Top Quotes: “Lies My Teacher Told Me” — James Loewen

Background: Loewen is a sociologist who walks the reader through a more accurate portrayal of American history than most of us probably got in school — telling the truth and giving a deeper analysis into things like the brutality of the slave trade, Native Americans’ interactions with white people, and who Rosa Parks and Helen Keller really were. He also explains how history textbooks are not typically written by historians and have become focused on singular topics like war and Presidents. History was always my favorite class growing up, so I really enjoyed this sociological perspective on American history.

Intro

“History is furious debate informed by reason and evidence. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learned.”

“History textbook authors almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might task students to consider contemporary gender roles as a means of prompting students to think about what women did and didn’t achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women’s movement. They might but they don’t.”

“History textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism.”

“History can be imagined as a pyramid — millions of primary sources at its base, historian-written secondary works in the middle, and minions deep in the bowels of publishers’ offices synthesizing the secondary literature into tertiary works.”

“Students spend more time reading from history textbooks than they do for any other subject.”

“Students of color underperform white students more in history than any other subject.”

The Process of Hero Making

“Our educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.”

“Surely textbooks should include some people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.”

“Helen Keller is taught as a blind and deaf girl who overcame her handicap, not the 64 years of her adult life. The truth is that Keller was a radical socialist. She came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat the symptom, not the cause. She learned that blindness was concentrated in the lower class — men who were poor might be blinded by industrial accidents; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life.”

“At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity — this time outraged newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap — charging that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her info.”

“Keller helped found the ACLU. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine — a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the ‘20s.”

“Woodrow Wilson had suffragists arrested; his wife detested them. Public pressure, aroused by hunger strikes and other actions of the movement, convinced Wilson that to oppose suffrage was politically unwise. By giving credit to a hero, authors tell less than half the story.”

“Under Wilson, the U.S. intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in history — 11 times in Mexico, plus sending troops to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Panama. Throughout his administration, Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua’s President and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the U.S.”

“When Haiti refused to declare war on Germany after the U.S. did, we dissolved the Haitian legislature. The U.S. supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the one it replaced. The U.S. also attacked Haiti’s proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land in favor of the establishment of large plantations.”

“During the first two decades of the 1900s, the U.S. effectively made colonies of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, and other countries.”

“Wilson’s Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, like Port Collector for New Orleans or the regulation of the Treasury. Wilson, an outspoken white supremacist (his wife was even worse) changed all that. Wilson submitted an extensive legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of blacks, but Congress wouldn’t pass it. Unfazed, he segregated the federal government, including the Navy. White and black workers had to work separately — this was the first time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction!”

“Wilson publicly supported America’s first epic motion picture — Birth of a Nation — which reestablished the KKK and made it a national phenomenon. Klan spectacles in the ’20s were the largest public gatherings in towns from Montpelier to Medford in their history, before or since. Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist Presidential leadership and like-minded public response.”

“To oppose America’s participation in World War I was dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to ‘report the man who cries for peace or belittles over efforts to win the war.’ After World War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks on civil liberties increased, now with anticommunism as the excuse. Neither before or since these campaigns has the U.S. come closer to being a police state.”

“Harding, who never even campaigned, crushed Wilson’s would-be successor in the 1920 election in the biggest landslide in the history of American politics — 64% of major party votes.”

“Keller called Wilson ‘the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known.’”

“Betsy Ross’ descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, invented the myth of the first flag. She isn’t mentioned in any major history textbook, but she features in elementary school pageants and proves the power of the social archetype.”

“Curators of history museums know that visitors bring in archetypes with them and consciously design exhibits to confront them when they are inaccurate, as textbook authors and teachers should do.”

“Keller wrote, ‘I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment…I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.’ The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America is an anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”

1493: The True Importance of Columbus

“Columbus’ voyage was not the first, but the ‘last’ discovery of the Americas. It was epoch-making because of the way Europeans responded. A significant factor was European rulers commissioning ever bigger guns and learning how to mount them on ships in 1400. The West has continued to zealously maintain its arms advantage over the rest of the world to this day.”

“Spaniards gave Native Americans a chance to convert to Christianity and threatened death or slavery if they didn’t.”

“Ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians sailed all the way around Africa before 600 BC, but textbooks credit Bartolomeu Dias with being the first to do so in 1488.”

“17 expeditions from around the world likely reached the Americans before Columbus. Native Americans also voyaged east to Europe a millennia ago.”

“When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded whatever the natives had that they wanted, including sex with their women. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. After a while, the Arawaks fought back, but the Spanish squashed the rebellion by loosing dogs to rip open limbs and bellies and skewering them on sword and pike.”

“In 1495, the Spanish on Haiti selected the 500 best specimens to go to Spain as slaves (200 of whom died on route). Another 500 were chosen as slaves for Spaniards living on the island.”

“Columbus, upset because he couldn’t locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system in which every person 14 and over had to pay gold dust or cotton every three months and wear a token around his neck as proof. Those whose tokens had expired had their hands cut off.”

“This system eventually broke down because what it demanded was impossible. It was replaced by entire Indian villages being granted to groups of colonists and forced to work. Arawaks responded by suicide and intentional abortion.”

“Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more — 5,000 — than any other individual. Other European countries quickly emulated his native slave trade. Because the Indian slaves died, this led to the African slave trade.”

“In 1499, when Columbus finally found a significant amount of gold on Haiti, Portugal, France, Holland, and England joined in conquering the Americas.”

“After America, Europeans had trouble explaining American Indians, who had never encountered Christianity, in the context of the belief that non-Catholics went to hell. Such questions shook Orthodox Catholicism and contributed to the Protestant Revolution, which began in 1517.”

“After 1492, Europeans began to see similarities among themselves and to see ‘white’ as a race and race as an important human characteristic.”

“Adding American corn to African diets caused the population to grow, fueling the African slave trade. Adding potatoes to the European diet caused the population to explode in the 1700s and 1800s, fueling European emigration to the Americas and Australia. American crops played a key role in the ascendancy of England, Germany, and Russia, shifting the European power base away from the Mediterranean.”

The Truth About The First Thanksgiving

“Spaniards and some of their African slaves settled in Florida, the Carolinas, and New Mexico in the 1500s. So Pilgrims were not the ‘first Americans,’ even if you don’t count Native Americans.”

“The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture (including its vocabulary: bronco, rodeo, mustang) to the U.S.”

“Humans evolved in tropical climates; tropical diseases evolved alongside them. When people migrated across the Bering Strait, it served as a frigid decontamination chamber and they probably arrived in a healthier state than most people on earth have enjoyed before or since. They also had less social density and bathed (unlike Europeans). But ironically their very health proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance to the microbes Europeans and Africans would bring.”

“In 1617 (3 years before the Pilgrims), English and French fishermen started a plague that killed 90–96% of the inhabitants of coastal New England. Unable to deal with so many corpses, the survivors abandoned the villages and fled often to a neighboring tribe. Because they carried the infestation with them, American Indians who had never encountered a white person died.”

“Europeans saw epidemics as evidence god was on their side. American Indians inferred that their god had abandoned them, sometimes destroying sacred objects, converting to Christianity, or simply killing themselves.”

“The technology and culture of East Coast natives were genuine rivals to those of the English. If colonists hadn’t been able to occupy land already cleared by native farmers who had perished from disease, colonization would’ve proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture hadn’t been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.”

“Miners and loggers recently introduced European diseases to the Yanomamos of Northern Brazil and Southern Venezuela, killing 1/4 of their population in 1991 alone.”

“Europeans were never able to ‘settle’ China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa because too many people lived there. There were about 100 million people in the Americas in 1492 and only 70 million Europeans so they wouldn’t have been able to settle the Americas without the plague.”

“Pilgrims numbered only about 35 out of 102 settlers on the Mayflower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. But Pilgrims didn’t intend to go there because they wanted to be far from Anglican control. The Mayflower Compact was so democratic because the non-Pilgrims were angry about being taken to New England and the Pilgrims needed to make concessions to them.”

“Textbooks underplay Jamestown in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the U.S. because Virginians’ relations with Native Americans were particularly unsavory — taking them prisoner, poisoning them, eating their corpses because they were haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops.”

“Throughout the hemisphere, Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations to appropriate their cornfields and avoid the backbreaking work of clearing the land of forest and rock.”

“From the start, the Pilgrims thanked god, not Native Americans, for assistance the latter had provided.”

“Pilgrims robbed native homes and graves.”

“Squanto was stolen as a boy and taken to England for nine years, sold into slavery in Spain, escaped, and made his way back to England where he talked a captain in taking him along on his next trip to Massachusetts, only to make the horrifying discovery that he was the sole member of his village still alive. He was essential to the survival of Plymouth in its first 20 years.”

“Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to ‘go boldly where no one dared go before.’ They went to where the Indians were.”

“All the food supposedly served at the first Thanksgiving is exclusively indigenous to the Americas and would have been provided by or with the aid of the local tribe and certainly not new to them.”

“The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern Thanksgiving celebration dates back to 1863, when the Union needed all the patriotism it could muster.”

Red Eyes

“Archaeological evidence of a Beringia crossing is slim and more and more archaeologists believe that boat crossings, accidental or purposeful, may have been the method. After all, people got to Australia at least 40,000 years ago and you could never walk to Australia. No artifacts survive from so long ago except stone tools. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“Archaeological finds do not grow older as we move northwest through the Yukon and Alaska, supporting the boat theory or at least suggesting that early Americans settled the entire continents quickly.”

“Hunter-gatherers were relatively peaceful, compared to agriculturalists, and modern societies are more warlike still. Violence can increase with civilization.”

“25 million Native Americans lived in the central valley of Mexico alone and a majority of Native Americans farmed, far from the image of the moccasined Indian paddling through the virgin forest.”

“Books often compare rural America to urban Europe, painting Native Americans as primitive and Europeans as modern, even though Tenochtitlan was a city of 100,000–300,000.”

“The only anthropological definition of civilized is having a complex division of labor, which natives had.”

“Native Americans became known as linguists, often speaking two European languages and two American Indian languages. English colonists sometimes used natives as interpreters when dealing with the Spanish or French.”

“To deal with the white military threat, many native groups gave chiefs more power, merged with other tribes, and became more male-dominated because of the expanded importance of war skills.”

“Tribes that were closest to the Europeans got guns, escalating Indian warfare. Europeans deliberately played one native nation off on another.”

“Europeans vastly expanded Native slavery; Charleston, SC, shipped over 10,000 natives in chains to the West Indies in a year. In the Southwest, whites enslaved Navajos and Apaches right up to the middle of the Civil War.”

“Intensified warfare and the slave trade rendered stable settlements no longer safe, helped to de-agriculturalize Native Americans. As Europeans learned from natives what to grow and how to grow it, they became less dependent on natives while natives became more dependent on Europeans and European technology.”

“Whites and Native Americans in what is now the U.S. worked together, sometimes lived together, and quarreled with each other for 325 years from the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565 to the end of Sioux and Apache autonomy around 1890.”

“John Sutter’s Sacramento fort was built by natives and they were part of the community.”

“Many white and black newcomers chose to live an American Indian lifestyle, more so than the other way around. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. Blacks fled to escape bondage; whites enjoyed natives’ freedom as individuals, lack of hierarchy, and higher status and power accorded to women.”

“The Iroquois wearied of dealing with several often bickering English colonies and suggested the colonies form a union like their league. The Constitutional Convention referred openly to Iroquois ideas. American Indians are directly or indirectly responsible for the public meeting tradition, free speech, and democracy.”

“For 100 years after our revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary era cartoonists used images of Native Americans to represent the colonies against Britain.”

“Dishes that make America distinctive like gumbo and Texas Chili combine Indian with European and African elements.”

“American Indian warfare absorbed 80% of the federal budget during Washington’s administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense.”

“Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small fraction within a much larger nation for land, like when they bought Weckquaesqeck-occupied Manhattan from the Brooklyn-area tribe the Canarsees.”

“The French did not really sell land to the U.S. during the Louisiana Purchase since much of it was native land. The U.S. was still paying and fighting for the land through the 1800s.”

“The War of 1812 resulted in Britain giving up its alliances with U.S. American Indian nations, making future Indian wars domestic mopping-up operations rather than international conflicts. After 1815, the term American began to apply to European Americans rather than Native Americans.”

“Columbus and Washington both initially held positive views of Native Americans and then, due to the process of cognitive dissonance, began to see them as slothful, vicious, and melancholy.”

“From 1815 on, instead of spreading democracy, we exported the ideology of white supremacy, seeking American hegemony over Mexico, the Philippines, and much of the Caribbean basin. Hitler praised American extermination of Native Americans and our concentration camps for them in the West.”

“In 1778, Delaware Indians proposed that Native Americans be admitted to the Union as a separate state, but Congress refused to even consider the idea. In the 1840s, Indian Territory sought the right enjoyed by other territories to send representatives to Congress, but white Southerners stopped them. The Confederacy won the backing of most Native Americans in Indian Territory by promising to admit them as a state if they won.”

“Native Americans who amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills, merely became the target of white thugs who coveted their land and improvement: ‘During the French and Indian War, the Susquehannas, living peacefully in white towns, were hatcheted by their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorities, who weren’t careful whose scalp they were paying for, as long as it was Indian.’”

“Ironically to native eyes, Europeans were the nomads. Indian ‘roaming’ consisted of moving between summer and winter homes.”

“Accultured natives simply stood out as a target since they had no legal rights.”

“In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson paid to distribute copies of her famous indictment of our Native American policies ‘A Century of Dishonor’ to every member of Congress.”

“We can alter our medical practices, modes of transportation, or housing while remaining white, but these types of changes were portrayed as Indians losing their ‘Indianness.’”

The Invisibility of Racism in American Textbooks

“From the 1805s to 1930s, minstrel shows were the dominant form of popular entertainment in America.”

“Wall Street was a marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week.”

“Slavery existed in many societies and periods before and after the African slave trade, but slavery started by Europeans in the 14th century was different because it became the enslavement of one race by another.”

“A pattern in our textbooks is that anything bad in American history happened anonymously.”

“Slave owners hoped to prevent Cuba and other Latin American nations from following Haiti’s successful establishment as an independent black republic. Slavery prompted the U.S. to have imperialistic designs on Latin America, rather than visions of democratic liberation for the region.”

“After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free blacks in Northern states fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.”

“For our first 70 years as a nation, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination.”

“The problem of Reconstruction was integrating Confederates, not black people.”

“During Reconstruction, upward mobility offered no way out for blacks but only made them more of a target.”

“Rewrites of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was no longer congenial to an increasingly racist white society, changed Tom from a martyr who gave his life to protect his people into a sentimental dope who was loyal to kindly masters and sold out his people’s interests.”

“For a time in the 1910s-1920s, the KKK openly dominated the state governments of Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon, and it proudly inducted President Harding as a member in a White House ceremony.”

“In the 1921 Tulsa riot, whites dropped dynamite from planes onto a black ghetto, killing over 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes.”

“Sundown towns were probably the majority of all incorporated communities in Indiana, Illinois, Oregon, and several other Northern states. Entire areas — most of the Ozarks, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — became almost devoid of black people.”

“Black people were excluded from juries throughout the South and in many places in the North, which usually meant they could forget about legal redress even for obvious wrongs like assault, theft, or arson by whites.”

The Invisibility of Antiracism in American Textbooks

“Abolitionist John Brown is portrayed as insane in American textbooks. His actions made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and 1970. To make no sense is to be crazy. By engaging in armed action, Brown made mere verbal abolitionism seem less radical.”

“Brown’s willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force. In a eulogy, Henry David Thoreau compared him to Jesus, who had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.”

“In 1863, Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted ’til Wilson.”

“Lincoln was nominated for President because of his rock-solid anti-slavery beliefs.”

“The existence and success of black troops in the Union army decreased white racism.”

“In 1864, the Republicans sought white votes by being anti-racist and triumphed almost everywhere.”

“Concern for states’ rights did not motivate secession. The Confederacy began to deny states’ rights within the new nation as the war continued. Every Confederate state except South Carolina supplied a regiment or company of white soldiers to the Union.”

“Throughout the war, Confederates withheld as much as 1/3 of their fighting forces and scattered them throughout areas with large slave populations to prevent uprisings.”

“The Confederacy’s ideological contradictions regarding slavery were along its greatest vulnerabilities.”

“Everyone who supported black rights in the South during Reconstruction did so at personal risk, including so-called ‘carpetbaggers’ from the North who moved South to teach and otherwise help freed blacks.”

What Textbooks Teach About The Federal Government

“Most textbooks demarcate U.S. history as a series of Presidential administrations.”

“Textbook authors regard the actions and words of the state as incomparably more important than what the American people were doing, listening to, sleeping in, living through, or thinking about.”

“The U.S. spends more on its armed forces than all other nations combined and has them stationed in 144 countries.”

“JFK initially tried to stop the March on Washington and sent his VP Lyndon Johnson to Norway to keep him away from it because he felt he was too pro-civil rights.”