Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (31 page)

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 ofwealth 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 criticize 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 mythmaybe believing in it might even help make it come true. For ifstudents think the sky is the limit, they may reach for the sky, while if they don't, they won't.

The analogy of gender points to the problem with this line of thought. How could high school girls understand their place in American history iftheir 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 conclusion 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 ofsexism and racism. But neither here nor anywhere else do Promise or Challenge (or most other textbooks) 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 sociologists call “blaming the victim,” blame the social system rather than African Americans 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 textbooks, are willing to credit racial discrimination as the cause of poverty among blacks and Indians and sex discrimination as the cause ofwomen's inequality but don't see class discrimination as the cause ofpoverty in general.

More than math or science, more even than American literature, courses in American history hold the promise oftelling 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 children usually cannot identify the cause of their alienation, history often turns them off because it justifies rather than explains the present. When these students 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 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.

Jo/in Quincy Adams 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 X 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.

PaulGagnon Song by Tom Paxton, 1963s

Lies My Teacher Told Me

8. Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks Teach about the...

Some traditional historians, critics ofthe new emphasis on social and cultural history, 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 government. Two ofthe twelve textbooks I 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 ofPromise 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 overlook 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 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 manualshandbooks 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 century,” the United States has been the most powerful nation on earth and has typically 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, provided a succinct statement of this approach in 1948. As head of the Policy Planning Staffofthe State Department, Kennan wrote in a now famous memorandum:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6,3% of its population. 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 benefactionunreal objectives such as human rights, the raising ofliving standards, and democratization.

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 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, disinterested 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 Statesand we are only six percent of the world's populationbears 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 foreign aid than does the United States.

The desire to emphasize our humanitarian dealings with the world influences 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 everywhere,” 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 multinational corporations. One multinational alone, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), which took the lead in prompting our government to destabilize 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 perWATCHIMG BIG BROTHER

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 happily 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 intervene 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 graduation 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 governments, national economies are becoming obsolete, Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has pointed out, “The very idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American corporation, 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 corporationslarge companies 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 corporations on U.S. foreign policy with the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Pressure 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.

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 Challenge makes almost a pun of interested. In its ensuing analysis of Wilson's interventions, 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,

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. I 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. . . . I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916, I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.

Business influence on U.S. foreign policy did not start with Woodrow Wilson's administration, however. John A. Hobson, in his 1903 book Imperialism, described “a constantly growing tendency” of the wealthy class “to use their political power as citizens of this State to interfere with the political condition of those States where they have an industrial stake.”17 Nor did such influence end with Wilson. Jonathan Kwitny'$ fine book Endless Enemies cites various distortions of U.S. foreign policy owing to specific economic interests of individual 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 multinationals on U.S. policy. This is the case not necessarily because textbook authors are afraid of offending multinationals, but because they never discuss any influence 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.