Lies my teacher told me chapter 11

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. - HANDICAPPED BY HISTORY Chapter 2. - 1493 Chapter 3. - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING Chapter 4. - RED EYES Chapter 5. - “GONE WITH THE WIND” Chapter 6. - JOHN BROWN AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN Chapter 7. - THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Chapter 8. - WATCHING BIG BROTHER Chapter 9. - SEE NO EVIL Chapter 10. - DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Chapter 11. - PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT Chapter 12. - WHY IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS? Chapter 13. - WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY LIKE THIS? AFTERWORD NOTES APPENDIX INDEX Copyright Page

ALSO BY JAMES W. LOEWEN

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus

The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White

Mississippi: Conflict and Change (with Charles Sallis et al.)

Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History

Social Science in the Courtroom

Sundown Towns:

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Dedicated to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks (and their ranks are growing)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE PEOPLE LISTED BELOW in alphabetical order talked with me, commented on chapters, suggested sources, corrected my mistakes, or provided other moral or material aid. I thank them very much. They are: Ken Ames, Charles Arnaude, Stephen Aron, James Baker, Jose Barreiro, Carol Berkin, Sanford Berman, Robert Bieder, Bill Bigelow, Michael Blakey, Linda Brew, Tim Brookes, Josh Brown, Lonnie Bunch, Vernon Burton, Claire Cuddy, Richard N. Current, Pete Daniel, Kevin Dann, Martha Day, Margo Del Vecchio, Susan Dixon, Ariel Dorfman, Mary Dyer, Shirley Engel, Bill Evans, John Fadden, Patrick Ferguson, Paul Finkelman, Frances FitzGerald, William Fitzhugh, John Franklin, Michael Frisch, Mel Gabler, James Gardiner, John Garraty, Elise Guyette, Mary E. Haas, Patrick Hagopian, William Haviland, Gordon Henderson, Mark Hilgendorf, Richard Hill, Mark Hirsch, Dean Hoge, Jo Hoge, Jeanne Houck, Frederick Hoxie, David Hutchinson, Carolyn Jackson, Clifton H. Johnson, Elizabeth Judge, Stuart Kaufman, David Kelley, Roger Kennedy, Paul Kleppner, J. Morgan Kousser, Gary Kulik, Jill Laramie, Ken Lawrence, Mary Lehman, Steve Lewin, Garet Livermore, Lucy Loewen, Nick Loewen, Barbara M. Loste, Mark Lytle, John Marciano, J. Dan Marshall, Juan Mauro, Edith Mayo, James McPherson, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Dennis Medina, Betty Meggars, Milton Meltzer, Deborah Menkart, Donna Morgenstern, Nanepashemet, Janet Noble, Roger Norland, Jeff Nygaard, Jim O’Brien, Wardell Payne, Mark Pendergrast, Larry Pizer, Bernice Reagon, Ellen Reeves, Joe Reidy, Roy Rozensweig, Harry Rubenstein, Faith Davis Ruffins, John Salter, Saul Schniderman, Barry Schwartz, John Anthony Scott, Louis Segal, Ruth Selig, Betty Sharpe, Brian Sherman, David Shiman, Beatrice Siegel, Barbara Clark Smith, Luther Spoehr, Jerold Starr, Mark Stoler, Bill Sturtevant, Lonn Taylor, Linda Tucker, Harriet Tyson, Ivan Van Sertima, Herman Viola, Virgil J. Vogel, Debbie Warner, Barbara Woods, Nancy Wright, and John Yewell.

Three institutions helped materially. The Smithsonian Institution awarded me two senior postdoctoral fellowships. Members of its staff provided lively intellectual stimulation, as did my fellow fellows at the National Museum of American History. Interns at the Smithsonian from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and especially Portland State University chased down errant facts. The flexible University of Vermont allowed me to go on leave to work on this book, including a sabbatical leave in 1993. Finally, The New Press, André Schiffrin, and especially my editor, Diane Wachtell, provided consistent encouragement and intelligent criticism.

TO THE SECOND EDITION

AS I ENDURED THE MORAL and intellectual torture of subjecting myself to six new high school American history textbooks in 2006-07, the following assisted in important ways: Cindy King, David Luchs, Susan Luchs, Natalie Martin, Jyothi Natarajan, the Life Cycle Institute and Department of Sociology at Catholic University of America, and Joey the guide dog in training. Many of the folks thanked for their assistance with the first edition—including those at The New Press—also helped this time. So did Amanda Patten at Simon & Schuster.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE SECOND EDITION

I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the room.

—HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT1

I just wanted to let you know that I don’t consider Lies My Teacher Told Me outdated; I really don’t see much improvement in textbooks at all!

—HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, SHERWOOD, AR2

I was expecting some liberal bullshit, but I thought it was right on. —WORKER, BAYER PHARMACEUTICALS, BERKELEY, CA3

READERS NEW TO Lies My Teacher Told Me should go straight to page one. This introduction tells old friends (and enemies?) how this edition differs from the first and why it came to be. Since it came to be largely because reader response to the first edition was so positive, the introduction seems self- congratulatory to me—another reason to skip it. Lies My Teacher Told Me does take readers on a voyage of discovery through our past, however, and some readers may want to learn of the reactions of fellow passengers.

From the first day, readers made Lies a success. As its name implies, The New Press was a small fledgling publisher without an advertising budget; word of

mouth caused Lies to sell. The book first created a stir on the West Coast. “Although the book is considered controversial by some, libraries in Alameda County [California] can’t keep it on their shelves,” reported an article at California State University at Hayward. A high school student wrote to the editor of the San Francisco Examiner: “I was a poor (D-plus) student in history until I read People’s History of the United States and Lies My Teacher Told Me. After reading those two books, my GPA in history rose to 3.8 and stayed there. If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.” 4 An early review in the San Francisco Chronicle called Lies “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education,” and my book spent several weeks on the Bay Area bestseller list in 1995.5

Independent bookstores—the kind whose owners and clerks read books and whose customers ask them for recommendations—spread the buzz across North America. “Turns American history upside down,” wrote “Joan” of Toronto in 1995 in a column called “Best New Books Recommended by Leading Independent Bookstores.” “A landmark book,” she went on, “a must read, not only for teachers of history and those who write it, but for any thinking individual.” 6 The Nation, a national magazine, said that Lies “contains so much history that it ends up functioning not just as a critique but also as a kind of counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past.” Soon Lies reached the bestseller lists in Boston; Burlington, Vermont; and other cities. It was also a bestseller for the History and Quality Paperback Book Clubs. In paperback, Lies has gone through more than thirty printings at Simon & Schuster. From the launch of Amazon.com, Lies has been the sales leader in its category (historiography). So, as far as I can tell, Lies is the bestselling book by a living sociologist.7 Counting all editions, including Recorded Books, sales of the first edition totaled about a million copies.

I wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me partly because I believed that Americans took great interest in their past but had been bored to tears by their high school American history courses. Readers’ reactions confirmed this belief. Their responses were not only wide, but deep. “My history classes in high school, I found, were not important to me or my life,” e-mailed one reader from the San Francisco area, because they “did not make it relevant to what was happening today.” Some adult readers had always blamed themselves for their lack of interest in high school history. “For all these years (I am forty-nine), I have had the opinion that I don’t like history,” wrote a woman from Utah, “when in truth,

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what I don’t like is illogic, or inconsistency. Thank you for your work. You have changed my life.”

Many readers found the book to be a life-changing experience. A forklift operator in Ohio, a forty-seven-year-old housewife in Denver, a “do-gooder” in upstate New York were inspired to finish college or graduate school and change careers by reading this book. “Words cannot describe how much your book has changed me,” wrote a woman from New York City. “It’s like seeing everything through new eyes. The eyes of truth as I like to call it.” While readers repeat adjectives like “shocked,” “stunned,” and “disillusioned,” many have also found Lies to be uplifting.

To be sure, not every reaction was positive. Although one reader “never could decide whether you were a Socialist or a Republican,” others thought they could and that Lies suffers from a leftward bias. “Marxist/hippie/socialist/ anti- American/anti-Christian” commented one reader at Amazon.com, who would be shocked to learn my real feelings about capitalism. “What a piece of racist trash,” said an anonymous postcard from El Paso. “Take your sour mind to Africa where you can adjust that history.”

That was, of course, a white response—a very white response. Very different has been the reaction from “Indian country.” A reader who I infer is part-Indian wrote:

Your book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially the chapter “Red Eyes,” has had an unprecedented effect on how I view the world. I have never felt inclined to write a letter of approval for anything I’ve read before. Your description of the Indian experience in the United States and, more importantly, the concept of a syncretic American society has subtly, but powerfully, changed my understanding of my country, and, in fact, my own ancestry.

If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history is the least-liked subject in American high schools, it is positively abhorred in Indian country. There it is the record of five centuries of defeat. Yet, properly understood, American history is not a record of Native incompetence but of survival and perseverance. From speaking before Native audiences in six states, I have come to understand to what extent false history holds Native Americans down. I now believe that only when they accurately understand their past—including their recent past—will young American Indians find the social and intellectual power to make history in

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the twenty-first century. That understanding must include the concept of syncretism—blending elements from two different cultures to come up with something new. Syncretism is how cultures typically change and survive, and all Americans need to understand that Native American cultures, too, must change to survive. Natives as well as non-Natives often labor under the misapprehension that “real” Indian culture was those practices that existed before white contact. Actually, real Indian culture is still being produced—by sculptors like Nalenik Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola, and American Indian parents everywhere.

Lies has also enjoyed huge success among African Americans. In the fall of 2004, for example, it reached number three on the bestseller list of Essence magazine and was the only book on that list by a nonblack author. “My students, who are all African Americans, were immensely enthused and energized by your book,” wrote a sociology professor at Hampton University. A Missouri native wrote that he found Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America “incredibly empowering” and planned “to buy an extra copy of both books and leave them in the barbershop I patronize in downtown St. Louis. I figure if one or two kids read it, it will make a huge difference for generations to come.”

Working-class groups and labor historians have also enjoyed Lies. “Thanks again for your scholarship and solidarity in helping show the side of the story that best reflects the roots of the other 90 percent who aren’t wealthy,” wrote a nonwealthy reader in 2004. Programs in gay and lesbian studies and women’s studies have also invited me to speak, even though Lies My Teacher Told Me— unlike its successor Lies Across America—contains no explicit treatment of sexual identity or preference or gender issues.8 Prisoners respond positively, too: a Wisconsin inmate, for example, wrote, “My congratulations to you for the courage you had to have to write such a book that goes against the grain.” Hardly least, “regular” white folks—even males—like my book, too, perhaps because I take obvious satisfaction in and give credit to those white men from Bartolomé de Las Casas through Robert Flournoy to Mississippi judge Orma Smith who have fought for justice for all of us.

If Lies My Teacher Told Me has made such an impact, why this new edition? Especially when the book, as of 2007, was selling better than ever, averaging nearly two thousand copies per week?

Back in 2003, writing from Walnut Creek, California, a devoted reader

convinced me of the need for a new edition. “I think many people believe that your book describes problems that USED TO exist in school textbooks, not as current problems,” she e-mailed me. “My own anecdotal experience with my own kids’ school textbooks is that many of your original findings remain valid. An updated edition would make it harder for people to minimize your book’s truth by characterizing it as dated.” Questions from audiences over the years taught me that despite my debunking of automatic progress in Chapter 11, many readers still believe in the myth, even as applied to the textbook publishing industry. The problems I noted with high school history books were so galling that these readers want to believe—and therefore do believe—that the books must have improved. Unfortunately, we cannot assume progress. Whether history textbooks have improved is an empirical question. It can only be answered with data. And it is an interesting question, especially to me, because it subsumes another query: Did my book make any difference?

So I spent much of 2006-07 pondering six new U.S. history textbooks. I did find them improved in a few regards—especially in their treatment of Christopher Columbus and the ensuing Columbian Exchange. I also found them worse or unchanged in many other regards—but that is the subject of the rest of the book. It’s safe to conclude that Lies didn’t influence textbook publishers very much. This did not surprise me, because fifteen years earlier, Frances FitzGerald’s critique of textbooks, America Revised, was also a bestseller, but it, too, made little impact on the industry.

However, Lies did reach and move teachers. Doing so is important, because one teacher can reach a hundred students, and another hundred next year. Teachers were a central audience I had in mind as I wrote Lies. What have they made of it?

Sadly, a few teachers rejected Lies unread, concluding from its title that I am one more teacher-basher. The book itself never bashes teachers. As a former college professor who in a typical semester appeared before students for nine hours a week, I have great respect for K-12 teachers. Many work in classrooms for as many as thirty-five hours a week; on top of that they must assign, read, and comment on homework, prepare and grade exams, and develop next week’s lesson plans. When are they supposed to find time to research what they teach in American history? During their unpaid summers and weekends? Moreover, I realize that a sizable proportion—I used to estimate 25 to 30 percent, but the number is growing—of high school American history teachers are serious about

their subject. They study it themselves and get their students involved in doing history and critiquing their textbooks. In speeches to teacher groups, I used to begin by acknowledging all the foregoing, trying to persuade them to venture beyond the book’s title.9 Moreover, there is a certain tension between the title and the subtitle, “Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.” If teachers merely rely on their textbooks, however, and try to get students to “learn” them, and if the textbooks are as bad as the next eleven chapters suggest, then teachers are complicit in miseducating their charges about our past.

In central Illinois, a teacher provided an example of what to do about bad textbooks. In autumn 2003, treating the early years of the republic, she told her sixth graders in passing that most presidents before Lincoln were slave owners. Her students were outraged—not with the presidents, but with her, for lying to them. “That’s not true,” they protested, “or it would be in the book!” They pointed out that the book devoted many pages to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and other early presidents, pages that said not one word about their owning slaves. “Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she replied, suggesting that they check her facts. Each chose a president and found out about him. When they regrouped, they were outraged at their textbook for denying them this information. They wrote letters to the putative author and the publisher. The author never replied, which did not surprise me—as we shall see, many authors never wrote “their” textbooks, especially in their later editions. Some are even deceased. The students did get a reply from a spokesperson at the publisher. “We are always glad to get feedback on our product,” it went, or boilerplate to that effect. Then it suggested, “If you will look at pages 501-506, you will find substantial treatment of the Civil Rights Movement.” The students looked at each other blankly: how did this relate to their complaint?

Such a critique is a win-win action for students. Either they improve the textbook for the next generation of students, or they learn that a vacuum resides at the intellectual center of the textbook establishment. Either way, they become critical readers for the rest of the academic year.

The story of these sixth graders shows that we underestimate children at our peril. Teachers who have gotten students as young as fourth grade to challenge textbooks and do original research have found that they exceeded expectations. A fifth-grade teacher in far southwestern Virginia wrote me that at the start of the year his students say they hate history. “Within two weeks, all or most love history.” He gets them involved with:

primary source documents such as newspaper accounts and actual photos of freedmen being lynched. This is tough on the kids sometimes but they handle it well. They get an attitude about evil and vow to keep it from happening. They no longer think that video games with people getting blown up are funny. They even start to check out books on history and read them and get away from the sanitized vanilla yogurt in the textbooks and shoot for a five-alarm chili type of history. They love history that has “the good stuff ” in it. And then they are promoted and go back to the textbook! Which creates a problem. They raise hell with the next teacher! They become politically active within the middle school. They look like they will become good citizens.

Surely good citizens are what we want—but what do we mean by a “good citizen”? Educators first required American history as a high school subject as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign around 1900. Its nationalistic genesis has always interfered with its basic mission: to prepare students to do their job as Americans.

Again, what exactly is our job as Americans? Surely it is to bring into being the America of the future. What should characterize that nation? How should it balance civil liberties and surveillance against potential terrorists? Should it allow gay marriage? What should its energy policies be, as the world’s finite supply of oil begins to impact upon us? To participate in these discussions and influence these debates, good citizens need to be able to evaluate the claims that our leaders and would-be leaders make. They must read critically, winnow fact from fraud, and seek to understand causes and results in the past. These skills must stand at the center of any competent history course.

These are not skills that American history textbooks foster—even the recent ones. Nor do courses based on them. Why then do teachers put up with such books? The answer: they make their busy lives easier. The teachers’ edition of Holt American Nation, to take one example, begins with twenty-two pages of ads making this point. One page touts its “Management System.” It contrasts two photographs. One shows a teacher struggling to carry a textbook, several other books, some overhead projections, a binder of lecture notes, and miscellaneous papers, the other a teacher smiling as she slips a single CD into her purse. “Everything you need is on one disk!” trumpets the ad, including “editable lesson plans,” “classroom presentations” containing lecture notes suitable for projection, and an “easy-to-use test generator.” No longer do teachers need to

make their own lesson plans or construct their own tests, and if they run out of things to say in the classroom, the disk also contains previews of the teaching resources and movies that Holt offers as ancillary materials. Many of these supplements, including a series of CNN videos, are more valuable education tools than the textbook itself. The problem is that the purpose of all the ancillaries is to get teachers to adopt Holt’s textbook. Then, since the textbook runs to 1,240 pages—and all too many teachers assign them all—students are unlikely to have time to do anything with any of these additional materials.

Sometimes help comes from the top down. Many school systems have grown displeased with the low student morale in these textbook-driven history courses. As a matter of school-board policy, at least two systems require any teacher in social studies or history to read my book. Homeschoolers have also found their way to Lies My Teacher Told Me. Wrote David Stanton, editor of a resource catalog for homeschoolers, “I read it cover to cover (including the footnotes), found it hard to put down, and was sad when it ended.”

Students have also taken matters into their own hands. A fourteen-year-old in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, going into the ninth grade, had already read Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America. “These are EXCELLENT books!” she wrote. “After reading them, I spread them around the school to different teachers. All were shocked and, due to this, are changing their teaching methods.” John Jennings, a high school student somewhere in cyberspace, wrote that he and a group of his friends “have read your book Lies My Teacher Told Me and it has opened our eyes to the true history behind our country, positive and negative.” He went on to add that he is “signed up to take American History next semester . . . and we are using one of the twelve textbooks you reviewed, so I can’t wait to attempt to start discussions in class concerning issues discussed in your book and use your book as a reference.” A North Carolina dad wrote, “My daughter uses Lies My Teacher Told Me as a guerrilla text in her grade eleven Advanced Placement U.S. History, and loves it—although the teacher isn’t always as pleased.” My favorite e-mail of all came in from a lad somewhere at AOL.com: “Dear Mr. Loewen, I really like your book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve been using it to heckle my history teacher from the back of the room.” My friends all like it, too, he went on. “If I could get a group price on it from the publisher, I could sell it in the corridors of my high school.” I got him the group price, and since then, several teachers—perhaps including his—have told me that my book, in the hands of precocious pupils, made their lives miserable until

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they got their own copy, which jarred them out of their textbook rut. So there is also hope from the bottom up.

Best of all has been the response in the “aftermarket”—adults who have turned to Lies because they sensed something remiss about their boring high school history courses. Many find it a book to share. “I read it twice and then it made the round of friends who were stubborn about returning it, but I finally got it back and now I’m reading it again,” wrote a security guard in California. “After completing each successive chapter, I always felt that I had to comment to a friend about what I just learned,” wrote a graduate-student-to-be in education. “I have been sharing your information with every teacher I can get to stand still for five minutes,” wrote a teacher’s aide in Montana. “This is a book that you buy two of,” wrote a professor in New Hampshire, “one to read and keep, and one to lend or give away.” A reader in Sherman Oaks, California, said, “It is more than just interesting: it is life-enriching. I will give copies as gifts . . . for years to come.” Some readers get them cheap: they join the Quality Paperback Book Club to obtain four copies of Lies for a dollar each, give them to four friends, quit the club, then join again to get four more.10

I hope you find this new edition of Lies as useful as the first in getting people to question what they think they know about American history. If you do, share it with others. No doubt the publisher would like to sell everyone you know a copy, but I’m happiest when Lies gets multiple readers. I’m also happy to get readers’ reactions—positive or negative11—to my work. You can reach me through my website, uvm.edu/~jloewen/, or jloewen@uvm.edu.

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INTRODUCTION

SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG

It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.

—JOSH BILLINGS1

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

—JAMES BALDWIN2

Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.

—GEN. PETRO G. GRIGORENKO, SAMIZDAT LETTER TO A HISTORY JOURNAL, c. 1975, USSR3

Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

—JAMES W . LOEWEN

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English.4