And, needless to say, our chambers of commerce with their Riot Department are going to see that we continue to get text-books of this sort. Says Colonel Galbraith of this Riot Department, at a May Day meeting, 1921:
We will see what kind of courses these teachers are giving and what text-books they use. If we find that they are disloyal we’ll tell you, and you can kick them out. We don’t care what you do with them.
And in another newspaper item I read:
Captain Walter I. Joyce, chairman of a sub-committee of the Americanization Committee of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is appointed to meet with the representatives of the American Book Company to scrutinize history text-books gotten out by that company in order to prevent the creeping in of un-American propaganda. The investigation of American histories has been going on for the past two years, and as a result thereof, two histories have been discarded by the Board of Education of New York and several are under consideration at the present time in Boston.
This kind of thing has been the rule all over the country, and the National Council for the Prevention of War has been making a study of standard text-books of history to determine the result. Here they are, briefly stated:
Fully 25% of the space in each approved text-book on history is devoted to war. “The test of a state is its ability to wage war,” is a statement frequently found in text-books. “Americans demonstrated their instinctive military talent.” “Fair field of battle,” “valor,” “bravery,” “audacious courage,” “brilliant,” “magnificent drive,” “our great adventure,” are terms frequently used to glorify war.
Underlying conditions predisposing to international friction, such as commercial rivalry, territorial ambitions, centralized autocratic government control and the maintenance of gigantic military and naval establishments, are rarely, and usually very inadequately, analyzed.
In analyzing the results of war, emphasis is always laid on the territorial gains acknowledged in the treaty of peace. If reference is made at all to tremendous destruction and cost of war, it is to point out that it was worth while.
No attempt is made in the text-books to understand developments in Russia. Sweeping terms are used in characterizing the present regime there; such phrases as “two sinister figures, Lenin and Trotzky,” “brazenly serving Germany’s ends,” “the anarchy known as Bolshevism,” are frequent.
In treating of the world war, all recent text-books perpetuate the hate and rancor engendered by the war. The guiltlessness of the allies is always proclaimed.