Much else is there that it were well they should ponder, and I am coming
to it presently; but first, one suggestion. Most of us, if we dig back
only fifty or sixty or seventy years, can disinter various relatives
over whose doings we should prefer to glide lightly and in silence.
Do you mean to say that you have none? Nobody stained with any shade
of dishonor? No grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc.
grandfather or grandmother who ever made a scandal, broke a heart, or
betrayed a trust? Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot right back to
Adam and Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous? How fortunate to
be sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels--and to know
all about them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen
heir!
But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has
every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and
vice, of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably
amidst the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are
to be found.
As it is with men, so it is with nations. Do you imagine that any nation
has a spotless history? Do you think that you can peer into our past,
turn over the back pages of our record, and never come upon a single
blot? Indeed you cannot. And it is better--a great deal better--that you
should be aware of these blots. Such knowledge may enlighten you, may
make you a better American. What we need is to be critics of ourselves,
and this is exactly what we have been taught not to be.
We are quite good enough to look straight at ourselves. Owing to one
thing and another we are cleaner, honester, humaner, and whiter than
any people on the continent of Europe. If any nation on the continent of
Europe has ever behaved with the generosity and magnanimity that we have
shown to Cuba, I have yet to learn of it. They jeered at us about Cuba,
did the Europeans of the continent. Their papers stuck their tongues in
their cheeks. Of course our fine sentiments were all sham, they said.
Of course we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had intended anything
else. And when General Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having made
Havana healthy, having brought order out of chaos on the island, and we
left Cuba independent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe!
Again, in 1909, it was not any European nation that returned to China
their share of the indemnity exacted in consequence of the Boxer
troubles; we alone returned our share to China--sixteen millions. It was
we who prevented levying a punitive indemnity on China. Read the whole
story; there is much more. We played the gentleman, Europe played the
bully. But Europe calls us “dollar chasers.” That dear old Europe!
Again, if any conquering General on the continent of Europe ever behaved
as Grant did to Lee at Appomattox, his name has escaped me.
Again, and lastly--though I am not attempting to tell you here the whole
tale of our decencies: Whose hands came away cleanest from that Peace
Conference in Paris lately? What did we ask for ourselves? Everything
we asked, save some repairs of damage, was for other people. Oh, yes! we
are quite good enough to keep quiet about these things. No need whatever
to brag. Bragging, moreover, inclines the listener to suspect you’re not
so remarkable as you sound.
But all this virtue doesn’t in the least alter the fact that we’re like
everybody else in having some dirty pages in our History. These pages it
is a foolish mistake to conceal. I suppose that the school histories
of every nation are partly bad. I imagine that most of them implant the
germ of international hatred in the boys and girls who have to study
them. Nations do not like each other, never have liked each other;
and it may very well be that school textbooks help this inclination to
dislike. Certainly we know what contempt and hatred for other nations
the Germans have been sedulously taught in their schools, and how
utterly they believed their teaching. How much better and wiser for the
whole world if all the boys and girls in all the schools everywhere
were henceforth to be started in life with a just and true notion of all
flags and the peoples over whom they fly! The League of Nations might
not then rest upon the quicksand of distrust and antagonism which it
rests upon today. But it is our own school histories that are my present
concern, and I repeat my opinion--or rather my conviction--that the way
in which they have concealed the truth from us is worse than silly,
it is harmful. I am not going to take up the whole list of their
misrepresentations, I will put but one or two questions to you.
When you finished school, what idea had you about the War of 1812?
I will tell you what mine was. I thought we had gone to war because
England was stopping American ships and taking American sailors out of
them for her own service. I could refer to Perry’s victory on Lake Erie
and Jackson’s smashing of the British at New Orleans; the name of the
frigate Constitution sent thrills through me. And we had pounded old
John Bull and sent him to the right about a second time! Such was my
glorious idea, and there it stopped. Did you know much more than that
about it when your schooling was done? Did you know that our reasons for
declaring war against Great Britain in 1812 were not so strong as they
had been three and four years earlier? That during those years England
had moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate further, had placated
us for her brutal performance concerning the Chesapeake, wanted peace;
while we, who had been nearly unanimous for war, and with a fuller
purse in 1808, were now, by our own congressional fuddling and messing,
without any adequate army, and so divided in counsel that only one
northern state was wholly in favor of war? Did you know that our General
Hull began by invading Canada from Detroit and surrendered his whole
army without firing a shot? That the British overran Michigan and parts
of Ohio, and western New York, while we retreated disgracefully? That
though we shone in victories of single combat on the sea and showed the
English that we too knew how to sail and fight on the waves as hardily
as Britannia (we won eleven out of thirteen of the frigate and sloop
actions), nevertheless she caught us or blocked us up, and rioted
unchecked along our coasts? You probably did know that the British
burned Washington, and you accordingly hated them for this barbarous
vandalism--but did you know that we had burned Toronto a year earlier?
I left school knowing none of this--it wasn’t in my school book, and
I learned it in mature years with amazement. I then learned also that
England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting
Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, and that this was
uncommonly lucky for us--as lucky quite as those ships from France under
Admiral de Grasse, without whose help Washington could never have caught
Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781.
Did you know that there were more French soldiers and sailors than
Americans at Yorktown? Is it well to keep these things from the young?
I have not done with the War of 1812. There is a political aspect of
it that I shall later touch upon--something that my school books never
mentioned.
My next question is, what did you know about the Mexican War of
1846-1847, when you came out of school? The names of our victories,
I presume, and of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott; and possibly the
treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby Mexico ceded to us the whole
of Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, and we paid her fifteen
millions. No doubt you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General, had
a wooden leg. Well, there is more to know than that, and I found it out
much later. I found out that General Grant, who had fought with
credit as a lieutenant in the Mexican War, briefly summarized it as
“iniquitous.” I gradually, through my reading as a man, learned the
truth about the Mexican War which had not been taught me as a boy--that
in that war we bullied a weaker power, that we made her our victim, that
the whole discreditable business had the extension of slavery at the
bottom of it, and that more Americans were against it than had been
against the War of 1812. But how many Americans ever learn these things?
Do not most of them, upon leaving school, leave history also behind
them, and become farmers, or merchants, or plumbers, or firemen, or
carpenters, or whatever, and read little but the morning paper for the
rest of their lives?
The blackest page in our history would take a long while to read. Not a
word of it did I ever see in my school textbooks. They were written on
the plan that America could do no wrong. I repeat that, just as we love
our friends in spite of their faults, and all the more intelligently
because we know these faults, so our love of our country would be just
as strong, and far more intelligent, were we honestly and wisely taught
in our early years those acts and policies of hers wherein she fell
below her lofty and humane ideals. Her character and her record on the
whole from the beginning are fine enough to allow the shadows to throw
the sunlight into relief. To have produced at three stages of our
growth three such men as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, is quite
sufficient justification for our existence