Lies My Teacher Told Me: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Another problem with history textbooks, Loewen says, is that they leave out ideas. American history is, in many ways, a history of the conflict between ideas: democracy versus monarchy; white supremacy versus egalitarianism; federalism versus states’ rights. Textbooks underplay the importance of ideas, instead emphasizing specific dates and people.

For a good example of how textbooks omit ideas from of history, consider the life of the abolitionist John Brown. In different textbooks, Brown has been described as insane, perfectly sane, and everything in between. All history textbooks agree that Brown and his followers, who included white and black people, organized a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the goal of arming slaves and starting an uprising. Textbooks sometimes criticize John Brown for being overly militant, and some treat him neutrally, but none depict him as a hero.

Was John Brown mentally ill? It’s true that, after Brown was arrested, some of Brown’s lawyers tried to plead insanity as a way of sparing his life. However, there’s little evidence that Brown displayed insane behavior, and many regarded him as a clear-headed, rational man. Textbooks often presume Brown’s madness, based on the far-fetched, even suicidal quality of his plan to raid Harpers Ferry. But based on the eloquent speech he delivered at his own trial, it seems that Brown was willing to sacrifice his own life for his abolitionist beliefs, and may have wanted to be executed to set an example for the abolitionist cause. In short, because textbooks don’t make any effort to understand John Brown’s beliefs, they assume that he must have been insane. As one writer put it, people refuse to accept that “a white person did not have to be crazy to die for black equality.”

For many decades after his hanging, John Brown was treated as a hero. But following the failure of Reconstruction and the overall degradation of African American life at the end of the 19th century, historians began to depict Brown as a madman. Brown was, undeniably, a murderer: he killed several people at Harpers Ferry. But it’s odd that textbooks don’t glorify the murderous legacy of John Brown, considering that they do glorify the genocide of Christopher Columbus.

Sometimes, contemporary textbooks portray Brown as a religious fanatic, who thought of himself as God’s puppet—in other words, they suggest that Brown believed that God “ordered him” to raid Harpers Ferry. Brown was deeply religious, but it seems that he was also a deeply thoughtful person, who chose to raid Harpers Ferry because of his deep conviction, not simply because “God ordered it.” In general, textbooks rarely treat religious belief as a legitimate motive for a historical figure’s actions. Instead, textbooks either downplay the role of religion (for example, in the case of Martin Luther King, Jr.) or imply that historical figures were insane religious fanatics (as in the case of John Brown).

Loewen now switches from John Brown—one of the most controversial figures in American history—to Abraham Lincoln—one of the most beloved. As with Brown, textbooks downplay the role of ideology in Lincoln’s life; they talk about what Lincoln did, but not what he believed. Lincoln, for much of his life, seems to have believed that whites were superior to blacks. Textbooks often argue that he supported the ending of slavery as a “strategy” for winning the Civil War. In this way, textbooks paint a picture of Lincoln as a pragmatic politician, not a committed abolitionist. However, there is considerable evidence that Lincoln strongly believed in the basic humanity of black people, and struggled with his own racist feelings. In his early days as a senator, Lincoln was one of the only politicians to oppose a bill condemning abolitionists, and when he ran for president, he was praised for his “rock-solid anti-slavery beliefs.” Textbooks give little of Lincoln as a controversial, conflicted thinker, and suggest that his sole priority was preserving the Union.

Consider how textbooks treat Lincoln’s writings and orations—the best expressions of his ideas. Amazingly, most contemporary history textbooks don’t mention the Gettysburg Address, the most famous speech Lincoln ever gave, and one of his most eloquent arguments for the connection between abolition and American ideals. Although many textbooks quote from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address—in which he made it clear that the debate over slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War, and suggested that all Americans, not just Southerners, were complicit in the sins of slavery—none give a sense for the radicalism and originality of Lincoln’s ideas.

In order to understand the Civil War in general, Loewen says, we must understand the role of ideas. The Southern states frequently invoked the concept of states’ rights to justify their secession from the Union. And yet, under President Jefferson Davis, the Southern Confederacy also criticized the idea of states’ rights as contradictory and self-destructive. Similarly, in the South it was often argued that slaves enjoyed their slavery. And yet, news of slave revolts and runaway slaves clearly demonstrated that many slaves did not enjoy their slavery. Frustrated with the contradictions of the Southern states’ beliefs, many Southern soldiers joined the Union army. Seen in such terms, the Confederacy lost the Civil War in part because it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions: the Civil War was a war of ideas, and in the end, the Union won because its ideas made more sense. Yet textbooks almost never study the South in ideological terms: instead, they have a tendency to present the Union and the Confederacy as equally idealistic.

Textbooks portray Reconstruction as a corrupt process, perpetrated by “radical” politicians in order to control the South. One clear example of the Southern bias in contemporary textbooks is their tendency to use the terms “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” to describe Northerners who came to the South after the war. Though this term was initially an insult, textbooks use it without any discussion of bias, normalizing the idea that Reconstruction was corrupt. In general, textbooks imply that Northern Republicans and blacks held all the power in the South during Reconstruction. Nothing could be further from the truth: it took tremendous courage for a Northerner to travel to the South to support equality between the race, because racist white supremacists exerted a lot of power.

In sum, history textbooks distort the lives and thoughts of America’s most notable racial idealists: they portray Brown as a fanatic and Lincoln as a pragmatist. Although Brown and Lincoln are still celebrated as idealistic heroes around the world, the people of their own country barely understand what they believed, and thus can’t fully understand what they fought for.