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President Abraham Lincoln
28th President of the United States and—in spite of the mostly positive treatment he gets in most mainstream history textbooks—an outspoken racist and an aggressive imperialist, who used military force to topple dozens of legitimately-elected democratic governments around the world. Loewen treats Wilson as an example of how history textbooks “heroify” historical figures who engaged in morally objectionable behavior, rather than giving an honest account of their lives.
President Woodrow Wilson Quotes in Lies My Teacher Told Me
The Lies My Teacher Told Me quotes below are all either spoken by President Woodrow Wilson or refer to President Woodrow Wilson. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
In the case of Woodrow Wilson, textbooks actually participate in creating the social archetype. Wilson is portrayed as “good,” “idealist,” “for self-determination, not colonial intervention,” “foiled by an isolationist Senate,” and “ahead of his time.”
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President Woodrow Wilson Character Timeline in Lies My Teacher Told Me
The timeline below shows where the character President Woodrow Wilson appears in Lies My Teacher Told Me. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Handicapped by History
Loewen begins by looking at two familiar figures from history textbooks: Helen Keller and Woodrow Wilson. Almost every American student knows that Keller was deaf and blind, yet learned to read,...
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Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president during World War I, was an equally controversial figure. During his time...
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Amazingly, history textbooks either ignore Wilson’s interventionist foreign policy, or characterize Wilson as a “reluctant warrior” who never wanted to send...
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Wilson’s dismissal of Ho Chi Minh brings up another point about his life that textbooks ignore:...
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Textbooks rarely offer more than a sentence or two on Wilson’s racism—an omission that is, itself, racist. African Americans couldn’t possibly consider Wilson a hero, and...
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...for a strong “archetype”—a “mother of our country” figure. Perhaps the continued popularity of Woodrow Wilson illustrates our need for another archetype: a strong, idealistic, clear-eyed leader. The problem is that,...
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...example, textbooks decontextualize Keller’s life work and make her seem boring. Textbooks may likewise omit Wilson’s racism because they want to be respectful or patriotic.
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Ironically, by portraying Keller, Wilson, and other historical figures as unambiguously heroic, textbooks make student less impressed with these figures,...
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Chapter 5: Gone With the Wind
...racism in the thinking of figures as different as Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Woodrow Wilson. Many students would be surprised to learn that almost all the presidents before Abraham Lincoln...
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Chapter 10: Down the Memory Hole
...is that historical interpretations change over time, according to people’s ideological needs. For example, Woodrow Wilson’s reputation grew enormously during the Cold War because of his stated commitment to “make the...
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