Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (35 page)

Richard M. Nixon The aim of the historian, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past, for the present is simply the developing past.. .. The goal of the historian is the living present.

We see things not as they are but as we are.

Frederick Jackson Turner3 Anai's Nin

Lies My Teacher Told Me

9. Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent...

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

Because we lack these Kiswahili terms, we rarely think about this distinction systematically, but we also make it. Consider how we read an account of an event we lived through, especially one in which we ourselves took part, whether a sporting event or the Persian Gulf War. We read partly in a spirit of criticism, assessing what the authors-got wrong as well as agreeing with and perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive. Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read.

Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sashaof the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamanigeneralized ancestorsis more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, which may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better. I examined how the ten narrative American histories in my sample cover the five decades leading up to the 1980s. (I excluded the 1980s because some of the textbooks came out in that decade, so they could not be expected to cover it fully.) On average, the textbooks give 47 pages to the 1930s, 43.6 pages to the 1940s, and fewer than 35 pages to each later decade. Even the turbulent decade of the 1960sincluding the civil rights movement, most of the Vietnam War, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedygets fewer than 35 pages.

I used the qualifier narrative in the previous paragraph because the examination revealed a striking difference between the two inquiry textbooks and the narrative textbooks. Discovering American History and The American Adventure, which consist largely of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources, do not downplay the sasha. Indeed, their attention to the recent past is indicative of their authors' intention of making history relevant to current events and issues. Even these two textbooks' early chapters challenge students to apply what they learn to the present. Therefore, despite the fact that both of the books were published before the 1970s ended, they give more space to the 1960s and 1970s than do the ten narrative textbooks. Unfortunately, these textbooks have long since gone out of favor and print, and, as far as I know, no inquiry textbooks remain on the market. Their lack of continued commercial viability suggests that by slighting the recent past publishers of narrative textbooks are somehow meeting a need. Probably it is the need to avoid controversy.

Avoiding the sasha surely does not meet students' needs. Textbook authors may work on the assumption that covering recent events thoroughly is unnecessary because students already know about them. Since textbook authors tend not to be young, however, what is sasha for them is zamani to their students.

As we college professors get older, we grow ever more astonished at what our undergraduatesdon't know about the recent past. I first became aware of this phenomenon as the 1970s inexorably became the 1980s. Lecturing on the Vietnam War, I increasingly got blank looks. One in four, then one in two, and in the 1990s four in five first-year college students have not known the meaning of the four-letter words bowk and dove. On the first day of class in 1989 I gave my students a quiz including the open-ended question, “Who fought in the war in Vietnam?” Almost a fourth of my students said the combatants were North and South Korea! I was stunnedto me this resembled answering “1957” to the question “When did the War of 1812 begin?” In fact, many recent high school graduates know more about the War of 1812 than about the Vietnam War.

It makes little sense and surely does no good to blame the students. It can hardly be their fault. If our civic memories begin when we are about ten years old, then the last students to have any memory of the Vietnam War graduated from high school in the spring of 1983. The war is unknown territory to today's college undergraduates, who were not alive when it ended. So are the women's movement, Watergate, and the Carter presidency. Movies, novels, songs, and other elements of popular culture do treat the recent past, but these fuse fact and fiction, as any Rambo fan can attest.6 Students need information about the recent past from their high school American history courses. The recent past is, after all, the history with the most immediate impact upon our lives today. The notion that history courses should slight the sasha for the distant zamani is perverse. Comparing textbook coverage of the Vietnam War and the War of 18 12 illuminates this perversion.

The War of 1812 took place almost two centuries ago and killed maybe two thousand Americans. Nevertheless, high school history books devote the same quantitative coveragenine pagesto the War of 1812 and the Vietnam War. One might argue, I suppose, that the War of 1812 was so much more important than the Vietnam War that it deserves as much space. Our textbooks make no such claim; most textbook authors don't know what to make of the War of 1812 and don't claim any particular importance for it.

Since the War of 1812 lasted only half as long as the Vietnam War, authors can treat it in far more detail. They enjoy the luxury of telling about individual battles and heroes in 1812. Land of Promise, for instance, devotes three paragraphs to a naval battle offPut-in-Bay Island in Lake Erie, which works out to one paragraph per hour of battle! Vietnam gets no such detail.

Scant space is only part of the problem. Nine gripping analytic pages on ihe Vietnam War might prove more than adequate.7 We must ask what kind of coverage textbooks provide, beginning with the images they supply. Photographs have been partofthe record ofwar in the United States since Matthew Brady's famous images of the Civil War. In Vietnam, television images joined still photos to shape the perceptions and sensibility of the American people. More than any other war in our history, the Vietnam War was distinguished by a series of images that seared themselves into the public consciousness. I have asked dozens of adults old enough to have lived during the war to tell me what visual images they remember; the list of images they have supplied shows remarkable overlap, A short list includes these five specific images:

a Buddhist monk sitting at a Saigon intersection immolating himself to protest the South Vietnamese government;

the little girl running naked down Highway 1, fleeing a napalm attack; the national police chief executing a terrified man, suspected of being in the Viet Cong, with a pistol shot to the side of his head; the bodies in the ditch after the My Lai massacre; and Quang Due, the first Buddhist monk to set himself on fire to protest the policies of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime that the United States supported in South Vietnam, shocked the South Vietnamese and the American people. Before the war ended, several other Vietnamese and at least one American followed Quang Puc's example.

Americans evacuating from a Saigon rooftop by helicopter, while desperate Vietnamese try to climb aboard.

The list might also include at least two generic images: B-5s with bombs streaming below them into the pock-marked countryside of Vietnam, and a ruined city such as Hue, nothing but rubble in view, as American and Sourh Vietnamese troops move in to retake it after the Tet offensive.

Merely reading these short descriptions prompts most older Americans to remember the images in sharp detail. The emotions that accompanied them come back vividly as well. Of course, since the main American involvement in the war took place from 1965 to 1973, Americans must have been at least thirty in 1993 to have these images in their sasha. Today's young people have little chance to see or recall these images unless their history books provide them.

They don't. These photographs have gone down the memory hole, that chute to the furnace where embarrassing facts burn to a crisp in George Orwell's 1984, A single book, The American Pageant, includes one of these pictures; the This little girl. Kim Phuc, ran screaming down Highway 1, fleeing from an accidental napalm attack on her village by South Vietnamese airplanes. She had stripped off her burning clothing as she ran. The television footage and still photographs of her flight were among the most searing of the war. The photograph violates two textbook taboos at once: no textbook ever shows anyone naked and none shows such suffering, even in time of war.

police chief shooting the terrified man,10 No other textbook reproduces any of them. The American Advenmres contains an image of our bombing Vietnam, but the photograph shows B-5s and bombs from below and gives no sense of any damage on the ground.

The seven cited images are important examples of the primary materials of the Vietnam War. Hawks might claim that these images exaggerate the aspects of the war they portray. However, the images have additional claims to historical significance: they made history, for they affected the way Americans thought about the war. Several of these photographs remain “among the most wellknown images in the world even now [1991],” according to Patrick Hagopian.“ Leaving them out of history textbooks shortchanges today's readers. As a student of mine wrote, ”To show a photograph of one naked girl crying after she has been napalmcd changes the entire meaning of that war to a high school student.

In Vietnam the U.S. dropped three times as many explosives as tt dropped in all theaters of World War II, even including our nuclear bombing of &&

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so textbook authors have many images of bomb DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE -

Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the national police chief of South Vietnam, casually shot this terri fied man, suspected of being a Viet Cong sympathizer, on a street in Saigon as an American photographer and television crew looked on. This photograph helped persuade many Americans that their side was not morally superior to the communists.12 The image is so haunting that, twenty-five years later, I have only to cock my fingers like a gun and people who were old enough to read newspapers or watch television in 1968 immediately recall the event and can describe it in some detail.

damage to choose from. On the ground, after the Tet offensive, in which Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops captured cities and towns all over South Vietnam, American and South Vietnamese troops shelled Hue, Ben Tre, Quang Tri, and other cities before moving in to retake them. Nonetheless, not one textbook shows any damage done by our side.

Of course, the authors and editors of textbooks choose among thousands of images of the Vietnam War. They might make different selections and still do justice lo the war. But at the very least they must show atrocities against the Vietnamese civilian population, for these were a frequent and even inevitable pan of this war without front lines, in which our armed forces had only the foggiest notion as to who was ally or opponent. Indeed, attacks on civilians were U.S. policy, as shown by Gen. William C. Westmoreland's characterization of civilian casualties; “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn't it?”“ We evaluated our progress by bodycounts and drew free-fire zones in which the LEFT: In the My Lai massacre American combat troops murdered women, old men, and children. Ronald Haeberle's photographs, including this one, which ran in Life magazine, seared the massacre into the nation's consciousness and still affect our culture.” Most Hollywood movies made about Vietnam include My Lai imagery; Platoon offers a particularly vivid example.

RIGHT: On April, 29, 1975, trtis American helicopter evacuated people from a Saigon rooftop. The next day Saigon fell and the long American (and Vietnamese) nightmare came to an end. Half of all Americans alive today were younger than ten or not yet born when this photograph was taken. Thus half know the war only from movies and textbooks.

entire civilian population was treated as the enemy. Such a strategy inevitably led to war crimes. Thus My Lai was not a minor event, unworthy of inclusion in a nation's history but was important precisely because it was emblematic of much ofwhat went wrong with the entire war in Vietnam. My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now a U.S. senator, called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, “Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” He went on to retell how American troops "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE