Chapter review: Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-Making

Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-Making is chapter 1 of historian James Loewen's 2018 edition of his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. This is another of those eye-openers. It is one thing to say, 'Yeah, my history in school wasn’t so good. Too much got whitewashed or omitted' or something like that. It is a quite different thing to read the details about just how bad the problem was and still is, and why it was and is that way. Chapter 1 gives a nice summary. Lowen is an expert on American history school textbooks and has written one himself.

In the introduction, Loewen makes this rather interesting observation: “Chapter 13 looks at the effects of using standard American history textbooks. It shows that the books actually make students stupid.”

That’s an interesting start to a book. Lowen argues that the stupidification of students by standard American history education includes boring them to death. Lowen hated reading the main textbooks, in large part because vibrant history and personalities gets crushed into dull, bland pulp, myths and lies.

Heroification and American myths

The main themes of chapter 1 relate to heroification and American myths that shoot through and poison history textbooks in American public schools. It also poisons the minds of children and adults who cling to the heroes and myths. Heroification is, as one would expect, treating venerated persons in history as mythic heroes rather than real people. Real people have strengths and flaws, and good and bad traits. Heroes don’t. Lowen sees heroification as a degenerative, reality distorting process about historical figures akin to calcification, resulting in a state on mind where “we cannot think straight about them.”

The rationale for heroification that Lowen describes amounts to a desire to protect children. Textbook writers and publishers want to leave children with a mental framework that posits historical figures as people who are usually uniformly good and wise. Heroes are people to be emulated and inspired by. 

Lowen builds chapter 1 mostly based on two historical figures, Hellen Keller (1880-1968) and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).[1] He points out that teaching about Keller ends with her heroic effort to overcome being deaf and blind. Textbooks uniformly ignore the last 65 years of her life and the fact that she was not the first person to do what she did to overcome her handicaps. Keller herself was aware that stories about her life would focus on her fight to learn to speak and write, while ignoring her later life, which she really wanted the world to understand. 

Public school history textbooks (and the mainstream media) ignore the fact that Keller wanted to use her experience to help others with similar handicaps. In the process of doing that she found that those people were usually poor and lived in literally stinking squalor. That led to her political radicalization. She came to publicly support socialism, labor unions, the NAACP, and Eugene Debs as the socialist candidate for US president. She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for free speech rights for poor people. She openly admired and supported the rise of Communism in Russia. 

Lowen points out that American history textbooks ignore Keller’s later life because of her radical socialist politics and her belief in this radical heresy, which she wrote in 1929: 

“I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate -- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased. .... I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance in a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. .... Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.”

Keller directly attacks the great American myth of equal opportunity. Lowen comments on Keller's epiphany:

“Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea. ‘There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,’ an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, ‘sex, religion and social class.’ While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. .... Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has ‘the power to rise in the world,’ is anathema to textbook authors and to many teachers as well. .... [Authors, editors and educators] leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over into a vague ‘up by the bootstraps’ operation. In the process, they make this passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.”

Lowen argues that heroification is potentially crippling to children because people like Keller are treated like bland children devoid of the complexities and vibrancy of the fascinating adults they usually are. Those myths are unrealistic Disneyland role models. In addition to that Lowen writes: 

“Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate incursions into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a ‘done deal.’”

Once again, one sees the endless battle raging between facts, truths and sound reasoning against deceit, misdirection, emotional manipulation and ideology-inspired motivated reasoning. 

Question: Should American history be taught more honestly, or would that damage children somehow, e.g., by turning them into cynics and/or inspiring them to want to do some or all of the bad things that famous people do?  

Footnote: 

1. To shorten this review, the following comments briefly summarize the importance of Wilson and how history fails to deal competently with him. Wilson sent US troops into Mexico, Latin America and 

Russia many times. The US fought on the side of the anti-communists in Russia and that held usher in the cold war and intense distrust of Western nations. Wilson talked a lot about self-determination and democracy, but at his core he was a crude racist, White Supremacist, colonialist, anti-communist and a shockingly intolerant authoritarian. Wilson rebuffed Ho Chi Minh’s appeal to the US to help it reach self-determination, setting up its gradual move toward communism. History textbooks whitewash all of that. But Wilson also signed some major pro-democracy legislation into law, e.g., some safety net protections. Lowen writes: 

“American needs to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response. .... Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished Espionage and Sedition Acts. .... Neither before nor since these [pro-WW I federal government propaganda] campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.” 

Lowen wrote that in 2018. One can wonder if he still feels that way. Probably so, given how close to being a police state the US was under Wilson. Lowen helps put America’s currently bad political situation into a useful historical context.