Wipe the slate blank, they say, and then we’ll see what we’ll write on it. Amid this stands Germany with her unchanged purpose to own the earth; and Japan is doing some thinking. Amid this also is the Anglo-Saxon race, the race that has brought our law, our order, our safety, our freedom into the modern world. That any school histories should hinder the members of this race from understanding each other truly and being friends, should not be tolerated.
Many years later than Mr. Sydney George Fisher’s analysis of England under George III, Mr. Charles Altschul has made an examination and given an analysis of a great number of those school textbooks wherein our boys and girls have been and are still being taught a history of our Revolution in the distorted form that I have briefly summarized. His book was published in 1917, by the George H. Doran Company, New York, and is entitled The American Revolution in our School Textbooks. Here following are some of his discoveries:
Of forty school histories used twenty years ago in sixty-eight cities, and in many more unreported, four tell the truth about King George’s pocket Parliament, and thirty-two suppress it. To-day our books are not quite so bad, but it is not very much better; and-to-day, be it added, any reforming of these textbooks by Boards of Education is likely to be prevented, wherever obstruction is possible, by every influence visible and invisible that pro-German and pro-Irish propaganda can exert.
Thousands of our American school children all over our country are still being given a version of our Revolution and the political state of England then, which is as faulty as was George III’s government, with its fake parliament, its “rotten boroughs,” its Little Sarum. Meanwhile that “army of spies” through which the Kaiser boasted that he ruled “supreme”
here, and which, though he is gone, is by no means a demobilized army, but a very busy and well-drilled and well-conducted army, is very glad that our boys and girls should be taught false history, and will do its best to see that they are not taught true history.
Mr. Charles Altschul, in his admirable enterprise, addressed himself to those who preside over our school world all over the country; he received answers from every state in the Union, and he examined ninety-three history textbooks in those passages and pages which they devoted to our Revolution. These books he grouped according to the amount of information they gave about Pitt and Burke and English sympathy with us in our quarrel with George III. These groups are five in number, and dwindle down from group one, “Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, give an account of general political conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, and give credit to prominent Englishmen for the services they rendered the Americans,” to group five, “Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, make no reference to general political conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, nor to any prominent Englishmen who devoted themselves to the cause of the Americans.” Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about our English sympathizers. In groups three and four this is so scanty as to distort the truth and send any boy or girl who studied books of these groups out of school into life with a very imperfect idea indeed of the size and importance of English opposition to the policy of George III; in group five nothing is said about this at all. The boys and girls who studied books in group five would grow up believing that England was undividedly autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our liberty. In his careful and conscientious classification, Mr. Altschul gives us the books in use twenty years ago (and hence responsible for the opinion of Americans now between thirty and forty years old) and books in use to-day, and hence responsible for the opinion of those American men and women who will presently be grown up and will prolong for another generation the school-taught ignorance and prejudice of their fathers and mothers. I select from Mr. Altschul’s catalogue only those books in use in 1917, when he published his volume, and of these only group five, where the facts about English sympathy with us are totally suppressed.
Barnes’ School History of the United States, by Steele. Chandler and Chitword’s Makers of American History. Chambers’ (Hansell’s) A School History of the United States. Eggleston’s A First Book in American History. Eggleston’s History of the United States and Its People. Eggleston’s New Century History of the United States. Evans’ First Lessons in Georgia History. Evans’ The Essential Facts of American History.
Estill’s Beginner’s History of Our Country. Forman’s History of the United States. Montgomery’s An Elementary American History. Montgomery’s The Beginner’s American History. White’s Beginner’s History of the United States.
If the reader has followed me from the beginning, he will recollect a letter, parts of which I quoted, from a correspondent who spoke of Montgomery’s history, giving passages in which a fair and adequate recognition of Pitt and our English sympathizers and their opposition to George III is made. This would seem to indicate a revision of the work since Mr. Altschul published his lists, and to substantiate the hope I expressed in my original article, and which I here repeat. Surely the publishers of these books will revise them! Surely any patriotic American publisher and any patriotic board of education, school principal, or educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other sinister influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school histories!
Whatever excuse they once had, be it the explanation I have offered above, or some other, there is no excuse to-day. These books have laid the foundation from which has sprung the popular prejudice against England. It has descended from father to son. It has been further solidified by many tales for boys and girls, written by men and women who acquired their inaccurate knowledge at our schools. And it plays straight into the hands of our enemies
Chapter IX: Concerning a Complex
All of these books, history and fiction, drop into the American mind during its early springtime the seed of antagonism, establish in fact an anti-English “complex.” It is as pretty a case of complex on the wholesale as could well be found by either historian or psychologist. It is not so violent as the complex which has been planted in the German people by forty years of very adroitly and carefully planned training: they were taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English complex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would tell you–it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should automatically exclaim whenever the right button is pressed, “England is a land-grabber,” and “What has England done in the War?”
The word complex has been in our dictionary for a long while. This familiar adjective has been made by certain scientific people into a noun, and for brevity and convenience employed to denote something that almost all of us harbor in some form or other. These complexes, these lumps of ideas or impressions that match each other, that are of the same pattern, and that are also invariably tinctured with either a pleasurable or painful emotion, lie buried in our minds, unthought-of but alive, and lurk always ready to set up a ferment, whenever some new thing from outside that matches them enters the mind and hence starts them off. The “suppressed complex” I need not describe, as our English complex is by no means suppressed. Known to us all, probably, is the political complex.