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.