History assignment 1

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

V I I

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 Hilgen-

dorf, 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 Liv-

ermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Mar-

ciano, 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 Ruben-

stein, 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 con-

sistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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, his-tory invariably comes in last. Students consider history "the most irrelevant" of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-rtng is the adjec-

tive they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most stu-

dents 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 diffi-

cult 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 his-

tory." 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 flex-

ible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks

and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow dis-

heartened 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 litera-

ture 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 impor-

tant. 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 contin-

uing 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 stu-

dents 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 stock-

broker 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 under-

standing of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color

are alienated. Even for male children from affluent white families, bland opti-

mism 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 Princi-

ples 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 informa-

tion—-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

I N T R O D U C T I O N - 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 sup-

pressing 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 his-

tory 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 pre-

dicted, "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 pri-

mary sources—the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, pho-

tographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters that document times past. Based

on these primary materials, historians write secondary works—books and arti-

cles 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.

L I E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

In practice, however, it doesn't happen that way. Instead, history text-

books 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 text-

book 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 text-

books, 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 nar-

rator'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 para-

graph 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. His-

tory is furious debate informed by evidence and reason. Textbooks encourage

students to believe that history is facts to be learned. "We have not avoided con-

troversial 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 ques-

tion 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. Five-

sixths 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.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

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 impor-

tant 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 pri- mary 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 States—A History of the

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 adop-

tion 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 TEACHER TOLD ME

afterword cites distortions and omissions undiscussed in earlier chapters and rec-

ommends 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 our- selves. ... We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.

—Charles V. Willie3

1. Handicapped by History:

The Process of Hero-making

This chapter is about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcifi-cation) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educa- tional 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 Eliza-

beth 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 car-

port 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 tra-

versed 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 hero-

ification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson was unarguably an impor-

tant 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 his-

tory 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 man-

child 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 syndi-

calist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Keller's commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a dis-

abled 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 popula-

tion 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 posi- tion 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.

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y • I I

12 - L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

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 Amer-

ican 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 sup-

ported 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 eco-

nomics. 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 rad-

ical—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

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 admin- istration, 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.

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y

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 over-

throw 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 men-

tions it. Russian history textbooks, on the other hand, give the episode consider-

able 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 dam-

ages 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 text-

book 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 pro-

voked 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 text-

books 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 undesir-

able to send Marines into the Caribbean, he saw no way to avoid it," This pas-

sage 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 docu-

mentary evidence suggests that Wilson suffered any such qualms about dis-

patching 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 inter-

vene. 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 legis-

lature 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;

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y

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 plantations, American troops

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 Tri-

umph 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 diplo-

matic recognition to the Soviet Union, He participated in barring Russia from

the peace negotiations after World War 1 and helped oust Bela Kun, the com-

munist leader who had risen to power in Hungary. Wilson's sentiment for self-

determination 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-determina-

tion as all right for, say, Belgium, but not for the likes of Latin America or

Southeast Asia.

16 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD 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 fed-

eral 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

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y • 1 7

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 char-

acter 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 Recon-

struction. 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 light-

ning, 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 pro-

duction of its time but also probably the most racist major movie of all time.

Dixon intended "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of his-

tory 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 over-

state 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 prede-

cessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state

18 • LIES MY TEACHER 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, "car-

ries 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 dif-

fered 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 provi-

sion giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with

Wilson's approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to sup-

press 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

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y

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 Depart- ment 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 liber-

ties, 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 undemoc-

ratic," 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 short-

comings, 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," text-

books 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 Amer-

ican history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students listed the

same political and military figures year after year, replicating the privileged posi-

tions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the proviso, "excluding

presidents, generals, statesmen, etc" Frisch still gets a stable list, but one less pre-

dictable 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 any-

thing. 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 univer-

sally 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 explana-

tion: 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 por-

trayed 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 arche-

types when they are inaccurate. Textbook authors, teachers, and moviemakers

would better fulfill their educational mission if they also taught against inaccu-

rate archetypes. Surely Woodrow Wilson does not need their flattering omis-

sions, 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 TEACHER TOLD ME

This statue of George Washington, now in the Smithsonian Institution, exempli- fies 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 pro-

fessional 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 distor-

tion 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

H A N D I C A P P E D B Y H I S T O R Y - 2 3

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 envi-

ronment. . . . 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, reli-

gion, 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 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

presidency, all twelve books reviewed share a common tone; respectful, patri-

otic, 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 inter-

ventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations, was "shaped decisively by the

ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson Administra-

tion," 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 Her-

itage 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 intel-

lectual 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, rever-

ence, 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

HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY ' 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 of7 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 Lin-

coln, 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 sym-

pathy 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 dis-

tressing. 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 heroifica-

tion has stolen from us the important facets of his life, leaving only melodra-

matic minutiae.

H A N D I C A P P E D BY H I S T O R Y • 27

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 his-

tory, 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 theblue. American history books present Columbus pretty much without prece- dent, 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 sur-

veyed include it. But they leave out virtually everything that is important to

know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Mean-

while, 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 Fer-

dinand 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 diffi-

cult. 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 omis-

sions, 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 "dis-

covery" 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 • L I E S 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 Euro-

peans 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, per-

haps because their authors are more at home in American history than European

history. They provide no real causal explanations for the age of European con-

quest. 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, nonethe-

less, 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

T H E 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 1

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 perpetu-

ated 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 Chris-

tians 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

IK

development in human history. Our history books ought to discuss seriously

what happened and why, instead of supplying vague, nearly circular pronounce-

ments 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 Ameri-

cans, 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 far-

flung 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.

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

T H E 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 3

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 sev-

eral 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 down-

play 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 power-

fully 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 con-

vert 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 con-

quest 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 con-

quer the Americas and, later, the islands of the Pacific.'* Except for one para-

graph 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 ten-

dency 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, cur-

rents, 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 impor-

tant, his purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade,

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS - 3 5

but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale.16 If

textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently

about why the West dominates the world today.

The textbooks concede that Columbus did not start from scratch. Every

textbook account of the European exploration of the Americas begins with Prince

Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, between 1415 and 1460. Henry is portrayed as

discovering Madeira and the Azores and sending out ships to circumnavigate

Africa for the first time. The textbook authors seem unaware that ancient Phoeni-

cians and Egyptians sailed at least as far as Ireland and England, reached Madeira

and the Azores, traded with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and

sailed all the way around Africa before 600 B.C. Instead, the textbooks credit

Bartolomeu Dias with being the first to round the Cape of Good Hope at the

southern tip of Africa in 1488. Omitting the accomplishments of the Afro-

Phoenicians is ironic, because it was Prince Henry's knowledge of their feats that

inspired him to replicate them." But this information clashes with another social

archetype: our culture views modern technology as a European development. So

the Afro-Phoenicians' feats do not conform to the textbooks' overall story line

about how white Europeans taught the rest of the world how to do things. None

of the textbooks credits the Muslims with preserving Greek wisdom, enhancing it

with ideas from China, India, and Africa, and then passing on the resulting

knowledge to Europe via Spain. Instead, they show Henry inventing navigation

and imply that before Europe there was nothing, at least nothing modern.

In fact, Henry's work was based mostly on ideas that were known to the

ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians and had been developed further in Arabia,

North Africa, and China, Even the word the Portuguese applied to their new

ships, caravel, derived from the Egyptian caravos.1* Cultures do not evolve in a

vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most important cause of cultural devel-

opment. Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthro-

pologists call this phenomenon efflorescence. Children in elementary school

learn that Persian and Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity due to

their location on trade routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of European world

domination, textbooks have a golden opportunity to apply this same idea of cul-

tural diffusion to Europe, They squander it. Not only did Henry have to develop

new instruments, according to The American Way, but "people didn't know how

to build seagoing ships, either,"" Students are left without a clue as to how

aborigines ever reached Australia, Polynesians reached Madagascar, or Afro-

Phoenicians reached the Canaries. By "people" Way means, of course, Euro-

peans—a textbook example of Eurocentrism.

36 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

These books are expressions of what the anthropologist Stephen Jett calls

"the doctrine of the discovery of America by Columbus."1" Table 1 provides a

chronological list of expeditions that may have reached the Americas before

Columbus, with comments on the quality of the evidence for each as of 1994.1[

While the list is long, it is still probably incomplete. A map found in Turkey

dated 1513 and said to be based on material from the library of Alexander the

Great includes coastline details of South America and Antarctica. Ancient

Roman coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing some archaeologists

to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas more than once,22 Native

Americans also crossed the Atlantic: anthropologists conjecture that Native

Americans voyaged east millennia ago from Canada to Scandinavia or Scotland.

Two Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 B.C. became major curiosities

in Europe."

The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into

the societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia

before 1492, They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant

past. If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which

claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged stu-

dents to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would

also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence—

oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human

blood types, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations—that researchers

use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem

locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle,

coauthors of the textbook The United States—A History of the Republic, have also

written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize

that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controver-

sies,14 Davidson and Lytle's high school textbook, howevet, like its competitors,

presents history as answers, not questions.

New evidence that emerges, as archaeologists and historians compare

American cultures with cultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia, may confirm or dis-

prove these arrivals. Keeping up with such evidence is a lot of work. To tell

about earlier explorers, textbook authors would have to familiarize themselves

with sources such as those cited in the three preceding footnotes. It's easier just

to retell the old familiar Columbus story.

Seven of the twelve textbooks 1 studied at least mention the expeditions

of the Norse. These daring sailors reached America in a series of voyages across

the North Atlantic, establishing communities on the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and

T H E 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 7

Table 1. Explorers of America

YEAR FROM TO QUALITY OF EVIDENCE

70,000? B.C.- SiUeria 12.0007 B.C.

Alaska

6000? B.C.- 1500? B.C.

5000? B.C.

Indonesia South America (or other direction)

Japan

10,000? B.C.- Siberia 600? B.C.

9000? B.C. to present

1000 B.C.

1000 B.C.- 300 A.D,

BOO B.C.

600 A.D.

1000-1350

Siberia

China

Greenland, Ice lard

1311?-1460? West Africa

c. 1460 Portugal

Ecuador

Canada. New Mexico

Alaska

Central America

Afro-Phoenicia Central America

Phoenicia, New England, Celtic Britain perhaps elsewhere

Ireland, Newfoundland? via Iceland Weal Indies?

Labrador, Baffin Land, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, possibly Cape Coo and further south

High: the survivors peopled the Americas.

Moderate: similarities in blowguns, pa per making, etc.

Moderate: similar pottery, fishing styles.

High: Navajos and Crees resemble each other culturally, differ horn other Indians.

High: continuing contact Oy Inults across Bering Sea.

Low. Chinese legend; cultural similarities.

Moderate: Negroid and Caucasoid likenesses in sculpture and ceramics, Arab history, etc.

Low. megaliths, possible similarities in script and language.

Low: legends of St. Brendan, written C. 850 A.D., confirmed by Norse sagas.

High: oral sagas, conf rmed by archaeology on Newfoundland.

Haiti, Panama, Moderate: Portuguese sources in possibly Brazil West Africa, Columbus on Haiti.

Balboa in Panama.

Newfoundland? Brazil? Low: inference from Portuguese sources and actions.

1375?-1491 Basque Spain Newfoundland coast

1481-91 Bristol, England Newfoundland coast

1492 Spain Caribbean, including Haiti

Low: cryptic historical sources.

Low: cryptic historical sources.

High: historical sources.

Greenland. The Norse colony on Greenland lasted five hundred years

(982-c. 1500), as long as the European settlement of the Americas until now.

From Greenland a series of expeditions, some planned, some accidental, reached

various parts of North America, including Baffin Land, Labrador, Newfound-

land, and possibly New England.

Textbooks that mention the Viking expeditions minimize them. Land of

Promise writes, "They merely touched the shore briefly, and sailed away." Perhaps

the authors of Promise did not know that, around 1005, Thorfinn and Gudrid

Karlsefni led a party of 65 or 165 or 265 homesteaders (the old Norse sagas

vary), with livestock and supplies, to settle Vineland. They lasted two years;

Gudrid gave birth to a son. Then conflict with Native Americans caused them to

give up. This trip was no isolated incident: Norse were still exporting wood

from Labrador to Greenland 350 years later. Some archaeologists and historians

believe that the Norse got as far down the coast as North Carolina. The Norse

discoveries remained known in western Europe for centuries and were never for-

gotten in Scandinavia. Columbus surely learned of Greenland and probably also

of North America if he visited Iceland in 1477 as he claimed to have done."

It may be fair to say that the Vikings' voyages had little lasting effect on

the fate of the world. Should textbooks therefore leave them out? Is impact on

the present the sole reason for including an event or fact? It cannot be, of

course, or our history books would shrink to twenty-page pamphlets. We

include the Norse voyages, not for their ostensible geopolitical significance, but

because including them gives a more complete picture of the past. Moreover, if

textbooks would only intelligently compare the Norse voyages to Columbus's

second voyage, they would help students understand the changes that took

place in Europe between 1000 and 1493. As we shall see, Columbus's second

voyage was ten times larger than the Norse attempts at settlement. The new

European ability to mobilize was in part responsible for Columbus's voyages

taking on their awesome significance.

Although seafarers from Africa and Asia may also have made it to the

Americas, they never make it into history textbooks. The best known are the

voyages of the Afro-Phoenicians, probably launched from Morocco but ulti-

mately from Egypt, that are said to have reached the Atlantic coast of Mexico in

about 750 B.C. Organic material associated with colossal heads of basalt that

stand along the eastern coast of Mexico stand has been dated to around 750

B.C. The stone heads are realistic portraits of West Africans, according to the

anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima, who has done much to bring these images into

popular consciousness.^ Around the same time Indians elsewhere in Mexico

T H E 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 . 39

created small ceramic and stone sculptures of what seem to be Caticasoid and

Negroid faces. As Alexander von Wuthenau, who collected many such terra-

cotta statues, put it, "It is contradictory to elementary logic and to all artistic

experience that an Indian could depict in a masterly way the head of a Negro or

of a white person without missing a single racial characteristic, unless he had

seen such a person."27 Although some scholars have dismissed the Caucasoid

images as "stylized" Indian heads and the Negroid faces as representing jaguars

or human babies, the faces nonetheless stare back at us, steadfastly Caucasoid or

Negroid, hard to explain away. Ivan von Sertima and others have adduced addi-

tional bits of evidence, including similarities in looms and other cultural ele-

ments, identical strains of cotton that probably required human intervention to

cross the Atlantic, and information in Arab historical sources about extensive

ocean navigation by Africans and Phoenicians in the eighth century B.C.18

What is the importance today of these African and Phoenician predeces-

sors of Columbus? Like the Vikings, they provide a fascinating story, one that

can hold high school students on the edge of their seats. We might also realize

another kind of importance by contemplating the particular meaning of

Columbus Day. Italian Americans infer something positive about their "national

character" from the exploits of their ethnic ancestors. The American sociologist

George Homans once quipped, explaining why he had written on his own

ancestors in East Anglia, rather than on some larger group elsewhere; "They may

be humans, but not Homans!" Similarly, Scandinavians and Scandinavian Ameri-

cans have always believed the Norse sagas about the Vikings, even when most

historians did not, and finally confirmed them by conducting archaeological

research in Newfoundland.

If Columbus is especially relevant to western Europeans and the Vikings

to Scandinavians, what is the meaning to African Americans of the pre-

Columbian voyagers from Africa? After visiting the Von Wuthenau museum in

Mexico City, the Afro-Carib scholar Tiho Narva wrote, "With his unique collec-

tion surrounding me, I had an eerie feeling that veils obscuring the past had

been torn asunder. . . . Somehow, upon leaving the museum I suddenly felt that

I could walk taller for the rest of my days."19 Von Sertima's book is in its six-

teenth printing and he is lionized by black undergraduates across America. Rap

music groups chant "but we already had been there" in verses about Columbus.*0

Obviously, African Americans want to see positive images of "themselves" in

American history. So do we all.

As with the Norse, including the Afro-Phoenicians gives a more complete

and complex picture of the past, showing that navigation and exploration did

40 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Rock heads nine feet tall face the ocean in southeastern Mexico. Archaeologists call them Olmec heads after their name for the Indians who carved them. Accord- ing to an archaeologist who helped uncover them, the faces are "amazingly Negroid." Today some archaeologists believe that the mouth lines resemble jaguar-like expressions Mayan children still make. Others think the statues are of "fat babies" or Indian kings or resemble sculptures in Southeast Asia.

not begin with Europe in the 1400s. Like the Norse, the A fro-Phoenicians illus-

trate human possibility, in this case black possibility, or, more accurately, the

prowess of a multiracial society. Unlike the Norse, the Africans and Phoenicians

seem to have made a permanent impact on the Americas. The huge stone statues

in Mexico imply as much. It took enormous effort to quarry these basalt blocks,

each weighing ten to forty tons, move them from quarries seventy-five miles

away, and sculpt them into heads six to ten feet tall. Wherever they were from,

the human models for these heads were important people, people to be wor-

shiped or obeyed or at least remembered." However, archaeologists have not

agreed that they were Afro-Phoenicians, so including the story opens a window

through which students can view an ongoing controversy.

Of the twelve textbooks I surveyed, only two even mention the possibility

of African or Phoenician exploration. The American Adventure simply poses two

questions: "What similarities are there between the great monuments of the

Maya and those of ancient Egypt?" and "Might windblown sailors from Asia,

Europe, Africa, or the South Pacific have mingled with the earlier inhabitants of

the New World?" The textbook supplies no relevant information and even

claims, "You should be able to deal with these questions without doing

research." Nonsense. Most classrooms will simply ignore the questions.32 The

United States—A History of the Republic mentions pre-Columbian expeditions only

to assure us that we need not concern ourselves with them: "None of these

Europeans, Africans, or Asians left lasting traces of their presence in the Amer-

icas, nor did they develop any lasting relationships with the first Americans."

Unsatisfactory as these fragments are, they are the entire treatment of the issue

in all twelve textbooks.

T H E 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 • 4 1

American history textbooks promote the belief that most important devel-

opments in world history are traceable to Europe. To grant too much human

potential to pre-Columbian Africans might jar European American sensibilities.

As Samuel Marble put it, "The possibility of African discovery of America has

never been a tempting one for American historians."3' Teachers and curricula that

present African history and African Americans in a positive light are often con-

demned for being Afrocentric. White historians insist that the case for the Afro-

Phoenicians has not been proven; we must not distort history to improve black

children's self-image, they say. They are right that the case hasn't been proven,

but textbooks should include the Afro-Phoenicians as a possibility, a controversy.

Standard history textbooks and courses discriminate against students

who have been educated by rap songs or by von Sertima. Imagine an eleventh-

grade classroom in American history in early fall. The text is Life and Liberty;

students are reading Chapter Two, "Exploration and Colonization," What hap-

pens when an African American girl shoots up her hand to challenge the state-

ment "Not until 1497-1499 did the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sail

around Africa"? From rap songs the girl has learned that Afro-Phoenicians beat

Da Gama by more than 2,000 years. Does the teacher take time to research the

question and find that the student is right, the textbook wrong? More likely,

s/he puts down the student's knowledge: "Rap songs aren't appropriate in a

history class!" Or s/he humors the child: "Yes, but that was long ago and didn't

lead to anything. Vasco da Gama's discovery is the important one." These

responses allow the class to move "forward" to the next topic. They also con-

tain some truth: the Afro-Phoenician circumnavigation didn't lead to any new

trade routes or national alliances, because the Afro-Phoenicians were already

trading with India through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Textbooks don't

name Vasco da Gama because something came from his "discovery," however.

They name him because he was white. Two pages later, Life and Liberty tells us

that Hernando De Soto "discovered [the] Mississippi River." (Of course, it had

been discovered and named Mississippi by ancestors of the Indians who were

soon to chase De Soto down it.) Textbooks portray De Soto in armor, not

showing that by the time he reached the river, his men and women had lost

almost all their clothing in a fire set by Indians in Alabama and were wearing

replacements woven from reeds. De Soto's "discovery" had no larger signifi-

cance and led to no trade or white settlement.'4 His was merely the first white

face to gaze upon the Mississippi. That's why ten of the twelve American his-

tory textbooks include him. From Erik the Red to Peary at the North Pole to

the first man on the moon, we celebrate most discoverers because they were

42 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

first and because they were white, not because of events ihat flowed or did not

flow from their accomplishments. My hypothetical teacher subtly changed the

ground rules for Da Gama, but they changed right back for De Soto. In this

way students learn that black feats are not considered important while white

ones are."

Continuing down the list of likely pre-Columbian explorations, we arrive

at an interesting vantage point from which to consider this debate. Let us com-

pare two other possible pre-Columbian expeditions, from the west coasts of

Africa and Ireland.

When Columbus reached Haiti, he found the Arawaks in possession of

some spear points made of "guanine." The Indians said they got them from

black traders who had come from ihe south and east. Guanine proved to be an

alloy of gold, silver, and copper, identical to the gold alloy preferred by West

Africans, who also called it "guanine." Islamic historians have recorded stories of

voyages west from Mali in West Africa around 1311, during the reign of Mansa

Bakari II. From time to time in ihe fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ship-

wrecked African vessels-—remnants, presumably, of transatlantic trade—washed

up on Cape Verde. From contacts in West Africa, the Portuguese heard that

African traders were visiting Brazil in the mid-1400s; this knowledge may have

influenced Portugal to insist on moving the pope's "line of demarcation" further

west in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).'6 Traces of diseases common in Africa

have been detected in pre-Columbian corpses in Brazil. Columbus's son Ferdi-

nand, who accompanied the admiral on his third voyage, reports that people

they met or heard about in eastern Honduras "are almost black in color, ugly in

aspect," probably Africans. The first Europeans to reach Panama-—Balboa and

company-—reported seeing black slaves in an Indian town. The Indians said

they had captured them from a nearby black community. Oral history from

Afro-Mexicans contains tales of pre-Columbian crossings from West Africa. In

all, then, data from diverse sources suggest that pre-Columbian voyages from

West Africa to America were probable.i7

In contrast, the evidence for an Irish trip to America comes from only

one side of the Atlantic. Irish legends written in the ninth or tenth century tell

of "an abbot and seventeen monks who journeyed to the 'promised land of the

saints' during a seven-year sojourn in a leather boat" centuries earlier. The sto-

ries include details that are literally fabulous: each Easter, the priest and his

crew supposedly conducted Mass on the back of a whale. They visited a "pillar

of crystal" {perhaps an iceberg) and an "island of fire." We cannot simply dis-

miss these legends, however. When the Norse first reached Iceland, Irish

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE Of C H R I S T O P H E R COLUMBUS - 4 3

monks were living on the island, whose volcanoes could have provided the

"island of fire.""

How do American history textbooks treat these two sets of legendary

voyagers? Five of the textbooks admit the possibility of an Irish expedition. The

Challenge of Freedom gives the fullest account:

Some people believe that . . . Irish missionaries may have sailed to the

Americas hundreds of years before the first voyages of Columbus.

According to Irish legends, Irish monks sailed the Atlantic Ocean in

order to bring Christianity to the people they met. One Irish legend in

particular tells about a land southwest of the Azores. This land was sup-

posedly discovered by St. Brendan, an Irish missionary, about 500 AD.

Not one textbook mentions the West Africans, however.

While leaving out Columbus's predecessors, American history books con-

tinue to make mistakes when they get to the last "discoverer." They present cut-

and-dried answers, mostly glorifying Columbus, always avoiding uncertainty or

controversy. Often their errors seem to be copied from other textbooks. Let me

repeat the collective Columbus story they tell, this time italicizing everything in

it that we have solid reason to believe is true.

Horn in Genoa, of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to become

an experienced seafarer, venturing as far O! Iceland and West Africa. His

adventures convinced him that the world must be round and that the

fabled riches of the East-—spices and gold—could be had by sailing

west, superseding the overland routes, which the Turks had closed off

to commerce. To get funding for his enterprise, he baeeched monarch after

monarch in Western Europe. After at first being dismissed by Ferdinand

and Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when Isabella

decided to underwrite a modest expedition. Columbus outfitted three pitifully

small ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and set forth from Spain.

After an arduous journey of more than two months, during which his

mutinous crew almost threw him overboard, Columbus discovered the

West Indies on October 12, 1492. Unfortunately, although he made three

more voyages lo America, he never knew he had discovered a New World.

Columbus died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his

daring American history u'ouid have been very different, for in a sense he

made it all possible.

44 - LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

As you can see, textbooks get the date right, and the names of the ships. Most

of the rest that they tell us is untrustworthy. Many aspects of Columbus's life

remain a mystery. He claimed to be from Genoa, Italy, and there is evidence that

he was. There is also evidence that he wasn't: Columbus didn't seem to be able

to write in Italian, even when writing to people in Genoa. Some historians

believe he was Jewish, a converso. or convert to Christianity, probably from

Spain, (Spain was pressuring its Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the

country.) He may have been a Genoese Jew. Still other historians claim he was

from Corsica, Portugal, or elsewhere.15

What about Columbus's social class background? One textbook tells us he

was poor, "the son of a poor Genoese weaver," while another assures us he was

rich, "the son of a prosperous wool-weaver." Each is certain, but people who

have spent years studying Columbus say we cannot be sure.

We do not even know for certain where Columbus thought he was going.

Evidence suggests he was seeking Japan, India, and Indonesia; other evidence

indicates he was trying to reach "new" lands to the west. Historians have

asserted each viewpoint for centuries. Because "India was known for its great

wealth," Las Casas points out, it was in Columbus's interest "to induce the mon-

archs, always doubtful about his enterprise, to believe him when he said he was

setting out in search of a western route to India."40 After reviewing the evidence,

Columbus's recent biographer Kirkpatrick Sale concluded "we will likely never

know for sure." Sale noted that such a conclusion is "not very satisfactory for

those who demand certainty in their historical tales."4' Predictably, all our text-

books are of this type: all "know" he was seeking Japan and the East Indies.

Thus authors keep their readers from realizing that historians do not know all

the answers, hence history is no! just a process of memorizing them.

The extent to which textbooks sometimes disagree, particularly when

each seems so certain of what it declares, can be pretty scary. What was the

weather like during Columbus's 1492 trip? According to Land of Promise, his

ships were "storm-battered"; but American Adventures says they enjoyed "peaceful

seas." How long was the voyage? "After more than two months at sea,"

according to The Challenge of Freedom, the crews saw land; but The American

Adventure says the voyage lasted "nearly a month." What were the Americas like

when Columbus arrived? "Thickly peopled," in one book, quoting Columbus;

"thinly spread," according to another.

To make a better myth, American culture has perpetuated the idea that

Columbus was boldly forging ahead while everyone else, even his own crew,

imagined the world was flat. The American Pageant is the only textbook that still

T H E 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 - 4 5

Most textbooks include a portrait of Columbus, These head-and-shoulder pic- tures have no value whatsoever as his- torical documents, because not one of the countless images we have of the man was painted in his lifetime. To make the point that these images are inau- thentic, the Library of Congress sells this T-shirt featuring six different Col- umbus faces.

repeats this hoax, "The superstitious sailors . . , grew increasingly mutinous,"

according to Pageant, because they were "fearful of sailing over the edge of the

world." In iruth, few people on both sides of the Atlantic believed in 1492 that

the world was flat. Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be

round. It looks round. It casts a circular shadow on the moon. Sailors see its

roundness when ships disappear over the horizon, hull first, then sails,

Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in

1828. In his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving described Columbus's

supposed defense of his round-earth theory before the flat-earth savants at Sala-

manca University, Irving himself surely knew the story to be fiction,42 He prob-

ably thought it added a nice dramatic nourish and would do no harm. But it

does. It invites us to believe that the "primitives" of the world, admittedly

including pre-Columbian Europeans, had only a crude understanding of the

planet they lived on, until aided by a forward-thinking European. It also turns

Columbus into a man of science who corrected our faulty geography.

Intense debunking of the flat-earth legend by professional historians has

made an impact. Yet even the eleven textbooks that do not repeat Irving's fic-

tion choose wholly ineffectual words to counter it. This passage from Triumph

of the American Nation exemplifies the problem: "Convinced that the earth was

round, a knowledge shared by many informed people of" the day, Columbus

46 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Wifliout project funding, the world might still be flat American culture perpetuates the image of Columbus boldly forging ahead while everyone else imagined the world was Hat. A character in the movie Slar Trek V, for instance, repeats the Washington Irving lie: 'The people of your world once believed the earth to be flat; Columbus proved it was round." Every October, Madison Avenue makes use of the flat-earth theme. This ad seeks clients for daring and courageous stock brokers!

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS • 47

believed that if he sailed far enough to the west he would reach Asia." To be

sure, the minor subordinate clause quietly notes that not everyone, perhaps not

even most people, believed in flat-earth geography. But the main subordinate

clause and the primary clause emphasize Columbus's own belief that the earth

was round. The sentence makes little sense unless the reader infers that

Columbus's belief was unusual. 1 have talked not only with students but also

with teachers who have read textbooks like Triumph without noticing this

point. Thus teachers often still believe and still relay to their students the flat-

earth legend.

Even the death of Columbus has been changed to make a better story.

Having Columbus come to a tragic end—-sick, poor, and ignorant of his great

accomplishment—-adds melodramatic interest. "Columbus's discoveries were not

immediately appreciated by the Spanish government," according to The American

Adventure. "He died in neglect in 1506." In fact, Spain "immediately appreciated"

Columbus's "discoveries," which is why they immediately outfitted him for a

much larger second voyage. In 1499 Columbus made a major gold strike on

Haiti, He and his successors then forced hundreds of thousands of Indians to

mine the gold for them. Money from the Americas continued to flow in to

Columbus in Spain, perhaps not what he felt he deserved, but enough to keep

all wolves far from his door. Columbus died well off and left his heirs well

endowed, even with the title, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," now carried by his

eighteenth-generation descendant. Moreover, Columbus's own journal shows

clearly that he knew he had reached a "new" continent.4'

The errors textbooks make about Columbus do not result simply from

sloppy scholarship. Textbooks want to magnify Columbus as a great hero, a

"man of vision, energy, resourcefulness, and courage," in the words of The Amer-

ican Pageant. Some of the details the textbook authors pile on are harmless, I

suppose, such as the fabrications about Isabella's sending a messenger galloping

after Columbus and pawning her jewels to pay for the expedition,44 All of the

enhancements humanize Columbus, however, to induce readers to identify with

him. Here is a passage from Land of Promise:

It is October, 1492. Three small, storm-battered ships are lost at sea,

sailing into an unknown ocean. A frightened crew has been threat-

ening to throw their stubborn captain overboard, turn the ships

around, and make for the safety of familiar shores.

Then a miracle: The sailors see some green branches floating on the

water. Land birds fly overhead. From high in the ship's rigging the

48 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

As Columbus cruised the coast of Venezuela on his third voyage, he passed the Orinoco River, "I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent, which was hitherto unknown," he wrote,

I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river and by this sea which is fresh," Columbus knew that no mere island could sustain such a large flow of water. When he returned home, he added a continent to the islands in his coat of arms. Its presence at the bottom of the lowet left quadrant visually rebuKes the authors of American history textbooks.

lookout cries, "Land, land ahead!" Fears turn to joy. Soon the grateful

captain wades ashore and gives thanks to God.

Now, really. The Nifia, Pinca, and Santd Mdrid were not "storm-battered." To

make a better myth, the textbook authors want the voyage to seem harder than

it was, so they invent bad weather. Columbus's own journal reveals that the

three ships enjoyed lovely sailing. Seas were so calm that for days at a time

sailors were able to converse from one ship to another. Indeed, the only time

they experienced even moderately high seas was on the last day when they

knew they were near land.

To make a better myth, to make the trip seem longer than it was, most of

the textbooks overlook Columbus's stopover in the Canary Islands. The voyage

across the unknown Atlantic took one month, not two.

To make a better myth, the textbooks describe Columbus's ships as tiny

and inefficient, when actually "these three vessels were fully suited to his pur-

pose," as naval author Pietro Barozzi has pointed out.4''

To make a better myth, six of twelve textbooks exaggerate the crew's

complaints into a near-mutiny. The primary sources differ. Some claim the

sailors threatened to go back home if they didn't reach land soon. Other sources

claim that Columbus lost heart and that the captains of the other two ships per-

suaded him to keep on. Still other sources suggest that the three leaders met and

agreed to continue on for a few more days and then reassess the situation. After

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS - 4 9

studying the matter, Columbus's biographer Samuel Eliot Mortson reduced the

complaints to mere griping: "They were all getting on each other's nerves, as

happens even nowadays,"46 So much for the crew's threat to throw Columbus

overboard.

Such exaggeration is not entirely harmless. Another archetype lurks below

the surface: that those who direct social enterprises are more intelligent than

those nearer the bottom. Bill Bigelow, a high school history teacher, has pointed

out that "the sailors are stupid, superstitious, cowardly, and sometimes scheming,

Columbus, on the other hand, is brave, wise, and godly." These portrayals

amount to an "anti-working class pro-boss polemic."47 Indeed, the only text-

book that still repeats the old flat-earth myth thinks badly of the sailors, whom

it characterizes as "a motley crew."

False entries in the log of the Santa Maria constitute another piece of the

myth, "Columbus was a true leader," says A History of the United Stales. "He altered

the records of distances they had covered so the crew would not think they had

gone too far from home," Salvador de Madariaga has persuasively argued that to

believe this, we would have to think the others on the voyage were fools.

Columbus had "no special method, available only to him, whereby distances

sailed could be more accurately reckoned than by the other pilots and masters."

Indeed, Columbus was las experienced as a navigator than the Pinion brothers,

who captained the Nina and Pinto.41 During the return voyage, Columbus con-

fided in his journal the real reason for the false log entries: he wanted to keep

the route to the Indies secret. As paraphrased by Las Casas, "He says that he pre-

tended to have gone a greater distance in order to confound the pilots and

sailors who did the charts, that he might remain master of that route to the

Indies."49

To make a better myth, our textbooks find space for many other human-

izing particulars. They have the lookout cry "Tierra!" or "Land!" Most of them tell

us that Columbus's first act after going ashore was "thanking God for leading

them safely across the sea"—even though the surviving summary of Columbus's

own journal states only that "before them all, he took possession of the island, as

in fact he did, for the King and Queen, his Sovereigns."50 Many of the textbooks

tell of Columbus's three later voyages to the Americas, but they do not find space

to tell us how Columbus treated the lands and the people he "discovered,"

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized

race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth,

and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the

transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

50 • LIES MY T E A C H E R TOL-D ME

Columbus's initial impression of the Arawaks, who inhabited most of the

islands in the Caribbean, was quite favorable. He wrote in his journal on October

13, 1492: "At daybreak great multitudes of men came to the shore, all young and

of fine shapes, and very handsome. Their hair was not curly but loose and coarse

like horse-hair. All have foreheads much broader than any people I had hitherto

seen. Their eyes are large and very beautiful. They are not black, but the color of

the inhabitants of the Canaries," (This reference to the Canaries was ominous, for

Spain was then in the process of exterminating the aboriginal people of those

islands.) Columbus went on to describe the Arawaks' canoes, "some large enough

to contain 40 or 45 men." Finally, he got down to business: "I was very attentive

to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little

bits of metal hanging at their noses, 1 gathered from them by signs that by going

southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a

king who possessed great cups full of gold." At dawn the next day, Columbus

sailed to the other side of the island, probably one of the Bahamas, and saw two

or three villages. He ended his description of them with these menacing words: "I

could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as 1 pleased."^1

On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five Indians

and took them back with him to Spain." Only seven or eight of the Indians

arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they

caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with

seventeen ships, 1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and

attack dogs for a second voyage.

One way to visualize what happened next is with the help of the famous

science fiction story War of the Worlds. H. G. Wells intended his tale of earth-

lings' encounter with technologically advanced aliens as an allegory. His fright-

ened British commoners (New Jerseyites in Orson Welles's radio adaptation)

were analogous to the "primitive" peoples of the Canaries or America, and his

terrifying aliens represented the technologically advanced Europeans. As we

identify with the helpless earthlings, Wells wanted us also to sympathize with

the natives on Haiti in 1493, or on Australia in 1788, or in the upper Amazon

jungle in the 1990s.51

When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded

food, gold, spun cotton—whatever the Indians had that they wanted, including

; sex with their women. To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by

example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off

his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evi-

dence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of.

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 - 5 1

After a while, the Indians had had enough. At first their resistance was

mostly passive. They refused to plant food for the Spanish to take. They aban-

doned towns near the Spanish settlements. Finally, the Arawaks fought back.

Their sticks and stones were no more effective against the armed and clothed

Spanish, however, than the earthlings' rifles against the aliens' death rays in War

of the Worlds.

The attempts at resistance gave Columbus an excuse to make war. On

March 24, 1495, he set out to conquer the Arawaks. Bartolome de Las Casas

described the force Columbus assembled to put down the rebellion. "Since the

Admiral perceived that daily the people of the land were taking up arms, ridicu-

lous weapons in reality . . . he hastened to proceed to the country and disperse

and subdue, by force of arms, the people of the entire island . . . For this he

chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with many crossbows and small cannon,

lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon against the Indians, in addi-

tion to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned loose and imme-

diately tore the Indians apart.'"54 Naturally, the Spanish won. According to

Kirkpatrick Sale, who quotes Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father

"The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to

rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them

on sword and pike, and 'with God's aid soon gained a complete victory, killing

many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.'"55

Having as yet found no fields of gold, Columbus had to return some kind

of dividend to Spain. In 1495 the Spanish on Haiti initiated a great slave raid.

They rounded up 1,500 Arawaks, then selected the 500 best specimens (of

whom 200 would die en route to Spain). Another 500 were chosen as slaves for

the Spaniards staying on the island. The rest were released. A Spanish eyewit-

ness described the event: "Among them were many women who had infants at

the breast. They, in order the better to escape us, since they were afraid we

would turn to catch them again, left their infants anywhere on the ground and

started to flee like desperate people; and some fled so far that they were

removed from our settlement of Isabela seven or eight days beyond mountains

and across huge rivers; wherefore from now on scarcely any will be had.""

Columbus was excited. "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here

all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold," he wrote to Ferdinand and

Isabella in 1496. "In Castile, Portugal, Aragon, . . . and the Canary Islands they

need many slaves, and I do not think they get enough from Guinea." He viewed

the Indian death rate optimistically: 'Although they die now, they will not

always die. The Negroes and Canary Islanders died at first."

52 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

In the words of Hans Koning, "There now began a reign of terror in His-

paniola." Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food.

Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the

island, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked:

"(The Indians) all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three

months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of

14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others

were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his

tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his

neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a

token was to be punished."" With a fresh token, an Indian was safe for three

months, much of which time would be devoted to collecting more gold.

Columbus's son neglected to mention how the Spanish punished those whose

tokens had expired: they cut off their hands.59

All of these gruesome facts are available in primary source material—-let-

ters by Columbus and by other members of his expeditions—and in the work of

Las Casas, the first great historian of the Americas, who relied on primary mate-

rials and helped preserve them. I have quoted a few primary sources in this

chapter. Most textbooks make no use of primary sources. A few incorporate

brief extracts that have been carefully selected or edited to reveal nothing

unseemly about the Great Navigator.

The tribute system eventually broke down because what it demanded was

impossible. To replace it, Columbus installed the tncomenda system, in which he

granted or "commended" entire Indian villages to individual colonists or groups

of colonists. Since it was not called slavery, this forced-labor system escaped the

moral censure that slavery received. Following Columbus's example, Spain made

the encomienda system official policy on Haiti in 1502; other conquistadors sub-

sequently introduced it to Mexico, Peru, and Florida.60

The tribute and encomienda systems caused incredible depopulation. On

Haiti the colonists made the Indians mine gold for them, raise Spanish food,

and even carry them everywhere they went. The Indians couldn't stand it. Pedro

de Cordoba wrote in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517, "As a result of the suf-

ferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen sui-

cide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. Trie women,

exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when

pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery

have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such

oppressive slavery."61

THE TRUE IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS • 53

American History reproduces "Columbus Landing in the Bahamas," the first of eight huge "historical" paintings in tbe rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (above). The 1847 painting by John vanderlyn illustrates the heroic treatment of Columbus in most text- books. An alternative representation of Columbus's enterprise might be Theodore de Bry's woodcut, created around 1504 (opposite). De Bry based this engraving on accounts of Indians who impaled themselves, drank poison, jumped off cliffs, hanged themselves, and killed their children. The artist squeezed all of these fatal deeds into one picture! De Bry's images became important historical documents in their own right. Accompanied by Las Casas's writings, they circulated throughout sixteenth- century Europe and gave rise to the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty, which other European countries used to denounce Spain's colonialism, mostly out of envy. No text- book includes any visual representation of the activities of Columbus and his men that is other than glorious.

Beyond acts of individual cruelty, the Spanish disrupted the Indian

ecosystem and culture. Forcing Indians to work in mines rather than in their

gardens led to widespread malnutrition. The intrusion of rabbits and livestock

caused further ecological disaster. Diseases new to the Indians played a role,

although smallpox, usually the big killer, did not appear on the island until after

1516. Some of the Indians tried fleeing to Cuba, but the Spanish soon followed

them there. Estimates of Haiti's pre-Columbian population range as high as

8,000,000 people. When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain, he left his

brother Bartholomew in charge of the island. Bartholomew took a census of

Indian adults in 1496 and came up with 1,100,000. The Spanish did not count

54 • LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

children under fourteen and could not count Arawaks who had escaped into the

mountains. Kirkpatrick Sale estimates that a more accurate total would probably

be in the neighborhood of 3,000,000. "By 1516," according to Benjamin Keen,

"thanks to the sinister Indian slave trade and labor policies initiated by

Columbus, only some 12,000 remained." Las Casas tells us that fewer than 200

Indians were alive in 1542, By 1555, they were all gone.*2

Thus nasty details like cutting off hands have somewhat greater historical

importance than nice touches like "Tierra!" Haiti under the Spanish is one of the

primary instances of genocide in all human history. Yet only one of the twelve

textbooks. The American Pageant, mentions the extermination. None mentions

Columbus's role in it.

Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably

sent more slaves—about five thousand—than any other individual. To her

credit, Queen Isabella opposed outright enslavement and returned some Indians

to the Caribbean. But other nations rushed to emulate Columbus. In 1501 the

Portuguese began to depopulate Labrador, transporting the now extinct

Beothuk Indians to Europe and Cape Verde as slaves. After the British estab-

lished beachheads on the Atlantic coast of North America, they encouraged

coastal Indian tribes to capture and sell members of mote distant tribes.

Charleston, South Carolina, became a major port for exporting Indian slaves.

The Pilgrims and Puritans sold the survivors of the Pequoi War into slavery in

Bermuda in 1637. The French shipped virtually the entire Natchez nation in

chains to the West Indies in 1731.*3

T H E 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

A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the

1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus

was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape.64 On Haiti, sex slaves

were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote a friend in

1500, "A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm,

and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for

girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."6'

The slave trade destroyed whole Indian nations. Enslaved Indians died. To

replace the dying Haitians, the Spanish imported tens of thousands more

Indians from the Bahamas, which "are now deserted," in the words of the

Spanish historian Peter Martyr, reporting in 1516.M Packed in below deck, with

hatchways closed to prevent their escape, so many slaves died on the trip that "a

ship without a compass, chart, or guide, but only following the trail of dead

Indians who had been thrown from the ships could find its way from the

Bahamas to Hispaniola."67 Puerto Rico and Cuba were next.

Because the Indians died, Indian slavery then led to the massive slave

trade the other way across the Atlantic, from Africa. This trade also began on

Haiti, initiated by Columbus's son in 1505. Predictably, Haiti then became the

site of the first large-scale slave revolt, when blacks and Indians banded together

in 1519. The uprising lasted more than a decade and was finally brought to an

end by the Spanish in the 1530s.6S

Of the twelve textbooks, only six mention that the Spanish enslaved or

exploited the Indians anywhere in the Americas. Of these only four verge on

mentioning that Columbus was involved. The Untied States—A History of the

Republic places the following passage about the fate of the Indians under the

heading "The Fate of Columbus": "Some Spaniards who had come to the Amer-

icas had begun to enslave and kill the original Americans. Authorities in Spain

held Columbus responsible for the atrocities." Note that A History takes pains to

isolate Columbus from the enslavement charge—others were misbehaving. Life and

Liberty implies that Columbus might have participated: "Slavery began in the New

World almost as soon as Columbus got off the boat." Only The American Adventure

clearly associates Columbus with slavery. American History levels a vague charge:

"Columbus was a great sailor and a brave and determined man. But he was not

good at politics or business." That's it. The other books simply adore him.

As Kirkpatrick Sale poetically sums up, Columbus's "second voyage marks

the first extended encounter of European and Indian societies, the clash of cul-

tures that was to echo down through five centuries."69 The seeds of that five-

century battle were sown in Haiti between 1493 and 1500. These are not mere

5 6 - L I E S M V T E A C H E R T O L D M E

details that our textbooks omit. They are facts crucial to understanding Amer-

ican and European history. Capt. John Smith, for example, used Columbus as a

role model in proposing a get-tough policy for the Virginia Indians in 1624:

"The manner how to suppress them is so often related and approved, I omit it

here: And you have twenty examples of the Spaniards how they got the West

Indies, and forced the treacherous and rebellious infidels to do all manner of

drudgery work and slavery for them, themselves living like soldiers upon the

fruits of their labors."70 The methods unleashed by Columbus are, in fact, the

larger part of his legacy. After all, they worked. The island was so well pacified

that Spanish convicts, given a second chance on Haiti, could "go anywhere, take

any woman or girl, take anything, and have the Indians carry him on their

backs as if they were mules."71 In 1499, when Columbus finally found gold on

Haiti in significant amounts, Spain became the envy of Europe. After 1500 Por-

tugal, France, Holland, and Britain joined in conquering the Americas. These

nations were at least as brutal as Spain. The British, for example, unlike the

Spanish, did not colonize by making use of Indian labor but simply forced the

Indians out of the way. Many Indians fled British colonies to Spanish territories

(Florida, Mexico) in search of more humane treatment.

Columbus's voyages caused almost as much change in Europe as in the

Americas. This is the other half of the vast process historians now call the

Columbian exchange.7' Crops, animals, ideas, and diseases began to cross the

oceans regularly. Perhaps the most far-reaching impact of Columbus's findings

was on European Christianity. In 1492 all of Europe was in the grip of the

Catholic Church. As L-trousu puts it, before America, "Europe was virtually inca-

pable of self-criticism."" After America, Europe's religious uniformity was rup-

tured. For how were these new peoples to be explained? They were not

mentioned in the Bible. The Indians simply did not fit within orthodox Chris-

tianity's explanation of the moral universe. Moreover, unlike the Muslims, who

might be written off as "damned infidels," Indians had not rejected Christianity,

they had just never encountered it. Were they doomed to hell? Even the animals

of America posed a religious challenge. According to the Bible, at the dawn of

creation all animals lived in the Garden of Eden. Later, two of each species

entered Noah's ark and ended up on Mt. Ararat. Since Eden and Mt. Ararat were

both in the Middle East, where could these new American species have come

from? Such questions shook orthodox Catholicism and contributed to the

Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517.74

Politically, nations like the Arawaks—without monarchs, without much

hierarchy—stunned Europeans. In 1516 Thomas More's Utopia, based on an

T H E 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 . 5 7

account of the Incan empire in Peru, challenged European social organization

by suggesting a radically different and superior alternative. Other social philoso-

phers seized upon the Indians as living examples of Europe's primordial past,

which is what John Locke meant hy the phrase "In the beginning, all the world

was America." Depending upon their political persuasion, some Europeans glori-

fied Indian nations as examples of simpler, better societies, from which Euro-

pean civilization had devolved, while others maligned the Indian societies as

primitive and underdeveloped. In either case, from Montaigne, Montesquieu,

and Rousseau down to Marx and Engels, European philosophers' concepts of

the good society were transformed by ideas from America.75

America fascinated the masses as well as the elite. In The Tempest, Shake-

speare noted this universal curiosity: "They wi!l not give a doit to relieve a lambe

beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."76 Europe's fascination with the

Americas was directly responsible, in fact, for a rise in European self-consciousness.

From the beginning America was perceived as an "opposite" to Europe in ways

that even Africa never had been. In a sense, there was no "Europe" before 1492.

People were simply Tuscan, French, and the like. Now Europeans began to see

similarities among themselves, at least as contrasted with Native Americans. For

that matter, there were no "white" people in Europe before 1492. With the transat-

lantic slave trade, first Indian, then African, Europeans increasingly saw "white" as

a race and race as an important human characteristic'7

Columbus's own writings reflect this increasing racism. When Columbus

was selling Queen Isabella on the wonders of the Americas, the Indians were "well

built" and "of quick intelligence." "They have very good customs," he wrote, "and

the king maintains a very marvelous state, of a style so orderly that it is a pleasure

to see it, and they have good memories and they wish to see everything and ask

what it is and for what it is used." Later, when Columbus was justifying his wars

and his enslavement of the Indians, they became "cruel" and "stupid," "a people

warlike and numerous, whose customs and religion are very different from ours."

It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans

to exploit. Modifying one's opinions to bring them into line with one's actions

or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as "cog-

nitive dissonance," according to the social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one

likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another

person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between

act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done,

and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our atti-

tude is easier,78

58 • L I E S M V T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Columbus gives us the first recorded example of cognitive dissonance in

the Americas, for although the Indians may have changed from hospirable to

angry, they could hardly have evolved from intelligent to stupid so quickly. The

change had to be in Columbus.

The Americas affected more than the mind. African and Eurasian stom-

achs were also affected. Almost half of all major crops now grown throughout

the world originally came from the Americas. According to Alfred Crosby,

adding corn to African diets caused the population to grow, which helped fuel

the African slave trade to the Americas. Adding potatoes to European diets

caused the population to explode in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

which in turn helped fuel the European emigration to the Americas and Aus-

tralia. Crops from America also played a key role in the ascendancy of Britain,

Germany, and, finally, Russia; the rise of these northern nations shifted the

power base of Europe away from the Mediterranean.79

Shortly after ships from Columbus's second voyage returned to Europe,

syphilis began to plague Spain and Italy. There is likely a causal connection. On

the other hand, more than two hundred drugs derive from plants whose phar-

macological uses were discovered by American Indians.*"

Economically, exploiting the Americas transformed Europe, enriching first

Spain, then, through trade and piracy, other nations. Columbus's gold finds on

Haiti were soon dwarfed by discoveries of gold and silver in Mexico and the

Andes, European religious and political leaders quickly amassed so much gold that

they applied gold leaf to the ceilings of their churches and palaces, erected golden

statues in the corners, and strung vines of golden grapes between them. Marx and

Engels held that this wealth "gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an

impulse never before known." Some writers credit it with the rise of capitalism

and eventually the industrial revolution. Capitalism was probably already

underway, but at the least, American riches played a major role in the transforma-

tion. Gold and silver from America replaced land as the basis for wealth and

status, increasing the power of the new merchant class that would soon dominate

the world.6' Where Muslim nations had once rivaled Europe, the new wealth

undermined Islamic power. American gold and silver fueled a 400 percent infla-

tion that eroded the economies of most non-European countries and helped

Europe to develop a global market system, Africa suffered: the trans-Saharan trade

collapsed, because the Americas supplied more gold and silver than the Gold

Coast ever could. African traders now had only one commodity that Europe

wanted: slaves. In anthropologist Jack Weatherford's words, "Africans thus became

victims of the discovery of America as surely as did the American Indians."62

T H E 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 • •}(>

Astoimdingly, not one textbook I surveyed describes these geopolitical

implications of Columbia's encounter with the Americas. Three of the twelve

books credit Indians with having developed important crops. Otherwise, the

west-to-east flow of ideas and wealth goes unnoticed. Eurocentrism blinds text-

book authors to contributions to Europe, whether from Arab astronomers,

African navigators, or American Indian social structure. By accepting this lim-

ited viewpoint, our history textbooks never invite us to think about what hap-

pened to reduce mainland Indian societies, whose wealth and cities awed the

Spanish, to the impoverished peasantry they are today. They also rob us of the

chance to appreciate how important America has been in the formation of the

modern world.

This theft impoverishes us, keeps us ignorant of what has caused the

world to develop as it has. Clearly our textbooks are not about teaching history.

Their enterprise is Building Character, They therefore treat Columbus as an

origin myth: He was good and so are we.8i In 1989 President Bush invoked

Columbus as a role model for the nation: "Christopher Columbus not only

opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing

what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith."84

The columnist Jeffrey Hart recently went even further: "To denigrate Columbus

is to denigrate what is worthy in human history and in us all."85 Textbook

authors who are pushing Columbus to build character obviously have no

interest in mentioning what he did with the Americas once he reached them—

even though that's half of the story, and perhaps the more important half.

I am not proposing the breast-beating alternative: that Columbus was bad

and so are we. On the contrary, textbooks should show that neither morality

nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part

of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make

us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

Again we must pause to consider: who are "we"? Columbus is not a hero

in Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the

United States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish his-

tory. Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United

States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. "No sensible

Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of

Columbus."*" Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not

American history,

Columbus's conquest of Haiti can be seen as an amazing feat of courage

and imagination by the first of many brave empire builders. It can also be under-

60 • LIES MV T E A C H E R TOLD ME

stood as a bloody atrocity that left a legacy of genocide and slavery that endures

in some degree to this day. Both views of Columbus are valid; indeed,

Columbus's importance in history owes precisely to his being both a heroic nav-

igator and a great plunderer. If Columbus were only the former, he would

merely rival Leif Erikson. Columbus's actions exemplify both meanings of the

word exploit—a remarkable deed and also a taking advantage of. The worshipful

biographical vignettes of Columbus in our textbooks serve to indoctrinate stu-

dents into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate

in today's postcolonia) era. In the words of the historian Michael Wallace, the

Columbus myth "allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world

into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a

historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus's first

voyage,"37

We understand Columbus and all European explorers and settlers more

clearly if we treat 1492 as a meeting of three cultures (Africa was soon

involved), rathet than a discovery by one. The term New World is itself part of

the problem, for people had lived in the Americas for thousands of years. The

Americas were new only to Europeans. The word discover is another part of the

problem, for how can one person discover what another already knows and

owns? Our textbooks are struggling with this issue, trying to move beyond

colonialized history and Eurocentric language, "If Columbus had not discovered

the New World," states Land of Promise, "others soon would have." Three sen-

tences later, the authors try to take back the word; "As is often pointed out,

Columbus did not really 'discover' America. When he arrived on this side of the

Atlantic there were perhaps 20 or more million people already here," Taking

back words is ineffectual, however. Promise's whole approach is to portray whites

discovering nonwhites tather than a mutual, multicultural encounter. The point

isn't idle. Words are important—they can influence, and in some cases ration-

alize, policy. In 1823 Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme

Court decreed that Cherokees had certain rights to their land in Georgia by dint

of their "occupancy" but that whites had superior rights owing to their "dis-

covery." How Indians managed to occupy Georgia without having previously

discovered it Marshall neglected to explain.ae

The process of exploration has itself typically been multiracial and multi-

cultural. William Erasmus, a Canadian Indian, pointed out, "Explorers you call

great men were helpless. They were like lost children, and it was our people

who took care of them."8" African pilots helped Prince Henry's ship captains

learn their way down the coast of Africa."0 On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus

THE T R U E IMPORTANCE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS • 6l

needed help. The Santa. Maria ran aground off Haiti. Columbus sent for help to

the nearest Arawak town, and "all the people of the town" responded, "with

very big and many canoes." "They cleared the decks in a very short rime,"

Columbus continued, and the chief "caused all our goods to be placed together

near the palace, until some houses that he gave us where all might be put and

guarded had been emptied."91 On his final voyage Columbus shipwrecked on

Jamaica, and the Arawaks there kept him and his crew of more than a hundred

alive for a whole year until Spaniards from Haiti rescued them.

So it has continued. Native Americans cured Cartier's men of scurvy near

Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake's Golden Hind in California so

he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579, Lewis and Clark's

expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of

American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby,

who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the

first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the

African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides,

men and women on whom the entire expedition relied.112 Our histories fail to

mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the

world like the Colossus at Rhodes.

So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have

played in exploration, from at least 6000 B.C. to the twentieth century, they

encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge

and intelligence. So long as our textbooks simply celebrate Columbus, rather

than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white

Western exploitation rather than study it.

The passage in the left-hand column of the opposing page is one of the

many legends that hang about Columbus like barnacles—"myths, all without

substance."" The passage in the right-hand column is part of a contempora-

neous account of an Arawak cacique (leadet) who had fled from Haiti to Cuba,

62 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

A man riding a mule moved slowly

down a dusty road in Spain. He wore

an old and shabby cloak over his

shoulders. Though his face seemed

young, his red hair was already

turning white. It was early in the year

1492 and Christopher Columbus was

leaving Spain.

Twice the Spanish king and

queen had refused his request for

ships. He had wasted five years of his

life trying to get their approval. Now

he was going to France. Perhaps the

French king would give him the ships

he needed.

Columbus heard a clattering

sound. He turned and looked up the

road. A horse and rider came racing

toward him. The rider handed him a

message, and Columbus turned his

mule around. The message was from

the Spanish king and queen, ordering

him to return. Columbus would get

his ships.

Learning that Spaniards were coming,

one day [the cacique] gathered all his

people together to remind them of

the persecutions which the Spanish

had inflicted on the people of His-

paniola: "Do you know why they perse-

cute us?"

They replied: "They do it

because they are cruel and bad."

"1 will tell you why they do it,"

the cacique stated, "and it is this—

because they have a lord whom they

love very much, and I will show him

to you."

He held up a small basket made

from palms full of gold, and he said,

"Here is their lord, whom rhey serve

and adore . . . To have this lord, they

make us suffer, for him they persecute

us, for him they have killed our par-

ents, brothers, all our people . . . Let

us not hide this lord from the Chris-

tians in any place, for even if we

should hide it in our intestines, they

would get it out of us; therefore let us

throw it in this river, under the water,

and they will not know where it is."

Whereupon they threw the

gold into the river.94

T H E 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 • 6 j

The reader will have already guessed chat [he passage on the left comes

from an American history textbook, in this case American Adventures. Since the

incident probably never happened, including it in a textbook is hard to defend.

One way to understand its inclusion is by examining what it does in the narra-

tive. The incident is melodramatic. It creates a mild air of suspense, even

though we can be sure, of" course, that everything will turn out all right in the

end. Surely the passage encourages identification with Columbus's enterprise,

makes Columbus the underdog—riding a mule, shabby of cloak—and places

us on his side.

The passage on the right was recorded by Las Casas, who apparently

learned it from Arawaks on Cuba. Unlike the mule story, the cacique's story

teaches important facts: that the Spanish sought gold, that they killed Indians,

that Indians fled and resisted, (Indeed, after futile attempts at armed resistance

on Cuba, this cacique fled "into the brambles." Weeks later, when the Spanish

captured him, they burned him alive.) Nonetheless, no history textbook includes

the cacique's story. Doing so might enable us to identify with the Indians' side.

By avoiding the names and stories of individual Arawaks and omitting their

points of view, authors "otherize" the Indians. Readers need not concern them-

selves with the Indians' ghastly fate, for Indians never appear as recognizable

human beings. Textbooks themselves, it seems, practice cognitive dissonance.

Excluding the passage on the right, including the passage on the left,

excluding the probably true, including the improbable, amounts to colonialist

history This is the Columbus story that has dominated American history books.

All around the globe, however, the nations that were "discovered," conquered,

"civilized," and colonized by European powers are now independent, at least

politically. Europeans and European Americans no longer dictate to them as

master to native and therefore need to stop thinking of themselves as superior,

morally and technologically. A new and more accurate history of Columbus

could assist this transformation.

Of course, this new history must not judge Columbus by standards from

our own time. In 1493 the world had not decided, for instance, that slavery was

wrong. Some Indian nations enslaved other Indians. Africans enslaved other

Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. To attack Columbus for doing

what everyone else did would be unreasonable.

However, some Spaniards of the time—Bartolome de las Casas, for

example—opposed the slavery, land grabbing, and forced labor that Columbus

introduced on Haiti. Las Casas began as an adventurer and became a plantation

owner. Then he switched sides, freed his Indians, and became a priest who

64 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

fought desperately for humane treatment of the Indians. When Columbus and

other Europeans argued that Indians were inferior, Las Casas pointed out that

Indians were sentient human beings, just like anyone else. When other histo-

rians tried to overlook or defend the Indian slave trade, begun by Columbus,

Las Casas denounced it as "among the most unpardonable offenses ever com-

mitted against God and mankind." He helped prompt Spain to enact laws

against Indian slavery.95 Although these laws came too late to help the Arawaks

and were often disregarded, they did help some Indians survive. Centuries after

his death, Las Casas was still influencing history; Simon Bolivar used Las Casas's

writings to justify the revolutions between 1810 and 1830 that liberated Latin

America from Spanish domination.

When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Ameri-

cans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to

Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explorers such

as De Soto just because they were white, out histories offend all people of color.

When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we

all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward

identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and

process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose

must be to keep us unaware of the important questions. Perhaps worst of all,

when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus, they pro-

vide feel-good history that bores everyone.

T H E 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 - 6 5

Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving con-

tains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception,

why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to per-

petually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?

—Michael Dorris1

European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pris-

tine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still, for neither the technology nor

the social organization of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had the capacity

to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from

home.

—Francis Jennings2

The Europeans were able to conquer America not Because of their military genius,

or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed. They conquered it

by waging unpremeditated biological warfare.

—Howard Simpson3

It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though wise, pious,

and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud;

and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially

against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in

pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest naked-

ness of our forefathers.

—Col. Thomas Aspinwall"

3. The Truth about

the First Thanksgiving

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, "Whenwas the country we now know as the United States first settled?" This is a generous way of phrasing the question; surely "we now know as" implies that

the original settlement antedated the founding of the United States. I initially

believed—certainly I had hoped—that students would suggest 30,000 B.C., or

some other pre-Columbian date.

They did not. Their consensus answer was " 1620."

Obviously, my students' heads have been filled with America's origin

myth, the story of the first Thanksgiving. Textbooks are among the retailers of

this primal legend.

Part of the problem is the word settle. "Settlers" were white, a student once

pointed out to me. "Indians" didn't settle. Students are not the only people

misled by settle. The film that introduces visitors to Plimoth Plantation tells how

"they went about the work of civilizing a hostile wilderness." One recent

Thanksgiving weekend I listened as a guide at the Statue of Liberty talked about

European immigrants "populating a wild East Coast." As we shall see, however,

if Indians hadn't already settled New England, Europeans would have had a

much tougher job of it.

Starting the story of America's settlement with the Pilgrims leaves out not

only the Indians but also the Spanish. The very first non-Native settlers in "the

country we now know as the United States" were African slaves left in South Car-

olina in 1526 by Spaniards who abandoned a settlement attempt. In 1565 the

Spanish massacred the French Protestants who had settled briefly at St. Augustine,

Florida, and established their own fort there. Some later Spanish settlers were our

first pilgrims, seeking regions new to them to secure religious liberty; these were

Spanish Jews, who settled in New Mexico in the late 1500s.5 Few Americans

know that one-third of the United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to

Natchez to Florida, has been Spanish longer than it has been "American," and that

Hispanic Americans lived here before the first ancestor of the Daughters of the

67

American Revolution ever left England. Moreover, Spanish culture left an indelible

mark on the American West. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs,

and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including its vocabulary: mustang,

bronco, rodeo, lariai, and so on.6 Horses that escaped from the Spanish and propa-

gated triggered the rapid flowering of a new culture among the Plains Indians.

"How refreshing it would be," wrote James Axtell, "to find a textbook that began

on the West Coast before treating the traditional eastern colonies."7

Beginning the story in 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in

what is now Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first per-

manent British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to

Jamestown, Virginia, No matter. The mythic origin of "the country we now know as the United

States" is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. Here is a representative

account from The American Tradition-.

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth

Harbor for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in

December and were not prepared for the New England winter. How-

ever, they were aided by friendly Indians, who gave them food and

showed them how to grow corn. When warm weather came, the

colonists planted, fished, hunted, and prepared themselves for the next

winter. After harvesting their first crop, they and their Indian friends

celebrated the first Thanksgiving.8

My students also remember that the Pilgrims had been persecuted in Eng-

land for their religious beliefs, so they had moved to Holland. They sailed on

the Mayflower to America and wrote the Mayflower Compact, the forerunner to

our Constitution, according to my students. Times were rough, until they met

Squanto, who taught them how to put a small fish as fertilizer in each little

cornhill, ensuring a bountiful harvest. But when I ask my students about the

plague, they just stare back at me. "What plague? The Black Plague?" No, 1 sigh,

that was three centuries earlier. The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. William

Langer has written that the Black (or bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the

worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind."9 In the years 1348 through

1350, it killed perhaps 30 percent of the population of Europe. Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the horror.

According to Langer, "Almost everyone, in that medieval time, interpreted the

68 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

plague as a punishment by God for human sins," Thinking the day of judgment

was imminent, farmers did not plant crops. Many people gave themselves over

to alcohol. Civil and economic disruption may have caused as much death as the

disease itself. The entire culture of Europe was affected: fear, death, and guilt

became prime artistic motifs. Milder plagues—typhus, syphilis, and influenza, as

well as bubonic—continued to ravage Eutope until the end of the seventeenth

century.10

The warmer parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa have historically been the

breeding ground for most of mankind's illnesses. Humans evolved in tropical

regions; tropical diseases evolved alongside them. People moved to cooler cli-

mates only with the aid of cultural inventions—clothing, shelter, and fire—that

helped maintain warm temperatures around their bodies. Microbes that live out-

side their human hosts during part of theit life cycle had trouble coping with

northern Europe and Asia.11 When humans migrated to the Americas across the

newly drained Bering Strait, if the archaeological consensus is correct, the

changes in climate and physical circumstance threatened even those hardy para-

sites that had survived the earlier slow migration northward from Africa. These

first immigrants entered the Americas through a frigid decontamination

chamber. The first settlers in the Western Hemisphere thus probably arrived in a

healthier condition than most people on earth have enjoyed before or since.

Many of the diseases that had long shadowed them simply could not survive the

journey.12

Neither did some animals. People in the Western Hemisphere had no

cows, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, or chickens before the arrival of Europeans and

Africans after 1492. Many diseases—from anthrax to tuberculosis, cholera to

streptococcosis, ringworm to various poxes—are passed back and forth between

humans and livestock. Since early inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere had

no livestock, they caught no diseases ftom them.15

Europe and Asia were also made unhealthy by a subtler factor: social den-

sity. Organisms that cause disease need a constant supply of new hosts for their

own survival. This requirement is nowhere clearer than in the case of smallpox,

which cannot survive outside a living human body. But in its enthusiasm, the

organism often kills its host. Thus the pestilence creates its own predicament: it

requires new victims at regular intervals. The various influenza viruses must like-

wise move on, for if their victims survive, they enjoy a period of immunity

lasting at least a few weeks, and sometimes a lifetime.14 Small-scale societies like

the Paiute Indians of Nevada, living in isolated nuclear and extended families,

could and did suffer post-Columbian smallpox epidemics, transmitted to them

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G - 6 9

by more urban neighbors, but they could not sustain such an organism over

time.15 Even Indians living in villages did not experience sufficient social den-

sity. Villagers might encounter three hundred people each day, but these would

usually be the same three hundred people. Coming into repeated contact with

the same few others does not have the same consequences as meeting new

people, either for human culture or for culturing microbes.

Some areas in the Americas did have high social density.'6 Incan roads

connected towns from northern Ecuador to Chile.'7 Fifteen hundred to two

thousand years ago the population of Cahokia, Illinois, numbered about 40,000.

Trade linked the Great Lakes to Florida, the Rockies to what is now New Eng-

land.1* We are therefore not dealing with isolated bands of "primitive" peoples.

Nonetheless, most of the Western Hemisphere lacked the social density found in

much of Europe, Africa, and Asia. And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere

were there sinkholes of sickness like London or Cairo, with raw sewage running

in the streets.

The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the

basic hygiene practiced by the region's inhabitants. Residents of northern

Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed

all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest. The Pilgrims smelled

bad to the Indians. Squanto "tried, without success, to teach them to bathe,"

according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.1''

For all these reasons, the inhabitants of North and South America (like

Australian aborigines and the peoples of the far-flung Pacific islands) were "a

remarkably healthy race"20 before Columbus. Ironically, their very health proved

their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through child-

hood diseases, ro the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to

them.

In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in southern

New England. For decades, British and French fishermen had fished off the

Massachusetts coast. After filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to

lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few Indians to sell into

slavery in Europe. It is likely that these fishermen transmitted some illness to the

people they met,21 The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by com-

parison. Some historians think the disease was the bubonic plague; others sug-

gest that it was viral hepatitis, smallpox, chicken pox, or influenza.

Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 percent and 96 per-

cent of the inhabitants of coastal New England. The Indian societies lay devas-

tated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote Robert Cushman, a

70 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Absent any illustrations of the epidemics in New England, these Aztec drawings depicting smallpox, coupled with the words of William Bradford, convey something of the horror. "A sorer disease cannot befall [the Indians], they fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. Ana then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep." (Quoted in Simpson, Invisible Armies, 8.) Textbooks never display such sympathy for the Indians; at best they give only the Tonto characters (here Squanto, later Sacagawea] individuality and agency.

T H E T R U T H A B O U T THE F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G . 7 1

British eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human

experience.22 Unable to cope with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned

their villages and fled, often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the

infestation with them, Indians died who had never encountered a white person.

Howard Simpson describes what the Pilgrims saw: "Villages lay in ruins

because there was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls

and the bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury

them.""

During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we

know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also con-

tracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered,

including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington."

Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures

was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a

divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side.

John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague

"miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in

these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part

of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So

as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these

parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection . . ,"24 God

the Original Real Estate Agent!

Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them.

Robert Cushman reported that "those that are left, have their courage much

abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted,"

After a smallpox epidemic the Cherokee "despaired so much that they lost confi-

dence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe."21

After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease.

Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief

Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Euro-

peans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, con-

verted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves.211

These epidemics probably constituted the most important geopolitical

event of the early seventeenth century. Their net result was that the British, for

their first fifty years in New England, would face no real Indian challenge.

Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth

enjoyed from the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, was eager to

ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he

72 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

feared the Narragansetts to the west." When a land conflict did develop

between new settlers and old at Saugus in 1631, ''God ended the controversy by

sending the small pox amongst the Indians," in the words of the Puritan min-

ister Increase Mather. "Whole towns of them were swept away, in some of them

not so much as one Soul escaping the Destruction,"28 By the time the Indian

populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was

too late to expel the intruders.

Today, as we compare European technology with that of the "primitive"

Indians, we may conclude that European conquest of America was inevitable,

but it did not appear so at the time. The historian Karen Kupperman speculates:

The technology and culture of Indians on America's east coast were

genuine rivals to those of the English, and the eventual outcome of the

rivalry was not at first clear. . . , One can only speculate what the out-

come of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases

on the American population had not been so devastating. If colonists

had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers

who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more

slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and

psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have pro-

ceeded at all.19

After all, Native Americans had driven off Samuel de Champlain when he had

tried to settle in Massachusetts in 1606. The following year, Abenakis had

helped expel the first Plymouth Company settlement from Maine.30 Alfred

Crosby has speculated that the Norse might have succeeded in colonizing New-

foundland and Labrador if they had not had the bad luck to emigrate from

Greenland and Iceland, distant from European disease centers.51 But this is

"what if" history. The New England plagues were no "if." They continued west,

racing in advance of the line of culture contact.

Everywhere in America, the first European explorers encountered many

more Indians than did their successors. A century and a half after Hernando De

Soto traveled the southeastern United States, French explorers there found the

population less than a quarter of what it had been when De Soto had passed

through, with attendant catastrophic effects on Native culture and social orga-

nization.52 Likewise, on their famous 1806 expedition, Lewis and Clark

encountered far more Natives in Oregon than lived there a mere twenty years

later."

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 7 3

Henry Dobyns has put together a heartbreaking list of ninety-three epi-

demics among Native Americans between 1520 and 1918. He has recorded

forty-one eruptions of smallpox, four of bubonic plague, seventeen of measles

and ten of influenza (both often deadly among Native Americans), and twenty-

five of tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and other diseases. Many of

these outbreaks reached truly pandemic proportions, beginning in Florida or

Mexico and stopping only when they reached the Pacific and Arctic oceans,34

Disease played the same crucial role in Mexico and Peru as it did in Massachu-

setts, How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City?

"When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians

smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city." When the Spanish

marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on

them. Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself

helped to crush Aztec morale."

The pestilence continues today. Miners and loggers have recently intro-

duced European diseases to the Yanotnamos of northern Brazil and southern

Venezuela, killing a fourth of their total population in 1991. Charles Darwin,

writing in 1839, put it almost poetically; "Wherever the European had trod,

death seems to pursue the aboriginal."36

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or

much of Africa, because too many people already lived there. The crucial role

played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple popula-

tion estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one

hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe had only

about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.37 The Europeans'

advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to domi-

nate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and

Africa, but not to "settle" the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required.

Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is

surely the most important event in the history of America.

The first epidemics wreaked havoc, not only with Indian societies, but

also with estimates of pre-Columbian Native American population. The result

has been continuing controversy among historians and anthropologists. In 1840

George Catlin estimated aboriginal numbers in the United States and Canada at

the time of white contact to be perhaps fourteen million. He believed only two

million still survived. By 1880, owing to warfare and deculturation as well as

illness, Native numbers had dropped to 250,000, a decline of 98 percent.38 In

1921 James Mooney asserted that only one million Native Americans had lived

74 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

in the Americas in 1492, Mooney's estimate was accepted until the 1960s and

1970s, even though the arguments supporting it, based largely on inference

rather than evidence, were not convincing. Colin McEvedy provided an example

of the argument:

The high rollers, of course, claim that native numbers had been

reduced to these low levels [between one million and two million] by

epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases introduced from

Europe—and indeed they could have been. But there is no record of

any continental [European] population being cut back by the sort of

percentages needed to get from twenty million to two or one million.

Even the Black Death reduced the population of Europe by only a

third.19

Note that McEvedy has ignored both the data and also the reasoning about ill-

ness summarized above, relying on what amounts to common sense to disprove

both. Indeed, he contended, "No good can come of affronting common sense."

But pre-Pilgrim American epidemiology is not a field of everyday knowledge in

which "common sense" can be allowed to substitute for years of relevant

research. By "common sense" what McEvedy really meant was tradition.

"The American Republic," the authors of The American Pageant tell us on

page one, "was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a

vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they

were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside." Henry Dobyns and Francis Jen-

nings have pointed out that this archetype of the "virgin continent" and its

corollary, the "primitive tribe," have subtly influenced estimates of Native popu-

lation: scholars who viewed Native American cultures as primitive reduced their

estimates of precontact populations to match the stereotype. The tiny Mooney

estimate thus "made sense"—resonated with the archetype. Never mind that the

land was, in reality, not a virgin wilderness but recently widowed.40

The very death races that some historians and geographers now find hard

to believe, the Pilgrims knew to be true. For example, William Bradford

described how the Dutch, rivals of Plymouth, traveled to an Indian village in

Connecticut to trade. "But their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to afflict

these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1,000, over 950 of them

died, and many of them lay rotting above ground for want of bur ia l . . ,"41 This

is precisely the 95 percent mortality that McEvedy rejected. On the opposite

coast, the Native population of California sank from 300,000 in 1769 (by

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G 75

which time it had already been cut in half by various Spanish-borne diseases) to

30,000 a century later, owing mainly to the gold rush, which brought "disease,

starvation, homicide, and a declining birthrate,"42

For a century after Catlin, historians and anthropologists "overlooked"

the evidence offered by the Pilgrims and other early chroniclers. Beginning

with P. M. Ashburn in 1947, however, research has established more accurate

estimates based on careful continentwide compilations of small-scale studies of

first contact and on evidence of early plagues. Most current estimates of the

precontact population of the United States and Canada range from ten to

twenty mill ion." How do the twelve textbooks, most of which were published in the

1980s, treat this topic? Their authors might let readers in on the furious debate

of the 1960s and early 1970s, telling how and why estimates changed.

Instead, the textbooks simply state numbers—very different numbers! "As

many as ten million," American Adventures proposes. "There were only about

1,000,000 North American Indians," opines The American Tradition, "Scattered

across the North American continent were about 500 different groups, many of

them nomadic." Like other Americans who have not studied the literature, the

authors of history textbooks are Still under the thrall of the "virgin land" and

"primitive tribe" archetypes; their most common Indian population estimate is

the discredited figure of one million, which five textbooks supply. Only two of

the textbooks provide estimates often to twelve million, in the range supported

by contemporary scholarship. Two of the textbooks hedge their bets by sug-

gesting one to twelve million, which might reasonably prompt classroom dis-

cussion of why estimates are so vague. Three of the textbooks omit the subject

altogether. The problem is not so much the estimates as the attitude. Only one book,

The American Adventure, acknowledges that there is a controversy, and this only

in a footnote. The other textbooks seem bent on presenting "facts" for children

to "learn." Such an approach keeps students ignorant of the reasoning, argu-

ments, and weighing of evidence that go into social science. About the plagues the textbooks tell even less. Only three of the twelve

textbooks even mention Indian disease as a factor at Plymouth or anywhere in

New England.04 Life and Liberty does quite a good job. The American Way is the

only book that draws the appropriate geopolitical inference about the Plymouth

outbreak, but it doesn't discuss any of the other plagues that beset Indians

throughout the hemisphere. According to Triumph of the American Nation: "If the

Pilgrims had arrived at Plymouth a few years earlier, they would have found a

76 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

busy Indian village surrounded by farmland. As it was, an epidemic had wiped

out most of the Indians. Those who survived had abandoned the village," "For-

tunately for the Pilgrims," Triumph goes on, "the cleared fields remained, and a

brook of fresh water flowed into the harbor." These four sentences exemplify

what Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith call dominance through

mentioning.45 The passage can hardly offend Pilgrim descendants, yet it gives

the publisher deniability— Triumph cannot be accused of omitting the plague.

But the sentences bury the plague within a description of the beautiful harbor at

Plymouth. Therefore, even though gory details of disease and death are exactly

the kinds of things that high school students remember best, the plague won't

"stick." I know, because I never remembered the plague, and my college text-

book mentioned it—in a fourteen-word passage nestled within a paragraph

about the Pilgrims' belief in God.46

In colonial times, everyone knew about the plague. Even before the

Mayftowtr sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his

great goodness and bounty towards us" for sending "this wonderful plague

among the salvages [j/c]."47 Two hundred years later the oldest American history

in my collection—]. W. Barber's Interesting Events in the History of the United States,

published in 1829—still recalled the plague.

A few years before the arrival of the Plymouth settlers, a very mortal

sickness raged with great violence among the Indians inhabiting the

eastern parts of New England. "Whole towns were depopulated. The

living were not able to bury the dead; and their bodies were found

lying above ground, many years after. The Massachusetts Indians are

said to have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting meti. In 1633,

the small pox swept off great numbers,"'"1

Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever

heard of the plague. Unless they have read Life and Liberty, students could

scarcely come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made

an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who set-

tled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms. Textbook authors have

retreated from the candor of Barber. Treatments like that in Triumph guatantee

our collective amnesia.

Having mistreated the plague, the textbooks proceed to mistreat the Pil-

grims. Their arrival in Massachusetts poses another historical controversy that

textbook authors take pains to duck. The textbooks say the Pilgrims intended

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G - 7 7

to go to Virginia, where there existed a British settlement already. But "the

little party on the Mayflower" explains American History, "never reached Virginia.

On November 9, they sighted land on Cape Cod." How did the Pilgrims wind

up in Massachusetts when they set out for Virginia? "Violent storms blew their

ship off course," according to some textbooks; others blame an "error in navi-

gation." Both explanations may be wrong. Some historians believe the Dutch

bribed the captain of the Mayflower to sail north so the Pilgrims would not

settle near New Amsterdam. Others hold that the Pilgrims went to Cape Cod

on purpose.49

Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 set-

tlers aboard the May/lower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes

in the new Virginia colony. George Willison has argued that the Pilgrim

leaders, wanting to be far from Anglican control, never planned to settle in

Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana, in South America,

versus the Massachusetts coast, and, according to Willison, they intended a

hijacking.

Certainly the Pilgrims already knew quite a bit about what Massachu-

setts could offer them, from the fine fishing along Cape Cod to that "won-

derful plague," which offered an unusual opportunity for British settlement.

According to some historians, Squanto, an Indian from the village of Patuxet,

Massachusetts, had provided Ferdinando Gorges, a leader of the Plymouth

Company in England, with a detailed description of the area. Gorges may even

have sent Squanto and Capt. Thomas Dermer as advance men to wait for the

Pilgrims, although Dermer sailed away when the Pilgrims were delayed in

England. In any event, the Pilgrims were familiar with the area's topography.

Recently published maps that Samuel de Champlain had drawn when he had

toured the area in 1605 supplemented the information that had been passed on

by sixteenth-century explorers, John Smith had studied the region and named

it "New England" in 1614, and he even offered to guide the Pilgrim leaders.

They rejected his services as too expensive and carried his guidebook along

instead.50

These considerations prompt me to believe that the Pilgrim leaders prob-

ably ended up in Massachusetts on purpose. But evidence for any conclusion is ,

soft. Some historians believe Gorges took credit for landing in Massachusetts

after the fact. Indeed, the May/Sower may have had no specific destination.

Readers might be fascinated if textbook authors presented two or more of the

various possibilities, but, as usual, exposing students to historical controversy is I

taboo. Each textbook picks just one reason and presents it as fact.

78 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

L

Among the Pilgrims' sources of information about New England were probably the maps of Samuel de Champlain, inducting this chart of Patuxet (Plymouth) when it was

still an Indian village, before the plague of 1617.

Only one of the twelve textbooks adheres to the hijacking possibility.

"The New England landing came as a rude surprise for the bedraggled and tired

[non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower" says Land of Promise. "[They]

had joined the expedition seeking economic opportunity in the Virginia tobacco

plantations." Obviously, these passengers were not happy at having been taken

elsewhere, especially to a shore with no prior English settlement to join.

"Rumors of mutiny spread quickly." Promise then ties this unrest to the

Mayflower Compact, giving its readers a fresh interpretation of why the

colonists adopted the agreement and why it was so democratic: "To avoid rebel-

lion, the Pilgrim leaders made a remarkable concession to the other colonists.

They issued a call for every male on board, regardless of religion or economic

status, to join in the creation of a 'civil body politic.'" The compact achieved its

purpose: the majority acquiesced. Actually, the hijacking hypothesis does not show the Pilgrims in such a

bad light. The compact provided a graceful solution to an awkward problem.

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 7 9

Although hijacking and false representation doubtless were felonies then as

now, the colony did survive with a lower death rate than Virginia, so no per-

manent harm was done. The whole story places the Pilgrims in a somewhat

dishonorable light, however, which may explain why only one textbook

selects it.

The "navigation error" story lacks plausibility: the one parameter of ocean

travel that sailors could and did measure accurately in that era was latitude—dis-

tance north or south from rhe equator. The "storms" excuse is perhaps still less

plausible, for if a storm blew them off course, when the weather cleared they

could have turned southward again, sailing out to sea to bypass any shoals. They

had plenty of food and beer, after all.51 But storms and pilot error leave the Pil-

grims pure of heart, which may explain why the other eleven textbooks choose

one of the two.

Regardless of motive, the Mayflower Compact provided a democratic

basis for the Plymouth colony Since the framers of our Constitution in fact paid

the compact little heed, however, it hardly deserves the attention textbook

authors lavish on it. But textbook authors clearly want to package the Pilgrims

as a pious and moral band who laid the antecedents of our democratic tradi-

tions. Nowhere is this motive more embarrassingly obvious than in John Gar-

raty's American History. "So far as any record shows, this was the first time in

human history that a group of people consciously created a government where

none had existed before," Here Garraty paraphrases a Forefathers' Day speech,

delivered in Plymouth in 1802, in which John Adams celebrated "the only

instance in human history of that positive, original social compact." George

Willison has dryly noted that Adams was "blinking several salient facts—above

all, the circumstances that prompted the compact, which was plainly an instru-

ment of minority rule."5' Of course, Garraty's paraphrase also exposes his igno-

rance of the Republic of Iceland, the Iroquois Confederacy, and countless other

polities antedating 1620. Such an account simply invites students to become

ethnocentric.

In their pious treatment of the Pilgrims, history textbooks introduce the

archetype of American exceptional ism. According to Tbt American Pageant, "This

rare opportunity for a great social and political experiment may never come

again." The American Way declares, "The American people have created a unique

nation." How is America exceptional? Surely we're exceptionally good. As

Woodrow Wilson put ic, "America is the only idealistic nation in the world.""

And the goodness started at Plymouth Rock, according to our textbooks, which

view the Pilgrims as Christian, sober, democratic, generous to the Indians, God-

80 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

thanking. Such a happy portrait can be painted only by omitting the facts about

the plague, the possible hijacking, and the Indian relations.

For that matter, our culture and our textbooks underplay or omit

Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth

Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States. Virginia, according to

T. H. Breen, "ill-served later historians in search of the mythic origins of Amer-

ican culture,"'4 Historians could hardly tout Virginia as moral in intent; in the

words of the first history of Virginia written by a Virginian: "The chief Design

of all Parties concern'd was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming

more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony."" The Virginians' rela-

tions with the Indians were particularly unsavory: in contrast to Scjuanto, a vol-

unteer, the British in Virginia took Indian prisoners and forced them to teach

colonists how to farm." In 1623 the British indulged in the first use of chem-

ical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the

Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The British offered a toast "symbolizing

eternal friendship," whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred

followers dropped dead of poison." Besides, the early Virginians engaged in

bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random

holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon

they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting them-

selves out to Indian families as servants—hardly the heroic founders that a great

nation requires.58

Textbooks indeed cover the Virginia colony, and they at least mention

the Spanish settlements, but they devote 50 percent more space to Massachu-

setts. As a result, and due also to Thanksgiving, of course, students are much

more likely to remember the Pilgrims as our founders.59 They are then embar-

rassed when I remind them of Virginia and the Spanish, for when prompted

students do recall having heard of both. But neither our culture nor our text-

books give Virginia the same archetypal status as Massachusetts. That is why

almost all my students know the name of the Pilgrims' ship, while almost no

students remember the names of the three ships that brought the British to

Jamestown. (For the next time you're on Jeopardy, they were the Susan Constant,

the Discovery, and the Goodspeed)

Despite having ended up many miles from other European enclaves, the

Pilgrims hardly "started from scratch" in a "wilderness." Throughout southern

New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, cre-

ating a parklike environment. After landing at Provincetown, the Pilgrims

assembled a boat for exploring and began looking around for their new home.

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 8 1

They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in

corn, and its useful harbor and "brook of fresh water." It was a lovely site for a

town. Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for "New Plimoth" was none

other than Squanto's village of Patuxet! The invaders followed a pattern:

throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of

Native populations—Cu;co, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New

England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields for their initial settlements,

avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.60 (This

explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region—

Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field) "Errand into the wilderness"

may have made a lively sermon title in 1650, a popular book title in 1950, and

an archetypal textbook phrase in 1990, but it was never accurate. The new set-

tlers encountered no wilderness: "in this bay wherein we live," one colonist

noted in 1622, "in former time hath lived about two thousand Indians."61

Moreover, not all the Native inhabitants had perished, and the survivors

now facilitated British settlement. The Pilgrims began receiving Indian assis-

tance on their second full day in Massachusetts. A colonist's journal tells of

sailors discovering two Indian houses:

Having their guns and hearing nobody, they entered the houses and

found the people were gone. The sailors took some things but didn't

dare stay. . . . We had meant to have left some beads and other things

in the houses as a sign of peace and to show we meant to trade with

them. But we didn't do it because we left in such haste. But as soon as

we can meet with the Indians, we will pay them well for what we took.

It wasn't only houses that the Pilgrims robbed. Our eyewitness resumes

his story:

We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the

corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found

some more com, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. . . . In

all we had about ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was

with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have

done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us.

From the start, the Pilgrims thanked God, not the Indians, for assistance chat the!

latter had (inadvertently) provided-—setting a pattern for later thanksgivingiH

8 2 ' L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Our journalist continues:

The next morning, we found a place like a grave. We decided to dig it

up. We found first a mat, and under thai a fine bow, . . . We also found

bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We took several of the pret-

tiest things to carry away with us, and covered the body up again,62

A place "like a grave"!

Although Karen Kupperman says the Pilgrims continued to rob graves for

years,6' more help came from a live Indian, Squanto. Here my students return to

familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. Land of Promise pro-

vides a typical account:

Squanto had learned their language, he explained, from English fish-

ermen who ventured into the New England waters each summer.

Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins.

Would the small band of settlers have survived without Squanto's

help? We cannot say. But by the fall of 1621, colonists and Indians

could sit down to several days of feast and thanksgiving to God (later

celebrated as the first Thanksgiving).

What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English.

According to Ferdinando Gorges, around 1605 a British captain stole Squanto, who

was then still a boy, along with four Penobscots, and took them to England. There

Squanto spent nine years, three in the employ of Gorges. At length, Gorges helped

Squanio arrange passage back to Massachusetts. Some historians doubt that

Squanto was among the five Indians stolen in 1605.M All sources agree, however,

that in 1614 a British slave raider seized Squanto and two dozen fellow Indians

and sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. What happened next makes Ulysses

look like a homebody. Squanto escaped from slavery, escaped from Spain, and made

his way back to England. After trying to get home via Newfoundland, in 1619 he

talked Thomas Dermer into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the

plague story, a hook that our textbooks choose not to use. For now Squanto set

foot again on Massachusetts soil and walked to his home village of Patuxet, only

to make the horrifying discovery that "he was the sole member of his village still

alive. All the others had perished in the epidemic two years before,"65 No

wonder Squanto threw in his lot with the Pilgrims.

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 8 3

Squanto's travels acquainted him with more of the world than any Pilgrim encountered. He had crossed the Atlantic perhaps six times, twice as a British captive, and had lived

in Maine, Newfoundland, Spain, and England, as well as Massachusetts.

Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in Land of

Promise: "He had learned their language from English fishermen."

As translator, ambassador, and technical advisor, Squanto was essential io

the survival of Plymouth in its first two years. Like other Europeans in

America, the Pilgrims had no idea what to eat or how to raise or find it until

Indians showed them. William Bradford called Squanto "a special instrument

sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to

set their corn, where to take fish, and to procure other commodities, and was

also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit." Squanto was

not the Pilgrims' only aide: in the summer of 1621 Massasoit sent another

Indian, Hobomok, to live among the Pilgrims for several years as guide and

ambassador.66

"Their profit" was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the

trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, "Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit

motive underlying much of our history."67 Profit too came from the Indians, by

way of the fur trade, without which Plymouth would never have paid for itself.

Hobomok helped Plymouth set up fur trading posts at the mouth of the Penob

scot and Kennebec rivers in Maine; in Aptucxet, Massachusetts; and in Windso

Connecticut.08 Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to "go boldly

where none dared go before," They went to the Indians.69

84 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

All this brings us to Thanksgiving. Throughout the nation every fall,

elementary school children reenact a little morality play, The First Thanksgiving,

as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made out of construc-

tion paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. Thanksgiving is the

occasion on which we give thanks to God as a nation for the blessings that He

[sic] hath bestowed upon us. More than any other celebration, more even than

such overtly patriotic holidays as Independence Day and Memorial Day,

Thanksgiving celebrates our ethnocentrism. We have seen, for example, how

King James and the early Pilgrim leaders gave thanks for the plague, which

proved to them that God was on their side. The archetypes associated with

Thanksgiving—God on our side, civilization wrested from wilderness, order

from disorder, through hard work and good Pilgrim character traits—-continue

to radiate from our history textbooks. More than sixty years ago, in an analysis

of how American history was taught in the 1920s, Bessie Pierce pointed out

the political uses to which Thanksgiving is put: "For these unexcelled bless-

ings, the pupil is urged to follow in the footsteps of his forbears, to offer

unquestioning obedience to the law of the land, and to carry on the work

begun."70

Thanksgiving dinner is a ritual, with all the characteristics that Mircea

Eliade assigns to the ritual observances of origin myths:

1. It constitutes the history of the acts of the founders, the Supernatural.

2. It is considered to be true.

3. It tells how an institution came into existence.

4. In performing the ritual associated with the myth, one '"experiences'

knowledge of the origin" and claims one's patriarchy.

5. Thus one "lives" the myth, as a religion.71

My Random House dictionary lists as its main heading for the Plymouth

colonists not Pilgrims but Pilgrim Fathers. The Library of Congress similarly cata-

logs its holdings for Plymouth under Pilgrim Fathm, and of course fathers is capi-

talized, meaning "fathers of our country," not of Pilgrim children. Thanksgiving

has thus moved from history into the field of religion, "civil religion," as Robert

Bellah has called it. To Bellah, civil religions hold society together. Plymouth

Rock achieved iconographic status around 1880, when some enterprising resi-

dents of the town rejoined its two pieces on the waterfront and built a Greek

templet around it. The templet became a shrine, the Mayflower Compact

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G

became a sacred text, and our textbooks began to play the same function as the

Anglican Book of Common Prayer, teaching us the meaning behind the civil rite of

Thanksgiving.72

The religious character of Pilgrim history shines forth in an introduc-

tion by Valerian Paget to William Bradford's famous chronicle OfPlimoth Plan-

tation: "The eyes of Europe were upon this little English handful of

unconscious heroes and saints, taking courage from them step by step. For

their children's children the same ideals of Freedom burned so clear and

strong that . . . the little episode we have just been contemplating, resulted in

the birth of the United States of America, and, above all, of the establishment

of the humanitarian ideals it typifies, and for which the Pilgrims offered their

sacrifice upon the altar of the Sonship of Man."7' In this invocation, the Pil-

grims supply not only the origin of the United States, but also the inspiration

for democracy in Europe and perhaps for all goodness in the world today! I

suspect that the original colonists, Separatists and Anglicans alike, would have

been amused.

The civil ritual we practice marginalizes Indians. Our archetypal image of

the first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the Pil-

grims in their starched Sunday best next to their almost naked Indian guests. As

a holiday greeting card puts it, "I is for the Indians we invited to share our

food." The silliness of all this reaches its zenith in the handouts that school-

children have carried home for decades, complete with captions such as, "They

served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen

such a feast!" When the Native American novelist Michael Dorris's son brought

home this "information" from his New Hampshire elementary school, Dorris

pointed out that "the Pilgrims had literally never seen 'such a feast,' since all

foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been pro-

vided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."74

This notion that "we" advanced peoples provided for the Indians, exactly

the converse of the truth, is not benign. It reemerges time and again in our his-

tory to complicate race relations. For example, we are told that white plantation

owners furnished food and medical care for their slaves, yet every shred of food,

shelter, and clothing on the plantations was raised, built, woven, or paid for by

black labor. Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of

the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, j

overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World

nation runs coward the United States.

86 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims

did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest

celebrations for centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for

national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During

the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an obser-

vance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national hol-

iday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even

get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until

the 1870s.75

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving

compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans eth-

nocentric After all, if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider

other cultures seriously? This ethnocentrism intensified in the middle of the last

century. In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman has shown how the idea

of "God on our side" was used to legitimate the open expression of Anglo-Saxon

superiority vis-a-vis Mexicans, Native Americans, peoples of the Pacific, Jews,

and even Catholics.7* Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with

their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with

people from other cultures.

On occasion, we pay a more direct cost: censorship. In 1970, for example,

the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a

speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James

"was selected, but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people

in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not

allow him to read it."77 James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you . . . but it is not a time of cele-

brating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what hap-

pened to my People. . , . The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores

of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ances-

tors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans, . . . Massasoit, the grear

leader of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yei he and his People wel-

comed and befriended the settlers , . , , little knowing that. . . before

50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags . . . and other Indians living

near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases

that we caught from them. . . . Although our way of life is almost gone

and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the

T H E T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 8 7

lands of Massachusetts.. .. What has happened cannot be changed, but

today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where

people and nature once again are important.79

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not

some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said,

had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wbeai. Our text-

books also omit the facts about grave robbing, Indian enslavement, the plague,

and so on, even though they were common knowledge in colonial New Eng-

land. For at least a century Puritan ministers thundered their interpretation of

the meaning of the plague from New England pulpits. Thus our popular history

of the Pilgrims has not been a process of gaining perspective but of deliberate

forgetting. Instead of these important facts, textbooks supply the feel-good

minutiae of Squanto's helpfulness, his name, the fish in the cornhills, sometimes

even the menu and the number of Indians who attended the prototypical first

Thanksgiving,

I have focused here on untoward detail only because our histories have

suppressed everything awkward for so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting

forth in the late fall to make their way on a continent new to them remains

unsurpassed. In their first year the Pilgrims, like the Indians, suffered from dis-

eases, including scurvy and pneumonia; half of them died. It was not immoral of

the Pilgrims to have taken over Patuxet. They did not cause the plague and were

as baffled as to its origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Massasoit was happy

that the Pilgrims were using the bay, for the Patuxet, being dead, had no more

need for the site. Pilgrim-Indian relations started reasonably positively. Ply-

mouth, unlike many other colonies, usually paid the Indians fot the land it took.

In some instances Europeans settled in Indian towns because Indians had invited

them, as protection against another tribe or a nearby competing European

power.79 In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history

of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi—but neither is it exceptionally less

violent.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and

inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give moral instruction,

the way origin myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by '

allowing students to learn both the "good" and the "bad" sides of the Pilgrim

tale. Conflict would then become part of the story, and students might discover

that the knowledge they gain has implications for their lives today. Correct!

88 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans

grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous.

The genial omissions and the invented details with which our textbooks retail

the Pilgrim archetype are close cousins of the overt censorship practiced by the

Massachusetts Department of Commerce in denying Frank James the right to

speak. Surely, in history, "truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost."

THE T R U T H A B O U T T H E F I R S T T H A N K S G I V I N G • 8 9

To understand the making of Anglo-America is impossible without close and sus-

tained attention to its indigenous predecessors, allies, and nemeses. —James Axtell1

The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the

morality of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared] . . . quantities of propa-

ganda to overpower their own countrymen's scruples. The propaganda gradually

took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics.

We live with it still. —Francis Jennings1

Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, "I could not have done that." Eventually,

memory yields. —Friedrich Nietzsche3

There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in

anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child

who has not come home in shame and tears. —Rupert Costo4

4. Red Eyes

H istorically, American Indians have been the most lied-about subset of ourpopulation. That's why Michael Dorris said that, in learning about Native Americans, "One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten."5 High

school students start below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologeti-

cally present Native Americans through white eyes. Today's textbooks should

do better, especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is

interracial) has flowered in the last twenty years, and the information on which

new textbooks might be based currently rests on library shelves.

There has been some improvement in textbooks' treatment of Native peoples

in recent years. In 1961 the best-selling Rise of ih( American Nation contained ten

illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations);

most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage war-

fare. Twenty-five years later, the retitled Triumph of the American Nation contained

fifteen illustrations of Indians; more importantly, no longer were Native Ameri-

cans depicted as one-dimensional primitives. Rather, they were people who par-

ticipated in struggles to preserve their identities and their land. Included were

Metacomet (King Philip), Crispus Attucks (first casualty of the Revolution, who

was also part black in ancestry), Sequoyah (who invented the Cherokee

alphabet), and Navajo code-talkers in World War II.

Nevertheless, the authors of American history textbooks "need a crash

course in cultural relativism and ethnic sensitivity," according to James Ax tell,

who criticized textbooks in 1987 for still using such terms as half-breed, mdisacre,

and war-whooping6 Reserving milder terms such as frontier initiative and settlers for

whites is equally biased. Even worse are the authors' overall interpretations,

which continue to be shackled by the "conventional assumptions and semantics"

that have "explained" Indian-white relations for centuries. Textbook authors still

write history to comfort descendants of the "settlers."

Our journey into the history of Indian peoples and their relations with

European and African invaders cannot be a happy excursion. Native Americans

91

are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go

to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples

who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our

Original Sin,"7 If we look Indian history squarely in the eye, we are going to get

red eyes. This is our past, however, and we must acknowledge it. It is time for

textbooks to send white children home, if not with red eyes, at least with

thought-provoking questions.

Today's textbooks at least try to be accurate about Indian culture. All but

two of the twelve textbooks I surveyed begin by devoting more than five pages

to pre-contact Native societies,8 And to their credit most of the textbooks recog-

nize diversity among Native societies. They tell about the League of Five

Nations among the Iroquois in the Northeast, potlatches among the North-

western coastal Indians, cliff dwellings in the Southwest, and caste divisions

among the Natchez in the Southeast. In the process of presenting ten or twenty

different cultures in six or eight pages, however, the textbooks can hardly reach

a high level of sophistication. So they seize upon the unusual. No matter that

the Choctaws were more numerous and played a much larger role in American j

history than the Natchez—they were also more ordinary. Students will not find

among the Native Americans portrayed in their history textbooks many "regular

folks" with whom they might identify.

American Indian societies pose a special problem for textbooks.9 The

authors of history textbooks are consumers, not practitioners, of archaeology,

ethnobotany, linguistics, physical anthropology, folklore studies, cultural anthro-

pology, ethnohistory, and other related disciplines. Scholars in these fields can j

tell us much, albeit tentatively, about what happened in the Americas before

Europeans and Africans arrived. Unfortunately, the authors of history textbooks j

treat archaeology et al. as dead disciplines to be mined for answers. These fields

study dead people, to be sure, but they are alive with controversy. Only The j

American Adventure admits uncertainty: "This page may be out of date by the time

it is read," Adventure goes on to present claims that humans have been in the

Americas for 12,000, 21,000, and 40,000 years. As a result, although Adventure \

is one of the oldest of the twelve textbooks, its pre-Columbian pages have not j

gone out of date.ia

Most other textbooks retain their usual authoritative tone. On the matter

of the first human settlement of the Americas, estimates vary from 12,000 years I

before the present to more than 70,000 B.P.11 Some scientists believe that the I

original settlers came in successive waves over thousands of years; genetic sitni- !

larities convince others that most Natives descended from a single small band,lz

92 - L I E S MY TEACHER TOLD ME

The majority of the textbooks choose one position or the other and present it as

undisputed fact. Every textbook says something like this, from American History:

"The water level of the oceans dropped sharply, exposing a land bridge between

Asia and North America." Actually, while most scholars accept a "Beringia"

crossing, actual evidence is siim, so we cannot rule out boat crossings, accidental

or purposeful.1' Even if the first Americans arrived on foot, they were just as

surely explorers as Columbus. Nonetheless, textbooks picture them as primitives,

vaguely Neanderthalian.

This archetype of the primitive savage, not very bright, enmeshed in wars

with nature and other humans, drives some of the certainties that textbooks

impose on the ancient past. American History tells of "the wanderers" who

"moved slowly southward and to the east. . . . Many thousand years passed

before they had spread over all of North and South America" Actually, a signifi-

cant number of archaeologists believe that people reached most parts of the

Americas within a thousand years, too rapidly to allow easy archaeological

determination of the direction and timing of their migration. "They did not

know that they were exploring a new continent," American History goes on,

offering no evidence upon which to infer these early Americans' alleged igno-

rance. The depiction of mental torpor persists as American History continues:

"None of the groups made much progress in developing simple machines or

substituting mechanical or even animal power for their own muscle power." In

Europe and Asia, most pre-1492 machines depended on horses, oxen, water

buffalo, mules, or cattle—beasts that were unknown in the Americas, after all.

American History then generalizes: "Those who planted seeds and culti-

vated the land instead of merely hunting and gathering food were more secure

and comfortable." Apparently the author has not encountered the "affluent

primitive" theory, which persuaded anthropology some twenty-five years ago

that gatherer-hunters lived quite comfortably, American History completes the

evolutionary stereotype: "These agricultural people were mostly peaceful,

though they could fight fiercely to protect their fields. The hunters and wan-

derers, on the other hand, were quite warlike because their need to move about

brought them frequently into conflict with other groups." Here the author

betrays the influence of the old savage-to-barbaric-to-civilized school dating

back to L. H. Morgan and Karl Marx in the last century. The authors of history

textbooks may well have encountered such thinking in anthropology courses

when they were undergraduates; it is no longer taught today, however. Decades

ago, most anthropologists challenged the outmoded continuum, determining

that hunters and gatherers were relatively peaceful, compared to agriculturalists,

R E D E V E S

and that modern societies were more warlike still. Thus violence increases with

civilization.

Today's textbooks do confer civilization on some Natives. Like the Spanish

conquistadors themselves, The American Adventure equates wealth and civilization:

"Unlike the noncivilized peoples of the Caribbean, the Aztec were rich and pros-

perous." Textbooks invariably put the civilization far away, in Mexico, Guatemala,

or Peru. By comparison, "Indian life in North America was less advanced," says

The American Pageant. It seems thai, despite good intentions, textbooks cannot

resist contrasting "primitive" Americans with modern Europeans, Part of the

problem is that the books are really comparing rural America to urban Europe—•

Massachusetts to London. Comparing Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) to rural

Scotland might produce a very different impression, for when Cortez arrived,

Tenochtitlan was a city of 100,000 to 300,000 whose central market was so

busy and noisy "that it could be heard more than four miles away," according to

Bernal Diaz, who accompanied him.14 Moreover, from the perspective of the

average inhabitant, life may have been equally as "advanced" and pleasant in

Massachusetts or Scotland as in Aztec Mexico or London.

For a long time Native Americans have been rebuking textbook authors

for reserving the adjective civilized for European cultures. In 1927 an organiza-

tion of Native leaders called the Grand Council Fire of American Indians criti-

cized textbooks as "unjust to the life of our people." They went on to ask,

"What is civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original

arts, stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we were not sav-

ages, but a civilized race."15 Even an appreciative treatment of Native cultures

reinforces ethnocentrism so long as it does not challenge the primitive-to-civi-

lized continuum. This continuum inevitably conflates the meaning of civilized in

everyday conversation—"refined or enlightened"—with "having a complex divi-

sion of labor," the only definition that anthropologists defend. When we con-

sider the continuum carefully, it immediately becomes problematic. Was the

Third Reich civilized, for instance? Most anthropologists would answer yes. In

what ways do we prefer the civilized Third Reich to the more primitive Arawak

nation that Columbus encountered? If we refuse to label the Third Reich civi-

lized, are we not using the tetm to imply a certain comity? If so, we must con-

sider the Arawaks civilized, and we must also consider Columbus and his I

Spaniards primitive if not savage. Ironically, societies characterized by a complex

division of labor are often marked by inequality and capable of supporting large

specialized armies. Precisely these "civilized" societies are likely to resort 10

savage violence in their attempts to conquer "primitive" societies.'6

94 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Thoughtless use of the "etherizing" terms civilized and trvilizttifm blocks

any real inquiry into the world-view or social structure of the "uncivilized"

person or society. In 1990 President Bush condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait

with the words, "The entire civilized world is against Iraq"—an irony, in that

Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates valleys are the earliest known seat of civilization.

After contact with Europeans and Africans, Indian societies changed

rapidly. Native Americans took into their cultures noi only guns, blankets, and

kettles, but also new foods, ways of building houses, and ideas from Christianity.

Most American history textbooks tell about the changes in only one group, the

Plains Indians. Eight of the twelve textbooks I surveyed mention the rapid efflo-

rescence of this colorful culture after the Spaniards introduced the horse to the

American West. It is an exhilarating example of syncretism—blending elements

of two different cultures to create something new.17

The transformation in the Plains cultures, however, was only the tip of the

cultural-change iceberg. An even more profound metamorphosis occurred as

Europeans linked Native peoples to the developing world economy. Yet textbooks

make no mention of this process, despite the fact that it continues to affect for-

merly independent cultures in the last half of our century. In the early 1970s, for

example, Lapps in Norway replaced their sled dogs with snowmobiles, only to

find themselves vulnerable to Arab oil embargoes.'" The process seems inevitable,

hence perhaps is neither to be praised nor decried—but it should not be ignored,

because it is crucial to understanding how Europeans took over America,

In Atlantic North America, members of Indian nations possessed a variety

of sophisticated skills, from the ability to weave watertight baskets to an under-

standing of how certain plants can be used to reduce pain. At first, Native Ameri-

cans traded corn, beaver, fish, sassafras, and other goods with the French, Dutch,

and British, in return for axes, blankets, cloth, beads, and kettles. Soon, however,

Europeans persuaded Natives to specialize in the fur and slave trades. Native

Americans were better hunters and trappers than Europeans, and with the guns

the Europeans sold them, they became better still. Other Native skills began to

atrophy. Why spend hours making a watertight basket when in one-tenth the

time you could trap enough beavers to trade for a kettle? Even agriculture, which

the Native Americans had shown to the Europeans, declined, because it became

easier to trade for food than to grow it. Everyone acted in rational self-interest in

joining such a system—that is, Native Americans were not mere victims—

because everyone's standard of living improved, at least in theory.

Some of the rapid changes in eastern Indian societies exemplify syn-

cretism. When the Iroquois combined European guns and Native American tac-

RED EVES • 95

tics to smash the Hurons, they controlled their own culture and chose which

elements of European culture to incorporate, which to modify, which to ignore.

Native Americans learned how to repair guns, cast bullets, build stronger forts,

and fight to annihilate.19 Native Americans also became well known as linguists,

often speaking two European languages (French, English, Dutch, or Spanish)

and at least two Indian languages, British colonists sometimes used Natives as

interpreters when dealing with the Spanish or French, not just with other Native

American nations.20

These developments were not all matters of happy economics and volun-

tary syncretic cultural transformation, however. Natives were operating under a

military and cultural threat, and they knew it. They quickly deduced that Euro-

pean guns were more efficient than their bows and arrows. Europeans soon real-

ized that trade goods could be used to win and maintain political alliances with

Indian nations. To deal with the new threat and because whites "demanded

institutions reflective of their own with which to relate," many Native groups

strengthened their tribal governments." Chiefs acquired power they had never

had before. These governments often ruled unprecedentedly broad areas,

because the heightened warfare and the plagues had wiped out smaller tribes or

caused them to merge with larger ones for protection. Large nations became

ethnic melting pots, taking in whites and blacks as well as other Indians. New

confederations and nations developed, such as the Creeks, Seminoles, and Lum-

bees.2' The tribes also became more male-dominated, in imitation of Europeans

or because of the expanded importance of war skills in their cultures.J1

Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got guns first, guns that could

be trained on interior peoples who had not yet acquired any. Suddenly some

nations had a great military advantage over others. The result was an escalation

of Indian warfare. Native nations had engaged in conflict before Europeans

came, of course. Tribes rarely fought to the finish, however. Some tribes did not

want to take over the lands belonging to other nations, partly because each had

its own sacred sites. For a nation to exterminate its neighbors was difficult

anyway, since all enjoyed the same level of military technology. Now all this

changed. European powers deliberately increased Indian warfare by playing one

nation off against another. The Spanish, for example, used a divide-and-conquer

strategy to defeat the Aztecs in Mexico. In Scotland and Ireland, the English

had played tr;'.,es against one another to extend British rule. Now they did the

same in North America.24

For many tribes the motive for the increased combat was the enslavement

of other Indians to sell to the Europeans for more guns and kettles. As northern

96 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

Ran away from his Master Nathanael Holbrook of Sherburn, on Wednesday the 19th of Sept last, an Indian Lad of

about 18 Years of Age, named John Pittarnc; He is pretty well sett

and of a guilty Countenance and has short Hair; He had on a grey

Coat with Pewter Buttons. Leather Breeches, an old tow Shirt.

grey Stockings, good Shoes, and a Felt Hat.

Whoever shall take up the said Servant, and convey him to

his Master in Sherburn. shall have Forty Shillings Reward and all

necessary Charges paid. We hear the said Servant intended to

change his Name and his Clothes.

Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when they could. This notice comes from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4,1739.

tribes specialized in fur, certain southern tribes specialized in people. Some

Native Americans had enslaved each other long before Europeans arrived. Now

Europeans vastly expanded Indian slavery. Colonists in South Carolina paid

nearby Indian nations in guns, ammunition, and other goods, which enabled

them to enslave interior nations as far west as Arkansas,25

I had expected to find in our textbooks the cliche that Native Americans

did not make good slaves, but only two books, Triumph of the American Nation

and The American Tradition, say even that. The American Pageant contains a para-

graph that at least states the basics—"Indian slaves were among the colony's

earliest exports"—even if it gives no hint of the trade's extent. American History

buries a sentence, "A few Indians were enslaved," in its discussion of the African

slave trade. Otherwise, the twelve textbooks are silent on the subject of the

Native American slave trade.26

The Europeans' enslavement of Native Americans has a long history. Text-

books used in elementary schools tell that Ponce de Leon went to Florida to

seek the mythical fountain of youth; they do not say that his main business was

to capture slaves for Hispaniola." In New England, Indian slavery led directly to

African slavery; the first blacks imported there, in 1638, were brought from the

RED EVES • 97

West Indies to be exchanged for Native Americans from Connecticut.28 On the

eve of the New York City slave rebellion of 1712, in which Native and African

slaves united, about one resident in four was enslaved and one slave in four was

Indian. A 1730 census of South Kingston, Rhode Island, showed 935 whites,

333 African slaves, and 223 Native American slaves."

The center of Native American slavery, like African American slavery, was

South Carolina. Its population in 1708 included 3,960 free whites, 4,100

African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured servants, presumably

white. These numbers do not reflect the magnitude of Native slavery, however,

because they omit the export trade. From Carolina, as from New England,

colonists sent Indian slaves (who might escape) to the West Indies (where they

could never escape), in exchange for black slaves. Charleston shipped more than

10,000 Natives in chains to the West Indies in one year!30 Further west, so

many Pawnee Indians were sold to whites that Pawnee became the name applied

in the plains to all slaves, whether they were of Indian or African origin.31 On

the West Coast, Pierson Reading, a manager of John Sutler's huge grant of

Indian land in central California, extolled the easy life he led in 1844: "The

Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the

south." In the Southwest, whites enslaved Navajos and Apaches right up to the

middle of the Civil War.'2

Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered stable settlements no

longer safe, helping to deagriculturize Native Americans. To avoid being targets

for capture, Indians abandoned their cornfields and their villages and began to

live in smaller settlements from which they could more easily escape to the

woods. Ultimately, they had to trade with Europeans even for food.53 As Euro-

peans learned from Natives what to grow and how to grow it, they became less

dependent upon Indians and Indian technology, while Indians became more

dependent upon Europeans and European technology." Thus what worked for

the Native Americans in the short run worked against them in the long. In the

long run, it was Indians who were enslaved, Indians who died, Indian technology

that was lost, Indian cultures that fell apart. By the time the pitiful remnant of the

Massachuset tribe converted to Christianity and joined the Puritans' "praying

Indian towns," they did so in response to an invading culture that told them their

religion was wrong and Christianity was right. This process exemplifies what

anthropologists call cultural imperialism. Even the proud Plains Indians, whose

syncretic culture combined horses and guns from the Spanish with Native an,

religion, and hunting styles, showed the effects of cultural imperialism: the Sioux

word for white man, wasichu, meant "one who has everything good."35

98 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Figure It Out Study the two drawings below Both were

made after the year 1500, but one shows how Indians lived before 1500 and one shows Indian life after 1500. Which shows Indian life before Europeans arrived and which shows Indian lite after? What evidence tells you the date

The textbook Life and Liberty is distinguished by its graphic presentation of change in Native societies. It confronts students with this provocative pair of illustrations and asks, "Which shows Indian life before Europeans arrived and which shows Indian life after? What evidence tells you the date?" Thus Life and Liberty helps students under- stand that Europeans did not "civilize" or "settle" "roaming" Indians, but had the oppo- site impact.

To be anthropologically literate about culture contact, students should be

familiar with the terms syncretism and cultural imperialism, or at least the concepts

they denote. None of the twelve textbooks mentions either term, and most of

them explain nothing of the process of cultural change, again except for the

Plains Indian horse culture, whjpSi, as a consequence, comes across as unique.

Not one textbook tells of the process of incorporation into the global economy,

none tells how contact worked to deskill Native Americans, most don't tell of

increased Indian warfare, and only The American Pageant even hints at the extent

of the Native American slave trade.

Just as American societies changed when they encountered whites, so

European societies changed when they encountered Natives. Textbooks com-

pletely miss this side of the mutual accommodation and acculturation process.

Instead, their view of white-Indian relations is dominated by the archetype of

the frontier line. Textbooks present the process as a moving line of white (and

R E D E V E S • 99

black) settlement—Indians on one side, whites (and blacks) on the other. Poca-

hontas and Squanto aside, the Natives and Europeans don't meet much in text-

book history, except as whites remove Indians further west. In reality, whites

and Native Americans worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled

with each other for scores and even hundreds of years. For 325 years, after all,

from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and

Apache autonomy around 1890, independent Native and European nations

coexisted in what is now the United States.

The term frontier hardly does justice to this process, for it implies a line or

boundary. Contact, not separation, was the rule. Frontier also locates the observer

somewhere in the urban East, from which the frontier is "out there." Textbook

authors seem not to have encountered the trick question, "Which came first, civ-

ilization or the wilderness?" The answer is civilization, for only the "civilized"

mind could define the world of Native farmers, fishers, and gatherers and

hunters, coexisting with forests, crops, and animals, as a "wilderness," Calling

the area beyond secure European control "frontier" or "wilderness" makes it

subtly alien. Such a viewpoint is intrinsically Eurocentric and marginalizes the

actions of nonurban people, both Native and non-Native.is

The band of interaction was amazingly multicultural. In 1635 "sixteen

different languages could be heard among the settlers in New Amsterdam,"

languages from North America, Africa, and Europe.57 In 1794, when the zone

of contact had reached the eastern Midwest, a single northern Ohio town, "the

Glaize," was made up of hundreds of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians,

British and French traders and artisans, several Nanticokes, Cherokees, and Iro-

quois, a few African American and white American captives, and whites who

had married into or been adopted by Indian families. The Glaize was truly

multicultural in its holidays, observing Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, the

birthday of the British queen, and Indian celebrations.36 In 1835, when the

contact area was near the West Coast, John Sutler, with permission of the Mex-

ican authorities, recruited Native Americans to raise his wheat crop, operate a

distillery, a hat factory, and a blanket company, and build a fort (now Sacra-

mento). Procuring uniforms from Russian traders and officers from Europe,

Sutler organized a 200-man Indian army, clothed in tsarist uniforms and com-

manded in German!'9

Our history textbooks still obliterate the interracial, multicultural nature

of frontier life. American History devotes almost a page to Suiter's Fort without

ever hinting that Native Americans were anything other than enemies: "Gradu-

ally he built a fortified town, which he called Sutler's Fort. The entire place was

100 * L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

surrounded by a thick wall 18 feet high (about 6 meters) topped with cannon

for protection against unfriendly Indians,"

The historian Gary Nash tells us that interculturation took place from the

start in Virginia, "facilitated by the fact that some Indians lived among the Eng-

lish as day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to Indian villages rather than

endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English."40 Indeed, many white

and black newcomers chose to live an Indian lifestyle. In his Letters from an Amer-

ican Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur wrote, "There must be in the

Indians' social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be

boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no

examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Euro-

peans."41 Crevecoeur overstated his case: as we know from Squanto's example,

some Natives chose to live among whites from the beginning. The migration

was mostly the other way, however. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "No European

who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies."42

Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando De Soto had

to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies.

The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear

long hair. "People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme

punishments, even up to the death penalty," if caught by whites.*3 Nonetheless,

right up to the end of independent Indian nationhood in 1890, whites con-

tinued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone,

became cultural heroes in white society.

Communist Eastern Europe erected an Iron Curtain to stop its outflow but

could never explain why, if Communist societies were the most progressive on

earth, they had to prevent people from defecting, American colonial embarrass-

ment similarly went straight to the heart of their ideology, also an ideology of

progress. Textbooks in Eastern Europe and the United States have handled the

problem in the same w»^. by omitting the facts. Not one American history text-

book mentions the attraction of Native societies to European Americans and

African Americans,

African Americans frequently fled to Indian societies to escape bondage.

What did whites find so alluring? According to Benjamin Franklin, "All their gov-

ernment is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no

officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment." Probably foremost, the lack

of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admi-

ration of European observers.44 Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which

Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded

R E D E Y E S • 101

more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time,

which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Although leadership

was substantially hereditary in some nations, most Indian societies north of

Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "There is not a Man in the Ministry of the

Five Nations, who has gain'd his Office, otherwise than by Merit," waxed Lt. Gov,

Cadwallader Colden of New York in 1727. "Their Authority is only the Esteem

of the People, and ceases the Moment that Esteem is lost." Colden applied to che

Iroquois terms redolent of "the natural rights of mankind": "Here we see the nat-

ural Origin of all Power and Authority among a free People."4'

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, tie demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be 'bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile the Native prisoners "went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy," in tine words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner {in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly

calls these scenes "infamous and embarrassing."

102 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democ-

ratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and

equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as

Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. These European

thinkers then influenced Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.46

In recent years historians have debated whether Indian ideas may also have

influenced our democracy more directly. Through 150 years of colonial contact,

the Iroquols League stood before the colonies as an object lesson in how to

govern a large domain democratically. The terms used by Lt. Gov. Golden find

an echo in our Declaration of Independence fifty years later.

In the 1740s the Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering

English colonies and suggested that the colonies form a union similar to the

league. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin, who had spent much time among the Iro-

quois observing their deliberations, pleaded with colonial leaders to consider

the Albany Plan of Union: "It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant

savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to

execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble;

and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English

colonies."47

The colonies rejected the plan. But it was a forerunner of the Articles of

Confederation and the Constitution. Both the Continental Congress and the

Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas and imagery. In

1775 Congress formulated a speech to the Iroquois, signed by John Hancock,

that quoted Iroquois advice from 1744. "The Six Nations are a wise people,"

Congress wrote, "let us harken to their council and teach our children to

follow it."4S

John Mohawk has argued that American Indians are directly or indirectly

responsible for the public-meeting tradition, free speech, democracy, and "all

those things which got attached to the Bill of Rights." Without the Native

example, "do you really believe that all those ideas would have found birth

among a people who had spent a millennium butchering other people because

of intolerance of questions of religion?"40 Mohawk may have overstated the case

for Native democracy, since heredity played a major role in office-holding in

many Indian societies. His case is strengthened, however, by the fact that wher-

ever Europeans went in the Americas, they projected monarchs ("King Philip")

or other undemocratic leaders onto Native societies. To some degree, this pro-

jecting was done out of European self-interest, so they could claim to have pur-

chased tribal land as a result of dealing with one person or faction. The practice

R E D E Y E S • 103

As a symbol of the new United States, Americans chose the eagle clutching a bundle of arrows. They knew that both the eagle and the arrows were symbols of the Iroquois League. Although one arrow is easily broken, no one can break six (or thirteen) at once.

also betrayed habitual European thought: Europeans could not believe (hat

nations did not have such rulers, since that was the only form of government

they knew.

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native

Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era car-

toonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Vir-

ginia's patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought

the redcoats. When colonists took action to oppose unjust authority, as in the

Boston Tea Party or the anti-rent protests against Dutch plantations in the

Hudson River valley during the 1840s, they chose to dress as Indians, not to

blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified

with liberty.50

Of course, Dutch traditions influenced Plymouth as well as New York. So

did British common law and the Magna Carta. American democracy seems to be

another example of syncretism, combining ideas from Europe and Native

America, The degree of Native influence is hard to specify, since that influence

came through several sources. Textbooks might, present it as a soft hypothesis

rather than hard fact. But they should not leave it out. In the twelve textbooks I

surveyed, discussion of any intellectual influence of Native Americans on Euro-

pean Americans was limited to Discovering American History, which pictures a

wampum belt paired with Benjamin Franklin's famous cartoon of a divided,

hence dying snake. "Franklin's Albany Plan might have been inspired by the

Iroquois League," captions Discovering. "The wampum belt expresses the unity of

tribes achieved through the League, Compare it with Franklin's cartoon." The

other eleven books are silent.

104 - L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

But, then, the books leave out most contributions of Native Americans to

the modern world. I had expected to find at least such noncontroversial items as

food, words, and place names. After all, our regional cuisines—the dishes that

make American food distinctive—often combine Indian with European and

African elements. Examples range from New England pork and beans to New

Orleans gumbo to Texas chili.51 Mutual acculturation between Native and

African Americans-—due to shared experience in slavery as well as escapes by

blacks to Native communities—accounts for soul food being part Indian, from

cornbread and grits to greens and hush puppies." Historians have known for

centuries that Indians of the Americas domesticated more than half of the food

crops now grown around the world. Native place names dot our landscape, from

Okefenokee to Alaska. Even nineteenth-century racists relished names like Mis-

sissippi, meaning "Great River." From hurricane to skunk to (probably) OK, Indian

words have been incorporated into English.53 Notwithstanding all this, only

Land of Promise and Triumph of the Amtricdn Nation discuss Indian foods, only Tri-

umph mentions Indian names, and none of the twelve books deals with Indian

words.

Transmitting food and names, mundane though it may seem, involves

ideas. Native farming methods were not "primitive." Indian farmers in some

tribes drew rwo or three times as much nourishment from the soil as we do.54

Place names, too, show intellectual interchange. Whites had to be asking

Indians, "Where am I?" "What is this place called?" "What is that animal?"

"What is the name of that mountain?" Although textbooks "appreciate" Native

cultures, the possibility of real interculturation, especially in matters of the intel-

lect, is foreign to them. This is a shame, for authors thereby ignore much of

what has made America distinctive from Europe. In a travel narrative, Peter

Kalm wrote in 1750, "The French, English, Germans, Dutch, and other Euro-

peans, who have lived for several years in distant provinces, near and among the

Indians, grow so like them in their behavior and thought that they can only be

distinguished by the difference of their color."55 In the famous essay, "The Fron-

tier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner told how the frontier mas-

ters the European, "strips off the garments of civilization," and requires him to

be an Indian in thought as well as dress. "Before long he has gone to planting

Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick." Gradually he builds something

new, "but the outcome is not the old Europe." It is syncretic; it is American.56

Acknowledging how aboriginal we are culturally—-how the United States

and Europe, too, have been influenced by Native American as well as European

ideas—-would require significant textbook rewriting. If we recognized American

R E D E V E S • 105

In the nineteenth century Americans knew of Native American contributions to medicine. Sixty percent of all medicines patented in the century were distributed bearing Indian images, including Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, and Kickapoo

Indian Oil. In this century America has repressed the image of Indian as healer.

Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure, we would

have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might

have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimates the

entire conquest." In 1970 the Indian Historian Press produced a critique of our

histories, Textbooks and the American Indian. One of the press's yardsticks for evalu-

ating books was the question, "Does the textbook describe the religions, philoso-

phies, and contributions to thought of the American Indian?"58 A quarter-century

later the answer must still be no.

106 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. The

American Way describes Native American religion in these words:

These Native Americans [in the Southeast] believed that nature was

filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a

spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They

shared their lives with the spirits of nature.

Way is trying to show respect for Native American religion, but it doesn't work.

Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated

theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the

beliefs of many Christians today.

These Americans believed that one great male god ruled ihe world.

Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father,

son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing

that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they

believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died.

Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would

immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning

or the spiritual satisfaction of communion.

Textbooks could present American Indian religions from a perspective

that takes them seriously as attractive and persuasive belief systems.'9 The

anthropologist Frederick Turner has pointed out that when whites remark upon

the fact that Indians perceive a spirit in every animal or rock, they are simultane-

ously admitting their own loss of a deep spiritual relationship with the earth.

Native Americans are "part of the total living universe," wrote Turner; "spiritual

health is to be had only by accepting this condition and by attempting to live in

accordance with it." Turner contends that this life-view is healthier than Euro-

pean alternatives: "Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are

the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and

because of this we are not fully alive."6" Thus Turner shows that taking Native

American religions seriously might require re-examination of the Judeo-Chris-

ttan tradition. No textbook would suggest such a controversial idea.

Similarly, textbooks give readers no clue as to what the zone of contact

was like from the Native side. They emphasize Native Americans such as

Squanto and Pocahontas, who sided with the invaders. And they invert the

RED EVES • 107

terms, picturing white aggressors as "settlers" and often showing Native settlers

as aggressors. "The United States Department of Interior had tried to give each

tribe both land and money," says The American Way, describing the U.S. policy of

forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to reservations. Whites were

baffled by Native ingratitude at being "offered" this land, Way claims: "White

Americans could not understand the Indians, To them, owning land was a

dream come true." In reality, whites of the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen.

Philip Sheridan—who is notorious for having said, "The only good Indian is a

dead Indian"—understood. "We took away their country and their means of

support, and it was for this and against this they made war," he wrote. "Could

anyone expect less?"6' The textbooks have turned history upside down.

Let us try a right-side-up view. "After King Philip's War, there was contin-

uous conflict at the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers worried about

savages scalping them." This description is accurate, provided the reader under-

stands that the settlers were Native American, the scalpers white. Even the best

of our American history books fail to show the climate of white actions within

which Native Americans on the border of white control had to live. It was so

bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas in North Carolina

"fled in every direction" in 1786 when a solitary white man rode into their vil-

lage unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe!112

From the opposite coast, here is a story that might help make such dis-

persal understandable: "An old white settler told his son who was writing about

life on the Oregon frontier about an incident he recalled from the cowboys and

Indians days. Some cowboys came upon Indian families without their men pre-

sent. The cowboys gave pursuit, planning to rape the squaws, as was the custom.

One woman, however, pushed sand into her vagina to thwart her pursuers."65

The act of resistance is what made the incident memorable. Otherwise, it was

entirely ordinary. Such ordinariness is what our textbooks leave out. They do

not challenge our archetypal Laura Ingalls Wilder picture of peaceful white set-

tlers suffering occasional attacks by brutal Indians, If they did, the fact thai so

many tribes resorted to war, even after 1815 when resistance was clearly

doomed, would become understandable.

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. But not our his-

tory textbooks. "For almost two hundred years," notes David Horowitz, "almost

continuous warfare raged on the American continent, its conflict more threat-

ening than any the nation was to face again." Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent

of the entire federal budget during George Washington's administration and

dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense. Yet most of our

I08 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

"Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre" shows a motif common m nineteenth-century litho- graphs: Indians invading the sanctity of the white settlers' homes. Actually whites were invading Indian lands and often Indian homes, but pictures such as this, not the reality, remain the archetype.

textbooks barely mention the topic. The American Pageant offers a table of "Total

Costs and Number of Battle Deaths of Major U.S. Wars" that completely omits

Indian wars! Pageant includes the Spanish-American War, according it a toll of

385 battle deaths, but leaves out the Ohio War of 1790-95, which cost 630

dead and missing U.S. troops in a single battle, the Battle of Wabash River.64

At least today's textbooks no longer blame the Natives for all the vio-

lence, as did most textbooks written before the civil rights movement. Histo-

rians used to say, "Civilized war is the kind we fight against them, whereas savage

war is the atrocious kind that they fight against us."" Not one of the twelve his-

tory books I examined portrays Natives as savages. The authors are careful to

admit brutality on both sides. Some of the books mention the massacres of

defenseless Native Americans at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.

Like the legacy of slavery, the legacy of conquest persists, however.

Indeed, conquest ended more recently than slavery, outlasting that unfortunate

institution by a qua tier-century. Slavery is now taken seriously in our histories;

R E D E Y E S • 109

conquest still is not.66 In this sense, the American Indian Movement, unlike the

civil rights movement, has failed. Our textbooks do not teach against the arche-

type of the savage Indian that pervades popular culture. On the contrary, text-

books give very little attention of any kind to Indian wars.

As a result, my college students still come up with savage when I ask them

for five adjectives that apply to Indians. Like much of our "knowledge" about

Native Americans, the "savage" stereotype comes particularly from Western

movies and novels, such as the popular "Wagons West" series by Dana Fullet

Ross. These paperbacks, which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, claim

boldly, "The general outlines of history have been faithfully followed." Titled

with state names—/i&/>0.', Utah!, etc.—the novels' covers warn that "marauding

Indian bands are spreading murder and mayhem among terror-stricken set-

tlers."*7 In the Hollywood Old West, wagon trains are invariably encircled by

savage Indian hordes. In the real West, among 250,000 whites and blacks who

journeyed across the Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 pioneers (and

426 Native Americans) died in all the recorded battles between rhe two groups,

Much more commonly, Indians gave the new settlers directions, showed them

water holes, sold them food and horses, bought cloth and guns, and served as

guides and interpreters.68 These activities are rarely depicted in movies, novels,

or our textbooks. Inhaling the misinformation of the popular culture, students

have no idea lhat Natives considered European warfare far more savage than

their own.

New England's first Indian war, the Pequot War of 1636-37, provides a

case study of the intensified warfare Europeans brought to America. Allied with

the Narragansetts, traditional enemies of the Pequots, the colonists attacked at

dawn. Surrounding the Pequot village, whose inhabitants were mostly women,

children, and old men, the British set it on fire and shot those who tried to

escape the flames. William Bradford described the scene: "It was a fearful sight

to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same,

and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sac-

rifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully

for them."1'5 The slaughter shocked the Narragansetts, who had wanted merely

to subjugate the Pequots, not exterminate them. The Narragansetts reproached

the English for their style of warfare, crying, "It is naught, it is naught, because

it is too furious, and slays too many men." In turn, Capt. John Underbill scoffed,

saying that the Narragansett style of fighting was "more for pastime, than 10

conquer and subdue enemies." Underbill's analysis of the role of warfare in Nar-

ragansett society was correct, and might accurately be applied to other tribes as

HO • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

well. Through the centuries, whites frequently accused their Native allies of not

fighting hard enough. The Puritans tried to erase the Pequots even from

memory, passing a law making it a crime to say the word Pequot. Bradford con-

cluded proudly, "The rest are scattered, and the Indians in all quarters are so ter-

rified that they are afraid to give them sanctuary."70 None of these quotations

enters our textbooks, which devote an average of 1'A sentences to this war.

Perhaps the most violent Indian war began in 1676, when white New

Englanders executed three Wampanoag Indians and the Wampanoags attacked-—

King Philip's War. One reason for the end of peace was that the fur trade,

which had linked Natives and Europeans economically, was winding down in

Massachusetts.11 Textbooks could present students with the Native side of this

conflict by quoting the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, whom the English called

King Philip:

The English who first came to this country were but a handful of

people, forlorn, poor, and distressed. My father was then sachem; he

relieved their distresses in the most kind and hospitable manner. He

gave them land to plant and build upon. They flourished and increased.

By various means they got possessed of a great part of his territory. But

he still remained their friend until he died. My elder brother became

sachem—he was seized and confined and thereby thrown into illness

and died. Soon after 1 became sachem they disarmed all my people.

Their land was taken; but a small part of the dominion of my ancestors

remains, 1 am determined not to live until T have no country.72

This was no minor war. "Of some 90 Puritan towns, 52 had been attacked

and 12 destroyed. . . . At the end of the war several thousand English and

perhaps twice as many Indians lay dead."7i King Philip's War cost more Amer-

ican lives in combat, Anglo and Native, in absolute terms than the French and

Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, or the Spanish-

American War. In proportion to population, casualties were greater than in any

other American war.'* Nonetheless, five of the twelve books T surveyed leave it

out entirely. Most others give it half a paragraph.

War with the Indians started in Acoma, now New Mexico, in 1599, when

a Spanish leader avenged the death of his brother by "enslaving most of the vil-

lagers and chopping off one foot of all males over 25 years of age."15 It spread

to the Southeast where, "because of fierce and implacable Indian resistance, the

Spanish were unable to colonize Florida for over a hundred years."76 Except foe

R E D EVES • in

Most textbook maps, like that above, show "French territory," "British territory," 'Spanish Territory," and sometimes "Disputed Territory." with no mention of Indians at all. In maps that include Indian nations, such as the map opposite from D, W. Meinig, The Shaping of America [(New Haven: Yale University Press. 19861, 1: 209], the func- tion of Indians as buffers between the colonial powers is graphically evident.

a few minor skirmishes, it ceased in 1890 with the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Our histories can hardly describe each war, because there were so many. But

precisely because there were so many, the way our textbooks minimize the

Indian wars misrepresents our history.

The textbooks also reduce the Indianness of some of our other wars,

From 1600 to 1754 Europe was often at war, including three world wars—the

War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97), known in the United States as

King William's War; the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), known

here as Queen Anne's War; and the War of the Austrian Succession (1744-48),

known here as King George's War. In North America the major European

powers, England, France, and Spain, buffered from each other by Indian land,

fought mainly through their Indian allies. Native Americans inadvertently pro-

vided a gift of relative peace to the colonies by absorbing the shock of combat

themselves.

LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Another world war, the Seven Years War (1754-63), in the United States

called the French and Indian War, was also fought in North America mostly by

Native Americans on both sides. Native Americans not only fought in the Amer-

ican Revolution but were its first cause, for the Proclamation of 1763, which pla-

cated Native American nations by forbidding the colonies from making land

grants beyond the Appalachian continental divide, enraged many colonists. They

saw themselves as paying to support a British army that only obstructed them

from seizing Indian lands on the western frontier. After hostilities with Britain

broke out, however, the fledgling United Colonies in 1775 were initially more

concerned about relations with Indian nations than with Europe, so they sent Ben-

jamin Franklin first to the Iroquois, then to France.7' Native Americans also played

a large role in the War of 1812 and participated as well in the Mexican War and

the Civil War.™ In each war Natives fought mostly against other Natives. In each,

the larger number aligned against the colonies, later the United States, correctly

R E D E V E S • Ii j

perceiving that, for geopolitical reasons, opponents of the United States offered

them better chances of being accorded human rights and retaining their land.

Even in describing the French and Indian War, textbooks leave out the

Indians! One of the worst defeats Indians ever inflicted on white forces was Ihe

rout of General Eraddock in 1755 in Pennsylvania. Braddock had 1,460 men,

including eight Indian scouts and a detachment of Virginia militia under George

Washington. Six hundred to one thousand Native Americans and 290 French

soldiers opposed them, but you would never guess any Indians were there from

The American Tradition:

On July 9, as they were approaching the fort, the French launched an

ambush. Braddock's force was surrounded and defeated. The red-coated

British soldiers, unaccustomed to fighting in the wilderness [s'c], suf-

fered over 900 casualties. Braddock, mortally wounded, murmured as he

died, "We shall know better how to deal with them another time."

Tradition thus renders Braddock's last words meaningless, for "them" refers not

to the French but to Native Americans.

This is one of many old lithographs that show Indians attacking BraddocK, evidence that colonials were aware who defeated Braddock, Today's textbooks make the Native Americans invisible.

114 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

In our Revolution, most of the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the

British and attacked white Americans in New York and northern Pennsylvania.

In 1778 the United States suffered a major defeat when several hundred Tories

and Senecas routed 400 militia and regulars at Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, killing

340. After the Revolution, although Britain surrendered, its Native American

allies did not. Our insistence on treating the Indians as if we had defeated them

led to the Ohio War of 1790-95, and later to the War of 1812.

The never-ending source of dispute was land. To explain this constant

conflict, half of the textbooks I examined rely on the cliche that Native Ameri-

cans held some premodern understanding of land ownership. When students are

informed that the Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of trade goods, pre-

sumably they are meant to smile indulgently. What a bargain! What foolish

Indians, not to recognize the potential of the island! Not one book points out

that the Dutch paid the wrung tribe for Manhattan, Doubtless the Canarsees,

native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal. The Weckquaesgeeks, who

lived on Manhattan and really owned the land, weren't so happy. For years

afterward they warred sporadically with the Dutch.™

Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction

within a much larger nation. Often they didn't really care; they merely sought

justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in

their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another. The

biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the text-

books tell how Jefferson "doubled the size of the United States by buying

Louisiana from France." Not one points out that it was not France's land to sell-

it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners befote

selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did

not really sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. France merely sold its claim to the ter-

ritory. The United States was still paying Native American tribes for Louisiana

throughout the nineteenth century. We were also fighting them for it: the Army

A/rnanac lists more than fifty Indian wars in the Louisiana Purchase from 1819 to

1890. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks do, is Eurocentric. Equally

Eurocentric are the maps textbooks use to show the Lewis and Clark expedition.

They make Native Americans invisible, implying that the United States bought

vacant land from the French, Although the Mandans hosted the expedition

during the winter of 1804-05 and the Clatsops did so the next winter, even

these ttibes drop out. Apparently Lewis and Clark did it all on their own.

Some textbooks chide Natives for not understanding that when they sold

their land, they transferred not only the agricultural rights, but also the rights to

R E D E Y E S • 115

the property's game, fish, and sheer enjoyment. "Indians regarded the land in

the same way we regard the sea," to quote Ldnd of Promise. Textbook authors

seem unaware that most land sales before the twentieth century, including sales

among whites, transferred primarily the rights to farm, mine, and otherwise

develop the land. Undeveloped private land was considered public and acces-

sible to all, within limits of good conduct. Moreover, tribal negotiators typically

made sure that deeds and treaties specifically reserved hunting, fishing, gath-

ering, and traveling rights to Native Americans.80

Six of the twelve histories I studied avoid this cliche of Indian naivete

about land ownership. Showing the influence of the new scholarship in Indian

history, several of them even point out that the problem lay in whites' not

abiding by accepted concepts of land ownership. But the textbook authors

never develop this isolated admission into a general understanding of Indian

wars. The most important cause of the War of 1812, for example, was land—

Spanish land (Florida), British land (Canada), but most of all Indian land. All

along the boundary, from Vermont to the Georgia Piedmont, white Americans

wanted to "push the boundaries of white settlement ever farther into the Indian

country." The British, on the other hand, wanted to "keep a sort of Indian buffer

state between the United States and Canada."81 Only three textbooks inquire

reasonably into the causes of this war.sz The others simply repeat the pretext

offered by the Madison administration—Britain's refusal to show proper respect

to American ships and seamen—even though it makes no sense. After all,

Britain's maritime laws had been in place since 1807 and caused no war until

the frontier states sent War Hawks-—senators and representatives who promised

military action to expand the boundaries of the United States—to Congress in

1810. After going on for two pages about the alleged maritime reasons for the

war, The American Tradition admits its puzzlement: "The West and the South,

oddly enough, were the most anti-British regions of the nation even though

they were the least affected by Britain's policies toward American shipping,"

Land of Promise is similarly perplexed: "Where, you must wonder, were the War

Hawks of New England? After all, it was New England ships and sailors who

bore the brunt of [Britain's] attacks."

Like its predecessors, the War of 1812 cannot be understood so long as

its Indian origin is obscured. Whites along the frontier wanted the war, and

along the frontier most of the war was fought, beginning in November 1811

with William Henry Harrison's attack on the Shawnecs and allied tribes in

Indiana, called the Battle of Tippecanoe. The United States fought five of the

seven major land battles of the War of 1812 primarily against Native Americans,

116 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

Nonetheless, unlike Canadian histories, none of our textbooks recognizes the

involvement of Native Americans.83

All but two textbooks miss the key result of the war. Some authors actu-

ally cite the "Star Spangled Banner" as the main outcome! Others claim that the

war left "a feeling of pride as a nation" or "helped Americans to win European

respect." The American Adventure excels, pointing out, "The American Indians

were the only real losers in the war." Triumph of the American Nation expresses the

same sentiments, but euphemistically: "After 1815 the American people began

the exciting task of occupying the western lands." The other ten books simply

ignore the key outcome: in return for our leaving Canada alone, Great Britain

gave up its alliances with Indian nations in what would become the United

States.

Without war materiel and other aid from European allies, future Indian

wars were transformed from major international conflicts to domestic mopping-

up operations. This result was central to the course of Indian-US, relations for

the remainder of the century. Thus Indian wars after 1815, while they cost

thousands of lives on both sides, would never again amount to a serious threat

to the United States,84 Although Native Americans won many battles in subse-

quent wars, there was never the slightest doubt over who would win in the end.

Another result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. "A

century of learning [from Native Americans] was corning to a close. A century

and more of forgetting—of calling history into service to rationalize con-

quest—was beginning."^ After 1815 Indians could no longer play what soci-

ologists call the role of conflict partner—an important other who must be

taken into account—so Americans forgot that Indians had ever been significant

in our history. Even terminology changed: until 1815 the word Americans had

generally been used to refer to Native Americans; after 1815 it meant European

Americans.*6

Ironically, several textbooks that omit King Philip's War and the Native

American role in the War of 1812 focus instead on such minor Plains wars as

Cetonimo's Apache War of 1885—86, which involved maybe forty Apache

fighters.87 The Plains wars fit the post-1815 story line of the textbooks, since

they pitted white settlers against serni-nomadic Indians. The Plains Indians are

the Native Americans textbooks love to mourn: authors can lament their passing

while considering it inevitable, hence untroubling.

The textbooks also fail to mention how the continuous Indian wars have

reverberated through our culture. Carleton Seals has written that "our acquies-

cence in Indian dispossession has molded the American character."89 As soon as

R E D E Y E S . 117

Natives were no longer conflict partners, their image deteriorated in the minds

of many whites. Karen Kupperman has shown how this process unfolded in Vir-

ginia after the Indian defeat in the 1640s: "It was the ultimate powerlessness of

the Indians, not their racial inferiority, which made it possible to see them as

people without rights."85 Natives who had been "ingenious," "industrious," and

"quick of apprehension" in 1610 now became "sloathfull and idle, vitious,

melancholy, [and] slovenly." This is another example of the process of cognitive

dissonance. Like Christopher Columbus, George Washington changed his atti-

tudes toward Indians. Washington held positive views of Native Americans early

in his life, but after unleashing the Ohio War in 1790 he would come to

denounce the Ohio Indians as "having nothing human except the shape."90

This process of rationalization became unofficial national policy after the

War of 1812. In 1845 William Gilmore Simms wrote, "Our blinding prejudices

. . . have been fostered as necessary to justiiy the reckless and unsparing hand

with which we have smitten [the Indians] in their habitations and expelled them

from their country," In 1871 Francis A. Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs,

considered Indians beneath morality: "When dealing with savage men, as with

savage beasrs, no question of national honor can arise." Whatever action the

United States cared to take "is solely a question of expediency."91 Thus cognitive

dissonance destroyed our national idealism. From 1815 on, instead of spreading

democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy. Gradually we sought

American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, much of the Caribbean basin,

and, indirectly, over other nations. Although European nations professed to be

shocked by our actions on the western frontier, before long they were emulating

us. Britain exterminated the Tasmanian aborigines; Germany pursued total war

against the Herrero of Namibia. Most western nations have to face this history.

We also have to admit that Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we

treated Native Americans than American high schoolers who rely on their text-

books. Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west "and

often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by

starvation and uneven combat" as the model for his extermination of Jews and

Gypsies.*2

Were there alternatives to this history of war? Of course, there were.

Indeed, France, Russia, and Spain all pursued different alternatives in the Amer-

icas. Since the alternatives to war remain roads largely not taken in the United

States, however, they are tricky topics for historians. As Edward Carr noted,

"History is, by and large, a record of what people did, not of what they failed to

do."9i On the other hand, making the present seem inevitable robs history of all

118 • U E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

its life and much of its meaning. History is contingent upon the actions of

people. "The duty of the historian," Gordon Craig has reminded us, "is to restore

to the past the options it once had." Craig also pointed out that this is an appro-

priate way to teach history and to make it memorable.94 White Americans chose

among real alternatives and were often divided among themselves. At various

points in our history, our anti-Indian policies might have gone another way. For

example, one reason the War of 1812 was so unpopular in New England was

that New Englanders saw it as a naked attempt by slaveowners to appropriate

Indian land.

Peaceful coexistence of whites and Native Americans presents itself as

perhaps the most obvious alternative to war, but was it really possible? In

thinking about this question, we must take care not to compare a static Indian

culture to changing modern culture. We have seen the rapid changes in indepen-

dent Native cultures—adaptation to an economy based on hunting and trap-

ping, the flowering of multilingualism, development of more formal hierarchies.

Such changes would no doubt have continued. Thus we are not talking about

bow-and-arrow hunters living side by side with computerized urbanites.

We should keep in mind that the thousands of white and black Americans

who joined Indian societies must have believed that coexistence was possible.

From the stari, however, white conduct hindered peaceful coexistence. A thou-

sand little encroachments eventually made it impossible for Indians to farm near

whiles. Around Plymouth, the Indians leased their grazing land but retained

iheir planting grounds. Too late they found that this did not keep colonists from

leiting theit livestock roam free to ruin the crops. When Native Americans

protested, they usually found that colonial courts excluded their testimony. On

the other hand, "the Indian who dared to kill an Englishman's marauding ani-

mals was promptly hauled into a hostile court."" The precedent established on

the Atlantic coast—that Indians were not citizens of the Europeans' state and

lacked legal rights—prevented peaceful white-Indian coexistence throughout

the colonies and later the United States. Even in Indian Territory, supposedly

under Native control, whether Indians were charged with offenses on white

land or whites on Indian land, [rial had to be held in a white court in Missouri,

miles away.96

Since many whites had a material interest in dispossessing Indians of their

land, and since European and African populations grew ever larger while

plagues continued to reduce the Indian population, plainly the United States

was going to rule. In this sense war only prolonged the inevitable. Another

alternative to war would have been an express commitment to racial harmony: a

R E D E V E S . 119

predominantly European but nonracist United States that did not differentiate

between Indians and non-Indians. U.S. history provides several examples of rela-

tively nonracist enclaves. Sociologists call them triracial isolates because their

heritage is white, black, and red, as it were. For centuries, these communities

occupied swamps and other undesirable lands, wanting mostly to be left alone.

The Revolutionary War hero Crispus Attucks was a member of such an enclave:

an escaped slave of Wampanoag, European, and African ancestry. The Lumbee

Indians in North Carolina comprise the largest such group. Other triracial iso-

lates include the Wampanoags in Massachusetts, the Seminoles in Florida, and

smaller bands from Louisiana to Maine.97

The first British settlement in North America, Roanoke Island in 1585,

probably did not die out but was absorbed into the nearby Croatoan Indians,

"thereby achieving a harmonious biracial society that always eluded colonial

planters." Eventually the English and Croatoans may have become pan of the

Lumbees. The British never learned/die outcome of the "Lost Colony," however.

Frederick Turner has suggested that they did not want to think about the possi-

bility that British settlers had survived by merging with Native Americans.

Instead, in the words of). F. Fausz, "tales of the 'Lost Colony' came to epitomize

the treacherous nature of hostile Indians and served as the mythopoeic 'bloody

shirt' for justifying aggressions against the Powhatan years later." Triracial iso-

lates have generally won only contempt from their whke neighbors, which is I

why they have chosen rural isolation. Our textbooks isolate them, too: none I

mentions the term or the peoples.9"

A related possibility for Natives, Europeans, and Africans was intermar-

riage. Alliance through marriage is a common way for two societies to deal!

with each other, and Indians in the United States repeatedly suggested such a I

policy." Spanish men married Native women in California and New Mexico I

and converted them to Spanish ways. French fur traders married Native women I

in Canada and Illinois and converted to Native ways. Not the British. Text*

books might usefully pass on to students the old cliche—the French penetrated I

Indian societies, the Spanish acculturatcd them, and the British expelled»

them—-for it offers a largely accurate summary of European-Indian relation*

ships.100 In New England and Virginia, English colonists quickly moved to]

forbid interracial marriage.10' Pocahontas stands as the first and almost the last!

Native to be accepted into British-American society, which we may therefore!

call "white society," through marriage. After her, most interracial couples found!

greater acceptance in Native society. There their children often became chiefsj

because their bicultural background was an asset in the complex world th

120 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

tribes now had to navigate.102 In Anglo society "half-breeds" were not valued

but stigmatized. Another alternative to war was the creation of an Indian state within the

United States. In 1778, when the Delaware Indians proposed that Native Ameri-

cans be admitted to the union as a separate state, Congress refused even to con-

sider the idea,11" In the 1840s Indian Territory sought the right enjoyed by

other territories to send representatives to Congress, but white Southerners

stopped them.104 The Confederacy won the backing of most Native Americans

in Indian Territory, however, by promising to admit the territory as a state if the

South won the Civil War. After the war Native Americans proposed the same

arrangement to the United States. Again the United States said no, but eventu- o O

ally admitted Indian Territory as the white-dominated state oF Oklahoma-—

ironically, the name means "[land for] red people" in Choctaw.

Our textbooks pay no attention to any of these possibilities. Instead, they

dwell on another road not taken: total one-way acculturation to white society.

The overall story line in contemporary American history textbooks about Amer-

ican Indians is this: We tried to Europeanize them; they wouldn't or couldn't do

it; so we dispossessed them. While more sympathetic than the account in earlier

textbooks, this account falls into the trap of repeating as history the propaganda

used by policymakers in the nineteenth century as a rationale for removal-—that

Native Americans stood in the way of progress. The only real difference is the

tone. Back when white Americans were doing the dispossessing, justifications

were shrill. They denounced Native cultures as primitive, savage, and nomadic.

Often writers invoked the hand or blessings of God, said to favor those who

"did more" with the land.105 Now that the dispossessing is done, our histories

can see mure virtue in the conquered cultures. But they still picture Indians as

tragically different, unable or unwilling to acculturate.

American ffistory tells of misguided liberals who

tried to get Indians to settle down on farms and become "good Ameri-

cans." They wanted Indians to give up their customs and religions and

copy the culture of the whites. They did not care that this would

destroy the Indians as a distinct group of people. They believed that

the change would be the best thing that could happen both to the

Indians and to their white neighbors on the frontier.

American History appears to offer a sympathetic treatment of a tragic clash of two

irreconcilable lifestyles in the Ohio Valley around 1800. This treatment mimics

R E D E Y E S . 121

Pres. Thomas Jefferson, who told a delegation of Cherokees in 1808, "Let me

entreat you therefore, on the lands now given [sic] you to begin every man a

farm, let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies

let it belong to his wife and children after him."106 Other textbooks share Jef-

ferson's view and lament that if only the Indians had become farmers like us,

everything would have turned out better. Triumph ofth? American Nation commis-

erates, "Two such different ways of life could not long exist peaceably side by

side. Conflict was inevitable."

The trouble is, it wasn't like that. The problem was not Native failure to

acculturate. In reality, many European Americans did not really want Indians

to acculturate. It wasn't in their interest. At times this was obvious, as when

the Massachusetts legislature in 1789 passed a law prohibiting teaching Native

Americans how to read and write "under penalty of death."11" The United

States claimed to be willing to teach the Indians to farm, but Indians in Ohio

already were farmers! American History fails to mention that the Cherokees

were visiting Jefferson precisely to ask the president to assign their lands to

them in severally [as individual farms] and to make them citizens.108 ]efferson

put them off. John Peterson has pointed out that a visitor catching sight of a

Mississippi farm in 1820 would have had no way of knowing whether it was

European or Choctaw until the farmers themselves came into view,109 The

Choctaws didn't need to "settle down." The American Way asks students, "Why

were the Indians moved further west?" Its teachers' edition provides the answer:

"They were moved so the settlers could use the land for growing crops." We

might add this catechism: What were the Indians doing on the land? They

were growing crops! When Jefferson spoke to the Cherokees, whites had

been burning Native houses and cornfields for 186 years, beginning in Virginia

in 1622.

No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not

succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. "Indians were always

regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society except

on its periphery."110 Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-

style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the first targets of white

thugs who coveted their land and improvements. In time of war the position of

assimilated Indians grew particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During

the French and Indian War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns;

were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorise

who weren't careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was IndianJ

Through the centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred. In 1860, fbtl

L IES M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

When they stress Natives' alleged unwillingness to acculturate, American histories slip into the story line of the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. "Come Over and Help Us" is white settler propaganda, which grew into an archetype of well- meaning Europeans and tragically different Indians.

instance, California ranchers killed 185 of the 800 Wiyots, a tribe allied with

ihe whites, because they were angered by other tribes' cattle raids."'

Occasionally textbooks acknowledge that most Native Americans were

settled, but they do not let these settled Indians interfere with the traditional

story line. Early on, American History admits that the Ohio Indians were farmers:

"Unlike the tribes who lived by hunting, many of these Indians had taken up

farming. For ihem, moving would mean more than having to find another

hunting ground." But forty pages later, when trying to rationalize the Indians'

removal: "They tried to get Indians to settle down on farms and become 'good

Americans.'" If the author of American History cannot remember from one chapter

to the next that the Indians didn't need to settle down, we can hardly expect his

readers to. The story line is too powerful an archetype. Most of the textbooks I

studied describe the acculturation achieved by the Indians of the Southeast, the

R E D E V E S 123

A Census taken among trie Cherokee in Georgia in 1825 (reported in Vogel, ed.. This

Country Was Ours, 289) showed that they owned "33 grist mills, 13 saw mills. 1 powder mill, 69 blacksmith shops, 2 tan yards, 762 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,923 plows, 7,683 horses, 22,531 black cattle, 46,732 swine, and 2,566 sheep." Some Cherokees were wealthy planters, including Joseph Vann, who in 1835 cultivated 300 acres, operated a ferry, steamboat, mill, and tavern, and owned this mansion. It aroused the envy of the sheriff and other whites in Murray County, wtio evicted Vann in 1834 and appropriated the house for themselves, according to Lela

Latch Lloyd.

"Five Civilized Tribes," and point out that the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee,

Creek, and Seminole nations were exiled to Oklahoma anyway. Nonetheless, .

our culture and our textbooks still stereotype Native Americans as roaming

primitive hunting folk, unfortunate victims of progress. Ironically, to Native eyes, Europeans were nomads. As Chief Seattle put it

in 1855, "To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is ,

hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seem-.

ingly without regret." In contrast, Indian "roaming" consisted mainly of moving

from summer homes to winter homes and back again.'11

I24 - L I E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

One way to understand why acculturation couldn't work for most Natives

is to imagine that the United States allowed lawless discrimination against all

people whose last name starts with the letter L. How long would we last? The

first non-L people who wanted our homes or jobs could force us out, arid we

would be without resources. People around us would then blame us L people for

being vagrants. That is what happened to Native Americans, In Massachusetts,

colonists were constantly tempted to pick quarrels with Indian families because

the result was likely to be acquiring their land.113 In Oregon, 240 years later,

the process continued. Ten thousand whites had moved onto the Nez Perce

reservation by 1862, so a senator from Oregon suggested that the United States

should remove the nation. Sen. William Fessenden of Maine pointed out the

problem.- "There is no difficulty, I take it, in Oregon in keeping men off the

lands that are owned by white men. But when the possessor happens to be an

Indian, the question is changed altogether."114 Without legal rights, acculturation

cannot succeed. Inmuttooyahlatlat, known to whites as Chief Joseph, said this

eloquently: "We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian

breaks the law, punish him by the law If a white man breaks the law, punish

him also. Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to

trade where I choose, free to talk and think and act for myself.""5 It was not to

be. Most courts simply refused to heat testimony from Native Americans against

whites. After noting how non-Indians could rise through the ranks of Native

societies, Peier Farb summed up the possibilities in white society; "At almost no

time in the history of the United States, though, were the Indians afforded sim-

ilar opportunities for voluntary assimilation."11'' The acculturated Indian simply

stood out as 3 target.

The authors of history textbooks occasionally announce their intentions in

writing. In the teachers' edition of The American Way, for instance, Nancy Bauer

states: "It is (he goal of this book that its readers will understand America, be

proud of its strengths, be pleased in its determination to improve, arid welcome

the opportunity to join as active citizens in The American Wsy" That the author

could noi possibly pay reasonable attention to Indian history follows logically.

It is understandable that textbook authors might write history in such a

way that studc'ins can feel good about themselves by feeling good about the

p.ist. Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot

bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy

because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good his-

tory for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we

wrested the comment from Native Americans. Today's college students, when

RED EYES • 125

asked to compile a list of U.S. wars, never think to include Indian wars, individ-

ually or as a whole. The Indian-white wars that dominated our history from

1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have disap-

peared from our national memory, The answer to minimizing the Indian wars is not maximizing them.

Telling Indian history as a parade of white villains might be feel-good history

for those who want to wallow in the inference that America or whites are bad.

What happened is more complex than that, however, so the history we tell must

be more complex. Textbooks are beginning to reveal some of the division

among whites that lent considerable vitality to the alternatives to war. Seven of

the textbooks tell of Roger Williams of Salem, who in the 1630s challenged

Massachusetts to renounce its royal patent to the land, asserting, "The natives are

the true owners of it," unless they sold it. (The Puritans renounced Williams,

and he fled to Rhode Island.)"7 Five textbooks mention Helen Hunt Jackson,

who in 1881 paid to provide copies of her famous indictment of our Native

American policies, A Century of Dishonor, to every member of Congress,11* Eight

of the textbooks tell how Andrew Jackson and John Marshall waged a titanic

struggle over Georgia's attempt to subjugate the Cherokees. Chief Justice Mat-

shall found for the Cherokees, whereupon President Jackson ignored the court,

reputedly with the words, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him

enforce it!" But no textbook brings any suspense to the issue as one of the dom-

inant questions throughout our first century as a nation. None tells how several

Christian denominations—Quakers, Shakers, Moravians, some Presbyterians—

and a faction of the Whig Party mobilized public opinion on behalf of fair play

for the Native Americans.'19 By ignoring the Whigs, textbooks make the

Cherokee removal seem inevitable, another example of unacculturated aborig-

ines helpless in the way of progress. Native Americans would have textbooks note that, despite all the wars,

the plagues, the pressures against their cultures, Indians still survive, physically

and culturally, and still have govemment-to-government relations with the

United States. As recently as 1984, a survey of American history textbooks com-

plained that "contemporary issues important to Native peoples were entirely j

excluded."130 The books I examined were somewhat better. The American

Indian Movement spurred three major Indian takeovers in the early 1970s:

Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wash-

ington, D.C., and Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Nine of the twelve textbooks

mention at least one of these incidents; The American Tradition and Triumph offal

American Nation competently explain the causes and results of all three. Seven of

the twelve texrt

facing Native fi

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the twelve textbooks make a reasonable attempt to cover the principal issues

facing Native Americans in the twentieth century. Discovering American History

and Triumph of the American Nation do a good job. Life and Liberty and Discovering

American History offer maps showing Native American lands today.

Anti-Indian racism has eased considerably in the twentieth century. Ironi-

cally, the very fact that the United States is beginning to let Natives acculturate

successfully, albeit on Anglo terms, poses a new threat to Native coexistence.

Poverty and discrimination helped isolate Indians, If Native Americans can now

get good jobs, as some can, buy new vehicles and satellite televisions, as some

have, and commute to the city for part of their life, as some do, it is much harder

to maintain the intangible values that make up the core of Indian cultures.121

Only one textbook raises perhaps the key question now facing Native Ameri-

cans: can distinctively Indian cultures survive? Discovering American History treats

this issue in an exemplary way, inviting students to experience the dilemma

through the words of Native American teenagers. The other textbooks cannot

raise this issue because they remain locked into non-Indian sources and a non-

Indian interpretive framework. Textbooks still define Native Americans in oppo-

sition to civilization and still conceive of Indian cultures in what anthropologists

call the ethnographic present—frozen at the time of white contact. When text-

books show sympathy for "the tragic struggle of American Indians to maintain

their way of life," they exemplify this myopia. Native Americans never had "a"

way of life; they had many, Indians would not have maintained those ways

unchanged over the last five hundred years, even without European and African

immigration. Indians have long struggled to change their ways of life. That

autonomy we took from them. Even today we divide Native American leader-

ship into "progressives" who want to acculturate and "traditionals" who want to

"remain Indian." Textbook authors do not put other Americans into this strait-

jacket. We non-Indians choose what we want from the past or from other cul-

tures. We jettisoned our medical practices of the 1780s while retaining the

Constitution, But Native American medical practitioners who abandon their tra-

ditional ways to embrace pasteurization from France and antibiotics from Eng-

land are seen as compromising their Indianness. We can alter our modes of

transportation or housing while remaining "American." Indians cannot and stay

"Indian" in our eyes.

Improved histories might increase the chances for syncretism on both

sides of our ideological frontier. If we knew the extent to which Indian ideas

lave shaped American culture, the United States might recognize Native Amer-

ican societies as cultural assets from which we could continue to learn. At pre-

H E D E V E S • 127

Perhaps Native Americans can break through the dilemma of acculturation and become modern and Indian. Certainly their artists have accomplished this. Only since the 1930s have Inuit artists in Canada been carving soapstone, a material that in the pre- vious century their ancestors used for making pots. This sculpture, "Dancing to My

Spirit," by Nalenik Temela. is a beautiful example of syncretism.

sent, none of our textbooks hints at this possibility; even the more enlightened

ones merely champion better treatment for Indians and stop short of suggesting

that our society might still benefit from Indian ideas.

Even if no Natives remained among us, however, it would still be impor-

tant for us to understand the alternatives foregone, to remember the wars, and to

learn the unvarnished truths about white-Indian relations, Indian history is the

antidote 10 the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that

European Americans are God's chosen people. Indian history reveals thai the

United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in

the world. We must not forget this-—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to

understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We must temper

128 • LIES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

our national pride with critical self-knowledge, suggests Christopher Vecsey:

"The study of our contact with Indians, the envisioning of our dark American

selves, can instill such a strengthening doubt."I12 History through red eyes offers

our children a deeper understanding than comes from encountering the past as a

story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

R E D E Y E S - 12t)

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, and if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.

—Maya Angelou1

The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great

challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget

that—if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our

country, our history, our experiment—we forget who we are, and we make the

great rift deeper and wider.

—Ken Burns1

We have got to the place where we cannot use our experiences during and after

the Civil War for the uplift and enlightenment of mankind,

—IV. E. 6. Du Bois3

More Americans have learned the story Of the South during the years of the Civil

War and Reconstruction from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind than from

all of the learned volumes on this period.

—Warren Beck and My/es dowers'

5. "Gone with the Wind": The Invisibility of

Racism in American History Textbooks

When was the country we now know as the United States first settled? Ifwe forget the lesson of the last chapter for the moment—that Native Americans settled—the best answer might be 1526. In the summer of that year,

five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town neat the

mouth of the Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina. Disease and disputes

with nearby Indians caused many deaths in the early months of the settlement.

In November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to

the Indians, By then only 150 Spaniards survived; they retreated to Haiti. The

ex-slaves remained behind and probably merged with nearby Indian nations.5

This is cocktail-party trivia, I suppose. American history textbooks cannot

be faulted for not mentioning that the first non-Native settlers in the United

States were black. Educationally, however, the incident has its uses. It shows that

Africans (is it too early to call them African Americans?) rebelled against slavery

from the first. It points to the important subject of three-way race relations—

Indian-African-European—which most textbooks completely omit. It teaches

that slavery cannot readily survive without secure borders. And, symbolically, it

illusttates that African Americans, and the attendant subject of black-white race

relations, were part of American history from the first European attempts to

settle.

Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of

black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in

American life. Issues of black-white relations propelled the Whig Party to col-

lapse, prompted the formation of the Republican Party, and caused the Democ-

ratic Party to label itself the "white man's party" for almost a century. The first

time Congress ever overrode a presidential veto was for the 1866 Civil Rights

Act, passed by Republicans over the wishes of Andrew Johnson. Senators

mounted the longest filibuster in U.S. history, more than 534 hours, to oppose

the 1964 Civil Rights bill. Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown how race prompted

the sweeping political realignment of 1964-72, in which the white South went

131

from a Democratic bastion to a Republican stronghold.6 Race still affects poli-

tics, as evidenced by the notorious Willie Horton commercial used by George

Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign and the more recent candidacies of the

Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Race riots continue to shake urban centers

from Miami to Los Angeles.

Almost no genre of our popular culture goes untouched by race. From the

1850s through the 1930s, except during the Civil War and Reconstruction,

minstrel shows, which derived in a perverse way from plantation slavery, were

the dominant form of popular entertainment in America. During most of that

period Uncle Tom's Cabin was our longest-running play, mounted in thousands of

productions. America's first epic motion picture, Birth of a Nation; first talkie, The

jazz Singer; and biggest blockbuster novel ever, Gone with the Wind, were substan-

tially about race relations. The most popular radio show of all time was "Arnos

'n' Andy," two white men posing as humorously incompetent African

Americans.' The most popular television miniseries ever was "Roots," which

changed our culture by setting off an explosion of interest in genealogy and

ethnic background. In music, race relations provide the underlying thematic

material for many of our spirituals, blues numbers, reggae songs, and rap pieces.

The struggle over racial slavery may be the predominant theme in Amer-

ican history. Until the end of the nineteenth century, cotton—planted, culti-

vated, harvested, and ginned by slaves—was by far our most important export.8

Our graceful antebellum homes, in the North as well as in the South, were built

largely by slaves or from profits derived from the slave and cotton trades. Black-

white relations became the central issue in the Civil War, which killed almost as

many Americans as died in all our other wars combined. Black-white relations

was the principal focus of Reconstruction after the Civil War; America's failure .

to allow African Americans equal rights led eventually to the struggle for civil I

rights a century later.

The subject also pops up where we least suspect it—at the Alamo, •

throughout the Seminole Wars, even in the expulsion of the Mormons from

Missouri.9 Studs Terkel is right: race is our "American obsession."'0 Since those , o

first Africans and Spaniards landed on the Carolina shore in 1526, our society I

has repeatedly been torn apart and sometimes bound together by this issue of I

black-white relations.

Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the I

enslavement of blacks. In each of the last two centuries America's most popular I

novel was set in slavery—Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Gwu I

with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The two books tell very different stories; I

132 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Uncle Tom's Cabin presents slavery as an evil to be opposed, while Gone with the

Wind suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing is to be

lamented. Until the civil rights movement, American history textbooks in this

century pretty much agreed with Mitchell. In 1959 my high school textbook

presented slavery as not such a bad thing. If bondage was a burden for African

Americans, well, slaves were a burden on Ole Massa and Ole Miss, too. Besides,

slaves were reasonably happy and well fed. Such arguments constitute the "mag-

nolia myth," according to which slavery was a social structure of harmony and

grace that did no real harm to anyone, white or black. A famous 1950 textbook

by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager actually said, "As for

Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some

reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its

'peculiar institution.'"'1 "Peculiar institution" meant slavery, of course, and

Morison and Commager here provided a picture of it that came straight from

Cone with the Wind.

This is not what textbooks say today. Since the civil rights movement,

textbooks have returned part of the way toward Stowe's devastating indictment

of the institution. The discussion in American History begins with a passage that

desctibes the living conditions of slaves in positive terms: "They were usually

given adequate food, clothing, and shelter." But the author immediately goes on

to point out, "Slaves had absolutely no rights. It was not simply that they could

not vote or own property. Their owners had complete control over their lives."

He concludes, "Slavery was almost literally inhuman." American Adventures tells

us, "Slavery led to despair, and despair sometimes led black people to take their

own lives. Or in some cases it led them to revolt against white slaveholders." Life

and Liberty takes a flatter view: "Historians do not agree on how severely slaves

were treated"; the book goes on to note that whipping was common in some

places, unheard of" on other plantations. Life and Liberty ends its section on slave

life, however, by quoting the titles of spirituals—"All My Trials, Lord, Soon Be

Over"—and by citing the inhumane details of slave laws. No one could read any

of these three books and think well of slavery. Indeed, ten of the twelve books I

studied portray slavery as intolerable to the slave.12

Today's textbooks also show how slavery increasingly dominated our

political life in the firsi half of the nineteenth century. They tell that the cotton

gin made slavery more profitable," They tell how in the 1830s Southern states

and the federal government pushed the Indians out of vast stretches of Missis-

sippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and slavery expanded- And they tell that in the

decades between 1830 and 1860, slavery's ideological demands grew shriller,

' G O N E W I T H THE W I N D " • 133

more overtly racist. No longer was ic enough for planters and slave traders to

apologize for slavery as a necessary evil. Now slavery came to be seen "of positive

value to the slaves themselves," in the words of Triumph of the American Nation.

This ideological extremism was matched by harsher new laws and customs. "Talk

of freeing the slaves became more and more dangerous in the South," in the

words of The United Slates—A History of the Republic. Merely to receive literature

advocating abolition became a felony in some slaveholding states. Southern states

passed new ordinances interfering with the rights of masters to free their slaves.

The legal position of already free African Americans became ever more precar-

ious, even in the North, as white Southerners prevailed on the federal govern-

ment to make it harder 10 restrict slavery anywhere in the nation.14

Meanwhile, many Northern whites, as well as some who lived below the

Mason-Dixon line, grew increasingly unhappy, disgusted that their nation had

lost its idealism.15 The debate over slavery loomed ever larger, touching every

subject. In 1848 Thomas Hart Benton, a senator from Missouri, likened the

ubiquity of the issue to a biblical plague: "You could not look upon the table but

there were frogs. You could not sit down at the banquet table but there were

frogs. You could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were

frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without

having this pestilence thrust before us."'6

History textbooks now admit that slavery was the primary cause of the

Civil War. In the words of The United States—A History of the Republic, "At the

center of the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away," Before the

civil rights movement, many textbooks held that almost anything else—differ-

ences over tariffs and internal improvements, blundering politicians, the conflict

between the agrarian South and the industrial North—caused the war. This was

a form of Southern apologetics.17 Among the twelve textbooks I reviewed, only]

Triumph of the American Nation, a book that originated in the 1950s, still hold

such a position.

Why do textbooks now handle slavery with depth and understanding?

Before the 1960s publishers had been in thrall to the white South, In the 192C

Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring "Securing a Correct

tory of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the Confederacy."1*

Textbooks were even required to call the Civil War "the War between

States," as if no single nation had existed which the South had rent apart. In ihc

fifteen years between 1955 and 1970, however, the civil rights movement

destroyed segregation as a formal system in America. The movement did not

succeed in transforming American race relations, but it did help African AmeriJ

134 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

cans win more power on the local level and prompted whites to abandon segre-

gation. Today many school boards, curricular committees, and high school his-

tory departments include African Americans or white Americans who have cast

off the ideology of white supremacy. Therefore contemporary textbooks can

devote more space to the topic of slavery and can use that space to give a more

accurate portrayal.1*

Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to

learn that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Interpreters

at Colonial Williamsburg say that many visitors are surprised to learn that

slavery existed there—in the heart of plantation Virginia! Very few adults today

realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free. Even

fewer know that slavery was important in the North, too, until after the Revolu-

tionary War. The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachu-

setts. In 1720, of New York City's population of seven thousand, 1,600 were

African Americans, most of them slaves. Wall Street was the marketplace where

owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week.30

Most textbooks downplay slavery in the North, however, so slavery seems

to be a sectional rather than national problem. Indeed, even the expanded cov-

erage of slavery comes across as an unfortunate bat minor blemish, compared to

the overall story line of our textbooks. James Oliver Horton has pointed out that

"the black experience cannot be fully illuminated without bringing a new per-

spective to the study of American history."21 Textbook authors have failed to

present any new petspective. Instead, they shoehorn their improved and more

accurate pottrait of slavery into the old "progress as usual" story line. In this

saga, the United States is always intrinsically and increasingly democratic, and

slaveholding is merely a temporary aberration, not part of the big picture. Ironi-

cally, the very success of the civil rights movement allows authors to imply that

the problem of black-white race relations has now been solved, at least formally.

This enables textbooks lo discuss slavery without departing from their custom-

arily optimistic tone.

While textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black

Amenca, they remain largely silent regarding the impact of slavery on white

America, North or South. Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything

might be wrong with white Americans, or with the United States as a whole.

Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy pan. After

all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can

acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond has

mounted an exhibit on slavery that does not romanticize the institution.22

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D ' 135

Without explaining its relevance to the present, however, extensive coverage of

slavery is like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff—just more facts

for hapless eleventh graders to memorize.

Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferi-

ority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both

continue to haunt our society. Thetefore, treating slavery's enduring legacy is

necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.

To function adequately in civic life in our troubled times, students must

learn what causes racism. Although it is a complicated historical issue, racism in

the Western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking

land from and destroying indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work

that land. To teach this relationship, textbooks would have to show students the

dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an

idea system. Sociologists call these the social structure and the superstructure.

Slavery existed in many societies and periods before and after the African slave

trade. Made possible by Europe's advantages in military and social technology,

the slavery started by Europeans in the fifteenth century was different, because it

became the enslavement of one race by another. Increasingly, whites viewed the

enslavement of whites as illegitimate, while the enslavement of Africans became

acceptable. Unlike earlier slaveries, children of African American slaves would be

slaves forever and could never achieve freedom through intermarriage with the

owning class. The rationale for this differential treatment was racism. As Mon-

tesquieu, the French social philosopher who had such a profound influence on

American democracy, ironically observed in 1748: "It is impossible For us to

suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspi-

cion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian."23

Historians have chronicled the rise of racism in the West. Before the

1450s Europeans considered Africans exotic but not necessarily inferior. As

more and more nations joined the slave trade, Europeans came to characterize

Africans as stupid, backward, and uncivilized. Amnesia set in: Europe gradually

found it convenient to forget that Moors from Africa had brought to Spain and

Italy much of the learning that led to the Renaissance. Europeans had knov

that Timbuctu, with its renowned university and library, was a center

learning. Now, forgetting Timbuctu, Europe and European Americans perceiv

Africa as the "dark continent."21 By the 1850s many white Americans, includin

some Northerners, claimed that black people were so hopelessly inferior thi

slavery was a proper form of education for them; it also removed them phy

cally from the alleged barbarism of the "dark continent."

136 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

The superstructure of racism has long outlived the social structure of

slavery that generated it. The following passage from Margaret Mitchell's Cone

with ibe Wind, written in the 1930s, shows racism alive and well in that decade.

The narrator is interpreting Reconstruction: "The former field hands found them-

selves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted them-

selves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to da Like

monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is

beyond their comprehension, they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in

destruction or simply because of their ignorance."25 White supremacy permeates

Mitchell's romantic bestseller. Yet in 1988, when the American Library Associa-

tion asked library patrons to name the best book in the library, Gone with the

Wine/won an actual majority against all other books ever published!2''

The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is

appropriate, even "natural," for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom. In its

core our culture tells us—tells all of us, including African Americans—that

Europe's domination of the world came about because Europeans were smarter. In

their cote, many whites and some people of color believe this. White supremacy is

not only a residue of slavery, to be sure. Developments in American history since

slavery ended have maintained it. Textbooks that do not discuss white involve-

ment in slavery in the period before 1863, however, are not likely to analyze

white racism as a factor in more recent years. Only five of the twelve textbooks

books list racism, racial prejudice, or any term beginning with race in their indexes.27

Only two textbooks discuss what might have caused racism. The closest

any of the textbooks comes to explaining the connection between slavery and

racism is this single sentence from The American Tradition-. "In defense of their

'peculiar institution,' southerners became more and more determined to main-

tain their own way of life." Such a statement hardly suffices to show today's stu-

dents the origin of racism in our society—-it doesn't even use the word! The

mean Adventure offers a longer treatment: "[African Americans] looked dif-

:rem from members of white ethnic groups. The color of their skin made

assimilation difficult. For this reason they remained outsiders." Here Adventure

as retreated from history to lay psychology. Unfortunately for its argument,

skin color in itself docs not explain racism. Jane Elliot's famous experiments in

M'S classrooms have shown that children can quickly develop discriminatory

behavior and prejudiced beliefs based on eye color. Conversely, the leadership

wsiiions that African Americans frequently reached among American Indian

itions from Ecuador to the Arctic show that people do not automatically dis-

criminate against others on [he basis of skin color.2S

' G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D " . 137

Events and processes in American history, from the time of slavery to the

present, are what explain racism. Not one textbook connects history and racism,

however. Half-formed and uninformed notions rush in to fill the analytic

vacuum textbooks thus leave. Adventure's three sentences imply that it is natural

to exclude people whose skin color is different. White students may conclude

that all societies are racist, perhaps by nature, so racism is all right. Black stu-

dents may conclude that all whites are racist, perhaps by nature, so to be anti-

white is all right. The elementary thinking in Adventure's three sentences is all

too apparent. Yet this is the most substantial treatment of the causes of racism

among all twelve textbooks. In omitting racism or treating it so poorly, history textbooks shirk a crit-

ical responsibility. Not all whites are or have been racist. Levels of racism have

changed over time," If textbooks were to explain this, they would give students

some perspective on what caused racism in the past, what perpetuates it today,

and how it might be reduced in the future. Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how slavery affected

African Americans, they minimize white complicity in it. They present slavery

virtually as uncaused, a tragedy, rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people

on others. Textbooks maintain the fiction that planters did the work on the

plantations. "There was always much work to be done," according to Triumph of

the American Nation, "for a cotton grower also raised most of the food eaten by

his family and slaves." Although managing a business worth hundreds of thou-

sands of dollars was surely time-consuming, the truth as to who did most of the

work on the plantation is surely captured more accurately by this quotation

from a Mississippi planter lamenting his situation after the war: "I never did a

day's work in my life, and don't know how to begin. You see me in these coarse

old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in my life before the war."30

The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of slavery is sadness, not]

anger. For there's no one to be angry at. Somehow we ended up with four mil-

lion slaves in America but no owners! This is part of a pattern in our textbook-

anything bad in American history happened anonymously. Everyone named il

our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the neX

chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks f1

1979, "In all history, there is no known case of anyone's creating a problem for

anyone else."" Certainly the Founding Fathers never created one. "Popular moderaj

depictions of Washington and Jefferson are utterly at variance with their lives as

eighteenth-century slave-holding planters,"" Textbooks play their part by mini-

138 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

mizing slavery in the lives of the founders. As with Woodrow Wilson, Helen

Keller, and Christopher Columbus, authors cannot bear to reveal anything bad

about our heroes. Nevertheless, almost half of the signers of the Declaration of

Independence were slaveowners.

In real life the Founding Fathers and their wives wrestled with slavery.

Textbooks canonize Patrick Henry for his "Give me liberty or give me death"

speech. Not one tells us that eight months after delivering the speech he

ordered "diligent patrols" to keep Virginia slaves from accepting the British offer

of freedom to those who would join their side. Henry wrestled with the contra-

diction, exclaiming, "Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own

purchase!"" Almost no one would today, because only two of the twelve text-

books, Land of Promise and The American Adventure, even mention the inconsis-

tency.'4 Henry's understanding of the discrepancy between his words and his

deeds never led him to act differently, to his slaves' sorrow. Throughout the

Revolutionary period he added slaves to his holdings, and even at his death,

unlike some other Virginia planters, he freed not a one. Nevertheless, Triumph of

ike American Nation quotes Henry calling slavery "as repugnant to humanity as it

is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty," without ever men-

tioning that he held slaves. American Adventures devotes three whole pages to

Henry, constructing a fictitious melodrama in which his father worries, "How

would he ever earn a living?" Adventures then tells how Henry failed at store-

keeping, "tried to make a living by raising tobacco," "started another store," "had

three children as well as a wife to support," "knew he had to make a living in

mme way," "so he decided to become a lawyer." The student who reads this

chapter and later learns that Henry grew wealthy from the work of scores of

slaves has a right to feel hoodwinked.

Even more embarrassing is the case of Founding Father Thomas Jef-

ferson. American history textbooks use several tactics to harmonize the contra-

diction between Jefferson's assertion that everyone has an equal right to "Life,

ttrty, and the pursuit of Happiness" and his enslavement of 175 human

leings at the time he wrote those words. JefTerson's slaveholding affected

almost everything he did, from his opposition to internal improvements to his

eign policy.'5 Nonetheless, half of our textbooks never note that Jefferson

owned slaves. Life and Liberty offers a half-page minibiography of Jefferson,

ivealing that he was "shy," "stammered," and "always worked hard at what he

Elsewhere Life contrasts Jefferson's political beliefs with Alexander

milton's and supplies six paragraphs about "Jeffersonian Changes" of Feder-

ist policies, noting that Jefferson refused to wear a wig, repealed a whiskey

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D ' • 139

tax, and walked rather than rode in his inaugural parade. Life dud Liberty says

nothing about Jefferson and slavery, however. American History offers six dif-

ferent illustrations of the man for us to admire but makes no mention of his

slaveholding. The Challenge of freedom mentions Jefferson on sixteen different

pages but never in the context of slavery.

Even textbooks that admit that Jefferson owned slaves go out of their way

to downplay the fact. The American Way buries his complicity with the institu-

tion in a paragraph about his opposition to the practice:

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1787, Thomas Jefferson

spoke out against owning slaves. Slavery, he said, made tyrants out of

the masters and destroyed the spirit of the slaves, , . . Although Jef-

ferson and others who owned slaves spoke against slavery, many

people did not believe that a mixed society of equals could work.

"Jefferson and others who owned slaves" is ambiguous. Only the careful reade

will infer that Jefferson was a slaveowner. Also ambiguous is Notes on the Slate of I

Virginia, which contains lengthy arguments about why blacks and whites can I

never participate in society equally. The attempt "will probably never end but i

the extermination of the one or the other race," Jefferson luridly concluded. Wt

has mischaracterized the source.*6

The paragraph in American Adventures is more forthright:

The idea of slavery bothered Thomas Jefferson all his life. As an adult,

he himself owned many slaves. He depended on their labor for raising

tobacco on his plantation. Yet he understood that slavery was wrong,

terribly wrong. It was the opposite of the thing he valued most in

life—freedom.

Again, the thrust of the treatment, the thing most likely to be remembered, j

that Jefferson was an opponent of slavery, not a slaveowner.

Textbooks stress that Jefferson was a humane master, privately tormen

by slavery and opposed to its expansion, not the type to destroy families I

selling slaves. In truth, by 1820 Jefferson had become an ardent advocate of I

expansion of slavery to the western territories. And he never let his ambivale

about slavery affect his private life. Jefferson was an average master who had I

slaves whipped and sold into the Deep South as examples, to induce other!

to obey. By 1822, Jefferson owned 267 slaves. During his long life, of hund

140 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

of different slaves he owned, he freed only three, and five more at his death—all

blood relatives of his."

Another textbook tactic to minimize Jefferson's slaveholding is to admit it

but emphasiz.e that others did no better, "Jefferson revealed himself as a man of

his times," states Land of Promise. Well, what were those times? Certainly most

white American1! in the 1770s were racist. Race relations were in flux, however,

due to the Revolutionary War and to its underlying ideology about the rights of

mankind thai Jefferson, among others, did so much to spread. Five thousand

black soldiers fought alongside whites in the Continental Army, "with courage

and skill," nccording to Triumph of the American Nation. In reality, of course, some

fought "with courage and skill," like some white recruits, and some failed to fire

their guns and ran off, like some white recruits.56 But because these men fought

in integrated units for the most part and received equal pay, their existence in

itself helped decrease white racism,5*

Moreover, the American Revolution is one of those moments in our his-

tory when the power of ideas made a real difference, "In contending for the

bir thr ight of freedom," said a captain in the army, "we have learned to feel for

the bondage of others."10 Abigail Adams wrote her husband in 1774 to ask how

we could "fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from

those who have as good a right to freedom as we have,"41 The contradiction

between his words and his slaveowning embarrassed Patrick Henry, who offered

only ii lame excuse—"I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living

here without them"- ;md admitted, "I will not, I cannot justify it."4! Other

options were available to planters. Some, including George Washington, valued

consistency more than Henry or Jefferson and freed their slaves outright or at

east in their wills. Other slaveowners freed their male slaves to fight in the

ilonial army, collecting a bounty for each one who enlisted. In the first two

lecades after the Revolution, the number of free blacks in Virginia soared ten-

fold, from 2,000 in 1780 to 20,000 in 1800. Most Northern states did away

with slavery altogether. Thus Thomas Jefferson lagged behind many whites of

us nines in the actions he look wiih regard to slavery45

Manumission gradually flagged, however, because most of the white

Southerners who, like Jefferson, kept their slaves, erew rich. Their neighbors ' I ' O O

rought well of them, as people often do of those richer than themselves. To a

:e the ideology of the upper class became the ideology of the whole

/, and as the Revolution receded, that ideology increasingly justified

ry. Jefferson himself spent much of his slave-earned wealth on his mansion

Vlomicello and on books that he later donated to the University of Virginia;

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D ' 141

these expenditures became part of his hallowed patrimony, giving history yet

another reason to remember him kindly,14

Other views are possible, however. In 1829, three years after Jefferson's

death, David Walker, a black Bostonian, warned members of his race that they

should remember Jefferson as their greatest enemy. "Mr. Jefferson's remarks

respecting us have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of whites, and never

will be removed this side of eternity."^ For the next hundred years, the open

white supremacy of the Democratic Party, Jefferson's political legacy to the

nation, would bear out the truth of Walker's warning.

Textbooks are in good company: the Jefferson Memorial, too, white-

washes its subject. On its marble walls a carved panel proclaims Jefferson's \

boast, "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the ,

mind of men," without ever mentioning his participation in racial slavery. Per- .

haps asking a marble memorial to tell the truth is demanding too much. Should

history textbooks similarly be a shrine, however? Should they encourage nu- I

dents to worship Jefferson? Or should they help students understand him, I

wrestle with the problems he wrestled with, grasp his accomplishments, and I

also acknowledge his failures?

The idealistic spark in our Revolution, which caused Patrick Henry such I

verbal discomfort, at first made the United States a proponent of democracy^

around the world. However, slavery and its concomitant ideas, which legitiJ

mated hierarchy and dominance, sapped our Revolutionary idealism. Most ttttM

books never hint at this clash of ideas, let alone at its impact on our fordgfl

policy.

After the Revolution, many Americans expected our example woulfl

inspire other peoples. It did. Our young nation got its first chance to help in thfll

1790s, when Haiti revolted against France, Whether a president owned slavJ

seems to have determined his policy toward the second independent nation iflj

the hemisphere. George Washington did, so his administration loaned hundred!

of thousands of dollars to the French planters in Haiti to help them suppre^B

their slaves. John Adams did not, and his administration gave considerable SUM

port to the Haitians. Jefferson's presidency marked a general retreat from tbM

idealism of the Revolution. Like other slaveowners, Jefferson preferred fll

Napoleonic colony to a black republic in the Caribbean. In 1801 he reversed

U.S. policy toward Haiti and secretly gave France the go-ahead to reconquer tn

island. In so doing, the United States not only betrayed its heritage, but also

acted against its own self-interest. For if France had indeed been able lo retakd

Haiti, Napoleon would have maintained his dream of an American empire. •!

142 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

United States would have been hemmed in by France to its west, Britain to its

north, and Spain to its south. But planters in the United States were scared by

the Haitian Revolution. They thought it might inspire slave revolts here (which

it did). When Haiti won despite our flip-flop, the United States would not even

extend it diplomatic recognition, lest its ambassador inflame our slaves "by

exhibiting in his own person an example of successful revolt," in the words of a

Geotgia senator.46 Five of the twelve textbooks mention how Haitian resistance

led France to sell us its claim to Louisiana, but none tells of our flip-flop. Indeed,

no textbook ever makes any connection between slavery and US, foreign policy.

Racial slavery also affected our policy toward the next countries in the

Americas to revolt, Spain's colonies. Haiti's example inspired them to seek inde-

pendence, and the Haitian government gave Simon Bolivar direct aid. Our

statesmen were ambivalent, eager to help boot a European power out of the

hemisphete but worried by the racially mixed rebels doing the booting. Some

planters warned our government to replace Spain as the colonial power, espe-

cially in Cuba. Jefferson suggested annexing Cuba. Fifty years later, diplomats in

the Franklin Pierce administration signed the Ostend Manifesto, which pro-

posed thai the United States buy or take the island from Spain. Slaveowners, still

obsessed with Haiti as a role model, thus hoped to prevent Cuba's becoming a

second Haiti, with "flames [that might] extend to our own neighboring shores,"

in the words of the Manifesto.47 In short, slavery prompted the United States to

have imperialist designs on Latin America rather than visions of democratic lib- eration fot ihe region.

Slavery affected our foreign policy in still other ways. The first require-

ment of a slave society is secure borders. We do not like to think of the United

Slates as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape

from, but the slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the Dred Scott deci-

sion in 1857, which declared "A Negro had no rights a white man was bound to

respect," thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe

even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.48 Slaveholders

dominated our foreign policy until the Civil War. They were always concerned

about our Indian borders and made sure that treaties with Native nations stipu-

ed thai Indians surrender all African Americans and return any runaways.4*

S. territorial expansion between 1787 and IS55 was due in large part

avers' influence. The largest pressure group behind the War of IS12 was

iveholdets who coveted Indian and Spanish land and wanted to drive Indian

S farther away from the slaveholding states to prevent slave escapes. Even

ugh Spain was our ally during that war, in the aftermath we took Florida

" G O M E W I T H T H E W I N D '

from Spain because slaveholders demanded we do so. Indeed, Andrew Jackson

attacked a Seminole fort in Florida in 1816 precisely because it harbored hun-

dreds of runaway slaves, thus initiating the First Seminole War.'"

The Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of Euro-

peans and Africans. They were a triracial isolate composed of Creek Indians,

remnants of smaller tribes, runaway slaves, and whites who preferred to live in

Indian society. The word Seminolt is itself a corruption of the Spanish cinmrrou

(corrupted to maroons on Jamaica), a word that came to mean "runaway slaves."51

The Seminoles' refusal to surrender their African American members led to the

First and Second Seminole Wars (1816-18, 1835-42). Whites attacked not

because they wanted the Everglades, which had no economic value to the

United States in the nineteenth century, but to eliminate a refuge for runaway

slaves. The Second Seminole War was the longest and costliest war the United

States ever fought against Indians," The college textbook America: P&i and Prt-

sent tells why we fought it, putting the war in the context of slave revolts:

The most sustained and successful effort of slaves to win their freedom

by force of arms took place in Florida between 1835 and 1842 when

hundreds of black fugitives fought in the Second Seminole War along-

side the Indians who had given them a haven. The Seminoles were

resisting removal to Oklahoma, but for the blacks who took part, the

war was a struggle for their own freedom, and the treaty that ended it

allowed most of them to accompany their Indian allies to the trans-

Mississippi West,

This is apparently too radical for high school: only six of the twelve text

even mention the war. Of these, only four say that ex-slaves fought with

Seminoles; not one tells that the ex-slaves were the real reason for the war.

Slavery was also perhaps the key factor in the Texas War (1835-36). Thl

freedom for which Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and the rest fought at die

Alamo was the freedom to own slaves! As soon as Anglos set up the Republic of

Texas, its legislature ordered all free black people out of the Republic.'1 Om

next major war, the Mexican War (1846-48), was again driven chiefly by

Southern planters wanting to push the borders of the nearest free land farthsfl

from the slave states. Probably the clearest index of how slavery affected USI

foreign policy is provided by the Civil War, foe between 1861 and 1865 we

had two foreign policies, the Union's and the Confederacy's, The Union lecog-j

nized Haiti and shared considerable ideological compatibility with postrcvolu-

book

ih the

144 - L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

formal black suit, usually rumpled and always too short for his long

arms and legs. Douglas was what we would call a flashy dresser. He

wore shirts with rufiles, fancy embroidered vests, a broad fell hat. He

had a rapid-fire way of speaking thai contrasted with Lincoln's slow,

deliberate style

Lincoln's voice was high pitched, Douglas's deep. Both had to have

powerful lungs to make themselves heard over street noises and the

bustle of the crowds. They had no public address systems to help them.

The author of The American Way concentrates in a similar fashion

appearances and voices:

One member of the audience, Gustave Koerner, reported how each of

the candidates looked and what effect each had on his audience:

"Douglas was fighting for his political life. No greater contrast

could be imagined than the one between Lincoln and Douglas. The

latter was really a little giant physically . . . while Lincoln, when

standing erect, towered to six feet four inches, Lincoln, awkward in D

posture and leaning a little forward, stood calm . . . He addressed his

hearers in a somewhat familiar yet very earnest way with a clear, dis-

tinct, and far-reaching voice, generally well controlled, but sometimes

expressive of sadness, though at times he could assume a most

humorous and even comical look.. ,." [ellipses in the textbook]

So we learn that Douglas was a flashy dresser and spoke powerfully—but'

are his ideas? What did he say?

Although Way quotes nine sentences of this bystander's description,

twelve textbooks combined give us just three sentence fragments from Doug

himself. Here is every word of his they provide:

"forever divided into free and slave states, as our fathers made it,"

"thinks the Negro is his brother," and

"for a day or an hour."

Just twenty-four words in twelve booksl While celebrating the "Little Gia

his "powerful speech" or "splendid oratory," nine textbooks silence him

pletely. Instead, the omnipresent authorial voice supplies his side of the

"Douglas was for popular sovereignty." This summary from Lift and Libi

146 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

shorter than most but otherwise representative. Of course, phrased this abstractly,

who would oppose popular sovereignty?

Douglas's position was not so vague, however. The debate was largely

about the morality of racially based slavery and the position African Americans

should eventually hold in our society. That is why Paul Angle chose the title

Created Equal? for his centennial edition of the debates.58 On July 9, 1858, in

Chicago, Douglas made his position dear, as he did repeatedly throughout that

summer:

In my opinion this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It

was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be

administered by white men. . . ,

I am opposed to taking any step that recognizes the Negro man or

the Indian as the equal of the while man, I am opposed to giving him

a voice in [he administration of the government. I would extend to the

Negro, and the Indian, and to all dependent races every right, every

privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety and welfare of

the white races; but equality they never should have, either political or

social, or in any other respect whatever.

My friends, you see that the issues are distinctly drawn.55

Texibook readers cannot see that the issues are distinctly drawn, however,

muse textbooks give them no access to Douglas's side. American History is the

only texlbook that quotes Stephen Douglas on race: "Lincoln 'thinks the Negro

is his brother,' the Little Giant sneered."

Why do textbooks censor Douglas? Since they devote paragraphs to his

wardrobe, it cannot be- for lack of space. To be sure, textbook authors rarely

te anyone. But more particularly, the heroification process seems to be oper-

iling again, Douglas's words might make us think badly of him.

Compared to Douglas, Lincoln was an idealistic equalitarian, but in

llithern Illinois, arguing with Douglas, he too expressed white supremacist ideas.

us at the debate in Charleston he said, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of

ringing about the social and political equality of the white and black races

|applause|—that 1 ant not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors

groes," Textbook authors protect us from a racist Lincoln. By so doing, they

lish students' capacity to recognize racism as a force in American life. For if

ttln could be racist, then so might the res! of us be. And if Lincoln could tran-

d racism, as he did on occasion, then so might the rest of us.

• G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D " • 147

During the Civil War, Northern Democrats countered the Republican

charge that they favored rebellion by professing to be the "white man's party," I

They protested the government's emancipation of slaves in the District of I

Columbia and its diplomatic recognition of Haiti. They claimed Republicans

had "nothing except 'nigger on the brain.'" They were enraged when the U.S.I

army accepted African American recruits. And they made race a paramount!

factor in their campaigns.

In those days before television, parties held coordinated rallies. On the I

last Saturday before the election, Democratic senators might address crowds inl

each major city; local officeholders would hold forth in smaller towns. Each ofl

these rallies featured music. Hundreds of thousands of songbooks were print™

so the party faithful might sing the same songs coast to coast. A favorite ofl

1864 was sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy":

THE NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM

"NIGGER DOODLE DANDY"

Yankee Doodle is no more,

Sunk his name and station;

Nigger Doodle takes bis place,

And favors amalgamation.

CHORUS: Nigger Doodle's all the go,

Ebony shins and bandy,

"Loyal"people all must bow

To Nigger Doodle dandy.

The white breed is under par

ft lacks the rich a-romy,

Give us something black as tar,

Give us "Old Dahomey."

CHORUS: Nigger Doodle's al! the go, £7"c.

Blubber lips are killing sweet,

And kinky heads are splendid;

And oh, it makes such bully feet

To have the heels extended.

CHORUS: Nigger Doodle's all the go, Ot

148 L I E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

I have shared these lyrics with hundreds of college students and scores of

high school history teachers. To get audiences to take the words seriously, I usu-

ally try to lead them in a singalong. Often even all-white groups refuse. They

are shocked by what they read. Nothing in their high school history textbooks

hinted that national politics was ever like this.

Partly because many party members and leaders did not identify with the

war effort, when the Union won Democrats emerged as the minority party.

Republicans controlled Reconstruction. Like slavery, Reconstruction is a subject

on which textbooks have improved since the civil rights movement. The earliest

accounts, written even before Reconstruction ended, portrayed Republican state

governments struggling to govern fairly but confronted with immense problems,

not the least being violent resistance from racist ex-Confederates. Textbooks

written between about 1890 and the 1960s, however, painted an unappealing

portrait of oppressive Republican rule in the postwar period, a picture that we

might call the Confederate myth of Reconstruction. For years black families

kep! the truth about Reconstruction alive. The aging slaves whose stories were

recorded by WPA writers in the 1930s remained proud of" blacks' roles during

Reconstruction. Some still remembered the names of African Americans elected

lo office sixty years earlier. "I know folks think the books tell the truth," said an

eighty-eight-year-old former slave, "but they shore don't."60 As those who knew

^construction from personal experience died off, however, even in the black

community the textbook view took over.

My most memorable encounter with the Confederate myth of Reconstruc-

tion came during a discussion with seventeen first-year students at Tougaloo

-ollege, a predominantly black school in Mississippi, one afternoon in January

970.1 was about to launch into a unit on Reconstruction, and I needed to find

out what the students already knew. "What was Reconstruction?" I asked. "What

nages come to your mind about that era?" The class consensus: Reconstruction

was ihe time when African Americans took over the governing of the Southern

S, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they

:d up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the

state governments.

I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement

was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never

over the Southern states. All governors were white and almost all legisla-

, had white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African Americans did

: Jniess up"; indeed, Mississippi enjoyed less corrupt government during

econstmction than in the decades immediately afterward. "Whites" did not

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D 1 149

take back control of the state governments; rather, some white Democrats used

force and fraud to wrest control from biracial Republican coalitions.

For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their

past seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, since their race

had "messed up" in its one appearance on American history's center stage. It also

invited them to conclude that it is only right that whites be always in control.

Yet my students had merely learned what their textbooks had taught them. Like

almost all Americans who finished high school before the 1970s, they had

encountered the Confederate myth of Reconstruction in their American history

classes. I, too, learned it from my college history textbook. John F. Kennedy and

his ghost writer retold it in their portrait of L. Q._C, Lamar in Profiles in Courage,

which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Compared to the 1960s, today's textbooks have vastly improved theii

treatments of Reconstruction. All but three of the twelve textbooks I surveys

paint a very different picture of Reconstruction from Gone with ihe Wind.''1 No

longer do histories claim that federal troops controlled Southern society

decade or more. Now they point out that military rule ended by 1868 in all 1

three states. No longer do they say that allowing African American men to vo

set loose an orgy of looting and corruption. The 1961 edition of TriumphoU

American Nation condemned Republican rule in the South: "Many of the 'c

petbag' governments were inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt." In stark conti

the 1986 edition explains that "The southern reconstruction legislatures stafl

many needed and long overdue public improvements , . . strengthened pub

education . . . spread the tax burden more equitably . . . [and] introdu

overdue reforms in local government and the judicial system."

Like their treatment of slavery, textbooks' new view of Reconstruc

represents a sea change, past due, much closer to what the original sources I

the period reveal, and much less dominated by white supremacy, Howeve:

the way the textbooks structure their discussion, most of them inadvertently I

take a white supremacist viewpoint. Their rhetoric makes African Ameri

rather than whites the "problem" and assumes that the major issue of 1

struction was how to integrate African Americans into the system, econotnif

and politically. "Slavery was over," says The American Way. "But the South'

ruined and the Blacks had to be brought into a working society," Blacks'

already working, of course. One wonders what the author thinks they had j

doing in slavery!62 Similarly, according to Triumph of the American Nation, 1

struction "meant solving the problem of bringing black Americans intQ

mainstream of national life " Triumph supplies an instructive example

150 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

myth oflazy, helpless black folk: "When white planters abandoned their planta-

tions on islands off the coast of South Carolina, black people there were left

helpless and destitute." In reality, these black people enlisted in Union armies,

operated the plantations themselves, and made raids into the interior to free

slaves on mainland plantations. The archetype of African Americans as depen-

dent or others begins here, in textbook treatments of Reconstruction. It con-

tinues to ihc present, when many white Americans believe blacks work less than whiles, even though census data show they work more.6'

In reality, white violence, not black ignorance, was the key problem

during Reconstruction. The figures are astounding. The victors of the Civil War

executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandant

of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders

and other Unionists, white and black,64 In Hinds County, Mississippi, alone,

whites killed an average of one African American a day, many of them ser-

vicemen, during Confederate Reconstruction—the period from 1865 to 1867

when ex-Con federates ran the governments of most Southern states. In

Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 per-

sons, mostly African Americans and white Republicans.^5 In one judicial district

in North Carolina, a Republican judge counted 700 beatings and 12 murders.66

lustration of armed whites raiding a black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, L866 riot, exemplifies white-black violence during and after Reconstruction. Forty

.Mean Americans died in this riot; whites burner! down every black church in the city.

• G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D "

Although the narratives in textbooks have improved, some of the pictures have i Four of the twelve textbooks feature this cartoon, "The Solid South" represented i delicate white woman. She is weighed down by Grant and armaments stuffed I carpetbag, accompanied by bluecoated soldiers of occupation. Textbook autfiors I discuss this cartoon to encourage students to analyze its point of view. The Ami Way at least asks, "How do you interpret this cartoon?" The other three tex merely use the drawing to illustrate Reconstruction: "The South's heavy burden

tions Triumph of the American Naiion.

152 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Moreover, violence was only the most visible component of a broader pattern of

white resistance to black progress.

Attacking education was an important element of the white supremacists'

program. "The opposition to Negro education made itself felt everywhere in a

combination not to allow the freedmen any room or building in which a school

might be taught," said Gen. O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau. "In

1865, 1866, and 1867 mobs of the baser classes at intervals and in all parts of

the South occasionally burned school buildings and churches used as schools,

flogged leachers or drove them away, and in a number of instances murdered

them."1'''

With the exception of The American Way and Discovering, American History,

each of the twelve textbooks includes at least a paragraph on white violence

during Reconstruction. Six of twelve textbooks tell how that violence, coupled

with failure by the United States to implement civil rights laws, played a major

role in ending Republican state governments in the South, thus ending Recon-

struction.'5* Hut, overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the

point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Conjvdfrates, not African

Americans, into the new order. As soon as the federal government stopped

addressing the problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since textbooks

find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treat-

ments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity. Triumph presents the end of

^construction as a failure of African Americans: "Other northerners grew

weary of the problems of black southerners and less willing to help them learn

their new roles ;is citizens." The American Adventure echoes: "Millions of ex-slaves

could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians,

farmers, and businessmen."

Because 1 too "learned" that African Americans were the unsolved prob-

lem of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma was an

'e-opening experience for me. Myrdal introduced his (944 book by

describing the change in viewpoint he was forced to make as he conducted his

research,

When the present investigator started his inquiry, the preconception

was thai it had to be focused on the Negro people. . . . But as he pro-

ceeded in his studies into the Negro problem, it became increasingly

evident that little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms

of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves. . . . The Negro problem

is predominantly a white . .. problem.69

" G O N E W I T H THE W I N D " - 1 5 3

154 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

This is precisely the change textbook authors still need to make. Their I

failure to make it lies behind the appalling results of a 1976 national survey of

first-year college students, a majority of whom ventured that Reconstruction led I

to "unparalleled corruption among the entrenched carpetbagger governors and I

their allies in the black dominated legislatures of the defeated states"—precisely I

the Confederate myth of Reconstruction.70 Textbooks in 1976 no longer said I

that. But they failed and still fail to counter this pervasive myth with an analysis I

that has real power. As one student said to me, "You'll never believe all the stuff I

1 learned in high school about Reconstruction—like, it wasn't so bad, it set up I

school systems. Then 1 saw Gone wiih the Wind and learned the truth about I

Reconstruction!" What is identified as the problem determines the frame of I

rhetoric and solutions sought. Myrdal's insight, to focus on whites, is critical to I

understanding Reconstruction.

Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding thefl

period Rayford Logan called "the nadir of American race relations": the years I

between 1890 and 1920, when African Americans were again put back into!

second-class citizenship.7' During this time white Americans, North and South, 1

joined hands to restrict black civil and economic rights. Perhaps because thcfl

period was marked by such a discouraging increase in white racism, ten of thH

twelve textbooks ignore the nadir. The finest coverage, in American History, sunn

marizes the aftermath of Reconstruction in a section entitled "The Long Night j

Begins." "After the Compromise of 1877 the white citizens of the North lurnfl

their backs on the black citizens of the South. Gradually the southern statfl

broke their promise to treat blacks fairly. Step by step they deprived them of the

right to vote and reduced them to the status of second-class citizens." America

History then spells out the techniques—restrictions on voting, segregation in

public places, and lynchings—which southern whites used to maintain wbH

supremacy.

Triumph of the American Nation, on the other hand, sums up in these bUflil

words; "Reconstruction left many major problems unsolved and created newifl

equally urgent problems. This was true even though many forces in the NolB

and the South continued working to reconcile the two sections." These sen-

tences are so vague as to be content-free. Frances FitzGerald used an earlier^B

sion of this passage to attack what she called the "problems" approach •

American history. "These 'problems' seem to crop up everywhere." she deli

panned. "History in these texts is a mass of problems."" Five hundred pifl

later in Triumph, when the authors reach the civil rights movement, race rtfc-

tions again becomes a "problem." The authors make no connection between •

failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need

for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

In fact, during Reconstruction and the nadir, a battle raged for the soul of

the Southern white racist and in a way for that of the whole nation. There is a

parallel in the reconstruction of Germany after World War II, a battle for the

soul of the German people, a battle which Nazism lost (we hope). But in the

Uniied Slates, as American History tells, racism won. Between 1890 and 1907

every Southern and border state "legally" disfranchised the vast majority of its

African American voters. Lynchings rose to an all-time high, (n 1896 the

Supreme Court upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. No textbook explains the

rationale of segregation, which is crucial to understanding its devastating effect

on black and white psyches. Describing the 1954 Supreme Court decision that

would begin to undo segregation, The American Way says, ''No separate school

could ttuly bv equal for Blacks," but offers no clue as to why this would be so.

Textbooks need to offer the sociological definition of segregation; a system of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the

oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication

tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking

or cleaning for while employers. The rationale of segregation thus implies that

the oppressed art a pariah people. "Unclean!" was the caste message of every

"colored" water fountain, waiting room, and courtroom Bible. "Inferior" was the

implication of every school that excluded blacks (and often Mexicans, Native

Americans, and "Orientals"). This ideology was born in slavery and remained

alive to rationalize- the second-class citizenship imposed on African Americans

after Reconstruction. This stigma is why separate could never mean equal, even

when black facilities might be newer or physically superior. Elements of this

stigma survive to harm the self-image of some African Americans today, which

helps explain why Caribbean blacks who immigrate to the United States often outperform black Americans,"

During the nadir, segregation increased everywhere. Jackie Robinson was iiii the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major

agues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out. In

911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they won fifteen of the

first twenty-eight derbies.74 Particularly in the South, whites attacked the richest

nd most successful African Americans, just as they had the most acculturated

Native Americans, so upward mobility offered no way out for blacks but only

de them more of 3 target. In the North as well as in the South, whites forced

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D ' 155

These cartoons by Thomas Mast mirror the revival of racism in the North. Above. "And Not Tnis Man?" from Harper's weekly, August 5, 1865, provides evidence of Mast's idealism in the early days after the Civil War. Nine years later, as Reconstruction was beginning to wind down, Nast's images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times. Opposite is "Colored Rule in a Reconstructed (?) State," from the same journal, March 14, 1S74. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.

African Americans from skilled occupations and even unskilled jobs such as

postal carriers.75 Eventually our system of segregation spread to South Africa, to

Bermuda, and even to European-controlled enclaves in China.

American popular culture evolved to rationalize whites' retraction of civil

and political rights from African Americans. The Bronx Zoo exhibited an

African behind bars, like a gorilla.n Theatrical productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin

played throughout the nadir, but since the novel's indictment of slavery was no

longer congenial to an increasingly racist white society, rewrites changed Uncle

Tom from a martyr who gave his life to protect his people into a sentimental

dope who was loyal to kindly masters. In the black community, Uncle Tom evcn-

156 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

tually came to mean an African American without integrity who sells out his

people's interests. In the 1880s and 1890s, minstrel shows featuring bumbling,

mislocuting whites in blackface grew wildly popular from New England to Cal-

ifornia. By presenting heavily caricatured images of African Americans who

were happy on the plantation and lost and incompetent off it, these shows

demeaned black ability. Minstrel songs such as "Carry Me Back to Old Vir-

ginny," "Old Black Joe," and "My Old Kentucky Home" told whites that Harriet

Beecher Stowe got Uncle Tom's Cabin all wrong; blacks really liked slavery.

Second-class citizenship was appropriate for such a sorry people.77

Textbooks abandoned their idealistic presentations of Reconstruction in

favor of the Confederate myth, for if blacks were inferior, then the historical

period in which they enjoyed equal rights must have been dominated by

wrong-thin king Americans. Vaudeville continued the portrayal of silly, lying,

chicken-stealing black idiots. So did early silent movies. Some movies made

more serious charges against African Americans: D, W. Griffith's racist epic Birth

of a Nation showed them obsessed with interracial sex and debased by corrupt

white carpetbaggers.

" G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D " • 157

Not only industrial jobs but even moving services were reserved for whites in some cities.

In politics, the white electorate had become so racist by 1892 that the

Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the White House partly by tar-

ring Republicans with their attempts to guarantee civil rights to African Ameri-

cans, thereby conjuring fears of "Negro domination" in the Northern as well as

Southern white mind. From the Civil War to the end of the century, not a single

Democrat in Congress, representing the North or the South, ever voted in favor

of any civil rights legislation. The Supreme Court was worse: its segregationist

decisions from 1896 (Pfery) through 1927 (Ricev. GongLum, which barred Chi-

nese from white schools) told the nation that whites were the master race. We

have seen how Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1912 and proceeded to

segregate the federal government. Aided by Birth of a Nation, which opened in

1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting over a million members.

The KKK openly dominated the state government of Indiana for a time, and it

proudly inducted Pres, Warren G. Harding as a member in a White House cere-

mony. During the Wilson and Harding administrations, perhaps one hundred

race riots took place, more than in any other period since Reconstruction. White

mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events,

like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in

Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from an airplane onto a

158 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100

homes, have completely vanished from our history books.78

It is almost unimaginable how racist the United States became during and

just after the nadir. Mass attacks by whites wiped out or terrorized black com-

munities in the Florida Keys, in Springfield, Illinois, and in the Arkansas Delta,

and were an implicit, ever-present threat to every black neighborhood in the

nation. Some small communities in the Midwest and West became "sundown"

towns, informally threatening African Americans with death if they remained

overnight. African Americans were excluded from juries throughout the South

and in many places in the North, which usually meant they could forget about

legal redress even for obvious wrongs like assault, theft, or arson by whites.

Lynchings offer evidence of how defenseless blacks were, for the defining char-

acteristic of a lynching is that the murder takes place in public, so everyone

knows who did it, yet the crime goes unpunished. During the nadir lynchings

took place as far north as Duluth. Once again, as Dred Scon had proclaimed in

1857, "a Negro had no rights a white man was bound to respect." Every time

African Americans interacted with European Americans, no matter how insignif-

icant the contact, they had to be aware of how they presented themselves, lest

they give offense by looking someone in the eye, forgetting to say "sir," or oth-

erwise stepping out of "their place." Always, the threat of overwhelming force

lay just beneath the surface.79

The nadir left African Americans in a dilemma. An "exodus" to form new

black communities in the West did not lead to real freedom. Migration north led

only to segregated urban ghettoes. Concentrating on Booker T. Washington's

plan for economic improvement while foregoing civil and political rights could

not work, because economic gains could not be maintained without civil and

political rights.80 "Back to Africa" was not practicable.

Many African Americans lost hope; family instability and crime increased.

This period of American life, not slavery, marked the beginning of what some

social scientists have called the "tangle of pathology" in African American

society.3' Indeed, some historians date low black morale to even later periods,

such as the great migration to Northern cities (1918-70), the Depression

(1929-39), or changes in urban life and occupational structure after World War

II. Unfortunately, no textbook discusses the changing levels of white racism or

black reaction in any of these periods. In any event this tangle was the result, not

the cause, of the segregation and discrimination African Americans faced. Black

jockeys and mail carriers were shut out, not because they were inadequate, but

because they succeeded.

' G O N E W I T H THE W I N D 1 159

Lynch mobs often posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identified because they knew no white jury would convict them. Mississippi: Conflict and Change, a revisionist state history textbook I co-wrote, was rejected by the Mississippi State Textbook Board partly because it included this photograph. At the trial that ensued, a rating committee member stated that material like this would make it hard for a teacher to control her students, especially a "white lady teacher" in a predominantly black class. At this point the judge took over the questioning. "Didn't lynchings happen in Mississippi?" he asked. Yes, admitted the rating committee member, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now? "It is a history book, isn't it?" asked the judge, who eventually ruled in the book's favor. None of the twelve textbooks in my sample includes a picture of a lynching. I hasten to reassure that no classroom riots resulted from our book or this photograph.

Several textbooks point out individual trees in the nadir forest. From The

American Way students learn that "By the early 1900s, [white workers] had con-

vinced most labor unions not to admit Blacks." Land of Promise teaches that

"Woodrow Wilson's administration was openly hostile to black people." The

United Scales—A History of the Republic mentions the exodus to Kansas. Seven

textbooks mention the Chicago riot. Several offer a description of lynchings. All

twelve books mention P/essy v. Ferguson. Life and Liberty reveals that Southern

160 - L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

states passed "laws that took the vote away from blacks." A History of the Republic,

Ldnd of Promise, and The American Pageant provide enough trees that readers

might infer some kind of forest, except that twenty pages on unrelated topics

usually separate each tree from the next." Only American History and The Amer-

ican Adventure summarize the nadir period.S! The other ten textbooks offer no

clue that race relations in the United States systematically worsened for almost

half a century. None of the textbooks analyzes the causes of the worsening.84

Six textbooks imply or state that Jackie Robinson was "the first black baseball

player ever allowed in the major leagues," in the words of Life and Liberty, even

though he wasn't, leaving students with the unmistakable implication of gener-

ally uninterrupted progress to the present,"5

Textbook authors would not have to invent their descriptions of the nadir

from scratch. African Americans have left a rich and bitter legacy from the

period. Students who encounter Richard Wright's narrative of his childhood in

Black Boy, read Ida B. Wells's description of a lynching in The Red Record, or sing

aloud Big Bill Broonzy's "If You're Black, Get Back!" cannot but understand the

plight of a people envisioning only a narrowing of their options. No book can

convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the

oppressed group. Yet not one textbook lets African Americans speak for them-

selves about the conditions they faced.

It is also crucial that students realize that the discrimination confronting

African Americans during the nadir (and afterward) was national, not just

Southern. Only The American Adventure points this out. Therefore most of my

first-year college students have no idea that in many locales until after World

War II, and continuing even today in some suburbs, the North too was segre-

gated: that blacks could not buy houses in communities around Minneapolis,

could not work in the construction trades in Philadelphia, would not be hired as

department store clerks in Chicago, and so on.

Even The American Adventure forgets its own coverage of the nadir and

elsewhere offers this simplistic view of the period: "The years 1880-1910

seemed full of contradictions. . . . During Reconstruction many people tried

hard to help the black people in the South. Then, for years, most white Ameri-

cans paid little attention to the blacks. Little by little, however, there grew a new

concern for them," The trouble is, many white high school graduates share this

world-view. Even if white concern for blacks has been only sporadic, they

would argue, why haven't African Americans shaped up in the hundred-plus

years since Reconstruction ended? After all, immigrant groups didn't have

everything handed to them on a platter, either.

"GONE WITH THE WIND" -161

It is true that some immigrant groups faced harsh discrimination, from the

No Irish Need Apply signs in Boston to the lynching of Italian Americans in

New Orleans to the pogroms against Chinese work camps in California. Some

white suburban communities in the North still shut out lews and Catholics.

Nonetheless, the segregation and physical violence aimed at African Americans

has been of a higher order of magnitude. If African Americans in the nadir had

experienced only white indifference, as The American Adventure implies, rather

than overt violent resistance, they could have continued to win Kentucky Der-

bies, deliver mail, and even buy houses in white neighborhoods. Their problem

was not black failure or white indifference—it was white racism.

Although formal racial discrimination grows increasingly rare, as young

Americans grow up, they cannot avoid coming up against (he rift of race rela-

tions. They will encounter predominantly black athletic teams cheered by pre-

dominantly white cheerleaders on television, self-segregated dining rooms on

college campuses, and arguments about affirmative action in the workplace.

More than any other social variable (except sex!), race will determine whom

they marry. Most of their friendship networks will remain segregated by race,

and most churches, lodges, and other social organizations will be overwhelm-

ingly either black or nonblack. The ethnic incidents and race riots of tomorrow

will provoke still mote agonizing debate.

Since the nadir, the climate of race relations has improved, owing espe-

cially to the civil rights movement. But massive racial disparities remain,

inequalities that can only be briefly summarized here. In 1990 African American

median family income averaged only 57 percent of white family income; Native

Americans and Hispanics averaged about 65 percent as much as whites. Money

can be used to buy many things in our society, from higher SAT scores to the

ability to swim, and African American, Hispanic, and Native American families

lag in their access to all those things. Ultimately, money buys life itself, in the

form of better nutrition and health care and freedom from danger and stress. It

should therefore come as no surprise that in 1990 African Americans and Native

Americans had median life expectancies at birth that were six years shorter than

whites'.

On average, African Americans have worse housing, lower scores on IQ_

tests, and higher percentages of young men in jail. The sneaking suspicion that

African Americans might be inferior goes unchallenged in the hearts of many

blacks and whites. It is all too easy to blame the victim and. conclude that people

of color are themselves responsible for being on the bottom. Without causal his-

torical analysis, these racial disparities are impossible to explain.

162 • LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct

our already poor ability to see it in the present. The closest they come to

analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in every-

thing, our society is constantly getting better. We used to have slavery; now we

don't. We used to have lynchings; now we don't. Baseball used to be all white;

now it isn't. The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white

relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their

own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can

infer that racism is over. "The U.S. has done more than any other nation in his-

tory to provide equal rights for all," The American Tradition assures us. Of course,

its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the

Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because

they don't mean their declaration as a serious statement of comparative his-

tory—it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.

High school students "have a gloomy view of the state of race relations in

America today," according to a recent nationwide poll. Students of all racial

backgrounds brood about the subject.8*' Another poll reveals that for the first

time in this century, young white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward black

Americans than those over thirty. One reason is that "the under-30 generation is

pathetically ignorant of recent American history."87 Too young to have experi-

enced or watched the civil rights movement as it happened, these young people

have no understanding of the past and present workings of racism in American

society.

Educators justify teaching history because it gives us perspective on the

present. If there is one issue in the ptesent to which authors should relate the

history they tell, the issue is racism. But as long as history textbooks make white

racism invisible in the nineteenth century neither they nor the students who use

them will be able to analyze racism intelligently in the present.

' G O N E W I T H T H E W I N D " - 1 6 3

It is not only radical or currently unfashionable ideas that the texts leave out—it

is all ideas, including those of their heroes.

—Frances FftzGeratti1

You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now. But this question

is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.

—John Brown, 18S92

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his char-

acter—his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in

the least.

—Henry David Thoreau,

"A Plea for Captain John Brown," 18593

We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go

home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like

about me, if that will help. . . . When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I

trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.

—Abraham Lincoln to abolitionist

Unitarian ministers, 18624

6. John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility

of Antiracism in American History Textbooks

Perhaps the most telling criticism Frances FitzGerald made in her 1979survey of American history textbooks, America Revised, was that they leave out ideas. As presented by textbooks of the 1970s, "American political life was

completely mindless," she observed.5

Why would textbook authors avoid even those ideas with which they

agree? Taking ideas seriously does not fit with the rhetorical style of textbooks,

which presents events so as to make them seem foreordained along a line of

constant progress. Including ideas would make history contingent: things could

go either way, and have on occasion. The "right" people, armed with the "right"

ideas, have not always won. When they didn't, the authors would be in the

embarrassing position of having to disapprove of an outcome in the past.

Including ideas would introduce uncertainty. This is not textbook style. Text-

books unfold history without real drama or suspense, only melodrama.

On the subject of race relations, John Brown's statement that "this ques-

tion is still to be settled" seems as relevant today, and even as ominous, as when

he spoke in 1859. The opposite of racism is antiracism, of course, or what we

might call racial idealism or equalitarianism, and it is still not clear whether it

will prevail. In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. Just as they

underplay white racism, they also neglect racial idealism. In so doing, they

deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the

new fault lines that will spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.

Since ideas and ideologies played an especially important role in the Civil

War era, American history textbooks give a singularly inchoate view of that

Struggle, Just as textbooks treat slavery without racism, they treat abolitionism

without much idealism.<• Consider the most radical white abolitionist of them

all, John Brown.

The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction,

has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John

Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he

165

regained his sanity. Since Brown himself did not change after his death, his

sanity provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society.

In today's textbooks, Brown makes two appearances: Pottawatomie,

Kansas, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Recall that the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act

tried to resolve the question of slavery through "popular sovereignty." The prac-

tical result of leaving the slavery decision to whoever settled in Kansas was an

ideologically motivated settlement craze. Northerners rushed to live and farm in

Kansas Territory and make it "free soil." Fewer Southern planters moved to

Kansas with their slaves, but slaveowners from Missouri repeatedly crossed the

Missouri River to vote in territorial elections and to establish a reign of terror to

drive out the free-soil farmers. In May 1856 hundreds of proslavery "border ruf-

fians," as they came to be called, raided the free-soil town of Lawrence, Kansas,

burning down the hotel and destroying two printing presses. The American Tra-

dition describes Brown's action at Pottawatomie: "In retaliation, a militant aboli-

tionist named John Brown led a midnight attack on the proslavery settlement of

Pottawatomie. Five people were killed by Brown and his followers."

Discovering American History describes Brown's 1859 Harpers Ferry raid:

)ohn Brown, son of an abolitionist, envisioned a plan to invade the

South and free the slaves. In 1859, with financial support from aboli-

tionists, Brown made plans to start a slave rebellion in Virginia, to

establish a free state in the Appalachian Mountains, and to spread the

rebellion through the South. On October 16, 1859, Brown and eigh-

teen of his men captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in the

present state of West Virginia. . . . He and his men were captured by a

force of marines. Brown was brought to trial and convicted of treason& against Virginia, murder, and criminal conspiracy. He was hanged on

December 2, 1859.

In all, seven of the twelve textbooks take this neutral approach to John Brown.7

Their bland paragraphs don't imply that Brown was crazy, but neither do they

tell enough about him to explain why he became a hero to so many blacks and

nonslaveholding whites.

Three textbooks still linger in a former era. "John Brown was almost cer-

tainly insane," opines American History. The American Way tells a whopper:

"[L]ater Brown was proved to be mentally ill." The American Pageant characterizes

Brown as "deranged," "gaunt," "grim," "terrible," and "crackbrained," "probably

of unsound mind," and says that "thirteen of his near relatives were regarded as

166 . L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

insane, including his mother and grandmother." Two other books finesse the

sanity issue by calling Brown merely "fanatical." No textbook has any sympathy

for the man or takes any pleasure in his ideals and actions.

For the benefit of readers who, like me, grew up reading that Brown was

at least fanatic if not crazed, let's consider the evidence. To be sure, some of

Brown's lawyers and relatives, hoping to save his neck, suggested an insanity

defense. But no one who knew Brown thought him crazy. He favorably

impressed people who spoke with him after his capture, including his jailer and

even reporters writing for Democratic newspapers, which supported slavery.

Governor Wise of Virginia called him "a man of clear head" after Brown got the

better of him in an informal interview. "They are themselves mistaken who take

him to be a madman," Governor Wise said. In his message to the Virginia legis-

lature he said Brown showed "quick and clear perception," "rational premises

and consecutive reasoning," "composure and self-possession."8

After 1890 textbook authors inferred Brown's madness from his plan,

which admittedly was farfetched. Never mind that John Brown himself pre-

sciently told Frederick Douglass that the venture would make a stunning impact

even if it failed. Nor that his twenty-odd followers can hardly all be considered

crazed too." Rather, we must recognize that the insanity with which historians

have charged John Brown was never psychological. It was ideological. Brown's

actions made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and about 1970, To

make no sense is to be crazy.

Clearly, Brown's contemporaries did not consider him insane. Brown's

ideological influence in the month before his hanging, and continuing after his

death, was immense. He moved the boundary of acceptable thoughts and deeds

regarding slavery. Before Harpers Ferry, to be an abolitionist was not quite

acceptable, even in the North. Just talking about freeing slaves—advocating

immediate emancipation—was behavior at the outer limit of the ideological

continuum. By engaging in armed action, including murder, John Brown made

mere verbal abolitionism seem much less radical.

After an initial shock wave of revulsion against Brown, in the North as

well as in the South, Americans were fascinated to hear what he had to say. In

his 1859 trial John Brown captured the attention of the nation like no other

abolitionist or slaveowner before or since. He knew it: "My whole life before

had not afforded me one half the opportunity to plead for the right."10 In his

speech to the court on November 2, just before the judge sentenced him to die,

Brown argued, "Had 1 so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, it

would have been all right." He referred to the Bible, which he saw in the

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N . j6j

courtroom, "which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men

should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further, to

remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. 1 endeavored to act up

to that instruction." Brown went on to claim the high moral ground: "I believe

that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have

done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong but right." Although he

objected that his impending death penalty was unjust, he accepted it and

pointed to graver injustices: "Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should for-

feit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood fur-

ther with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave

country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,

I say, let it be done."11

Brown's willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right

had a moral force of its own. "It seems as if no man had ever died in America

before, for in order to die you must first have lived," Henry David Thoreau

observed in a eulogy in Boston. "These men, in teaching us how to die, have at

the same time taught us how to live." Thoreau went on to compare Brown with

Jesus of Nazareth, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.12

During the rest of November, Brown provided the nation graceful instruc-

tion in how to face death. In Larchmont, New York, George Templeton Strong

wrote in his diary, "One's faith in anything is terribly shaken by anybody who is

ready to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing it."13 Brown's letters to

his family and friends softened his image, showed his human side, and

prompted an outpouring of sympathy for his children and soon-to-be widow, if

not for Brown himself. His letters to supporters and remarks to journalists,

widely circulated, formed a continuing indictment of slavery. We see his

charisma in this letter from "a conservative Christian"—so the author signed

it—written to Brown in jail: "While I cannot approve of all your acts, J stand in

awe of your position since your capture, and dare not oppose you lest 1 be found

fighting against God; for you speak as one having authority, and seem to be

strengthened from on high."14 When Virginia executed John Brown on

December 2, making him the first American since the founding of the nation to

be hanged as a traitor, church bells mourned in cities throughout the North.

Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf

Whittier, and Walt Whitman were among the poets who responded to the event.

"The gaze of Europe is fixed at this moment on America," wrote Victor Hugo

from France. Hanging Brown, Hugo predicted, "will open a latent fissure that

will finally split the Union asunder. The punishment of John Brown may consol-

168 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

idate slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American Democracy.

You preserve your shame but you kill your glory."15

Brown remained controversial after his death. Republican congressmen

kept their distance from his felonious acts. Nevertheless, Southern slaveowners

were appalled at the show of Northern sympathy for Brown and resolved to

maintain slavery by any means necessary, including quitting the Union if they

lost the next election. Brown's charisma in the North, meanwhile, was not spent

but only increased due to what many came to view as his martyrdom. As the

war came, as thousands of Americans found themselves making the same com-

mitment to face death that John Brown had made, the force of his example took

on new relevance. That's why soldiers marched into battle singing "John

Brown's Body." Two years later, church congregations sang Julia Ward Howe's

new words to the song: "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men

free"—and the identification of John Brown and Jesus Christ took another turn.

The next year saw the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment parading through

Boston to the tune, en route to its heroic destiny with death in South Carolina,

while William Lloyd Garrison surveyed the cheering bystanders from a balcony,

his hand resting on a bust of John Brown. In February 1865 another Massachu-

setts colored regiment marched to the tune through the streets of" Charleston,

South Carolina.16

That was the high point of old John Brown. At the turn of the century, as

southern and border states disfranchised African Americans, as lynchings prolif-

erated, as blackface minstrel shows came to dominate American popular culture,

white America abandoned the last shards of its racial idealism. A history pub-

lished in 1923 makes plain the connection to Brown's insanity: "The farther we

get away from the excitement of 1859 the more we are disposed to consider this

extraordinary man the victim of mental delusions."'7 Not until the civil rights

movement of the 1960s was white America freed from enough of its racism to

accept that a white person did not have to be crazy to die for black equality. In a

sense, the murders of Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in Mississippi,

James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo in Alabama, and various other white civil rights

workers in various other southern states during the 1960s liberated textbook

writers to see sanity again in John Brown. Rise of the American Nation, written in

1961, calls the Harpers Ferry plan "a wild idea, certain to fail," while in Triumph

of the American Nation, published in 1986, the plan becomes "a bold idea, but

almost certain to fail."

Frequently in American history the ideological needs of white racists and

black nationalists coincide. So it was with their views of John Brown, During

JOHN BROWN AND A B R A H A M LINCOLN • 169

the heyday of the Black Power movement, I listened to speaker after speaker in

a Mississippi forum denounce whites. "They are your enemies," thundered one

black militant. "Not one white person has ever had the best interests of black

people at heart." John Brown sprang to my mind, but the speaker anticipated

my objection: "You might say John Brown did, but remember, he was crazy."

John Brown might provide a defense against such global attacks on whites,

but, unfortunately, American history textbooks have erased him as a usable

character.

No black person who met John Brown thought him crazy. Many black

leaders of the day—-Martin Delaney, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Dou-

glass, Harriet Tubman, and others—knew and respected Brown. Only illness

kept Tubman from joining him at Harpers Ferry, The day of his execution

black-owned businesses closed in mourning across the North. Frederick Dou-

glass called Brown "one of the greatest heroes known to American fame."'8 A

black college deliberately chose to locate at Harpers Ferry, and in 1918 its

alumni dedicated a memorial stone to Brown and his men "to commemorate

their heroism." The stone stated, in part, "That this nation might have a new

birth of freedom, that slavery should be removed forever from American soil,

John Brown and his 21 men gave their lives."

Quite possibly textbooks should not portray this murderer as a hero,

although other murderers, from Christopher Columbus to Nat Turner, get the

heroic treatment. However, the flat prose that textbooks use for Brown is not

really neutral. Textbook authors' withdrawal of sympathy from Brown is per-

ceptible; their tone in presenting him is different from the tone they employ

for almost everyone else. We see this, for instance, in their treatment of his

religious beliefs. John Brown was a serious Christian, well read in the Bible,

who took its moral commands to heart. Yet our textbooks do not credit

Brown with religiosity—subtly they blame him for it. "Believing himself com-

manded by God to free the slaves, Brown came up with a scheme . . . ," in the

words of Ldnd of Promise. The American Pageant calls Brown "narrowly igno-

rant," perhaps a euphemism for overly religious, and "God's angry man." "He

believed that God had commanded him to free the slaves by force," states

American History. God never commanded Brown in the sense of giving him

instructions; rather, Brown thought deeply about the moral meaning of Chris-

tianity and decided that slavery was incompatible with it. He was also not

"narrowly ignorant," having traveled widely in the United States, England,

and Europe and talked with many American intellectuals of the day, black and

white.

170 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

By way of comparison, consider Nat Turner, who in 1831 Jed the most

important slave revolt since the United States became a nation. John Brown

and Nat Turner both killed whites in cold blood. Both were religious, but,

unlike Brown, Turner saw visions and heard voices. In most textbooks, Turner

has become something of a hero. Several textbooks call Turner "deeply reli-

gious." None calls him "a religious fanatic." They reserve that term for Brown.

The closest any textbook comes to suggesting that Turner might have been

crazy is this passage from American History: "Historians still argue about

whether or not Turner was insane." But the author immediately goes on to

qualify, "The point is that nearly every slave hated bondage. Nearly all were

eager to see something done to destroy the system." Thus even American History

emphasizes the political and social meaning of Turner's act, not its psycholog-

ical genesis in an allegedly questionable mind.

The textbooks' withdrawal of sympathy from Brown is also apparent in

what they include and exclude about his life before Harpers Ferry. "In the

1840's he somehow got interested in helping black slaves," according to Amer-

ican Adventures. Brown's interest is no mystery: he learned it from his father, who

was a trustee of Oberlin College, a center of abolitionist sentiment, if Adventures

wanted, it could have related the well-known story about how young John

made friends with a black boy during the War of 1812, which convinced him

that blacks were not inferior. Instead, its sentence reads like a slur. Textbook

authors make Brown's Pottawatomie killings seem equally unmotivated by

neglecting to tell that the violence in Kansas had hitherto been perpetrated pri-

marily by the proslavery side. Indeed, slavery sympathizers had previously killed

six free-soil settlers. Several years before Pottawatomie, at Osawatomie, Kansas,

Brown had helped thirty-five free-soil men defend themselves against several

hundred marauding proslavery men from Missouri, thereby earning the nick-

name "Osawatomie John Brown." Not one textbook mentions what Brown did

at Osawatomie, where he was the defender, but eight of the twelve tell what he

did at Pottawatomie, where he was the attacker.'"

Our textbooks also handicap Brown by not letting him speak for him-

self. Even his jailer let Brown put pen to paper! American History includes three

important sentences; American Adventures gives us almost two. The American

Pageant reprints three sentences from a letter Brown wrote his brother. The

other nine books do not provide even a phrase. Brown's words, which moved a

nation, therefore do not move students today.

Textbook authors have an additional reason to avoid Brown's ideas: they

are tinged with Christianity. Religion has been one of the great inspirations and

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 171

explanations of human enterprise in this country. Yet textbooks, while they may

mention religious organizations such as the Shakers or Christian Science, never

treat religious ideas in any period seriously.20 An in-depth portrayal of Mor-

monism, Christian Science, or the Methodism of the Great Awakening would be

controversial. Mentioning atheism or Deism would be even worse. "Are you

going to tell kids that Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in Jesus? Not me!" a text-

book editor exclaimed to me. Treating religious ideas neutrally, nonreligiously,

simply as factors in society, won't do either, for that would likely offend some

adherents. The textbooks' solution is to leave out religious ideas entirely.21

Quoting John Brown's courtroom words—"whatsoever I would that men should

do to me, I should do even so to them"—would violate the taboo.

Ideological contradiction is terribly important in history. Ideas have

power. The ideas that motivated John Brown and the example he set lived on

long after his body lay a-moldering in the grave. Yet American history text-

books give us no way to understand the role of ideas in our past.

Conceivably, textbook authors ignore John Brown's ideas because in their

eyes his violent acts make him ineligible for sympathetic consideration. When

we turn from Brown to Abraham Lincoln, we shift from one of the most contro-

versial to one of the most venerated figures in American history. Textbooks

describe Abraham Lincoln with sympathy, of course. Nonetheless they also min-

imize his ideas, especially on the subject of race. In life Abraham Lincoln wres-

tled with the race question more openly than any other president except

perhaps Thomas Jefferson, and, unlike Jefferson, Lincoln's actions sometimes

matched his words. Most of our textbooks say nothing about Lincoln's internal

debate. If they did show it, what teaching devices they would become! Students

would see that speakers modify their ideas to appease and appeal to different

audiences, so we cannot simply take their statements literally. If textbooks rec-

ognized Lincoln's racism, students would learn that racism not only affects Ku

Klux Klan extremists but has been "normal" throughout our history. And as they

watched Lincoln struggle with himself to apply America's democratic principles

across the color line, students would see how ideas can develop and a person

can grow.

In conversation, Lincoln, like most whites of his century, referred to

blacks as "niggers." When responding 10 Stephen Douglas's race-baiting in the

Lin coin-Douglas debates, Lincoln himself sometimes descended into explicit

white supremacy: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality

between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the

two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together

172 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that

there must be a difference, I as well as Judge Douglas am in favor of the race to

which I belong, having the superior position,"" Only one textbook quotes [his

passage; the rest censor Lincoln's racist ideas, as they censored Douglas's.;J

Lincoln's attitudes about race were more complicated than Douglas's,

however. The day after Douglas declared for white supremacy in Chicago,

saying the issues were "distinctly drawn," Lincoln replied and indeed drew the

issue distinctly: "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Indepen-

dence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making excep-

tions to it—where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why

does not another say it does not mean some other man? If that Declaration is

not . . . true, let us tear it out! [Cries of "no, nol"] Let us stick to it then, let us

stand firmly by it then."24 No textbook quotes this passage, and every book but

one leaves out Lincoln's thundering summation of what his debates with Dou-

glas were really about: "That is the issue that will continue in this country when

these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal

struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the

world,"25

Lincoln's realization of the basic humanity of African Americans may have

derived from his father, who moved the family to Indiana partly because he dis-

liked the racial slavery that was sanctioned in Kentucky, Or it may stem from an

experience Lincoln had on a steamboat trip in 1841, which he recalled years

later when writing to his friend Josh Speed: "You may remember, as I well do,

that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or twelve

slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was continual torment to me,

and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-

border." Lincoln concluded that the memory still had "the power of making me

miserable."26 No textbook quotes this letter.

As early as 1835, in his first term in the Illinois House of Representatives,

Lincoln cast one of only five votes opposing a resolution that condemned aboli-

tionists. Textbooks imply that Lincoln was nominated for president in I860

because he was a moderate on slavery, but, in fact, Republicans chose Lincoln

over front-runner William H. Seward partly because of Lincoln's "rock-solid

antislavery beliefs," while Seward was considered a compromiser."

As president, Lincoln understood the importance of symbolic leadership

in improving race relations. For the first time the United States exchanged

ambassadors with Haiti and Liberia. In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White

House staff, which initiated a desegregation of" the federal government that

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 173

lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers,

notably Frederick Douglass, He also tontinued to wrestle with his own racism, \

asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed

"colonizing") African Americans to Africa or Latin America,

Six of the twelve textbooks mention that Lincoln opposed slavery. Two

even quote his 1864 letter; "If slavery isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong."28

However, most textbook authors take pains to separate Lincoln from undue

idealism about slavery. They venerate Lincoln mainly because he "saved the

Union," By far their favorite statement of Lincoln's, quoted or paraphrased by

nine of the twelve books, is his letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley's

New York Tribune;

If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, 1 would do it; and

if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, 1 would do it; and if 1 could

save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, 1 would also do that.

What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it

helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because 1 do not

believe it would help to save the Union. . . . 1 have here stated tny pur-

pose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modifica-

tion of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere could

be free.

Most textbooks don't let students see all of the above quotation; seven of the

nine leave out the last sentence,29 Thus they present a Lincoln who was morally

indifferent to slavery and certainly did not care about black people. Ironically,

this is also the Lincoln whom black nationalists present to African Americans to

persuade them to stop thinking well of him.'0

Every historian knows that the fragment of Lincoln's letter to Greeley that

most textbooks supply does not represent his intent regarding slavery. Lincoln

wrote the letter to seek support for the war from Northern supporters of slavery.

He aimed it not at Greeley, who wanted slavery to end, but at antiwar Democ-

rats, antiblack Irish Americans, governors of the border states, and the many

Republicans who opposed emancipating the slaves. Saving the Union had never

been Lincoln's sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-

hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve

the Union by preserving slavery forever." Every textbook writer knows that a

month before Lincoln wrote to Greeley, he had presented the Emancipation

Proclamation to his cabinet as an irreversible decision, but no textbook makes

174 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

this clear. Not one explains the political context or the intended audience for

the Greeley letter. Nor does a single textbook quote Lincoln's encouragement

that same summer to Unitarian ministers to "go home and try to bring the

people to your views," because "we shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the

country, and more." If they did, students might understand that indifference was

not Lincoln's only response to the issue of slavery in America.

When textbook's discuss the Emancipation Proclamation, they explain

Lincoln's actions in realpolitik terras. "By September 1862," says Triumph of the

American Nation, "Lincoln had reluctantly decided that a war fought at least

partly to free the slaves would win European support and lessen the danger of

foreign intervention on the side of the Confederacy." Triumph has forgotten its

own earlier judgment: "President Lincoln had long believed slavery to be

wrong." For if Lincoln opposed slavery, why would he emancipate "reluctantly"

and merely for reasons related to international politics?

To be sure, international and domestic political concerns did impinge on

Abraham Lincoln, master politician that he was. But so did considerations of

right and wrong. Political analysts then and now believe that Lincoln's Sep-

tember 1862 announcement of emancipation cost Republicans the control of

Congress the following November, because Northern white public opinion

would not evolve to favor black freedom for another year.32 Textbook authors

suppress the possibility that Lincoln acted at least in part because he thought it

was right. From Indian wars to slavery to Vietnam, textbook authors not only

sidestep putting questions of right and wrong to our past actions but even avoid

acknowledging that Americans of the time did so.

Abraham Lincoln was one of the great masters of the English language.

Perhaps more than any other president he invoked and manipulated powerful

symbols in his speeches to move public opinion, often on the subject of race

relations and slavery. Textbooks, in keeping with their habit of telling every-

thing in the authorial monotone, dribble out Lincoln's words three and four at a

time. The only complete speech or letter any of them provide is the Gettysburg

Address, and only four of the twelve textbooks dispense even that. Lincoln's

three paragraphs at Gettysburg comprise one of the most important speeches

ever given in America and take up only a fourth of a page in the textbooks that

include them. Nonetheless five books do not even mention the speech, while

three others provide only the last sentence or phrase from it: "government of the

people, by the people, for the people."

Lincoln understood that fighting a war for freedom was ideologically

more satisfying than fighting simply to preserve a morally neutral Union. To

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 175

save the Union, it was necessary to find rationales for the war other than "to

save the Union." At Gettysburg he provided one.

Lincoln was a fine lawyer who knew full well that the United States was

conceived in slavery, for the Constitution specifically treats slavery in at least

three places. Nevertheless he began, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers

brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedi-

cated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Thus Lincoln wrapped

the Union cause in the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, which

emphasized freedom even while many of its signers were slaveowners.35 In so

doing, Lincoln was at the same time using the Declaration to redefine the Union

cause, suggesting that it ultimately implied equal rights for all Americans,

regardless of race.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war," Lincoln continued, "testing

whether that nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long

endure." Again, Lincoln knew better: by 1863 other nations had joined us in

democracy. For that matter, every European nation and most American nations

had outlawed slavery. How did our civil war test whether they could endure?

Here Lincoln was wrapping the Union cause in the old "last best hope of

mankind" cloak, a secular version of the idea of a special covenant between the

United States and God.i4 Although bad history, such rhetoric makes for great

speeches. The president thus appealed to the antiwar Democrats of the North to

support the war effort for the good of all mankind.

After invoking a third powerful symbol—-"the brave men, living and

dead, who struggled here"—-Lincoln closed by identifying the cause for which

so many had died: "that this nation, under Cod, shall have a new birth of

freedom." To what freedom did he refer? Black freedom, of course. As Lincoln

well knew, the war itself was undermining slavery, for what began as a war to

save the Union increasingly had become a war for black freedom. Citizens at the

time understood Lincoln perfectly. Indeed, throughout this period Americans

purchased copies of political speeches, read them, discussed issues, and voted at

rates that now seem impossibly high. The Chicago Times, a Democratic news-

paper, denounced the address precisely because of "the proposition that all men

are created equal." The Union dead, claimed the Times, "were men possessing

too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals, or were entitled

to equal privileges."'5

Textbooks need not explain Lincoln's words at Gettysburg as I have done.

The Gettysburg Address is rich enough to survive various analyses.5" But of the

four books that do reprint the speech, three merely put it in a box by itself in a

176 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

corner of the page. Only Li/e andLiberty asks intelligent questions about it.57 As a

result, I have yet to meet a high school graduate who has devoted any time to

thinking about the Gettysburg Address,

Even worse is textbook treatment of Lincoln's Second Inaugural. In this

towering speech, one of the masterpieces of American oratory, Lincoln specifi-

cally identified differences over slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War,

then in its fourth bloody year.)B "If we shall suppose that American slavery is

one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but

which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove,

and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to

those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from

those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to

him?" Lincoln continued in this vein by invoking the doctrine of predestination,

a more vital element of the nation's idea system then than now: "Fondly do we

hope-—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily

pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the

bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and

until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn

with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said,

'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" This last is an

astonishing sentence. Its length alone astounds. Politicians don't talk like that

nowadays. When students read this passage aloud, slowly and deliberately, they

do not fail to perceive it as a searing indictment of America's sins against black

people. The Civil War was by far the most devastating experience in our

nation's history Yet we had it coming, Lincoln says here. And in his rhetorical

context, sin or crime, not mere tragedy, is the fitting and proper term. Indeed,

this indictment of U.S. race relations echoes John Brown's last note: "I, John

Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be

purged away, but with Blood.""

Lincoln's Second Inaugural made such an impact on Americans that when

the president was shot, a month later, farmers in New York and Ohio greeted

his funeral train with placards bearing its phrases. But only The United Slates-—A

History of the Republic includes any of the material quoted above. Five other text-

books restrict their quotation to the speech's final phrase, about binding up the

nation's wounds "with malice toward none," The other six textbooks ignore the

speech altogether.

Like Helen Keller's concern about the injustice of social class, Lincoln's

concern about the crime of racism may appear unseemly to textbook authors.

JOHN BROWN AND A B R A H A M L INCOLN • 177

The strange career of the log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born symbolizes in a way what textbooks nave done to Lincoln. The actual cabin fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to research by D. T. Pitcaithley, tbe new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax], and was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where, reassembled, it still stands. The cabin also became a children's toy; Lincoln Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son John in 1920, came with instructions on how to build both Lincoln's log cabin and Uncle Tom's cabinl The cabin still makes its arche- typal appearance in our textbooks, signifying the rags to riches legend of Abraham Lin- coln's upward mobility. No wonder one college student could only say of him, in a much-repeated biooper, "He was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands."

Must we remember Lincoln for ibat? Let's leave it out! Such an approach to Lin-

coln might be called the Walt Disney interpretation: Disney's exhibit at the

1964 New York World's Fair featured an animated sculpture of Lincoln that

spoke for several minutes, choosing "his" words carefully to say nothing about

slavery.

Having disconnected Abraham Lincoln from considerations of right and

wrong, several textbooks present the Civil War the same way. In reality, United

States soldiers, who began righting to save the Union and not much more,

ended by righting for all the vague but portentous ideas in the Gettysburg

Address, From 1862 on, Union armies sang "Battle Cry of Freedom," composed

by George Root in the summer of that year:

178 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

We will we/come to our numbers the loyal true and brave,

Shooting the battle cry of freedom.

And although he may be poor, no! a man shall be a slave.

Shouting she battle cry of freedom.'"1

Surely no one can sing these lines even today without perceiving that both

freedom and the preservation of the Union were war aims of the United States

and without feeling some of the power of that potent combination. This power

is what textbooks omit: they give students no inkling that ideas matter.

The actions of African Americans played a big role in challenging white

racism. Slaves fled to Union lines. After they were allowed to fight, the contribu-

tions of black troops to the war effort made it harder for whites to deny that

blacks were fully human.1" A Union captain wrote to his wife, "A great many

[whites] have the idea that the entire Negro race are vastly their inferiors—a few

weeks of calm unprejudiced life here would disabuse them, I think—I have a

more elevated opinion of their abilities than I ever had before."42 Unlike histo-

rians of a few decades ago, today's textbook authors realize that trying to pre-

sent the war without the actions of African Americans makes for bad history. All

twelve current textbooks at least mention that more than 180,000 blacks fought

Triumpli of the American Nation includes this evocative photograph of the crew of the USS Hunchback in the Civil War. Such racial integration disappeared during the nadir of race relations in the United States, from 1890 to 1920.

J O H N B R O W N A M D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N . 179

in the Union army and navy. Several of the textbooks include an illustration of

African American soldiers and describe the unequal pay they received until late

in the war.4' Discovering American History mentions that Union soldiers trapped

behind Confederate lines found slaves to be "of invaluable assistance." Only The

United Stales—A History of the Republic, however, takes the next step by pointing

out how the existence and success of black troops decreased white racism.

The antiracist repercussions of the Civil War were particularly apparent in

the border states. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Con-

federacy. It left slavery untouched in Unionist Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky,

and Missouri. But the war did not. The status of planters became ambiguous:

owning black people was no longer what a young white man aspired to do or

what a young white woman aspired to accomplish by marriage. Maryland was a

slave state with considerable support for the Confederacy at the onset of the

war. But Maryland held for the Union and sent thousands of soldiers to defend

Washington. What happened next provides a "positive" example of the effects of

cognitive dissonance: for Maryland whites to fight a war against slaveowners

while allowing slavery within their own state created a tension that demanded

resolution. In 1864 the increasingly persuasive abolitionists in Maryland

brought the issue to a vote. The tally went narrowly against emancipation until

the large number of absentee ballots were counted. By an enormous margin,

these ballots were for freedom. Who cast most absentee ballots in 1864 in

Maryland? Soldiers and sailors, of course. Just as these soldiers marched into

battle with "John Brown's Body" upon their lips, so their minds had changed to

favor the freedom that their actions were forging.44

As noted in the previous chapter, songs such as "Nigger Doodle Dandy"

reflect the racist tone of the Democrats' presidential campaign in 1864. How did

Republicans counter? In part, they sought white votes by being antiracist. The

Republican campaign, boosted by military victories in the fall of ] 864, proved

effective. The Democrats' overt appeals to racism failed, and antiracist Republi-

cans triumphed almost everywhere. One New York Republican wrote, "The

change of opinion on this slavery question . . . is a great and historic fact. Who

could have predicted . . , this great and blessed revolution?"45 People around the

OPPOSITE: This is the October 15, 1864, centerfold of Harper's magazine, which throughout the nineteenth century was the mouthpiece of the Republican party. The words are from the Democratic platform. The illustrations, by young Thomas Nast, show shortcomings in the Democratic plan. Ore could hardly imagine a political party today seeking white votes on the basis of such racial idealism.

180 - L I E S M V T E A C H E R T O L D M E

The Democratic platform began innocuously enough: "We will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the UNION under the CONSTITUTION as the ONLY solid foundation of our

STRENGTH, SECURITY, and HAPPINESS as a PEOPLE," But Mast's illustration was a knockout: he shows siavecatchers and dogs pursuing hapless runaways into a swamp. He jolts the reader to exclaim. What aoout them? These are people too!

world supported the Union because of its ideology. Forty thousand Canadians

alone, some of them black, came south to volunteer for the Union cause.40

Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contra-

dictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began, John Brown knew

that masters secretly feared that their slaves might revolt, even as they assured

abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid

prompted such an outcry in the South was that slaveowners feared their slaves

might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the "Black Republicans"

who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them

toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave-

owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt.

White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white

supremacy. According to Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confed-

eracy: "Our new government's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon

the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery—sub-

ordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition." Confed-

erate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays

182 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

Illustrating "PUBLIC LIBERTY and PRIVATE RIGHT," Nast shows the New York City draft riot of 1863: white thugs are exercising their "right" to beat and kill African Americans, including a child held upside down.

into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black

people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery. Confed-

erates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.47 Throughout

the war, "the protection of slavery had been and still remained the central core

of Confederate purpose."48 Textbooks downplay all this, probably because they

do not want to offend white Southerners loday.

The safeguarding of states' rights, often mentioned as a motive for the

establishment of the Confederacy, was for the most part merely an accompanying

rationale. Historically, whatever faction has been out of power in America has

pushed for states' rights. Slaveowners were delighted when Supreme Court Chief

Justice Taney decided in 1857 that throughout the nation, irrespective of the

wishes of state or territorial governments, blacks had no rights that whites must

respect. Slaveowners pushed President Buchanan to use federal power to legit-

imize slaveholding in Kansas the next year. Only after they lost control of the

executive branch in the 1860 election did they advocate limiting federal power.40

As the war continued, neither states' rights nor white supremacy proved

adequate to the task of inspiring a new nation. As early as December 1862,

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 183

Pres. Jefferson Davis denounced states' rights as destructive to the Confederacy,

The mountainous counties in western Virginia bolted to the Union. Confederate

troops had to occupy east Tennessee to keep it from emulating West Virginia,

Winn Parish, Louisiana, refused to secede from the Union. Winston County,

Alabama, declared itself che Republic of Winston. Unionist farmers and

woodsmen in Jones County, Mississippi, declared the Free State of Jones, Every

Confederate state except South Carolina supplied a regiment or at least a com-

pany of white soldiers to the Union army, as well as many black recruits. Armed

guerrilla actions plagued every Confederate state. (With the exception of Mis-

souri, and the 1863 New York City draft riots, few Union states were afflicted

with such problems.) It became dangerous for Confederates to travel in parts of

Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. The war was fought

not just between North and South but between Unionists and Confederates

within the Confederacy (and Missouri).50 By February 1864 President Davis

despaired: "Public meetings of treasonable character, in the name of state sover-

eignty, are being held." Thus stales' rights as an ideology was contradictory and

could not mobilize the white South for the long haul.

The racial ideas of the Confederate states proved even less serviceable to

the war effort. According to Confederate ideology, blacks liked slavery; never-

theless, to avert revolts and runaways, the Confederate states passed the "twenty

nigger law," exempting from military conscription one white man as overseer for

every twenty slaves. Throughout the war Confederates withheld as much as a

third of their fighting forces from the front lines and scattered them throughout

areas with large slave populations to prevent slave uprisings.^1 When the United

States allowed African Americans to enlist, Confederates were forced by their

ideology to assert that it would not work-—blacks would hardly fight like white

men. The undeniable bravery of the 54th Massachusetts and other black regi-

ments disproved the idea of black inferiority. Then came the incongruity of truly

beastly behavior by Southern whites toward captured black soldiers, such as the

infamous Fort Pillow massacre by troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest, who

crucified black prisoners on tent frames and then burned them alive, all in the

name of preserving white civilization.52

Contradiction piled upon contradiction. After the fall of Vicksburg, Presi-

dent Davis proposed to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy, promising them

freedom to win their cooperation. But if servitude was the best condition for the

slave, protested supporters of slavery, how could freedom be a reward? To win

foreign recognition, other Confederate leaders proposed to abolish slavery alto-

gether. Some newspaper editors concurred. "Although slavery is one of the prin-

184 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

ciples that we started to fight for," said the Jackson Mississippian, if it mim be jet-

tisoned to achieve our "separate nationality, away with it!" A month before

Appomattox, the Confederate Congress passed a measure to enroll black troops,

showing how the war had elevated even slaveowners' estimations of black abili-

ties and also revealing complete ideological disarray. What, after all, would the

new black soldiers be fighting far? Slavery? Secession? What, for that matter,

would white Southern troops be fighting for, once blacks were also armed? As

Howell Cobb of Georgia said, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole

theory of slavery is wrong."55

In part owing to these contradictions, some Confederate soldiers switched

sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to

the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because

thousands of white Southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost

two-thirds of the Confederate army opposing Sherman disappeared through

desertion,54 Eighteen thousand slaves also joined Sherman, so many that the

army had to turn some away. Compare these facts with the portrait common in

our textbooks of Sherman's marauders looting their way through a united

South!

The increasing ideological confusion in the Confederate states, coupled

with the increasing ideological strength of the United States, helps explain the

Union victory. "Even with all the hardships," Carleton Deals has noted, "the

South up to the very end still had great resources and manpower." Many nations

and people have continued to fight with far inferior means and weapons. Beals

thinks that the Confederacy's ideological contradictions were its gravest liabili-

ties, ultimately causing its defeat. He shows how the Confederate army was dis-

banding by the spring of 1865 in Texas and other states, even in the absence of

Union approaches. On the home front too, as Jefferson Davis put it, "The zeal of

the people is failing."55

Five textbooks tell how the issue of states' rights interfered with the Con-

federate cause,5* Only The American Adventure gives students a clue of any other

ideological weakness of the Confederacy or strength of the Union. Adventure

tells how slavery broke down when Union armies came near and that many

poor whites in the South did not support the war because they felt they would

be fighting for slaveowners. Ac/venterf also quotes original sources on the evolu-

tion of Union war aims and asks, "How would such attitudes affect the conduct

and outcome of the war?" No other textbook mentions ideas or ideologies as a

strength or weakness of either side. The Civil War was about something, after

all. Textbooks should tell us what."

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 185

This silence has a history. Throughout this century textbooks have pre-

sented the Civil War as a struggle between "virtually identical peoples." This is

all part of the unspoken agreement, reached during the nadir of race relations in

the United States (1890-1920), that whites in the South were as American as

whites in the North.58 White Northerners and white Southerners reconciled on

the backs of African Americans, while the abolitionists became the bad guys.

In the 1920s the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Union

veterans, complained that American history textbooks presented the Civil War

with "no suggestion" ihat the Union cause was right. Apparently the United

Daughters of the Confederacy carried more weight with publishers," The UDC

was even able to erect a statue to the Confederate dead in Wisconsin, claiming

they "died to repel unconstitutional invasion, to protect the rights reserved to

the people, to perpetuate the sovereignty of the states"60 Not a word about

slavery, or even disunion.

History textbooks still present Union and Confederate sympathizers as

equally idealistic. The North fought to hold the Union together, while the

Southern states fought, according to The American Way, "for the preservation of

their rights and freedom to decide for themselves." Nobody fought to preserve

racial slavery; nobody fought to end it. As one result, unlike the Nazi swastika,

which lies disgraced, even in the North whites still proudly display the Stars

and Bars of the Confederacy on den walls, license plates, T-shirts, and high

school logos. Even some (white) Northerners vaguely regret the defeat of the

"lost cause." It is as if racism against blacks could be remembered with

nostalgia.61 In this sense, long after Appomattox, the Confederacy finally won.

Five days after Appomattox, President Lincoln was murdered. His mar-

tyrdom pushed Union ideology one step further. Even whites who had opposed

emancipation now joined to call Lincoln the great emancipator.62 Under Repub-

lican leadership, the nation entered Reconstruction, a period of continuing ideo-

logical conflict.

At first Confederates tried to maintain prewar conditions through new

laws, modeled after their slave codes and antebellum restrictions on free blacks.

Mississippi was the first state to pass these draconian "Black Codes." They did

not work, however. The Civil War had changed American ideology. The new

antiracism forged in its flames would dominate Northern thinking for a decade.

The Chicago Tribune, the most important organ of the Republican party in the

Midwest, responded angrily: "We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men

of the North will convert the state of Mississippi into a frog pond before they

will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our

186 • LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves."65 Thus black civil rights

again became the central issue in the congressional elections of 1866. "Support

Congress and You Support the Negro," said the Democrats in a campaign broad-

side featuring a disgusting caricature of an African American. "Sustain the Presi-

dent and You Protect the White Man."64 Northern voters did not buy it. They

returned "radical" Republicans to Congress in a thunderous repudiation of Pres.

Andrew Johnson's accommodation of the ex-Confederates. Even more than in

1864, when Republicans swept Congress in 1866 antiracism became the policy

of the nation, agreed to by most of its voters. Over Johnson's veto, Congress and

the slates passed the Fourteenth Amendment, making all persons citizens and

guaranteeing them "the equal protection of the laws." The passage, on behalf of

blacks, of this shining jewel of our Constitution shows how idealistic were the

officeholders of the Republican Party, particularly when we consider that similar

legislation on behalf of women cannot be passed today.65

During Reconstruction a surprising variety of people went to the new

civilian "front lines" and worked among the newly freed African Americans in

the South. Many were black Northerners, including several graduates of Oberlin

College, This passage from a letter by Edmonia Highgate, a white woman who

went south to teach school, describes her life in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana.

The majority of my pupils come from plantations, three, four and even

eight miles distant. So anxious are they to learn that they walk these

distances so early in the morning as never to be tardy.

There has been much opposition to the School. Twice I have been

shot at in my room. My night school scholars have been shot but none

killed. A week ago an aged freedman just across the way was shot so

badly as to break his arm and leg. The rebels here threatened to burn

down the school and house in which I board yet they have not materi-

ally harmed us. The nearest military protection is 200 miles distant at

New Orleans.6*

Some Union soldiers stayed in the South when they were demobilized.

Some Northern Republican would-be politicians moved south to organize their

parry in a region where it had not been a factor before the war. Some went

hoping to win office by election or appointment. Many abolitionists continued

their commitment by working in the Freedman's Bureau and priva[e organiza-

tions to help blacks obtain full civil and political rights. In terms of party affilia-

tion, almost all of these persons were Republicans; otherwise, they were a

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 187

The white woman at left, whom textbooks would call a "carpetbagger." could hardlyj expect to grow rich teaching school hear Vicksbutg, where this illustration was done. | This woman risked her life to bring basic literacy to African American children and'j adu Its d u ri ng Reco nst ru ctio n.

diverse group. Still, all but one of the twelve textbooks routinely use the dis-

graceful old tag carpeibaggers, without noting its bias, lo describe Northern white]

Republicans who lived in the South during Reconstruction."

Many whites who were born in the South supported Reconstruction.!

Every Southern state boasted Unionists, some of whom had volunteered for ilic

Union army. They now became Republicans. Some former Confederates,!

including even Gen. James Longstreet, second in command under Lee at Gettys-.

burg, became Republicans because they had grown convinced that equality for |

blacks was morally right. Robert Flournoy, a Mississippi planter, had raised a

188 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

company of Confederate soldiers but then resigned his commission and

returned home because "there was a conflict in my conscience." During the war

he was once arrested for encouraging blacks to flee to Union lines. During

Reconstruction he helped organize the Republican party, published a newspaper,

Equd Rights, and argued for desegregating the University of Mississippi and the

new state's public school system.hs Republican policies, including free public

education, never before available in the South to children of either race, con-

vinced some poor whites to vote for the party Many former Whigs became

Republicans rather than join their old nemesis, the Democrats. Some white

Southerners became Republicans because they were convinced that black suf—

frage was an accomplished fact; they preferred winning political power with

blacks on their side to losing. Others became Republicans to make connections

or win contracts from the new Republican state governments. Of the 113 white

Republican congressmen from the South during Reconstruction, 53 were South-

erners, many of them from wealthy families.69 In sum, this is another diverse

group, amounting to between one-fourth and one-third of the white population

and in some counties a majority. Nevertheless all but one textbook still routinely

apply the disgraceful old tag scalawags to Southern white Republicans,70

Carpetbaggers and scalawags are terms coined by white Southern Democrats

to defame their opponents as illegitimate. Reconstruction-era newspapers in

Mississippi, at least, used Republicans far more often than aaperbaggffi or

scdlawags. Carpeiba^er implies that the dregs of Northern society, carrying all

their belongings in a carpetbag, had come down to make their fortunes off the

"prostrate [white] south." Scalawag means "scoundrel." Employing these terms

would be appropriate if textbook authors made clear that they were terms of the

time and explained who used them and in what circumstances. But textbooks

incorporate them as if they were proper historical labels, with no quotation

marks, in preference to neutral terms such as Reconstruction Republicans.

Consider these sentences from The United States—A History of the Republic:

"In Mississippi the carpetbaggers controlled politics. In Tennessee the scalawags

did." Or this from The American Tradition: "Despite southern white claims to the

contrary, the Radical regimes were not dominated by blacks, but by scalawags

and carpetbaggers." In reality, "scalawags" were Southern whites, of course, but

this sentence writes them out of the white South, just as die-hard Confederates

were wont to do. Moreover, referring to perfectly legal governments as "regimes"

is a way of delegitimizing them, a technique Tradition applies to no other

administration, not even the 1836 Republic of Texas or the 1893 Dole

pineapple takeover in Hawaii,

J O H N B R O W N A M D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N • 189

To be sure, newer editions of American history textbooks no longer

denounce Northerners who participated in Southern politics and society as "dis-

honest adventurers whose only thought was to feather their own nests at the

expense of their fellows," as Rise of the American Nation put it in 1961. Again, the

civil rights movement has allowed us to rethink our history. Having watched

Northerners, black and white, go south to help blacks win civil rights in the

1960s, today's textbook authors display more sympathy for Northerners who

worked with Southern blacks during Reconstruction.71 Here is the paragraph on

"carpetbaggers" from Rise's successor, Triumph of the American Nation:

The carpetbaggers came for many different reasons. Some sincerely

wanted to help the freed slaves exercise their newly acquired rights.

Some hoped to get themselves elected to political office. Some came to

make their fortunes by acquiring farmland or by starling new busi-

nesses. However, some came for reasons of pure greed or fraud, Horace

Greeley the editor of the New York Tribune, wrote that such carpetbag-

gers were "stealing and plundering, many of them with both arms

around the Negroes, and their hands in their rear pockets, seeing if

they cannot pick a paltry dollar out of them."

And here is the paragraph on "scalawags":

Some of these native-born southerners had the best of motives. Having

opposed slavery and secession, they had sympathized with the Union

during the war. Now they believed that the best way to restore peace

and prosperity to the South and to the nation was to forgive and

forget. However, others were selfish and ambitious individuals who

seized any opportunity to advance their own fortunes at the expense of

their neighbors.

The new treatment is kinder. The authors are trying to be positive about white

Republicans, even if they cannot resist ending each paragraph by invoking

greed. Of course, textbook authors might use the notion of private gain to dis-

parage every textbook hero from Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims

through George Washington to Jackie Robinson. They don't, though. Text-

books attribute selfish motives only to characters with whom they have little

sympathy, such as the idealists in Reconstruction, The negatives then stick in the

mind, cemented by the catchy pejoratives carpetbaggers and scalawags, while the

190 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

qualifying phrases—"some sincerely wanted ..."—are likely to be forgotten. No

textbook introduces us to idealists such as Edmonia Highgate, facing down

white violence, or Robert Flournoy, casting his lot with black Republicans

because he believed in justice. Everyone who supported black rights in the

South during Reconstruction did so at personal risk. At the beginning of

Reconstruction, simply to walk to school to teach could be life-threaten ing.

Toward the end of the era, there were communities in which simply to vote

Republican was life-threatening. While some Reconstructionists undoubtedly

achieved economic gain, it was a dangerous way to make a buck. Textbooks

need to show the risk, and the racial idealism that prompted most of the people

who took it,'2

Instead, textbooks deprive us of our racial idealists, from Highgate and

Flournoy, whom they omit, through Brown, whom they make fanatic, to Lincoln,

whose idealism they flatten. In the course of events, Lincoln would come to

accomplish on a national scale what Brown tried to accomplish at Harpers Ferry:

helping African Americans mobilize to fight slavery. Finally, like John Brown,

Abraham Lincoln became a martyr and a hero. Seven million Americans, almost

one-third of the entire Union population, stood to watch his funeral train pass,73

African Americans mourned with particular intensity. Gideon Welles, secretary of

the navy, walked the streets of Washington at dawn an hour before the president

breaihed his last and described the scene: "The colored people especially—and

there were at this time more of them perhaps, than of whites—were over-

whelmed with grief." Welles went on to tell how all day long "on the avenue in

from of the White House were several hundred black people, mostly women and

children, weeping for their loss," a crowd that "did not appear to diminish

through the whole of that cold, wet day" In their grief African Americans were

neither misguided nor childlike. When the hour came for dealing with slavery, as

Lincoln had surmised, he had done his duty and it had cost his life.74 Abraham

Lincoln, racism and all, was blacks' legitimate hero, as earlier John Brown had

been. In a sense, Brown and Lincoln were even killed for the same deed: arming

black people for their own liberation. People around the world mourned the

passing of both men,

Bui when I ask ray (white) college students on the first day of class who

their heroes are in American history, only one or two in a hundred pick

Lincoln," Even those who choose Lincoln know only that he was "really

great"—they don't know why. Their ignorance makes sense-—after all, text-

books present Abraham Lincoln almost devoid of content. No students choose

John Brown. Not one has ever named a white abolitionist, a Reconstruction

J O H N B R O W N A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L / S

Republican, or a civil rights martyr. Yet these same students feel sympathy with

America's struggle to improve race relations. Among their more popular choices

are African Americans, from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to Rosa

Parks and Malcolm X.

While John Brown was on trial, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of

Brown's place in history. Phillips foresaw that slavery was a cause whose time

was passing, and he asked "the American people" of the future, when slavery

was long dead in "the civilization of the twentieth century," this question:

"When that day comes, what will be thought of these first martyrs, who teach us

how to live and how to die?"7fi Phillips meant the question rhetorically. He

never dreamed that Americans would take no pleasure in those who had helped

lead the nation to abolish slavery, or that textbooks would label Brown's small

band misguided if not fanatic and Brown himself possibly mad.77

Antiracism is one of America's great gifts to the world. Its relevance

extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to "a new birth of freedom"

after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each

century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women's

rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying.

Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of

oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our aboli-

In Vicksburg, Mississippi, these African Americans gathered at the courthouse to hear the news of Lincoln's death confirmed, to express their grief, and perhaps to seek pro- tection in the face of an uncertain future.

192 - L I E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

tionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticom-

munists in East Germany were marked by singing "We Shall Overcome." Ira-

nians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther

King, Jr., to overthrow their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh's desk in Hanoi on

the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes whose ideas

inspired the students in Tienanmen Square and whose words spilled from their

lips was Abraham Lincoln.78 Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are

admired around the globe, seem (o have lost these men and women as heroes.

Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that we might again value

our own idealism.

JOHN BROWN A N D A B R A H A M L I N C O L N . 193

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and

could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of

capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

—Abraham Lincoln1

I had. once believed that we were all masters of our fate—that we could mould our

lives into any form we pleased. . . . 1 had overcome deafness and blindness suffi-

ciently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could corne 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. . . . I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of

everyone.

—Helen Keller1

Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy

enough to eat.

—Will Rogers, 1931

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its

dominant class,

—Kwame Nkrumah3

7. The Land of Opportunity

H igh school students have eyes, ears, and television sets {all too many havetheir own TV sets), so they know a lot about relative privilege in America. They measure their family's social position against that of other families, and

their community's position against other communities. Middle-class students,

especially, know little about how the American class structure works, however,

and nothing at all about how it has changed over time. These students do not

leave high school merely ignorant of the workings of the class structure; they

come out as terrible sociologists. "Why are people poor?" I have asked first-year

college students. Or, if their own class position is one of relative privilege, "Why

is your family well off?" The answers I've received, to characterize them chari-

tably, are half-formed and naive. The students blame the poor for not being suc-

cessful.4 They have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal

in America and no notion that social structure pushes people around, influ-

encing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion.

High school history textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of

affairs. Some textbooks cover certain high points of labor history, such as the

1894 Pullman strike near Chicago that President Cleveland broke with federal

troops, or the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 women in New York

City, but the most recent event mentioned in most books Is the Taft-Hartley Act

of fifty years ago. No book mentions the Hormel meat-packers' strike in the

mid-1980s or the air traffic controllers strike broken by President Reagan. Nor

do textbooks describe any continuing issues facing labor, such as the growth of

multinational corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas. With such omis-

sions, textbook authors can construe labor history as something that happened

long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago. It logically

follows that unions appear anachronistic. The idea that they might be necessary

in order for workers to have a voice in the workplace goes unstated.

Textbooks' treatments of events in labor history are never anchored in any

analysis of social class,5 This amounts to delivering the footnotes instead of the

This photograph of a sweatshop in New York's Chinatown, taken in the early 1990s, illustrates that the working class still works in America, under conditions not so dif- ferent from a century ago, often in the same locations.

lecture! Six of Che dozen high school American history textbooks I examined

contain no index listing at all for "social class," "social stratification,11 "class struc-

ture," "income distribution," "inequality," or any conceivably related topic. Not

one book lists "upper class," "working class," or "lower class." Two of the text-

books list "middle class," but only to assure students that America is a middle-

class country, "Except for slaves, most of the colonists were members of the

'middling ranks,'" says Land of Promise, and nails home the point that we are a

middle-class country by asking students to "Describe three 'middle-class' values

that united free Americans of all classes." Several of the textbooks note the

explosion of middle-class suburbs after World War II. Talking about the middle

class is hardly equivalent to discussing social stratification, however; in fact, as

Gregory Mantsios has pointed out, "such references appear to be acceptable pre-

cisely because they mute class differences."6

196 . L I E S M Y T E A C H E R T O L D M E

Stressing how middle-class we all are is particularly problematic today,

because the proportion of households earning between 75 percent and 125 per-

cent of the median income has fallen steadily since 1967. The Reagan-Bush

administrations accelerated this shrinkage of the middle class, and most families

who left its ranks fell rather than rose,7 This is the kind of historical trend one

would think history books would take as appropriate subject matter, but only

four of the twelve books in my sample provide any analysis of social stratifica-

tion in the United Stales. Even these fragmentary analyses are set mostly in

colonial America. Land of Promise lives up to its reassuring title by heading its

discussion of social class "Social Mobility." "One great difference between colo-

nial and European society was that the colonists had more social mobility,"

echoes The American Tradition. "In contrast with contemporary Europe, eighteenth-

century America was a shining (and of equality and opportunity-—with the

notorious exception of slavery," chimes in The American Pageant. Although The

Challenge of freedom identifies three social classes—upper, middle, and lower—

among whites in colonial society, compared to Europe "there was greater social

mobility"

Never mind that the most violent class conflicts in American history-

Bacon's Rebellion and Shays's Rebellion—took place in and just after colonial

times. Textbooks still say that colonial society was relatively classless and

marked by upward mobility And things have gotten rosier since. "By 1815," The

Challenge of Freedom assures us, two classes had withered away and "America was

a country of middle class people and of middle class goals." This book returns

repeatedly, at intervals of every' fifty years or so, to the theme of how open

opportunity is in America. "In the years after 1945, social mobility— movement

from one social class to another—became more widespread in America," Chal-

lenge concludes, "This meant that people had a better chance to move upward in

society" The stress on upward mobility is striking. There is almost nothing in

any of these textbooks about class inequalities or barriers of any kind to social

mobility. "What conditions made it possible for poor white immigrants to

become richer in the colonies?" Land of Promise asks. "What conditions made/

make it difficult?" goes unasked. Textbook authors thus present an America in

which, as preachers were fond of saying in the nineteenth century, men start

from "humble origins" and aitain "the most elevated positions."8

Sodal class is probably the single most important variable in society. From

womb to tomb, it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people

that we can measure. Affluent expectant mothers are more likely to get prenatal

care, receive current medical advice, and enjoy general health, fitness, and nutri-

T H E L A N D OF O P P O R T U N I T Y • 197

tion. Many poor and working-class mothers-to-be first contact the medical pro-

fession in the last month, sometimes the last hours, of their pregnancies. Rich

babies come out healthier and weighing more than poor babies. The infants go

home to very different situations. Poor babies are more likely to have high levels

of poisonous lead in their environments and their bodies. Rich babies get more

time and verbal interaction with their parents and higher quality day care when

not with their parents. When they enter kindergarten, and through the twelve

years that follow, rich children benefit from suburban schools that spend two to

three times as much money per student as schools in inner cities or impover-

ished rural areas. Poor children are taught in classes that are often 50 percent

larger than the classes of affluent children. Differences such as these help

account for the higher school-dropout rate among poor children.

Even when poor children are fortunate enough to attend the same school

as rich children, they encounter teachers who expect only children of affluent

families to know the right answers. Social science research shows that teachers

are often surprised and even distressed when poor children excel. Teachers and

counselors believe they can predict who is "college material," Since many

working-class children give off the wrong signals, even in first grade, they end

up in the "general education" track in high school* "If you are the child of low-

income parents, the chances are good that you will receive limited and often

careless attention from adults in your high school," in the words of Theodore

Sizer's best-selling study of American high schools, Horace's Compromise. "If you

are the child of up per-mid die-income parents, the chances are good that you

will receive substantial and careful attention,"111 Researcher Reba Page has pro-

vided vivid accounts of how high school American history courses use rote

learning to turn off lower-class students." Thus schools have put into practice

Woodrow Wilson's recommendation: "We want one class of persons to have a

liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class

of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit

themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."IJ

As if this unequal home and school life were not enough, rich teenagers

then enroll in the Princeton Review or other coaching sessions for the

Scholastic Aptitude Test. Even without coaching, affluent children are advan-

taged because their background is similar to that of the testmakers, so they are tH & /

comfortable with the vocabulary and subtle subcultural assumptions of the test.

To no one's surprise, social class correlates strongly with SAT scores.

All these are among the reasons why social class predicts the rate of college

attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other

198 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

factor, including intellectual ability, however measured. After college, most affluent

children get white-collar jobs, most working-class children get blue-collar jobs,

and the class differences continue. As adults, rich people are more likely to have

hired an attorney and to be a member of formal organizations that increase their

civic power. Poor people are more likely to watch TV. Because affluent families can

save some money while poor families must spend what they make, wealth differ-

ences are ten times larger than income differences. Therefore most poor and

working-class families cannot accumulate the down payment required to buy a

house, which in turn shuts them out from our most important tax shelter, the

writeoff of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in

elite subdivisions or hire high-quality day care, so the process of educational

inequality replicates itself in the next generation. Finally, affluent Americans also

have longer life expectancies than lower- and working-class people, the largest

single cause of which is better access to health care.13 Echoing the results of Helen

Keller's study of blindness, research has determined that poor health is not distrib-

uted randomly about the social structure but is concentrated in the lower class.

Social Security then becomes a huge transfer system, using monies contributed by

all Americans to pay benefits disproportionately to longer-lived affluent Americans.

Ultimately, social class determines how people think about social class.

When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the

system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed

the system. Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said

the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system. (Some replied "don't

know" or chose a middle position.) The largest single difference between our

two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55

percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent

blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed

the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.14

Few of these statements are news, I know, which is why I have not docu-

mented most of them, but the majority of high school students do not know or

understand these ideas. Moreover, the processes have changed over time, for [he

class structure in America today is not the same as it was in 1890, let alone in

colonial America. Yet in Land of Promise, for example, social class goes unmen-

tioned after 1670.

Many teachers compound the problem by avoiding talking about social

class. Recent interviews with teachers "revealed that they had a much broader

knowledge of the economy, both academically and experientially than they

admitted in class." Teachers "expressed fear that students might find out about the

T H E L A N D OF O P P O R T U N I T Y • 199

Beer is one of the few products (pickup trucks, some patent medicines, and false-teeth cleansers are others) that advertisers try to sell with working-class images. Advertisers use upper-mid die- class imagery to sell most items, from wine to nylons to toilet-bowl cleansers. Signs of social class cover these two models, from footwear to headgear. Note who has the newspaper, briefcase, lunchOox, and, in a final statement, the

cans and the bottles.

injustices and inadequacies of their economic and political institutions,"15 By never

blaming the system, American history courses thus present "Republican history."

Historically, social class is intertwined with all kinds of events and

processes in our past. Our governing system was established by rich men, fol-

lowing theories that emphasized government as a bulwark of the propertied class.

Although rich himself, James Madison worried about social inequality and wrote

The Federalist #10 to explain how the proposed government would not succumb

to the influence of the affluent. Madison did not fully succeed, according to

Edward Pessen, who examined the social-class backgrounds of all American pres-

idents through Reagan. Pessen found that more than 40 percent hailed from the

upper class, mostly from the upper fringes of that elite group, and another 15

percent originated in families located between the upper and upper-middle

classes. More than 25 percent came from a solid upper-middle-class background,

leaving just six presidents, or 15 percent, to come from the middle and lower-

middle classes and just one, Andrew Johnson, representing any part of the lower

class. For good reason, Pessen titled his book The Log, Cabin Myth111 While it was

sad when the great ship Titanic went down, as the old song refrain goes, it was

saddest for the lower classes: among women, only 4 of 143 first-class passengers

were lost, while 15 of 93 second-class passengers drowned, along with 81 of

179 third-class women and girls. The crew ordered third-class passengers to

remain below deck, holding some of them there at gunpoint.17 More recently,

200 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

social class played a major role in determining who fought in the Vietnam War:

sons of the affluent won educational and medical deferments through most of the

conflict.13 Textbooks and teachers ignore all this.

Teachers may avoid social class out of a laudable desire not to embarrass

their charges. If so, rheir concern is misguided. When my students from non-

affluent backgrounds learn about the class system, they find the experience lib-

erating. Once they see the social processes that have helped keep their families

poor, they can let go of their negative self-image about being poor. If to under-

stand is to pardon, for working-class children to understand how stratification

works is to pardon themselves and their families. Knowledge of the social-class

system also reduces the tendency of Americans from other social classes to

blame the victim for being poor. Pedagogicslly, stratification provides a gripping

learning experience. Students are fascinated to discover how the upper class

wields disproportionate power relating to everything from energy bills in Con-

gress to zoning decisions in small towns.

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a pre-

dominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning

an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her

mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of

her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a win-

terized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban

homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks pre-

sent the American past as 390 years of progress and portray our society as a

land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they

get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin

inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps,

Within the white working-class community the girl will probably find

few resources—-teachers, church parishioners, family members—who can tell

her of heroes or struggles among people of her background, for, except in

pockets of continuing class conflict, the working class usually forgets its own

history. More than any other group, white working-class students believe that

they deserve their low status, A subculture of shame results. This negative self-

image is foremost among what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called

"the hidden injuries of class."1' Several years ago, two students of mine provided

a demonstration: they drove around Burlington, Vermont, in a big, nearly new,

shiny black American car (probably a Lexus would be more appropriate today)

and then in a battered ten-year-old subcompact. In each vehicle, when they

reached a stoplight and it turned green, they waited until they were honked at

T H E L A N D OF O P P O R T U N I T Y • 2OI

before driving on. Motorists averaged less than seven seconds to honk at them

in the subcompact, but in the luxury car the students enjoyed 13.2 seconds

before anyone honked. Besides providing a good reason to buy a luxury car, this

experiment shows how Americans unconsciously grant respect to the educated

and successful. Since motorists of all social stations honked at the subcompact

more readily, working-class drivers were in a sense disrespecting themselves

while deferring to their betters. The biting quip "If you're so smart, why aren't

you rich?" conveys the injury done to the self-image of the poor when the idea

that America is a meritocracy goes unchallenged in school.

Part of the problem is that American history textbooks describe American

education itself as meritocratic. A huge body of research confirms that education

is dominated by the class structure and operates to replicate that structure in the

next generation.20 Meanwhile, history textbooks blithely tell of such federal

largesse to education as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed

under Pres. Lyndon Johnson. Not one textbook offers any data on or analysis of

inequality within educational institutions. None mentions how school districts

in low-income areas labor under financial constraints so shocking that Jonathan

Kozol calls them "savage inequalities."21 No textbook ever suggests that students

might research the history of their own school and the population it serves. The

only two textbooks that relate education to the class system at all see it as a

remedy! Schooling "was a key to upward mobility in postwar America," in the

words of The Challenge of Freedom21

The tendency of teachers and textbooks to avoid social class as if it were a

dirty little secret only reinforces the reluctance of working-class families to talk

about it. Paul Cowan has told of interviewing the children of Italian immigrant

workers involved in the famous 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, mill strike. He

spoke with the daughter of one of the Lawrence workers who testified at a

Washington congressional hearing investigating the strike. The worker, Camella

Teoli, then thirteen years old, had been scalped by a cotton-twisting machine

just before the strike and had been hospitalized for several months. Her testi-

mony "became front-page news all over America." But Teoli's daughter, inter-

viewed in 1976 after her mother's death, could not help Cowan. Her mother

had told her nothing of the incident, nothine of her trip to Washington,f & C Q nothing about her impact on America's conscience—even though almost every

day, the daughter "had combed her mother's hair into a bun that disguised the

bald spot."2' A professional of working-class origin told me a similar story about

being ashamed of her uncle "for being a steelworker." A certain defensiveness is

built into working-class culture; even its successful acts of working-class resis-

202 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

lance, like the Lawrence strike, necessarily presuppose lower status and income,

hence connote a certain inferiority. If" the larger community is so good, as text-

books tell us it is, then celebrating or even passing on the memory of conflict

with it seems somehow disloyal.

Textbooks do present immigrant history. Around the turn of the century

immigrants dominated the American urban working class, even in cities as distant

from seacoasts as Des Moines and Louisville. When more than 70 percent of the

white population was native stock, less than 10 percent of the urban working

class was.JJ But when textbooks tell the immigrant story, they emphasize Joseph

Pulitzer, Andrew Carnegie, and their ilk—immigrants who made supergood.

Several textbooks apply the phrases rags to riches or land of opportunity to the

immigrant experience. Such legendary successes were achieved, to be sure, but

they were the exceptions, not the rule. Ninety-five percent of the executives and

financiers in America around the turn of the century came from upper-class or

upper-middle-class backgrounds. Fewer than 3 percent sratted as poor immi-

grants or farm children. Throughout the nineteenth century, just 2 percent of

American industrialists came from working-class origins." By concentrating on

the inspiring exceptions, textbooks present immigrant history as another heart-

ening confirmation of America as the land of unparalleled opportunity.

Again and again, textbooks emphasize how America has differed from

Europe in having less class stratification and more economic and social mobility.

This is another aspect of the archetype of American except!onalism: our society

has been uniquely fair. Jt would never occur to historians In, say, France or Aus-

tralia, to claim that their society was exceptionally equalitarian. Does this treat-

ment of the United States prepare students for reality? It certainly does not

accurately describe our country today Social scientists have on many occasions

compared the degree of economic equality in the United State? with that in

other industrial nations. Depending on the measure used, the United States has

ranked sixth of six, seventh of seven, ninth of twelve, or fourteenth of four-

teen." In the United States the tichest fifth of the population earns eleven times

as much income as the poorest fifth, one of the highest ratios in the industrial-

ized world: in Great Britain the ratio is seven to one, in Japan just four to one.27

In Japan the avetage chief executive officer in an automobile-manufacturing firm

makes 20 times as much as the average worker in an automobile assembly plant;

in the United States he (and it is not she) makes 192 times as much.28 The Jef-

fersonian conceit of a nation of independent farmers and merchants is also long

gone: only one working American in thirteen is self-employed, compared to one

in eight in Western Europe.29 Thus not only do we have far fewer independent

THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY • 3O3

entrepreneurs compared to two hundred years ago, we have fewer compared to

Europe today.

Since textbooks claim that colonial America was radically less stratified

than Europe, they should tell clieir readers when inequality set in. It surely was

not a recent development By 1910 the top 1 percent of the United States popu-

lation received more than a third of all personal income, while the bottom fifth

got less than one-eighth.50 This level of inequality was on a par with that in

Germany or Great Britain.3' If textbooks acknowledged inequality, then they

could describe the changes in our class structure over time, which would intro-

duce their students to fascinating historical debate,32

For example, some historians argue that wealth in colonial society was

more equally distributed than it is today and that economic inequality increased

during the presidency of Andrew Jackson—a period known, ironically, as the age

of the common man. Others believe that the flowering of the large corporation in

the late nineteenth century made the class structure more rigid. Walter Dean

Burnham has argued that the Republican presidential victory in 1896 (McKinley

over Bryan) brought about a sweeping political realignment that changed "a

fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly based oligarchy," so by the 1920s

business controlled public policy.35 Clearly the gap between rich and poor, like

the distance between blacks and whites, was greater at the end of the Progressive

Era in 1920 than at its beginning around 1890.H The story is not all one of

increasing stratification, for between the depression and the end of World War II

income and wealth in America gradually became more equal. Distributions of

income then remained reasonably constant until President Reagan took office in

1981, when inequality began to grow.*1* Still other scholars think that little

change has occurred since the Revolution. Lee Sokow, for example, finds "sur-

prising inequality of wealth and income" in America in 1798. At least for Boston,

Stephan Thernstrom concludes that inequalities in life chances owing to social

class show an eerie continuity.36 All this is part of American history. But it is not

part of American history as taught in high school.

To social scientists, the level of inequality is a portentous thing to know

about a society. When we rank countries by this variable, we find Scandinavian

nations at the top, the most equal, and agricultural societies like Colombia and

India near the bottom. The policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations,

which openly favored the rich, abetted a secular trend already in motion,

causing inequality to increase measurably between 1981 and 1992. For the

United States to move perceptibly toward Colombia in social inequality is a

development of no small import." Surely high school students would be inter-

204 - L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

ested to learn that in 1950 physicians made two and s. half times what union-

ized industrial workers made but now make six times as much. Surely they need

to understand that top managers of clothing firms, who used to earn fifty times

what their American employees made, now make 1,500 times what their

Malaysian workers earn. Surely it is wrong for our history textbooks and

teachers to withhold the historical information that might prompt and inform

discussion of these trends.

Why might they commit such a blunder? First and foremost, publisher

censorship of textbook authors. "You always run the risk, if you talk about social

class, of being labeled Marxist," the editor for social studies and history 3t one

of the biggest publishing houses told me. This editor communicates the taboo,

formally or subtly to every writer she works with, and she implied that most

other editors do too.

Publisher pressure derives in part from textbook adoption boards and

committees in states and school districts. These are subject in turn to pressure

from organized groups and individuals who appear before them. Perhaps the

most robust such lobby is Educational Research Analysts, led by Mel Gabler of

Texas. Gabler's stable of right-wing critics regards even alleging that a textbook

contains some class analysis as a devastating criticism. As one writer has put it,

"Formulating issues in terms of class is unacceptable, perhaps even un-Amer-

ican."^ Fear of not winning adoption in Texas is a prime source of publisher

angst, and might help explain why Life and Liberty limits its social-class analysis

to colonial times in England1. By contrast, "the colonies were places of great

opportunity," even back then. Some Texans cannot easily be placated, however.

Deborah L. Brezina, a Gabler ally, complained to the Texas textbook board that

Life and Liberty describes America "as an unjust society," unfair to lower eco-

nomic groups, and therefore should not be approved.w Such pressure is hardly

new. Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problem of American Culture and his popular

history textbook, written during the depression, included some class analysis. In

the early 1940s, according to Frances FitzGerald, the National Association of

Manufacturers attacked Rugg's books, partly for this feature, and "brought to an

end" social and economic analysis in American history textbooks.40

More often the influence of the upper class is less direct. The most potent

rationale for class privilege in American history has been Social Darwinism, an

archetype that still has great power in American culture. The notion that people

rise and fall in a survival of the fittest may not conform to the data on intergen-

erational mobility in the United States, but that has hardly caused the archetype

to fade away from American education, particularly from American history

THE L A N D OF O P P O R T U N I T Y • 205

classes.4' Facts that do not fit with the archetype, such as the entire literature of

social stratification, simply get left out.

Textbook authors may not even need pressure from publishers, the right

wing, the upper class, or cultural archetypes to avoid social stratification. As part

of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero,

indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the

facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero,

for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why

1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth. Could the

other 99 percent of us be that lazy or otherwise undeserving? To go on to

include some of the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—by which

the upper class stays upper would clearly involve criticism of our beloved nation.

For any or all of these reasons, textbooks minimize social stratification.

They then do something less comprehensible: they fail to explain the benefits of

free enterprise. Writing about an earlier generation of textbooks, Frances

FitzGerald pointed out that the books ignored "the virtues as well as the vices of

their own economic system."42 Teachers might mention free enterprise with

respect, but seldom do the words become more than a slogan,45 This omission is

strange, for capitalism has its advantages, after all. Basketball star Michael

Jordan, Chrysler executive Lee lacocca, and ice-cream makers Ben and Jerry all

got rich by supplying goods and services that people desired. To be sure, much

social stratification cannot be justified so neatly, because it results from the abuse

of wealth and power by those who have these advantages to shut out those who

do not. As a social and economic order, the capitalist system offers much to crit-

icize but also much to praise. America is a land of opportunity for many people.

And for all the distortions capitalism imposes upon it, democracy also benefits

from the separation of power between public and private spheres. Our history

textbooks never touch on these benefits.

Publishers or those who influence them have evidently concluded that what

American society needs to stay strong is citizens who assent to its social structure

and economic system without thought. As a consequence, today's textbooks

defend our economic system mindlessly, with insupportable pieties about its

unique lack of stratification; thus they produce alumni of American history courses

unable to criticize or defend our system of social stratification knowledgeably.

But isn't it nice simply to believe that America is equal? Maybe the "land

of opportunity" archetype is an empowering myth—maybe believing in it might

even help make it come true. For if students think the sky is the limit, they may

reach for the sky, while if they don't, they won't.

206 • LIES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

The analogy of gender points to the problem with this line of thought.

How could high school girls understand their place in American history if their

textbooks told them that, from colonial America to the present, women have

had equal opportunity for upward mobility and political participation? How

could they then explain why no woman has been president? Girls would have to

infer, perhaps unconsciously, that it has been their own gender's fault, a conclu-

sion that is hardly empowering.

Textbooks do tell how women were denied the right to vote in many

states until 1920 and faced other barriers to upward mobility. Textbooks also tell

of barriers confronting racial minorities. The final question Land of Promise asks

students following its "Social Mobility" section is "What social barriers prevented

blacks, Indians, and women from competing on an equal basis with white male

colonists?" After its passage extolling upward mobility. The Challenge of Freedom

notes, "Not all people, however, enjoyed equal rights or an equal chance to

improve their way oflifc," and goes on to address the issues of sexism and racism.

But neither here nor anywhere else do Promise or Challenge (or most other text-

books) hint that opportunity might not be equal today for white Americans of

the lower and working classes,44 Perhaps as a result, even business leaders and

Republicans, the respondents statistically most likely to engage in what sociolo-

gists call "blaming the victim," blame the social system rather than African Ameri-

cans for black poverty and blame the system rather than women for the latter's

unequal achievement in the workplace. In sum, affluent Americans, like their text-

books, are willing to credit racial discrimination as the cause of poverty among

blacks and Indians and sex discrimination as the cause of women's inequality but

don't see class discrimination as the cause of poverty in general.45

More than math or science, more even than American literature, courses in

American history hold the promise of telling high school students how they and

their parents, their communities, and their society came to be as they are. One

way things are is unequal by social class. Although poor and working-class chil-

dren usually cannot identify the cause of their alienation, history often turns

them off because it justifies rather than explains the present. When these stu-

dents react by dropping out, intellectually if not physically, their poor school

performance helps convince them as well as their peers in the faster tracks that

the system is meritocratic and that they themselves lack merit. Zn the end, the

absence of social-class analysis in American history courses amounts to one

more way that education in America is rigged against the working class.

THE L A N D OF O P P O R T U N I T Y . 207

The historian must have no country.

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?

I learned our government must be strong.

It's always right and never wrong. . . .

That's what I learned in school.

—Song by Tom Paxton, 1963s

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human

story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We

have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of

reality.

—Bin Meyers3

As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do

anything.

—Malcolm X4

To study foreign affairs without putting ourselves into others' shoes is to deal in

illusion and to prepare students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in

the world. —PaulGagnon5

—Jo/in Quincy Adams1

8. Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks

Teach about the Federal Government

Some traditional historians, critics of the new emphasis on social and culturalhistory, believe that American history textbooks have been seduced from their central narrative, which they see as the story of the American state.

Methinks they protest too much. The expanded treatments that textbooks now

give to women, slavery, modes of transportation, developments in popular music,

and other topics not directly related to the state have yet to produce a new core

narrative. Therefore they appear as unnecessary diversions that only interrupt the

basic narrative that the textbooks still tell: the history of the American govern-

ment. Two of the twelve textbooks 1 studied were "inquiry" textbooks, assembled

from primary sources. They no longer make the story of the state quite so

central," The ten narrative textbooks in my sample continue to pay overwhelming

attention to the actions of the executive branch of the federal government. They

still demarcate US. history as a series of presidential administrations.

Thus, for instance, Land of Promise grants each president a biographical

vignette, even William Henry Harrison {who served for one month), but never

mentions arguably our greatest composer, Charles Ives; our most influential

architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; or our most prominent non-Indian humanitarian

on behalf of Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson, Although textbook authors include

more social history than they used to, they still regard the actions and words of

the state as incomparably more important than what the American people were

doing, listening to, sleeping in. living through, or thinking about. Particularly

for the centuries before the Woodrow Wilson administration, this stress on the

state is inappropriate, because the federal executive was not nearly as important

then as now.

What story do textbooks tell about our government? First, they imply that

the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors over-

look the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution,

granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the

states, and reserving some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the

209

last two hundred years. The federal government they picture is still the people's

servant, manageable and tractable. Paradoxically, textbooks then underplay the

role of nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in bringing about

improvements in the environment, race relations, education, and other social

issues. In short, textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like their other

heroes, this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts

textbooks into anticitizenship manuals—handbooks for acquiescence.

Perhaps the best way to show textbooks' sycophancy is by examining

how authors treat the government when its actions have been least defensible.

Let us begin with considerations relating to U.S. foreign policy.

College courses in political science generally take one of two approaches

when analyzing U.S, actions abroad. Some professors and textbooks are quite

critical of what might be called the American colossus. In this "American cen-

tury," the United States has been the most powerful nation on earth and has typ-

ically acted to maintain its hegemony. This view holds that we Americans

abandoned our revolutionary ideology long ago, if indeed we ever held one, and

now typically act to repress the legitimate attempts at self-determination of

other nations and peoples.

More common is the realpolitik view. George Kennan, who for almost half

a century has been an architect of and commentator on U.S. foreign policy, pro-

vided a succinct statement of this approach in 1948. As head of the Policy Plan-

ning Staff of the State Department, Kennan wrote in a now famous memorandum:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6,3% of its popula-

tion. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and

resentment. Our real test in the coming period is to devise a pattern of

relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.

We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of

altruism and world benefaction—unreal objectives such as human

rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.7

Under this view, the historian or political scientist proceeds by identifying

American national interests as articulated by policymakers in the past as well as

by historians today. Then s/he analyzes our acts and policies to assess the

degree to which they furthered these interests.

High school American history textbooks do not, of course, adopt or even

hint at the American colossus view. Unfortunately, they also omit the realpolitik

approach. Instead, they take a strikingly different tack. They see our policies as

210 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

part of a morality play in which the United States typically acts on behalf of

human rights, democracy, and "the American way." When Americans have done

wrong, according to this view, it has been because others misunderstood us, or

perhaps because we misunderstood the situation. But always our motives were

good. This approach might be called the "international good guy" view.

Textbooks do not indulge in any direct discussion of what "good" is or

might mean. In Frances FitzGerald's phrase, textbooks present the United States

as "a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world."8 In so doing, they echo

the nation our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely1 moral, disin-

terested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen. "Other countries

look to their own interests," said Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1961, pridefully

invoking what he termed our "obligations" around the globe. "Only the United

States—and we are only six percent of the world's population—bears this kind

of burden."9 Since at least the 1920s, textbook authors have claimed that the

United States is more generous than any other nation in the world in providing

foreign aid.10 The myth was untrue then; it is likewise untrue now. Today at

least a dozen European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of

their gross domestic product (GDP) or total governmental expenditures to for-

eign aid than does the United States."

The desire to emphasize our humanitarian dealings with the world influ-

ences what textbook authors choose to include and omit. All but one of the

twelve textbooks contain at least a paragraph on the Peace Corps. The tone of

these treatments is adoring. "The Peace Corps made friends for America every-

where," gushes Life and Liberty. Triumph of eke American Nation infers our larger

purpose: "The Peace Corps symbolized America's desire to provide humane

assistance as well as economic and military leadership in the non-Communist

world." As a shaper of history, however, the Peace Corps has been insignificant.

It does not disparage this fine institution to admit chat its main impact has been

on the intellectual development of its own volunteers.

More important and often less affable American exports are our multi-

national corporations. One multinational alone, International Telephone and

Telegraph (ITT), which took the lead in prompting our government to destabi-

lize the socialist government of Salvador Allende, had more impact on Chile

than all the Peace Corps workers America ever sent there. The same might be

said of Union Carbide in India and United Fruit in Guatemala, By influencing

U.S. government policies, other American-based multinationals have had even

more profound effects on other nations.11 At times the corporations' influence

has been constructive. For example, when Pres. Gerald Ford was trying to per-

W A T C H I M G B I G B R O T H E R • 211

Textbook authors select images to reinforce the idea that our country's rnain role in the world is to bring about good. This photograph from Life arid Liberty shows "a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in Botswana."

suade Congress to support U.S. military intervention on behalf of the UNITA

rebels in Angola's civil war, Gulf Oil lobbied against intervention. Gulf was hap-

pily producing oil in partnership with Angola's Marxist government when it

found its refineries coming under fire from American arms in the hands of

UNITA. At other times, multinationals have persuaded our government to inter-

vene when only their corporate interest, not our national interest, was at stake.

All this is a matter of grave potential concern to students, who after grad-

uation may get drafted and then sent to fight in a foreign country, partly

because U.S. policy has been unduly influenced by some Delaware corporation

or New York bank. Or students may find their jobs eliminated by multinationals

that move factories to Third World countries whose citizens must work for

almost nothing.n Social scientists used to describe the world as stratified into a

wealthy industrialized center and a poor colonialized periphery; some now hold

that multinationals and faster modes of transportation and communication have

made management the new center, workers at home and abroad the new

periphery. Even if students are not personally affected, they will have to deal

with the multinationalization of the world. As multinational corporations such

as Exxon and Mitsubishi come to have budgets larger than those of most gov-

212 • L IES MY T E A C H E R TOLD ME

ernments, national economies are becoming obsolete, Robert Reich, secretary of

labor in the Clinton administration, has pointed out, "The very idea of an Amer-

ican economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American cor-

poration, American capital, American products, and American technology."14

Multinationals may represent a threat to national autonomy, affecting not only

small nations but also the United States.

When Americans try to think through the issues raised by the complex

interweaving of our economic and political interests, they will not be helped by

what they learned in their American history courses. History textbooks do not

even mention multinationals. The topic doesn't fit their "international good guy"

approach. Only American Adventures even lists "multinationals" in its index, and

its treatment consists of a Single sentence: "These investments [in Europe after

World War I] led to the development of multinational corporations—large com-

panies with interests in several countries," Even this lone statement is inaccurate:

European multinationals date back centuries, and American multinationals have

played an important role in pur history since at least 1900.

Textbooks might begin discussing the influence of multinational corpora-

tions on U.S. foreign policy with the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Pres-

sure from First National Bank of New York helped prompt Wilson's intervention

in Haiti. U.S. interests owned more of Mexico than interests from anywhere else,

including Mexico itself, which helps explain Wilson's repeated invasions of that

country. In Russia the new communist government nationalized all petroleum

assets; as a consequence, Standard Oil of New Jersey was "the major impetus"

behind American opposition to the Bolsheviks.15

Textbooks mystify these circumstances, however. The closest they come to

telling the story of economic influences on our foreign policy is in passages such

as this, from The Challenge of Freedom, regarding Wilson's interventions in

Mexico: "Many Americans were very interested in the outcome of these events

in Mexico. This was because over 40,000 Americans lived in Mexico. Also,

American businesses had invested about 1 billion dollars in Mexico." Here Chal-

lenge makes almost a pun of interested. In its ensuing analysis of Wilson's inter-

ventions, Challenge never again mentions American interests and instead takes

Wilson's policies at face value. The treatment of Wilson's Haitian invasion in The

American Pageant is still more naive:

Hoping to head off trouble, Washington urged Wall Street bankers to

pump dollars into the financial vacuums in Honduras and Haiti to keep

out foreign funds. The United States, under the Monroe Doctrine,

W A T C H I N G B I G B R O T H E R - 2 1 3

would not permit foreign nations to intervene, and consequently it had

some moral obligation to interfere financially to prevent economic and

political chaos.

Evidently even our financial intervention was humanitarian! The authors of

Pageant could use a shot of the realism supplied by former Marine Corps Gen,

Smedley D. Butler, whose 19 31 statement has become famous:

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. 1 helped

make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys

to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international

banking house of Brown Brothers. . . . 1 brought light to the

Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916, 1 helped

make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking

back on it, 1 might have given Al Capone a few hints.16

Business influence on U.S. foreign policy did not start with Woodrow

Wilson's administration, however. John A. Hobson, in his 1903 book Imperi-

alism, described "a constantly growing tendency" of the wealthy class "to use

their political power as citizens of this State to interfere with the political condi-

tion of those States where they have an industrial stake."17 Nor did such influ-

ence end with Wilson. Jonathan Kwitny'$ fine book Endless Enemies cites various

distortions of U.S. foreign policy owing to specific economic interests of indi-

vidual corporations and/or to misconceived ideological interests of U.S. foreign

policy planners. Kwitny points out that during the entire period from 1953 to

1977, the people in charge of U.S. foreign policy were all on the Rockefeller

family payroll. Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger, who ran our foreign policy

from 1961 to 1977, were dependent upon Rockefeller payments for their very

solvency.18 Nonetheless, no textbook ever mentions the influence of multina-

tionals on U.S. policy. This is the case not necessarily because textbook authors

are afraid of offending multinationals, but because they never discuss any influ-

ence on U.S. policy. Rather, they present our governmental policies as rational

humanitarian responses to trying situations, and they do not seek to penetrate

the surface of the government's own explanations of its actions.

Having ignored why the federal government acts as it does, textbooks pro-

ceed to ignore much of what the government does. Textbook authors portray the

U.S. government's actions as agreeable and nice, even when U.S. government

officials have admitted motives and intentions of a quite different nature. Among

214 * L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

the less savory examples are various attempts by U.S. officials and agencies to

assassinate leaders or bring down governments of other countries. The United

States has indulged in activities of this sort at least since the Wilson administra-

tion, which hired two Japanese-Mexicans to try to poison Pancho Villa,'* I sur-

veyed the twelve textbooks to see how they treated six more recent US,

attempts to subvert foreign governments. To ensure that the events were ade-

quately covered in the historical literature, I examined only incidents that

occurred before 1973, well before any of these textbooks went to press. The

episodes are:

1. our assistance to the shah's faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister

Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;

2, our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in

1954;

3. our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the

Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next

year;

4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in

1961;

5, our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and

bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and

6, our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile in 1973.

The U.S. government caJls actions such as these "state-sponsored terrorism"

when other countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban

or Libyan attempts to influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our

government expressed outrage at Iraq's Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange

the assassination of former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and

retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the United States has repeat-

edly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.

In 1990 Warren Cohen resigned from the historical committee that he

headed at the State Department to protest the government's deletion from its

official history of U.S. foreign relations of "all mention of the C.I.A. coup that

put Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in power in Iran in 1953."3° Eight of the

twelve textbooks I reviewed would side with the U.S. government against

Cohen: they too say nothing about our overthrow of Mussadegh. The American

Pageant and Life and Liberty stand out with far and away the most accurate

accounts. Here is the paragraph from Life and Liberty:

W A T C H I N G BIG B R O T H E R - 2 1 5

The United Slates had been a long-time friend of the ruler of Iran,

Shah Reza Pahlevi. In fact, the United States had helped him to his

throne by overthrowing a democratically elected government in 1953,

which the United States felt was too leftist. America supplied the shah

with large numbers of arms, and also trained the shah's army and

police. Unfortunately, the shah used the army and police to form a

police state.

Triumph of the American Nation and Land of Promise mention that the United States

deposed Mussadegh but justify the act as anticommunist. In the words of

Promise, "In 1953, a Communist-backed political party seized control of the

government and attempted to assert control over Iran's oil resources." This will

not do: Mussadegh himself had led the drive to expel the Soviets from northern

Iran after World War II. And his party did not "seize control" any more than

parties do in other parliamentary democracies such as Canada or Great Britain.

Indeed, the shah himself had appointed Mussadegh prime minister because of

his immense popularity in parliament and among the people.

The other eight textbooks say nothing about our government's actions in

prerevolutionary Iran. The only specific U.S. action in Iran that A History of the

Republic reports, for example, is our assistance in wiping out malaria! When

these textbooks' authors later describe the successful attempt in 1979 by the

people of Iran to overthrow the shah, their accounts cannot explain why Ira-

nians might be so upset with the United States. Of the twelve textbooks, only

Lift and Liberty and The American Pageant explain the shah's unpopularity as a

ruler imposed from without and America's unpopularity owing to our identifica-

tion with the shah and his policies. Thus only two books give students a basis

for understanding why Iranians held Americans hostage for more than a year

during the Carter administration.

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA threatened the government of Jacobo

Arbenz with an armed invasion, Arbenz had antagonized the United Fruit Com-

pany by proposing land reform and planning a highway and railroad that might

break their trade monopoly. The United States chose an obscure army colonel as

the new president, and when Arbenz panicked and sought asylum in the Mex-

ican embassy, we flew our man to the capital aboard the US. ambassador's pri-

vate plane. Only one textbook, The American Tradition, mentions the incident:

In the 1950's the United States, concerned with stopping the spread of

communism, directed its attention to Latin America once again. In

216 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

1954 the CIA helped to overthrow the leftist government of Jacobo

Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. In following years, in order to prevent

communist takeovers, the United States continued to support unpop-

ular conservative or military governments in Latin America.

Here, as with Promise's account of Iran, Tradition offers anticommunism as the

sole motive for U.S. policies. Bear in mind that this incident took place at the

height of McCarthyism, when, as Lewis Lapham has pointed out, the United

States saw communism everywhere; "When the duly elected Guatemalan presi-

dent, Jacobo Arbenz, began to talk too much like a democrat, the United States

accused him of communism."21 Thirty years later The American Tradition main-

tains the US. government's McCarthyist rhetoric as fact.

Not one textbook includes a word about how the United States helped

the Christians in Lebanon fix the 1957 parliamentary election in that then tenu-

ously balanced country. The next year, denied a fair share of power by electoral

means, the Muslims took to armed combat, and President Eisenhower sent in

the marines on the Christians' behalf Five books discuss that 1958 interven-

tion. Land of Promise offers the fullest treatment;

Next, chaos broke out in Lebanon, and the Lebanese President,

Camille Chamoun, fearing a leftist coup, asked for American help.

Although reluctant to interfere, in July 1958 Eisenhower sent 15,000

United States marines into Lebanon. Order was soon restored, and the

marines were withdrawn.

This is standard textbook rhetoric: chaos seems always to be breaking out or

about to break out. Other than communism, "chaos" is what textbooks usually

offer to explain the actions of the other side. Communism offers no real expla-

nation either. Kwitny points out that the United States has often behaved so

badly in the Third World that some governments and independence movements

saw no alternative but to turn to the USSR.23 Since textbook authors are

unwilling to criticize the U.S. government, they present opponents of the United

States that are not intelligible. Only by disclosing our actions can textbooks

provide readers with rational accounts of our adversaries.

Promise goes on to tell the happy results of our intervention: "Although

there was no immediate Communist threat to Lebanon, Eisenhower demon-

strated that the United States could react quickly. As a result, tensions in the

region receded." In reality, the civil war in Lebanon lasted until the 1980s, with

W A T C H I N G BIG B R O T H E R - 2 1 7

mounting destruction in Beirut and throughout the nation. In 1983 a whole lot

of chaos broke out, so President Reagan sent in our marines again. A truck

bomb then killed more than two hundred marines in their barracks, and three

textbooks treat that intervention. Two of them say nothing about our involve-

ment in either 1957 or 1958, and the remaining textbook, The American Pageant.

tells of Eisenhower's 1958 intervention in even rosier terms than Land of Promise.

So not one of twelve textbooks offers students anything of substance about the

continuity of conflict in Lebanon or our role in causing it.

"ZaYre" or "the Congo" appears in the index of just two textbooks, The

American Pageant and Triumph of the American Nation, Neither book mentions that

the CIA urged the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961." Pageant offers an

accurate account of the beginning of the strife: "The African Congo received its

independence from Belgium in 1960 and immediately exploded into violence.

The United Nations sent in a peacekeeping force, to which Washington con-

tributed much money but no manpower." There Pageant stops. The account in Tri-

umph of the American Nation mentions Lumumba by name: "A new crisis developed

in 1961 when Patrice Lumumba, leader of the pro-Communist faction, was assas-

sinated." Triumph says nothing about U.S. involvement with the assassination,

however, and concludes with the happiest of endings: "By the late 1960s, most

scars of the civil war seemed healed. The Congo (Zaire) became one of the most

prosperous African nations." Would that it were! The CIA helped bring to power

Joseph Mobutu, a former army sergeant. By the end of the 1960s, Triumph to the

contrary, Zaire under Mobutu had become one of the most wretched African

nations, economically and politically. As of 1993, Mobutu had yet to hold an

election, allow the free functioning of political parties, or condone a free press.

The New York Times noted that starvation was growing in Zaire and called the

problems "self-inflicted, the result of nearly 30 years of Government corrup-

tion."24 While per capita income in Zaire fell by more than two-thirds, Mobutu

himself became one of the richest persons on the planet and perhaps the most

hated person in the country.25 As I write in 1994, Zaire is ripe for a "new" crisis

to "develop," quite possibly with anti-American overtones. If it does, we can be

sure, textbooks will be just as surprised as our students when "chaos breaks out."

Ali twelve textbooks are silent about our repeated attempts to assassinate

Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba. The federal government had tried to kill Castro

eight times by 1965, according to testimony before the US. Senate; by 1975

Castro had thwarted twenty-four attempts, according «_Cuba. These undertak-

ings ranged from a botched effort to get Castro to light an exploding cigar to a

contract with the Mafia to murder him. Since Pres. John F, Kennedy probably

2l8 • L I E S MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

ordered several of the earlier attempts on Castro's life personally, including the

Mafia contract, Kennedy's own assassination might be explained as a revenge

slaying. Because no textbook tells how Kennedy tried to kill Castro, however,

none can logically suggest a Cuban or Mafia connection in discussing

Kennedy's death,i6 The Kennedy administration also lied about its sponsorship

of the Bay of Pigs invasion; immediately after that failed, Kennedy launched

Operation Mongoose, "a vast covert program" to destabilize Cuba. Pierre

Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, has written that JFK even planned to invade

Cuba with U.S. armed forces until forestalled by the Cuban missile crisis.27 No

textbook tells about Operation Mongoose.

Undaunted by its failures in Cuba, the CIA turned its attention farther

south. Only three textbooks, Life and Liberty, The American Adventure, and Triumph

of the American Nation, mention Chile. "President Nixon helped the Chilean army

overthrow Chile's elected government because he did not like its radical socialist

policies," Lift and Liberty says bluntly This single sentence, which is all that Life

and Liberty offers, lies buried in a section about President Carter's human rights

record, but it is far and away the best account in any of the textbooks.

According to Triumph, Nixon approved "the secret use of funds by the CIA to try

to prevent a socialist-communist election victory in Chile. The CIA later made it

difficult for the Marxist government elected by these parties to govern." Since

the "difficulties" President Allende faced included his own murder, perhaps this

is the ultimate euphemism! The American Adventure offers a fuller account:

Some people, in the United States and abroad, said that the United

States arranged the overthrow of Allende. Indeed, in 1974, Pres. Ford

admitted that the United States CIA had given help to the opposition

to Allende. However, he denied that the United States encouraged or

knew of the revolutionary plan.

Why leave our involvement open to question? Historians know that the CIA

had earlier joined with ITT to try to defeat Allende in the 1970 elections.

Failing this, the United States sought to disrupt the Chilean economy and bring

down Allende's government. The United States blocked international loans to

Chile, subsidized opposition newspapers, labor unions, and political parties,

denied spare parts to industries, paid for and fomented a nationwide truckers'

strike that paralyzed the Chilean economy, and trained and financed the military

that staged the bloody coup in 1973 in which Allende was killed. The next year,

CIA Director William Colby testified that "a secret high-level intelligence

W A T C H I N G BIG B R O T H E R -219

committee led by Kissinger himself had authorized CIA expenditures of over

$8,000,000 during the period 1970-73 to 'destabilize' the government of Pres.

Allende."28 Secretary of State Kissinger himself later explained, "I don't see why

we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible."29

Since the Chilean people's "irresponsibility" consisted of voting for Allende,

here Kissinger openly says that the United States should not and will not

respect the electoral process or sovereignty of another country if the results do

not please us. With this attitude and policy in place in our government, whether

the CIA or its Chilean allies pulled the trigger on Allende amounts to a nit-

picking detail. The American Adventure at least mentions our action in Chile;

however, nine books overlook it entirely.50

Do textbooks need to include all government skullduggery? Certainly not.

I am not arguing in favor of what Paul Gagnon calls "relentless mentioning."31

Textbooks do need to analyze at least one of our interventions in depth, however,

for they raise important issues. To defend these acts on moral grounds is not easy.

The acts diminish U.S. foreign policy to the level of Mafia thuggery, strip the

United States of its claim to lawful conduct, and reduce our prestige around the

world. To be sure, covert violence may be defensible on tealpolitik grounds as an

appropriate way to deal with international problems. It can be argued that the

United States should be destabilizing governments in other countries, assassinating

leaders unfriendly to us, and fighting undeclared unpublicized wars. The six

cloak-and-dagger operations recounted here do not support this view, however.

In Cuba, for instance, the CIA's "pointless sabotage operations," in Rhodri

Jeffreys-Jones's words, "only increased Castro's popularity." Even when they suc-

ceed, these covert acts provide only a short-term fix, keeping people who worry

us out of power for a time, but identifying the United States with repressive,

undemocratic, unpopular regimes, hence undermining our long-term interests.'2

The historian Ronald Kessler relates that a CIA officer responsible for engi-

neering Arbenz's downfall in Guatemala agreed later that overthrowing elected

leaders is a short-sighted policy." "Was it desirable to trade Mossadegh for the

Ayatollah Khomeni?" asks the historian Charles Ameringer about our "success" in

Iran. When covert attacks fail, like the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, they leave

the U.S. government with no viable next step short of embarrassed withdrawal or

oven military intervention. If instead of covert action we had had a public debate

about how to handle Mussadegh or Castro, we might have avoided Khomeni or

the Bay of Pigs debacle. Unless we become more open to nationalist govern-

ments that embody the dreams of their people, Robert F. Smith believes we will

face "crisis after crisis."54

220 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

This debate cannot take place in American history courses, however,

because most textbooks do not let on about what our government has done.

Half of the twelve textbooks I surveyed leave out all six incidents. Most of the

other textbooks pretend, when treating the one or two incidents they include,

that our actions were based on humanitarian motives. Thus textbook authors

portray the United Stales basically as an idealistic actor, responding generously

to other nations' social and economic woes. Robert Leckie has referred to "the

myth of 'the most peace-loving nation in the world'" and noted that it persists

"in American folklore." It also persists in our history textbooks.35

These interventions raise another issue: are they compatible with democ-

racy? Covert violent operations against foreign nations, individuals, and political

parties violate the openness on which our own democracy relies. Inevitably,

covert international interference leads to domestic lying. U.S. citizens cannot

possibly critique government policies if they do not know of them. Thus covert

violent actions usually flout the popular will. These actions also threaten our

long-standing separation of powers, which textbooks so justly laud in their

chapters on the Constitution. Covert actions are always undertaken by the exec-

utive branch, which typically lies to the legislative branch about what it has

done and plans to do, thus preventing Congress from playing its constitutionally

intended role.

The US. government lied about most of the six examples of foreign inter-

vention just described. On the same day in 1961 that our Cuban exiles were

landing at the Bay of Pigs in their hapless attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro,

Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, "The American people are entitled to know

whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer

to that question is no." Among the dead three days later were four American

pilots. When asked about Chile in his Seriate confirmation hearings for U.S. Sec-

retary of State in 1973, Henry Kissinger replied, "The CIA had nothing to do

with the [Chilean] coup, to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I only put

in that qualification in case some madman appears down there who, without

instruction, talked to somebody." Of course, later statements by CIA Director

William Colby and Kissinger himself directly contradicted this testimony. The

U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee eventually denounced our campaign against

the Allende government,'6

President Eisenhower used national security as his excuse when he was

caught in an obvious lie: he denied that the United States was flying over Soviet

airspace, only to have captured airman Gary Powers admit the truth on Russian

television. Much later, the public learned that Powers had been just the tip of

W A T C H I N G B I G B R O T H E R . 2 2 1

the iceberg: in the 1950s we had some thirty-one flights downed over the

USSR, with 170 men aboard. For decades our government lied to the families

of the lost men and never made substantial representation to the USSR to get

them back, because the flights were illegal and were supposed to be secret. Sim-

ilarly, during the Vietnam War the government kept our bombing of Laos secret

for years, later citing national security as its excuse. This did not fool Laotians,

who knew full well we were bombing them, but did fool Americans. Often pres-

idents and their advisors keep actions covert not for reasons of tactics abroad,

but because they suspect the actions would not be popular with Congress or

with the American people.

Over and over, presidents have chosen not to risk their popularity by

waging the campaign required to persuade Americans to support their secret mili-

tary policies." Our Constitution provides that Congress must declare war. Back in

1918 Woodrow Wilson tried to keep our intervention in Russia hidden from Con-

gress and the American people. Helen Keller helped get out the truth: "Our gov-

ernments are not honest. They do not openly declare war against Russia and

proclaim the reasons," she wrote to a New York newspaper in 1919. "They are

fighting the Russian people half-secretly and in the dark with the lie of democracy

on their lips"38 Ultimately, Wilson failed to keep his invasion secret, but he was

able to keep it hidden from American history texrbooks. Therein lies the problem:

textbooks cannot report accurately on the six foreign interventions described in

this chapter without mentioning that the U.S. government covered them up.

The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is

the series of related scandals called Watergate. In its impact on the public, the

Watergate break-in stood out. In the early 1970s Congress and the American

people learned that President Nixon had helped cover up a string of illegal acts,

including robberies of the Democratic National Committee and the office of

Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist. Nixon also tried with some success to use the

Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA, and various regulatory agencies to

inspire fear in the hearts of his "enemies list" of people who had dared to

oppose his policies or his reelection. In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame

Richard Nixon, as they should.59 But they go no deeper. Faced with this unde-

niable instance of governmental wrongdoing, they manage to retain their uni-

formly rosy view of the government. In the representative words of The United

Slates—A History of the Republic, "Although the Watergate crisis was a shock to

the nation, it demonstrated the strength of the federal system of checks and bal-

ances. Congress and the Supreme Court had successfully checked the power of

the President when he appeared to be abusing that power."

222 • L IES MY T E A C H E R T O L D ME

As Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, "the problem will not go away

with the departure of Richard Nixon," because it is structural, stemming from

the vastly increased power of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some

ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administrations, a web of

secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet mem-

bers, special operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel,

Iran, Brunei, and elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than

Nixon's.*1 Textbooks' failure to put Watergate into this perspective is pan of

their authors' apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that

schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government

has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face

an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic poli-

cies.41 To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from

their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and

unprepared to rhink about them.

"Our country . . . may she always be in the right," toasted Stephen

Decatur in 1816, "but our country, right or wrong!" Educators and textbook

authors seem to want to inculcate the next generation into blind allegiance to

our country. Going a step beyond Decatur, textbook analyses fail to assess our

actions abroad according to either a standard of right and wrong or realpolitik.

Instead, textbooks merely assume that the government tried to do the right

thing. Citizens who embrace the textbook view would presumably support any

intervention, armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective of our legitimate

national interests or not, because they would be persuaded that all our policies

and interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims. They could never credit

our enemies with equal humanity.

This "international good guy" approach is educationally dysfunctional if

we seek citizens who are able to think rationally about American foreign policy,42

To the citizen raised on textbook platitudes, George Kenrian's realpolitik may be

painful to contemplate. Under the thrall of the America-the-good archetype, we

expect more from our country. But Kennan describes how nations actually

behave. We would not risk the decline of democracy and the end of Western civi-

lization if we simply let students see a realistic description and analysis of our

foreign policies. Doing so would also help close the embarrassing gap between

what high school textbooks say about American foreign policy and how their big

brothers, college textbooks in political science courses, treat the subject.

When high school history textbooks turn to the internal affairs of the

U.S. government, the books again part company with political scientists. A large

WATCHING BIG BROTHER . 2 2 3

chunk of introductory political science coursework is devoted to analyzing the

various forces that influence our government's domestic policies. High school

American history textbooks simply credit the government for most of what gets

done. This is not surprising, for when authors idealize the federal government,

perforce they also distort the real dynamic between the governed and the gov-

ernment. It is particularly upsetting to watch this happen in the field of civil

rights, where the courageous acts of thousands of citizens in the 1960s

entreated and even forced the government to act.

Between 1960 and 1968 the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed

to the federal government for protection and for implementation of federal law,

including the Fourteenth Amendment and other laws passed during Reconstruc-

tion. Especially during the Kennedy administration, governmental response was

woefully inadequate. In Mississippi, movement offices displayed this bitter

rejoinder:

THERE'S A STREET IN ITTA BENA CALLED FREEDOM. THERE'S A TOWN IN MISSISSIPPI CALLED LIBERTY. THERE'S A DEPARTMENT IN WASHINGTON CALLED JUSTICE.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's response to the movement's call was

especially important, since the FBI is the premier national law enforcement

agency. The bureau had a long and unfortunate history of antagonism toward

African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI got

their start investigating alleged communists during the Woodrow Wilson admin-

istration. Although the last four years of that administration saw more antiblack

race riots than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus on gath-

ering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were vio-

lating blacks' civil rights. Hoover explained the antiblack race riot of 1919 in

Washington, D.C., as due to "the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon

white women." In that year the agency institutionalized its surveillance of black

organizations, not white organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the bureau's

early years there were a few black agents, but by the 1930s Hoover had weeded

out all but two. By the early 1960s the FBI had not a single black officer,

although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs.43 FBI agents in

the South were mostly white Southerners who cared what their white Southern