[lit-ideas] History revisited??
- From: "Steven G. Cameron" <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:36:24 -0400
More fascist behavior from the administration and their allies??
TC,
/Steve Cameron
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-ross13oct13,1,2369963.story
21st Century Book-Burning
Mrs. Cheney, there's more to U.S. history than heroes.
COMMENTARY
By Steven J. Ross, Steven J. Ross is chairman of the history department
at the University of Southern California and author of "Working-Class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America" (Princeton
Univer
One of the marks of authoritarian regimes is their effort to stop the
spread of knowledge and free speech. In May 1933, Nazi sympathizers in
Berlin burned 20,000 "degenerate" books, many of them written by Jews
and anti-fascists such as Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Franz
Kafka. Here at home, slaveholders were so frightened by the power of the
word that throughout the antebellum South legislatures made it a crime
to teach slaves to read and write.
Now, Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's wife and the former head
of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has placed herself in the
company of dictators and slaveholders. At her urging, the Education
Department destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed to
help parents and children learn more about America's past.
Cheney objected to the booklet's reference to the National Standards for
History, guidelines for teaching history in secondary schools that were
developed at UCLA in the 1990s and that suggest that American history
should be taught with an eye not only to America's successes but to its
struggles and dark moments as well.
Cheney could learn important lessons from the kind of history she
apparently finds so un-American.
One is that the lines between authoritarianism and democracy have never
been as sharply drawn as we might think. In his latest novel, "The Plot
Against America," Philip Roth describes what the United States might
have been like if voters had spurned Franklin D. Roosevelt and elected
Charles A. Lindbergh, an anti-Semite and admirer of Adolf Hitler, as
their president in 1940. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here"
presented a scenario in which newly elected President Berzelius "Buzz"
Windrip, the demagogic darling of big business and religious extremists,
stripped Americans of their rights, destroying the power of the
legislature and judiciary and installing a fascist dictatorship.
What was so horrible about the National Standards for History that any
reference to them would merit the mass destruction of several hundred
thousand volumes of knowledge? According to Cheney, the standards failed
to recognize the achievements of America's traditional heroes and
focused instead on the accomplishments of women, minorities and radicals
such as Harriet Tubman, the former slave who helped found the
Underground Railroad. As Cheney wrote in 1994, "We are a better people
than the national standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it."
Cheney insisted that the standards focused too much on the negatives of
the past, on the presence of such stains on our democratic legacy as the
Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism, and not enough on great heroic figures
such as Paul Revere, Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers.
What Cheney really opposes is the prominent place that "social history"
has assumed over the last 30 years. Known among its practitioners as
"history from the bottom up," social historians argue that American
history has too often been taught as the history of famous white men,
political parties and industrialists.
Far less attention has been paid to the history of the "ordinary" people
who helped build our nation. Social historians do not reject the
important contributions of the former, as Cheney has repeatedly
insisted. Rather, they suggest that there are two American histories
worth knowing: the history of the nation and the history of its peoples.
The latter is composed of a number of different histories: the history
of rich and poor; of employers and employees; of men and women; of
blacks, whites, Asians and Indians; of Protestants, Catholics and Jews.
As someone who has taught, written about and studied history for more
than 25 years, I would suggest that good historical writing tries to
help us understand the full contours of the past, paying equal attention
to our triumphs and tragedies. Historians should not be afraid to hail
the heroic figures of the past, but those should also include the
less-than-famous men and women who struggled on behalf of democracy.
Likewise, historians should never avoid dealing with the dark stories of
our past — such as slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans during
World War II and McCarthyism. As our founding fathers understood,
democracies are not perfect; they only grow stronger by learning from
the mistakes of the past.
Destroying books that disagree with one's vision of history will never
take us closer to truth and freedom. As President Eisenhower warned
Dartmouth College graduates in June 1953: "Don't think you're going to
conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed." His words
remain true today.
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