E PIuribus Confusion

U.S. history texts turn a pageant into patchwork

It's textbook time again. In the next few weeks millions of American schoolchildren will be confronted by thick history books with uplifting names like Rise of the American Nation or The Free and the Brave.

For most students the book will represent their main chance of learning about U.S. history. For their middle-aged parents, such titles bring back memories of George Washington with an inked-in mustache, and their own introduction to a unified, changeless heritage: a view of America shaped by its great men, sealed against doubt, rocklike in the conviction of national righteousness.

But wait. That isn't General Custer on page 476 any more, it's a wronged native American called Sitting Bull.

In general, generals are out. Sociology is in; so are racism and other apparently insoluble problems--pollution, poverty and the energy crisis. The illustrations show successful Chicanos and Asian Americans, most of them smiling a lot. Blacks were there before, but mainly as slaves and oppressed sharecroppers. Now they are scientists wearing lab coats. In the old pantheon of black leaders George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington have been joined not only by Martin Luther King Jr. but by Radical Educator W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony has replaced Dolley Madison. As for the oldest of ethnic heroes, Christopher Columbus, he is only a bit player now.

These dramatic exits and entrances are described in America Revised (Little, Brown; $9.95), a heavily researched book due out this fall. Its author, Frances FitzGerald, 38, examines America's view of itself as reflected in school history texts going back more than a century. Her conclusion: the once familiar tapestry of American history, long Waspish, pious and upbeat, has been ripped apart and converted into a glum, pluralistic patchwork. America and its view of the past are now changing so rapidly that few American schoolchildren in the future will share any common attitude toward their country's history. The books they read, now produced by committees, not historians, are loath to proclaim any values as self-evident, including the notion of a lofty national destiny.

FitzGerald's account begins in the early 1800s, when U.S. schools relied heavily on textbooks because of a shortage of trained teachers. The dependence was so marked that textbook use in Europe became known as "the American system." The authors, often clergymen, had no problem defining the national identity: it was white, Protestant and suspicious of foreigners. The Rev. Jedidiah Morse, for example, a friend of Dictionary Compiler Noah Webster's and the author of America's first geography textbook, described the Spanish as "naturally weak and effeminate."

In the 1840s the first wave of immigrants appeared from Ireland and Germany. According to FitzGerald, however, their presence was not seriously reflected in U.S. school textbooks until 1900, after the enormous influx of people from Eastern and Southern Europe had started.

Even then the immigrants were referred to as "they," the Americans as "we." The hope was that they could be made more like "us."

Despite the fact that the immigrants stirred up antiforeign prejudices, by 1907 the attempt to assimilate them produced the democratic melting pot theory, though years passed before textbooks preached it. National self-confidence, meanwhile, was being further boosted by America's growing role on the global scene. David Saville Muzzey's An American History, the most successful U.S. history text ever, appeared in 1911.

Muzzey imparted a courtly patrician New England tone in his history. He looked fondly toward Europe, disliked Reconstruction and was intensely patriotic about America's virtue and increasing power. He also wrote well, partly because he saw history as the work of great men whose stories made for a dramatic narrative. His book remained a standard text for more than 60 years.

It was not until the Depression that history texts began to grapple with the nation's changing social and cultural issues. The most notable grappler was Harold Rugg. In An Introduction to the Problems of American Culture and other books, he boldly discussed class structure, unemployment, even talked of socialism as a possible way of redistributing wealth. His texts were popular with liberals and sold widely. In the mid-1930s nearly half the schoolchildren of America read Rugg. But as war threatened, Rugg was thought to be unAmerican. In 1939 such diverse organizations as the American Legion and the Advertising Federation of America attacked his views. Rugg textbooks were dropped by schools.

The '50s brought other changes. The optimistic liberal internationalism of the New Deal was replaced in textbooks by a stern and admonitory antiCommunism. In one volume, The Story of American Democracy by Mabel B. Casner and Ralph Henry Gabriel, junior high school children were encouraged to report to the FBI anyone they suspected of "Communist activity." Still, the old heroes lingered on --Custer, Robert E. Lee, "the friendly Indian, Squanto," who welcomed the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims in 1620 and showed them how to plant corn.

Sitting Bull's revenge did not come until the 1960s. The catalyst was the civil rights movement, which forced textbook publishers to do some justice to the role of blacks in American life. But other ethnic minorities, as well as women's groups and antiwar protesters, demanded redress. Organizations from the.B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League to the Council on Interracial Books for Children all pushed for revisions of textbook passages they considered demeaning. Even poor Squanto was taken to task by the Interracial Books people because by helping the Pilgrims, he had given aid and comfort to a foreign invader.

The result: in little more than a decade, American textbook history has become a crazy quilt of revised judgments.

Reconstruction has been completely reinterpreted. Where Muzzey and many others castigated the "scalawags" and "carpetbaggers," a new edition of a bestselling history, the Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti Rise of the American Nation, speaks primly of "Radical Republicans" who were "influenced by a sincere feeling of obligation to the freed slaves." A few post-Viet Nam texts note the use of torture by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines in 1899, a subject never mentioned before.

Some changes represent an inclusion of facts previously suppressed. Some are simply the result of shifting historical interpretations, still highly contested or questionable. Inevitably a changing country will reshape its vision of its own past, for good or ill. Frances FitzGerald has kind words for some of the new texts -- and techniques. Among them: so-called "inquiry" texts which, instead of presenting a strict chronology, offer primary sources organized around specific continuing historical issues: The People Make a Nation by Martin W. Sandier, Edwin C. Roswenc and Edward C. Martin delves extensively into such topics as "The Centralization of Power" and ";The Black Looks at Himself." A section on "Founders and Forefathers" includes quotations from John Winthrop to Oscar Handlin.

But the price for recent revisions, she feels, has been high. Because of the need not to offend anyone, history texts are not written any more. They are "developed," writes FitzGerald, by editorial teams, sometimes involving a dozen people "and many compromises" to encourage acceptance by as many school systems as possible. A typical textbook project, the author reports, had nine consultants, including one for "learning skills" and one for "values." Such editions are continually revised to keep up with fashions. In 1975 many text houses were so distressed by women's group lobbying that they ordered editors to avoid such terms as "fatherland," and to replace familiar phrases like "the founding fathers" with, simply, "the founders."

FitzGerald disapproves of Muzzey's historical viewpoint but likes his writing.

She complains, correctly, about the "dullness" and timidity of modern textbooks, inevitable in books more concerned with commerce than with quality. But in some ways she is as divided as the texts she writes about. "All of us children of the 20th century know, or should know," she writes, "that there are no absolutes in human affairs." Today's textbooks do, fairly accurately, reflect that knowledge and mirror the confused national mood. The collapse of American confidence reflected in the histories since the 1960s is the product of the pluralism of values that FitzGerald somewhat ironically espouses.

Without a return to some consensus in society at large, no future textbook historian will ever again have Muzzey's authority or his winning "tone of self-assurance, his assumption of his own legitimacy in the American tradition." sb

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