Lies My Teacher Told Me (2 page)

Chapter Eleven analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption in an attempt to
explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I
once co-wrote a history textbook. Mississippi: Conflict and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although the book won the
Lillian Smith Award for “bestnon-fictionabout the South” in 1975, Mississippi rejected it
for use in public schools. In turn, three local school systems, my coauthor, and I sued
the state textbook board. In April 1980 Loewn et a/, v.Turnipseedel al. resulted in a sweeping victory on the basis of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The
experience taught me firsthand more than most writers or publishers would ever want to
know about the textbook adoption process. I also learned that not all the blame can be
laid at the doorstep of the adoption agencies.

Chapter Twelve looks at the effects of using standard American history textbooks. It shows
that the books actually make students stupid. Finally, an afterword cites distortions and omissions undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends
ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history more honestly. It is
offered as an inoculation program ofsorts against the future lies we are otherwise sure to
encounter.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

James Baldwin One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be
forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but
only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George
Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable
and inspiring. The difficulty. Of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its
value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does
not tell the truth.

By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. . .
. We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise.

Charles V. Willie

This chapter is about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification)
that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, our educational media turn
flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest. Many American history textbooks
are studded with biographical vignettes of the very famous (Land of Promise devotes a box to each president) and the famous (The Challenge ofFreedom provides “Did You Know?” boxes about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate
from medical school in the United States, and Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, among many others). In themselves, vignettes are not a bad idea. They instruct by human
example. They show diverse ways that people can make a difference. They allow textbooks to
give space to characters such as Blackwell and Hansberry, who relieve what would otherwise
be a monolithic parade of white male political leaders. Biographical vignettes also
provoke reflection as to our purpose in teaching history: Is Chester A. Arthur more
deserving of space than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright? Who influences us more todayWright, who
invented the carport and transformed domestic architectural spaces, or Arthur, who, um,
signed the first Civil Service Act? Whose rise to prominence provides more drama
Blackwell's or George Bush's (the latter born with a silver Senate seat in his mouth)? The
choices are debatable, but surely textbooks should include some people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to
achieve it.

We could go on to thirdand fourth-guess the list of heroes in textbook pantheons. My
concern here, however, is not who gets chosen, but rather what happens to the heroes when
they are introduced into our history textbooks and our classrooms. Two twentieth-century
Americans provide case studies of heroification: Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller. Wilson
was unarguably an important president, and he receives extensive textbook coverage.
Keller, on the other hand, was a “little person” who pushed through no legislation,
changed the course of no scientific discipline, declared no war. Only one of the twelve history
textbooks I surveyed includes her photograph. But teachers love to talk about Keller and
often show audiovisual materials or recommend biographies that present her life as
exemplary. All this attention ensures that students retain something about both of these
historical figures, but they may be no better off for it. Heroification so distorts the
lives of Keller and Wilson (and many others) that we cannot think straight about them.

Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical
handicaps, as an inspiration to generations ofschoolchildren. Every fifth-grader knows the
scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen's hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made
on Keller's life. Each yields its version of the same cliche. A McGraw-Hill educational
film concludes; “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly
remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us
what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and
the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential.”

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have
disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to
learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by
history. The result is that we really don't know much about her.

Over the past ten years, I have asked dozens of college students who Helen Keller was and
what she did. They all know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most of them know that she
was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to
speak. Some students can recall rather minute details of Keller's early life: that she
lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and
so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next,
about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller
became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She
wrote, didn't she?” or “she spoke”conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in
1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the sixty-four years of
her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist parry of
Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from
Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new
communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order
has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a manchild is born! Onward, comrades,
all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!”' Keller hung
a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist
party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the
syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Keller's commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and
from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet
for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat
symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed
randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were
poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women
who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Always a voice for the voiceless. Helen Keller championed women's suffrage. Her position
at the head of this 1912 demonstration shows her celebrity status as well as her
commitment to the cause. The shields are all from Western states, where women were already
voting.

Keller learned how the social class system controls people's opportunities in life,
sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller's research was not just
book-learnIng; “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could notseeit,Icouldsmelli t . ” A tthetimeKellerbecameasocialist,shewasoneofthemostfamous
women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism
caused a new storm of publicitythis time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her
courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap.

Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those
who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller's “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her
development.”

Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that time the compliments he paid me were so
generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he
reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must
have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.” She went on, “Oh,
ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of
much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”'

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation
for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having
herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to
fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support
that appeared in its magazine The Crisisa radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V Debs,
the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays
on the women's movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote
to Elizabeth Curley Flynn, leader of the American Communist party, who was then
languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: "Loving birthday greetings, dear
Elizabeth Flynn May the sense ofserving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave
heart!

One may not agree with Helen Keller's positions. Her praise of the USSR now seems naive,
embarrassing, to some even treasonous. But she was a radicala fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media and left it out. What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable.

When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they
respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country Among the progressive-era reforms with which students often credit Woodrow Wilson is
women's suffrage. Although women did receive the right to vote during Wilson's admin
istration, the president was at first unsympathetic. He had suffragists arrested; his wife
detested them. Public pressure, aroused by hunger strikes and other actions of the
movement, convinced Wilson that to oppose women's suffrage was politically unwise.
Textbooks typically fail to show the interrelationship between the hero and the people. By
giving the credit to the hero, authors tell less than half of the story.

reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and
internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive
causes like women's suffrage. A handful ofstudents recall the Wilson administration's
Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two
antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal
government and his military interventions in foreign countries.

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other
time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican
Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson's
presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson
maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua's president and to force
passage of a treaty preferential to the United States.

In 1917 Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started sending secret monetary aid
to the “White” side of the Russian civil war. In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval
blockade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and
Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of Britain and
France, and in a joint command with Japanese soldiers, American forces penetrated westward
from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces that had
declared an anticommunist government headquartered at Omsk, After briefly maintaining
front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian forces disintegrated by the end of
1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.'

Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our “unknown war with
Russia,” to quote the title of Robert Maddox's book on this fiasco. Not one of the twelve
American history textbooks in my sample even mentions it. Russian history textbooks, on
the other hand, give the episode considerable coverage. According to Maddox: “The
immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing
thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered
society. And there were longer-range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof . . .
that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance.”'

This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and
until its breakup the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.

Wilson's invasions of Latin America are better known than his Russian adventure. Textbooks
do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to
justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayal of the invasions could not possibly show
Wilson or the United States in a favorable light. With hindsight we know that Wilson's
interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the
dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still
reverberate. Even in the 1910s, most of the invasions were unpopular in this country and provoked a
torrent of criticism abroad. By the mid-1920s, Wilson's successors reversed his policies
in Latin America. The authors of history textbooks know this, for a chapter or two after
Wilson they laud our “Good Neighbor Policy,” the renunciation of force in Latin America by
Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Textbooks might (but don't) call Wilson's Latin American actions a “Bad Neighbor Policy”
by comparison. Instead, faced with pleasantries, textbooks wriggle to get the hero off the hook, as in this example from The Challenge of Freedom: “President Wilson wanted the United States to build friendships with the countries of
Latin America. However, he found this difficult. . . .” Some textbooks blame the
invasions on the countries invaded: “Necessity was the mother of armed Caribbean
intervention,” states The American Pageant. Land ofPromise is vague as to who caused the invasions but seems certain they were not Wilson's doing:
“He soon discovered that because of forces he could not control, his ideas of morality and
idealism had to give way to practical action.” Promise goes on to assert Wilson's innocence: “Thus, though he believed it morally undesirable
to send Marines into the Caribbean, he saw no way to avoid it,” This passage is sheer
invention. Unlike his secretary of the navy, who later complained that what Wilson “forced
[me] to do in Haiti was a bitter pill for me,” no documentary evidence suggests that
Wilson suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops to the Caribbean.