Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (14 page)

History is about remembering the past, but it is also about choosing to forget. In political campaigns, candidates challenge one another with what they have chosen not to put in their biographies. We do it in our personal lives. “You never told me that,” we say angrily or with shock. “I never knew that about you.” Some of the most difficult and protracted wars in societies around the world have been over what is being omitted or downplayed in the telling of their history—and what should be in. When people talk, as they frequently do, about the need for “proper” history, what they really mean is the history they want and like. School textbooks, university courses, movies, books, war memorials, art galleries, and museums have all from time to time been caught up in debates that say as much about the present and its concerns as they do about the ostensible subject of history.

Educating the next generations and instilling in them the right views and values are things most societies take very seriously. The fact that so many countries, especially in the West, have received large immigrant populations has given the issue even more importance. Most Western societies have been shaken by
evidence, acts of terrorism especially, that there are immigrants who are indifferent to the values of the host society and a smaller number who in fact actively despise them. Episodes like the murder of the controversial director Theo van Gogh or the discovery of a terrorist plot in Toronto have forced the Dutch and the Canadians to look at the ways in which they integrate, or fail to integrate, new arrivals. There are fears as well that even the well-established inhabitants do not properly understand their own societies or the key values they embody. As a result, there are repeated calls for the teaching of national values. (Finding agreement on what those might be is not always easy, as the case of France so clearly shows, where religious tolerance conflicts with a concern that Muslim immigrants become French and secular.)

History is often used as a series of moral tales, to enhance group solidarity or, more defensibly in my view, to explain how important institutions such as parliaments and concepts such as democracy developed, and so the teaching of the past has been central to the debates over how to instill and transmit values. The danger is that what may be an admirable goal can distort history either by making it into a simple narrative in which there are black-and-white characters or by depicting it as all tending in one direction, whether that of human progress or the triumph of a particular group. Such history flattens out the complexity of human experience and leaves no room for different interpretations of the past.

The motto of the province of Quebec is
“Je me souviens,”
and the French speakers in particular do indeed remember, but often selectively. History, as taught in the Quebec schools, has stressed the continued existence of French speakers as an embattled minority in an English Canada and how they have struggled unceasingly for their rights. When the Parti Québécois, the political expression of the separatist movement in Quebec, was in power
in the 1990s, its education minister, Pauline Marois (now party leader), promised to double the time spent on history by high school students. Hard-line separatists were not satisfied: the curriculum, in their view, included too much world history and paid too much attention to English and aboriginal minorities in the province.

English-speaking Canadians have other fears, including that young Canadians are not learning enough about the past to give them pride in their country. The Dominion Institute conducts surveys every year and announces with much gloom that Canadians cannot identify their prime ministers or remember the dates when key events took place. In 1999, a group of philanthropists set up the Historica Foundation, whose mission is to fill in, as they see it, the gaps in the teaching of Canada’s past. In Australia, John Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007, caused a spirited public debate when he announced that he had had enough of the “black armband” view of Australian history. The charge came at a difficult time, as Australians were considering what to do about the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children who had been taken from their families and given to white families. Professional historians, Howard said, were “self-appointed cultural dieticians” who had persuaded Australians that their history is a sorry tale of racism, filled with crimes against the Aboriginals. Journalists and other commentators, appealing to the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in Australian culture, attacked the “moral mafia” and the “chattering classes” with glee. Most Australians, one columnist said, would be happy to see reconciliation between the Aboriginals and mainstream society, if only the former would “stop talking about the past.”

In the United Kingdom, there are repeated debates over what history schoolchildren should be learning. Should it tell, as the Conservative Kenneth Baker wanted when he was minister of education,
“how a free and democratic society had developed over the centuries”? Or should it be the history of those who were oppressed and marginalized? History from the top down or history from the bottom up? Do children need a chronology at all, or are they better off learning about topics such as the family or women or science and technology? In the summer of 2007, Ofsted, the body that inspects British schools, set off a national debate when it complained that the history being taught was too fragmented and that students had no idea when anything had taken place or in what order. Many parents had already discovered this for themselves and had made a surprise bestseller out of an Edwardian history for children.
Our Island Story
takes for granted that British history has moved onward and upward over the centuries, that the British Empire was a good thing, and that Britain was generally in the right. It is filled with stories, of Richard the Lion Heart, Sir Walter Raleigh, Robin Hood, and, of course, King Arthur. There are heroes and villains. A pre-Raphaelite Boadicea (as she was still known then) gallops across an illustrated page with her golden hair streaming behind her. A thoughtful Robert the Bruce watches a spider weaving its web and learns persistence. The two little princes tremble together as their evil uncle Richard III prepares to kill them. It is not good history— it has nothing to say about the new, multiethnic and multicultural Britain of today—but it is entertaining and may encourage children to take more of an interest in their country’s past. The debates over what sort of history to teach often get entangled with the question, being hotly debated in so many countries today, of how to integrate immigrants into the host society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Thatcher Conservatives worried that new arrivals were not being taught what it was to be British. Mrs. Thatcher herself wanted a “patriotic history.” More recently, the Labour Party’s Gordon Brown, who would presumably
disagree with her on the content of such history, said that those who want to become British citizens should be able to show that they understand British history and culture.

In the United States, it used to be taken for granted that immigrants would become assimilated into American society and that one of the most important ways of doing this was through the schools. The Civil War, perhaps because it showed how fragile the Union could be, stimulated a deep interest in American history. Textbooks showed a history that unfolded triumphantly from the early settlements and the Founding Fathers up to the present. Patriotic societies, by the hundreds, encouraged the veneration of the American flag and held parades and festivals to commemorate the great moments of the American past. Thanksgiving took on even greater importance as a time when Americans gathered to remember the founding of the nation. Theodore White, the distinguished journalist, remembered himself and his classmates, the children of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, enacting the first meetings between the Pilgrim fathers and the local Indians. For him it was a part of becoming American. The newer Memorial Day, proclaimed after the Civil War, became a time to remember the dead soldiers. In many states, schools were required by law to teach American history and civics in a way that would encourage patriotism. Self-appointed guardians vetted textbooks to ensure that the right message was getting across. Arthur Schlesinger Sr., one of the giants of American history in the years between the two world wars, was roundly criticized by Irish Chicago politicians for writing a text that, in their view, promoted an unhealthy and unpatriotic admiration of the British and their institutions. In 1927, the mayor had a copy of one of his “treason-tainted” books publicly burned.

Because history has been so intertwined with Americans’ views of themselves as a people and with making immigrants a
part of that people, textbooks and curriculum in the schools have repeatedly stirred up public controversies. In 1990 the first president Bush unwittingly lit the fuse for the most recent explosion when he announced that the federal government would work with state governors to establish National Education Goals, partly to ensure that American students could compete in a world where education was increasingly important but also to prepare them to be good citizens. The Clinton administration, which succeeded in 1993, carried on with the project. One of the core subjects, along with English, mathematics, science, and geography, where goals were to be set was history. After much debate and consultation, the National Council for History Standards produced a set of guidelines for American and world history which states could accept or not as they pleased. Although there was more stress on multiculturalism and on non-Western civilizations, those responsible for the guidelines felt confident that they were successfully telling the story of the United States in a way that would appeal to students. Moreover, they had included aspects of the past—women’s or black history, for example—that had previously been neglected.

Shortly before the document was to be released, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, and a prominent conservative Republican herself, carried out what would have been called, in words familiar to the second Bush’s administration, a preemptive attack. In an article in the
Wall Street Journal
, she deplored the proposed new standards, which, she argued, gave a “grim and gloomy” view of the American past. As she saw it, politically correct professors who were driven by a hatred of traditional political and chronological history had produced a story in which the Ku Klux Klan got more attention than Daniel Webster or Albert Einstein. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio show host, was beside himself with patriotic righteousness. The historians responsible for
the National History Standards, he said, were bent on inculcating in the young the belief that “our country is inherently evil.” Others, including members of Congress, were not far behind. Those reformed criminals G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, now themselves hosting radio shows, talked about “the standards from hell.” Senator Slade Gorton of Washington State denounced the standards in Congress as a vicious attack on Western civilization. In the fall of 1995, Senator Bob Dole, who was preparing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, went even further. The standards, he said, were treasonous, “worse than external enemies.”

The attacks did not go unanswered. Indeed, the United States found itself in a nationwide and far-reaching debate about what history was and what it should be for. Teachers and professional historians were delighted to see history restored to a central place in the curriculum. Liberals felt that the standards reflected the new, increasingly diverse United States. Many simply liked the stress on content and chronology. The
Los Angeles Times
said with approval, “Would that college graduates could all meet the standards for knowledge of the Constitution that are set here.” In the end, after more discussion and revision, new guidelines were published in 1996. They included a new final section where students were asked to explore controversies over history itself.

The public and often bitter debate over the history standards was always about more than curriculum. It came at a time when the United States was uncertain about its role in the post–Cold War world and about its own society. The neoconservatives feared the United States no longer possessed the will to use its enormous power. At home, conservative Americans saw a decline in family values, which for them was often symbolized by legalized abortion. And many Americans worried about whether there truly was a central American identity anymore. Many of
the new immigrants no longer appeared to want to be assimilated. Hispanics, for example, were insisting on keeping their own language and even having Spanish schools. Universities were abandoning their traditional Western civilization courses, and American history courses increasingly focused on cultural and social history. If Americans did not share a common sense of the past, what would happen to the dream expressed in the widely used government motto
“E pluribus unum”
? Would it come to stand for “Out of the one, many,” rather than the other way around? Although the particular furor over the National History Standards died down (indeed they have been widely adopted), the fear remains. In 2004, the respected historian Samuel Huntington published a melancholy book,
Who Are We?
, in which he warns that the “deconstructionist project” has elevated group and regional histories at the expense of national history. “People,” he warns, “who are losing that memory are becoming something less than a nation.”