Earlier this month, the disheartening news from Texas reached us that conservatives there won a decisive vote to put a right-wing spin on social studies textbooks. Future textbooks will stress the Christian roots of American society, the positive impact of Republican political philosophy, and the superiority of American capitalism. Such attempts to rewrite history in order to bolster hegemonic arrangements are nothing new, so we can draw on some of the history that the right would like to see submerged for a forceful response to this decision.
If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
Those words are by W. E. B. DuBois, and they were written in 1935 in response to the misrepresentation of the Reconstruction era in contemporary history textbooks. It was not unusual to read pronouncements such as the following: “Although the Negroes were now free, they were also ignorant and unfit to govern themselves.” Or: “These men knew not only nothing about the government, but also cared for nothing except what they could gain for themselves.” Or: “In the exhausted states already amply ‘punished’ by the desolation of war, the rule of the Negro and his unscrupulous carpetbagger and scalwag patrons, was an orgy of extravagance, fraud and disgusting incompetency.”
Further into the essay, DuBois writes these invocative lines:
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.
May we not be led by the blind and make a spurious peace with the present.
