Category Archives: American History

Newt Wants to Be Your President

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Un-bee-lee-va-bull:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich twice called on the United States to attack North Korea and Iran Thursday because the United States has only attacked “one out of three” of so-called “Axis of Evil” members by invading Iraq. He also claimed that Muslims are trying to install Sharia law on America and said that the “War on Terror” should have been a war on “radical Islamists” instead.

Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute event yesterday, Gingrich compared not following through on President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” agenda with not fully engaging the Axis power in World War II.

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ’41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said, adding that Americans should “over-match the problem.”

Newt, who allegedly has a degree in history, doesn’t notice that FDR did not “fully engage the Axis power” in World War II until after Pearl Harbor and after Germany had declared war on the U.S. Before that, Germany had already bombed Britain and invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The destroyer U.S.S. Ruben James had been sunk by a U-boat attack weeks before Pearl Harbor. But the U.S. officially was neutral until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The United States under Franklin Roosevelt did not enter the war until the war was brought to us.

So no, Newt, history does not tell us that Roosevelt would have attacked Iran and North Korea just because it was on his to-do list.

Also, Newt continues to spout inane and hateful drool about the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” the Islamic center that would not actually be a mosque and would not even be visible from “Ground Zero.”

According to Nate Silver, Newt’s biggest obstacle to the Republican nomination in 2012 is Sarah Palin. This is because the two of them appeal to the same demographic slice of the conservative base, but that slice likes Palin better than Gingrich. So maybe he thinks that to have a shot at the White House he has to out-Palin Palin. Otherwise, if that’s what he really thinks, someone should adjust his meds.

The Constitutional Anchor Baby Crisis

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A few days ago Rand Paul expounded on the “anchor baby” crisis. Anchor babies are, of course, babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. The babies are citizens by virtue of their birth, and this infuriates righties. In recent years Republican lawmakers have been promoting a bill that would deny citizenship to such babies. Mind you, this is coming from some of the same people who want to extend citizenship to frozen embryos.

Yesterday, in an entirely different context, Jeffrey Goldberg quoted the Babylonian Talmud: “Who is wise? The one who can foresee consequences.” That may become my new favorite saying. Applied to the citizenship question — like it or not, the 14th Amendment gave us a clear, bright line regarding citizenship:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I can see all kinds of unfortunate consequences of making that clear, bright line fuzzier and darker. Leave well enough alone, I say.

Now, most legal experts say that because of the 14th Amendment, Congress does not have the power to deny citizenship to so-called “anchor babies.” Doing this would require a constitutional amendment. But righties are arguing no, because the 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says. This argument was presented by none other than George Will a few days ago, and it is a tortured argument, indeed. But when I read Will’s column I didn’t have the time to research what he was saying to see if it could hold mayonnaise, never mind water.

But lo, yesterday, while researching something else entirely, I ran into a discussion of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) (see also Wikipedia discussion of Wong). Wong Kim Ark was a man born in the United States of ethnic Chinese parents. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. You probably remember that this barred anyone of the Chinese “race” from entering the U.S., and it denied citizenship to ethnic Chinese people already in the U.S. Wong challenged this law, and in a 6-2 decision the Supreme Court agreed with Wong, and said he was a citizen of the United States by virtue of being born here. And it seems to me there’s a made-for-television movie script in there somewhere.

Anyway, as I read about the Wong decision I realized that the dissenting argument in the Wong case is exactly the same argument being made today by Will and the Republican lawmakers.

The dissent was based on an interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Will and the two SCOTUS dissenters (John Harlan and Melville Fuller) say this phrase means “and not subject to any foreign power.” In their dissent of Wong, Harlan and Fuller point out that native Americans were (at the time) not citizens of the U.S. because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 had given citizenship to “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”

This act became law just two months before the 14th Amendment was proposed. So, the argument is, this wording gives us insight into where lawmakers’ heads were at the time. And thus, if the parents are subjects of a foreign power, then their baby born in the U.S. is not eligible for citizenship. This was the dissenting opinion in Wong in 1898, and Will repeated this same argument in his Washington Post column. Will doesn’t bother discussing that pesky Wong majority opinion, however.

Will argues further,

What was this [the jurisdiction phrase] intended or understood to mean by those who wrote it in 1866 and ratified it in 1868? The authors and ratifiers could not have intended birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants because in 1868 there were and never had been any illegal immigrants because no law ever had restricted immigration.

As far as I know, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first attempt to render any sort of immigration illegal, and it didn’t become law until 1882. Congress had passed an earlier version of the exclusion act in 1878, but this was vetoed by President Hayes. But the Wong majority decision says plainly that an act of Congress making Chinese immigration illegal, and denying citizenship status to ethnic Chinese, did not override the clear language of the 14th Amendment.

So, whether Will and the Republican lawmakers like it or not, SCOTUS already nixed their argument.

The majority opinion in Wong is based partly on English common law, which said that babies born in England are English, with the exception of the children of diplomats and children born to hostile forces occupying English territory.

In addition, at the time native American tribes were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction and were therefore not citizens. Another case decided in 1884 (Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94) had declared that a native American who left his tribe and went to live in a white community didn’t automatically get citizenship, although he could be considered a citizen if he went through whatever naturalization process existed at the time and paid taxes.

Will leans heavily on the example of non-citizen native Americans to argue that the 14th Amendment was not intended to confer citizenship to babies of foreigners who happened to be in the U.S. at the time. But the Elk decision (which Will doesn’t mention, either) did not consider Indian tribes to be foreign states. A tribe was an alien political entity which Congress dealt with through treaties, but not the same thing as a foreign nation.

So, it seems to me the Wong decision — the majority opinion, anyway — more closely speaks to the circumstance of babies born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants than does the Elk decision. And I think I just blew by nerd blogging quotient for the day.

Update: Read more about Wong Kim Ark in “The Progeny of Citizen Wong.”

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Moonshine

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Reviving a practice begun by George “Macaca” Allen in 1995, and suspended by Allen’s two Democratic successors, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has April Confederate History Month. Thus, a formerly sleeping pup is now awake and howling.

The continued glorification of the Lost Cause by southern whites is perplexing to damnyankees, so let me explain it. Essentially, it’s all about stoking a cherished sense of righteous and glorious victimhood.

For example, white southerners still call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression” even though South Carolina started it by firing on the federal military garrison at Fort Sumter. Sumter and the sandbar on which is was built were federal territory and not part of the “soil” of South Carolina, even if it was in Charleston Harbor. South Carolina besieged Sumter and dared Abraham Lincoln to re-supply it before the troops in Sumter surrendered or starved to death. The latter possibility was looming when Lincoln sent re-supply ships, and then the South Carolinians called it an invasion and fired.

Then, having started the war, they whined ever since about “northern aggression.” Sounds a lot like our modern-day wingnuts. Nothing is ever their fault.

I’m not sure when they decided the war wasn’t really about slavery, but of course that’s a crock. The Confederacy existed only to protect the institution of slavery. It was THE issue that motivated the secessionists to secede.

After the war it was not long at all before the former plantation class was back in power in the South, brutally oppressing the black population and hoarding most of the region’s wealth, but somehow the South put over a revisionist version of Reconstruction history about how they were all picked on by those awful carpetbaggers.

That said, I’d be all for a “Confederate History Month” if it pushed an honest version of history rather than the highly fictional “moonlight and magnolias” romance that much of the white South still believes.

On the “Mount Vernon Statement”

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The conservative “old guard” has released a political manifesto called the “Mount Vernon Statement,” which to me is a textbook example of what happens when people ignorant of history attempt to interpret a historical document. Or, in this case, it’s possibly not so much that they are ignorant of history but that they are incapable of thinking outside their ideology box.

This ideological myopia creates howlers such as the claim the Founding Fathers were vitally concerned with “economic reforms grounded in market solutions.” I don’t think so. The Founders lived in the dawn of the age of industrial capitalism, but I’ve never noticed that they were much influenced by industrial-capitalist thought. Most of them were old-money Agrarian Age aristocrats, remember.

Indeed, if you think about it, the whole idea of naming a [free-market] manifesto after Mount Vernon — a bleeping slave plantation when George Washington lived there — reveals their aversion to actual history as opposed to symbolism and allegory (see the previous Mahablog post).

Another oddity noted by Jack Balkin — the word equality does not appear anywhere in the Mount Vernon statement. “It is hard to speak of fidelity to the Declaration and to the Constitution without once mentioning equality as a central value behind the Declaration and the Constitution,” he says, with profound understatement. “The Declaration’s most famous passage announces the self-evident truth is that all men are created equal.” Today’s Mount Vernon crew do bring up the Declaration, but only so they could work in a mention of God, who is inconveniently missing from the Constitution itself (courtesy of the “godless liberals” who wrote it).

Another anachronism — the Mount Vernon crew claims the Constitution “supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.” Um, where is the “opposing tyranny in the world” clause?

The first statement in the document that set off alarm bells for me came in the first paragraph —

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding. Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

The Constitution was indeed created to maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government. However, today’s movement conservatism does not believe in “republican self-government.” In the article by Michael Lind I discussed in the previous post, Lind wrote,

Likewise, the idea of popular sovereignty, though it dates back to John Locke in the 17th century, need not inspire reactionary reverence for existing institutions, much less a desire to restore an alleged golden age. On the contrary, the sovereign people have the right to remake their political and social order every generation or two, in order to achieve their perennial goals in changing conditions.

This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said in his Second Annual Message to Congress: “As our case is new, we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.” And it was the view of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 in his Commonwealth Club Address: “Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demand that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract.”

At the high level of public philosophy, the debate between the tea party right and progressives boils down to this: Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?

To put it another way: The American Revolution was a beginning, not an end. The real equivalents today of the American revolutionaries are those who view the republic, not as an 18th-century utopia to be restored with archaeological exactitude, but as a work in progress to which every generation of Americans can contribute.

The conservative idea of “republican self-government” makes the Constitution into a straightjacket, taking away the ability of We, the People to use government to address our concerns, as opposed to the concerns of 1787. Government is an active thing. Government in any form is assessing changing conditions and making decisions based on current needs and available resources.

Since Reagan, however, conservatives have slapped the hands of anyone who actually wants to practice “republican self-government.” Government is supposed to be drowned in the bathtub and replaced by corporate oligarchy.

Come to think of it, maybe they hadn’t forgotten Mount Vernon was a slave plantation.

Anyway, it should be noted that the tea partiers are way underwhelmed. “Old school movement conservative leaders have ceased to be relevant in any meaningful way,” one wrote. The tea partiers are writing their own manifesto, called the “Contract From America.” And yes, that old school movement conservative and old whore Newt Gingrich saw this movement and managed to position himself in front of it. (This is all linked on the tea partier site, which is set up so that you can’t link to individual items on it. Not user-friendly.)

The tea partiers want specifics, apparently, and not mushy bromides, which suggests they haven’t entirely given up on “republican self-government” even if the solutions they favor are grotesquely wrong-headed. Credit where credit is due.

Memory Lapses

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The ever mildly annoying Ann Althouse criticizes President Obama for being on vacation in Hawaii while the nation suffered a terrorist attack. And even as you read this, I’m sure some of you are thinking of the last President, who was nearly always on vacation when anything significant happened. Well, Bush was nearly always on vacation, in Washington or out of it.

But that’s not what really inspired me to write. One of the commenters wrote,

Being President of democratic republic isn’t much fun.

Insty linked to a NY Post story citing how dissatisfying Obama finds our form of government, when tyrannies clearly make the trains run so much better.

In a similar vein, FDR’s acolytes thought wistfully of Hitler and Mussolini, at least until the bullets and ashes started to fill the sky.

The link goes to a Charles Hurt column in the New York Post titled “O Rips the American Way.” Wow, it’s hard to imagine an American president expressing a preference for a dictatorship, huh? Oh, wait …

In fact, Hurt doesn’t quote President Obama saying anything bad about our great Republic. The President was discussing the current malfunction in the Senate, which is a genuine concern outside of Wingnuttia.

But what really astonished me was the bit about “FDR’s acolytes thought wistfully of Hitler and Mussolini, at least until the bullets and ashes started to fill the sky.” Here in the Matrix of Objectively Verifiable Facts, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did its best to oppose fascism in Europe in spite of much public sentiment to the contrary. FDR opposed Hitler from the beginning of his administration. Before Pearl Harbor he already was doing as much as he could for America’s future allies, in particular Britain. He pushed through the lend-lease program, for example.

No, it was the conservatives of the 1930s who thought Hitler and Mussolini were swell guys with whom America could do business.

Yet we are not quite done in the memory lapse department. Another blogger — I’m guessing he’s a libertarian, but his blogroll doesn’t give away a partisan orientation — defended President Obama and said it was silly to think the President’s being in Hawaii instead of DC while some guy tried to blow up a plane flying over Michigan made any difference to anything. Of course not. But then he said,

The greatest President in American history was inaugurated on August 2, 1923. He was woken up after the death of his predecessor, strolled downstairs, took the oath of office, and went back to bed. Would that we understood today how to behave as the chief bureaucrat of the central public goods administration.

To which I had two reactions — one, what the hell is the “central goods administration”? And two, — OMG, he’s talking about Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge let the country rot and prepared the way for the Great Depression.

If it’s true that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana), we’re in trouble.

December 7, 2009

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Nice Column by James Carroll at the Boston Globe —

Bloody as the battles [of World War II] were, the enemy was readily identified, and definitions of victory and defeat were clear.

Not so after 9/11. Instead of battleships and aircraft carriers, the real danger comes from variations on box cutters and explosive charges hidden in shoes. The revelation is that such small bore threat can frighten a nation as much as an armada. After Pearl Harbor, the scale and meaning of mobilization was crystal clear. After 9/11, with our futile, misdirected, ongoing wars of vengeance, which lay nary a glove on Al Qaeda, the mobilization has mainly been against ourselves.

See also “Pearl Harbor mini-submarine mystery solved?”

How Dangerous Is the Wingnut Right?

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Paul Krugman brings up Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in his column today, noting that much of what Hofstadter wrote about the far Right in 1964 sounds just like the far Right of 2009. The biggest difference, Krugman says, is that in 1964 both parties rejected the wingnuts. It was Ronald Reagan who began to cater to them and gave them a foot in the door, and Republican politicians began to win elections by stirring up the wingnuts. I have some quibbles with that analysis, but let’s skip that for now.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

Pretty much what Thomas Franks wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas?

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

In Wingnut Lore, “Republican elites” have joined the ranks of the “Liberal Elite” as betrayers of American values.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Newt’s political career is long over; only he and Big Media don’t seem to know that. He still has some uses as a shill for corporate interests, which makes corporate media take him seriously. But he has no actual following among the plebes that I can see.

But I want to go back to the history of the Republican Party and its relationship to right-wing whackjobs. It’s not entirely accurate to say that the GOP rejected wingnuts until Reagan. Much of the Red-baiting of the 1950s and 1960s amounted to a shout-out to wingnuts. During the height of Joe McCarthy’s Reign of Terror, for example, ca. 1952, many GOP leaders publicly supported and encouraged him. However, it was also a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who helped orchestrate his demise.

A great deal of today’s political landscape also was determined by the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Every facet of conservatism was opposed to civil rights for racial minorities in those days, and part of the pushback came in the form of connecting civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King to the Communist Conspiracy. Some libertarians today still try to make that connection.

Barry Goldwater flirted with the whackjobs in his failed presidential bid in 1964. Richard Nixon, a master Red-Baiter in his prime, also played a role. To counteract news stories that made Tricky Dick look bad, the Nixon Administration created the myth of the liberal media that gave wingnuts permission to ignore any news they don’t like as “media bias.” This in turn paved the way for manufactured news from the Wingnut Alternative Reality to be given the same weight and respect as accounts of stuff that actually happened.

So what we saw from the end of World War II to today was a process by which the extreme Right created its own mythical narrative (beginning with “stabbed n the back” at Yalta). At the same time, the authority of news media — an Edward R. Murrow; a Walter Cronkite — to set the record straight was undermined. And a big chunk of the American public became putty in the hands of unscrupulous demagogues.

Krugman continues,

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

This is essentially true, although we could argue how much anyone in the Bush II administration cared about governing, as opposed to looking out for the interests of the financial and defense industry sectors.

Krugman’s concern is that the poor economy and high unemployment could help Republicans take back many seats in Congress next year. Republicans can stomp around staying that President Obama’s big-spending stimulus failed. The irony is that it fell short largely because Obama watered it down to please Republicans, but good luck getting that message out past the Wingnut Noise Machine.

Krugman concludes,

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The U.S. has been nearly ungovernable for some time, thanks to the Right, but I agree there is some room for matters to get worse.

A Thought Experiment

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At the Boston Globe, James Carroll has a very thoughtful column on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You might remember that the Hiroshima bombing occurred 64 years ago this week. Carroll does not defend the bombings — in his words, they were “a mistake and a crime” — but he acknowledges that people who were adults in 1945 saw the bombings very differently from those of us who know them from history books. However, he says that “To firmly regret atomic use in the past is to invite absolute renunciation of nuclear weapons in the present and future.” Firm regret is an imperative.

Within the spirit of firm regret I’d also like to see a little more — well, actually, a lot more — humility across the board regarding the bombings. Living memory of World War II is fading, and it’s unrealistic to expect people who have firmly held a point of view for many years to change it. But I think it would be very useful for those of us who came along later to be able to acknowledge that the decision to bomb Hiroshima was not as simple at the time as it seems to most of us today.

Please let me be clear that I am not defending the dropping of the bomb. However, I think if we could put ourselves in the places of the decision-makers of 1945 — knowing only what they knew, feeling what they felt — there are lessons to be learned that we have not learned from the way we remember Hiroshima.

Except on the extreme Right there is widespread consensus that the bomb should never be dropped again, and that’s good. But because we’ve enshrined the bombings of Hiroshima and Hagasaki as events apart from the course of ordinary history, we are not hearing everything the bombings are saying to us.

With the passage of time, events can take on symbolic meaning that obscures factual events and muddies the lessons we might have learned. We see this a lot on the Right, where historic figures become archetypes for virtues or faults that have little to do with reality. For example, Winston Churchill represents never-back-down resolve, when at times the real Churchill did advise backing down. The hapless Neville Chamberlain has been cast in the role of “liberal appeaser,” when in fact Chamberlain was a Conservative whose style of governing closely resembled that of George W. Bush.

My point is that people and events of history can, over time, take on symbolic meaning that can be considerably removed from the actual person or event, and these symbols are often made by our own projections more than by what the real historical person actually did or how the real historical event actually happened. And then the deeper lessons we might have learned are brushed aside in favor of our own biases.

It’s useful, I think, to acknowledge the atomic bomb today has taken on a symbolic meaning it didn’t have in 1945. Consider that possibly as many or more people had been killed in the March 1945 Tokyo firebombings, by conventional bombs dropped from B-52 29s, as would die in Hiroshima. Deaths in Japan from all conventional bombs dropped in the course of the war far exceeded the number of people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the conventional bombings of Japan have passed from the collective consciousness of the American general public, and today “conventional bombing” lacks the metaphorical clout of “mushroom cloud.”

Indeed, some seem to have the attitude that conventional bombing isn’t that big a deal; it’s only nuclear bombing that is unthinkable. Is that the lesson we should be taking?

Let’s go back to 1945. It would be a few years, I believe, before the lingering danger of radioactive fallout would be fully appreciated. It would be a few years before it began to dawn on most people that full-scale thermonuclear war could wipe out our entire species. At the time, as far as most decision makers knew, what they had was a really big bomb with no more moral weight attached to it than any other bomb they had dropped already. Even many of the physicists didn’t seem to fully appreciate what it was they had made until after it was dropped.

And for those whose knowledge of the bloodbath in the Pacific was fresh, raw and oozing — not acted out heroically by John Wayne on the big screen — and who anticipated more months of hand-to-hand carnage, the bomb must have seemed the mother of all magic bullets.

Yes, there were military experts who believed the war could have been concluded as quickly without the bomb. But there were other experts, with titles just as impressive, with just as many stars on their shoulders and medals on their chests, who said otherwise. Would you have known which argument to believe in 1945? How would you have known?

I think it’s important to be able to acknowledge the decision was difficult, because otherwise we take no lessons from it that we can apply to other decisions. This applies to those who defend the decision to drop the bomb as much as to those who think the decision indefensible. It would be useful to suspend judgments and look at the decision, and the decision makers, dispassionately. What did they know? What did they not know? What were the reasons expressed at the time for dropping or not dropping the bomb? How might we know how and when the war would have ended had the bomb not been used? How much did bias and emotion effect the decision? What lessons can be taken from this (beyond “the bomb is bad”), and how can we apply those lessons to national security decisions being made today?

It may be that history repeats itself, but never in exactly the same way. If the only lesson we take from Hiroshima is “don’t drop nuclear bombs,” what are we missing? The next magic bullet to come along and promise to end an intractable situation probably will not be a nuclear bomb, but something entirely different. When the decision is made whether to use that shiny new thing, will we have learned any lessons from Hiroshima?

Texas and Textbooks

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A panel of “experts” hired by the Texas Board of Education to review social studies textbooks wants your children to learn all about Jesus. I have a rant about this on the other blog.

I know I’ve gone on about textbooks in the past, but it bears repeating that a handful of political appointees in a few large states pretty much dictate what goes into textbooks used in America’s public schools. This is because in many states textbooks have to be approved by adoption committees appointed by the governor before a textbook can be used in that state’s public schools. Because sales in the most populous states are critical to textbook publishers, textbooks are more or less crafted to please the adoption committees of those states.

Although publishers do crank out special state editions that are unique to each adoption state, the practice is to make all textbooks as uniform as possible to hold down production costs. This means the textbooks are written in a way to get them approved by as many state adoption committees as possible. State-specific demands are accommodated on the printing press with a black plate change for selected signatures.

The six-member panel reviewing Texas social studies texts includes an evangelical minister and the president of a Christian heritage advocacy group, whatever that is. They are recommending that social studies texts be generously infused with the significance of Christianity in American history, even when it wasn’t especially significant.

To make room for Jesus, panelists want to delete biographies of prominent civil rights leaders and the contributions of non-white Americans such as Thurgood Marshall. Just plain weirdly, biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen F. Austin have been removed from the early grades.

Oh, and where textbooks talk about “democratic” values, they want that changed to “republican” values. Politicized, much?

The panel’s recommendations will not necessarily be followed. But if they are, you can expect Thurgood Marshall to disappear from textbooks used everywhere — unless the California textbook adoption committee mandates that Thurgood Marshall be included.

Having watched this nonsense for years, I am certain the nation’s textbooks would improve considerably — and be much less expensive to publish — if the adoption committees were dissolved and teachers allowed to choose whatever textbooks they want to teach from.