So far as I know, it was Mr. Sydney Gent Fisher, an American, who was the
first to go back to the original documents, and to write from study of
these documents the complete truth about England and ourselves during the
Revolution. His admirable book tore off the cloak which our school
histories had wrapped round the fables. He lays bare the political state
of Britain at that time. What did you learn at your school of that
political state? Did you ever wonder able General Howe and his manner of
fighting us? Did it ever strike you that, although we were more often
defeated than victorious in those engagements with him (and sometimes he
even seemed to avoid pitched battles with us when the odds were all in his
favor), yet somehow England did seem to reap the advantage she should be
reaped from those contests, didn’t follow them, let us get away, didn’t in
short make any progress to speak of in really conquering us? Perhaps you
attributed this to our brave troops and our great Washington. Well, our
troops were brave and Washington was great; but there was more behind—more
than your school teaching ever led you to suspect, if your schooling was
like mine. I imagined England as being just one whole unit of fury and
tyranny directed against us and determined to stamp out the spark of
liberty we had kindled. No such thing! England was violently divided in
sentiment about us. Two parties, almost as opposed as our North and South
have been—only it was not sectional in England—held very
different views about liberty and the rights of Englishmen. The King’s
party, George the Third and his upholders, were fighting to saddle
autocracy upon England; the other party, that of Pitt and Burke, were
resisting this, and their sentiments and political beliefs led them to
sympathize with our revolt against George III. “I rejoice,” writes Horace
Walpole, Dec. 5, 1777, to the Countess of Upper Ossory, “that the
Americans are to be free, as they had a right to be, and as I am sure they
have shown they deserve to be.... I own there are very able Englishmen
left, but they happen to be on t’other side of the Atlantic.” It was
through Whig influence that General Howe did not follow up his victories
over us, because they didn’t wish us to be conquered, they wished us to be
able to vindicate the rights to which they held all Englishmen were
entitled. These men considered us the champions of that British liberty
which George III was attempting to crush. They disputed the rightfulness
of the Stamp Act. When we refused to submit to the Stamp Tax in 1766, it
was then that Pitt exclaimed in Parliament: “I rejoice that America has
resisted.... If ever this nation should have a tyrant for a King, six
millions of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily
to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments to make slaves of the
rest.” But they were not willing. When the hour struck and the war came,
so many Englishmen were on our side that they would not enlist against us,
refused to fight us, and George III had to go to Germany and obtain
Hessians to help him out. His war against us was lost at home, on English
soil, through English disapproval of his course, almost as much as it was
lost here through the indomitable Washington and the help of France. That
is the actual state of the case, there is the truth. Did you hear much
about this at school? Did you ever learn there that George III had a fake
Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not represent the
English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy’s last ditch in
England; that it choked for a time the English democracy which, after the
setback given it by the excesses of the French Revolution, went forward
again until to-day the King of England has less power than the President
of the United States? I suppose everybody in the world who knows the
important steps of history knows this—except the average American.
From him it has been concealed by his school histories; and generally he
never learns anything about it at all, because once out of school, he
seldom studies any history again. But why, you may possibly wonder, have
our school histories done this? I think their various authors may
consciously or unconsciously have felt that our case against England was
not in truth very strong, that in fact she had been very easy with us, far
easier than any other country was being with its colonies at that time.
The King of France taxed his colonies, the King of Spain filled his purse,
unhampered, from the pockets of Mexico and Peru and Cuba and Porto Rico—from
whatever pocket into which he could put his hand, and the Dutch were doing
the same without the slightest question of their right to do it. Our
quarrel with the mother country and our breaking away from her in spite of
the extremely light rein she was driving us with, rested in reality upon
very slender justification. If ever our authors read of the meeting
between Franklin, Rutledge, and Adams with General Howe, after the Battle
of Long Island, I think they may have felt that we had almost no grievance
at all. The plain truth of it was, we had been allowed for so long to be
so nearly free that we determined to be free entirely, no matter what
England conceded. Therefore these authors of our school textbooks felt
that they needed to bolster our cause up for the benefit of the young.
Accordingly our boys’ and girls’ sense of independence and patriotism must
be nourished by making England out a far greater oppressor than ever she
really had been. These historians dwelt as heavily as they could upon
George III and his un-English autocracy, and as lightly as they could upon
the English Pitt and upon all the English sympathy we had. Indeed, about
this most of them didn’t say a word.
Now that policy may possibly have been desirable once—if it can ever
be desirable to suppress historic truth from a whole nation. But to-day,
when we have long stood on our own powerful legs and need no bolstering up
of such a kind, that policy is not only silly, it is pernicious. It is
pernicious because the world is heaving with frightful menaces to all the
good that man knows. They would strip life of every resource gathered
through centuries of struggle. Mad mobs, whole races of people who have
never thought at all, or who have now hurled away all pretense of thought,
aim at mere destruction of everything that is. They don’t attempt to offer
any substitute. Down with religion, down with education, down with
marriage, down with law, down with property: Such is their cry. Wipe the
slate blank, they say, and then we’ll see what we’ll write on it. Amid
this stands Germany with her unchanged purpose to own the earth; and Japan
is doing some thinking. Amid this also is the Anglo-Saxon race, the race
that has brought our law, our order, our safety, our freedom into the
modern world. That any school histories should hinder the members of this
race from understanding each other truly and being friends, should not be
tolerated.
Many years later than Mr. Sydney George Fisher’s analysis of England under
George III, Mr. Charles Altschul has made an examination and given an
analysis of a great number of those school textbooks wherein our boys and
girls have been and are still being taught a history of our Revolution in
the distorted form that I have briefly summarized. His book was published
in 1917, by the George H. Doran Company, New York, and is entitled The
American Revolution in our School Textbooks. Here following are some of
his discoveries:
Of forty school histories used twenty years ago in sixty-eight cities, and
in many more unreported, four tell the truth about King George’s pocket
Parliament, and thirty-two suppress it. To-day our books are not quite so
bad, but it is not very much better; and-to-day, be it added, any
reforming of these textbooks by Boards of Education is likely to be
prevented, wherever obstruction is possible, by every influence visible
and invisible that pro-German and pro-Irish propaganda can exert.
Thousands of our American school children all over our country are still
being given a version of our Revolution and the political state of England
then, which is as faulty as was George III’s government, with its fake
parliament, its “rotten boroughs,” its Little Sarum. Meanwhile that “army
of spies” through which the Kaiser boasted that he ruled “supreme” here,
and which, though he is gone, is by no means a demobilized army, but a
very busy and well-drilled and well-conducted army, is very glad that our
boys and girls should be taught false history, and will do its best to see
that they are not taught true history.
Mr. Charles Altschul, in his admirable enterprise, addressed himself to
those who preside over our school world all over the country; he received
answers from every state in the Union, and he examined ninety-three
history textbooks in those passages and pages which they devoted to our
Revolution. These books he grouped according to the amount of information
they gave about Pitt and Burke and English sympathy with us in our quarrel
with George III. These groups are five in number, and dwindle down from
group one, “Textbooks which deal fully with the grievances of the
colonists, give an account of general political conditions in England
prior to the American Revolution, and give credit to prominent Englishmen
for the services they rendered the Americans,” to group five, “Textbooks
which deal fully with the grievances of the colonists, make no reference
to general political conditions in England prior to the American
Revolution, nor to any prominent Englishmen who devoted themselves to the
cause of the Americans.” Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about
our English sympathizers. In groups three and four this is so scanty as to
distort the truth and send any boy or girl who studied books of these
groups out of school into life with a very imperfect idea indeed of the
size and importance of English opposition to the policy of George III; in
group five nothing is said about this at all. The boys and girls who
studied books in group five would grow up believing that England was
undividedly autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our liberty. In his
careful and conscientious classification, Mr. Altschul gives us the books
in use twenty years ago (and hence responsible for the opinion of
Americans now between thirty and forty years old) and books in use to-day,
and hence responsible for the opinion of those American men and women who
will presently be grown up and will prolong for another generation the
school-taught ignorance and prejudice of their fathers and mothers. I
select from Mr. Altschul’s catalogue only those books in use in 1917, when
he published his volume, and of these only group five, where the facts
about English sympathy with us are totally suppressed. Barnes’ School
History of the United States, by Steele. Chandler and Chitword’s Makers of
American History. Chambers’ (Hansell’s) A School History of the United
States. Eggleston’s A First Book in American History. Eggleston’s History
of the United States and Its People. Eg-gleston’s New Century History of
the United States. Evans’ First Lessons in Georgia History. Evans’ The
Essential Facts of American History. Estill’s Beginner’s History of Our
Country. Forman’s History of the United States. Montgomery’s An Elementary
American History. Montgomery’s The Beginner’s American History. White’s
Beginner’s History of the United States.
If the reader has followed me from the beginning, he will recollect a
letter, parts of which I quoted, from a correspondent who spoke of
Montgomery’s history, giving passages in which a fair and adequate
recognition of Pitt and our English sympathizers and their opposition to
George III is made. This would seem to indicate a revision of the work
since Mr. Altschul published his lists, and to substantiate the hope I
expressed in my original article, and which I here repeat. Surely the
publishers of these books will revise them! Surely any patriotic American
publisher and any patriotic board of education, school principal, or
educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other sinister
influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school histories!
Whatever excuse they once had, be it the explanation I have offered above,
or some other, there is no excuse to-day. These books have laid the
foundation from which has sprung the popular prejudice against England. It
has descended from father to son. It has been further solidified by many
tales for boys and girls, written by men and women who acquired their
inaccurate knowledge at our schools. And it plays straight into the hands
of our enemies.
