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A conversation with
historian and author James Loewen. Sort of.
By Carrie McLaren
SOURCE:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
From the titles of James Loewen’s
books, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America,
you might peg him as a liberal-minded historian in the tradition
of Howard Zinn . . . and, okay, he is. In fact, Zinn’s name
and praises are emblazoned across the paperback version of
Teacher. But Loewen takes his people’s approach to history an
important step beyond Zinn and other scholars who expose the
misinformation that some of us have been raised on. Loewen very
pointedly argues that what is taught as American history is not only
often wrong but, worse, boring. The flesh and blood of history–the
conflicting points of view, the ambiguity, and any semblance of
human motivation–have been stripped out and replaced with mindless
patriotism and disjointed facts. As a result, the discipline is,
quite understandably, loathed by high schools students.
Loewen, as you’d imagine, encourages
the reading of alternative viewpoints: Native Americans, African
Americans, women, the poor, and workers. But he does so with the
insistence that students compare them with the perspectives of
traditional, conservative Americans. For Loewen, history should be
approached as an inquiry. Pose a question and then investigate.
After reading Lies My
Teacher Told Me, I was dead set on getting an interview. Loewen
is a funny, clear-headed thinker who comes off as the sort of writer
who you wish lived downstairs so you could get their newspaper for
them and lend them eggs and things. I tracked Loewen down but he
didn’t respond to my repeated (and increasingly desperate) attempts
to talk. So, to make a long story short, I decided to answer the
questions myself. What follows is a mix of ideas that have been
gleaned from Loewen’s books, from his previous interviews, and my
interpretations. Although I have stolen from him liberally, I cannot
promise that he’d agree with everything.–Carrie
McLaren
Stay Free: If I had to
grossly oversimplify your stance, I would say that the problem with
history is that it’s boring and wrong. How are being boring and
being false connected?
"James Loewen": The same things
that make history false are what makes it boring. Many high school
history teachers are teaching out of field. That is, they don’t have
a degree in history or a related discipline. And they usually aren’t
even interested in history. So they hide behind the textbook and the
questions at the end of chapters. And that’s another problem–the
textbooks.
You reviewed twelve
textbooks for Teacher. Were they all equally bad?
I think the differences between them are
less important than the fact that textbooks in general are a lousy
way of teaching history.
Are textbooks a bad way to
learn in general, or is history somehow unique?
Well, a high school chemistry textbook is
likely to be called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry.
The same is true in mathematics and even in English literature. But
very few books are called American History or something bland
like that. They’re called Rise of the American Nation; Triumph of
the American Nation; The Great Experiment; The Great Republic; Land
of the Free. These are real titles. What this says is that we
are not just going to learn about history; we are going to salute
it. It’s going to be an exercise in nationalism. I think that’s
wrong because we develop stronger, more knowledgeable citizens if we
teach history with all of its dirt and its glory, with all of its
questions.
You write a bit about hero
worship in textbooks. What are a couple examples of the
misinformation we’ve been taught?
Helen Keller is known to most of us as the
famous blind and deaf girl who "overcame.’’ From what you’d read in
textbooks, you’d think she never lived past adolescence. Helen
Keller lived to be 88. And she hardly sat around in obscurity–she
was one of the most famous women on the planet in the early part of
the century. But you never hear about her adult life because she
became a radical Socialist. She was a Wobbly, a member of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and she helped found the
American Civil Liberties Union. The reason she did this is actually
related to her blindness. She wanted to do something to help blind
people, and she came to realize that blindness is not distributed
randomly across society. It’s concentrated in the lower class,
primarily due to medical care and, in Keller’s time, to industrial
accidents and syphilis.
Woodrow Wilson is another example.
People associate him with progressive causes like woman’s suffrage
but don’t know that he was an outspoken white supremacist. When he
came to power, which was with the considerable aid of black voters,
he proceeded to segregate Washington. He segregated the federal
cafeterias and work places. If two people, one white and one black,
had been sorting mail together, they now had to be in separate rooms
or have a screen between them. He also stopped blacks from obtaining
political appointments that had been routinely given them since the
days of Lincoln and Grant.
Did the textbooks you
reviewed say anything about this?
About five or so associated Woodrow Wilson
with segregation, but usually without an active verb. For instance,
one textbook says that workrooms in the federal government were
segregated, and that Woodrow Wilson undid that. That’s just totally
false. Wilson never called a halt to it, but there’s a common
practice of whenever anything bad is mentioned, it’s put in the
passive voice as if nobody did it. It just "happened."
You would think that if
history has to have heroes, it would have to have villains as well,
but that’s not the case.
Right. Textbooks rarely suggest that
anyone actually caused a problem for anyone else. The bad guy is
always very abstract. For example, in the post-Civil War period, you
won’t read that Southerners or Northerners caused any problems, but
"the era of Reconstruction" did.
What about the internet? Do
you think it has promise?
The web, by its nature, encourages
critical reading. There’s so much garbage that students must
learn how to select sources. So as long as they realize the need to
filter, then, yes, that’s an advantage over textbooks right there.
There’s no one authority that has all the answers, so students get a
chance to be their own historian.
Do you think every student
can be their own historian? Some teachers might say that’s naive.
I not only think that every person can be
a historian, I think every person is. Of course, whether they
are any good at it is another matter.
Is it true that the most
organized and prolonged attacks on textbooks have come from the
right?
Up until the 1960s, yes. But around then
you started seeing more African American, feminist, and other groups
organizing around textbooks. I’m not opposed to local communities
having input in their children’s education so long as that doesn’t
leave them with false or one-sided views.
A lot of groups that have
attacked textbooks in the past–Daughters of the American Revolution
and the John Birch Society–wanted to eliminate public education. So
why would schools even listen to people who are clearly
anti-education?
Well, education–particularly when it comes
to any sort of social study–is very much a mixed blessing in
America. Probably the best way to explain this is to give you an
example. I once did an exercise where I asked people about what kind
of adults, by education level, supported the war in Vietnam. By an
overwhelming margin–almost 10 to 1–audiences responded that
college-educated people were more likely to be for withdrawing the
troops, were more "dovish". When they explained their reasoning,
they usually wrote that educated people are more informed and
critical and therefore better able to figure out that the war wasn’t
in our best interests. Well, the truth was very different. Educated
people disproportionately supported the war in Vietnam, were
more "hawkish." Today, most people agree the Vietnam war was a
mistake. So, if we follow conventional wisdom, it turns out that the
more educated a person was, the more likely s/he was wrong about the
war.
Now, when I asked my audience why
educated Americans supported the war, they couldn’t figure it out.
One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to
war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research
shows that when people expect to go to war–whatever educational
level they are–they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive
dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I
pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to
school, that could help explain why educated people supported the
war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and
affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a
strong incentive for believing that American is fair because it
means they earned their success. Two, education is socialization,
and socializing teaches people how to conform to the needs of
society. The more schooling, the more socialization.
We like to believe schooling is a
good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with
historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional
schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will
understand it.
Students who have taken math courses
are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages,
and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the
result of more, not less, schooling.
You’re better off taking no
history, because then you know that you’re missing it.
Right. Thinking well of education
reinforces what we might call American individualism, a society
marked by its equality of opportunity. Yet precisely to the extent
that students believe that equality of opportunity exists, they are
encouraged to blame the uneducated for being poor, just as my
audiences blame them for supporting the war in Vietnam.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a
great essay in Harper’s where he argued for teaching terms like "Sambo"
and "darkie." He said that if there were no hurt feelings than
something other than history would be the subject being taught.
Would you agree with that? That hurt feelings are inevitable?
Well, I don’t know about inevitable. For a
lot of black students, reading those terms points out the real
barriers that they’ve been up against. But what he’s suggesting is
basically true: there are a lot of hurt feelings. What I’d
like to see is history that spreads the discomfort around, rather
than just teaching history that only makes affluent white children
comfortable.
I recently read about an economics
textbook that teaches everything in terms of a couple’s romance.
What do you think of using a storyline like that to teach?
I haven’t seen that book. There are
history books that use fictional stories to describe a period. I
have no problem with that, although I think actual events can be
more interesting than fictional ones. The fact is that people learn
through stories. Now, whether you want to encourage students to view
their personal relationships in terms of macroeconomics is another
question entirely.
When your book came out,
there was another book by conservatives (Molding the Good Citizen)
that analyzed fifteen history textbooks but came to opposite
conclusions. They said that history textbooks reflect a liberal
bias; that people of color and feminists get more due than their
due; and that business is denigrated and downplayed. So how does
that figure?
People approach history from different
perspectives, that’s to be expected. It’s impossible to come up with
any definitive history that’s going to please both Jesse Helms and
Jesse Jackson. And, in fact, trying to do so is what has made
history so boring and meaningless that it alienates everyone. So
let's hear the conservative take on the women¹s movement, on the
Civil Rights movement. But let's hear other perspectives, too.
Are you afraid that history
then becomes an exercise in teaching "it's all relative?"
No, to encourage differences of opinion is not to say that all
opinions are equally appropriate. There is a reason that teachers
are at the head of the class. And there is such a thing as truth.
You can only get there, though, by scrutinizing different
perspectives and encouraging debate.
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SOURCE:
http://intellectualconservative.com/article2081.html
Question for D'Souza: What makes conservatism more important
now than ever?
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Conservatism is the
governing ideology of the Republican Party, just as liberalism
is the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party. The Bush
administration is fundamentally guided by a conservative view of
the world. Since the Reagan years we have had a conservative
tide in America. Even Clinton, who swam against this tide in the
first term, ended up signing welfare reform and free trade and
declaring that “the era of big government is over.” Conservatism
is important today because it sets the terms of debate.
Question for D'Souza:
What is the most serious flaw in contemporary liberal thinking?
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Contemporary
liberalism has three major flaws, all of which flow from its
excessively benign view of human nature: the Big Government
flaw, which was introduced by Franklin Roosevelt, the Give Peace
a Chance flaw, which was introduced by the Vietnam protesters,
and the Moral Irresponsibility flaw, which was a product of the
“do your own thing” ethos of the 1960s. Even today, whenever
there is a social problem, liberals look to the government for a
remedy. Even today, when America intervenes abroad, liberals
worry that it’s Vietnam all over again. Finally liberals seek to
expand personal freedom but they don’t seem to recognize that it
is equally important that people, especially young people, be
taught to use freedom well.
Question for D'Souza:
How has the political and social landscape changed since the 1980s,
when you were a co-founder of the Dartmouth Review?
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The good news on
campus is that the speech codes are dead. The bad news is that
the faculty whose politics were shaped in the 1960s are now
fully in charge. Conservatives can’t get rid of these people, so
the best thing to do is to figure out what annoys them the most,
and then do it repeatedly. Many of the issues that we dealt with
on the Dartmouth campus—affirmative action, multiculturalism,
diversity, feminism, gay rights—are still being debated today.
On the national scene, conservatism has won spectacular
victories. The two main pillars of the Reagan agenda—defeating
the “evil empire” and ushering in an age of entrepreneurship and
global capitalism—have both been realized. Islamic radicalism
has replaced Soviet Communism as the greatest external threat
facing America.
Question for D'Souza:
Did you ever think of yourself as a liberal?
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When I was a
freshman at Dartmouth I thought of myself as non-political. But
in fact my views were mostly liberal. If you had said “Reagan” I
would have said “washed-up former actor.” If you had said
“capitalism” I would have said “greed.” If you had said
“morality” I would have said, “Can’t legislate it.” These were
not reasoned convictions. Rather, I was carried by the tide. A
liberal current flows on most college campuses, and if you do
not actively resist it you will be swept along. Thus my early
liberalism was entirely uncritical. When I started thinking for
myself, I stopped being a liberal.
Question for D'Souza:
Why should conservatives be “temperamentally radical” and what is
the greatest challenge facing young conservatives today?
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Usually the job of
the conservative is to conserve, to maintain the status quo, to
hold on to the values of the existing society. But what if the
existing society is liberal? What if the existing society is
inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a
conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he (or
she) must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at
the root level. This means that the conservative must stop being
conservative. More precisely, he must be philosophically
conservative but temperamentally radical. The biggest challenge
facing young conservatives is to develop their minds and enjoy
life on the liberal campus even as they subvert the liberal
culture on those campuses.
Question for D'Souza:
Do conservatives favor the rich and big business?
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No. What
conservatives favor is the chance to get rich. Conservatives
believe that a society that encourages merit and
entrepreneurship will be a prosperous, mobile society. In
general, conservatives support business because business serves
the interest of customers and creates jobs and wealth. (By
contrast, government does not create wealth but only seizes the
wealth of some people to give to other people.) But
conservatives have no bias in favor of big business. Indeed the
Republican Party draws most of its support from small
entrepreneurs. Some big businessmen seek to use the power of
government to impose protective tariffs or restrict their
competitors. Conservatives oppose this. We support free markets
and competition, not big business.
Question for D'Souza:
You title one of your chapters “The Feminist Mistake.” Do
conservatives believe that women are not equal to men?
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Women are, on
average, just as intelligent and capable as men, but they are
biologically different and this physical difference also
produces differences of psychology, of temperament, and of
interests. Social policy should give women and men the same
opportunities while recognizing that the two groups may not
avail themselves of these opportunities (say to be construction
workers or major in engineering) in the same way. Moreover, I
draw on intelligence research to show that men tend to be
over-represented in the genius category and also in the category
of dummies and mental retards. This would help to explain why
men are so dominant in chess and the Westinghouse Science
awards, and also why there are so many men in the nation’s
prisons and asylums.
Question for D'Souza:
What’s wrong with gay marriage? Why not allow gay relationships to
become more conventional and mainstream?
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Journalist Andrew
Sullivan argues that it is social ostracism that encourages the
reckless promiscuity and socially destructive behavior of male
homosexuals. If gays are allowed to marry like everyone else,
Sullivan is confident that this outrageous element of gay
culture would diminish. Sullivan’s argument can be condensed to
the slogan, “Marriage civilizes men.” But Sullivan is wrong.
Marriage doesn’t civilize men, women do. This point is even
evident in the gay community: it helps to explain why lesbians
are generally much better than male homosexuals in sustaining
long-term relationships. The reason that society privileges
marriage and gives it a special legal status is because marriage
is the only known incubator for the raising of children. This
arrangement works best when marriage is restricted to
heterosexual couples who are of adult age and unrelated to each
other. Polygamous arrangements, incest, and homosexual
relationships do occur in society, but there is no reason to
give them greater social acceptance, nor to give them the
special legal status of “marriage.”
Question for D'Souza:
You have been a longtime foe of affirmative action. What is your
view of reparations?
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I do not favor
reparations. Despite the enormous debt that African Americans
owe America, I do not think it is fair to ask that blacks be
asked to pay money in order to express their gratitude for
American prosperity and American freedom. I guess I am sounding
facetious, but I don’t think I am being unreasonable in casting
the issue in this way. The crimes that blacks allege against
America, such as slavery, are universal crimes. The West is
unique not in having slavery but in abolishing it. Moreover,
although slavery was terrible for the slaves, it has proven to
be beneficial to the descendants of slaves because it was the
transmission belt that brought them to America, where their
lives are immeasurably better than if they were living today in
Africa. When Muhammad Ali returned to America from Zaire after
winning the heavyweight title, a reporter asked him, “Champ,
what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my
grand-daddy got on that boat!”
Question for D'Souza:
What do you think of the anti-globalization protesters?
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Some of them need a
bath, but most of them need a horsewhipping. These fellows want
to force American multinationals to pay Indian and Thai and
Indonesian workers the same rates that they pay American
workers. This would ensure that American multinationals stop
hiring poor people in the Third World. Don’t the protesters
realize that the foreign companies pay the best rates in the
Third World? Don’t they see that foreign companies bid up the
wage scales so that even workers at other Indian, Thai and
Indonesian companies benefit? I can understand it when Pat
Buchanan calls for trade restrictions aimed at helping American
workers at the expense of Third World workers. Buchanan doesn’t
care about the Third World and is refreshingly honest in
admitting it. But I am appalled when anti-globalists support the
same kinds of policies, while pretending that they are fighting
on behalf of Third World people. In fact, they are undermining
the interests of the poor in the Third World. No wonder that
ordinary people from India, Indonesia and Thailand are
conspicuously absent from demonstrations against globalization.
Question for D'Souza:
Why do you admire Abraham Lincoln so much?
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Although Lincoln was
the first great leader of the Republican Party, the presence of
a strong Southern wing in the conservative movement has made
Lincoln controversial. Some conservatives accuse Lincoln of
being the true founder of “big government” and of being an enemy
of civil liberties. Of course Lincoln has long been
controversial among liberals, because some liberal and African
American activists accuse him of being a racist and not really
caring that much about slavery. I defend Lincoln against
criticism both from the left and from the right. In my view he
was the ideal statesman, a man of true philosophical bent who
had noble ideals but who also realized that politics is the art
of the possible. In other words, statesmanship means finding the
meeting point between what it is good to do, and what can be
accomplished. I try to show that Lincoln was masterful in
finding that meeting point.
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