The method provided in other sections of the law for banishing textbooks which have been adopted but which are repugnant to the above provision is as follows: Upon complaint of any five citizens, filed with the state superintendent of public instruction, a hearing shall be arranged, to be held before the state superintendent or his deputy, in the county from which the complaint came. Previous notice must have been given through the press to the public and by mail to the complainants and to the publishers of the textbook complained of. A decision must be rendered within ten days. If the book shall be found obnoxious to the provisions of the law, that fact shall be noted by the state superintendent in the list of books for schools which he publishes annually. Thereafter the book so listed may be used only during the remainder of the year in which the state superintendent publishes it as proscribed. The penalty for retaining it beyond the time limit, shall be the loss to the school or district concerned of the state aid normally falling to its share.
The passage of this bill in the senate with only one vote against it, created a good deal of surprise, which changed to admiration for the oratorical powers of its author and sponsor, Senator John Cashman of Manitowoc County, when it was learned that his impassioned appeal to patriotism figuratively swept senators “off their feet.”
History students can have no quarrel with the motive assigned by Senator Cashman for the passage of this law. He says: “The history of a nation is its proudest asset. It includes the record of its great men, their ideals, sacrifices, and achievements. To preserve that history in all its original purity and teach it to the rising generations is a nation’s first duty.” With every word in that stirring exordium the historically minded man or woman will cordially agree. Thoughtful persons, whether historians or not, will also sympathize with Senator Cashman when he undertakes to rebuke anything approaching levity in characterizing the fathers of the Republic or captiousness in criticizing their policies, motives, and achievements. Unfortunately, there always have been among writers some who display a certain air of “smartness” or superciliousness which hardly comports with the inherent dignity of the historian’s office, or with the aim of doing equal and exact justice to all persons and to all causes discussed. Yet it will probably be no light task to convince an impartial umpire that writers of textbooks which have been adopted for use in the schools, after careful scrutiny by boards of education and other school officers responsible to the people, have been guilty of “treason to the nation,” as Senator Cashman seems to think has often been the case.[88] The framers of the constitution, with wise prevision, limited the application of the word “treason” in such a way as to exclude that indefinite class of crimes known elsewhere under the name of constructive treason, which in England and other countries had provided a favorable soil for plotters of revenge against individuals and in times of high tension always yielded a sinister harvest of oppression and suffering. So they defined treason against the United States narrowly as consisting only in “levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” and they also provided that conviction under a charge of treason could be secured only on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or confession in open court.
This view of the fathers as relates to treason was of course lost sight of during the Civil War, when in the North it used to be fashionable for men to pillory as “fool” or “traitor” (with an emphatic expletive) anyone who had the temerity to vote the Democratic ticket; it was lost sight of in the recent war when men were called traitors because they refused to buy liberty bonds or because they declared the draft a violation of the rights of the individual; and it is likewise lost sight of when we condemn under the term treason opinions on history which we may regard as too favorable to our nation’s one-time enemies, or too contemptuous of the characters or the acts of our own distinguished men of a past age. It would be strange if the impulses engendered by the war and the peace were not reflected more or less in editions of books prepared since 1917. It is probably true that some authors have overstressed the “hands across the sea” sentiment, while others perhaps lean unduly in an opposite direction. But that any of them have been guilty of treasonable acts or even intentions is what no one who knows the historical profession can believe without the most explicit proof.
But this question of treason aside, the problem still remains to determine what is the history of our country “in all its original purity.” What shall be the test of purity inasmuch as, happily, there is no established list of authorized books or records from which writers must derive their facts? Are they not compelled either to investigate each point for themselves or to accept as probably correct the results of other men’s investigations? To be sure, every important event creates its own legend or tradition, and such legends tend to be preserved and to be handed down from generation to generation. But legends are not history. No one worthy to rank as a careful historian would presume to write the history of the Great War on the basis of legends now crystallizing about it. No more can one write the history of the Revolution on such a legendary basis. This view, that much which once was thought to be history but was in fact mere legend, is not in any sense new. James Russell Lowell, who ranks among the very distinguished Americans of the last generation, wrote, in 1864, that the early reports of the battle of Lexington claimed for the Yankee minutemen a non-resistant attitude.
The Anglo Saxon could not fight without the law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Red coats under Pitcairn almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is nothing on which so little reliance can be placed as facts, especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part of what goes on under their eyes.[89]
It is hardly necessary at this late day to insist that no writer is justified in building his narrative of events on unverified tradition. He must try to penetrate to the truth that lies behind the legend (which in some cases will differ very widely from the legend itself). It is no easy task at best to perform a successful piece of historical research, and the questions on which final agreements have been reached are not numerous. Accordingly, if the law should be so construed as to enforce banishment from the schools of any book which can be proved incorrect in some of its alleged facts without regard to their importance, no textbooks will be left in the schools, for none are impeccable. True, the Cashman law would condemn only for falsifying the history of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, leaving four other foreign wars in which our country has engaged, and the great Civil War, to be treated without other restraint than that contained in the last clause of section 1, denouncing propaganda in favor of any foreign government. But under that sole provision it might still prove embarrassing for a writer to tell the truth about the Mexican War and possibly the others also, for the term propaganda—as the whole world has learned lately—is a most elastic one. Presumably, the propaganda test applies as well to other phases of history as to the military phases, wherefore an author of a textbook is apt, under a strict construction of this law, to be hauled into court on the charge of propaganda if he should consider it his duty to say a single thing in commendation of any other nation. For, will there not always be found, in any school district, five citizens whose views collide with those of the author; and if so, what is to prevent a case being called? Surely a word in favor of France would be resented by some; a word in favor of Great Britain would be resented by others; a word in favor of Germany would offend still others; and so on through the list. In the present mournful state of general unrest and want of confidence among nations, an author would tread unsafely on any ground outside the “three-mile limit.”
It does not follow from the fact that under the law it is easy to bring cases, that convictions would be equally easy. Presumably the state superintendent has had knowledge of all books now in use in the schools and, in effect if not in form, has approved them. This he would not have done had he considered any of them purveyors of treason or excessively faulty in statement. Moreover, as judge in cases that may arise under this law, the superintendent will be bound to take judicial notice of some things. For example, it is common knowledge that no history text is perfect either on its factual side, in its literary qualities, or in the author’s perspective of events; that few writers display at all times perfect taste, and none perfect judgment, in their criticisms of men and their comments on historical actions and movements; that a given textbook may be valuable, despite minor defects in all of the above points, by reason of its superior arrangement, its psychological adaptation to children’s needs, and the success with which it communicates to them the main features and the spirit of American history. He will also be obliged to rule that the truth is not malicious propaganda and he is bound to maintain an author’s right to liberty of research.
It goes without saying that if a book is palpably and grossly inaccurate; if it gives the child a wholly erroneous view of history; if it is crassly censorious of America’s great men; if it is written in a spirit tending to destroy American ideals; if it tends to make boys and girls ashamed of American character and achievements, not in exceptional instances here and there, but generally; then there would hardly be a question about the duty of getting rid of it with all convenient promptness. But would it not be strange if, with the superintendent and other educational experts on guard, such a book had got itself adopted? On general principles one would expect that only in the rarest cases would this law come into operation; for it ought not to be easy for a thoroughly unworthy book to elude the critical eyes of publishers, editors, school superintendents, teachers, and school boards, to be finally detected and exposed by some school patron or other private citizen. No doubt such cases are possible, but one could hardly conceive them to be of common occurrence. Misgivings are aroused, therefore, by the report that at the legislative hearing Senator Cashman denounced, by name, five well known and widely used textbooks.
If the Senator’s historical views, as published in the Senate Journal under date of March 1, 1923, are intended to be made the platform in a campaign to purify the history teaching of our schools, the upshot may prove widely different from what is now anticipated; for among those views, the derivation of which is not indicated, are some which it would be difficult to find expressed in any existing textbook. For example, Senator Cashman holds that our country is indebted to Holland “for town and county representation in a legislature.” Americans have long been taught that, in the picturesque phrase of John Fiske, “self-government broke out in Virginia” in 1619 by reason of the fact that these people were English. We are aware of no investigations which have brought forth evidence compelling the abandonment of that view, though some very extravagant claims have been made for the Dutch influence upon both colonial politics and colonial education. He also holds that “our free public school system came from Prussia.” If by this were meant merely that Prussian influence has been felt in the creation of a system of state supervision of education, and in the strengthening of a school system already in existence, we would gladly concur. But the statement is too sweeping to admit of such an interpretation. Wisconsin Germans ought to be very glad to assign to New England colonies and states the chief influence in giving us the public school system because, in the present state of research, that appears to be where the credit belongs. To all that the Senator says about the selection of immigrants for America, the development in the colonies themselves of a new and vivid love of liberty which found expression in the Declaration of Independence, the stupid tyranny of George III, and the heroic sufferings and achievements of patriots in the Revolution, we utter a hearty Amen; realizing, of course, that his statement is necessarily a crowded summary, cast in oratorical mould, and not designed as a complete exposition of his views. But, in thus concurring we do not yield up our sympathy with the aphorism of Edmund Burke, that in their reaction to tyranny the colonists “are descendants of Englishmen.”