Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (40 page)

Interestingly, the upper class may not even control what is taught in its “own” history classrooms. “Preppies” who attend the University of Vermont are more likely than public school graduates to have encountered high school history teachers who challenged them and diverged from rote use of textbooks. Such teachers' success in teaching “subversively” in the belly of the upper class should hearten us to believe that it can be done anywhere.

On the other hand, if textbooks are devised t>y the upper class to manipulate youngsters to support the status quo, they hardly seem to be succeeding. Instead of revering Columbus, students wind up detesting history. Evidence suggests that history textbooks and courses make little impact in increasing trust in the United States or inducing good citizenship, however these are measured.25 Voting is the one form of citizenship that the textbooks push, yet voting in America is way down, especially among recent high school graduates. The fact that social studies and history courses give citizenship such a sanctimonious tinge may help explain why fewer than 17 percent of eligible voters aged eighteen to twenty-four voted in 1986.!

In sum, power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has. Indeed, regarding their alleged influence on American history textbooks, they may be scapegoats: blaming the power elite is comforting. Power elite theory offers tidy explanations: educational institutions cannot reform because the upper class prevents it, or the reform is not in that class's interest. Accordingly, power elite theory may create a world more satisfying and more coherent in evil than the real world with which we are all complicit. Power elite theories thus absolve the rest of us from seeing that all of us participate in the process of cultural distortion. This line of thought not only excuses us from responsibility for the sorry state of American history as currently taught, it also frees us from the responsibility for changing it. What's the use? Any action we might take would be inconsequential by definition.

Upper-class control may not be necessary to explain textbook misrepresentation, however. Special pressures in the world of textbook publishing may account to some extent for the uniformity and dullness of" American history textbooks. Almost half the states have textbook adoption boards. Some of these boards function explicitly as censors, making sure that books not only meet criteria for length, coverage, and reading level, but also that they avoid topics and treatments that might offend some parents. States without such boards are not necessarily freer of censorship, for there screening usually takes place on the local level, where concern about giving offense can be even more immediate. Moreover, states without textbook boards constitute smaller markets, since publishers must win approval at the individual district or school level. Therefore states without boards have less influence on publishers, who orient their best efforts toward the large states wilh adoption boards. California and Texas, in particular, directly affect publishers and textbooks because they are large markets with statewide adoption and active lobbying groups. Schools and districts in nonadoption states must choose among books designed for the larger markets.

Textbook adoption processes are complex.ZB Some states, such as Tennessee, accept almost every book that meets certain basic criteria for binding,

reading level, and subject matter. Tennessee schools then select from among perhaps two dozen books, usually making districtwide decisions. At the other extreme, Alabama adopts just one book per subject. State textbook boards are usually small committees whose members have been appointed by the governor or the state commissioner of education. They are volunteers who may be teachers, lawyers, parents, or other concerned citizens. The daily work of the textbook board is typically performed by a small staff that begins by circulating specifications, which tell publishers the grade levels, physical requirements (size,

binding, and the like), and guidelines as to content for all subjects in which they next plan to adopt textbooks. Publishers respond by sending books and ancillary materials. Meanwhile the board, with input from the person(s) who appointed them and sometimes with staff input as well, sets up rating committees in each subject areafor instance, high school American history. The staff holds orientation meetings for these rating committees, explains the forms used for ratine the textbooks, and then sends the books to the raters. B Usually one formal meeting is set up foe publishers' representatives to address the rating committees. Large states may hold several meetings in different parts of the state. At these meetings the representatives emphasize the ways in which their books excel. For the most part representatives push form, not content: they tout special features of layout, art work, “skills building,” and ancillary material such as videos and exams.

Rating committees face a Herculean task. Remember that the twelve books I examined average 888 pages. I have spent much of the last ten years struggling to comprehend and evaluate these books. In a single summer raters cannot even read all the books, let alone compare them meaningfully. Raters also wrestle with an average of seventy-three different rating criteria, which they apply to each book they rate, an Augean stable. Therefore publishers' representatives can make a difference. Since raters have time only to flip through most books, they look for easy readability, newness, a stunning color cover, appealing design, color illustrations, ancillary filmstrips, and ready-made teaching aids and test questions, seizing on these attributes as surrogates for quality.29 Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.

What content do adopters want to see? First off, they !ook for their own state. In Vermont, woe to [he textbook that omits Chester A. Arthur, famed twenty-first president of these United States. While he never made it very far into the hearts ofhis countrymen, Arthur had best get into the pages ofits textbooks, because he is one of only two presidents Vermont produced. The Alamo lies deep in the heart of (white) Texans; woe to any textbook that might point out that love of slavery motivated Anglos to fight there for “freedom.” California's legislature recently debated a bill to require textbooks to include the internment ofJapanese Americans during World War II.30 Usually adopters find the details they seek. Most textbook editors start their careers in publishing as sales representatives. They are not historians, but they know their market. They include whatever is likely to be of concern. Everything gets mentioned. Lynne Cheney, former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, decried the result; “Textbooks come to seem like glossaries of historical eventscompendiums oftopics.”

In some states the next step is hearings, in which the public is invited to comment on books approved by the rating committees. In Texas and California, at least, these are occasions at which organized groups attack or promote one or more of the selections, often contending that a book fails to meet a requirement found within the regulations or specifications. Although publishers lament the procedure, critics, particularly in Texas, have unearthed and forced publishers to correct hundreds of errors, from misspellings to the claim that “President Truman 'easily settled' the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb”!" Since adoption committees do try to please constituents, those who complain at hearings often make a difference.

Adoption states used to pressure publishers overtly to espouse certain points of view. For years any textbook sold in Dixie had to call the Civil War “the War between the States.” Earlier editions of The American Pageant used the even more pro-Confederate term “the War for Southern Independence” and did “exceptionally well” in Southern states; only after the civil rights movement did Pageant revert to “the Civil War.” Alabama law used to require that schools avoid “textbooks containing anything partisan, prejudicial, or inimical to the interests of the [white] people of the State” or that would “cast a reflection on their past history.” Texas still requires that “textbooks shall not contain material which serves to undermine authority.”35 Such standards are astounding in their breadth and might force drastic cuts in almost every chapter of every textbook, except that authors have already omitted most unpleasantries and controversies.

Many states have rewritten their textbook specifications to strike such blatant content requirements. Since at least 1970 Mississippi's regulations, for example, have consisted of a series of cliches with which no reasonable textbook author or critic could disagree. Publishers might be forgiven if they believe chat the spirit of the old regulations still survives, however, for the initial rejection of Mississippi: Conflict and Change proves that it does. I was senior author of the book, a revisionist state history text finally published by Pantheon Books in 1974. I say “finally” because Pantheon brought it out only after eleven other publishers refused. The problem wasn't with the quality of the manuscript, which won the Lillian Smith Award. The problem was that trade publishers said they could not publish a textbook, while textbook publishers said they could not publish a book so unlikely to be adopted. Some publishers even feared that Mississippi might retaliate against their textbooks in other subjects! Textbook publishers proved partly rightthe textbook board refused to allow our book. It contained too much black history, featured a photograph of a lynching, and gave too much attention to the recent past, according to the white majority on the rating committee. My coauthors and I, joined by three school districts that wanted to adopt the book, sued the state in a First Amend ment challenge, Loewtn a al. v. Tumipseed et a!., and in 1980 got the book on the state's approved list.

Another force for uniform, conservative textbooks comes from publishing houses themselves, “There's a great deal of copying,” Carolyn Jackson, who has probably edited more American history textbooks than any other single individual, told me. Every house covets the success of Triumph of the American Nation, which holds a quarter to a third of the American market. Although adequate scholarship exists in the secondary literature to support such ventures intellectually, not a single left-wing or right-wing American history textbook has ever been published. Neither has a major textbook emphasizing African American, Latino, labor, or feminist history as the entry point to general American history.56 Such books might sell dozens of thousands of copies a year and make thousands of dollars in profit. At the least, they would command niches in the marketplace all their own. Publishers might do fine without Texas.31 Nonetheless no publishing house can see such possibilities; all are blinded by the golden prospect of putting out the next Triumph and making millions of dollars. One editor characterized a prospective book, perhaps unfairly, as too focused on “the mistreatment of blacks” in American history, “We couldn't have that as our only American history,“ he continued. ”So we broke the contract.“ The manuscript was never published. ”We didn't want a book with an axe to grind,” the editor concluded. Of course, one person's point of view is another's axe to grind, so textbooks end up without axes or points of view.

Thus textbook uniformity cannot be attributed exclusively to oven state censors. Even in the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe, censorship was largely effected by authors, editors, and publishers, riot by state censors, and was “ultimately 3 matter of . . . sensitivity to the ideological atmosphere.”38 It is not too different here: textbook publishers rarely do anything that they imagine might risk state disapproval. Therefore they never stray far from the traditional textbooks in form, tone, and content. Indeed, when Scott, Foresman merely replaced Macbeth with Hamlet in their literature reader, educators and editors considered the change so radical that Hillel Black devoted three pages to the event in his book on textbook publishing, The American Scbootbook}TM In American history, even more than in literature, publishers strive for a “balanced” approach to offend no one.

Publishers would undoubtedly think twice before including a hard-hitting account of Columbus, for example. In Chapter Two I used genocide to refer to the destruction of the Arawaks in the Caribbean. When scholars used the same term in applying for a grant for a television series on Columbus from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the endowment rejected them.40 Lynne Cheney said that the word was a problem. The entire project, “1492: Clash of Visions,” was too pro-Indian for the endowment. “It's OK to talk about (he barbarism of the Indians, but not about the barbarism of the Europeans,” according to the series producer.

For publishers to avoid giving offense is getting increasingly difficult, however. A dizzying array of criticscreationists, the radical right, civil liberties groups, racial minorities, feminists, and even professional historianshave entered the fray No longer do textbooks get denounced only as integrationist or liberal.1" Now they are also attacked as colonialist, Eurocentric, or East-Coastcentric. Publishers must feel 3 bit flustered as they delete a passage modestly critical of American policy to please right-wing critics in one state, only to find they have offended left-wing critics in another. Including a photograph of Henry Cisneros may please Hispanics but risk denunciation by New Englanders demanding a photograph ofJohn Adams.

Although publishers want to think of themselves as moral beings, they also want to make money. “We want to do well while doing good,” the president of Random House, the parent company of Pantheon, said to me as he inquired into the commercial prospects of our Mississippi textbook.43 Thoughts of the bottom line narrow the range of thought publishers tolerate in textbooks. Publishers risk over half a million dollars in production costs with every new text book. Understandably, this scares them.