American History

Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

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Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen. New York: Touchstone, 1995 (Link is to 2018 edition with a different publisher).

Summary: Based on an examination of twelve American history high school textbooks, looks at how these oversimplify, omit, distort, and sometimes perpetuate false myths of American history, and make the teaching of history boring in the process.

The late James Loewen wrote this book after surveying twelve history textbooks used to teach high school students in the early 1990’s. He found that most of these often passed along lies or distortions of the material they covered. Often this was the result of omitting important discussions. Loewen opens this study considering what most history books don’t tell us about Woodrow Wilson. They don’t tell us that he launched a war with Communist Russia at the end of the First World War. Wilson also launched invasions of several Latin America, and after an era of progress, instituted racist policies in government that may have contributed to the resurgence of the Klan in the 1920’s. Likewise with Helen Keller. We hear about how she overcomes blindness and deafness but most say little about the other six decades of her life, probably because of her socialist activism.

Loewen goes on to discuss a number of examples throughout American history and what the twelve textbooks do with them: Christopher Columbus and what his “discovery” meant to indigenous peoples who were “discovered,” the realities of the first Thanksgiving, how we narrate the history of Native Americans, how we whitewash racism from textbooks, even in accounts of the Civil War and in our treatments of both John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. He goes on to discuss federal power and how our government sought to bring down regime after regime, rarely discussed in our history books and how many texts are nearly silent about Vietnam, with the results that students think it was a war between North and South Korea!

Why does this happen? Loewen, who had worked with editorial committees of textbook publishers, discusses the aversion these publishers have to controversy. Controversy can mean losses of millions of dollars. Patriotism sells. America’s failures to live up to its stated ideals do not. They realize how consequential state and local boards are to the adoption of textbooks. He believes a large part of the fault lies here. He is more forgiving of teachers, recognizing both that they may not always have the knowledge or the time to gain the knowledge to challenge the textbooks–and they have huge demands on their lives.

The tragedy of all this in Loewen’s mind is that in making history uncontroversial we have made it dull. Accurate history, in all its complicatedness, is far more interesting. When students explore a president like Wilson at both his best and worst, they stop worshipping heroes and see historical figures as real and fallible human beings. History that is honest about both our failings and how people stood up to resist corruption and power because of their belief in America’s ideals doesn’t teach students to hate the country, it teaches them to care.

Loewen was writing this in 1995 and what reading him helped me realize is that what is going on in many of our state legislatures and parents groups around what is taught as our history is not a new discussion, simply a reinvigorated one. For a long time, we have been a nation that wants to feel good about ourselves without doing the hard work of facing what has been and is not good about us and learning from those who have brought progress toward our American ideals. For a long time, powerful interests have sought to hide what they are doing to the rest of the country behind facades of American greatness. How can it be that the wealth disparities between the top 1 percent and the rest of the country are just because the rest of us are benighted losers?

What is saddest is that we don’t turn students into patriots, we turn them into cynics, because they are good at detecting falsehoods. The tragedy is that we also teach them that truth cannot be found in our history, or really in anything else. And when there is no basis for liberty and justice in truth, then all that we have left is power.

I was one educated in the way Loewen describes. Thankfully, several college professors opened my eyes to what it really means to do history without the lies, to look at our complicated human condition, and to keep asking questions, and to care about the answers. They taught me to love history. They also helped teach me that for love of country to really mean something, it has to be able to look at ourselves at our best and worst and to keep showing up as citizens, pursuing the common good.

Loewen holds out to us the hope that we can do so much better, not by sanitized versions of our history but through texts and teachers that teach both the good and the bad, that will not only capture our children’s interest, but help them become passionate about making our country at least a little better in their generation. It seems to me that this is something all true patriots ought support.

Review: American Moonshot

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American Moonshot, Douglas Brinkley. New York: Harper, 2020.

Summary: A history of the American space program centering around John F. Kennedy’s embrace of the space race and goal that an American would walk on the moon by the end of the 1960’s.

Born in the 1950’s, I grew up loving rockets. I built models of rockets, launched rockets, and read about rockets. In first and second grade, I remembered televisions wheeled into our classrooms when Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space and John Glenn the first to orbit the earth three times. As fellow Ohioans, we were especially proud of Glenn, as we were that moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon–we stayed up to watch the landing and hear those words “That’s one small step for a man…”

In Douglas Brinkley’s book, I was able to relive all of that, as well as understand the history and personalities behind America’s race to the moon. Brinkley introduces us early to two central figures, John F. Kennedy and Werner von Braun, the former a war hero, the latter a German scientist who hitched his scientific aspirations in rocketry to Nazism, then escaped prosecution as a “paperclip” scientist brought to the U.S. for his expertise. Brinkley describes how the two would team up to drive America’s space program to new heights, even while making his own opinion clear that von Braun was a Nazi war criminal unworthy of enduring fame, despite his signal contributions to American rocketry culminating in the Saturn V and eventually the space shuttle boosters.

Brinkley casts this against the backdrop of the Cold War with the USSR and the space race kicked off with the launch of Sputnik, followed by the Soviet manned (and womaned) spaceflights with few answering U.S. accomplishments, although we rapidly surpassed the Soviets in satellite technology. These flights also underscored a feared threat of nuclear weapons in space and that the USSR would dominate space. This provided Kennedy an issue in the form of “the missile gap,” later shown to be spurious, that helped him win the 1960 presidential election. The Eisenhower administration had taken only slow, measured steps to develop space exploration.

Kennedy changed all that, facing the opposition of the former president, especially when he gave the speech at Rice University pledging the United States to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, galvanizing von Braun and those he worked with at Huntsville. The book narrates the efforts to create NASA, mobilize the funding, and under space administrator James Webb, build out the capacity to accomplish the complex task of figuring out how to actually do what Kennedy pledged. As Kennedy’s re-election approached, Brinkley describes the increasing resistance and efforts to cut NASA funding. Paradoxically, it was Kennedy’s death that saved the program as Lyndon Johnson carried it through. The book portrays the breadth of Kennedy’s vision–at once to meet the Soviet threat, to give the country a lofty goal, and to create a kind of technology infrastructure that would bolster the economy of a number of states and result in spinoff inventions that enhanced Americans lives from medical devices to microchips.

Another facet of the book were the first American astronauts, the Mercury Seven, who were our space pioneers and paved the way for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programs. It was fascinating to learn how deeply acquainted Kennedy became with the astronauts, hosting them collectively and individually at the White House. Some, like John Glenn, became family friends. It was Glenn who represented the astronauts at John Kennedy’s funeral, and who comforted the children of Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated. Those relationships, in turn, led to Glenn’s decision to pursue public service in a political career, serving as an Ohio Senator for three decades, attempting a run for president, and then returning to space in his seventies.

Because the book center’s around Kennedy’s role in the space program, the Gemini and Apollo launches are much more briefly covered, coming after Kennedy’s death, with the book ending with the Apollo 11 mission and the announcement that “the Eagle has landed” beating Kennedy’s goal by five months.

Douglas Brinkley pulls all these threads together around a study of presidential leadership in setting America a lofty goal wedding disciplined and courageous performance with technological innovation. While Brinkley doesn’t overlook it, one wonders if Lyndon Johnson deserves greater credit for bringing this program to fruition, if not being its inspiration. While telling a compelling story, Brinkley still left me wondering, was it worth it, particularly when what considers was not done with the tremendous outlay of money, further complicated by the Vietnam war? How important are national goals that capture the imagination and harness the resources of our best and brightest? How do we address the militarism and military industrial complex that grew around this program?

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which this was a “bright-shining moment,” a national effort that captured and held the country’s imagination. It was an exercise in presidential leadership, for which Brinkley has given us an in-depth case study. And for some of us, Brinkley’s book enables us to relive a decade of space exploration that is just as, if not more extraordinary, fifty to sixty years later as it was at the time.

Review: The Forgotten Man

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The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes. New York: MJF Books, 2008.

Summary: An account of the Depression years, focusing on why the Depression lasted so long, and the impact it had on so many different kinds of “forgotten men” and women.

Many accounts of the Depression have focused on the magnetic leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, creating work programs, declaring bank holidays, and seeking to give hope to the “forgotten man.” Amity Shlaes also considers various forgotten people, but asks the searching question of why the Depression lasted so long.

We are introduced to an impressive array of characters, many who recur as central figures throughout the account. There is the brain trust around Roosevelt, the “best and brightest” of his generation, who conceived of a variety of social and reform programs, mostly ineffectual: Harold Ickes, Raymond Moley, and Rex Tugwell. We meet the entrepreneurs and business people who find themselves on the wrong side of a government crusade against business, from Andrew Mellon to electrification pioneers Samuel Insull and Wendell Willkie, to the Schechter Brothers, kosher poultry wholesalers prosecuted for violating regulations of the National Recovery Act, and ultimately vindicated in court.

There are a variety of colorful figures, from Father Divine, a cult leader teaching Black self-sufficiency, John Llewellyn Lewis, a strong labor leader, David Lilienthal who headed up the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federalized effort to bring electric power to the South and “Bill” Wilson, the Wall Street alcoholic who founds Alcoholics Anonymous and in the 1930’s writes AA’s Big Book.

The book is basically an argument that the reason the Depression lasted so long was that the financial tinkering, taxation, and New Deal programs and over-reaching attacks on business “forgot” the people who made the country prosper. It recognizes the value of public works efforts like the WPA, the foundations of which were laid in the Hoover administration resulting in important infrastructure development that both put money into and facilitated the economy.

The book raises important questions about the role of government in economic downturns, arguing a classic conservative line that an activist, interventionist approach may prolong an economic downturn. Yet it also reflects the pressure a government faces from those suffering the most to “do something,” to appear to have not forgotten the little guy.

I personally found the work a tough read because it tried to follow so many threads, so many figures in a chronological account that at time the narrative felt like a lot of disparate stories and events strung together rather than the cohesive and compelling accounts the best historians render.

In the end, a global war lifted the country out of the Depression. Shlaes leaves us wondering if it needed take that long.

Review: Morgenthau

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Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, Andrew Meier. New York: Random House, 2022.

Summary: An account of the 153 year history of four generations of the Morgenthau family and its impact on real estate, politics, diplomacy, and law enforcement.

Lazarus Morgenthau probably never should have migrated from Bavaria, where he invented a cigar box that made his fortune, for a time, before the business failed. He moved his family to America where other members of the Jewish elite had made fortunes after similar migrations. For Lazarus, all his schemes failed, from a wine import business to elixirs to cure various ailments to his Golden Book of Life. He spent the latter part of his life in and out of insane asylums. It might be that his principle purpose was to land his progeny in America, who would have a profound influence in many fields over the next hundred years.

Andrew Meier’s lengthy account of this family dynasty begins here. What follows are three full-length biographies of the leading family figure in each of the next three generations: Henry, Sr., Henry, Jr., and Robert Morgenthau, concluding at the end of the latter’s life in 2019.

Henry, Sr. built the family fortune in New York real estate. Meier takes us through the growth of his empire from his first acquisitions up through the relationship with Adolph Ochs and his acquisition of the properties that made up Times Square, and the headquarters of The New York Times. In 1912, his genius in fund-raising for Woodrow Wilson resulted in his being offered the ambassadorship to Turkey, the “Jewish seat.” It was not his first choice, but he distinguished himself in history in his efforts to advocate for and document the Armenian genocide.

Perhaps his greatest challenge was to help launch his son Henry, Jr. in life. Henry, Jr. seemed to lack a clear ambition other than becoming a farmer, which his father helped him to do in acquiring land in Duchess County. This put Henry, Jr. in touch with Franklin Roosevelt, a friendship that endured from Roosevelt’s rise as governor of New York through his presidency. He was a kind of “fixer” for Roosevelt–on farm matters in upstate New York, and later, at the Treasury. This seemed the saddest part of the book because the “friendship” seemed one of providing Roosevelt pleasant company at weekly lunches, but not asserting his own ideas or personality. Perhaps, like his father, his most significant work may have been advocacy for Jews in Europe as Hitler’s genocidal plans took shape. The US State Department and Roosevelt had been intransigent in opposing vigorous measures to help refugees, but Morgenthau probably managed to rescue 200,000 and help awaken the country to the Holocaust. The latter part of his life was the saddest in many ways as he lost his wife, was dumped by Truman, and spent the latter part of his life living lavishly with his second wife, considered “this thing he married” by his children.

I found the third part of the book the most interesting in many respects. Robert Morgenthau was an authentic war hero, offering exemplary leadership when his ship was attacked. He tried politics but failed in two runs for governor. Working with the Kennedy campaign, he won the appointment as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He took on organized crime when the FBI refused to acknowledge its existence. He also set his sights on Roy Cohn (an associate and mentor of Donald Trump), who became the “White Whale” he could never convict. When Nixon took office, he won office as the District Attorney for New York, a position he held until 2009. He was most known for the prosecutions of organized crime (the Gambino family) and the BCCI banking firm, which he believed was channeling money to Iran for development of nuclear weapons. The latter featured high powered American figures including Clark Clifford. It was a case that may have been pursued at the Federal level. For Morgenthau, if it came through New York, it was his jurisdiction.

He built a modestly-staffed department into a powerhouse, increasing the hiring of women and minorities, funding its operations in part with the fines he won. He often opted for plea bargains for fines in lieu of prison sentences–he had no appetite for sending people to prison–except for five youth accused of assault, rape, and murder of the Central Park Jogger. They were part of a “wilding” incident that night and, when apprehended, eventually confessed to the crime and were convicted and sent to prison. Except that DNA evidence, a relatively new technology at the time, linked none of the boys to evidence collected and was set aside. Several years later, new evidence matched with a man already in prison. Morgenthau admitted the mistake and reversed the convictions, albeit too late for the boys, who later recovered an award in court. It was the major stain on his record, lessened by his integrity when new evidence came forward.

This is a massive work, really three major biographies woven into a single account of a powerful family. One gains a sense of the distinctive character of the leading figure of each generation–Henry, Sr., the shrewd, incisive, and courageous businessman turned ambassador; Henry, Jr., the modest steady friend of Roosevelt who found his voice representing Jews caught in the Holocaust; and Robert, the resolute, ambitious prosecutor with a deep sense of integrity and justice that extended to the white collar criminals who often escaped prosecution. This book will carry you through the winter months, introducing you to a family who played a key role, often behind the scenes, over one hundred years in a variety of American institutions, centered around New York City,

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.

Review: Asian American Histories of the United States

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Asian American Histories of the United States, Catherine Ceniza Choy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.

Summary: The multiple, interleaved histories of the diverse Asian American peoples who migrated to, built communities in, contributed to, experienced discriminatory acts in the United States.

If you look closely at the title of this book, you will note that it is not a singular history but rather plural “histories.” Asian American peoples have been migrating to the United States from various countries in various waves over the past two hundred years. Catherine Ceniza Choy sets out in this work to sketch the outlines of these multiple stories. Two aspects of that methodology stood out to me in the reading. One was that she followed a reverse chronology, taking more recent key events and migrations first and working back in history to 1869. The other aspect of this work is that it is a people’s history, sketching not just the large contours and key events but the stories of individual persons and families–showing us the hopes, hardships, and particular experience of anti-Asian discrimination at different periods

She considers:

  • 2020. The outbreak of Anti-Asian hatred during the pandemic, blaming those of Asian appearance for the origin and spread of the disease. At the same time, Filipino nurses, a mainstay in many hospital systems, were dying in disproportionate numbers.
  • 1975. The journeys of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees to the United States at the fall of Saigon. We learn of Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian who became the “donut king.”
  • 1968. The student strike at San Francisco State College and the growth of the Asian American Movement on campuses across the country.
  • 1965. The passage of the Hart-Cellar Act equalizing the numbers of immigration visas for all countries, allowing for expanded immigration from Asian countries, both highly skilled entering the professions as well as less-educated working in businesses like nail salons and restaurants, including the Filipino nurses among which came the author’s parents.
  • 1965. The Delano Grape Strike was part of the birth of the United Farm Workers, led by Filipino American Larry Itliong, often overlooked in the histories that focus on Cesar Chavez.
  • 1953. Permission to adopt transracial children of mixed birth from Korea and Japan, left behind when American soldiers returned home. This history raises the specter of the anti-miscegenation laws preventing inter-racial marriages.
  • 1942. Executive Order 9066 resulting in the forced removal of Japanese Americans in western states, losing property and belongings without due process to be interned in camps. George Takei and many others have told the stories of these camps.
  • 1919. The story of both Korean Americans and Filipino Americans seeking independence from Japan and the United States, respectively. The U.S. would remain silent about Korea due to their own hegemony in the Philippines.
  • 1875. The Page Act, ostensibly passed to keep out prostitutes, was used to keep Chinese women out of the United States, representing various laws that would keep Asians out of the country. This episode also reflects the sexualized stereotypes of Asian women as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms and prostitutes.
  • 1869. The completion of the transcontinental railroad. Chinese workers build much of the Central Pacific Railroad, yet were excluded from the celebratory photographs at Promontory Point and treated hostilely.

As may already be evident, Choy addresses three themes throughout the work: violence, erasure, and resistance. I was aware of both the violence and resistance but Choy makes evident that strategies of erasure are not new, whether it is blocking the publication of photographs, the scrubbing of stories from our history books, or even overshadowing the celebration of the centenary of the gurdwara in Stockton, California with a brutal mass killing at another gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. She also makes us aware that perhaps the greatest tragedy is the “othering” of those who have contributed so much as Asian Americans. Choi gives us not only Asian American histories, but also histories of the United States that both confront us with our failures to live up to our highest ideals and the opportunities before us to do so.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Black Hands, White House

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Black Hands, White House, Renee K. Harrison. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021.

Summary: A history of how enslaved peoples played a major role in the building of this country and the need to remember that work in our monuments and by other means.

A number of histories have detailed the slave experience in America. What is unique about this history is that it seeks to give an account of the contribution enslaved Blacks made to the building of this country and its economy. Not only that, it seeks to tell the story of people, often by name who made that contribution while enslaved. The author believes they need to be remembered for their important role. They are a part of America’s history and are worthy to be included.

The author begins with an overview of the economic impact enslaved Blacks made in the country especially through the production of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar. She also lists six pages of companies and institutions that benefited from American slavery, or directly from slave labor. These include the government — slaves built many of Washington’s buildings and infrastructure. Insurance companies insured slaves for their owners, various banks accepted slaves as collateral or owned slaves, newspapers advertised slave sales, universities were funded by slave owners and some used slave labor in their construction, railroads rented slave labor, mines employed slaves–even churches and seminaries owned slaves and used slave labor.

Succeeding chapters chronicle the role slaves played in specific building projects. Mount Vernon’s buildings and tobacco and wheat crops depended on slaves. The author lists the names and values of slaves inherited by or subsequently hired by Washington and their trades, spouses, and enslaved children. At least 150 are buried in unmarked graves there.

Benjamin Banneker, a free black son of a slave was a self taught astronomer who was part of the survey team laying out boundaries, his role being to place the boundary markers for the new capital city. Slaves fired and laid many of the bricks and cut and hauled much of the stone for buildings in Washington. Slave markets often existed in the shadow of builds rising as shrines to democracy and freedom.

Both the White House and Capitol building were built with slave labor–and slaves re-built the White House after it was burned in the War of 1812. Of the first eighteen presidents, only two never owned slaves and publicly opposed slavery. Eight brought slaves they owned into the White House, four others owned slaves but did not have them at the White House. Four others, including Lincoln, did not own slaves but had ambiguous positions on slavery.

A similar story may be told of the Capitol. On page 175, the author lists 100 people who were “rented” for the construction of the Capitol building, a partial list. Philip Reid, a slave from Charleston, South Carolina, figured out how to cast Clark Mills Statue of Freedom in sections and install it atop the Capitol dome. His owner received most of the wages, apart from $41.25, for his work.

She goes on to describe slave involvement in the construction of the Supreme Court building, the Treasury building, the Smithsonian castle, Georgetown University, and the Library of Congress. At the core of the Library is the collection of Thomas Jefferson’s library. John Hemings fashioned the pine bookshelves and the portable book boxes in which the books were transported, Burwell Colbert painted the carriage that transported the books and Joseph Fossett fashioned the ironwork on the carriage.

Harrison believes it is past time to recognize in our nation’s monuments, particularly on the National Mall, the history of slavery, the vast machine of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the contribution that peoples forcibly removed from their own countries made in ours. She chronicles the inadequate attempt to do so with the Freedman’s Memorial, funded by former slaves but appropriated by white directors who chose the design, Abraham Lincoln towering over a kneeling slave who had been freed. Frederick Douglass, in a speech at its dedication, acknowledged the bravery associated with Emancipation but also the white self-interest.

The author describes the memorial as a pattern of absolution without accountability that has run from the end of the Civil War to the relatives of the Charleston Nine. A monument alone will not satisfy all the needs for accountability but a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers would mark a beginning–a tribute to their labors that also helped build our country, a remembrance of the people whose names and work are often absent from the pages of our histories. It’s part of a larger conversation of acknowledgement of harm and accountability and appropriate restitution without which our national wounds associated with slavery and racism cannot be healed.

This is a compelling history that moves beyond the indignities done to Black bodies to the dignity of their work, already evident in many of our national landmarks. They nourished the economy of an infant nation. I thought the idea of a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers was quite appropriate. I was surprised to find no way to help with the funding of such an effort or petition for such a monument. The University of Virginia was the only place (one mentioned in her list of institutions) where such a thing has been done. I could find no website to advocate for a national memorial. I hope the author will persist and find others to mobilize a national effort toward this end, one worthy of the many she has written of by name and the many nameless others.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.