The final effort by the Trump administration to alter the teaching of history was a report from the newly minted 1776 Commission released on Martin Luther King Day. The report was widely condemned by historians and history teachers.
You may remember that shortly before the election, Ben Carson was inexplicably tasked with leading a White House panel discussion on history education. Only one actual historian, conservative pundit Allen Guelzo, was on the panel. Nearly everyone else who spoke was hawking teaching materials with a distinctly right-wing flavor. The report released by the 1776 Commission, which includes no credentialed academic historians, urges the rewriting of history to eliminate the importance of racism, slavery, the “Indian removals,” and other unsavory aspects of American life.
The Washington Post interviewed a number of historians on the 1776 Commission report and here are excerpts from their story:
“It’s a hack job. It’s not a work of history,” American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post. “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” said public historian Alexis Coe. “This ‘report’ lacks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it’s riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies.”
Kali Nicole Gross, a history professor at Rutgers and Emory universities and the co-author of “A Black Women’s History of the United States,” said it was “dusty, dated” and “the usual dodge on the long-lasting, harmful impacts of settler-colonialism, enslavement, Jim Crow, the oppression of women, the plight of queer people … as the true threat to democracy.”
Coe, who published a biography of George Washington last year, pointed to a section of the report that claims the first president had “freed all the slaves in his family estate” by the end of his life. In fact, he freed only one enslaved person upon his death; the 254 other enslaved people at Mount Vernon had a much more complicated fate.
Hilary Green, a history professor at the University of Alabama, tweeted a list of books on American history people could read “instead of a certain report.”
Several historians said it was particularly offensive that the report was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and included several photos King and quotes they said were taken out of context.
“The suggestion that affirmative action programs are somehow antithetical to the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. is simply ludicrous,” said Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse. “King was alive when the Johnson administration launched its affirmative action programs and publicly declared his support, specifically noting that it was a logical extension of the struggle for black equality. The document ignores King’s record of support for affirmative action, lamely pointing to the one line conservatives know from his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and ignoring the rest of his radical record. The fact that this historical distortion of King’s life and work was released on MLK Day makes it even worse.”
“It is fitting that this president, who was impeached again, this time for inciting an insurrection in the nation’s capital, would mark his last Martin Luther King Jr. Day in office by attacking the very movement Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of,” Coe said.
“To say that the racial divisions that have existed for the last half century are due to insistence by African Americans on ‘group rights’ rather than to the depth and breadth of racism, to say that on a page where you have a photograph of Dr. King is offensive to Dr. King’s legacy,” Grossman said…
Historian Kevin M. Levin, author of several books about the Civil War, said: “The 1776 report views students as sponges who are expected to absorb a narrative of the American past without question. It views history as set in stone rather than something that needs to be analyzed and interpreted by students.”
The White House also released Monday a long list of historical figures to be featured at Trump’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes.” Georgetown history professor Adam Rothman compared the report to the list, saying it was “nothing but the National Garden of Heroes in prose form, a stiff and lifeless history of America on a pedestal.”
Grossman, the AHA executive director, said: “This is written as if no historical scholarship has been produced in nearly 70 years, so it’s bereft of any professional historical sensibility at all. There are no historians on this commission. Would you take your car to a garage where there’s no mechanic?”
I firmly believe that “patriotic education” should not be a thing, at least not in public schools or universities, except perhaps to some degree in military academies. It should not be the goal of schools to make students love nor hate their country. Civics should be mandatory, but the purpose of civics should be knowledge and awareness, not patriotism. Patriotism is a personal matter, as is a neighbor of religion.