Wait, was there an election? Let's talk about textbooks
A little more related than you might think...
The Skipped History train rattles on, subscriber,
And maybe with more relevance than ever. You know how we’ve seen evidence over the last few days (and years and centuries) that racism is widespread? Well, click below to look at a bigoted textbook used in the North until not so long ago:
This week’s story comes from America Revised, by Frances Fitzgerald.
Next time on Skipped History…
We’ll check out the 1964 New York City School Boycott. The broken system students protested back then seems not to have changed much in the intervening 56 years:
Word. I can’t say I’m too surprised. After all, many people who read the racist textbooks we’ve discussed are now voters, politicians, and parents with kids who are morons (43% of white 18-29-year-olds voted for McDonald).
On the flip side, remember: unless you’re a Knicks fan, there’s always hope for wiser days ahead.
This week’s transcript is below. See you next week!
Ben
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This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about author David Muzzey and his textbook, An American History. I read about him in America Revised, by Frances Fitzgerald.
Last time on Skipped History, we talked about Mildred Rutherford, the Confederate historian who inserted the white supremacist mythology of the Lost Cause into textbooks. Mildred hated textbooks that vilified the South, and #1 on her hit list was An American History, by David Muzzey. It’s little surprise why: Writing in 1911, Muzzey described the history of slavery as “a sad picture of violence, greed, and stunted moral sense,” which yes, sounds a little like me at a breakfast buffet. So what else was in Muzzey’s book, and were the students who read it in the North really better off?
To answer that question, let’s go back to the Revolutionary War, when according to Muzzey, New Englanders like John and Sam Adams were “the undisputed leaders of society.” Born in 1870 in Massachusetts, Muzzey belonged to a group of New England intellectuals who modeled themselves after men like the Adams and felt they should have similar power and prestige. But after the Civil War, as major corporations grew, things began to change for the New England gentlemen, and Muzzey felt threatened by the rising influence of businessmen and the Republican politicians they often supported. The relationship between the two, Muzzey wrote, “was highly injurious to our democratic ideals. Men are put into office [simply] for the favors they can procure for the business interests,” which, to be fair, does describe amphibious reptiles today, and did describe politicians back then. There was widespread corruption after the Civil War, as seen for example in a scandal in 1872 involving “colossal bribery” of Congress by the railroad industry.
So Muzzey’s sense of self-importance sometimes led to conclusions we’d agree with; it also led to conclusions we’d disagree with. Do you remember Frederick Hoffman, the racist statistician we looked at in the first couple episodes of Skipped History who believed that Black people were constrained by their inherently inferior “moral nature”? Well, that was a view shared by many intellectuals in the early 1900s, including David Muzzey. So, sure, he described slavery as a “sad picture of violence, greed, and stunted moral sense,” but he didn’t think Black people had the capacity to rise above the lowest rungs of society. And Muzzey expressed that sentiment when describing Reconstruction, the brief period after the Civil War when Black men received the right to vote.
“Conceding that Congress had the right to impose negro suffrage on the South,” Muzzey wrote, “it was nevertheless a most unwise thing to do. To reverse the relative position of the races, to ‘stand the social pyramid on its apex,’ to set the ignorant, superstitious, gullible slave in power over his former master” thrust Black people “into positions of high political office which they had no idea how to fill” and worse still, “they could be counted on to vote the Republican ticket.” Consequently, by the 1900s, the South was still “in many parts a spectacle of anarchy, violence, and fraud,” which, yes, also sounds like me at a breakfast buffet.
Why was Muzzey so opposed to Black voters? Well, maybe because he was a white supremacist, and maybe because Black men did vote in overwhelming numbers for Republicans, which further empowered the businessmen whose influence Muzzey was keen to displace. So, at the end of the day, although Confederate sympathizers hated Muzzey, his own mixture of self-importance and racism led him to disparage Black people, and like Mildred Rutherford, to glorify the KKK, whom he commended for forcing “the Black man… back into the humble social position which he held before the war.”
And while the texts Mildred inspired spread throughout the South, An American History simultaneously spread throughout the North, where from 1911 until the 1960s, a high percentage, and maybe a majority of schoolkids, learned history from this one book. Because it was an engaging, sometimes insightful text that confirmed a lot of white people’s views of race, the book topped bestseller lists until the 1930s, sold well into the 1960s, and was still widely read in the 1970s. Put another way, two of the people most influential in the U.S. history textbook tradition, and by extension, the U.S. high school history tradition, were white supremacists, and Mildred and Muzzey served students all they could eat at the racist history buffet for generations.
And though it does seem like there’s no limit to how far I’ll take this analogy (I’m sorry, I just miss being able to eat fruit and pancakes and cut people in the omelet line… literally), there is a limit to how much bullshit students can stomach, and we need look no further than New York for proof. Because it was here, not in the South and not at the March on Washington, where the largest protest of the Civil Rights Era occurred, and it was directly tied to the racist textbooks used in school.
Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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Take a deep breath, look at some trees, and see you amid next week’s constitutional crisis.