By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The new guidelines that have been put in place for the Advanced Placement American history course are generating considerable criticism from a variety of conservative groups. Those criticizing the guidelines are also being criticized. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Horsey of The Los Angeles Times is an example of a critic of the critics.
(For those unfamiliar with Advanced Placement courses, they are honors-level courses for high school students that are designed to replicate college courses. High school students who do well on the end-of-year tests written by the Advanced Placement organization can earn college credit while still in high school.)
Horsey directs his criticism toward Republican legislators in Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, Nebraska, and North Carolina, who, writes Horsey, say the new tests fail “to instill patriotism and an appreciation for American exceptionalism, and instead put too much emphasis on race, gender, and class.” Horsey also points to the Republican National Committee which last summer declared that the framework “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects while omitting or minimizing the positive.”
The headline for Horsey’s column in my local newspaper (which, to be fair, Horsey probably had nothing to do with writing) was “Tea party legislators oppose teaching complexities of U.S. history.” Horsey believes it is a “safe bet that 99 percent of the riled up lawmakers who want to run this AP history course out of their state’s classrooms have never even looked at the framework,” but are relying “talking points picked up from a Rush Limbaugh rant.”
Horsey assures us that he, in contrast, has “actually taken the time to read through the framework” and “can see why these folks are upset” because “it is not your grandparents’ version of the story, and that is what the critics do not like.”
And which is what Horsey does like. He commends the new framework for providing a narrative, not just about the “achievements of famous white men,” but “also from the viewpoint of common laborers, immigrants, slaves, Native Americans, and women.” He praises the new focus on the “racist Jim Crow era,” the “internment of Japanese Americans during World War II,” and the “good things” done by the “progressives at the turn of the last century, such as protecting the environment, eliminating child labor, and curbing the destructive greed of giant corporate monopolies.”
He complains the “old history” seldom mentioned how the United States “turned the Philippines into an American vassal state,” that “Oregon’s 1859 constitution barred black people from living in the state — something that was not changed until 1926,” and that “Martha Washington’s slave ran away to freedom when she heard the first first lady was preparing to give her away as a wedding gift.” Horsey calls this an “updated history” that “teaches that there is more to the story of America than the achievements of famous white men. It is not just smart high school kids who could benefit from a deeper understanding of our exceptional history; all of us could — simplistic, reactionary state legislators most of all.”
Oh, my. Come on: No one objects to the complete account of our past being given to our students in their high school history classes, the good along with the bad. The truth is the truth. I have no way of knowing whether Horsey has a hidden agenda in this matter, but there are those who do. Since the late 1960s, new left historians have been promoting a view of American history that calls for far more than a fair and complete presentation of the events in our past. No one objects to American students learning about the injustices of slavery and the Jim Crow era, the plight of Native Americans or the history of the progressive era.
These themes have been part of the curriculum in American high schools at least since I was a high school student in the 1950s. Every high school student who paid attention learned that Washington, Jefferson, and many other Founding Fathers were slaveholders and that Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Teachers did not hide these facts.
The lawmakers that Horsey is raking over the coals are not dummies. Their objection is not to the truth but to the revisionist view of American history that emphasizes the injustices of the past as a way to depict capitalism and the free-market system as inherently unjust systems that need to be radically transformed in favor of socialism. The new left historians admit to this goal this openly. The American “failures” the new left stresses are not legalized abortion, the growth of pornography, and the bias against Roman Catholics. What they focus on is the land expropriated from Native Americans, how we took control of Cuba, the Panama Canal, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
They see our national expansion as a path the country chose to escape a socialist expropriation of the wealth of the American propertied classes and a redistribution of it to our growing population. The new left goes so far as to contend that we opposed the Soviet Union and Communist China during the Cold War because the socialist economies in the countries they controlled denied American businesses access to raw materials and markets for our manufactured goods.
The late William Appleman Williams, onetime professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, and often called the “dean” of the new left historians, writing in 1961, called this the “contour” of American history, the ongoing search for “new frontiers” as a way of avoiding what he thought would be “the ideal and the Utopia of a true human community based far more on social property than upon private property.”
Williams was convinced the search for new frontiers was a “great escape” from our national responsibilities and opportunities.” He praised socialists for recognizing “that it is time to stop running away from life.” His hope was “that Americans would one day prove mature and courageous enough to . . . one day ‘put away childish things’ and undertake the creation of a socialist commonwealth . . . the first truly democratic socialism in the world.”
I repeat: I do not know David Horsey and cannot pretend to read his mind. But he is an educated man: He is aware of the role that new left historians such as William Appleman Williams have played in shaping the thinking of the history and social studies departments in American universities since the 1970s. He is being unfair, maybe even dishonest, when he argues that only an ignorant right-wing partisan shill could raise the question of whether the emphasis on the failures and injustices in our past found in the new Advanced Placement curriculum is part of the new left’s attempt to promote their view of the past.
The bottom line: American parents and taxpayers would be out of order if they objected to an accurate and balanced presentation of our history to our children, but completely within their rights to challenge courses designed to promote a hidden left-wing agenda.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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