means of winning esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. As
Columbus put it, “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who
has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.”10 In
1005 the Vikings intended only to settle Vineland, their name for New England
or, more likely, the maritime provinces of Canada. By 1493 Columbus planned
THE T R U E I M P O R T A N C E OF C H R I S T O P H E R C O L U M B U S • 33
to plunder Haiti. The sources are perfectly clear about Columbus’s motivation:
in 1495, for instance, Michele de Cuneo wrote about accompanying Columbus
on his 1494 expedition into the interior of Haiti “After we had rested for several days in our settlement, it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put
into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had
started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers,”12 Columbus was no
greedier than the Spanish, or later the English and French. But textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to the Americas when they
describe Columbus and later explorers and colonists. Even the Pilgrims left
Europe partly to make money, but you would never know it from our textbooks.
Their authors apparently believe that to have America explored and colonized
for economic gain is somehow undignified.
A fourth factor affecting Europe’s readiness to embrace a “new” continent
was the particular nature of European Christianity. Europeans believed in a
transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of
Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after “discovering” an island and
encountering a tribe of Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in
Spanish) what came to be called “the Requirement.” Here is one version:
I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the
Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you
do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I
can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to
his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves.
. . . The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be
your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that
accompany me.”
Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Indians a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards then felt free to do whatever they wanted
with the people they had just “discovered.”
A fifth development that caused Europe’s reaction to Columbus’s reports
about Haiti to differ radically from reactions to earlier expeditions was Europe’s
recent success in taking over and exploiting various island societies. On Malta,
Sardinia, the Canary Islands, and, later, in Ireland, Europeans learned that conquest of this sort was a route to wealth. In addition, new and more deadly forms
of smallpox and bubonic plague had arisen in Europe since the Vikings had
54 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME
sailed. Passed on to those the Europeans met, these diseases helped Europe conquer the Americas and, later, the islands of the Pacific.’* Except for one paragraph on disease in The American Pageant, not one of the twelve textbooks
mentions either of these factors as contributing to European world dominance.
Why don’t textbooks mention arms as a facilitator of exploration and
domination? Why don’t they treat any of the foregoing factors? If crude factors
such as military power or religiously sanctioned greed are perceived as reflecting
badly on us, who exactly is “us”? Who are the textbooks written for (and by)?
Plainly, descendants of the Europeans.
High school students don’t usually think about the rise of Europe to
world domination. It is rarely presented as a question. It seems natural, a given,
not something that needs to be explained. Deep down, our culture encourages
us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we’re smarter. Of
course, there are no studies showing Americans to be more intelligent than, say,
Iraqis. Still, since textbooks don’t identify or encourage us to think about the
real causes, “we’re smarter” festers as a possibility. Also left festering is the
notion that “it’s natural” for one group to dominate another,15 While history
brims with examples of national domination, it also is full of counterexamples.
The contact between Norse and Indians around 1000 A.D., for example, though
mostly unfriendly, was not marked by domination. The triracial Native American
societies that developed after 1492—from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts,
through Florida to Ecuador—also offer evidence that domination is not natural
but cultural.
The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of
Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately,
and this is based on fact; Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the
boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land
and dominating the Indians was inevitable if not natural. This is unfortunate,
because Columbus’s voyages constitute a splendid teachable moment. As official
missions of a nation-state, they exemplify the new Europe. Merchants and rulers
collaborated to finance and authorize them. The second expedition was heavily
armed. Columbus carefully documented the voyages, including directions, currents, shoals, and descriptions of the Indians as ripe for subjugation. Thanks to
the printing press, detailed news of Haiti and later conquests spread swiftly.
Columbus had personal experience of the Atlantic islands recently taken over by
Portugal and Spain, as well as with the slave trade in West Africa. Most important, his purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade,
THE T R U E I M P O R T A N C E O F C H R I S T O P H E R C O L U M B U S – 3 5
but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a ra…