Lies My Teacher Told Me (32 page)

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.

Having ignored why the federal government acts as it does, textbooks proceed to ignore much of what the government does. Textbook authors portray the U.S. government's actions as agreeable and
nice, even when U.S. government officials have admitted motives and intentions of a quite
different nature. Among the less savory examples are various attempts by U.S. officials and agencies to
assassinate leaders or bring down governments of other countries. The United States has
indulged in activities of this sort at least since the Wilson administration, which
hired two Japanese-Mexicans to try to poison Pancho Villa,' I surveyed the twelve
textbooks to see how they treated six more recent US, attempts to subvert foreign
governments. To ensure that the events were adequately covered in the historical
literature, I examined only incidents that occurred before 1973, well before any of these
textbooks went to press. The episodes are:

1. our assistance to the shah's faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister Mussadegh and
returning the shah to the throne in 1953;

2, our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;

3. our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and
led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;

4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;

5, our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his
government by terror and sabotage; and 6, our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile in 1973.

The U.S. government caJls actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism” when other
countries do them to us. We would be indignant to learn of Cuban or Libyan attempts to
influence our politics or destabilize our economy. Our government expressed outrage at
Iraq's Saddam Hussein for trying to arrange the assassination of former President Bush
when he visited Kuwait in 1993 and retaliated with a bombing attack on Baghdad, yet the
United States has repeatedly orchestrated similar assassination attempts.

In 1990 Warren Cohen resigned from the historical committee that he headed at the State
Department to protest the government's deletion from its official history of U.S. foreign
relations of “all mention of the C.I.A. coup that put Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in power
in Iran in 1953.”3¡ Eight of the twelve textbooks I reviewed would side with the U.S. government against
Cohen: they too say nothing about our overthrow of Mussadegh. The American Pageant and Life and Liberty stand out with far and away the most accurate accounts. Here is the paragraph from Life and Liberty:

The United Slates had been a long-time friend of the ruler of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlevi. In
fact, the United States had helped him to his throne by overthrowing a democratically
elected government in 1953, which the United States felt was too leftist. America supplied
the shah with large numbers of arms, and also trained the shah's army and police.
Unfortunately, the shah used the army and police to form a police state.

Triumph of the American Nation and Land of Promise mention that the United States deposed Mussadegh but justify the act as anticommunist. In
the words of Promise, “In 1953, a Communist-backed political party seized control of the government and
attempted to assert control over Iran's oil resources.” This will not do: Mussadegh
himself had led the drive to expel the Soviets from northern Iran after World War II. And
his party did not “seize control” any more than parties do in other parliamentary
democracies such as Canada or Great Britain. Indeed, the shah himself had appointed
Mussadegh prime minister because of his immense popularity in parliament and among the
people.

The other eight textbooks say nothing about our government's actions in prerevolutionary
Iran. The only specific U.S. action in Iran that A History ofthe Republic reports, for example, is our assistance in wiping out malaria! When these textbooks'
authors later describe the successful attempt in 1979 by the people of Iran to overthrow
the shah, their accounts cannot explain why Iranians might be so upset with the United
States. Of the twelve textbooks, only Lift and Liberty and The American Pageant explain the shah's unpopularity as a ruler imposed from without and America's unpopularity
owing to our identification with the shah and his policies. Thus only two books give
students a basis for understanding why Iranians held Americans hostage for more than a
year during the Carter administration.

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA threatened the government of Jacobo Arbenz with an armed
invasion, Arbenz had antagonized the United Fruit Company by proposing land reform and
planning a highway and railroad that might break their trade monopoly. The United States
chose an obscure army colonel as the new president, and when Arbenz panicked and sought
asylum in the Mexican embassy, we flew our man to the capital aboard the US.
ambassador's private plane. Only one textbook, The American Tradition, mentions the incident:

In the 195s the United States, concerned with stopping the spread of communism, directed
its attention to Latin America once again. In 1954 the CIA helped to overthrow the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in
Guatemala. In following years, in order to prevent communist takeovers, the United States
continued to support unpopular conservative or military governments in Latin America.

Here, as with Promise's account of Iran, Tradition offers anticommunism as the sole motive for U.S. policies. Bear in mind that this incident
took place at the height of McCarthyism, when, as Lewis Lapham has pointed out, the United
States saw communism everywhere; “When the duly elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo
Arbenz, began to talk too much like a democrat, the United States accused him of
communism.”21 Thirty years later The American Tradition maintains the US. government's McCarthyist rhetoric as fact.

Not one textbook includes a word about how the United States helped the Christians in
Lebanon fix the 1957 parliamentary election in that then tenuously balanced country. The
next year, denied a fair share of power by electoral means, the Muslims took to armed
combat, and President Eisenhower sent in the marines on the Christians' behalf Five books
discuss that 1958 intervention. Land of Promise offers the fullest treatment;

Next, chaos broke out in Lebanon, and the Lebanese President, Camille Chamoun, fearing a
leftist coup, asked for American help. Although reluctant to interfere, in July 1958
Eisenhower sent 15,000 United States marines into Lebanon. Order was soon restored, and
the marines were withdrawn.

This is standard textbook rhetoric: chaos seems always to be breaking out or about to
break out. Other than communism, “chaos” is what textbooks usually offer to explain the
actions of the other side. Communism offers no real explanation either. Kwitny points
out that the United States has often behaved so badly in the Third World that some
governments and independence movements saw no alternative but to turn to the USSR.23 Since textbook authors are unwilling to criticize the U.S. government, they present
opponents ofthe United States that are not intelligible. Only by disclosing our actions
can textbooks provide readers with rational accounts of our adversaries.

Promise goes on to tell the happy results of our intervention: “Although there was no immediate
Communist threat to Lebanon, Eisenhower demonstrated that the United States could react
quickly. As a result, tensions in the region receded.” In reality, the civil war in
Lebanon lasted until the 1980s, with mounting destruction in Beirut and throughout the nation. In 1983 a whole lot of chaos
broke out, so President Reagan sent in our marines again. A truck bomb then killed more
than two hundred marines in their barracks, and three textbooks treat that intervention.
Two of them say nothing about our involvement in either 1957 or 1958, and the remaining
textbook, The American Pageant. tells of Eisenhower's 1958 intervention in even rosier terms than Land of Promise. So not one of twelve textbooks offers students anything of substance about the continuity
of conflict in Lebanon or our role in causing it.