New Allamo Film promotes PC History.

The Fordham Foundation report, Lynne Cheney's op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on The National History Standards, and the Albert Shanker Institute Report, all correctly concluded that today's U.S. history textbooks overemphasize America's flaws and failures and omit many of America's strengths, successes, and heroes. They also concluded that the history textbooks today are anti-Western Civilization and pro-Third World. This is all done in the euphemistic name of "diversity," "multiculturalism," or "political correctness". This is why so many of our young people are disillusioned with and bored by the study of history. True religious, political, scientific, and military history has been suppressed and replaced by a censored politically correct "social studies".

For example, The National History Standards, put forth by politically correct professors at UCLA, omitted the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell, because the professors thought there were too many "dead white male" inventors in the traditional U.S. history textbooks and more room needed to be made for "diversity." The Wright Brothers were taken out, and Mansa Musa was put in their place. No mention was made of the invention of the airplane. Following that precedent, a current text for high school students, A History of the United States by Boorstin, published in 2002 by Prentice-Hall, does not mention the Wright Brothers.

Many of our "social studies" students are so bored and fed up with their textbooks that they no longer read them. They learn most of their history from one aspect of what Michael Medved calls the "popular culture," i.e. movies. Unfortunately, many of the new history movies are, like their textbook counterparts, anti-American.

For example, the new Disney Alamo film, which is scheduled to be released in April of 2004, promotes a politically correct revisionist agenda aimed at destroying traditional American heroes. According to early reviews of the script, William Barret Travis is portrayed as a "serial adulterer," James Bowie is featured as an evil "slave trader," Sam Houston is portrayed as a "bi-polar, manic depressive, alcoholic," and Davy Crockett is portrayed as a "frightened wanderer" who wanted to escape "over the wall" in the dark of night, but felt paralyzed and trapped by his own undeserved heroic reputation.

The truth is that Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and Houston are American heroes who fought against overwhelming odds in the name of what William Barret Travis referred to as "liberty, patriotism, and honor." They deserve our honor and respect, not a tabloid trashing of their reputations. If Mr. Walt Disney could treat the Alamo defenders with respect in 1955, and Mr. John Wayne could treat them with respect in 1960, why can't Mr. Michael Eisner treat them with respect in 2004?

Positive heroes like Travis, Bowie, and Crockett should be held up to inspire our young people. But Leftists in academia and in the media want to destroy the traditional American heroes, so that they may be replaced by leftwing rock, rap, and hip hop music stars. In the 1950's children went to school wearing coonskin caps in admiration of Davy Crockett. Today children go to school dressed as gangster rappers, with their droopy drawers, and listening to music with foul language that desecrates Judeo-Christian morality. Eminem is in. Davy Crockett is out. Eisner and his allies are winning the culture war.

Heroes like the Wright Brothers, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, must be vigorously defended by the political Right in the culture war. They represent Western culture. To defend only tax cuts and not the culture is a recipe for disaster. We, as present day citizens of Western Civilization, stand upon the shoulders of the heroes who have come before us. We must defend these heroes from politically correct revisionist attacks, or else the edifice we call our culture will collapse, and then we shall all surely fall into the darkness of the abyss.

--B. Forrest Clayton, author of Suppressed History: Obliterating Politically Correct Orthodoxies, which is available for $14.95 post paid from Armistead Publishing, P.O. Box 54516-E, Cincinnati, OH 45254.