Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (36 page)

The only photograph of troops in Triumph of the American Nation shows them happily surrounding President Johnson when he visited the American base at Cam Ranh Bay during the war.

stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.“ All this was ”in addition to the normal ravage of war."15 Any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during the war, would get this point across, but no textbook uses any photograph of any wrongdoing by an American. Indeed, no book includes any photograph of any destruction, even of legitimate targets, caused by our side. Only Discovering American History, an inquiry textbook, treats the My Lai massacre as anything but an isolated incident. In addition to leaving students ignorant of the history of the war, the silence of other textbooks on this matter also makes the antiwar movement incomprehensible.

Two textbook authors, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, are on record elsewhere as knowing of the importance of My Lai. “The American strategy had atrocity built into it,” Lytle said to me. Davidson and Lytle devote most of a chapter to the My Lai massacre in their book After the Fart. There they tell how news of the massacre stunned the United States. “One thihg'was cer tain,” they write, “the encounter became a defining moment in the public's perception of the war,” Plainly they do not think high school students need to know about it, however, for their high school history textbook, The United StatesA History ofthe Republic, like seven other textbooks in my sample, never mentions My Lai.

If textbooks omit all the important photographs of the Vietnam War, what images do they include? Uncontroversial shots, for the most partservicemen on patrol, walking through swamps, or jumping from helicopters. Seven books show refugees or damage caused by the other side, but since such damage was usually less extensive than that caused by our bombardment, the pictures are not very dramatic What about their prose? Sadly, textbook authors also leave out all the memorable quotations of the era. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war, opposed it in his trademark cadences: “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. . . . We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”17 No textbook quotes King. Even more famous was the dissent of Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Ali refused induction into the military, for which his title was stripped from him, and said, “No Viet Cong ever called me 'nigger.'” All twelve textbooks leave out that line too. After the Tet offensive, a US. army officer involved in retaking Ben Tre said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” For millions of Americans, this statement summarized America's impact on Vietnam. No textbook supplies it. Nor does any textbook quote John Kerry's plea for immediate withdrawal: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”19 Indeed, the entire antiwar movement becomes unintelligible because textbooks do not allow it to speak for itself. They exclude the antiwar songs, the chants“Hell, no; we won't go!” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”and, above all, the emotions.20 Virtually the only people who get quoted are Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In a typical passage in The American Pageant, Nixon says, “America cannot-and will notconceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The passage does not help to clarity the war or the opposition to it. Even Pageant's auxiliary reader quotes only Johnson and Nixon as primary sources on the Vietnam Warnot a word from those who fought in or opposed it.

Having excluded the sights, the sounds, and the feelings of the Vietnam era, textbook authors proceed to exclude the issues. Frances FitzGerald, who, in addition to America Revised, wrote Fire in the Lake, a fine book about Vietnam, called the textbooks she reviewed in 1979 “neither hawkish nor dovish on the warthey are simply evasive.” She went on to say, "Since it is really quite hard DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE .

to discuss the war and evade all the major issues, their Vietnam sections make remarkable reading."21 To some degree, defining the issues is a matter of interpretation, and I would not want to fault textbooks for holding a different interpretation from my own. Perhaps we can agree that any reasonable treatment of the Vietnam War would discuss at least these six questions:

Why did the United States fight in Vietnam? What was the war like before the United States entered it? How did we change it? How did the war change the United States? Why did an antiwar movement become so strong in the United States?

What were its criticisms of the war in Vietnam? Were they right? Why did the United States lose the war? What lesson(s) should we take from the experience?

Simply to list these questions is to recognize that each of them is still controversial. Take the first. Some people still argue that the United States fought in Vietnam to secure access to the country's valuable natural resources. Others claim that we fought to bring democracy to Vietnam's people. Perhaps more common are analyses of our internal politics: Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, having seen how Republicans castigated Truman for “losing” China, did not want to be seen as “losing” Vietnam. Another interpretation brings forth the domino theory: while we know now that Vietnam's communists are antagonists of China, we didn't then, and some leaders believed that if Vietnam “fell” to the communists, so would Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Yet another view is that America felt its prestige was on the line, so it did not want a defeat in Vietnam, lest Pax Americana be threatened in Africa, South America, or elsewhere in the world.“ Some conspiracy theorists go even further and claim that big business fomented the war to help the economy. Other historians take a longer view, arguing that our intervention in Vietnam derives from a cultural pattern of racism and imperialism that began with the first Indian war in Virginia in 1622, continued in the nineteenth century with ”Manifest Destiny,“ and is now winding down in the ”American century." They point out that GI's in Vietnam collected and displayed Vietnamese ears just as British colonists in North America collected and displayed Indian scalps.23 A final view might be that there was no clear cause and certainly no clear purpose, that we blundered into the war because no subsequent administration had the courage to undo our 1946 mistake of opposing a popular independence movement. “The fundamental blunder with respect to Indochina was made after 1945,” wrote Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, when “our Government allowed itself to be persuaded” by the French and British “to restore France's colonial position in Indochina.”!

Perhaps the seeds of America's tragic involvement with Vietnam were sown at Versailles in 1918, when Woodrow Wilson failed to hear Ho Chi Minn's plea for his country's independence. Perhaps they germinated when FDR's policy of not helping the French recolonize Southeast Asia after World War II terminated with his death. Since textbooks rarely suggest that [he events of one period caused events of the next, unsurprisingly, none of the textbooks I surveyed look before the 1950s to explain the Vietnam War.

Within the 1950s and 1960s, the historical evidence for some of these conflicting interpretations is much weaker than for others, although I will not choose sides here.23 Textbook authors need not choose sides, either. They could present several interpretations, along with an overview of the historical support for each, and invite students to come to their own conclusions. Such challenges are not the textbook authots' style, however. They seem compelled to present the “right” answer to all questions, even unresolved controversies.

So which interpretation do they choose? None of the above! Most textbooks simply dodge the issue. Here is a representative analysis, from American Adventures: “Later in the 195s, war broke out in South Vietnam, This time the United States gave aid to the South Vietnamese government.” “War broke out” what could be simpler! Adventures devotes four pages to discussing why we got into the War of 1812 but just these two sentences to why we fought in Vietnam.

One reason textbook authors tiptoe through the recent past, evading all the main issues, may be that they do not feel they have the expertise to deal with it. None of the forty-five authors of the twelve textbooks in my sample is an expert on the recent past, so far as I can tell. Of course, even textbooks written by several authors necessarily treat many subjects on which their authors cannot be expert. For topics in the zamani, however, textbook authors can use historical perspective as a shield. By writing in an omniscient boring tone about events in the zamani, authors imply that a single historic truth exists, upon which historians have agreed and which they now teach and students now should memorize. Such writing implies that historical perspective grows ever more accurate with the passage of time, blessing today's textbook authors with cumulative historical insight. They cannot use historical perspective to defend their treatment of events in the sasha, however. Without historical perspective,

textbook authors appear naked; no particular qualification gives them the right DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE .

to narrate recent events with the same Olympian detachment with which they declaim on events in the zamani.

Indeed, historical perspective implicitly justifies neglecting the sasha. Historians tell us how we are too close to whichever recent event we are discussing to be able to step back and view it in context. As new material becomes available in archives, they claim, or as the consequences of actions become clearer over time, we can reach a more “objective” assessment. The passage of time does not in itself provide perspective, however. Information is lost as well as gained over time.

At this point we might usefully recall a few changes in perspective noted in earlier chapters. Woodrow Wilson enjoys a dramatically more positive ranking now than in 1920. The improvement did not derive from the discovery of fresh information on his administration but from the ideological needs of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In those years white historians would hardly fault Wilson for segregating the federal government, because no consensus held that racial segregation was wrong. The foremost public issue of that postwar era was not race relations but the containment of communism. During the Cold War our government operated as it did under Wilson, with semideclared wars, executive deception of Congress, and suppression of civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. Wilson's policies, controversial and unpopular in 1920, had become ordinary by the 1950s. Statesmen and historians of the 1950s rejected and even trivialized isolationism. Interested in pushing the United Nations, then thoroughly under U.S. influence, they appreciated Wilson's efforts on behalf of the League of Nations. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., put it neatly: “Ultimately, in the post-World War II period, Wilsonian values would have their complete triumph in the bi-partisan Cold War consensus.”" Thus Wilson's improved evaluation in today's textbooks can be attributed largely to the fact that the ideological needs of the 1950s, when Wilson was in the zamani, were different from those of the 1920s, when he was passing into the sasha.

The mistreatment and enslavement of the Caribbean Indians by the Spaniards was noted by Bartolome de las Casas and others while Columbus was still in the sasha. Later, however, Columbus was lionized as a daring man of science who disproved the flat-earth notion and opened a new hemisphere to progress. This nineteenth-century Columbus appealed to a nation concluding three hundred years of triumphant warfare over Indian nations. But by 1992 Columbus the exploiter had begun receiving equal billing with Columbus the explorer, and many Columbus celebrations drew countercelebrations, often mounted by Native Americans. The “new” Columbus, closer to the Columbus of the sasha, appealed to a nation that had to get along with dozens of former colonies, now new nations. The contrast between the 1892 and 1992 celebrations of Columbus's first voyage again shows the effect of different vantage points.

The Confederate myth of Reconstruction first permeated the historical literature during the nadir of race relations, from 1890 to 1920, and hung on in textbooks until the 1960s. Reconstruction regimes came to be portrayed as illegitimate and corrupt examples of “Negro domination,” Now historians have returned to the view of Reconstruction put forth in earlier histories, written while Republican governments still administered the Southern states. Eric Foner hails the change as due to “objective scholarship and modern experience,” a turn of phrase that concisely links the two key causes. Objective scholarship does exist in history, which is why I risk words like truth and lies. Mere chronological distance did not promote a more accurate depiction of Reconstruction. Because the facts about Reconstruction simply did not suit the “modern experience” of the nadir period, they lay mute during the early decades of the twentieth century, overlooked by most historians. Not until the civil rights movement altered “modern experience” could the facts speak to us.

Historical perspective is thus not a by-product of the passage of time. A more accurate view derives from Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, which suggests that the social practices of the period when history is written largely determine that history's perspective on the past.29 Objective scholarship must be linked with a modern experience that permits it to prevail. The claim of inadequate historical perspective will not do as an excuse for ignoring the sasha. Historians have no reason other than timidity for avoiding a full and thoughtful exposition of our recent past.