Patriotism over Democracy: A Critical Analysis of U.S. History Textbooks
Reading by James Loewen
In his critical analysis of 18 commonly used U.S history textbooks, James Loewen found that they consistently misrepresented the role of the federal government in foreign and domestic policy. In doing so, he concludes, “American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly antidemocratic.” He examines how textbooks describe U.S. foreign policy in response to international struggles for human rights and self-determination, and then looks at domestic policy with a focus on the federal government’s role in the Civil Rights Movement.
Amzie Moore became active in the fight for voting rights when he returned to Mississippi after serving in WWII. Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society.
What story do textbooks tell about our government? First, they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the states, and reserving some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the last 200 years. The federal government they picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable. Paradoxically, textbooks then underplay the role of nongovernmental institutions or private citizens in bringing about improvements in the environment, race relations, education, and other social issues. In short, textbook authors portray a heroic state, and, like their other heroes, this one is pretty much without blemishes. Such an approach converts textbooks into anti-citizenship manuals — handbooks for acquiescence.
Perhaps the best way to show textbooks’ sycophancy is by examining how authors treat the government when its actions have been least defensible.
The Federal Government at Home: Focus on the Civil Rights Movement
When high school history textbooks turn to the internal affairs of the U.S. government, the books again part company with political scientists. A large chunk of introductory political science coursework is devoted to analyzing the various forces that influence our government’s domestic policies. High school American history textbooks simply credit the government for most of what gets done. This is not surprising, for when authors idealize the federal government, perforce they also distort the real dynamic between the governed and the government. It is particularly upsetting to watch this happen in the field of civil rights, where the courageous acts of thousands of citizens in the 1960s entreated and even forced the government to act.
Between 1960 and 1968, the Civil Rights Movement repeatedly appealed to the federal government for protection and for implementation of federal law, including the 14th Amendment and other laws passed during Reconstruction.
Especially during the Kennedy administration, governmental response was woe- fully inadequate. In Mississippi, Movement offices displayed this bitter rejoinder:
THERE’S A STREET IN ITTA BENA CALLED FREEDOM. THERE’S A TOWN IN MISSISSIPPI CALLED LIBERTY.
THERE’S A DEPARTMENT IN WASHINGTON CALLED JUSTICE.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s response to the Movement’s call was especially important, since the FBI is the premier national law enforcement agency. The bureau had a long and unfortunate history of antagonism toward African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI got their start investigating alleged communists during the Woodrow Wilson administration. Although the last four years of that administration saw more anti-Black race riots than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating Blacks’ civil rights. Hoover explained the anti-Black race riot of 1919 in Washington, D.C., as due to “the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women.” In that year the agency institutionalized its surveillance of Black organizations, not white organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the bureau’s early years there were a few Black agents, but by the 1930s Hoover had weeded out all but two. By the early 1960s the FBI had not a single Black officer, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his chauffeurs. FBI agents in the South were mostly white Southerners who cared what their white Southern neighbors thought of them and were themselves white supremacists. And although this next complaint is reminiscent of the diner who protested that the soup was terrible and there wasn’t enough of it, the bureau had far too few agents in the South. In Mississippi it had no office at all and relied for its initial reports on local sheriffs and police chiefs, often precisely the people from whom the Civil Rights Movement sought protection.
Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed white supremacist who thought the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education was a terrible error. He helped Kentucky prosecute a Caucasian civil rights leader, Carl Braden, for selling a house in a white neighbor- hood to a Black family. In August 1963 Hoover initiated a campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. With the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King’s associates, bugged King’s hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of King’s conversations with and about women. The FBI then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts, and tapes, to Sen. Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters, labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president. In 1964, a high-level FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having sex, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King kill himself, to the office of King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The FBI must have known that the incident might not actually persuade King to commit suicide; the bureau’s intention was apparently to get Coretta Scott King to divorce her husband or to blackmail King into abandoning the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI tried to sabotage receptions in King’s honor when he traveled to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country” and tried to prove that the SCLC was infested with communists. King wasn’t the only target: Hoover also passed on disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project, other civil rights organizations such as CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and other civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson.
A nearly unredacted copy of the ‘You Are Done’ letter sent to Dr. Martin Luther King by the F.B.I. National Archives, Maryland.
At the same time, the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death threats to him. The FBI knew these threats were serious, for civil rights workers were indeed being killed. In Mississippi alone, civil rights workers endured more than a thousand arrests at the hands of local officials, 35 shooting incidents, and six murders. The FBI repeatedly claimed, however, that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not its job. In 1962, SNCC sued Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to force them to protect civil rights demonstrators. Desperate to get the federal government to enforce the law in the Deep South, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie Moore and Robert Moses hit upon the 1964 “Freedom Summer” idea: Bring 1,000 Northern college students, most of them white, to Mississippi to work among Blacks for civil rights. Even this helped little: white supremacists bombed 30 homes and burned 37 Black churches in the summer of 1964 alone. After the national outcry prompted by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, how- ever, the FBI finally opened an office in Jackson. Later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the FBI tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King Jr.; in so doing, the bureau was complying with a request from Pres. Lyndon Johnson.
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The FBI’s conduct and the federal leadership that tolerated it and sometimes requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s, alongside such positive achieve- ments as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As historian Kenneth O’Reilly put it, “When the FBI stood against Black people, so did the government.” How do American history textbooks treat this legacy? They simply leave out everything bad the government ever did. They omit not only the FBI’s campaign against the Civil Rights Movement, but also its break-ins and under- cover investigations of church groups, organizations promoting changes in U.S. policy in Latin America, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Textbooks don’t even want to say anything bad about state governments: all 16 narrative textbooks in my sample include part of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but 15 of them censor his negative comments about the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.
Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, but many actually credit the government, almost singlehandedly, for the advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what we might call the Hollywood approach to civil rights. To date, Hollywood’s main feature film on the Movement is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. In that movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single civil rights worker or Black Mississippian over the age of 12 with whom the viewer could possibly identify. Instead, Parker concocts two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary “good cop/bad cop” formula and in the process double-handedly solve the murders. In reality — that is, in the real story on which the movie is based — supporters of the Civil Rights Movement, including Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita, and every white Northern friend the Movement could muster, pressured Congress and the executive branch of the federal government to force the FBI to open a Mississippi office and make bringing the murderers to justice a priority. Meanwhile, Hoover tapped Schwerner’s father’s telephone to see if he might be a communist.
Everyone in eastern Mississippi knew for weeks who had committed the murder and that the Neshoba County deputy sheriff was involved. No innovative police work was required; the FBI finally apprehended the conspirators after bribing one of them with $30,000 to testify against the others.
The 12 textbooks I studied for the first edition of this book offered a Parker-like analysis of the entire Civil Rights Movement. Like the arrests of the Mississippi Klansmen, advances in civil rights were simply the result of good government. Federal initiative in itself “explained” such milestones as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we have them today. Or, in the immortal passive voice of American History, “Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed.” Several textbooks even reversed the time order, putting the bills first, the Civil Rights Movement later. Challenge of Freedom provided a typical treatment:
President Kennedy and his administration responded to the call for racial equality. In June 1963 the President asked for congressional action on far-reaching equal rights laws. Following the President’s example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D.C.
This account reverses leader and led. In reality, Kennedy initially tried to stop the march and sent his vice-president to Norway to keep him away from it because he felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights. Even Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy partisan, has dryly noted that “the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency.”
The damage is not localized to the unfounded boost textbooks give to Kennedy’s reputation. The greater danger comes from removing what scholars call “agency” from African Americans. When describing the attack on segregation that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the bestselling old book, Triumph of the American Nation, and one of the bestselling current books, The American Pageant, make no mention that African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also brought by the NAACP prepared the way. The latest Pageant actually claims that the Kennedys — Jack and Robert — prodded SNCC and other civil rights groups to register Black people to vote. All prodding went the other way around! Today many young African Americans think that desegregation was something the federal government imposed on the Black community. They have no idea it was something the Black community forced on the federal government. Meanwhile, many young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to Black people. Crediting the federal government for actions instigated by African Americans and their white allies surely disempowers African American students today, and surely helps them feel that they “have never done anything,” as Malcolm X put it.
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[The] textbook authors’ servile approach to the government [cannot] teach students to be effective citizens. Just as the story of Columbus-the-wise has as its flip side the archetype of the superstitious unruly crew, so the archetype of a wise and good government implies that the correct role for us citizens is to follow its leadership. Without pushing the point too far, it does seem that many 20th-century nondemocratic states, from the Third Reich to the Central African Empire, have had citizens who gave their governments too much rather than too little allegiance. The United States, on the other hand, has been blessed with dissenters. Some of these dissenters have had to flee the country. Since 1776 Canada has provided a refuge for Americans who disagreed with policies of the U.S. government, from Tories who fled harassment during and after the Revolution, to free Blacks who sought haven from the Dred Scott ruling, to young men of draftable age who opposed the Vietnam War. No textbook mentions this Canadian role, because no textbook portrays a U.S. government that might ever merit such principled opposition….
By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance of the executive branch. By taking the government’s side, textbooks encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship. And by presenting government actions in a vacuum, rather than as responses to such institutions as multinational corporations and civil rights organizations, textbooks mystify the creative tension between the people and their leaders. All this encourages students to throw up their hands in the belief that the government determines everything anyway, so why bother, especially if its actions are usually so benign. Thus, our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly antidemocratic. ■
© 2018 James W. Loewen. Reprinted with permission from James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press, 2018).