Now consider the impact of the Civil Rights Movement. Imagine yourself the parent of a white 2nd grader, your daughter, as late as 1969. All your life you have been told by your state, Mississippi, and by the federal government as well,6 that African Americans are inferior beings—so inferior that they must be kept away, in separate and unequal schools, lest they hold white children back. Local industries hire them only as janitors, not as line workers. Blacks cannot live on the white side of town, and the city has not even paved some of the streets on the black side. Indeed, African Americans are a pariah people who cannot even be allowed to eat in white restaurants or rest in white cemeteries. Exactly what menace they represent is left vague—crime, surely, and mental inferiority, maybe also a sexual threat. Your daughter has been in an all-white school for two years—well, not quite all-white; under your district’s “freedom of choice” desegregation plan, two black children have enrolled in her otherwise white elementary school.
It is easy for such parents to believe that African Americans are inferior. They do make less money, after all, and live in worse homes. Besides, the alternative would be to think of ourselves as bad people. For we all participate in a society that confines blacks to the worst jobs, the worst schools, even the worst streets. To treat others so badly while considering them reasonable human beings like ourselves creates a dissonance between act and attitude that demands resolution. No one can erase what society has done, and no single parent can have much influence on its current or future actions. Even to try would not be in our best interest, lest we be called “nigger lovers” and lose our position in the white community. To change our attitude is far easier. So we agree with what authority figures tell us. We conclude that African Americans are inferior, and that segregation is appropriate for such people. Would we let our daughter marry a black person? Surely not! Indeed, only 4% of whites approved of interracial marriage before the Civil Rights Movement, and that was the national proportion, not just in the Deep South. Almost as few whites agreed, “It is OK to have Negroes as foremen over whites.”7
In the fall of 1969, in Alexander v. Holmes, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled “freedom of choice” desegregation plans unconstitutional. Giving black children the right to attend white schools put all the burden of desegregating society on their heads. Besides, there should not be white schools, or black schools—just schools. So on January 5, 1970, public schools desegregated across Mississippi. Your daughter’s white elementary school became the school for all 3rd and 4th graders in town; all 1st and 2nd graders had to attend the former black elementary school. Ninety-three percent of white parents kept their children in the public schools. Some hastily organized a private school in the Sunday School building of the Baptist Church, but it hardly equalled public school facilities. Moreover, your daughter got to keep her former teacher at her new school. As a white parent, you may have hoped that this day would never come, but of course you were upbeat about it with your little girl.
Imagine now that a year has passed. Your daughter is now halfway through 3rd grade. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west. She still comes home bubbling with enthusiasm about school and shows you her art drawings. At this point, you have another cognitive dissonance problem. You can continue saying to yourself, “African Americans are inferior. They are so inferior mentally that they must be kept in separate schools, lest they hold white children back.” But then you would have to conclude, “I am sending my little daughter off to school with them. That is bad parenting. I am a jerk!”
Again, Festinger would remind us, people don’t want to say that about themselves. To change behavior would be hard: scrimping to pay tuition for what looks to be a second-rate private school anyway. So attitudes change. “They aren’t so bad. My husband served under a black sergeant in the Army, and he was all right.” Within months of school desegregation, most white Southerners agreed with the statement, “It is OK to have Negroes as foremen over whites.” By 2003, nationally, 66% of whites “would not object to a child or grandchild’s marrying someone of another race.”8
Although my imaginary parent was a Southerner, the impact of the Civil Rights Movement was national, like the Gallup poll referred to in the previous citation. Before 1954, every white American had been complicit to a degree in denying African Americans equal rights, because the federal government had played a role. Not only did it do little or nothing to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, promising equal rights to all without regard to race. As well, the FDR administration built eight all-white “model towns,” from Greenbelt, Maryland, to Richland, Washington, that flatly prohibited African Americans after dark. Throughout the United States, the Federal Housing Administration told banks not to make loans to African Americans trying to buy in white suburbs and suggested that realtors not show them properties in white neighborhoods. White registrars across much of the South absolutely denied African Americans the right to vote, yet the U.S. did not enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, which had promised all races the right to vote. In this setting, historians found it easy to assume the inferiority of African Americans and write bad history about abolitionists, including John Brown.
What happened during Reconstruction got especially distorted in the decades before the Civil Rights Movement. No wonder, since Reconstruction was the one period when African Americans were granted and exercised their rights as citizens. Looking at what textbooks written in different eras say about Reconstruction engages students. Quickly they see that the time period in which authors wrote—as well as their race and region—can influence their writing more than what actually took place. Within the South, after 1890, only white supremacists had the power to determine how Reconstruction would be remembered, having disfranchised African Americans outright and terrorized white Republicans into submission. In the North, too, from the start of the Nadir of race relations in 1890 and persisting through World War II and up to the civil rights struggle, most historians emphasized tales of corruption and bad behavior during Congressional Reconstruction, when blacks had some influence on state and local governments. Indeed, the entire enterprise of Congressional Reconstruction seemed corrupt to historians who “knew better” than to presume that blacks could or should enjoy equal rights. Once the Civil Rights Movement wrested our society onto a path toward racial justice, these distortions no longer seemed appropriate. Bernard Weisberger’s article “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography” chronicled the changes in historians’ views up to 1959; Eric Foner continued the chronicle to 1982 in his article “Reconstruction Revisited.”9 These sources can underpin an assignment inviting students to assess old and recent textbooks or secondary works on Reconstruction. Not everything has been made right; to a degree even new textbooks still reflect the influence of the “Nadir” in their terminology and treatment of Reconstruction (and other topics).
As the changes in attitudes toward African Americans reverberated through our culture in the 1970s, not only the history of black-white race relations improved. The introduction suggests that textbook portrayals of the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast in concentration camps also got better. Students can research this topic as an example of historiography. They might begin by reading newspaper accounts from 1942–45, now available on the Web. Then they can compare textbook treatments over time. I would suggest dividing the books into four periods: “early” (1943–50), “pre-civil rights” (1950–70), “post-civil rights” (1970–88), and “post-reparations” (1988–present). They may find that early accounts were cursory, sometimes omitting the matter entirely, and justified the action. After the Civil Rights Movement, coverage in textbooks may have increased and treatments may have become more critical. After the United States apologized and paid reparations in 1988, coverage may have grown still fuller. Such improvement cannot be credited to better sources, because journalists covered the internment well at the time. Cognitive dissonance leads us to hypothesize a reciprocal relationship between tru
th about the past and justice in the present. That is, after Japanese Americans achieved some measure of justice after 1988, their incarceration became a success story of sorts. The U.S. wronged them, yes, but then the nation did something to make it right. So now authors can give it major coverage.10
STUDYING BAD HISTORY
Students find it intriguing to think about what topics textbooks handle especially badly. This is the flip side of our earlier discussion of the incarceration of Japanese Americans. The following ten questions—or a subset—can be applied to a feature film, field trip site, documentary, novel, newspaper article, textbook, or other historic source.
When was it created? The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that the actual social practices of the period when history is written largely determine that history’s perspective on the past. How did that time differ from ours? From the time of the event or person described?
Who created it? Representing which participant group’s point of view? What was their position in social structure?
Why? What were their ideological needs and social purposes? Their values?
Who was/is the intended audience? What does the work ask that audience to go and do?
Did the intended audience include powerful people and institutions? For example, is the source a textbook that is striving to win government adoption? Is it a book that needed to win an editor’s approval? Did the process of getting approved by the powerful influence what it says?
Who is left out? What points of view go largely unheard? How would the story differ if a different group had told it? Another political party? Another race, sex, class, or religious group?
Are there problematic words or symbols that would not have been used today, or by an author from another social group?
How was it received? Is it largely forgotten? Remembered? Why?
A critical question to ask at any historic site is: What does it leave out about the people it treats as heroes?
Is the presentation accurate? What actually happened? What do other sources—primary as well as secondary—say?
What difference does each point make to what is said? Under #2, for example, how does the creator’s point of view and position in social structure influence what s/he wrote? Does the source appear inadequate—or worse—in the light of these questions?11 Of course, all ten questions should not be applied tediously to every text or picture. On the contrary, students can choose which question(s) are most important for a given source.
Armed with these questions, students can read between the lines of their textbooks, or whatever source they are studying. Then the book (or movie, etc.) can furnish insights not only about the era it describes, but also about the time in which it was created. Indeed, the worse it is, the more it reveals. I know at least two high school teachers of U.S. history who deliberately adopted the worst book they could find on their state’s approved list. After all, even the worst book gets the basic chronology right—South Carolina did secede in 1860, and World War I did precede World War II. So a bad book won’t interfere much with twig learning, while it might provoke critical reading and thinking.
Why are textbooks so bad? The example of the Nadir of race relations, treated in Chapter 10, provides a way in to thinking about this question. Not one high school textbook I have seen uses the term. Of the eighteen on which I based Lies My Teacher Told Me, only one treated it adequately (albeit without naming it), and it has been out of print for more than twenty years.12 Why such inattention? Perhaps because various elements of the Nadir, such as sundown towns and suburbs, still plague our nation today. Therefore, we can hardly call the Nadir a success story.
A still more likely reason for the neglect of the Nadir has to do with the basic story line underlying American history textbooks: the archetype of progress. As a nation, we started out great, and we’ve been getting better ever since—pretty much automatically. This notion of perpetual progress legitimizes ignoring anything bad Americans ever did, because in the end it turned out all right; indeed, our history led to the most progressive nation in the history of the world. In this view, progress is what doomed the American Indian, for example, not bad things “we” (non-Indians) did. Progress as an ideology always supports the status quo: because things are getting better all the time anyway, all groups should support the system. Unfortunately, this line of thinking disempowers students (and everyone else), for it implies that simply by working and living in society, Americans contribute to a nation that is constantly improving and remains the hope of the world. The very notion of a Nadir—that things got worse, and for a long time—is contrary to the ideology of progress.
The most pervasive reason why textbooks supply bad history is that they simply don’t want to offend. Speaking badly of the dead is unkind, after all. Take the case of Franklin W. Pierce, perhaps America’s least popular president. Certainly his home state of New Hampshire came to detest him, for his administration committed two key blunders, both on behalf of Southern slaveowners: the Ostend Manifesto and policies that led to Bleeding Kansas. The 1854 Ostend Manifesto was a memo signed by three important Pierce appointees—his ambassadors to Spain, Great Britain, and France. It suggested the U.S. should force Spain to sell us Cuba as the first parcel of an expanding Southern slave empire. If Spain refused, we should simply take it. When the memo leaked, it ignited a firestorm, since it showed the Pierce administration aligned with pro-slavery expansionists. In Kansas, Pierce openly supported the pro-slavery territorial government that had been elected with the help of men from Missouri who crossed into Kansas and voted illegally. This disregard of democracy precipitated near-war between pro-slavery and pro-freedom settlers in Kansas, aware that the conflict would not be solved under the rule of law.
To this day, Pierce remains the only elected president ever denied re-nomination by his own party. He slouched back to New Hampshire in silence and then managed to alienate his few remaining supporters by growing even more pro-Southern as the Civil War approached. In 1860 he endorsed Jefferson Davis as the best presidential candidate. He called the Emancipation Proclamation “an attempt to butcher the white race for the sake of inflicting freedom on blacks.” In a speech on July 4, 1863, the very day that U.S. forces took Vicksburg and won the battle of Gettysburg, Pierce attacked the idea of saving the Union. In 1869, he died of cirrhosis of the liver, the result of years of heavy drinking.
A case can be made for Pierce as the worst president in the history of the republic. Do textbooks make it? Here is the entire treatment of his presidency in Holt American Nation, published in 2003:
Pierce won the election by a landslide.13 In his inaugural address, he called for national harmony and proceeded to appoint a cabinet that included both southerners and northerners. Pierce proved to be a weak leader, however. He was unable to control his diverse cabinet or to convince northerners that he was not caving in to southern pressure. Abolitionists labeled him a “northern man with southern principles.”14
While it does not try to make a positive case for Pierce, this paragraph excuses his failings as human weakness, implicitly blaming his cabinet for whatever went wrong. Also, he suffered from a public relations problem, according to these authors. In reality, Pierce’s problem was not that he couldn’t “convince northerners that he was not caving in to southern pressure.” Even to write “he caved in to southern pressure” would be too kind, for no evidence supports the claim that he opposed slavery but caved in to pressure. Pierce favored the Confederacy during the Civil War and pursued overtly pro-Southern and pro-slavery policies before it. Holt American Nation is far from the worst. Another recent textbook, McDougall Littell’s The Americans, supplies as its entire treatment of Pierce this phrase: “With the help of President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat elected in 1852,” in a sentence that tells how Stephen A. Douglas got the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress.
Saying bad things about our fourteenth president, to be sure, might cost a few textbook adoptions in New Hampshire. In th
e twentieth century, New Hampshire residents developed amnesia about Pierce. They erected his statue at the State Capitol in 1914, called him an “effective political leader” on his historical marker, and named Franklin Pierce College, founded in 1962, after him. Pierce remains the only president to come from the Granite State. No need to say anything about him that might offend his home state, reasons the marketing department of the textbook publisher. Surely no school district will refuse to adopt our book because it is too kind to Pierce, while a district in New Hampshire might reject our book if it treated Pierce accurately. Of course, if textbooks cannot present Pierce in a way that might offend anyone in New Hampshire, surely they cannot treat the Alamo in a way that might offend someone in Texas, a much larger market. The upshot is: honest history might always offend someone. So instead, textbooks offer dishonest history.
Whatever the specific reasons that prompt textbooks to lie or omit, what is distorted or left out usually points to times and ways that the United States went astray as a nation. The reciprocal relationship between truth and justice suggests that such issues usually remain unresolved in our own time. For that reason, it may be more important to understand what textbooks get wrong than what they get right. Thus, Americans need history courses that make us thoughtful—that tell of our past honestly, warts and all.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 12