Spirit in Action

Debunking the Lies My Teacher Told Me

James Loewen is a sociologist, historian and author. His writings include the renowned Lies My Teacher Told Me. In an effort to expose the truth and improve our world, James stirs the passion for knowledge that unbiased history can provide. His first history textbook had too much fact in it, was suppressed, and led to his successful First Amendment challenge to the censorship of free speech & press. If you have info about a Sundown Town in your area, you can email James at jloewen[at]uvm.edu

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 14 Dec 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Wow, have we got a great guest here today for Spirit in Action? James Lowen is the author of many books, but the best known of them is "Lies My Teacher Told Me." I'm putting words in his mouth, but I'd say that perhaps James Lowen believes the truth can set us free. And, unfortunately, we've been and are fed a lot of lies that keep us in bondage of sorts. James is a sociologist, historian, and writer, and a teacher, a teacher who's working to debunk many of the lies limiting us in so many ways. I want to give a shout out to my great friend, Mark Ruddy, who arranged a visit with James through a mutual friend, and to James, who crammed in an interview in his hotel room in the very brief interval between landing in Eau Claire and his first appointment. Oh, and one more thing, I want to tell you up front that I'll be asking James several questions related to Quakers in history, and in case you're tempted to believe that we had some kind of inside deal, I want you to know that he is not a Quaker, but a UU, a Unitarian Universalist. He's taught about racism for 20 years at the University of Vermont, Ben Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and since 1997, he's been a visiting professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. So he's got the credentials, and if you read any book he's written, you'll see yourself why he's got plenty of street cred as well. Now, it might seem natural to go right to my interview with James Lohan in his hotel room here in Eau Claire, but first I want to share with you one of the musical influences that got me asking questions about the lives of history we're too often fed. I've listened to the music of Holly Neer since 1974, and it's a great way to prepare for our visit with James Lohan again, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, first Holly Neer and her song "No More Genocide" than James Lohan. Why are our history books all full of lives? When no word is spoken of why the Indians died, or that the Chicano's loved the California land? Do our books all say it was discovered by one white man? Well, that's just a lie. One of the many, and we've had plenty, I don't want more of the same. No more genocide in my name. Nazi forces grow again, ignorance gives them a place. The clan is teaching children to hate the human race. Well, once there was a playground, now an MX missile plan. Do they think it's fun to see just how much we can stand? People die all around the world from starvation and grief all the time. Some folks try to avoid the truth by saying God and gun will provide. In Auschwitz, Cape Town and Beirut, San Salvador, Greensboro, Belfast, Manila, and many more. It's a crime, don't we think the fascist right will say the world in time? They try to tell us all, but we've got to tell them no. Tell them that it's a lie. One of the many, and we've had plenty, I don't want more of a same. No more genocide, no more genocide, no, no, no, no more genocide in our name. James, I'm excited to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Happy to be here. You've come into Eau Claire, where are you going to be speaking tonight? At University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, exactly where on campus I have no idea. I speak all over the United States. I was just yesterday at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, and tomorrow I'll be in Detroit, and so I rely on my local handlers to get me to the room on time. I noticed on your schedule that Brooklyn Friends School, North Carolina Social Studies Supervisor, One Day Institute, how did these people get a hold of you, and why did they bring you in? I mean, you're the person who's exposing lies, aren't they supposed to make you shut up? You know, actually, when you've asked a complex question there with that last part, Brooklyn Friends School was very interesting. I think Friends schools are often interesting. There aren't very many Friends at them. I didn't meet a single student who was Quaker. There must be one somewhere, but there's certainly a considerable Friends influence at the school. I had a wonderful time there with a bunch of middle school students who had read at least the Columbus chapter of lies my teacher told me, and they knew more about the Colombian exchange than their teachers did, except the teacher of them, but I mean, then the rest of the staff did at the school. They were really expert. They just got every part of it nailed correctly. In North Carolina, we hear a lot about how conservative it is recently, that some of the astounding things that it's doing, like trying to narrow the vote, but the Department of Education is doing very creative things, and so they had me speak to the entire social studies staff, I guess you might call it, 70 people from across the state who coordinate social studies, K-12, everywhere. They are in sync with this new national initiative you probably heard about called the Common Core Standards, which I think are basically good, which emphasize critical thinking, dealing with material that goes far beyond just the textbook and vote memorization. In both places, I found completely kindred spirits. So they've invited you in to help them learn how to dispel or how to make history interesting. I mean, that's what I got from lies my teacher told me. I mean, I got the idea that if only we'd really tell history, wow, what fun time it would be. Well, the problem is, of course, survey after survey of high school students shows nationally, history always comes in last when they are asked, what's your favorite subject? As you say, it should be interesting. We're very interested in our past, basically. I mean, look at the popularity of, for instance, the Civil War. I think that's the most popular, Ken Burns' Civil War, I mean, is the most popular series ever on educational television. Right now, we have some very interesting historical movies, in particular this one that just came out 12 years of slave. That's doing, I think, surprisingly well among white folks. Everybody knew it would do okay among black folks, but I think the United States is not only ready, but way overdue for a reasonably honest look at slavery, which I think 12 years of slave provides. The problem is how we've been teaching at K-12. There, the problem basically is that it is dominated by these ponderous textbooks. I am the only American ever to have read 18 of them. There's no doubt about that. It was a near-death experience. And they actually grew in length. That is, for the first edition of my Best Seller Lies, my teacher told me, they averaged 12 of them, averaged 888 pages. For the second and final edition, because I'm never going to do this again, they averaged 1,152 pages. Who would have thought they would have gotten longer? There's no excuse for it, because now, you know, it used to be like, I'm taking the train tomorrow to get to Detroit my next engagement. I'm going up to Tomah. This is a little town in Wisconsin. Okay, Tomah in maybe 1950 probably didn't have very many resources for teaching U.S. history. It had undoubtedly a small high school library. Maybe it's the same as the community library. But now, Tomah, or even town's one tenth the size of Tomah, have what's called the web, you know. They all have electricity. They all have phones, no matter how far out they are in rural Montana or whatever. So there's no excuse for an 1,152 page textbook. I think that teachers should be using the 300 page textbooks that we sell for, for instance, people who are having to pass the citizenship history requirement to become U.S. citizens. Instead of renting these books, these 1,152 page books, to students for what amounts to about $12 a year, you could buy these 300 page paperbacks for about $10, give them to the student, then the student actually owns a book. And we can go from there. Maybe someday in their life they'll buy another book and they've got a library and the future lies ahead, you know. I get the feeling that it isn't just the obesity of our books. That's the issue. And you can understand, by the way, America is kind of into obesity these days. It's not just the obesity of the books that is the issue. It is the content. It's insipid. It isn't accurate. Well, and it's ponderous. It's boring. I think I've got to hold on why it's boring. I think there's two key reasons. One of them is publisher caution. The publishers don't want to say anything that might cause that book not to get adopted somewhere. One of my examples would be President Franklin Pierce. He is my favorite candidate for the second worst president in the history of the country. He was so bad that when he returned home to New Hampshire at the end of his term, just before the Civil War, he was the president just before Buchanan, who was the president just before the Civil War. When he returned home, nobody even met his train, all right? And he then proceeded to go downhill from there. He actually favored the South doing the Civil War. This is not a position that was popular in New England, so he went to Great Britain for most of the Civil War because nobody liked him. But in the 20th century, he gets not exactly rehabilitated. Nobody ever claimed he was a good president. But he's the only president that New Hampshire ever produced, you know? And so if a textbook said any of what I just said, you know, that he was a terrible president, that he did the following bad things I didn't even get into the specifics. But then maybe they won't get adopted in conquered New Hampshire or wherever New Hampshire doesn't adopt by state, but it does have over a million people, and they buy textbooks. And we don't want to say anything that would cause them to not adopt our book, the title of which is America. They're really greatest. That's kind of a typical title. I've made that one up. So, they can't say that, or they feel they can't say that. Well, that just makes the books boring. If you can't tell the truth about anything, you know, because you're afraid of offending everybody. So, publisher caution is the first reason why they're so boring. And the second reason is, although most people don't know this, the authors of these books did not write them. Did you know that? No, I didn't. Okay. Well, I actually proved that. I've got a front page story in The New York Times about it about four or five years ago. When I was doing the research for the second edition of Lies My Teacher told me, for that edition, that revision, I was reading six new American history textbooks. These are the ones that averaged this 1,152 pages. And I'm writing a new chapter. I don't read the books all the way through. I read it on a given topic, all six of them. Then I read it on another topic, all six of them. So, I was reading on the topic of the George W. Bush administration, our war in Iraq, and so on. And suddenly I said to myself, wait a minute, reading one of the textbooks. Didn't I just read this? And it turned out I did. That is to say I was reading A History of the United States by Borsten and Kelly. Now Daniel Borsten was, I think, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He was the librarian of Congress, very eminent man. Brooks Mather Kelly was the chief archivist at Yale University. And so I looked through the other five books. And sure enough, in one of them, called Pathways to the Present, written by four professors, I think most of them, maybe all of them were at Miami University of Ohio. And the guy who wrote, by wrote I mean didn't write. The guy who wrote the modern section, the stuff on the 20th century and 21st century, is named Alan Winkler. His title is Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio. For paragraph after paragraph, these two books are identical. Or one of them might have the word "very" or, you know, tiny little copy editing differences. They have the same photos with the same captions. You know, this is the largest plagiarism scandal ever heard of. I mean, you know, we have these scandals where Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose or whoever didn't put in enough footnotes. Well, these folks are writing identically. So I called them up. I called them, let me think. Who did I call first? I called Winkler first. He knew my work. Actually, if you'd like me, teacher told me very favorably for the guardian of London some years back. So he says, "Hi." And he's happy to talk with me. And I said, "Do you realize that your book, in its treatment of the born Iraq and Afghanistan and so on, is identical for paragraph after paragraph, page after page, with this other book by Boyston and Kelly?" And he said, and I quote, "Oh no, that's terrible." And he then goes on to say, "I never even read that book." Meaning, Boyston and Kelly, meaning he's still claiming he wrote his book. Pretty soon, he admits he didn't write it. And I said, "Well, aside from the fact that you didn't write it, what do you think about it as a work of history?" And he said, quote, "Just a minute. Let me get it down from the shelf." Meaning, I don't know. I haven't even read it. You know? Now, I tell students that if you are a really bad student, whether high school or college, and you buy your term paper for $9.95 off the web, I hope you at least have enough brains to read the damn thing before you hand it into your professor. You know, Alan Winkler could have Osama bin Laden being a Jewish rabbi. He doesn't know what he said. Okay? So then I called up Brooks-Mather Kelly. I couldn't call Boyston anymore because he had just died. So I called up Kelly. And Kelly said, "Borsden did it." Not meaning Boyston copied, but Boyston wrote it. And I said, "Well, did you know that for paragraph after paragraph, it's identical to this other book?" And he said, "He honest to God said this. Oh, no, that's terrible." So then-- A lot of plagiarism going on. Yes, there sure is. So pretty soon he admits, "Prentice Hall hired some guy to write it. I forget the man's name." So in other words, the authors, by which, of course, I mean not authors, have no idea who is writing the book or what their credentials might be. Kelly has a big idea that it's a male. That's all he knows. Now, this is, I think, completely unconscionable. But it's the other reason the books are boring because these authors, I mean, the real authors, the gnomes, the clerks deep in the bowels of the publisher, the unnamed people who are actually doing the writing, may or may not have any history credentials. They may not even know enough to challenge what's wrong with the textbooks. So what happens is, "Prentice Hall," or whatever the publisher, gives them a few of their competitors and say, "Here, write this stuff up." And so that's why the books are all alike, and that's why they make mistake after mistake that has been corrected. In one case, I point to a mistake about Columbus that got corrected in 1913, but the books are still making it. So it's a failure of scholarship. Horrible failure of scholarship. Before I lose the question, you mentioned the second worst president. Did you want, you're not going to tell me number one. I don't think about it. I absolutely know just for the record. I mean, that is kind of a joke because maybe it's a matter of opinion to some degree. I actually think it isn't. I think it's clear who's the worst president. But I like audiences to think about that rather than write it down because low-end said so. So I'm not going to tell you. Well, I'd like you to match two of them up. There are only two presidents that have been Quaker, Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover, who are Quaker presidents. Neither one of them gets great historical evaluations, right? Which one was worse out of the two? Just for the record, I don't think they get great Quaker evaluations either. I don't remember, for instance, much of the society of friends thinking in either of their administrations and most especially in Richard Millhouse Nixon's administration. You know, that's a good question. I don't think it's always obvious how to rank presidents. I do actually think it's quite obvious who the worst president was. But in terms of how to rank them, I mean, for example, Nixon did some over-the-top bad things. I mean, he actually had people breaking into, maybe the most outrageous is Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Now, a lot of you are listening. I'm going to know who Daniel Ellsberg is, even though he's still alive and still doing good things. But he was this person who, of course, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the nation's press and he was seeing a psychiatrist and so Nixon has the creative idea or someone on his team has the creative idea and Nixon approves it. Let's break into his psychiatrist's office. Now, you think about that. My gosh, who amongst us doesn't have some kind of secret either in terms of our mental health, our physical health, what we did yesterday, somebody we contacted, whatever, you know? And if the federal government, which is the police state, if you think about it, if they have the power to break into and steal stuff from not only us, but our friends, our doctors or whoever, well, we're in a Stalinist state, you know? That's not very Quaker. That's terrible. That's over the top. On the other hand, Nixon, sometimes on purpose, that is, he should get credit for it. And sometimes it just happened during his administration, had some positives. One little note positive, he had the best darn policies vis-a-vis Native Americans, or American Indians, of any president going at least back to FDR and possibly going all the way back to Grant. Native Americans like him all to pieces, especially the hope he's, but many other tribes do too. Now, it may be that he just appointed somebody in charge of the BIA or in charge of the part of the interior and didn't even know he was having a good Indian policy, but he would have to give him credit for it, you know, just as we give him blame for breaking into officers and for all of his illegal behavior. So how do you mix then the positives of that and some of his, like his opening to China and so on, with the incredible negatives? Hoover didn't have that many of either, you know, that many positives or negatives. That's kind of hard to say. Let's take a couple steps back. You're a sociologist. You're a PhD from Harvard. You're a Midwestern boy. I mean, grew up in Illinois. You went to Minnesota School Carleton College where my son didn't get accepted. My name is Jordan. Your son didn't get accepted? You did not, unfair. So my question is, how did you become such a radical and why is a sociologist writing so much about history? I don't think I'm radical at all. I think I'm mainstream. What I write about history, for instance, what I say about, let's say, Columbus is known by every Columbus scholar. I don't get any arguments from Columbus people. Some people who don't know anything about Columbus, whose specialty is the Civil War, let's say, or the women's movement of the 1970s, will have their mouth open because they never heard this stuff about Columbus. You know, that he started the transatlantic slave trade from west to east, for instance, or lots of the other things that, in fact, he did do. But I think I'm right down the middle with what I say about Columbus, or what I say about the Civil War, or whatever I'm talking about. I think that if you look history squarely in the eye, if you look US history squarely in the eye, you're going to get a black eye. You're maybe even going to get red eyes, which is the title of my chapter about Native Americans. And I mean that as a pun. I mean, you may end up in tears when you read some of the things that the United States did to Native Americans. And you will maybe also see history somewhat from a native perspective, i.e. through red eyes. I mean, I'm white, but that doesn't mean I can't learn stuff. You know, I can't come to understand how things look from a Native viewpoint, especially if I talk with people, if I read people, and if I think that's true for everybody else too. If we look at history clear-eyed, we'll all become intelligent, by gosh. And maybe we'll become what, I don't know what you were defining as radical, but maybe we'll certainly, let's put it this way. I take my definition of patriotism from a guy named Frederick Douglass. And Frederick Douglass, now he's using sexist terminology, but everybody did until about 20 years ago. He was terrific on women's rights, so let's give him a pass. His definition of patriotism goes like this. I call him a patriot who rebukes his country for its sins and does not excuse them. Now, that doesn't mean you can't laud your country for its triumphs. That's just fine too. But a nationalist, on the other hand, I'm making a distinction between nationalism and patriotism. A nationalist is going to say, what do you mean it since we never had any? What are you talking about? Them's fighting words, you know. The United States never did nothing wrong, and if we did it, it was with the best of intentions. Well, that just makes you stupid. A patriot becomes wiser, and to the extent that he or she has influence on the country, he or she makes the country wiser too in its next decision. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't think that's radical. But you're a sociologist, not a historian. No. That's probably the question I didn't answer yet. I really got interested in history. Well, first of all, I have to say, the world doesn't come divided up into disciplines, you know. The topic I wrote my dissertation on when I was in graduate school was the title of my book. It's called "The Mississippi Chinese Between Black and White." I learned, actually during my Carleton years, because I took part of my junior year abroad in Mississippi, I learned that there were a lot of Chinese Americans in Mississippi, more than in any other southern state, and I learned what they were doing, and that they were, of course, a third race in a segregated system that was built for two. So I thought this would be a fascinating subject for a sociologist, and it was. On the other hand, they got there in about 1870. I wrote my dissertation in 1967. The book is still in print, and I revised it in 1985 or so. Isn't that history? Or to put it another way, what's history? What's sociology? You know, we can't divide that up that way. That would be my first comment, but my particular interest in how we teach U.S. history, and in these sad textbooks, and the sad teaching that a lot of high schools indulge in, came about because of my first teaching job. My first teaching job was at Tugaloo College, my first full-time teaching job. Tugaloo was and is an overwhelmingly black school right next to Jackson, Mississippi. Very good school. It's very small. People don't know about it up in Wisconsin. T-O-U-G-A-L-O-O, there will be a quiz for your listeners later. I, my first year there, was teaching the courses I expected to be teaching in sociology, but I was also pressed into service to teach one section of what they called the Freshman Social Science Seminar. Now, this was a very good course that had been invented by the History Department to introduce students to, you know, the drill, Polisai, Anthro, Psych, Econ, Social. And it did this in the context of African American history, made since 99 plus percent of our students being African American. Now, when you're in that context, that's the same chronology as regular U.S. history. So, the second semester not only begins after Christmas, it also begins right after the Civil War with the period known as Reconstruction. So, that first day of class in January, I had a new group of students. I didn't want to do all the talking. So, I asked them, "Okay. What is Reconstruction? What happened then?" And what happened to me might be called a, a "ha" reaction, although it might better be called an "oh no" reaction, because 16 of my 17 students in this seminar replied that Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over at the government of the southern states, but they were too soon out of slavery and they screwed up and white folks had to take control again. Now, you're making a face and well you might, because there are at least three, maybe four, direct lies in that sentence. Blacks never took over the government of the southern states. All of the southern states had white governors throughout the period. All but one had a white legislative majority. The Reconstruction governments did not screw up almost without exception or, in fact, without exception across the South. They passed the best state constitutions that the southern states have ever had, much better than the ones they labor under today. They started the public school system for both races in Mississippi. There had been scattered public schools in the larger towns for white folks, but no system that included the whole state. And, of course, there had been no schools whatsoever for black folks. It was a felony before slavery ended to teach even free blacks how to read and write. They did various other interesting things. Mississippi in particular had better government during Reconstruction than at any other later time in the entire century. And then, of course, there wasn't white folks who took over at the end of Reconstruction. It was a certain brand of them. It was white racist Democrats. So we have to go through a whole explanation today about how the Democrats were the party of overt white supremacy in the 19th century. The two parties finished a flip-flop on this matter in 1964. So it just broke my heart. I'm thinking, what does it do to you to believe the one time your race was center stage? They screwed up. Now, if it happened, that's another matter, then you have to figure this out. Why did this happen? You have to come to terms with it. But, of course, it did not happen. This was an example of what we in sociology called BS, a joke I'll use tonight, meaning bad sociology. So I was stunned, and I went to nearby high schools to see how this could have happened. I went to nearby black high schools, where I saw a black male teacher teaching all black class white racist white supremacist history, particularly in the course Mississippi history of required subject in ninth grade, because he was just teaching what was in the book. I tried for a year and a half to get history teachers to write a better book. They were busy with their projects. So eventually, I put together a team of students and faculty at Tugaloo and also at Milcep's College, the nearby white school. And we wrote a new history of Mississippi called Mississippi Conflict and Change. It got published, it won a very important award, the Lillian Smith Award for best southern nonfiction of that year, and the state of Mississippi rejected it for use. Well, Mississippi, as all southern states are, and half of all states, is a statewide textbook adoption state. If you don't get on the adoption list, you don't get used, even in the private schools. So we eventually wound up suing them. The ensuing lawsuit is called low-end at all versus turnip seed at all. And we won. The American Library Association lists it and describes it as one of the, I think, 13 cases that are critical to giving us a right to read in this country. Well, that whole escapade showed me that history can be a weapon, that it could be used against you, and that it had been used against my students. And then after seven or eight years, I left Mississippi and I went to the University of Vermont. I tell people I taught at the Blacklist and the whitest schools in America, and it's pretty important. But I found that my UVM students, as they're called, also believed the damnedest things about our past that never happened and didn't know about the most important things that did happen. So I came to realize that distorted history was a national problem, not a Mississippi problem. Mississippi exemplified this problem in a more grandiose scale as Mississippi exemplified various other problems in a more severe way, but it was and remains a national problem. So that's what led to lies my teacher told me, and that's what led to my continuing interest in how we miss teach history. We're visiting today with James Lowens, sociologist, historian, and author of a number of books, including Lies My Teacher Told Me. This is Spirit In Action, and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this northern spirit radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org. Right now, there are eight and a half years of our programs there for free listening and download. There are links to and info about our guests. There's a place to leave comments. I leave it to you to make our communication two-way by posting your feedback, suggestions for future guests, et cetera. There's also a donate button there, so please support us and make the program possible. Your donations are critical to our work. But also remember, first, to support your local community radio station doing an invaluable, irreplaceable job of bringing you a slice of news and music that you get nowhere else. So support them with your time and money first. We'll get right back to the hotel room where I'm speaking with James Lowen, but first, let's listen to another song which opens up some hidden history. It's by David Rovicks, and it's called The St. Patrick Battalion. If you haven't heard about it before, that's why we're talking with James Lowen today. First, David Rovicks, The St. Patrick Battalion. My name is John Riley. I'll have your ear only a while. I left my dear home in Ireland. It was death, starvation, or exile. When I got to America, it was my duty to go. Enter the army and slog across Texas to join in the war against Mexico. And it was there in the Pueblos and hillsides that I saw the mistake I had made. Part of a conquering army with the morals of a bayonet blade. And there amidst all these poor dying Catholics, screaming children, the burning stench of it all. Myself and 200 Irishmen decided to rise to the call from Dublin City to San Diego. We witnessed freedom denied, so we formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We marched beneath the green flag of St. Patrick, emblazoned with erring old bra. Bright with the harp and the shamrock, and libertad para mejicada. And just 50 years after Wolfton, 5,000 miles away, the Yanks called us a legion of strangers. And they can talk as they may, but from Dublin City, San Diego. We witnessed freedom denied, so we formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We fought them in matamotals, where their volunteers were raping the nuns. In Monterey and Cerro Gordo, we fought on as Ireland sons. We were the red-headed fighters for freedom. Amidst these brown-skinned women and men, side by side we fought against tyranny, and I dare say we'd do it again. From Dublin City to San Diego, we witnessed freedom denied, so we formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ We fought them in five major battles, and Ciro Bosco was the last, overwhelmed by the cannons from Boston. We fell after each mortar blast. Most of us died on that hillside, in the service of the Mexican state. So far from our occupied homeland, we were heroes and victims of fate. From Dublin City to San Diego, we witnessed freedom denied, so we formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. From Dublin City to San Diego, we witnessed freedom denied, so we formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. We formed the St. Patrick Battalion, and we fought on the Mexican side. That was David Rovicks, the St. Patrick Battalion. Now, back to you, James Lowen. I'm wondering if the missed teaching of history vacillates over time, so that at one point we are distorting history in one direction at another time in history, we're distorting it in a different direction. For example, though one might think of the right-wing rewriting of our history, perhaps with the political correctness movement, some texts won't be accepted if they don't match that standard of speech thought or action. Does political correctness, perhaps, tilt the story, the history that we're told in a different direction? Well, that's two different questions. The answer to your first question is, yes, every age distorts history in its own way. I'm going to talk tonight at UW Eau Claire about the title of my talk is going to be called the most important era in the US history that you never heard of and why it's important today. That era, which is basically the period 1890 to 1940, caused us to understand a whole bunch of things, all the way from Columbus up to the Woodrow Wilson administration, in a white supremacist, counterfactual way. Well, that isn't how we understood the past in 1880. That's quite different by say 1910 and much worse. The same kind of thing happens. We see changes in, I'll give you an example, much more recently. Everybody knew in the early 1940s that the United States government was incarcerating our Japanese-Americans, at least our Japanese-Americans from California, Oregon, and Washington. That wasn't the secret, but it's hardly mentioned in the textbooks written from 1942 on through maybe 1960. And if it is mentioned, it's very short and it's sometimes even justified. Today, our textbooks do a very good job on this subject. Some of them are a lot as much as two pages with pictures and stuff, and they show that it was not justified by the facts on the ground. It was a usurpation of rights and so on. How come? Well, maybe it makes a difference that during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies, the United States apologized, actually paid indemnities, they called it, or reparations, we might say, of $20,000 to each surviving Japanese-American. Thus, we made it right. Or we made it just right as we could. I mean, yes, some people lost businesses, some people committed suicide as a result of what happened to them. We can't make everything right, but we did what we could. And thus, I submit, it became one more American success story. Now, that's great. That's wonderful. We also have to be able to face the past on those topics that we haven't made good, and they are many. So, when we tell the story, definitely impacts how we tell it. Now, I want to go off -- that was all in response to the first part of your question. Then you went off on this riff about political correctness. I want to say something about that. I think it's an unfortunate term. I think it's a term coined by right-wingers to put down the notion that, for example, we should call people what they themselves want to be called. You know, people got irritated with changing from colored people to Negro to Black and now to African-American. So why do we need to do that? That's just politically correct. People got irritated with having to change from American-Indian to Native-American. So, definitely, some Native-Americans haven't made that change and would rather be called American-Indians. And so, I used the two terms interchangeably and go with whoever I'm talking with. But, you know, why do we have to do that? That's just political correctness. Why do we have to say disabled rather than crippled? You know, there's all these terms. Well, among other things, most people do get to be called what they want to be called. Some people have changed their names. Some people are, you know, so why not? I mean, why not be not only kind, but also literally correct and use the term that the group itself calls itself and wants to be called. I don't see anything wrong with that. But politically correct is used as a way to belittle it. And then we say things like, well, it's just politically correct to emphasize that Columbus enslaved all these Native Americans. People back then did that. There wasn't any argument about it. So we're just imposing the standards of today. We're just being politically correct for today. Well, that turns out to be another case of BS. There were all kinds of people in 1493 when Columbus started his mass enslavement of Native people who rebuked him for it. All of the Natives did, after all, and besides that, a bunch of Spaniards did from by Ptolema de Las Casas to many others. He even got in trouble with the king and queen of Spain. So it isn't just a matter that we now are using these terms politically correct to disparage Columbus. We need to be accurate in assessing what Columbus did. And I'm going to finish on him. I know we're running out of time. But I try to assess Columbus and sum him up with one word, which I think does a good job of it. And that's the word exploit. He did a remarkable exploit, particularly his first journey. Sailing west, of course, Lev Erikson and these North Norsemen had done something similar several hundred years earlier. But still, he did it. I think he knew that there was an America in the way I don't think he was really trying to reach India. But we're not sure. Maybe he was. Anyway, he did it. And even more amazingly, in 1493, he comes back with 17 ships with between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers with attack dogs with armored horses. And he proceeds to do what no nation had ever done before, which is take over another nation or take over another people, an entire ocean away. He takes over Haiti, renames it Hispaniola, and the rest is history, if you will. He's a terribly important person, so he did a remarkable exploit. He also proceeded to exploit everybody he came into contact with in the Western Hemisphere. So we can use that one word to sum up both sides of his temperament and both sides of his activities. And so then, how you come out on Columbus, I suppose, depends on your values, but we do have to recognize that if you leave out either half of the exploit stuff, then you're doing bad history. Yes, we're doing bad history. And I want to come back to the point I made about political correctness. There's censorship that happens from both sides, liberal and conservative sides. And so, for instance, there are the folks who want to suppress the publication of Huckleberry Finn, which I think is probably -- probably -- and I'm not black, so maybe I don't fully understand the issue -- is probably a bad idea. Do you find the pressures equal or balanced in terms of wanting to suppress history? Is that why it ends up being cabbalom instead of being something very interesting? You know, I think that is why, actually. I think there are pressures from both sides. They're not equal. It depends on where you are. For example, K-12, I think the pressures, if you will, from the left are fairly minor. And one of the reasons for this is because the largest single influence on K-12 history textbooks is the state of Texas. It's the largest single market that adopts statewide -- California adopts statewide, but not on the high school level. So publishers do change their books so as not to offend the Texas market, whereas the places of greatest liberalism -- I don't know, Madison, Wisconsin, New York City -- I'm being serious, actually -- don't adopts statewide, don't have that much influence on the publishers. So I think -- well, but there are distortions even caused by the left, though, if you want to call it the left. One example being, some, I guess, left-wingers we can call -- some New York people think that we should not discuss the role of religion in U.S. history. Now, obviously, we shouldn't discuss the role of religion from a proselytizing standpoint. We shouldn't say America is a great country because it's a Christian nation, and it was founded as a Christian nation, that lot of statement isn't true among other things. But that doesn't mean that you can even do a halfway decent job, let's say, of discussing Utah history without mentioning the Mormons, and probably you'd best mention something about what they believed, too. You know? And there's nothing wrong with that. But there are people who believe that the separation of church and state means that you can't even teach about religion. Well, of course, you can teach about religion. You just can't proselytize. You know, that's a very important distinction that a lot of left-wingers don't understand. So there is pressure in K-12 from both sides. And then on college level, there are definitely considerable pressures from the left. I see this, for instance, in discussion of gender, where we have almost no discussion in college of ways that males are systematically discriminated against in the United States. The most obvious, because it's so clearly legal, being the draft. We don't have a draft right now, but we certainly still have registration for the draft, and you only register for the draft if you are male. What's that about? You know? That's straight sexual discrimination. There are other ways that males are discriminated against in our society. And even just to say that, race is the standard, academical hackles, if you will. So we ought to fight this kind of censorship wherever it occurs, from whatever direction. Thank you for saying that, Jim. I've noticed it myself. I'm part of a men's group. I've had to open my eyes and realize that I was dismissing a whole bunch of history that was right in front of me. You also mentioned religion and the role that played in the United States, and that's a special interest to me as part of spirit and action, and as a Quaker. Quakers generally get pretty good press all around. Both left and right, kind of surprisingly, because Quakers were supposedly all opposed to slavery and valued equality for women and so on, which are true, but there's a whole lot that gets swept under there. Have you ever read the book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship? I've interviewed the authors of that, and I was embarrassed, of course, as a Quaker that so much of my extended family has been that way. Well, that's very interesting. You bring that up. I think, of course, there were Quaker slaveholders, and there were Quakers who never gave up their slaveholding. But Quakers and Mennonites, I'm genetically Mennonite. I was never raised Mennonite, but they were the first two groups in the United States to come out against slavery, the first two white groups, let's put it that way. I think black groups and Native American groups were against slavery for a long time, and Quakers have been leaders in these ways. But what happened to this country, and we'll be talking about it at UW, in 1890 was the whole country goes incredibly racist, and Quakers lose their anti-racist idealism across the country. And that's when this Fit for Freedom, but not for friendship, really becomes clear. We have interracial towns across the Midwest, including Quaker towns, that became Sundown towns. I wrote the book Sundown towns about towns that are all white on purpose, and Quaker towns were less likely to become Sundown than others, but some still did, because it just was the thing to do. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why this terrible period of racial relations between 1890 and 1940 occurred. It's a one-hour lecture that I'm going to give, but Quakers were swept up as others were. Well, you know, Jim, you've got a plethora of books. No, maybe that's too much. You've got a lot of books out there. Besides, Lies My Teacher told me lies across America, Sundown towns, telling what really happened, the Confederate and non-Confederate reader. And I think you've got one coming up very soon, surprises on the landscape. It's coming up very slowly, unfortunately. I call it my book in lack of progress, rather than my book in progress. But anyway, has there been insufficient light chined on some of those books? Lies My Teacher told me. I mean, I think a lot of people know about are there others that should be highlighted better? Well, Lies My Teacher told me it is the best seller. It still sells something like a thousand copies a week, so I'm not going to flog it. I'm not trying to flog any of my books, but I would submit that Sundown towns was maybe, in some ways, my most important single book in that the factual record of Sundown towns was pretty much unknown, it was unknown to me anyway, before I wrote it. And that factual record is this. Sundown towns are, of course, towns that were, for decades, all white on purpose. Some of them still are, all white on purpose. There are still all kinds of towns in the Midwest, in Appalachia, in the Ozarks, et cetera, where no black people live, and that's prudent, as we speak. When I first went to write that book, I thought, I knew I was from Illinois, so I knew I was going to do more research in Illinois than any other single state. I thought I would discover maybe ten Sundown towns in Illinois, and maybe fifty across the country. Not so. I am now at a count of five hundred and six Sundown towns, in Illinois alone, which is seventy percent of all the towns that there are in Illinois. I think a similar percentage afflicted the towns of Indiana, of Oregon, and of various other northern states. We are in Wisconsin today, when I wrote a very important and good historian, white historian, but he's expert about black stuff, in Wisconsin. Early in my research, and I told him about my research about Sundown towns, and he replied, "Well, I have no doubt that you'll find a few of those in Illinois, but I don't think they're any in Wisconsin." Well, I learned differently, and he now agrees with me. There are somewhere between one hundred, I think, and two hundred Sundown towns in Wisconsin, including large cities like Appleton, Wisconsin, sixty thousand, seventy thousand people, that absolutely kept out black folks in Appleton's case until about 1970. There's a town, maybe thirty thousand people, north of Milwaukee called Manitowalk, that had a sign at its city limits. Nigger, don't let the sun go down on you in Manitowalk. Similar policies in Beaver Dam, in all kinds of towns across Wisconsin. And this is an unknown history, unknown by expert historians in Wisconsin. Same thing is true in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I'm speaking in Michigan tomorrow. Almost every suburb of Detroit was a sundown town. Almost every suburb of Los Angeles was a sundown town. Kept out Chinese Americans too, not just black folks. Lots and lots of suburbs kept out Jews, lots of beach towns. The entire outside of Florida, for instance, most of the south doesn't believe in sundown towns. White folks thought this was crazy, who's going to be the maid? You people don't know how to run race relations. But the outside of Florida, by which I mean all the way around the Atlantic to the Gulf, is northern, mostly, and so it is full of sundown towns. Well, this is just an incredible exhibit, if you will, of the power of this terribly racist period, 1890 to 1940, that I've been talking about. And it's also a problem that we're still living with today. Many of your listeners probably know about their own town, or the next town over, that had a policy informally, or even formally, of keeping up black folks. And if so, they can usefully email me about it. So I'm going to supply my email, is that all right? All right, it's J-Lo-N-J-L-O-E-W-E-N at U-V-M, University of Vermont.edu. I'd love to hear from any of your listeners. I understand you have far-flung listeners in all kinds of different states, and sundown towns are in almost every state, because that's how we progress. The very first thing a town has to do to get over this past is to admit it. That's so important. We've been speaking with James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher, told me in a lot of other books, come to the NortonSpiritRadio.org website to find links. You also find links to his email so you can contact him, because history can come from the individuals, not only from institutions. I appreciate so much the work you've done, opening our eyes. I believe in enlightenment, and I think you're doing that work. So thanks so much for joining me, Jim. It's been my pleasure. And time for one more song, or at least most of it, on the topic of history. This one's by Sai Khan, and it's about one of the events that spurred on the improvements in labor conditions that transformed our work world in the USA in the early 1900s. Again, it's by Sai Khan. It's called Washington Square. See you next week for Spirit in Action. On the southeast corner of Green Street and Waverly. On the east side of Washington Square. The air is still troubled, the sidewalk unsettled. The young voices still cry through the afternoon air. March 25th, 1911, this is the way she told it to me. A factory of immigrants, Jews and Italians are hard at their work when the fire breaks free. At the triangle, shirt waste factory. Women fall through the bitter spring air. Their young faces turn to question me. They still hear their voices as I walk in Washington Square. They rush to the doors, but the bosses have locked them. Let someone step out for a breath of fresh air. Trapped in this wreckage, they run for the windows. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)