by James W. Loewen, 2018
Eye-opening book about the sorry state of American History textbooks in high schools. This was one of our Old Town Library Book Club selections for 2019-2020. He provides the truth about Woodrow Wilson (extremely racist), Helen Keller (ardent socialist), Christopher Columbus (extreme brutality to the natives), the first Thanksgiving, how racism is invisible in the history books, how anti-racism is invisible in the history books, how the history books completely overlook the Vietnam War, how they don’t cover the recent past, and why history is taught this way.
Here are the chapter titles:
Chapter I: Handicapped by History – The Process of Hero-making
This chapter is about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.
At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices…He was an outspoken white supremacist — his wife was even worse–and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted an extensive 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….
on the racism of Woodrow Wilson
Chapter 2 – 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.
he goes on to describe in detail the brutality and cruelty that Columbus wrought when he returned in 1493 to “Haiti” as Loewen calls the island Hispaniola because “Columbus renamed the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic Hispaniola, “Little Spain.” I call the island Haiti because, as a term, Hispaniola is less well known by the public than Haiti, and because Haiti was the aboriginal term, although confusion remains as to whether Haiti referred to the entire island or the highlands…”
It’s possible African or Phoenicians were the first to come to the Americas. There are stone statues in Mexico: “Rock heads nine feet tall face the ocean in southeastern Mexico.” They look Negroid. When an Afro-Carib scholar, Tiho Narva, visited a museum in Mexico City (the von Wuthenau museum) with a collection of miniatures of these statues, he said, “Somehow, upon leaving the museum I suddenly felt that I could walk taller for the rest of my days.” Our textbooks never mention the possibility that Africans or Phoenicians came to the Americas before Columbus.
Chapter 3 – The Truth About the First Thanksgiving
Chapter 4 – Red Eyes (what we did to the Indians)
Chapter 5 – “Gone With the Wind”: The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks (He gives the truth about Reconstruction and the “Nadir of Race Relations 1890-1920” when southern white democrats undid everything that had been done towards equality and brought back the attitudes and cruelties of slavery.)
Almost all textbooks include at least a paragraph on white violence during Reconstruction. Most 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 Reconstruction. But, overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, 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 treatments of why Reconstruction failed still lack clarity.
from page 160
…The rationale of segregation thus implies that the oppressed are 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 not the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major leagues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out.
from page 163
Chapter 6 – John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Antiracism in American History Textbooks
Chapter 7 – The Land of Opportunity. How social stratification in America determines your future.
Chapter 8 – Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks Teach About the Federal Government. The executive branch was not always so powerful and was not meant to be as powerful as it is. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was racist – he was a white supremacist, and tried to destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement starting in 1963.
Not only to textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period.
John F. Kennedy was NOT a friend of African Americans. On the contrary, he and his brother, Bobbie, did a lot to prevent the civil rights movement from taking hold.
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 Reconstruction. Especially during the Kennedy administration, governmental response was woefully inadequate…
from page 236
…From the Woodrow Wilson administration until now, the federal executive has grown ever stronger and now looms as by far our nation’s largest employer. In the last fifty years, the power of the CIA, the National Security Council, and other covert agencies has grown to become, in some eyes, a fearsome fourth branch of government. Threats to democracy abound when officials in the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and other institutions of government determine not only our policies but also what the people and the Congress need to know about them.
By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive branch. By taking the government’s side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship…
Chapter 9 – See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam
…A final view might be that there was no clear cause and certainly no clear purpose, that we blundered into the war because no subsequent administration had the courage to undo our 1946 mistake of opposing a popular independence movement…
Perhaps the seeds of America’s tragic involvement with Vietnam were sown at Versailles in 1918, when Woodrow Wilson failed to hear Ho Chi Minh’s plea for his country’s independence. Perhaps they germinated when FDR’s policy of not helping the French recolonize Southeast Asia after World War II terminated with his death…
from page 255
Chapter 10 – Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past
Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign policy because from beginning to end they typically assume the America as “international good guy” model we noted in Chapter 8…
from page 167
Chapter 11 – Progress Is Our Most Important Product
…”Considering the beauty of the land,” Christopher Columbus wrote on first seeing Haiti, “there must be gain to be got.” Columbus and the Spanish transformed the island biologically by introducing diseases, plants, and livestock. The pigs, hunting dogs, cows, and horses propagated quickly, causing tremendous environmental damage. By 1550 the “thousands upon thousands of pigs” in the Americas had all descended from the eight pigs that Columbus brought over in 1493. “Although these islands had been, since God made the earth, prosperous and full of people lacking nothing they needed,” a Spanish settler wrote in 1518, after the Europeans’ arrival “they were laid waste, inhabited only by wild animals and birds.” Later, sugarcane monoculture replaced gardening in the name of quick profit, thereby impoverishing the soil. More recently, population pressure has caused Haitians and Dominicans to farm the island’s steep hillsides, resulting in erosion of the topsoil. Today this island ecosystem that formerly supported a large population in relative equilibrium is in far worse condition than when Columbus first saw it. This sad story may be a prophecy for the future now that modern technology has the power to make of the entire earth a Haiti.
Not one textbook brings up the whale oil lesson, the Haiti lesson, or any other inference from the past that might bear on the question of progress and the environment. In sum, although this issue may be the most important of our time, no hint of its seriousness seeps into our history textbooks…
from page 293
Chapter 12 – Why Is History Taught Like This?
Eleven chapters have shown that textbooks supply irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues ranging from Columbus’s second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide. We have also seen that history textbooks offer students no practice in applying their understanding of the past to present concerns, hence no basis for thinking rationally about anything in the future. Reality gets lost as authors stray further and further from the primary sources and even the secondary literature…
from page 301
Reasons are various: in 1925, the American Legion wanted textbooks to inspire patriotism, textbook adoption processes are complex, there is a lot of copying among publishing houses, no one really knows who the authors are, teachers don’t know that the textbooks are wrong, teachers don’t have time to research and develop teaching plans that get history right, and society wants our children to be taught these fallacies.
Chapter 13 – What Is the Result of Teaching History Like This?
This was a very eye-opening book. Taught me many things I didn’t know, and how important it is to get this right. Teaching history as it really happened can cause people to feel powerful and hopeful, rather than hopeless.