Learning from history

In 1872, John Carroll Power was commissioned by the Old Settlers’ Society of Sangamon County to write up a history of the local community. Five years later, the “History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois” was ready for bookshelves. To get a copy, one had to pay ten dollars, a sum that was not only large at the time but, if one was poor, almost impossible to pay. Consequentially, “History” tells the narrative of Sangamon County through the eyes of the wealthy, established landowners of the village, the “men of character” who were deemed to have built the community. This is not to say that the destitute squatters who struggled to obtain property and become socially mobile, or the women who labored all day in the confines of the home, were not integral to the construction of Sangamon County. Generally excluded from the political and economic structures of power, they simply lacked the means to transfer their story to future generations. 

One gets a sense that similar things are occurring today in Texas. The recent decision by the Texas State Board of Education to implement a radically conservative portrayal of American history reflects the same danger of the politically powerful usurping and manipulating the nation’s past. The Republican Party of Texas, along with a powerful coalition rooted in the economically plush evangelical movement/industry and Texas business community, turned engines full steam in pushing through this reform. If there are any doubts about who funded this successful political onslaught, the Texas Freedom Network has issued a report on the financial sources sustaining the movement with religious right and corporate contributions heavily represented. In 2006, 11 influential pro-reform groups raised over $7 million to purchase the new history curriculum from the Texas State Board of Education. Once again, history was written by those willing and able to pay.
 
The new Texas curriculum appears to be, simply put, bad history. It invents a national past centered on a canard of a never-existing homogenous society of Christian white men, and sometimes women, perpetually dedicated to the growth of democracy and capitalism. This romanticized narrative was pre-constructed and is meant to provide infantile comfort rather than vigorous academic education. To make room for this daydream, crucial social developments such as slavery, campaigns for workers’ rights, The Declaration of the Seneca Falls Convention, and key moments of the Civil Rights Movement will be pushed aside. These historical realities are conveyed more as inconvenient blemishes in a noble story of the American past, but the heirs to these social movements are far from happy. Mary Helen Berlanga, a Hispanic member of member of the Texas State Board of Education, left deliberations in protest, stating that the Board “can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”   

At times, the fantastic account offered by the reformers borders on the absurd. Take, for example, their dual project of promoting traditional, patriotic American values while simultaneously rehabilitating the Confederacy. The Inaugural Address of Jefferson Davis will now be studied next to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, while slavery and Reconstruction will be given new treatment (or, more accurately, whitewashing). How the Board circles the square of promoting the virtues of “patriots and good citizens” alongside the largest insurrection in American history, initiated to save a system based on the presumed inequality of its millions of slaves, is truly mind-boggling. The whole movement to reform the history curriculum smacks of prior conservative onslaughts of demagoguery, such as McCarthyism, Father Coughlin or The Dearborn Independent, though these historical references will likely not make their way into the new textbooks.    

This is not an appeal to make high school history curricula more “liberal” or “progressive.”  It is merely a plea that Texan education appreciates the diversity of experience of the American past. Fabricating a narrative of homogeneity and unity on purpose does not even promote core national values. Rather, illustrating the struggles of various men and women from many walks of life to obtain freedom and democracy, and questioning whether or not American society was living up to these principles, is a far more compelling and worthy purpose for history curricula. The radical abolitionists, the feminists, the Civil Rights Movement, labor’s revolt in the Gilded Age, the Populists, and the Black Panthers are not blemishes on the American story, but the very pillars that offer redemption to the nation’s many imperfections. History should not be muscled aside because of the successful fundraising and campaigning of a well-connected cabal. But then again, as with the “History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois,” it always seems to be the powerful and wealthy who can present their story of the past. And as cliche as it may sound, the Texas State Board of Education has failed to learn from history.

The author is Columbia College senior majoring in history and political science. He is a member of the Undergraduate History Council and the Roosevelt Institute.