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A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of.

by Carrie McLaren | Issue #18

From the titles of James Loewen’s books, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America, you might peg him as a liberal-minded historian in the tradition of Howard Zinn . . . and, okay, he is. In fact, Zinn’s name and praises are emblazoned across the paperback version of Teacher. But Loewen takes his people’s approach to history an important step beyond Zinn and other scholars who expose the misinformation that some of us have been raised on. Loewen very pointedly argues that what is taught as American history is not only often wrong but, worse, boring. The flesh and blood of history–the conflicting points of view, the ambiguity, and any semblance of human motivation–have been stripped out and replaced with mindless patriotism and disjointed facts. As a result, the discipline is, quite understandably, loathed by high schools students.

Loewen, as you’d imagine, encourages the reading of alternative viewpoints: Native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, and workers. But he does so with the insistence that students compare them with the perspectives of traditional, conservative Americans. For Loewen, history should be approached as an inquiry. Pose a question and then investigate.

After reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, I was dead set on getting an interview. Loewen is a funny, clear-headed thinker who comes off as the sort of writer who you wish lived downstairs so you could get their newspaper for them and lend them eggs and things. I tracked Loewen down but he didn’t respond to my repeated (and increasingly desperate) attempts to talk. So, to make a long story short, I decided to answer the questions myself. What follows is a mix of ideas that have been gleaned from Loewen’s books, from his previous interviews, and my interpretations. Although I have stolen from him liberally, I cannot promise that he’d agree with everything.–Carrie McLaren

Stay Free: If I had to grossly oversimplify your stance, I would say that the problem with history is that it’s boring and wrong. How are being boring and being false connected?
"James Loewen": The same things that make history false are what makes it boring. Many high school history teachers are teaching out of field. That is, they don’t have a degree in history or a related discipline. And they usually aren’t even interested in history. So they hide behind the textbook and the questions at the end of chapters. And that’s another problem–the textbooks.

You reviewed twelve textbooks for Teacher. Were they all equally bad?
I think the differences between them are less important than the fact that textbooks in general are a lousy way of teaching history.

Are textbooks a bad way to learn in general, or is history somehow unique?
Well, a high school chemistry textbook is likely to be called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry. The same is true in mathematics and even in English literature. But very few books are called American History or something bland like that. They’re called Rise of the American Nation; Triumph of the American Nation; The Great Experiment; The Great Republic; Land of the Free. These are real titles. What this says is that we are not just going to learn about history; we are going to salute it. It’s going to be an exercise in nationalism. I think that’s wrong because we develop stronger, more knowledgeable citizens if we teach history with all of its dirt and its glory, with all of its questions.

You write a bit about hero worship in textbooks. What are a couple examples of the misinformation we’ve been taught?
Helen Keller is known to most of us as the famous blind and deaf girl who "overcame.’’ From what you’d read in textbooks, you’d think she never lived past adolescence. Helen Keller lived to be 88. And she hardly sat around in obscurity–she was one of the most famous women on the planet in the early part of the century. But you never hear about her adult life because she became a radical Socialist. She was a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. The reason she did this is actually related to her blindness. She wanted to do something to help blind people, and she came to realize that blindness is not distributed randomly across society. It’s concentrated in the lower class, primarily due to medical care and, in Keller’s time, to industrial accidents and syphilis.

Woodrow Wilson is another example. People associate him with progressive causes like woman’s suffrage but don’t know that he was an outspoken white supremacist. When he came to power, which was with the considerable aid of black voters, he proceeded to segregate Washington. He segregated the federal cafeterias and work places. If two people, one white and one black, had been sorting mail together, they now had to be in separate rooms or have a screen between them. He also stopped blacks from obtaining political appointments that had been routinely given them since the days of Lincoln and Grant.

Did the textbooks you reviewed say anything about this?
About five or so associated Woodrow Wilson with segregation, but usually without an active verb. For instance, one textbook says that workrooms in the federal government were segregated, and that Woodrow Wilson undid that. That’s just totally false. Wilson never called a halt to it, but there’s a common practice of whenever anything bad is mentioned, it’s put in the passive voice as if nobody did it. It just "happened."

You would think that if history has to have heroes, it would have to have villains as well, but that’s not the case.
Right. Textbooks rarely suggest that anyone actually caused a problem for anyone else. The bad guy is always very abstract. For example, in the post-Civil War period, you won’t read that Southerners or Northerners caused any problems, but "the era of Reconstruction" did.

What about the internet? Do you think it has promise?
The web, by its nature, encourages critical reading. There’s so much garbage that students must learn how to select sources. So as long as they realize the need to filter, then, yes, that’s an advantage over textbooks right there. There’s no one authority that has all the answers, so students get a chance to be their own historian.

Do you think every student can be their own historian? Some teachers might say that’s naive.
I not only think that every person can be a historian, I think every person is. Of course, whether they are any good at it is another matter.

Is it true that the most organized and prolonged attacks on textbooks have come from the right?
Up until the 1960s, yes. But around then you started seeing more African American, feminist, and other groups organizing around textbooks. I’m not opposed to local communities having input in their children’s education so long as that doesn’t leave them with false or one-sided views.

A lot of groups that have attacked textbooks in the past–Daughters of the American Revolution and the John Birch Society–wanted to eliminate public education. So why would schools even listen to people who are clearly anti-education?
Well, education–particularly when it comes to any sort of social study–is very much a mixed blessing in America. Probably the best way to explain this is to give you an example. I once did an exercise where I asked people about what kind of adults, by education level, supported the war in Vietnam. By an overwhelming margin–almost 10 to 1–audiences responded that college-educated people were more likely to be for withdrawing the troops, were more "dovish". When they explained their reasoning, they usually wrote that educated people are more informed and critical and therefore better able to figure out that the war wasn’t in our best interests. Well, the truth was very different. Educated people disproportionately supported the war in Vietnam, were more "hawkish." Today, most people agree the Vietnam war was a mistake. So, if we follow conventional wisdom, it turns out that the more educated a person was, the more likely s/he was wrong about the war.

Now, when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they couldn’t figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research shows that when people expect to go to war–whatever educational level they are–they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a strong incentive for believing that American is fair because it means they earned their success. Two, education is socialization, and socializing teaches people how to conform to the needs of society. The more schooling, the more socialization.

We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it.

Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling.

You’re better off taking no history, because then you know that you’re missing it.
Right. Thinking well of education reinforces what we might call American individualism, a society marked by its equality of opportunity. Yet precisely to the extent that students believe that equality of opportunity exists, they are encouraged to blame the uneducated for being poor, just as my audiences blame them for supporting the war in Vietnam.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a great essay in Harper’s where he argued for teaching terms like "Sambo" and "darkie." He said that if there were no hurt feelings than something other than history would be the subject being taught. Would you agree with that? That hurt feelings are inevitable?
Well, I don’t know about inevitable. For a lot of black students, reading those terms points out the real barriers that they’ve been up against. But what he’s suggesting is basically true: there are a lot of hurt feelings. What I’d like to see is history that spreads the discomfort around, rather than just teaching history that only makes affluent white children comfortable.

I recently read about an economics textbook that teaches everything in terms of a couple’s romance. What do you think of using a storyline like that to teach?

I haven’t seen that book. There are history books that use fictional stories to describe a period. I have no problem with that, although I think actual events can be more interesting than fictional ones. The fact is that people learn through stories. Now, whether you want to encourage students to view their personal relationships in terms of macroeconomics is another question entirely.

When your book came out, there was another book by conservatives (Molding the Good Citizen) that analyzed fifteen history textbooks but came to opposite conclusions. They said that history textbooks reflect a liberal bias; that people of color and feminists get more due than their due; and that business is denigrated and downplayed. So how does that figure?
People approach history from different perspectives, that’s to be expected. It’s impossible to come up with any definitive history that’s going to please both Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson. And, in fact, trying to do so is what has made history so boring and meaningless that it alienates everyone. So let's hear the conservative take on the womenıs movement, on the Civil Rights movement. But let's hear other perspectives, too.

Are you afraid that history then becomes an exercise in teaching "it's all relative?"
No, to encourage differences of opinion is not to say that all opinions are equally appropriate. There is a reason that teachers are at the head of the class. And there is such a thing as truth. You can only get there, though, by scrutinizing different perspectives and encouraging debate.