The history standards controversy and social history.

The swirling controversy over the National History Standards that erupted in late October 1994 is linked to the wide-ranging attacks on social history in recent years. One way of understanding why Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, John Leo, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Lynne Cheney, G. Gordon Liddy, and Newt Gingrich have heaped abuse on the U.S. and World History Standards is to revisit the long-forgotten Rugg controversy that occurred more than fifty years ago.

Harold Rugg emerged in the 1920s as a progressive educational theorist, teacher, and textbook writer. A ninth-generation New Englander who worked as a weaver in a textile mill in order to understand industrial work and acquire an understanding of life at the bottom of the American social hierarchy, Rugg acquired a college education and a graduate degree in civil engineering.(1) By 1910, he had discovered his true calling - in education, sociology, and psychology. After completing a Ph.D. in psychology and sociology at the University of Illinois in 1915, he taught at the University of Chicago, became part of the now legendary psychological division of the U.S. Army in World War I, and then in 1920 accepted an appointment as associate professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University and as educational psychologist at Columbia's experimental Lincoln School.(2)

Rugg drank deeply from the wells of progressive thinkers as he reached for ideas and pedagogical strategies to unleash the innate creative ability in young learners. Rummaging widely across many disciplines, he drew inspiration from Van Wyck Brooks, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, John Maynard Keynes, R. H. Tawney, John R. Commons, Charles E. Merriam, and others - in effect, the leading historians, political scientists, economists, educators, and cultural critics of the early twentieth century.(3) Soon firmly committed to the progressive movement in education, Rugg figured prominently in Teachers College's John Dewey Society and in its journal The Social Frontier which became "the leading voice of educational reform."(4) Though Rugg was lesser known than many members of the Teacher College movers and shakers, it was this small, mild-mannered, and highly moral man who became the leading social studies textbook author of the group.

Rugg, one of the founders of the National Council for the Social Studies, became perhaps the principal challenger to David Muzzey, whose junior and senior high school history textbooks dominated history education from the 1920s until the 1950s.(5) In an outpouring of books for the elementary and secondary schools - some twenty books in a series entitled Man and His Changing Society - Rugg brought a grain of the leaven of social and economic history to the loaf of what had been a politically dominated curriculum. His A History of American Civilization, Economic and Social (1930) became something of a bestseller.

Also notable was Rugg's stress, in all of his books, on the need for students to develop critical judgment, reflective thinking, and creative self-expression.

In his Teacher's Guide and Key, he insisted that "pupils must learn to think critically about modern problems." Carl Wittke, a reviewer of his books and the emerging pillar of immigration history, wrote that Rugg "emphasizes the need for tolerance, which he defines as 'open-mindedness' and 'critical mindedness."' In his Teacher's Guide, Rugg advised teachers, in pursuing the goal of "tolerant understanding," to make constant use of phrases such as 'Why do you think so?' 'Are you open-minded about the matter?' 'What is your authority?' 'Have you considered all sides of the case ?'"(6)

As would soon become apparent, Rugg was not shy about directing students - in the middle of the Great Depression - to examine how wealth was divided in the United States and to what degree the rising standard of living extended to all ranks.(7) His biographer describes his presentation of history as "gravita[ting] toward the moderate left and merg[ing] with [the] sort of piecemeal reformism characteristic of New Dealers."(8) Certainly, Rugg believed that rapid industrialization and laissez-faire economic policy, while producing a dizzying consumer culture and a higher standard of living for broad segments of society, had also produced a materialistic mentality, corrosive competition, and an impoverishment of the arts. But his was "a lover's quarrel" with his country, as his biographer puts it; Rugg was a constructive critic deeply devoted to "building a better America.(9)

Reading his many textbooks from the perspective of the 1990s, one is impressed with Rugg's remarkably mild and determinedly balanced explorations of U.S. and world history. Rugg was unusual in opening his History of American Civilization with a section on "The Red Man's Continent," and he was far in advance of his fellow textbook writers in asking students to ponder such questions as: "In what spirit did the Indians and the Europeans receive each other? Did the white men buy the Indians' land that they settled upon? Or did they ruthlessly conquer it as the Spaniards had done in Central and South America? ... Again ask yourself whether it was possible for two widely differing civilizations to live side by side in the same region. Consider also the ethical problem: Was it right for the more numerous Europeans to drive back the scattered tribes of Indians?"(10) But these questions and pedagogical strategies are only remarkable in the furor they aroused once self-appointed censors decided that Rugg was subversive and "un-American."

By the late 1930s, Rugg's books - some 25,000 pages of printed material - had sold several million copies in more than 5,000 schools and were widely admired by teachers in every corner of the country.(11) Then the onslaught began. After The National Republic, a conservative opinion weekly, attacked Rugg in 1936 for his infatuation with "collectivism," the right-wing howitzers rolled into place in 1939-40. The American Federation of Advertising quickly took offense at Rugg's comments that one of the purposes of advertising was "to persuade the purchaser to buy whether he wants to or not."(12) But the indictment was much broader than this. The publicist for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), writing in Liberty, indicted reformist educators like Rugg, along with Carl Becker and George Counts, for promoting "Marxist teachings." Bertie Forbes, the brash young founder of Forbes Magazine, soon spearheaded the attacks, quickly enlisting the American Legion. By the eve of Pearl Harbor, the Legion was punctuating the press with astringent Ruggbeating articles and vicious cartoons. In one article, "Treason in the Textbooks," a cartoon displayed a leering teacher pouring slime on four books labeled "Constitution," "Religion," "U. S. Heroes," and "U. S. History," while intimidated boys and girls cowed in their desk chairs.(13)

The attacks on Rugg, in the analysis of one historian of education, "turned into a veritable crusade to eliminate certain textbooks from the public schools" because of their reputed anti-Americanism.(14) In Bradner, Ohio, true-blue patriots taught students about first-amendment rights by burning Rugg's textbooks. Other communities, such as Binghamton, Bronxville, and Mt. Kisco, New York and Wayne Township, New Jersey, contented themselves with removing the books from the schools and blacklisting them. By spring 1940, the National Association of Manufacturers had 6,830 "sentinels" working in 1,338 communities with "educational assignments" to cleanse the schools from "creeping collectivism." "For a generation now," proclaimed NAM President H. W. Prentis, Jr., "our free institutions and the heroes of the American republic have been derided and debunked by a host of puny iconoclasts, who destroy since they cannot build."(15)

My examination of Rugg's books leads me to conclude that most of those who attacked them seem not to have read them (a situation to be duplicated in the History Standards controversy of 1994-95). Rugg's own analysis of the controversy begins with a chapter entitled "I Haven't Read the Books, But __!" He explains that as he criss-crossed the country by train to defend his books: "Over and over again it came. 'I haven't read the books, but,' in essence, 'they are bad' from young and old, man and woman alike."(16) Charged with Marxist or Communist leanings, Rugg found himself defending his textbook discussion of whether all Americans shared in the rising standard of living that had resulted from the development of industrial capitalism. Rugg entirely omitted discussion of the chronic industrial warfare that punctuated the 1870s through the 1920s, confining himself to a discussion of how the rapid increase in worker wages from 1850-1900 tailed off and how national income, by the late 1920s, was very unevenly distributed. But this was enough to touch off a wave of censorship on the grounds that young Americans who studied from Rugg's books would think poorly of their country and would be incited to class conflict.(17)

The authoritarian and anti-intellectual tendencies in the conservative ranks became evident in the attack launched by the corresponding secretary of the Daughters of the Colonial Wars. Mrs. Elwood Turner blasted Rugg for trying "to give a child an unbiased viewpoint instead of teaching him real Americanism. All the old histories taught my country right or wrong. That's the point of view we want our children to adopt. We can't afford to teach them to be unbiased and let them make up their own minds."(18)

Persistent themes in the attacks were that Rugg's books "undermine patriotism," "stress 'errors and evils' in our civilization," "belittle and malign America," "debunk our great heroes of the past," and were in general "subversive" and "un-American."(19) The NAM, American Legion, and assorted self-styled patriots ripped Rugg for toppling the marbled heroes of the American pantheon, but one searches in vain for evidence of this other than one passage, repeated ad nauseum, about the Constitutional Convention. "The merchants, landowners, manufacturers, shippers and bankers were given what they wanted ...," wrote Rugg, but then he continued, in what his critics deftly extinguished from this passage, "namely a government which would stabilize the money and trade, keep order within the country and defend the nation against foreign enemies."(20) In a later biographical account, Rugg put his finger on what is highly relevant today in the case of the National History Standards controversy: "Obviously, a writer's meaning can be completely altered or destroyed by lifting statements out of context ... Certainly it is clear that without the indispensable contexts such statements lose their meaning and validity."(21)

Alarmed by the attacks on the first amendment and the grotesque misrepresentations of Rugg's books, the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom published five appraisals of Rugg's texts in 1942: The Textbooks of Harold Rugg, An Analysis. Contributing to the analysis were five eminent university leaders - none of them likely to be charged with anti-Americanism: George H. Sabine, professor of philosophy and dean of Cornell's graduate school; Arthur N. Holcombe, professor of government at Harvard; Carl Wittke, professor of history and Oberlin College's dean of arts and sciences; Robert S. Lynd, professor of sociology at Columbia; and Arthur W. Macmahon, professor of public administration at Columbia. Wesley C. Mitchell, Chairman of the Committee on Textbooks of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, wrote the introduction.

The Textbooks of Harold Rugg supported the volumes and warned that "attacking textbooks is easy; evaluating them fairly is hard." Mitchell deplored the "acrimonious controversy that generates more heat than light," and lamented the "numerous onslaughts upon textbooks by groups that have condemned brief passages isolated from their contexts ...."(22) The pamphlet pointed out that Rugg's contributions to the development of a spirit of free inquiry, so necessary to a free society, were considerable. The pamphlet's defense of Rugg helped enable him to continue his career as World War II loomed. But the attacks on his books led to a precipitous decline of their use, and after World War II they were quietly dropped by his publishers.

Against the backdrop of the Rugg episode, we can consider the heated attacks on social history that have emerged in the context of the National History Standards. A good place to begin is with Newt Gingrich's formula for revitalizing American society. In his wildly ahistorical book, To Renew America, readers learn how historians have contributed to the undermining of American culture. The first of the six dicta that he deems necessary to insure "an America that is prosperous, free, and safe" reads like this: "We must reassert and renew American civilization. From 1607 until 1965, America had one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles. From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," up to the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American. Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit the civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them. Our first task is to return to teaching Americans about America and teaching immigrants how to become Americans. Until we re-establish a legitimate moral and cultural standard, our civilization is at risk."(23)

Whatever the significance of 1965 as the beginning of the end, it is clear that Gingrich holds historical revisionism of the last several decades as "a calculated effort" to discredit the way Americans had been taught history. He is correct in at least one particular - that professional historians have indeed tried to discredit earlier versions of history because history has been presented in a narrow and deeply distorted way. What teacher today would assign Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager's The Growth of the American Republic, a textbook that was competing with Rugg's high school books in the 1930s? In Morison and Commager's description of slavery, students learned that "Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears ... suffered less than any other class in the South from its 'peculiar institution' ... The majority of slaves were ... apparently happy ... There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization. The negro learned his master's language, and accepted in some degree his moral and religious standards. In return he contributed much besides his labor - music and humor for instance - to American civilization."(24)

Examples of this sort can be multiplied, but it is hardly necessary to convince teachers that returning to the pre-1965 histories that Gingrich believes are compatible "with American freedoms as we have known them" would return us to a narrowly conceived and distorted history that ignored and demeaned huge parts of the American people - hardly a prescription for maintaining American freedoms or unifying American society.

But more worthy of attention is the notion that revisionist history is the work of "cultural elites." As Peter Novick has brilliantly detailed, historians before World War II were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of white, male, Protestant, and upper-class society. This was truly a cultural elite. From the perspective of the gentlemen historians, it was entirely fitting that they should be the keepers of the past because they believed that only those of the highest intellect, the most polished manners, and the most developed aesthetic taste could stand above the ruck and look dispassionately at the annals of human behavior. Such a view conformed precisely to the centuries-old view of the elite that ordinary people were ruled by emotion and only the wealthy and educated could transcend this state and achieve disinterested rationality. Pitted against this thoroughly dominant group was a small number of women, African Americans, and people of blue collar background such as Harold Rugg who worked to create alternative histories.

As the GI bill opened the doors of higher education to broad masses of Americans after World War II and white male control of the history profession began to break up, the outcry against newcomers to the profession quickly arose. The Chairman of the Department of History at Yale complained in 1957 that "far too few of our history candidates are sons of professional men; far too many list their parents' occupation as janitor, watchman, salesman, grocer, pocketbook cutter, bookkeeper, railroad clerk, pharmacist, clothing cutter, cable tester, mechanic, general clerk, butter-and-egg jobber, and the like."(25) In 1962, the old-school Carl Bridenbaugh, president of the American Historical Association, lamented "The Great Mutation" that was undermining the profession. "Many of the younger practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices, are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions."(26)

The cultural elite deplored by Gingrich is in fact liberally sprinkled with elite-breakers: women, people of color, the sons and daughters of working-class Americans, and sturdy middle-class middle Americans. It is their work in social history that has leavened the traditional emphasis on male- and elite-centered political and institutional history. It is not surprising that these scholars have posed new questions about the past - questions that never occurred to a narrowly constituted group of historians. The emphasis on conflict rather than consensus, on racism and exploitation, on history from the bottom up rather than the top down, on women as well as men, is entirely understandable. What could be more appropriate in a democracy than that the property in history should be distributed, that a multivocal reading of the past should emerge, that Plato's dictum that "those who tell the stories also hold the power" should be reformulated to say "when the power is widely shared, the stories will be multifarious."

Is social history then a part of the "culture of irresponsibility"? One would be hard put to imagine why it would be in the interest of historians - or other Americans who "teach Americans about America" - to foster irresponsibility. To the contrary, social historians believe that recapturing parts of the American past about which we have suffered bad cases of historical amnesia promises to promote greater unity among Americans. Will not African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans be more likely to feel less alienated from the American past when they see the struggles and contributions of their own predecessors in the way the nation developed? Will not that benefit all Americans who believe in e pluribus unum?

The attention to social history over recent decades has no doubt raised new questions, not the least of which is the problem of developing master narratives to take the place of the narrowly constructed and distorted mega-stories of the past. Critics see the new history of women, laboring people, religious and racial minorities producing a hopelessly chaotic version of the past in which no grand synthesis, overarching themes, or coherent structure is visible. This is the lamented triumph of pluribus without unum. But it needs to be remembered that the old coherence and the old overarching themes were those derived from studying mostly the experiences of much less than the whole of the American people and from grounding the megahistorical constructs nearly exclusively in the Western experience. The contribution of social history is to show that the overarching themes and grand syntheses promulgated by past historians will not hold up when we broaden our perspectives to include the history of all the people who constituted American society. If the rise of women's history or African American history or labor history has created a crisis, we must ask "whose crisis"? The crisis, in fact, is in the minds of those whose monopolistic hold on the property of history has been shattered.

Joan Wallach Scott has proposed that social history is being attacked because it "has exposed the politics by which one particular viewpoint established its predominance."(27) Equally threatening, the rise of social history has ended forever any single interpretation or completely unified picture of American history - or, for that matter, of any national history. By showing that many sets of Americans have experienced a particular era or movement in starkly different ways, social historians have exposed labels such as "The Jacksonian Age of the Common Man," the "Westward Movement," the "Progressive Era," or the post-1945 "Affluent Society" as the telltale labels of a narrowly conceived history. It is not new for historians to argue over a particular movement or era. For decades they have vigorously debated whether the American Revolution was radical or conservative; whether slavery was profitable or not; whether Progressivism was deeply reformist or a bandaid covering the scars of industrial capitalism. But these arguments took place within certain conceptually defined spaces where race and gender - and often class - were hardly regarded as usable categories.

The deepest threat of the new social history has been that it raises the specter of a society that never was seamlessly unified, never had an entirely common cultural standard, and never fully agreed upon what it means to be an American. Constance O'Rourke, in her classic study of American Humor: A Study of National Character, tried to define homo Americanus, but the best she could do was to say this sub-species was part Yankee, part backwoodsman, part Indian, and part African American. Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and a host of others argued memorably about this at the beginning of this century. We will be arguing it out for a good long time, and those who fear this continuing debate offer only the remedy of imposing their own view of American culture, quite undemocratically, on those who beg to differ.

How dyspeptic conservative critics of social history can become can be seen in the recent attacks on a revision of Todd and Curti's The American Nation - for years the bestselling high school textbook in American history. When Paul Boyer, an eminent historian at the University of Wisconsin, wove into the much-beloved textbook some of the threads of women's history, labor history, African American history, and other new material that illuminates the historical experience and contributions of ordinary Americans, he was incorporating the scholarship of hundreds of accomplished historians working in the last few decades. Remarkably similar to the attacks on David Muzzey's textbooks in the 1920s and Harold Rugg's textbooks in the 1930s, John Leo, in the U.S. News and World Report, and Gilbert Sewall in the Wall Street Journal, could see no benefit at all to a more inclusive account of those whose histories have been ignored or distorted in the past. For Sewall, who runs a one-man American Textbook Council, this was simply the "triumph of textbook trendiness," "affirmative action history," "revisionist folly," and multiculturalism forced upon publishers by "pressure groups." Boyer replied properly that Sewall's "ideologically driven broadside" presented "a grotesquely distorted caricature of a carefully planned, meticulously edited work ... [that] preserves the strengths of the original [textbook] while incorporating the best of recent scholarship.... " Similarly, he lamented Leo's scornful attack on the inclusion of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the American Revolution. After all, these three groups represented a majority of all the people involved in the war, but for Leo this treatment of huge parts of society is simply an exercise in a "balkanized view of America." "What's next ?" queries Leo. "Maybe describe the impact of the Los Angeles earthquake on Polish-Americans."(28) Such disdain for some of the most important historical research of the last generation - much of it acknowledged with Pulitzer prizes and other awards - is emphatically not shared by thousands of teachers across the country who have read and are using Todd and Curti's American Nation.

The recent attacks on the new National History Standards are hardly an unprecedented phenomenon but only the latest outbreak of opposition to historical teaching and research that would challenge the traditional super-narrative. One key part of the blasts against the National History Standards brings into focus the broader indictments of social history. Social history is under attack, like the History Standards, because it is not celebratory enough. The Gingrichian prescription for the nation's ills, so far as history is concerned, is to teach a stainless steel version of history, a consensual past. Social history, in contrast, undeniably covers episodes of the American experience that cannot be absorbed into happy-face history. One of the critics' key strategies has been to portray the standards, particularly in their use of social history, as "grim and gloomy." Lynne Cheney, copied by many other conservative op-ed pundits, points to the presentations of the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism as evidence of history that is too dreary. In fact, the KKK is introduced in the U.S. History Standards in a section on the 1870s when that organization was founded and again in a section on the 1920s when the Klan became a national movement. All references to McCarthyism are presented on two pages in connection with a section on the Cold War era.

The KKK and McCarthyism are somber episodes in American history. But will not students be taught valuable lessons and indeed be uplifted by learning how most Americans put the KKK and McCarthyism behind them? This is not dismal history but dismal history overcome. Can our children endow their own offspring with the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice on which the nation is founded if they never understand that these ideals must be defended against those who would abuse or annihilate them? Is it inadmissible to say that the agenda set two centuries ago is an agenda not fully accomplished?

It will make as much sense to deny young learners access to the darker chapters of our history as to banish most of the literature that we treasure as part of our cultural achievements. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright's Native Son, Toni Morrison's Beloved, William Faulker's Absalom, Absalom, F. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and indeed nearly the entire American literary library will have to be put off-limits for youngsters if the test of their worth is measured in terms of grimness and gloominess. Likewise, we will need to hide away the works of art produced by the American regionalist painters of the 1930s: Ben Shawn, Grant Wood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and others who celebrated the endurance and strength of everyday heroes and common landscapes through bleak lenses of life (and yet with a fondness for the people who endured it). Literature and art are about triumph and tragedy, lightness and darkness, cowardice and heroism, accomplishment and failure, nobility and treachery. So is history.

The critics also fear that the History Standards, robustly infused with social history (but equally concerned with political, economic, intellectual, and religious history), will become "official knowledge," dictating new textbooks and teacher lesson plans. This assertion underestimates teachers, who are stalwartly independent and fully capable of using these voluntary guidelines as resources, not catechisms. Will publishers follow the standards slavishly? So long as competition is in fashion, this is unlikely.

But even more to the point, the Standards take an explicit stand against official forms of history. In setting forth critical thinking skills, the Standards call for students to "differentiate between historical facts and historical intepretations." They ask students to "challenge arguments of historical inevitability," to "compare competing historical narratives," to "hold historical interpretations as tentative," and to "evaluate major debates among historians." They urge students to examine historical eras, movements, and transformations from "multiple perspectives."

Such a formulation of history education presumes a never-ending interrogation of the past, where revision is as essential to collective memory as corrective eyeglasses are to restoring vision, clouded by astigmatisms, to the human eye. This is a renunciation of official history. In fact, the ultra-conservative attacks on the National History Standards implicitly call for an official history of the sort that has long been discarded. In my radio and tv debates with Lynne Cheney, she vented her special outrage that, having funded the writing of National History Standards, she received "version Y when she expected version X." I replied that she, as a federal official, could hardly expect to dictate the History Standards, which in fact were being crafted by hundreds of dedicated teachers and professional historians. History standards shaped in advance by a Big Sister in Washington approach would hardly be well received in the 16,000 school districts in the country, where democratic sensibilities are acute. Apparently, Gingrich, similarly, believes that because until 1965 "America had one continuous civilization" and that it had produced a unified, undifferentiated understanding of "what it meant to be an American," we can therefore write a standardized United States history that will last forever in the schools, never to be revised.

One of the accomplishments of social history as it has been practiced in the last generation is to nourish an inquiry-based approach to history education. Harold Rugg, insistent on tolerant inquiry and the development of supple-minded, self-realizing young Americans, would approve. Social history moves young learners farther from official history than ever before in this nation. It is precisely the multi-layered, multi-faceted social history of the last generation that has transcended semi-official versions of this country's development. The more diverse the history profession becomes, the more we will learn from the explorations of those who ask new questions and mine new sources. In the process, history education will leave our semi-official history farther and farther behind. The open question is less whether this process will occur, than whether it can involve less vituperation than that which accompanied earlier efforts such as Rugg's.

National Center for History in the Schools Los Angeles, CA 90024

ENDNOTES

1. Harold Rugg, That Men May Understand: An American in the Long Armistice (New York, 1941), pp. 176-83.

2. Ibid., pp. 186-95; Peter F. Carbone, Jr., The Social and Educational Thought of Harold Rugg (Durham, NC, 1977), pp. 16-21.

3. Rugg writes poignantly about the circumscribed life of his New England forbears and his own arid educational experience at the hands of the traditionalists who ruled the schools. "The narrow physical inheritance had produced its counterpart in the circumscribed mental horizon of the people. Life was thin and arid like the soil; norm domineered over the spirit. All social forces - home, community and education - made for acquiescence, molding my contemporaries and myself to the standards of adult life. Independence of thought was minimized; loyalty was canonized." That Men May Understand, p. 173.

4. Carbone, p. 23.

5. Though Muzzey's books were widely adopted by the early 1920s, the Red Scare patriots scorched his "treason texts" as they were called. Muzzey's vocal critics declared his books "unfit for public-school use because subversive of [the] American spirit," "grossly defamatory," "defamatory of our nation's founders" and "eminent Americans," and so forth. Rugg recounts these attacks in That Men May Understand, p. 136.

6. George H. Sabine, Arthur N. Holcombe, Arthur W. Macmahon, Carl Wittke, and Robert S. Lynd, The Textbooks of Harold Rugg (New York, 1942), p. 25.

7. Rugg's textile mill experience undoubtedly affected his sensitivity to the widening gap in wealth and the perils of industrialism. He recounts that at 18 years of age "I was plunged ... into the stark mercenariness of industrial mass production. From before dawn until after dark I stood in the din of clacking looms, shoulder to shoulder with a dozen races and nationalities from eastern and southern Europe. There I not only sensed the struggle of the 'new' immigration for a safe place on the ladder of economic life; through firsthand contact with piecework I saw the ruthlessness with which an uncontrolled industry could exact precision of skill in a world in which dividends apportioned bread ... And firsthand I was learning that immigrant families often did find it difficult to live on nine dollars a week." That Men May Understand, pp. 176-77.

8. Carbone, p. 25.

9. Ibid p. 42.

10. Harold Rugg, A History of American Civilization: Economic and Social (Boston, 1930), p. 198; Idem, Teacher's Guide for A History of American Civilization: Economic and Social (Boston, 1931), pp. 80-83.

11. Carbone, p. 11.

12. Ibid, p. 26.

13. O.A. Armstrong, "Treason in the Textbooks," American Legion Magazine 29 (September 1940): 8-9, 51, 70-72.

14. S. Alexander Rippa, Education in a Free Society: An American History, 5th ed. (New York, 1984), p. 298.

15. Time, "Book Burnings," September 9, 1940, 64-65; New York Times, June 6, 1940; August 23, 1940; November 11, 1941; Rippa, Education in a Free Society, pp. 298-99.

16. Rugg, That Men May Understand, p. 12.

17. Like so many Progressives, Rugg ignored race and race relations in his social and economic history of the United States. In a brief section on "Negro Slavery After the Revolution," Rugg quickly detailed the spread of slavery, restrictions on slaves, and slave resistance. The 3-page section ended with an account of the "many plantation-owners [who] were kind to their slaves, feeling a deep sense of responsibility for their comfort and welfare." African Americans disappear entirely from the post-Civil War sections of A History of American Civilization.

18. Quoted in Carbone, p. 28.

19. Rugg, That Men May Understand, pp. 6, 92-93.

20. "The Crusade Against Rugg," The New Republic, March 10, 1941, pp. 327-28.

21. Rugg, That Men May Understand, pp. 16, 91-92.

22. The Textbooks of Harold Rugg, pp. 4-5.

23. Excerpted from Newt Gingrich, To Renew America, in Los Angeles Times, August, 1995, E.1.

24. Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), p. 229.

25. Quoted in ibid., p. 366.

26. Carl Bridenbaugh, "The Great Mutation," American Historical Review 68 (1963): 322-28.

27. Joan W. Scott, "History in Crisis? The Others' Side of the Story," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 690.

28. Gilbert Sewall, "Triumph of Textbook Trendiness," Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1994; John Leo, "Affirmative Action History," U. S. News and World Report, March 28, 1994, p. 24; replies by Paul Boyer in Wall Street Journal, March 11, 1994, and U. S. News and World Report, April 25, 1994.