How Textbooks Distort American History

How many of you have had a college history course? Oh, lots of you. Well, you have gone through it. Those of you who have courses yet to take in history will come to grips with this issue of bias as well. What I want to focus on in college history texts are two types of common biases that you'll see. They are liberal biases, but I want to be a little more detailed than that. Number one would be an economic bias - that would be capitalism or the free market has failed and that we need government intervention to correct or modify this failing....

If you look at the story of Columbus, the opening section of a history textbook, you will look at Columbus and his motives and look at why he did what he did. I think a good starting point would be to ask Columbus himself why he did what he did, if we could, and we find that Columbus wrote a book of prophecies and he had a journal and he recorded why he explored and did what he did. I think you might be interested in that. "It was the Lord who put [it]into my mind. I could feel his hand upon me the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit because he comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures." For the execution of the journey to the Indies, "I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It was simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied." The two specific verses he is referring to in Isaiah chapter 49 are this - keeping in mind that the name Christopher, Christ-bearer, he saw himself bearing Christ's message to another part of the earth, he believed these verses were his call to go and deliver the message of salvation to another part of the earth - "Listen to me O coastlands and hearken your people from afar, the Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." Columbus believed that as Christ's bearer, he would deliver that message. And of course when he sailed he wore a uniform with a cross on it. And even where he landed, San Salvador - the Savior - all of this shows the incredible Christian motivation that he had.

What I would like to do for you is just show a comment about Columbus from a typical textbook, and the one that I will be mainly using is called The National Experience. It is a book used on college campuses for almost 50 years. It has gone through eight or nine editions. It is written by some of the most prominent people in the history profession - John Blum, a history professor at Yale; Edmund Morgan, also history professor at Yale; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., City University of New York, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; the late C. Vann Woodward, he taught for many years at Yale, and also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Now Columbus, keep in mind, is not especially appealing to academics because he was not academically inclined himself, and those who were academically inclined, the Boards of Scholars in Portugal and in Spain tended to reject his proposals. Isabella had to overrule the Board of Scholars in order to get the money for Columbus to set sail. So, we have some profs who are unhappy because they are the experts and here is a guy who did not want to listen to the experts and he was motivated by Christianity. You can see the kind of sinister message that we're getting.

"Christopher Columbus, son of a Genovese weaver was a man with a mission, he wanted to reach the Orient by sailing west, and he was convinced that the distance was no more than about 4,000 miles. Columbus was wrong, and when he wanted to sell his idea, the experts told him so. The experts had known for centuries that the world was round, and they had a much better notion of its size than Columbus did. The king of Portugal would have none of his scheme and neither would anybody else until Queen Isabella of Spain, who was not an expert, decided to take a chance. Armed with this commission and with a letter to the Emperor of China, Columbus made his magnificent mistake. He failed to deliver the letter, but he found America."

Now, I am a Christian, and I am sure that there are many out here who are, probably some who are not. The issue is not necessarily here in the textbook promoting Christianity or Islam, or any other religion, the issue is describing what happened in history, what motivated Columbus. One may think that he was a nut, but the point is what was motivating him was Christianity, to spread the Gospel to another part of the world. This comes down to, if you move on in history, the Founders, because over 90% of the founders were churchgoing Christians. There were a few exceptions, there was the 10% who were not - Thomas Jefferson being one and Benjamin Franklin being another. But by and large the founders were Christians, both the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the signers of the U.S. Constitution.

Take a look at someone like George Washington.... He said when he became President, "It is impossible to rightly govern without God and the Bible." That is a quote not in textbooks. In his Farewell Address, he said, "Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion from religious principle." So, in other words, national morality must be connected to religious principle, and then he says that it is impossible to rightly govern without God and the Bible. Well, one of the reasons that this is important, is because of what kind of nation was this intended to be. If Columbus was a Christian and his intent was to spread the Gospel to the New World, and that Christianity, if it was important to George Washington that Christianity ought to be part of the governing, then that means that we have to look and see what this is all about, and insert it and make it a key theme in history textbooks.

Now Washington, how does it play out, you have a practicing Christian in a position of authority. Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces in the Revolutionary War, had a difficult job. We were out-manned, we lost the Battle of Long Island, the British troops came down and defeated us soundly at Long Island, then they defeated us in Manhattan, while riding off. And that is the first year of the war.... Washington and his troops are protecting Philadelphia, the problem is that the British came from New York and captured Philadelphia. Washington and his troops flee. They go 17 miles north to Valley Forge. So there they are out there at Valley Forge and I mean when the winter comes it is cold, one of the coldest winters in Pennsylvania. We see out there at Valley Forge, Washington wanted the troops to train and be effective, but one of the problems is that the troops were often so demoralized that they had hardly anything in the way of clothing. They would have one man in the cabin who might have another pair of pants, a set of shoes, socks, for a couple of people to march out of the twelve or so in the cabin, two or three to march, maybe not even that. So a group would march and they would come back, give the clothes back, and then another group would take the clothes and they would go out and march. It was a desperate situation but the troops had to be trained.

Washington comments on this: "No history now extant can furnish an instance of an army suffering with such uncommon hardships as ours have done, and bearing them with the patience and fortitude, to see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lie on, without shoes for the want of which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and submitting without a murmur, is a proof of patience and obedience, which in my opinion, can scarce be paralleled." Washington was proud of the troops doing what they did. Well, you can read some of the accounts of soldiers and civilians that were there to see what they ate. And there was not only no McDonalds nearby, there was no one in the Continental Congress to deliver any food. "For some days there has been little less than famine in the camp. Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiers."

So you have extreme situations. One of the meals was firecake - wheat kernel. And you pour them and bake them, and pour them out on a rock, and then everybody gets a little bit of the washout in the bowl, and then eats it. Sometimes you put leaves in it to flavor it - firecake. George Washington desperately needed food. He wrote the Continental Congress, "send food." They wrote back to be careful sending messengers because the British might find out where we are, and furthermore we are not going to send you any food. Their suggestion was an interesting one - and an interesting one for a practicing Christian like George Washington to have to deal with. Their response was to steal the food from a nearby farm.

Sometimes you get a question in situational ethics, should a general steal food to feed his starving army? "Well, stealing is usually bad, but maybe it is ok if it might be the only way to win the war." Washington was not a practitioner of situational ethics. What he did was he got this "steal the food" stuff from the Continental Congress, and said no we are not going to build us a foundation for this nation, a group of people who go out and steal from their countrymen. If we can not get a better foundation than that this country is not worth founding.

When that army finished that winter, it was a fighting force. You knew you had been through something when you survived the Valley Forge experience. And not surprisingly Washington chose to have a very quick attack on the British, to see what they could do, at the Battle of Monmouth. As the British left Philadelphia for New York, the colonial army, a patriot army, attacked the British. Many consider it a draw because we did not capture the British Army, but the British ended up going to New York. They did not overwhelm the continental troops. Therefore, in many ways, it was a victory for the continental army - certainly a moral victory. And sure enough the persistence that the troops kept up after that allowed them to prevail in the battle of Yorktown was a winning assault that Washington masterminded. An excellent strategy, fooling the British into thinking that he was going to attack New York. In fact he even had his ovens where he is baking bread, the odor wafting into New York City, secretly taking the army down to attack Cornwallis, attacks at Yorktown, the British had divided its army into two different groups, he attacked the southern part in Virginia, defeated Cornwallis, that part of the army surrendered, and eventually the war was won, and it was won on a principled basis. "We the people of the United States in order to establish a more perfect union, establish ... justice."

Washington could sit in a room and with a straight face make a statement like that to kick off the Constitution because when pressured he had lived for justice. He had not stolen from the neighbors and the U.S. had a firmer foundation because he held to his Christian principles and conducted the war in an honest manner. Well, you don't find any of this in the textbooks. In fact, in a current standard national history textbook, Valley Forge is not even included as an aspect of the Revolutionary War. It is simply absent, or at least discussed in a way that does not bring across the character, some character displayed by George Washington, and what a role model he could be today for people, young and old, alike.

Well, this morning I talked on the rise of the United States being a world power after the Civil War. In the Schlesinger textbook it might be interesting to see how they look at that. Here you have a situation where you are a second rate nation in the 1860s, we lagged behind the rest of the world in steel, chemicals, and we had not done much with oil discoveries yet. Within forty to fifty years by the early 1900s we were number one in the world in steel production, and in oil production, which of course is going to mean car production in the 20^th century will belong primarily to the U.S., and then we had challenged the Germans significantly, in many other chemical markets. The U.S. emerges as a major nation. The title of the chapter that deals with this study is called this: "The Ordeal of Industrialization." The ordeal of victory? The Los Angeles Lakers recently had an "ordeal" in which they won the NBA championship! The ordeal of the New York Yankees baseball team the last few seasons! Sure there are problems along the way. It is not to say that there were not some problems, but merely the second when you improve the prosperity level of your nation, what happened when people over in Europe are trying to get inside your borders, and your country is growing by leaps and bounds - that is not a sign that you are experiencing is an "ordeal." But it tilts the message to the reader - we have relative free markets, and in these free markets, we are going to have an ordeal!

They talk a little bit about the railroad subsidy, the Transcontinentals - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific - but don't mention that the subsidized railroads did very poorly. Although, and I am quoting the textbook, "government subsidies were often obtained through bribery and were responsible for much corruption, the policies of subsidizing railroads with grants of public land was probably justified in the long run." Wow! Sixty million dollars and 60 million acres roughly to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific and that is called justified when we had the Great Northern with no subsidy crossing the country with no expense to the federal government? They have a map of the Transcontinental, which is interesting. In the map they had the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, and the Northern Pacific, but there is no Great Northern on the map! It's called "Early Pacific Railroad Lines," but no Great Northern!

They have a section on Grover Cleveland, the most free-market President of the era.... the section on Cleveland in the Schlesinger textbook [is] called "Cleveland in Command." It starts like this: "No one could be sure of the new President's views on any of the several leading issues, but everyone could be sure he was a conservative." We don't have any idea of what he thinks, we just know that he must be a conservative. Well, I guess, to make the point we have a picture of Cleveland on the next page. Captions are a way to reveal your hidden agenda. The caption under Cleveland reads "Grover Cleveland: Stubborn Conservative." Well, if we turn the textbook over another 100 pages, we have another picture - of Fidel Castro, the head of Cuba, a communist. Here is the picture of Castro: "Fidel Castro: A Romantic Marxist." So you get the message. In case the student did not get the message from the text, fortunately for slow readers we have captions, and we grasp the message in the caption....

Let's turn to the issue of tax cuts, because that's the thing today. It is big here in our history, that's the other part of the economics I want to get to. If capitalism has failed and we need government intervention, then obviously we need lots of taxes, that is right to raise money for the government, so therefore favoring tax cuts is not particularly good policy. Well, the first President to significantly favor a tax cut - the income tax being developed in 1913 (becoming a constitutional amendment) - was Calvin Coolidge. By the time Harding and Coolidge got into office in the early �20s - Coolidge was the Vice President, Harding the President - the tax rate on top incomes had risen.

Harding appointed Andrew Mellon.... Secretary of the Treasury. Harding then died. Coolidge retained him as Secretary of the Treasury�. Mellon's view was this: the bottom rate was 4 %, the top rate 73%. Four percent was the starting rate, 73% top rate. Mellon said: Look, we need across the board tax cuts, we need to cut taxes on the rich, because, he said, look, 73% is the top rate, that's nice I suppose for the government, if you get that money, but 73%, people are doing everything to avoid investment. They are doing foreign investment. They are doing municipal bonds. They are buying art collections and selling them somewhere else. They are keeping the money in something else that cannot be taxed easily. They are not investing in the economy.

And the economy was down in the early �20s, so then Mellon said that we have to cut that top rate, he concluded about 25% or about as much as anyone could agree, he said 73% of nothing is nothing, 25% of something is something, the best chance of reorienting investment into economic development in this country is to cut the top rate from 73% to 25%. His final cut slashed the top rate to 24% in 1929. So what we have is about a three-fold cut on the top rate. On the bottom rate he cut it from 4, to by the end of the �20s, down to � of 1 percent. So that the starting point was � of 1%, because he said the poor people need relief too, and so what you do is give everybody some relief and then you have a high personal exemption so that only 2 percent of Americans were even paying income tax under Mellon.

Now what's fascinating about this is that Mellon predicted because of his idea that 73% of nothing is nothing and 25% of something is something, I would not be surprised if we get more revenue into the government. If we look at the government statistics collected we see that the revenue from income taxes was $719 million in 1921, when Harding came into office. The revenue by the end of the decade was over a billion dollars, a thirty percent increase. We had a cut from 73% to 24%. A cut at the bottom level from 4 to � percent. What happened at the end of that was that we raised more money than we did at the beginning of the early �20s. We had a budget surplus every single year now under the Secretary of the Treasury, in the '20s.

Well, my gosh, we actually got more money, what are the textbooks going to say about that? I read again from Professor Schlesinger's textbook (Woodward may have written this section in any case): "Foremost among Harding's advisors was Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, a reticent multimillionaire from Pittsburgh, whose intricate banking and investment holdings gave him, his family, and his associates control, among many other things, of the aluminum monopoly. A man of slight build with a cold and weary face, Mellon exuded sober luxury and contemptuous worldliness. �The government is just a business.' Mellon believed, �and can and should be run on business principles.' Great businesses, Mellon knew, thrive on innovation and expansion. Yet the only business principle he considered relevant to government was economy, with small regard for the services that only the government could furnish the nation. Mellon worked unceasingly to reduce federal expenditures. Expenses had to be cut if he was to achieve his corollary purpose: the reduction of taxes, especially taxes on the wealthy. It was there, he argued, to place the burden of taxes on lower income groups. For taxing the rich inhibited their investments, and thus retarded economic growth."

You might think, my gosh, that is a shocking statement. Let me read from another history textbook by another Pulitzer Prize-winner, Erwin Unger�. Here's what Unger says in his book, and I quote: "Harding allowed Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh industrialist and one of the world's richest men, to pursue soak-the-poor-policies. He persuaded Congress to reduce income-tax rates at the upper levels while leaving those at the bottom untouched. Between 1920 and 1929, Mellon won further victories for his drive to shift the tax burden onto the backs of the middle and wage-earning classes."

With this kind of info we are then prepared to oppose tax cuts and not learn in any way the effect of tax cuts on American history, with this kind of misinformation. Of course during the Great Depression what happens is that tax rates go back up. Under Hoover it goes back up to 63% (top rate); under Roosevelt to 79% (top rate). The income we received from income taxes correspondingly dropped. It was the highest, if we look at the profile, from 1920-1935. We can see the income rising as the taxes were cut, and then we can see the income dropping off as the taxes were raised again.

Franklin Roosevelt promoted a further hike. He recommended at one point a 99.5% income tax on all income over $100,000. So in your second $100,000, how much would get to keep? Right, $500. And give $99,500 to the government. When he was asked about this, his response was: why not? Roosevelt - he was defeated, by the way, the Congress would not go along with that - on April 27, 1942, issued an executive order for a 100% income tax on all income over $25,000, arguing that it was needed to win the war.