American History in the Schools

The practice of rewriting the record of the past so as to draw support for an ideological conceit is not confined to the Marxists. American historians with pretensions to scholarship are not above making use of the art, as E. Merrill Root shows in his new book, Brainwashing in the High Schools (Devin-Adair, $4.50). The book consists of an examination of eleven American history books used either as texts or collateral reading in many of our high schools.

These texts are characterized by an attempt to interpret the history of our country in terms of materialist dialectics. The American Revolution, for instance, is described as both a vertical and a horizontal revolution: it was not only a struggle between the colonists and the British regime, but also between the ruling class and the exploited class within the colonies. The students also learn from these books that the Constitution was designed by capitalists for the express purpose of continuing and strengthening their privileged position, at the expense, of course, of the “common man.” They learn, too, that Washington was more concerned with the fortunes of his class than he was with independence; that Hamilton was a reactionary, nothing else; that Jefferson, far from favoring the institution of private property, as his writings testify, was a “Liberal” in the modern sense. Andrew Jackson was the nearest thing to a perfect President until Franklin Roosevelt came along.

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Frank Chodorov

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The practice of rewriting the record of the past so as to draw support for an ideological conceit is not confined to the Marxists. American historians with pretensions to scholarship are not above making use of the art, as E. Merrill Root shows in his new book, Brainwashing in the High Schools (Devin-Adair, $4.50). The book consists of an examination of eleven American history books used either as texts or collateral reading in many of our high schools.

These texts are characterized by an attempt to interpret the history of our country in terms of materialist dialectics. The American Revolution, for instance, is described as both a vertical and a horizontal revolution: it was not only a struggle between the colonists and the British regime, but also between the ruling class and the exploited class within the colonies. The students also learn from these books that the Constitution was designed by capitalists for the express purpose of continuing and strengthening their privileged position, at the expense, of course, of the “common man.” They learn, too, that Washington was more concerned with the fortunes of his class than he was with independence; that Hamilton was a reactionary, nothing else; that Jefferson, far from favoring the institution of private property, as his writings testify, was a “Liberal” in the modern sense. Andrew Jackson was the nearest thing to a perfect President until Franklin Roosevelt came along.