Lies My Teacher Told Me: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Recent textbooks emphasize the role of gender, race, and culture on history to a far greater degree than textbooks written fifty years ago. Yet recent textbooks have continued to offer the same “central narrative” about America’s past: the growth of the federal government. One of the major ways that textbooks emphasize the importance of the federal government is by discussing presidential administrations at great length. Presidents are, of course, very important to American history, but it seems wrong that textbooks devote many pages to relatively unimportant presidents while largely ignoring America’s greatest writers, painters, humanitarians, and scientists. Textbooks also tend to imply that the “state we live in today is the state created in 1789.” The truth is that the state, as the Founding Fathers conceived of it, is radically different, both functionally and philosophically, from the state as it exists today.

One reason why textbooks treat the state as an unchanging, all-important entity is that they’re inherently meant to flatter the state. To understand how, we can look to the history of U.S. foreign policy. Most prominent historians believe that America has always practiced a foreign policy designed to preserve its own interests, even when doing so necessitates violence or corruption. But high school textbooks argue nothing of the kind: they present the U.S. as a moral agent that has always prioritized peace and democracy around the world. Almost every textbook mentions the Peace Corps—an admirable, but relatively insignificant government program designed to promote peace abroad—as an example of American generosity. Textbooks rarely mention America’s large corporations, which have sometimes influenced the federal government to destabilize other countries and install brutal pro-American dictators. Indeed, textbooks rarely mention the post-World War II rise of multinational corporations at all, even though such corporations have exerted a profound influence on the modern world, often promoting war and violence abroad in order to further their interests.

Loewen considers six of America’s most controversial foreign policy decisions: 1) installing a shah in Iran in 1953; 2) bringing down the Guatemalan government in 1954; 3) rigging the 1957 elections in Lebanon; 4) assassinating Patrice Lumumba in Zaire in 1961; 5) repeatedly attempting to murder Fidel Castro in Cuba; 6) bringing down the government of Chile in 1973. In all six cases, the U.S. government engaged in behavior that it would classify as “state-sponsored terrorism” when practiced by another country. So how do textbooks address these foreign policy decisions?

To begin with, the majority of U.S. history textbooks leave out all six of the foreign policy decisions listed above. When the textbooks do mention the decisions, they give nearly the same justification for America’s actions: the U.S. government was afraid that the existing leadership abroad was Communist, and installed an anticommunist leader to prevent “all hell from breaking loose.” While anticommunism has certainly been an important motive in American foreign policy, it’s not the only motive. And in the case of American intervention in Lebanon, it’s untrue that the U.S. intervened to fight Communism; indeed, the Eisenhower administration determined that there was no immediate Communist threat in the country. Not one high school textbook mentions America’s dozens of attempts to murder Fidel Castro; Castro is always portrayed as a dangerous aggressor. In the case of intervention in Chile, it’s an accepted fact that the CIA spent millions of dollars to destabilize the Chilean government led by the socialist Salvador Allende—a process that ended in Allende’s murder.

Loewen is not arguing that history textbooks need to record all instances of the U.S. meddling in other countries. However, textbooks need to stress the fact that the U.S. government has frequently intervened in other countries to destabilize democratically elected regimes and install dictatorships. The reason why textbooks omit a discussion of American foreign policy is clear enough: such a discussion would conflict with America’s reputation as a democratic nation. This discussion would also show that the government has lied about its covert actions—for example, Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State in the early 1970s, testified that the CIA had nothing to do with destabilizing Chile—a statement that was quickly proven to be false.

The sole government crime that all history textbooks address is the Watergate Scandal. In the early 1970s, Congress and the American public learned that President Richard Nixon had helped cover up a series of crimes that included the burglary of the Democratic National Committee. All textbooks blame Nixon for supporting the Watergate break-in, but none go into detail about why Nixon did so. They treat Richard Nixon as a uniquely corrupt and irresponsible politician, instead of telling the truth—which is that almost all modern presidents have supported illegal covert actions.

Because textbooks idealize the government, they also do a poor job of conveying the history of the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, conducted illegal surveillance on important civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover, an avowed white supremacist, waged a secret campaign to destroy King and his followers: members of his staff sent King threatening messages telling him to kill himself, and, when they obtained recordings of King cheating on his wife, they sent the recordings to other white supremacists. On multiple occasions, when the FBI learned of a plot to assassinate King, they declined to alert him.

The federal government’s attempts to sabotage the civil rights movements extended far beyond tapping Martin Luther King, Jr.’s phones. In Chicago, the FBI spread false information about the behavior of the Black Panther Party, and encouraged the Chicago Police to raid the apartment of the Black Panther leader Freddy Hampton, a decision that resulted in Hampton being shot in his bed. It’s even possible that the FBI or CIA was involved in the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., given that the convicted killer, James Earl Ray, a penniless “country boy,” had flown to Montreal, London, and Lisbon in the weeks leading up to the crime, and seems to have had aid from wealthy, powerful people. Hoover also supported a plan to investigate “all black college student organizations organized to project the demands of black students.”

By and large, American history textbooks ignore the FBI’s record on civil rights. In fact, they tend to credit the federal government with advancing the cause of civil rights almost single-handedly. In general, textbooks create the impression that the federal government imposed desegregation and other civil rights milestones upon the United States, when, in reality, the black community imposed these measures on the federal government.

As a general rule, textbooks downplay progressive populism of all kinds and credit the federal government with most progressive achievements. As with so many of the implicit narratives that textbooks offer, the idea that the federal government always behaves virtuously is boring. Worse, it creates the impression that good citizens should trust their government to look out for their own interests—when, in fact, history clearly shows that citizens must lobby their government for change.