Lies My Teacher Told Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

with propaganda linking Germans to barbarism. But Tradition hastens to shield Wilson from the ensuing domestic fallout: “Although President Wilson had
     been careful in his war message to state that most Americans of German descent were 'true
     and loyal citizens,' the anti-German propaganda often caused them suffering.”
    Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his
     own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. “Congress,” not Wilson, is
     credited with having passed the Espionage Act ofJune 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious attacks on the
     civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In
     fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad
     censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson's approval, his
     postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was
     socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have
     threatened the war effort. Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for producing The Spirit of '76, a film about the Revolutionary War To oppose America's participation in World War I. or even to be pessimistic about ft, was
     dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to “report the man who . . . cries for
     peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.” Send their names to the Justice Depart
     ment in Washington, it exhorted. After World War I, the Wilson administration's attacks on
     civil liberties increased, now with anticommunisrn as the excuse. Neither before nor since
     these campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.
    that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably. Textbook authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson's suppression of civil
     liberties, but in 1920, when World War 1 was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that would
     have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts. Textbook authors blame the anticomrnutist and antilabor union witch hunts of Wilson's
     second term on his illness and on an attorney general run amok. No evidence supports this
     view Indeed, Attorney General Palmer asked Wilson in his last days as president to pardon
     Eugene V. Debs, who was serving time for a speech attributing World War I to economic
     interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic,“ The president replied,
     ”Never!“ and Debs languished in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him. The American Way adopts perhaps the most innovative approach to absolving Wilson of wrongdoing; Way simply moves the ”red scare" to the 1920s, after Wilson had left office!
    Because heroideation prevents textbooks from showing Wilson's shortcomings, textbooks
     are hard pressed to explain the results of the 1920 election. James Cox, the Democratic
     candidate who was Wilson's would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G.
     Harding, who never even campaigned, In the biggest landslide in the history of American
     presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people
     were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just warned a “return to normalcy.” The possibility
     that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors. It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual
     disappointment the world has ever known!”
    It isn't only high school history courses that heroify Wilson. Textbooks such as Land ofPromise, which discusses Wilson's racism, have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the
     archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television
     documentaries, and historical novels.
    For some years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an experiment in social archetypes
     at the State University of New York at