Lies My Teacher Told Me (3 page)

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 ofthe American Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene. But “as the months passed, even President Wilson began to lose patience.”
Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the factsthe invasion was Wilson's
idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American people. 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 legislature 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;

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.” The United States also attacked Haiti's proud tradition of individualownershipofsmalltractsofland,whichdatedhacktotheHaitianRevolution,infavoroftheestablishmentoflargeplanta 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 Triumph 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.”

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.” Even after the White Russian alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend diplomatic
recognition to the Soviet Union, He participated in barring Russia from the peace
negotiations after World War 1 and helped oust Bela Kun, the communist leader who had
risen to power in Hungary. Wilson's sentiment for selfdetermination 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. It seems that Wilson regarded self-determination as all right for, say, Belgium, but not
for the likes of Latin America or Southeast Asia.

t 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 supremacisthis wife was
even worseand 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.

Of the twelve history textbooks I reviewed, only four accurately describe Wilson's racial
policies. Land ofPromise 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 federal
government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first time such segregation
had existed since ReconstructionI When black federal employees in Southern cities
protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired. In November, 1914, a black delegation asked the President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and refused their demands.

Unfortunately, except for one other textbook, The United SlatesA 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 character 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.

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 Reconstruction. 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 ofa Nation, and returned Griffith's compliment: “It is like writing history with lightning, 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.

This landmark of American cinema was not only the best technical production of its time
but also probably the most racist major movie of all time. Dixon intended “to
revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every
man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . And make no mistake about itwe are doing
just that.”' Dixon did not overstate 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 (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.

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, “carries a dagger that he is ready to
plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” 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 differed from his
own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. “Congress,” not Wilson, is
credited with having passed the Espionage Act ofJune 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 provision giving broad
censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson's approval, his
postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress 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 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.

that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably. Textbook authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson's suppression of civil
liberties, but in 1920, when World War 1 was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that would
have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts. Textbook authors blame the anticomrnutist and antilabor 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 undemocratic,“ The president replied,
”Never!“ and Debs languished in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him. 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 heroideation prevents textbooks from showing Wilson's shortcomings, 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,” textbooks 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. It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual
disappointment the world has ever known!”