Eric Foner - The Complicity of the Textbooks

 Reviewed:

Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

by Donald Yacovone

Pantheon, 431 pp., $32.50

Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most of the groupings are unexceptional—for example, monographs, government reports, and biographies. But Du Bois’s first and largest category comes as a shock to the modern reader: it consists of books by historians who believe African Americans to be “sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage.” Just before the bibliography, Du Bois includes a chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” that indicts the profession for abandoning scholarly objectivity in the service of “that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few.” This was the state of historical scholarship in the United States when Black Reconstruction was published, in 1935.

As part of his research, Du Bois scoured history textbooks to see what was being taught in American classrooms about Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War, when laws and the Constitution were rewritten in an attempt to make the US, for the first time, an interracial democracy. Students learned that Reconstruction was the lowest point in the American saga, a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting the right to vote to Black men. The violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, the books related, was an understandable response by white southerners to the horrors of “Negro rule.” The heroes of this narrative were the self-styled white Redeemers who restored what they called “home rule” to the South, the villains northern abolitionists who irresponsibly set North against South, bringing on a needless civil war. Du Bois was well aware that what is said in history classrooms has an impact beyond the schoolhouse. The history of Reconstruction taught throughout the country “proved” that nonwhite peoples are congenitally incapable of intelligent self-government.

Now, nearly a century later, Donald Yacovone, an associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and a prolific writer on African American history, has published Teaching White Supremacy, which follows in Du Bois’s footsteps by tracing what textbooks, over the course of our history, have said about slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and race relations more generally. Yacovone examined hundreds of texts held in the library of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, published from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s—a heroic effort that few historians are likely to wish to emulate. Some of the authors were well-known scholars. Most will be unfamiliar even to specialists in the history of education—writers such as John Bonner, Marcius Willson, and Egbert Guernsey.

From the beginning, Yacovone concludes, American education has served “the needs of white supremacy.” Well into the twentieth century, he finds, most textbooks said little about slavery or portrayed it as a mild institution that helped lift “savage” Blacks into the realm of civilization. From generation to generation the books made no mention of Blacks’ role in helping to shape the nation’s development. They ignored Black participation in the crusade against slavery and the Civil War and portrayed Reconstruction as a disaster caused primarily by Black incapacity. Many of these textbooks were produced by the nation’s leading publishing houses—Little, Brown; Scribner’s; Harper and Brothers; Macmillan; and Yale and Oxford University Presses, to name just a few.

Columbus Day II

Despite my Italian heritage, I don't understand the adulation that some Italian-Americans continue to bestow on Christopher Columbus, who, as history demonstrates, was less a hero than a thug, exploiting and enslaving indigenous peoples.

But the real culprit behind the subjugation of non-European peoples across the globe wasn't an individual, or even a monarch. It was the Roman Catholic Church. It's time the church owned that grievous mistake.

As early as the 15th century, as European nations were making voyages of discovery, Catholic popes gave them permission to subjugate and steal. The most significant of these papal permission slips was the Doctrine of Discovery. A decree Issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI, it essentially told Catholic countries that any lands they "discovered" were theirs to keep and exploit, provided the inhabitants were not Christians but heathens ripe for conversion.

Popes issue lots of decrees, but this one stuck. The Doctrine of Discovery proved to be very popular with monarchs across Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike. Its impact has been felt in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. The idea was simple and attractive: Plant a flag and a cross on a land not claimed by any other Christian ruler, and it's yours.

The doctrine also served to legitimize the seizure of lands by white American settlers. In considering an Illinois property dispute that came before the Supreme Court in 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall referred to the discovery doctrine to rule that Native Americans couldn't sell their lands — since they hadn't "owned" them in the first place.

"All the nations of Europe, who have acquired territory on this continent, have asserted in themselves, and have recognised [sic] in others, the exclusive right of the discoverer to appropriate the lands occupied by the Indians," Marshall wrote. When the U.S. became independent from Britain, he concluded, it inherited all the land the British crown had claimed.

Even the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg invoked the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery in a 2005 ruling against the Oneida tribe of New York, holding that honoring its land claims would be "disruptive."

In 2005, even the sainted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled against the Oneida tribe, which had repurchased some of its tribal lands from the city of Sherrill, New York, and then argued that these properties should be exempt from city taxes. The Oneidas once held six million acres in New York, but agreed to a treaty ceding nearly all their land to the state.

Writing for the court's 8-1 decision, Ginsburg concluded that siding with the Oneida tribe in the 21st century would be too "disruptive," given the town's "distinctly non-Indian character." Her decision cites the Doctrine of Discovery, essentially conceding that longstanding oppression can acquire the status of legal precedence.

But stolen lands don't tell the whole story. The idea that indigenous peoples were less fully human than white settlers clearly informed how the Canadian and U.S. governments treated Native American children. As we have learned in recent years, thousands of Native children were ripped from their families and forced to "assimilate" to white society in a system of cruel and sadistic boarding schools. More than 400 such schools existed, from 1819 until the last were closed in 1969, and about 150 of those were run by either the Catholic church or various Protestant denominations. Some victims of this abusive system have spoken out, but the true extent of the harms done to Native children in this country have yet to be fully investigated.

Pope Francis has a historic opportunity to move the world's largest Christian denomination into the future. It's obvious that admitting that previous generations of popes and cardinals were wrong is not easy. But papering over past sins with more enlightened pronouncements and apologies clearly isn't enough. It's long past time for the church to face the painful truth and undo this hateful doctrine that has caused so much pain.

-Celia Viggo Wexler in Salon.com

Columbus Day

 Whether you "celebrate" Columbus Day or prefer Indigenous Peoples Day as I do as a student of American history I correctly take note of the myths of our past. The myths start with Columbus "discovering" America. Never mind that there were millions of native Americans here for 10,000 years before Columbus found land in the Caribbean. In his four trips he never landed in the what is now the continental United States.

In recent years historians have started telling the truth about Columbus and the papal bulls that started the European invasion of the Americas. The trend is toward Indigenous Peoples and away from a totally Eurocentric view of our history.

The practice of U.S. cities eschewing Columbus Day to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day began in 1992 with Berkeley, California. The list of cities that have followed suit as of 2018 includes Austin, Boise, Cincinnati, Denver; Los Angeles, Mankato, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle, Saint Paul, Phoenix, Tacoma, and "dozens of others".

All to the good.

Tony Castro - Maris and Mantle - Notes

 First of all, I am glad that Aaron Judge is recognized as breaking Roger Maris's record and not Barry Bonds. This is only right that cheaters should not be rewarded. I hope that Bonds, Sosa, McGuire, and you can throw in Pete Rose, only get into to the baseball Hall of Fame if they buy an admission ticket at the front door like the rest of us. Mickey Mantle was the big hero of my 60's growing days, but I have always had a special baseball, the greatest game in world by the way, place in my baseball heart for the man from Hibbing, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota. Roger Maris was such a decent, introverted, square, honest, heckuva of a man who never received the accolades he deserved. Great all-around baseball player too.

David Halberstam said that Maris wasn't cut out for the media age.

"I don't want to be Babe Ruth.  He was a great ballplayer.  I'm not trying to replace him.  The record is there and I want to break it, but that isn't replacing Babe Ruth."  Roger Maris p.xiii

Mantle had his best season in 1957 with an on base pct. of .512.  Today's analytics say this might have been the best baseball season ever.  

"Throughout most of my life, I was a hero to many people.  I was as big as Elvis.  But what no one ever understood is that it never meant anything to me.'  Mickey Mantle  P. 1

There are family background similarities between Mantle and Babe Ruth.  P. 26

Mickey Mantle was born on October 20, 1931 in a 2 room house on an unpaved road in the middle of Oklahoma.  P. 34

For MM it all began with his father and the Oklahoma he came from.  P. 36

Mickey Mantle was despondent over the winter of 1959,  thinking he might be washed up as the Yankees handily  lost the pennant race to the White Sox, but he brightened up when Whitey Ford told him the Yankees had acquired Roger Maris from Kansas City in effect sending four Yess to the A's for Maris.  Mantle and family had just moved to North Dallas near his bowling alley.

Mantle fought contract talks with GM George Weiss, a penny pincher in the the time before collective bargaining and player agents .  After the '58 season he wanted to cut Mantle's salary by 15% for the '59 season.

He was born Roger Maras before changing the spelling of Croatian descent.

Maris's parents had their disagreements.  The mother may have been Serbian and Serbs and Croatians do not get along.

Mutt Mantle insisted that Mickey be a switch-hitter.  Mutt threw left-handed so Mickey would bat right-handed against balls thrown by his father.  His grandfather threw right-handed so Mickey would bat left-handed against his Grandpa Charley.  They started out with tennis balls. Mutt forced Mickey to become a switch-hitter.  He was a naturally right-handed.   P. 49

In Mickey's childhood his father and grandfather were his playmates and closest friends.  P. 50

Real baseballs took the place of tennis balls at age 6.  During the summer he would practice as much as  5 hours a day.

Mutt Mantle believed that any kid could develop into a switch hitter if you taught him early enough.  P. 51

In the middle of the depression in Oklahoma baseball was the only way he saw for his son to escape.  P. 51

Baseball was a bond between Mickey's mother and father.  P. 51

Living in Oklahoma Mickey grew up a Cardinals fan.  P. 52

Mantle was not attached to his hometown, Commerce, Oklahoma.  P. 52

The level of dysfunction in the Mantle family planted the seeds for addictive personalities throughout most of the family.  P. 53

As a Yankee Mantle would one day endorse Camel cigarettes.  P. 54

"A ballplayer has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer.  That's why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues."  Joe DiMaggio  P. 57

Tom Greenwade was able to out slick the Mantles by signing Mickey for a paltry $1,500 with help from Mickey's high school principal whereas the golden boy at the time Jackie Jensen got $40,000.  P. 58

Mutt was too impatient to get his son signed to a professional contract, but this was the depression era and Mutt was something of a fatalist.  P. 63

OU wanted him to play football.  P. 64

"When I first came to Yankee Stadium I felt like the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were walking around in there."  Mickey Mantle p. 69

Mickey professed to not understand the impact he had on people who worshipped and adored him so powerfully emotionally affected by him.  P. 74

"Mickey Mantle was the last American hero.  He was a walking to an age of innocence and a symbol and a symbol of a time when all was right with the world."  Mickey's friend George Lois

I would only add that this view works with White America but I doubt that Mickey and his worshippers were aware of the civil rights movement.

Roger Maris certainly did not have the hoopla early on like Mantle but he might have been just as good coming out of North Dakota.  P. 80

Maris could be difficult to manage.  He had run-ins with managers.  P. 80

Mantle's major league debut took place at Yankee Stadium on April 17, 1951.  P. 108

When Maris had his slumps a lot of the cause might have been psychological.  P. 128

Mickey married Merlyn on December 23rd in Commerce, Oklahoma with Mutt, barely able to stand serving as best man.  P. 130

Maris may have taken his family more seriously than Mickey.

The author makes too much of Mickey Mantle as a cultural icon in the 50's and 60's.  There is no mention of Willie Mays.

Mantle started in a blaze of glory in spring graining and early season in 1951 only to go into a slump with Stengel sending down to the minors in Kansas which precipitated Mantle having something of a nervous breakdown as he thought he might not make it in the majors.  Mutt and Merlyn met him in Kansas City with Holly being there.  I can't imagine what Merlyn might have been thinking.  Mutt suggested returning to Commerce to work with him in the mines and told Mickey he didn't realize he had raised a coward.  Of course, Mickey returned to the Yankees with Holly and the rest is history.  Mutt did not warm to Holly.  The impression is created that Mickey loved Holly the most but married Merlyn who fathered him four boys to please his father.

In that torrid 1961 season the likes of which we will never see again Maris was criticized unfairly.  He said what he wanted to say not always knowing how what he said would be received.  P. 198

Maris's season of immortality in '61 would not be fully appreciated until later.  P. 200

I didn't realize until reading about Maris's #61 that Red Barber left the Dodgers in '53 and joined Mel Allen with the Yankees broadcast.  His last yr with the Yankees was 1966.

Mantle made what he called his best catch ever in game five of the '56 Series to save Don Larson's perfect game.  P. 207

A vitamin shot in the hip by President Kennedy's doctor of all doctors put Mickey in the hospital and doomed his chance to beat the Babe.  P. 208

Mantle hit the first homer in the Astrodome in 1966.  P. 235

Mantle's career declined greatly at the end as did the Yankee dynasty.  P. 236

In his '56 triple crown year the ball looked as big as a grapefruit to Mickey.

The Yankees were never the same after firing Yogi after losing the '64 Series to the Cardinals.  P. 238

The Yankee decline in 1965 was so abrupt.  George Weiss was forced out.  The National League rather than the American League was signing black players.  Who did the Yankees develop other than Elston Howard.  The Yankees lost their predatory relationship with Kansas City when Charles O. Finley bought the franchise in 1960.  Then there was the firing of Yogi.  P. 239

Mickey and Manager Keane did not get along.  P. 241

"After Roger beat me in the home run race in 1961, I could do no wrong.  Everywhere I went I got standing ovations."  Mickey Mantle  P. 243

Maris felt betrayed by the Yankees because they hid the severity of a hand injury from him.  P. 244

Maris went on to play '67 and '68 with the Cardinals winning the World Series in 1967.  P. 244

Maris wanted to retire after the 1966 season but Ralph Houk tried to convince him to stay, told him the Yankees were not going to trade him, but then they traded him to the Cardinals in December of '69.  But Maris got the proverbial last laugh playing on two pennant winning teams and one Series winner.  P. 245

Mantle last Yankee seasons in the late 60's were difficult to say the least.

The Yankees held four Mickey Mantle Days in the late 60's to fill the stadium attendance was so bad.  P. 249.

The first Mickey Mantle Day was near the end of the dismal '65 season with a packed stadium. Joe DiMaggio introducing Mickey.  The two were not enemies but friends who respected each other.  P. 250

Mickey asked Paul Simon why he didn't use him rather than Joe DiMaggio.  Simon said it was matter syllables rather than explain the complexity of a simpler time whereas the ignorant DiMaggio  threatened to sue Simon.  What do mean, where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?  I'm right here!  P. 251

Mickey struck out to a hard throwing you left hander  on the first Mickey Mantle Day in 1965 and Mantle complained about it.  P. 254

Roger Maris died on December 19, 1985, after a long bout with lymphatic cancer.  P. 255

There never was an asterisk beside 1961.  All mythology.  P. 269

The asterisk beside the 61 was always invisible.  P. 270

Mark McGwire finally came clean on his drug use and called Patricia Maris to apologize.  I did not know this.  P. 274

Roger Maris in the Hall of Fame is a long shot but that's the HOF"s loss.  Aaron Judge has made Maris famous again.  This has been a good yr for Roger Maris.  His stature continues to grow.  P. 275-276

Though hardly religious,  Mickey Mantle was a WASP.  The Croatian- American beat the WASP.  P. 279

Poor Herschel

l almost feel sorry for Herschel Walker. He is so clearly unfit for the job of United States senator that it's uncomfortable to watch him flounder about, unable to coherently answer even the simplest questions or offer any reasons why he should be one of the most powerful people in government. He was a star athlete, forever to be revered by college football fans, and now he's just a pathetic tool of cynical politicians, particularly, of course, Donald Trump. Still, Walker willingly allowed himself to be used and that's on him.

Once again we see the shamelessness of the Republican Party and the rank hypocrisy of the conservative evangelical Christians who form its strongest base. They're sticking with Walker no matter what, with ludicrous excuses that wouldn't pass theological muster in a fourth-grade Sunday school class.

Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com

Judge Jackson Makes a Difference

 Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest Supreme Court justice and first African American woman on the court, made her presence known on Tuesday during oral arguments in a dispute over whether Alabama’s redistricting plan is illegal.

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The case, Merrill v. Milligan, centers on whether the state must create a second majority-Black congressional district. Alabama and, likely, the right-wing majority on the court say no, contending that the Voting Rights Act’s requirement to do so is unconstitutional. Jackson, however, blew up that argument, illustrating why she is such a potent intellectual force and why faux originalists trying to undo remedies for enduring racism have so much to lose.

First, some background: Republicans have been telling themselves a useful fiction, namely that racism has vanished, and any attempt to teach about the enduring effects or to remedy enduring discrimination is unfair to White people and is unconstitutional. We see the phenomenon in their contrived war against “critical race theory” in schools (even though it is not taught to children).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mouthed this notion in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The same reasoning echoed in his ruling in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated the preclearance provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans celebrated the latter decision, which reinforced their conviction that Whites are victims of government attempts to address the ongoing inequities suffered by Blacks and other disadvantaged groups.

Jonathan Capehart: Why Black people feel Jackson’s ‘seat at the table’ is ours, too

This is of a piece with white-grievance proponents’ infatuation with a single sentence from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This is often misconstrued as a condemnation of efforts to promote racial justice, ignoring the rest of the speech and King’s life’s work. Indeed, King was dedicated to exposing enduring racism and devising legislative and moral responses to it. The result was, among other things, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically targeted measures that discriminated against Black voters in the South.

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And that brings us to Jackson on Tuesday. Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:

In a series of extraordinary exchanges with Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour, Jackson explained that the entire point of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was to provide equal opportunity for formerly enslaved people, using color-conscious remedies whenever necessary to put them on the same plane as whites.

As Stern explains, this was a “masterclass” in originalism. And by that he means it was historically pristine originalism, not the faux originalism of the right-wing majority that cherry-picks its way through history to reach a desired partisan end.

Jackson took her colleagues through the history of the Civil War amendments, revisions to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and even the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction from 1866. Jackson informed her colleagues: “The legislator who introduced [the 14th] amendment said that ‘unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated Freedman.’ ” Jackson observed, “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy.”

To borrow from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who once chastised Roberts for “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”: The Constitution does not bar Congress from giving umbrellas to those who’ve been rained on for centuries. 

The right-wing’s fixation on a “colorblind” society serves to strip Congress of the power under the 14th Amendment to address discrimination. The right-wing justices are so determined to show the Constitution to require their “colorblind” result that they’ve ignored the history, meaning and intent of the document they claim to revere.

The court’s six-justice conservative majority has shown repeatedly that it has the votes to achieve the radical, partisan outcomes it desires, so it need not make convincing arguments — or even coherent ones (see its ruling overturning abortion rights). That’s what makes Jackson’s remarks so effective. Essentially, she said, “I’m making sure everyone understands what is going on here.”

She might have made it more difficult for the court to adopt Alabama’s extreme position. Election law guru Rick Hasen observes that “there did not appear to be any appetite on the Court for Alabama’s constellation of radical arguments, including one that would require proof of racially discriminatory intent to require the creation of a minority opportunity district.” He continues: “That would look radical: the Court would be overturning decades of precedent, beginning with the Court’s 1986 decision in Gingles, which sets up a three-part threshold test for [Voting Rights Act] redistricting claims, followed by a look at the totality of the circumstances.” Instead, the court is likely to finesse its decision to ostensibly leave Gingles in place but make it near-impossible for plaintiffs to succeed in Voting Rights Act claims.

Jackson’s analysis is not new. Voting rights advocates have been making similar arguments for years. But rarely — if ever — has a member of the court so authoritatively and definitively used the relevant legislative and constitutional history to demolish the “colorblind” charade. And doing so with a purely originalist interpretation made it much more powerful.

No wonder Republicans were so desperate to keep her off the court. To the dismay of the senators who sneered at her qualifications (insisting that President Biden’s decision to limit potential nominees to Black women meant he would select someone of lesser quality), she demonstrated that she not only deserves to be there but that there is no better judge out there who can stand up to Republicans as they try to systematically dismantle civil rights.

-Jennifer Rubin in the WaPost

 Now, nearly a century later, Donald Yacovone, an associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and a prolific writer on African American history, has published Teaching White Supremacy, which follows in Du Bois’s footsteps by tracing what textbooks, over the course of our history, have said about slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and race relations more generally. Yacovone examined hundreds of texts held in the library of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, published from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s—a heroic effort that few historians are likely to wish to emulate. Some of the authors were well-known scholars. Most will be unfamiliar even to specialists in the history of education—writers such as John Bonner, Marcius Willson, and Egbert Guernsey.

From the beginning, Yacovone concludes, American education has served “the needs of white supremacy.” Well into the twentieth century, he finds, most textbooks said little about slavery or portrayed it as a mild institution that helped lift “savage” Blacks into the realm of civilization. From generation to generation the books made no mention of Blacks’ role in helping to shape the nation’s development. They ignored Black participation in the crusade against slavery and the Civil War and portrayed Reconstruction as a disaster caused primarily by Black incapacity. Many of these textbooks were produced by the nation’s leading publishing houses—Little, Brown; Scribner’s; Harper and Brothers; Macmillan; and Yale and Oxford University Presses, to name just a few.