I. Why Textbooks Matter

In the American Chronicle novels of Gore Vidal, the left liberal revisionist view of American history has achieved a major breakthrough into the American cultural mainstream. But this is far from its only important victory in recent years. It has also made its way into the textbooks that American high school and college students are required to read when they take courses in American history.

And the importance of this last achievement can scarcely be overestimated. For, as Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser note in a recent report in The Journal of American History, "most teachers of United States history survey courses assign a textbook as core reading, and many assign only a textbook.[...] American history textbooks shape how American college students encounter their nation's history and their society's cultural heritage."³⁸⁵ It has long been thus—and not only for college students. According to Frances FitzGerald,

[i]n the nineteenth century, a heavy reliance on textbooks was the distinguishing mark of American education; it was called "the American system" by Europeans. The texts were substitutes for well-trained teachers; in some parts of the country, they constituted the whole of a school's library and the only books a child would ever read on the subject of, say, American history.³⁸⁶

More than a hundred years later, the story is little changed. As of 2003, according to Diane Ravitch,

[t]extbooks are very important in American schools, especially in history. In most history classes, they are the curriculum. Many teachers are dependent on their textbook because they have not studied history. Today, most teachers of history in grades 7-12 have neither a major nor a minor in history. Instead they have a degree in social studies education, some other branch of pedagogy, a social science, or a completely unrelated field.³⁸⁷

Early in 2005, Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University education professor and author of the book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (2001), reported in the Los Angeles Times that "[n]early a third of the students who apply to Stanford's master's in teaching program to become history teachers have never taken a single college course in history." Nor is this at all out of the ordinary, for "[a]mong high school history teachers across the country, only 18% have majored (or even minored) in the subject they now teach."³⁸⁸

For most students of history in public secondary schools in this country, then, the implications seem straightforward: "what they are taught will be the material in the textbook."³⁸⁹ A chance to influence what appears in that textbook is, accordingly, a prize of great moment to all those who seek to hale their particular truth before the court of public opinion. And consequently, the history of American history textbooks in American public schools has been a history of controversy and struggle for advantage—not from the very beginning, perhaps, but certainly from the time when public secondary schools first became an important force in American education.

That time was the 1890s. "Before then," as Frances FitzGerald notes, "American history was not very widely taught. The public grade schools had very little history of any kind in their curricula, and the private academies that prepared students for colleges and universities concentrated on classical studies and European history." But as the "Gay Nineties" dawned, the "public high schools" for the first time actually "had more students than the private academies."³⁹⁰ And the question of what was written in the history textbooks used by those public high schools therefore began to interest a great many people who had heretofore invested little or no thought in such matters.

By 1897, according to Jonathan Zimmerman, the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans' organization for soldiers who had fought in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, had formed a "school history committee" and had begun issuing calls "for a unified schoolbook that would bind [all sections of the country] together." At around the same time, the history committee of the United Confederate Veterans (ucv) made a similar demand.

"There shall not be one history for Massachusetts and another for South Carolina," declared the Mississippi war hero Stephen D. Lee, chair of the UCV's history committee," but Americans everywhere shall read the same books." The following year Lee predicted that the Spanish-American War would link North and South "at home"— that is, in their textbooks—as well as "on the field of battle."³⁹¹

By the 1920s, these newly interested observers, along with a horde of others, had begun reaching some tentative conclusions about the specific textbooks they'd been studying, and they had begun taking their specific grievances public—with a vengeance. In 1927, Chicago Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson convened "a dismissal hearing for Superintendent William McAndrew, whom Thompson accused of imposing 'treasonous' and 'un-American' texts on the schools." Thompson made these history textbooks—"texts by Charles Beard, David Muzzey, and other leading scholars"—the centerpiece of his public case against McAndrew. Nor was Chicago the only venue in which protests against Beard and Muzzey were mounted during the '20s. They raged nationwide, "from Boston and Baltimore to Seattle and San Francisco."³⁹²

What the protesters found so objectionable about Beard's and Muzzey's texts was their unduly "pro-English" character. Zimmerman notes that the movement against these books "drew most of its support from Irish and German immigrants," neither of whom would have been too keen on any book that portrayed the English too favorably.³⁹³ And there can be little question that this is precisely what many of these books did. David Muzzey was a student of James Harvey Robinson of Columbia University, whom we first met in Chapter 2 in his capacity as one of the founders of the New History, the first revisionist movement in American historiography. Muzzey took Robinson's ideas to heart and, under their guidance, created a high school American history textbook, An American History, which, as Frances FitzGerald points out, "survived for sixty-five years, selling more copies for much of that time than any of its competitors—and in certain periods more than all of them combined— and proving almost as popular in the days of the jet aircraft as in those of the horse-drawn carriage." According to FitzGerald, "[f]or nearly half the [20^th] century, a high percentage—perhaps even a majority—of American schoolchildren learned American history" from Muzzey's book.³⁹⁴ And those who didn't likely learned it from one of Muzzey's many imitators.

These texts, FitzGerald argues, placed enormous emphasis on "the English ancestry of Americans. In their discussions of exploration and colonization, they gave far greater space and approval to Sir Francis Drake than to any of the other explorers except Columbus, and they concentrated on the English colonists to the near-exclusion of the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch." In general, these books "viewed the Colonies as extensions of England into the New World," and they ended with "acclaim" for "the American entry into the First World War on the side of the British."³⁹⁵ Muzzey insisted that there were two sides to the American Revolution. According to Zimmerman, the original edition of An American History described "Stamp Act demonstrators as a 'mob' and [...] the Boston Massacre's victims as 'ruffians.'"³⁹⁶ More important—at least from the point of view of early-20^th Century immigrant Americans from Ireland, Germany, and Southern and Eastern Europe—Muzzey and his imitators depicted all these non-English arrivals on our shores "as nothing more than a problem.[...] they gave no information about how these people lived, what they did, or where they came from, much less why they came."³⁹⁷ In a word, the non-English newcomers felt excluded.

Charles Beard's books were another matter entirely. The unduly pro-English material in Beard's books was more subtle, less overt than in Muzzey. Still, it was there. In his most famous and most successful textbook, The Rise of American Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife, Mary Beard, and published only a year before its public denunciation by Big Bill Thompson, he wrote that support for the newly minted U.S. Constitution in the 1780s

ran along economic lines. The merchants, manufacturers, private creditors, and holders of public securities loomed large among the advocates of the new system, while the opposition came chiefly from the small farmers behind the seaboard, especially from the men who, in earlier years, had demanded paper money and other apparatus for easing the strain of their debts.³⁹⁸

But this might put in children's heads the notion that the Founding Fathers had masterminded a revolution and created a new government, not because of the intolerable tyranny of George III and the sanctity of individual rights, but in order to make a profit. And if the children somehow got that idea in their heads, it would be a small and easy step for them to an unduly pro-English attitude.

"It is true," the Beards wrote in 1927,

that one branch of American mythology represents the second war with England [the War of 1812] as springing inevitably from her de-pradations on American trade and her impressment of American seamen, but the evidence in the case does not exactly support that view. Northern shipowners, upon whom the losses fell with special weight, did not ask for armed intervention. On the contrary, they took great pains to prove that the federal government's report listing thousands of impressment outrages was false and they were almost unanimous in their opposition to drawing the sword against England.

Diplomatic efforts might well have done the trick, the Beards argued, without the necessity for a costly war that included the destruction by fire of the nation's new capitol at Washington, D.C. "[I]t must be remembered," they wrote,

that two days after the United States declared war—before news of the event reached London—the British government withdrew its obnoxious Orders in Council, leaving only the impressment issue unsettled by parleys and diplomacy. If, as had been said, that alone was sufficient cause for war, the fact remained that the communities which suffered most from it did not so regard the matter.³⁹⁹

Perhaps worst of all, from the viewpoint of the protesters, the Beards questioned the originality of the Founding Fathers, whose "high doctrines," they declared,

were essentially English, being derived [...] from the writings of John Locke, the philosopher who supplied the rhetorical defense mechanism for the Whig revolution of 1688 which ended in the expulsion of James II. In Locke's hands, the catechism of politics was short indeed: the aim of government is to protect property and when any government invades the privileges of property, the people have a right to alter or abolish the government and establish a new one. The idea was almost a century old when Jefferson artfully applied it in a modified form to the exigencies of the American Revolution.⁴⁰⁰

The Veterans of Foreign Wars were indignant. "The inspired men," they complained, "who startled the world with their new conception of human rights are charged with having plagiarized it all from England."⁴⁰¹

The protests and official inquiries into the unduly pro-British textbooks did have impact here and there. The historian Andrew C. McLaughlin was forced to change a sentence in his account of the battle of Bunker Hill, for example. His original, unduly pro-British sentence had read: "Three times the British returned courageously to the attack." His new sentence read: "Three times the cowardly British returned to the attack."⁴⁰² But by and large, the efforts of the reformers were not repaid with significant success. The first textbook activists to reach that milestone were to do so nearly twenty years later, during the war years of the early 1940s.

Back in 1917, a report issued by the National Education Association had suggested that secondary schools then in the habit of teaching "subjects such as history, geography, and economics" might consider an alternative proposal—"that the various disciplines be replaced by an integrated system of 'social studies,' in which the emphasis would shift from history to the social sciences and from the past to the present and the future."⁴⁰³ Far and away the most successful of the various writers and pedagogues who sought to transform this vision into reality was Harold Rugg, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose fourteen-volume series, Man and His Changing Society, began appearing in print in 1930. "Throughout the 1930s," Jonathan Zimmerman writes, "no American textbooks were more popular than the works of Harold Rugg." The publisher of Man and His Changing Society credited the series with "keeping [us] in the 'black' during the depression."⁴⁰⁴Diane Ravitch notes that Rugg's "textbooks were read by millions of students in some five thousand schools across the country."⁴⁰⁵

Then the Advertising Federation of America, "which was offended by Rugg's disparaging remarks about advertising," launched a frontal assault on the series, circulating "brochures against the books" on a national basis.⁴⁰⁶ The American Legion soon followed suit, distributing a million copies of one polemic against Rugg's texts and "nearly half a million pamphlets reviling them" a year later.⁴⁰⁷

[T]hen the National Association of Manufacturers [...] and a columnist for the Hearst press joined in, calling the series Socialist or Communist propaganda. The charges caught on and spread to community groups across the country. Dr. Rugg went on an extensive lecture tour to defend the series, during which he announced publicly that he was neither a Communist nor a Socialist. But in vain. A number of school boards banned the books, and others simply took them out of circulation. In 1938, the Rugg books sold 289,000 copies; in 1944, they sold only 21,000 copies; not long afterward, they disappeared from the market altogether.⁴⁰⁸

Twenty more years were to pass before a comparable triumph was achieved by protesters bent on influencing the textbooks used in public schools. It was in 1962, Frances FitzGerald tells us, that the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) petitioned the Detroit Board of Education, asking that a "history text, published by Laidlaw Brothers, [which] depicted slavery in a favorable light" be withdrawn "from the city school system."⁴⁰⁹ The NAACP had been protesting textbooks for thirty years at that point, ever since 1932, the year in which it established its first textbook committee and "called on local branches to examine their history, literature, and civics textbooks—and to protest the most offensive texts."⁴¹⁰ As FitzGerald notes, however, though "[t]he N.A.A.C.P. and other civil-rights organizations had denounced racial prejudice in the textbooks a number of times in prior years," they had had "no real effect."⁴¹¹

In 1962, the NAACP finally prevailed.

[T]he Detroit board withdrew the text, and subsequently began to examine for racial bias all the history texts used in the school system. The Newark Textbook Council soon followed suit. The movement then spread to other big-city school systems and was taken up by organizations representing other racial and ethnic minority groups— Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Asian-Americans, Armenian-Americans, and so on—all of whom claimed, with justice, to have been ignored or abused by the textbooks.

Then the new "movement," as FitzGerald styles it, mushroomed.

Within a few years, a dozen organizations from the B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League to a new Council on Interracial Books, were studying texts for racial, ethnic, and religious bias and making recommendations for a new generation of texts. What began as a series of discrete protests against individual books became a general proposition: all texts had treated the United States as a white, middle-class society when it was in fact multiracial and multicultural.

The Detroit NAACP's modest protest of 1962 had made what seemed like massive changes in the nation's history textbooks, and it had wasted no time in doing so—"by the late sixties," FitzGerald reminds us, the "general proposition" that "all texts" had shortchanged minorities had "come to be a truism for the educational establishment."⁴¹²

And so it was that over the next few years "[d]ozens of states passed laws or resolutions requiring the study of American minorities, including Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans as well as African-Americans." So it was that textbooks began devoting

far greater attention—and more accurate information—to blacks and other minorities. As recently as 1966 southern school districts had balked at the mere appearance of blacks in textbook illustrations. By the early 1980s, however, students across the country read about Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Textbooks also admitted an assortment of other ethnic luminaries, ranging from Pocahontas and Sacajawea to Roberto Clemente and Cesar Chavez.⁴¹³

The process of implementing these changes was never perfectly smooth, needless to say. Nor was it without moments of unintended hilarity. As of 1979, for example, according to Frances FitzGerald, textbook publishers were producing "guidelines for authors and editors on the treatment of racial and other minorities in the textbooks. These guidelines[...] give instructions on such things as the percentage of illustrations to be devoted to the various groups, and ways to avoid stereotyping in text or pictures." For example,

A history book [...] would not sell in Texas if it did not have a good deal of material on Mexican-Americans, and it would not sell anywhere if it had pictures of minority-group members who were not aspiring people: pictures of black sharecroppers could not be used in order to illustrate Reconstruction; if blacks were pictured they had to be, say, technicians in lab coats.⁴¹⁴

Twenty years later, at the dawn of a new millennium, Diane Ravitch found very similar guidelines still very much in place in the offices of American textbook publishers. She quotes from a guideline published by McGraw-Hill advising illustrators researching historical photos to (in Ravitch's words) "be on the watch for the following stereotyped images":

Pioneer women doing domestic chores must be replaced by pioneer women chopping wood, using a plow, using firearms, and handling large animals.

Pioneer woman riding in a covered wagon as man walks must be replaced by both man and woman walking or both riding, or woman walking while man rides.

Women as passengers on a sailboat must be replaced by women hoisting the sails on a boat.

Women depicted as nurses, elementary school teachers, clerks, secretaries, tellers, and librarians must be replaced by women as doctors, professors, managers, police officers, sports figures, and construction workers, and by men as nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers.

It is useful to remember, at this point, that our only purpose in following such guidelines as these at all is to remedy the failure of traditional history textbooks to include the true history of women and minorities. For, as Diane Ravitch notes,

[s]ome of these replacements require writers and artists to tell lies about history. Until the latter decades of the twentieth century, most women who worked were in fact nurses, teachers, and secretaries; not many women were doctors, professors, managers, police officers, sports figures, and construction workers. To pretend otherwise is to falsify the past. It minimizes the barriers that women faced. It pretends that the gender equality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was a customary condition in the past.⁴¹⁵

Then again, truth—fidelity to the past as best we can reconstruct it—has never been the chief goal of textbook writers. Frances FitzGerald notes that in the 1970s, it was the conventional wisdom among textbook publishers that "the inclusion of nasty information constitutes bias even if the information is true."⁴¹⁶ As FitzGerald explains, "[h]istory textbooks for elementary and secondary schools [...] are written not to explore but to instruct—to tell children what their elders want them to know about their country. This information is not necessarily what anyone considers the truth of things."⁴¹⁷ James J. Martin is more blunt: "If you mistake a zinc rainspout for a hollow tree," he writes, "and you are a woodpecker, you have a fundamentally flawed conception of the total situation. The same thing can be said for those who think that school history books are primarily intended to assist the young in appreciating and understanding history."⁴¹⁸ Public school history textbooks are meant to inculcate a certain general view of America in their student readers— a view that can be as well (perhaps better) served by a dose of myth as by a dose of truth. (Nor is this true only of American history textbooks. As Zimmerman notes, "All nations—not just the United States—construct narratives that are partly 'untrue' or mythological. But these narratives provide a common discourse of understanding" for those who read and study them.⁴¹⁹)

"The idea that the United States was a pure, high-minded nation and model of virtue"—this is where the general view of America, the "common discourse of understanding," promoted by public school history texts in this country begins.⁴²⁰ From that point, what J onathan Zimmerman calls "America's majestic national narrative" unfolds inexorably—a "triumphal narrative" of the steady evolution toward perfection of America, land of "liberty, prosperity, and equality" and "beacon of hope and liberty to the world."⁴²¹

What is perhaps most amazing about the otherwise dramatic changes in textbooks during the 1970s and after, including the systematic inclusion of more information about the roles of women and minorities in American history, is the fact that this subtext, this "triumphal" tale of America's inexorable march to greatness, has been left substantially unchanged. As Jonathan Zimmerman argued in 2002, while "[r]eform-ers did win important victories, forcing text publishers to add minority achievements and to delete egregiously racist passages," at the same time "the traditional themes of American high school history—freedom, progress, and prosperity—remained mostly undisturbed." While "hundreds of textbooks that had ignored or denigrated minorities now included accurate and sympathetic material about them," this "was not allowed to alter the old story about peace, justice, and freedom." In sum,

Our "history wars" have usually surrounded the issue of "inclusion"— who gets into the national narrative, and who does not—rather than the structure of the narrative itself: each "race" gets to have its heroes sung, as the New York Times put it in 1927, but no group may question the melody of peace, freedom, and economic opportunity that unites them all.⁴²²