Eccentric Flower:199912/Big Macs and Half-hearted History II

The point of the previous entry has to do with another book I was reading this week. It's called Lies Across America by James Loewen. It's good, but not as good as Lies My Teacher Told Me, his first book, which was literally the kind of mind-expanding, eye-opening book you read only a few times in your life if you're lucky. The second book just continues to elaborate on the same themes.

Okay, show of hands: Who likes history?

Come on, don't be shy. I know there's got to be someone out there who will admit to it besides me.

Truth is, Americans and history are not a match made in heaven. History is one of the poorest-taught and least-liked subjects in school, and since the students resent having to learn it, they tend to promptly forget it afterwards. History was an ordeal for most of us, a bore, and we're happy to put it past us and not look back.

Of course, our collective lack of history is just one of the many things which leads us to be ridiculed by the rest of the world - not that most Americans care. They should. This deliberate refusal to remember has already begun to hurt us and it will continue to hurt us more in the future.

The reason, Loewen says, that you didn't like learning history is because the history you got was a crock. Loewen's first book is an indictment of American history textbooks - what they don't tell you that's true, and what they do tell you that's false.

Here's the root problem: In America we like our heroes unblemished and our past decisions unclouded. We like the past to be sparkling clean, free of regret and error.

The problem is, that's nonsense, and even little kids in school know it. When students are presented with a picture of, say, Jefferson or Washington that paints these great men as saints, they know enough not to believe it, but they don't know enough to root out the whole story. So they just discard the lot.

Jefferson was a complex man. He believed in some things we endorse today and some things we don't. He contained a lot of internal contradictions - and was smart enough to be aware of this. He contained multitudes. Jefferson the slave-owner makes much more interesting reading than Jefferson the saint. Washington rebelled, futilely, against his own canonization - he was unlucky enough to see it happen in his own lifetime, and it annoyed him. He didn't want to be a saint in his twilight years; he just wanted to run his farm and be left alone. I respected Washington a lot more when I learned about his crankiness and his difficulties dealing with his fans. Before that, I'd always seen him as a sort of cardboard stock character. Knowing the man had a cranky side made him human to me. We are generally more interested in learning about humans than statues.

And the shame of it is, he didn't stop being a statue for me until earlier this year. I am thirty-one. It's taken me twenty years longer than it should have to appreciate our first President.

In only telling people The Cheerful Parts, nothing is more affected than our history of race relations, especially as pertaining to the Civil War. Do you know that Reconstruction was actually quite a success, in terms of giving blacks rights and freedom of movement? You might not, especially in the South, where Reconstruction is portrayed as being the era of the "carpetbagger" (translation: they came from the North and made us clean up our act) and an unmitigated disaster.

But the disaster was actually in the years after the collapse of Reconstruction - a collapse brought about deliberately by the rising white-supremacist groups among others - when all of the gains in race relations and human rights were systematically undone and buried. Loewen describes the Confederacy as "not having won the Civil War until after it ended," setting off a national nadir in race relations that didn't even start to reverse until the civil rights activism of the Sixties.

Did you know this? Did you know that one of the most prolific groups placing public monuments all over the country in the 1900s was the United Daughters of the Confederacy?

Our national history is a whitewash. It omits unpleasant facts about the wars we've fought (in some cases pretending that wars don't exist!), the violent birth of organized labor, our horrid treatment of anyone not white and male, our early activists (like Helen Keller, whose latter years simply don't exist as far as most textbooks are concerned), and basically anything remotely sordid about our past.

And I am not trying to induce a lot of liberal guilt - I am pointing out that it is precisely the sordid stuff that makes history interesting, that makes it provocative. A history designed to give easy answers and leave the audience feeling good afterwards is insufficient - it leaves the hearers feeling empty inside, cheated ... and afterwards they wonder why they ever bothered with that history stuff in the first place.

If, after reading this, you still can't figure out what these two entries have to do with one another, send me some mail.