Any Convenient Fairy Tale
The fight about how to teach American history in public schools is an old one
From the pages of Virginia’s Richmond Dispatch comes a report about a group of outraged citizens who met to discuss what they saw as a grave threat to future generations: the distortion of crucial information about American history in the public schools. Impassioned speeches were greeted with enthusiastic applause from the crowd; the speakers appealed to a common heritage and to a moral obligation to protect the young from dangerous ideas which might make them feel “ashamed” of their parents and grandparents. In their words, the narrative being taught in classrooms misrepresented “the very facts of history, the principles of the former Constitution as admitted in the days of freedom by all statesmen of all parties, the characters and motives of our patriots, the purposes of parties, the very essential names of rights and virtues and vices.” “Shame on those who write such books!” one man cried. “And triple shame on those who foist them upon their innocent children!” Another made the case for tapping into the group’s electoral power to influence government decisions being made about education in the state. “We are going to have a change, that is settled,” he said. “If our school people won’t change our histories, then let us change our school people.”
Though some of the meeting’s minutes read like a transcript from the 2021 national panic over Critical Race Theory (in 26 states, Republican lawmakers have passed or are considering restrictive education legislation), this gathering took place in 1897. The occasion was the keynote of Virginia’s Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans held that October in Richmond, and the speakers were prominent Southern doctors, teachers, writers, and businessmen, champions of the Confederate cause during the war and after. The meeting’s urgent, scandalized tone was a sign of the times, not just in Virginia but across the country. The 1890s marked an inflection point in a battle over the way that American history was taught in schools. There were more children enrolled in public schools than ever before, especially in the South, where free public schools did not exist before the Civil War.
In both the North and South, aging Civil War veterans led the charge, driven in part by a desire to cement their own legacy. An ex-Confederate put it this way: “Veterans…realizing that the sun is fast setting on their horizon, demand that they and their comrades shall be set right in the eyes of the generations yet to come.” The Boston Evening Transcript viewed this conflict about memory as the latest chapter of the long Civil War. “The rebellion against the United States government had its beginning in a context of ballots; this was succeeded by a warfare of bullets,” it wrote. “And now we are passing through a third stage, wherein the contending parties are firing at each other with printer’s ink through the historical textbooks.”
In the North, the predominant Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, mobilized against textbooks that members viewed as too even-handed in their treatment of the South’s role in the Civil War; the GAR wanted students to read textbooks “calculated to make treason odious.” In the South, Confederate veterans and Confederate women’s groups waged an all-out war to remove any whiff of Northern influence or sympathy from schools. In 1897, Texas adopted a uniform textbook law that meant that the state would mandate book choices for cities with fewer than 10,000 people. They also banned any book that contained “anything of a partisan or sectarian character.” In 1908, a math textbook was recalled in Texas because of word problems that used biographical facts from the lives of Union generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan to pose arithmetic questions.
In 1995, the historian Fred Bailey wrote about how this movement “expunged books from schools and libraries, silenced dissident teachers, and indoctrinated Southern children with antebellum aristocratic social values.” Bailey linked the growing education agitation in this period to the rise of populism in the South and the political threats posed to elite, white Southerners’ power and cherished class hierarchies by any potential alliance between African American and poor white farmers. In Joseph Moreau’s Schoolbook Nation, Moreau describes how white Southerners “wanted to use the past to legitimate the new social order they were creating,” and to “make Jim Crow seem both desirable and inevitable.” The obsessive consideration of history books’ content was not just about remembering the past but about influencing the present and future of American life.
In Virginia, Confederate veterans pushed the schools to adopt textbooks written by Southerners, books that told a very specific story about the Civil War. “What we want to get rid of is the book that teaches that the South fought to continue slavery,” one of the veterans at the meeting said. They condemned what they called “cold smooth smiling deliberate Yankee lies” about Gettysburg, slander against Robert E. Lee (“Think of it. Robert E. Lee an insurrectionist!”), and praise for John Brown and his stand at Harper’s Ferry. They spoke about rampant “errors” and the need for truth: “No Southern man is afraid of the truth. It is what we want.”
They advocated for history textbooks written by Virginians, like Susan Pendleton Lee, a relative of Robert E. Lee’s, and J. William Jones, an ardent champion of the Lost Cause. Lee’s textbook blamed the Federal Government for instigating the Civil War, claimed that the war was not fought over slavery, that Northerners had never thought slavery morally wrong until abolitionism became politically expedient to adopt as a tool against the South, and wrote that “the kindest and most affectionate relations existed between the slaves and their owners.”
Edward A. Johnson, who was born into slavery and became an educator and lawyer and who wrote the first textbook by a Black author to be approved for use in North Carolina schools, described the bias in textbooks like Lee’s and Jones’ as “the sin of omission and commission” carried out by white authors, who seemed to “have written exclusively for white children.” In these textbooks, Black Americans were “credited with no heritage of valor,” and “mentioned only as a slave,” given “not one word of credit, not one word of favorable comment.” These books did not include the patriotism of Black soldiers in American wars, the soldier who was “faithful to a land not his own in a point of rights and freedom..a land that after he had shouldered his musket to defend, rewarded him with a renewed term of slavery.” They did not describe the educational and financial progress made by the formerly ensalved since the Civil War, despite enormous obstacles. Johnson entreated the Black teachers who would be teaching from his history book in segregated schools to “teach from the truth of history that complexions do not govern patriotism, valor, and sterling integrity.”
Like their comrades’ in Texas, the Virginia Confederate veterans’ campaign against Northern or “biased” textbooks was successful. The History Committee of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans’ official report in 1900 quantified this swift success. Only six counties in Virginia were still assigning a history textbook that the Committee disapproved of; the other 112 were using Lee’s or Jones’ histories, or both. Moreover, the report claimed, all three members of the State Board of Education were “not only native and true Virginians, but men devoted to the principles for which we fought,” who “stand ready to cooperate with us.”
In W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, from 1935, Du Bois surveys the consequences of this Confederate education campaign that began in the 1890s, devoting an entire chapter to the teaching and interpretation of history. The proliferation of Lost Cause and Reconstruction-era Confederate propaganda not just in grade schools and high schools but in universities, too, was proof that “with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes,” Du Bois wrote, “the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale.”
On my mother’s side, I am a member of the tenth generation to be born in Pennsylvania, the descendant of German, Irish, Dutch immigrants who came to America beginning in the 17th century. I was always curious about the history of the place I grew up, in part because of my family’s rootedness, the graveyard where I read my mother’s last name chiseled indistinctly into rows of mossed slabs. As a child, I was taught simple but powerful stories about the founding of this country and Philadelphia’s magnificent role in that founding. There were field trips to Independence Hall and William Penn’s estate and Valley Forge; textbooks that belabored Benjamin Franklin’s impeccable virtue and timeless wisdom; live demonstrations of antique cannons firing, attended by men wearing tricornered hats. I was taught about great inventions and triumphant battles and patriotic ideals worth dying for, about Revolutionary and Civil War heroes, the foot-soldiers of freedom whose ranks included my ancestors. I was taught a lot about the beneficence of Quakers.
But in 12 years of public schooling in Pennsylvania, which included years of required local history instruction, I was never taught that Benjamin Franklin owned slaves (nor ever about his traitorous son). I was not taught that William Penn owned slaves. I was not taught about the Lombard Street Riots or the life and death of Octavio Catto. I was not taught that George Washington rotated his slaves in and out of Philadelphia while he lived there so that none of them would be subject to a Pennsylvania law stating that any enslaved person living on this state’s soil for more than six months must be freed. I was not taught that although Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780, it was a gradual abolition law, and the last enslaved people in Pennsylvania were not free until 1847. And this is to say nothing of what I was not taught about the 20th century, which was hardly covered in my education at all before 11th grade.
Du Bois wrote about the old idea that in history “evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over,” in favor of “the things we regard as creditable and inspiring.” This impulse motivated the silences in my early education; we were to remember Ben Franklin’s genius and William Penn’s goodness and George Washington’s bravery and to overlook any information that blemished these rosy portraits. Pennsylvania stood as a bastion of freedom, the Liberty Bell’s purest echoes ringing loud enough to drown out the complex reality of the state’s past and its present.
What happens when children are taught fables instead of spiky, difficult, contradictory facts? History as fairytale can be a potent political weapon, a tool wielded by the powerful and used for control. But students also lose the chance to see the value of history as “incentive and example,” as Du Bois put it. They lose the opportunity to learn from history’s messy sweep, its complications and ambiguities and failures, which we have inherited in one shape-shifting form or another. “Nations reel and stagger on their way. They make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things,” Du Bois wrote. “And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this?”