Larry Schweikart - 48 Liberal Lies About American History: (That You Probably Learned in School)

Table of Contents

To those honest and ethical scholars everywhere
who allow the evidence to determine their worldview, not the opposite.

Conservatives frequently ask, How is it for you on a college campus? Are you harassed? Is it hard to get along? I am always pleased to respond that the University of Dayton has been extremely supportive of all my work since I arrived there in 1985. While certainly I do not speak for UD, nor does the university endorse most of my viewsif any of themnevertheless, UD has done what an institution of higher education is supposed to do: advance and foster the expansion of knowledge, no matter where it leads. Even though I tip my hat to UD in virtually every one of my books, Id like to once again thank the administrators, department chairmen and chairwomen, and colleagues who have for two decades encouraged me and made possible yet another book. My chairman, Professor Julius Amin, has kept my other duties at a minimum, and located research support funds when I needed them. At UD, in particular, I want to thank Ron Acklin at Print and Design for once again providing excellent graphics, and Professor Yuguen (David) Yu, now at Wilberforce University, for lending me recent editions of U.S. history textbooks.

Burton Folsom, a historian at Hillsdale College, offered moral support and allowed me to look at parts of his unfinished manuscript on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Clayton Cramer shared material on early American history, as well as his superb work on guns in the early Republic. Richard Newby educated me on the Sacco-Vanzetti debate. My coauthor on A Patriots History of the United States, Mike Allen, helped with timely information and a critical reading of key sections. Vicki Harlow was of immense assistance in acquiring photographs, and my son, Adam Schweikart, contributed research to almost every entry.

To be fair, this book was Adrian Zackheims idea originally, and he got the project started. But it was Bernadette Malone Serton, my editor on A Patriots History of the United States and Americas Victories, who kept the process going and refined the focus. Brooke Carey stepped in to apply the final touches. Obviously, none of them are to blame for any errors, for which I take full responsibility. Finally, thanks again to my excellent agent, Ed Knappman.

Larry Schweikart
Centerville, Ohio

If you surveyed ten of the most widely used American history survey textbooks looking at the twentieth century, what picture do you think you would find most commonly represented? The sailor kissing the woman in Times Square at the end of World War II? A smiling Franklin D. Roosevelt? The atomic bomb? It might surprise you to know that one of the most frequently appearing images depicting American life in the 1920snot Reconstructionis that of the Ku Klux Klan. Virtually all of these textbooks dedicate at least one page, often more, to the Klan in the twentieth century. George B. Tindall and David E. Shis America: A Narrative History uses almost two pages to cover the Klan; Paul S. Boyer et al.s Enduring Vision also gives the Klan the better part of two pagesabout the same as it gives to the Clinton impeachment, despite the fact that Clintons was only the second impeachment of a president in U.S. history.

According to these historians, the Klan, above all other groups, defined America. Mark C. Carnes and John Garratys American Destiny provides the standard photo and claims that the Klan remained influential for a number of years, but fails to mention that, as of 2007, U.S. senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Klan member himself, still sits in the Senate as a well-regarded Democrat.

Or consider this: In chapter-length treatments of the United States in World War II, what image (besides the obligatory atomic bomb) might one normally expect to find? Soldiers, right? Given that the military was unfortunately still segregated, and that whites did the overwhelming share of front-line fighting, one would expect to see at least a few pictures of average American soldiers fighting in Europe or in the South Pacific. One might... but one wouldnt. The American Journey, by David Goldfield et al., has only one distant shot of D-Daybut not a single close-up picture of American soldiers in combat. There is a picture of some soldiersAfrican Americans, but not in combatunder a discussion of the black experience. Indeed, in The American Journey, for the entire twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the only non-black soldier is depicted fighting in Iraq. Despite the fact that four million Americans served in World War I aloneand over 53,000 were killed in that conflictThe American Journey does not bother to include a single photo of the war. Instead, police are shown beating strikers with their nightsticks under a discussion of the dislocations of the postwar economy.

Merely a photo/image study of major college history textbooks would reveal a great deal about their biases, but we have their words and content as well. With issue after issuethe Great Depression, slavery, World War I, the Far West, the Reagan yearsmodern textbooks are obvious in their leftward slant that America is a racist, sexist, imperialist regime. Even when trying to take conservatism seriously, historians show their true colors. In 1992, The American Historical Review published an article called The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century. The author, Michael Kazin, correctly noted that most historians were overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics.

Other than a photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt or the atomic bomb, the most commonly appearing picture in the twentieth-century section of U.S. history textbooks is some depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. The implication is that the Roaring Twenties were racist and that somehow the economic growth of the decade rested on nativism and intolerance.

What does the post-Vietnam wave of history books do with all the pages it does not dedicate to exposing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan? A sampling of major textbooks reveals a tendency to describe Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal as the only possible salvation to a country wracked by the failures of big business, or the Great Society as remarkable and impressive, despite the fact that it created the massive rise in black family breakup and illegitimacy. Native Americansat least those Columbus didnt killare portrayed as wonderful environmentalists who lived in harmony with the buffalo; the Founders, on the other hand, are often represented as moneyed interests who sought to cement their position at the top of the heap through the Constitution. Early presidents avoided all international entanglements and were backward isolationists; Andrew Jackson was the forerunner of new liberal Democrats and the opponent of the elites; and the causes of the Civil War were complex, including disagreements over the tariff and a clash of cultures. Abraham Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation because he was running out of white troops to prosecute the war. The Scopes trial exposed religious fundamentalism as unintellectual and unpopular; Prohibition failed in all its objectives; and government successfully stepped in to control the rapacious robber barons.