A Comment on James W. Loewen's LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Paperback)

I am copying this from Amazon comments on the paperback.

Today I received the routine Amazon invitation to review LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME because I had bought it. I have been brooding about the book for the last weeks, so I can write at least a short hasty personal response to a chapter that happened to fall open when I took up the book. It may not be typical of what Loewen does in other chapters.

When my paperback copy of LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME arrived it fell open to 172-173--and stayed open, for it is a surprisingly well-bound book, for a paperback, a book easy to use. I read on 173 that in the mid-1850s slaveholders from Missouri had established "a reign of terror" to drive free-soil farmers out of Kansas. In May 1856, I read, "hundreds of proslavery 'border ruffians'" raided free-soil Lawrence, "burning down the hotel and destroying two printing presses." Loewen quotes an old textbook on the retaliation: "a militant abolitionist named John Brown led a midnight attack on the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie. Five people were killed by Brown and his followers." That's all I see about the killings at Pottawatomie at that point. Loewen goes on to focus on whether or not Brown was crazy in 1859, when he led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in which five "people" were killed. Rather than being crazy, Loewen thinks, "Brown provided the nation graceful instruction in how to face death." He raises the possibility that textbooks "should not portray this murderer as a hero," "murderer" only in reference to those killed at Harper's Ferry. Later Loewen explains that previous textbooks have told what Brown did at Pottawatomie, "where he was the attacker," and make it seem that "Brown's Pottawatomie killings" were "unmotivated." I kept looking in Loewen for a full account of what Brown did at Pottawatomie and did not find it.

Does it matter what happened at Pottawatomie? It mattered to me when I was editing Thoreau selections for the first edition of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE even while Nixon was still drawing out the war in Viet Nam. I put Thoreau's most radical essays into the first edition (1979), and kept them in as long as teachers did not demand that they be excluded as irrelevant to their teaching plans. I wanted the selections to show the consistency or inconsistency in Thoreau's attitudes toward how he could change society. I wanted to know how much he and the other Concord abolitionists knew about Pottawatomie, and in those years before newspaper databases spent some weeks looking for accounts of Pottawatomie. I wanted to know what Thoreau was willing to ignore or justify as he wrote his plea for Captain John Brown. I was particularly interested in showing whether or not he was ever willing to let someone else vote his proxy.

In the first edition of NAAL (1979) I gave this account of the background out of which Brown "assumed near-mythic dimensions in the American consciousness as madman-saint": "In May, 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek, John Brown routed five men and boys out of their cabins by night and murdered them in cold blood. Kansans knew who led the massacre, but news reached the rest of the nation in imperfect form and was played down by papers sympathetic to the antislavery forces. When Brown went east in 1857, 1858, and 1859, acquaintances of Emerson and Thoreau supplied him with money for guns. Probably ignorant of Pottawatomie (Brown's guilt was suppressed until 1879), Thoreau easily justified the Harpers Ferry raid." In the second edition (1985) I changed "Probably" to "Possibly" on the basis of more research in newspapers and after consulting the best Thoreau experts. Thoreau probably knew and probably was willing to overlook those murders because Brown was a hero to him, a man willing to act on principle. In his "Plea" Thoreau demanded: "Do the thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane?" I don't see how you can teach Thoreau powerfully unless you grapple with Brown's ordering his sons and others to hack men (and one boy?) to death with sabres or machetes. All this you find on Google now and can probably find more in some newspaper databases, although a quick look at America's Historical Newspapers database was unproductive just now. Fultonhistory.com? The Gale site?

What did Thoreau know and when did he know it? And does it matter for how we see his life and ideas? Focusing on Pottawatomie as well as on Harpers Ferry is a powerful way of teaching the essential Thoreau. Should we read the rapturous "A Plea for Captain John Brown" as the near-hysteria of one who had not acted boldly, himself, although he had one spent a night in jail? Is "A Plea for Captain John Brown" nearly insane? Idealistic people can go crazy from living in prolonged, unwilling complicity to evil, as many now-PC folks may feel they came close to doing, or actually did, during the Viet Nam years, during Watergate, during, they might say, Reagan's systematic deregulation, or during the presidency of the second Bush. Under the prolonged horror of living in a slave society did Thoreau stop being Thoreau, who would never, in his early years, have let someone else vote his proxy? In 1859 was Thoreau a hero in the light of his own early principles?

Years later, in 1997, while Captain Paul Watson was in a Dutch jail fighting extradition to Norway (on charges interestingly hard to pin down, using Google), I put on reserve copies of Watson's OCEAN WARRIOR and EARTH WARRIOR and asked students to decide if Thoreau in supporting Brown unconditionally was acting in a Thoreauvian manner. Is Paul Watson now being more Thoreauvian than the late Thoreau who was increasingly weakened by tuberculosis and willing to rely on others to act out his principles? Watson was soon freed from the Dutch jail. Years later he survived my feeding him sourdough blueberry pancakes and now is fighting the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic to at least a temporary standstill. A hero. When Bob Barker gives him big money to carry on the crusade against whaling, is Barker, like the late Thoreau, letting someone else vote his proxy? Are those of us who send the Sea Shepherd society a little money letting Paul Watson vote our consciences when we might more actively be fighting Japanese whaling ourselves on the STEVE IRWIN or through safer means, since we know that the Japanese are slaughtering whales for their meat, certainly not for "research" on the habits of whales? A student can be powerfully challenged to read Thoreau in the light of Watson or other obsessed, dedicated or even fanatical heroes who value their lives less than their causes.

Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry give teachers a chance to weigh momentous issues. Thoreau's "A Plea for Captain John Brown" can provide "teaching moments" that transform students' lives--but only if history is honestly taught. Loewen is so anxious to make Brown an American saint, as Thoreau did, that he suppresses history at least in this instance. Granted, news of Pottawatomie was suppressed in 1856, although information was out in at least one major eastern newspaper, I found, before being systematically suppressed for many years (apparently, Google confirms, until 1879). Untold stories, suppressed stories, dangerous stories, moral ambiguities--they all ought to be part of any book called LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME.