[Mb-civic] COMMENTARY 21st Century Book-Burning LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ross13oct13.story

COMMENTARY

21st Century Book-Burning

Mrs. Cheney, there's more to U.S. history than heroes.
 By Steven J. Ross
 Steven J. Ross is chairman of the history department at the University of
Southern California and author of "Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and
the Shaping of Class in America" (Princeton Univer

 October 13, 2004

 One of the marks of authoritarian regimes is their effort to stop the
spread of knowledge and free speech. In May 1933, Nazi sympathizers in
Berlin burned 20,000 "degenerate" books, many of them written by Jews and
anti-fascists such as Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. Here
at home, slaveholders were so frightened by the power of the word that
throughout the antebellum South legislatures made it a crime to teach slaves
to read and write. 

 Now, Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's wife and the former head of
the National Endowment for the Humanities, has placed herself in the company
of dictators and slaveholders. At her urging, the Education Department
destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed to help parents and
children learn more about America's past.

 Cheney objected to the booklet's reference to the National Standards for
History, guidelines for teaching history in secondary schools that were
developed at UCLA in the 1990s and that suggest that American history should
be taught with an eye not only to America's successes but to its struggles
and dark moments as well.

 Cheney could learn important lessons from the kind of history she
apparently finds so un-American.

 One is that the lines between authoritarianism and democracy have never
been as sharply drawn as we might think. In his latest novel, "The Plot
Against America," Philip Roth describes what the United States might have
been like if voters had spurned Franklin D. Roosevelt and elected Charles A.
Lindbergh, an anti-Semite and admirer of Adolf Hitler, as their president in
1940. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" presented a scenario
in which newly elected President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the demagogic
darling of big business and religious extremists, stripped Americans of
their rights, destroying the power of the legislature and judiciary and
installing a fascist dictatorship.

 What was so horrible about the National Standards for History that any
reference to them would merit the mass destruction of several hundred
thousand volumes of knowledge? According to Cheney, the standards failed to
recognize the achievements of America's traditional heroes and focused
instead on the accomplishments of women, minorities and radicals such as
Harriet Tubman, the former slave who helped found the Underground Railroad.
As Cheney wrote in 1994, "We are a better people than the national standards
indicate, and our children deserve to know it."

 Cheney insisted that the standards focused too much on the negatives of the
past, on the presence of such stains on our democratic legacy as the Ku Klux
Klan and McCarthyism, and not enough on great heroic figures such as Paul
Revere, Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers.

 What Cheney really opposes is the prominent place that "social history" has
assumed over the last 30 years. Known among its practitioners as "history
from the bottom up," social historians argue that American history has too
often been taught as the history of famous white men, political parties and
industrialists. 

 Far less attention has been paid to the history of the "ordinary" people
who helped build our nation. Social historians do not reject the important
contributions of the former, as Cheney has repeatedly insisted. Rather, they
suggest that there are two American histories worth knowing: the history of
the nation and the history of its peoples. The latter is composed of a
number of different histories: the history of rich and poor; of employers
and employees; of men and women; of blacks, whites, Asians and Indians; of
Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

 As someone who has taught, written about and studied history for more than
25 years, I would suggest that good historical writing tries to help us
understand the full contours of the past, paying equal attention to our
triumphs and tragedies. Historians should not be afraid to hail the heroic
figures of the past, but those should also include the less-than-famous men
and women who struggled on behalf of democracy. Likewise, historians should
never avoid dealing with the dark stories of our past ‹ such as slavery, the
internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and McCarthyism. As our
founding fathers understood, democracies are not perfect; they only grow
stronger by learning from the mistakes of the past.

 Destroying books that disagree with one's vision of history will never take
us closer to truth and freedom. As President Eisenhower warned Dartmouth
College graduates in June 1953: "Don't think you're going to conceal faults
by concealing evidence that they ever existed." His words remain true today.







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