Lies My Teacher Told Me (20 page)

sent, none of our textbooks hints at this possibility; even the more enlightened ones
merely champion better treatment for Indians and stop short of suggesting that our society
might still benefit from Indian ideas.

Even if no Natives remained among us, however, it would still be important for us to
understand the alternatives foregone, to remember the wars, and to learn the unvarnished
truths about white-Indian relations, Indian history is the antidote 10 the pious
ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God's
chosen people. Indian history reveals thai the United States and its predecessor British
colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this-not to wallow in
our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again. We
must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge, suggests Christopher Vecsey: “The study
of our contact with Indians, the envisioning of our dark American selves, can instill such
a strengthening doubt.”I12 History through red eyes offers our children a deeper understanding than comes from
encountering the past as a story of inevitable triumph by the good guys.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need
not be lived again.

The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. It is the great
challenge to which all our deepest aspirations to freedom must rise. If we forget thatif
we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history,
our experimentwe forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.

Ken Burns We have got to the place where we cannot use our experiences during and after the Civil
War for the uplift and enlightenment of mankind,

IV. E. 6. Du Bois More Americans have learned the story Of the South during the years of the Civil War and
Reconstruction from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind than from all of the learned volumes on this period.

Warren Beck and My/es dowers'

Maya Angelou

When was the country we now know as the United States first settled? If we forget the
lesson of the last chapter for the momentthat Native Americans settledthe best answer
might be 1526. In the summer of that year,

five hundred Spaniards and one hundred black slaves founded a town neat the mouth of the
Pee Dee River in present-day South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians
caused many deaths in the early months of the settlement. In November the slaves rebelled,
killed some of their masters, and escaped to the Indians, By then only 150 Spaniards
survived; they retreated to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind and probably merged with
nearby Indian nations.

This is cocktail-party trivia, I suppose. American history textbooks cannot be faulted for
not mentioning that the first non-Native settlers in the United States were black.
Educationally, however, the incident has its uses. It shows that Africans (is it too early
to call them African Americans?) rebelled against slavery from the first. It points to the important subject of three-way race relations
Indian-African-Europeanwhich most textbooks completely omit. It teaches that slavery
cannot readily survive without secure borders. And, symbolically, it illusttates that
African Americans, and the attendant subject of black-white race relations, were part of
American history from the first European attempts to settle.

Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by
white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life. Issues of
black-white relations propelled the Whig Party to collapse, prompted the formation of
the Republican Party, and caused the Democratic Party to label itself the “white man's
party” for almost a century. The first time Congress ever overrode a presidential veto was
for the 1866 Civil Rights Act, passed by Republicans over the wishes of Andrew Johnson. Senators mounted the longest
filibuster in U.S. history, more than 534 hours, to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights bill.
Thomas Byrne Edsall has shown how race prompted the sweeping political realignment of
1964-72, in which the white South went from a Democratic bastion to a Republican stronghold.6 Race still affects politics, as evidenced by the notorious Willie Horton commercial used
by George Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign and the more recent candidacies of the Ku
Klux Klan leader David Duke, Race riots continue to shake urban centers from Miami to Los
Angeles.

Almost no genre of our popular culture goes untouched by race. From the 1850s through the
1930s, except during the Civil War and Reconstruction, minstrel shows, which derived in a
perverse way from plantation slavery, were the dominant form of popular entertainment in
America. During most of that period Uncle Tom's Cabin was our longest-running play, mounted in thousands of productions. America's first epic
motion picture, Birth of a Nation; first talkie, The jazz Singer; and biggest blockbuster novel ever, Gone with the Wind, were substantially about race relations. The most popular radio show of all time was
“Arnos 'n' Andy,” two white men posing as humorously incompetent African Americans.' The
most popular television miniseries ever was “Roots,” which changed our culture by setting
off an explosion of interest in genealogy and ethnic background. In music, race relations
provide the underlying thematic material for many of our spirituals, blues numbers, reggae
songs, and rap pieces.

The struggle over racial slavery may be the predominant theme in American history. Until
the end of the nineteenth century, cottonplanted, cultivated, harvested, and ginned by
slaveswas by far our most important export.8 Our graceful antebellum homes, in the North as well as in the South, were built largely by
slaves or from profits derived from the slave and cotton trades. Blackwhite relations
became the central issue in the Civil War, which killed almost as many Americans as died
in all our other wars combined. Black-white relations was the principal focus of
Reconstruction after the Civil War; America's failure . to allow African Americans equal
rights led eventually to the struggle for civil I rights a century later.

The subject also pops up where we least suspect itat the Alamo,

throughout the Seminole Wars, even in the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri.9 Studs Terkel is right: race is our “American obsession.” Since those , o first Africans and Spaniards landed on the Carolina shore in 1526, our society I has
repeatedly been torn apart and sometimes bound together by this issue of I black-white
relations.

Over the years white America has told itself varying stories about the I enslavement of
blacks. In each of the last two centuries America's most popular I novel was set in slaveryUncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Gwu I with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The two books tell very different stories; I Uncle Tom's Cabin presents slavery as an evil to be opposed, while Gone with the Wind suggests that slavery was an ideal social structure whose passing is to be lamented. Until
the civil rights movement, American history textbooks in this century pretty much agreed
with Mitchell. In 1959 my high school textbook presented slavery as not such a bad thing.
If bondage was a burden for African Americans, well, slaves were a burden on Ole Massa and
Ole Miss, too. Besides, slaves were reasonably happy and well fed. Such arguments
constitute the “magnolia myth,” according to which slavery was a social structure of
harmony and grace that did no real harm to anyone, white or black. A famous 1950 textbook
by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager actually said, “As for Sambo, whose
wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he
suffered less than any other class in the South from its 'peculiar institution.'” “Peculiar institution” meant slavery, of course, and Morison and Commager here provided a
picture of it that came straight from Cone with the Wind.

This is not what textbooks say today. Since the civil rights movement, textbooks have
returned part of the way toward Stowe's devastating indictment of the institution. The
discussion in American History begins with a passage that desctibes the living conditions of slaves in positive terms:
“They were usually given adequate food, clothing, and shelter.” But the author immediately
goes on to point out, “Slaves had absolutely no rights. It was not simply that they could not vote or own property. Their owners had complete
control over their lives.” He concludes, “Slavery was almost literally inhuman.” American Adventures tells us, “Slavery led to despair, and despair sometimes led black people to take their
own lives. Or in some cases it led them to revolt against white slaveholders.” Life and Liberty takes a flatter view: “Historians do not agree on how severely slaves were treated”; the
book goes on to note that whipping was common in some places, unheard of“ on other plantations. Life and Liberty ends its section on slave life, however, by quoting the titles of spirituals”All My
Trials, Lord, Soon Be Over"and by citing the inhumane details ofslave laws. No one could
read any ofthese three books and think well ofslavery. Indeed, ten ofthe twelve books I
studied portray slavery as intolerable to the slave.

Today's textbooks also show how slavery increasingly dominated our political life in the
firsi half of the nineteenth century. They tell that the cotton gin made slavery more
profitable," They tell how in the 1830s Southern states and the federal government pushed
the Indians out of vast stretches of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and slavery
expandedAnd they tell that in the decades between 1830 and 1860, slavery's ideological
demands grew shriller,

more overtly racist. No longer was ic enough for planters and slave traders to apologize
for slavery as a necessary evil. Now slavery came to be seen “ofpositive value to the
slaves themselves,” in the words of Triumph of the American Nation. This ideological extremism was matched by harsher new laws and customs. “Talk of freeing
the slaves became more and more dangerous in the South,” in the words of The United SlatesA History of the Republic. Merely to receive literature advocating abolition became a felony in some slaveholding states. Southern
states passed new ordinances interfering with the rights of masters to free their slaves.
The legal position of already free African Americans became ever more precarious, even
in the North, as white Southerners prevailed on the federal government to make it harder
10 restrict slavery anywhere in the nation.

Meanwhile, many Northern whites, as well as some who lived below the Mason-Dixon line,
grew increasingly unhappy, disgusted that their nation had lost its idealism.15 The debate over slavery loomed ever larger, touching every subject. In 1848 Thomas Hart
Benton, a senator from Missouri, likened the ubiquity of the issue to a biblical plague:
“You could not look upon the table but there were frogs. You could not sit down at the
banquet table but there were frogs. You could not go to the bridal couch and lift the
sheets but there were frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed,
without having this pestilence thrust before us.”

History textbooks now admit that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. In the
words of The United StatesA History of the Republic, “At the center of the conflict was slavery, the issue that would not go away,” Before the
civil rights movement, many textbooks held that almost anything elsedifferences over
tariffs and internal improvements, blundering politicians, the conflict between the
agrarian South and the industrial Northcaused the war. This was a form of Southern
apologetics.17 Among the twelve textbooks I reviewed, only] Triumph ofthe American Nation, a book that originated in the 1950s, still hold such a position.

Why do textbooks now handle slavery with depth and understanding? Before the 1960s
publishers had been in thrall to the white South, In the 192C Florida and other Southern
states passed laws requiring “Securing a Correct tory of the U.S., Including a True and
Correct History of the Confederacy.”1 Textbooks were even required to call the Civil War “the War between States,” as if no
single nation had existed which the South had rent apart. In ihc fifteen years between
1955 and 1970, however, the civil rights movement destroyed segregation as a formal system
in America. The movement did not succeed in transforming American race relations, but it
did help African AmeriJ cans win more power on the local level and prompted whites to abandon segregation. Today
many school boards, curricular committees, and high school history departments include
African Americans or white Americans who have cast off the ideology of white supremacy.
Therefore contemporary textbooks can devote more space to the topic of slavery and can use
that space to give a more accurate portrayal.

Americans seem perpetually startled at slavery. Children are shocked to learn that George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg say
that many visitors are surprised to learn that slavery existed therein the heart of
plantation Virginia! Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much
longer than it has been free. Even fewer know that slavery was important in the North,
too, until after the Revolutionary War. The first colony to legalize slavery was not
Virginia but Massachusetts. In 1720, of New York City's population of seven thousand,
1,600 were African Americans, most of them slaves. Wall Street was the marketplace where owners could
hire out their slaves by the day or week.

Most textbooks downplay slavery in the North, however, so slavery seems to be a sectional
rather than national problem. Indeed, even the expanded coverage of slavery comes across
as an unfortunate bat minor blemish, compared to the overall story line of our textbooks.
James Oliver Horton has pointed out that “the black experience cannot be fully illuminated
without bringing a new perspective to the study of American history.”21 Textbook authors have failed to present any new petspective. Instead, they shoehorn their
improved and more accurate pottrait of slavery into the old “progress as usual” story
line. In this saga, the United States is always intrinsically and increasingly democratic, and
slaveholding is merely a temporary aberration, not part of the big picture. Ironically,
the very success of the civil rights movement allows authors to imply that the problem
ofblack-white race relations has now been solved, at least formally. This enables
textbooks lo discuss slavery without departing from their customarily optimistic tone.

While textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black Amenca, they remain
largely silent regarding the impact of slavery on white America, North or South. Textbooks
have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans, or with the
United States as a whole. Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves
is the easy pan. After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can
acknowledge its evils. Even the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond has mounted an
exhibit on slavery that does not romanticize the institution.

Without explaining its relevance to the present, however, extensive coverage of slavery is
like extensive coverage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariffjust more facts for hapless eleventh
graders to memorize.

Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it
conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to
haunt our society. Thetefore, treating slavery's enduring legacy is necessarily
controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.

To function adequately in civic life in our troubled times, students must learn what
causes racism. Although it is a complicated historical issue, racism in the Western world
stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying
indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work that land. To teach this relationship,
textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a
socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system. Sociologists call these the social
structure and the superstructure. Slavery existed in many societies and periods before and
after the African slave trade. Made possible by Europe's advantages in military and social
technology, the slavery started by Europeans in the fifteenth century was different,
because it became the enslavement of one race by another. Increasingly, whites viewed the enslavement of whites as illegitimate, while
the enslavement of Africans became acceptable. Unlike earlier slaveries, children of
African American slaves would be slaves forever and could never achieve freedom through
intermarriage with the owning class. The rationale for this differential treatment was
racism. As Montesquieu, the French social philosopher who had such a profound influence
on American democracy, ironically observed in 1748: “It is impossible For us to suppose
these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow
that we ourselves are not Christian.”