Murray Rothbard hated the State, but he loved America. Unfortunately, many of the “educators” in our so-called “public” schools have just the reverse values. They love the State but hate America. As I pointed out in an earlier column, the only permanent cure for this is to end public education: we must separate School and State. So long as the government controls the “public” schools, there are bound to be conflicts over what should be taught there. Only if all schooling is supplied by the free market will the problem end. In a free market, parents can get schools that supply them with the sort of education they want for their children. As Ludwig von Mises says in his great book Liberalism:
“There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions. It is better that a number of boys grow up without formal education than that they enjoy the benefit of schooling only to run the risk, once they have grown up, of being killed or maimed. A healthy illiterate is always better than a literate cripple.”
But “public” schools aren’t going to go away very soon, and in the meantime, we need to do everything we can to counter efforts to make textbooks that these students use “woke” textbooks, portraying America as evil.
Let’s look at some examples. Columbus never set foot on the North American continent, but he was celebrated as the man who opened the Americas to European settlement. The wokies want to replace this with an account that takes Columbus as a criminal and the European settlement of America as genocidal. According to educator Bill Bigelow,
“What students don’t know is that year after year their textbooks have, by omission or otherwise, been lying to them on a grand scale. Some students learned that Columbus sailed on three ships and that his sailors worried whether they would ever see land again. Others know from readings and teachers that when the Admiral landed, he was greeted by naked, reddish-skinned people whom he called Indians. And still others may know Columbus gave these people little trinkets and returned to Spain with a few of the Indians to show King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. All this is true. What is also true is that Columbus took hundreds of Indians as slaves and sent them back to Spain, where most of them were sold and subsequently died. What is also true is that in his quest for gold, Columbus had the hands cut off of any Indian who did not return with his or her three-month quota. And what is also true is that on one island alone, Hispaniola, an entire race of people was wiped off the face of the earth in a mere forty years of Spanish administration.”
The great Murray Rothbard had a different view. Writing in 1992, he said:
“And while I’m on this topic, this is the year 1992, so I am tempted to say, repeat after me: COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA! Even though a fan of diversity, the only revisionism I will permit on this topic is whether Columbus discovered America, or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci. Poor Italian-Americans! They have never been able to make it to accredited victim status. The only thing they ever got was Columbus Day. And now, they’re trying to take it away!”
What about slavery? Slavery is, of course, wrong; every person owns himself. But it does not follow from this truth that American slavery was a charnel house of brutal treatment. This is exactly what the wokies want our children to believe. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been in the forefront of these efforts. According to an article published on the Center’s website by Hasan Kwami Jeffries,
“In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals of their radical experiment in democracy; racial justice, however, was not included in that list. Instead, they embedded protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the founding document, guaranteeing inequality for generations to come. To achieve the noble aims of the nation’s architects, we the people have to eliminate racial injustice in the present. But we cannot do that until we come to terms with racial injustice in our past, beginning with slavery. It is often said that slavery was our country’s original sin, but it is much more than that. Slavery is our country’s origin. It was responsible for the growth of the American colonies, transforming them from far-flung, forgotten outposts of the British Empire to glimmering jewels in the crown of England. And slavery was a driving power behind the new nation’s territorial expansion and industrial maturation, making the United States a powerful force in the Americas and beyond.
“Slavery was also our country’s Achilles’ heel, responsible for its near undoing. When the southern states seceded, they did so expressly to preserve slavery. So wholly dependent were white Southerners on the institution that they took up arms against their own to keep African Americans in bondage. They simply could not allow a world in which they did not have absolute authority to control black labor—and to regulate black behavior. The central role that slavery played in the development of the United States is beyond dispute. And yet, we the people do not like to talk about slavery, or even think about it, much less teach it or learn it. The implications of doing so unnerve us. If the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery, then what does that say about those who revere the people who took up arms to keep African Americans in chains? If James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his entire life, refusing to free a single soul even upon his death, then what does that say about our nation’s founders? About our nation itself? Slavery is hard history. It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justifies it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it. We, the people, have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present. We, the people, would much rather have the Disney version of history, in which villains are easily spotted, suffering never lasts long, heroes invariably prevail, and life always gets better. We prefer to pick and choose what aspects of the past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning that which makes us uneasy. We enjoy thinking about Thomas Jefferson proclaiming, ‘All men are created equal.’ But we are deeply troubled by the prospect of the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, who bore him six children, declaring, ‘Me too.’ Literary performer and educator Regie Gibson had the truth of it when he said, “Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. What we love is nostalgia.’ But our antipathy for hard history is only partly responsible for this sentimental longing for a fictitious past. It is also propelled by political considerations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white Southerners looking to bolster white supremacy and justify Jim Crow reimagined the Confederacy as a defender of democracy and protector of white womanhood. To perpetuate this falsehood, they littered the country with monuments to the Lost Cause.
“Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence. We miseducate students because of it. Although we teach them that slavery happened, we fail to provide the details or historical context they need to make sense of its origin, evolution, demise, and legacy. And in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential. As a result, students lack a basic knowledge and understanding of the institution, evidenced most glaringly by their widespread inability to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. This is profoundly troubling because American slavery is the key to understanding the complexity of our past. How can we fully comprehend the original intent of the Bill of Rights without acknowledging that its author, James Madison, enslaved other people? How can we understand that foundational document without understanding that its author was well versed not only in the writings of Greek philosophers and Enlightenment thinkers but also in Virginia’s slave code? How can we ignore the influence of that code, that ‘bill of rights denied,’ which withheld from African Americans the very same civil liberties Madison sought to safeguard for white people? Our discomfort with hard history and our fondness for historical fiction also lead us to make bad public policy. We choose to ignore the fact that when slavery ended, white Southerners carried the mindsets of enslavers with them into the post-emancipation period, creating new exploitative labor arrangements such as sharecropping, new disenfranchisement mechanisms, including literacy tests, and new discriminatory social systems, namely Jim Crow. It took African Americans more than a century to eliminate these legal barriers to equality, but that has not been enough to erase race-based disparities in every aspect of American life, from education and employment to wealth and well-being. Public policies tend to treat this racial inequality as a product of poor personal decision-making, rather than acknowledging it as the result of racialized systems and structures that restrict choice and limit opportunity. Understanding American slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today. The formal and informal barriers to equal rights erected after emancipation, which defined the parameters of the color line for more than a century, were built on a foundation constructed during slavery. Our narrow understanding of the institution, however, prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of addressing the historically rooted causes of their problems.
“The intractable nature of racial inequality is a part of the tragedy that is American slavery. But the saga of slavery is not exclusively a story of despair; hard history is not hopeless history. Finding the promise and possibility within this history requires us to consider the lives of the enslaved on their own terms. Trapped in an unimaginable hell, enslaved people forged unbreakable bonds with one another. Indeed, no one knew better the meaning and importance of family and community than the enslaved. They fought back too, in the field and in the house, pushing back against enslavers in ways that ranged from feigned ignorance to flight and armed rebellion. There is no greater hope to be found in American history than in African Americans’ resistance to slavery. The Founding Fathers were visionaries, but their vision was limited. Slavery blinded them, preventing them from seeing black people as equals. We, the people, have the opportunity to broaden the founders’ vision, to make racial equality real. But we can no longer avoid the most troubling aspects of our past. We have to have the courage to teach hard history, beginning with slavery.”
The demonization of the Confederacy is especially worthy of note. As Gib Kerr, writing in The Generals' Redoubt, says:
“Should descendants of Confederates be ashamed of their ancestors or feel obligated to apologize for their past? Were all Confederates evil? Does everyone who served in the Confederacy deserve universal condemnation? The actual combatants on both sides of the Civil War did not believe so. Although hard feelings certainly lingered, most were able to bury the hatchet and work toward reconciliation in the immediate aftermath of the war. Robert E. Lee was a leading voice for such efforts. Yet the modern trend to demonize and dehumanize those who hold opposing points of view has reopened old wounds that had almost totally healed in America. When you believe that the other side is demonic or sub-human, then you feel justified (if not duty-bound) to eliminate your opponent by any means necessary. Violence, terror, and intimidation are excusable when facing the threat of evil. That mindset led to riots and hysterical protests throughout the country in the chaotic pandemic year of 2020, particularly after George Floyd’s death. Angry mobs followed Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, particularly his rule to ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.’ Robert E. Lee found himself in their crosshairs. Self-described ‘progressives’ are quick to claim the moral high ground when discussing America’s past. Many cannot concede that some of their targeted historical enemies may, in fact, have been good and decent people. The truth about Lee—that he was an honorable and virtuous man—poses a threat to progressives’ presumed monopoly on virtue. The causes of the Civil War and the motives for each side to fight will be debated till the cows come home. While we can all agree that slavery was ‘a moral and political evil’ (to quote Lee), most reasonable people will also agree that slavery was not the primary motivation for many (or most) of the combatants to fight. It was clearly not what motivated Lee to fight.”
Let’s do everything we can to reverse the wokies’ capture of school textbooks and to promote genuine knowledge of American history!
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