2025-05-16 15:44:00 by The Atlantic

Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democracy is a way of living, not a settled destination.The AtlanticEIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO WAS A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION year, and the exchanges between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, which were notably superficial and sometimes unsavory, avoided most of the toughest questions facing Americans at the time. Perhaps it was no accident, then, that at year’s end the illustrious Committee of Ten’s subcommittee on history (including Woodrow Wilson) proclaimed the need for all high school students, whether or not they were college-bound, to take four years of history courses about America and the outside world. Why? The study of history, they said, best prepared the student to exert “a salutary influence upon the affairs of his country,” because it best promoted “the invaluable mental power which we call judgment.”When students, and school boards, ask, Why history? What are we supposed to be getting out of this? the best answer is still that one word: judgment. We demand it of all professionals: doctors, lawyers, chefs, and quarterbacks. And we need it most in the profession of citizen, which, like it or not, exercise it or not, we all are born into. Just as surely, candidates for public office need to know that a fair number of citizens possess judgment. Cleveland and Harrison were not simpletons. Like most political leaders, they knew more than they dared to say, and worried more than they dared to show. The Committee of Ten put civic education at the top of the school agenda because they saw a need to raise the level of political debate in the country. We still need to do it; not much has changed since then. The great committee’s recommendations were not widely adopted, or for very long.People asked then, as they ask now, Why history, and why so much of it? What does the past have to do with preparing citizens for the next century? Why isn’t a civics or American-government course good enough? The answer goes back to judgment, which requires more than knowing where the tools of self-government are and how to wield them. Judgment implies nothing less than wisdom—an even bigger word—about human nature and society. It takes a sense of the tragic and of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment. It takes a bone-deep understanding of how hard it is to preserve civilization or to better human life, and of how these have nonetheless been done repeatedly in the past. It takes a sense of paradox, so as not to be surprised when failure teaches us more than victory does or when we slip from triumph to folly. And maybe most of all it takes a practiced eye for the beauty of work well done, in daily human acts of nurture. Tragedy, comedy, paradox, and beauty are not the ordinary stuff of even the best courses in civics and government. But history, along with biography and literature, if they are well taught, cannot help but convey them.This year another committee, of distinguished historians and outstanding schoolteachers, spelled out those historical habits of mind that promote judgment. Studying history, said the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, helps students to develop a sense of “shared humanity”; to understand themselves and “otherness,” by learning how they resemble and how they differ from other people, over time and space; to question stereotypes of others, and of themselves; to discern the difference between fact and conjecture; to grasp the complexity of historical cause; to distrust the simple answer and the dismissive explanation; to respect particularity and avoid false analogy; to recognize the abuse of historical “lessons,” and to weigh the possible consequences of such abuse; to consider that ignorance of the past may make us prisoners of it; to realize that not all problems have solutions; to be prepared for the irrational, the accidental, in human affairs; and to grasp the power of ideas and character in history.Such habits of mind are the fruits of civic education, which casual observers (and many educators) mistakenly think is easier and naturally more interesting for students than other school subjects. History and social-studies teachers know better. With Tocqueville, they know that teaching the art of democratic politics is extraordinarily difficult, demanding more of learners than other subjects do, not only while they learn but also afterward, in the conduct of their lives. One reason for the difficulty, as Tocqueville explained in Democracy in America, is that many of the most vital problems for democratic politics are not solvable in any neat or final way.To take Tocqueville’s foremost example, democracies cherish both liberty and equality, both personal freedom and social justice. There is no recipe for just the right blend, in any given situation, of liberty and equality. The two impulses inevitably clash, yet each is indispensable to the preservation of a bearable level of the other. Civic education teaches the young why this is so, by presenting the tough historical experiences that have convinced us of it. Young people need to see that conflict is to be expected and is not some failure of a system that should run itself and leave them alone.Thus civic education is difficult because it asks people to accept the burdens of living with tentative answers, with unfinished and often dangerous business. It asks them to accept costs and compromises, to take on responsibilities as eagerly as they claim rights, to honor the interests of others while pursuing their own, to respect the needs of future generations, to speak the truth and do the right thing when falsehood and the wrong thing would be more profitable, and generally to restrain their appetites and expectations—all this while working to inform themselves on the multiple problems and choices their elected servants confront.It is easy enough to lay out these wholesome values and attitudes in classroom lessons and have the students repeat the phrases and swear devotion to them in quizzes and papers. And it is not so hard even to practice them, provided that a certain level of morale prevails. There is no trick to virtuous behavior when things are going well. Most people will hold ethical attitudes, without much formal instruction, when they feel themselves to be free, secure, and justly treated.WHEN STUDENTS ASK WHY THEY MUST STUDY HIStory, they are entitled to some such answer as this. They have the right to know our purposes, why we ask so much of them, and why we have no choice but to do so, in fairness to them and to the larger society. Why try to deny that it is hard to gain historical perspective on the adventures of democratic ideas, or their vulnerability in times of stress?Hard, yes, but how much more engaging, and less burdensome, than to memorize the parades of dates, names, and facts that students have so long complained about. Historical study, the Bradley Commission said, should “focus upon broad, significant themes and questions, rather than short-lived memorization of fact without context.”What are those “broad, significant themes and questions” that in the history of the United States would bring life to the facts and promote wisdom about ourselves and our place in the world? In a single year’s course—all that is required in most high schools today—that purports to cover everything from the Mayans to moon landings, the choice of a few major themes is imperative.The story of American democracy must be one of these. This means political history, broadly defined—not a recital of successive presidential Administrations, names, dates, laws, and elections but the story of the slow, unsteady journey of liberty and justice, together with the economic, social, religious, and other forces that barred or smoothed the way, and with careful looks at advances and retreats made, and at the distance yet to be covered.Three questions, for example, are central to civic education and today’s politics: What conditions—geographic, military, economic, social, technological—have nurtured democratic society, and what happens when conditions change? What ideas, values, and educational forces have promoted freedom and justice for us in the past, and can we take these for granted now? What have Americans in each generation actually done to extend democracy, and what needs doing still? Such questions, which have no final, agreed-upon answers, demand exploration if students are to be prepared for citizenship.Together with the evolution of democratic ideas and practices, other themes suggest themselves. One is the gathering of the many diverse groups of people, the many cultures, that have made up our society and are still changing it. Another is the economic transformation of America from the pre-industrial society of the colonies into the contemporary technological, post-industrial society. A third is the evolution of our role in the world, from that of a cluster of small, quarrelsome colonies in revolution in the 1770s to that of superpower.Each of these themes is related to all the others, and each directly affects the course of democracy here and elsewhere in the world. Each produces tensions for all the others. This, too, needs to be repeated as the history course goes on, until it becomes obvious to students that most questions worth asking have no final answers and that no themes worth examining have endings, happy or otherwise—in sum, that the adventure of democracy, the struggle for liberty, equality, and human dignity, is a way of living, not a settled destination. There can be no such thing, despite the title of a leading high school textbook, as the final “triumph” of the American nation. Our triumph occurs, or does not, in the daily routines of how we do what needs to be done and how we treat one another and the rest of humankind.The failure of textbooks to pursue large questions reflects not only on the publishing industry and the pressures it faces but on the historical profession as well. Not many historians devote themselves to wide sweeps of history, working at big themes and synthesizing the new scholarship that keeps piling up. The pressure to specialize in narrow periods or techniques, coming from both the profession and the university, is formidable.One result is a shortage of imaginative books of synthesis, in which textbook writers could find inspiration. Another is that survey courses at the college level—precisely those courses that could be of most help to future teachers—are neglected, casually put together, and often understaffed or left to part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants. Beyond the survey courses are the history programs for majors, whose pattern and requirements are frequently ill designed to prepare teachers. And at the graduate level, where academic historians are trained, veryrare are the courses dealing with synthesis and interpretive themes.All of this is to say that textbooks are only part of the many-sided problem of teaching history in the schools. However critical some of the following comments may be, the authors of high school history textbooks deserve a good deal of sympathy. It cannot be said too often that the prevailing high school curriculum severely circumscribes what the American-history course can accomplish. The nature of the course, in turn, limits how good the textbook can be. Because an eleventh-grade course is the only history required in most states, the authors of textbooks can assume very little prior knowledge among their readers. And they know too well that the American-history course—and their own books—may be the last exposure to history most students will get. Even those students who are collegebound are unlikely to find further history required for their general education, so shapeless have university core curricula become.The authors’ responses to curricular emptiness are all too evident: the texts are overloaded with facts. Unable to count on any prior historical, cultural, or political literacy in their readers, the authors omit ideas and analyses, or pitch them to the lowest common denominator. Since the American-history course must serve the dual purpose of informing students about history and shaping approved civic attitudes, texts also fall into a tendency toward “presentism,” in which people and actions of the past are judged by today’s fashions rather than by the different circumstances and prevailing ideas of their time. Needless to say, this makes for bad history, swapping truth for a temporary glow of moral superiority. Worse, it deprives students of perspective on themselves. By ignoring the reality of change from the past, it ignores as well the change there will surely be after us, producing still different fashions of thought—by which we should not necessarily wish to be judged.Limited in their conception of time, these textbooks are constrained to be parochial about space as well. Already overloaded with more material than could possibly be absorbed over the course of a school year, the textbooks are hard put to place the United States in its global setting, present or past. Yet they must try. What has been our impact on other societies, and theirs on ours? However banal the phrase has become, “global consciousness” is imperative in textbooks designed for the American-history course; self-understanding requires global understanding.This is not something new and suddenly to be worried about because we find ourselves interdependent with the rest of a globe shrunk by the technologies of travel, communications, economic production and exchange, and weapons systems. John Donne’s admonition (“No man is an island. . .”) has always held, particularly for us Americans, who have so often tried to ignore it, in our flight from the Old World and troublesome foreigners, in our faith in our exceptionalism. Events early and elsewhere have directed our national life. The American-history course should make plain that the bell tolled for us when the Portuguese began African slave-trading in 1444, when the French bombarded Saigon in 1859, when the Japanese humiliated Nicholas II in 1905, when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, when the Weimar Republic fell in 1933, when Mao took the Long March to Shensi the year after. And now it tolls for us in the investment banks of Tokyo, the sweatshops of Seoul and Hong Kong, the drug depots of Colombia, the killing grounds of the Middle East. To know and to understand all this is both the birthright and the duty of citizens, but it is an enormous burden for a single course and its textbook to bear.The five high school American-history texts examined here lead the field in the number of state and major district adoption lists on which they appear across the country. They are• Boorstin, Daniel J., and Brooks M. Kelley, A History of the United States, Ginn and Company, 1986.• Bragdon, Henry W., and Samuel P. McCutchen, History of a Free People, Macmillan, 1981.• Davidson, James West, and Mark H. Lytle, The United States: A History of the Republic, Prentice-Hall, 1988.• Risjord, Norman K., and Terry L. Haywoode, People and Our Country, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.• Todd, Lewis Paul, and Merle Curti, Triumph of the American Nation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.What follows is not a critical review of either the authors’ writing style or their professional scholarship but simply a response to two questions: First, how helpful are these books for teaching democracy’s ideas, practices, and adventures in the United States? Second, what might they add to promote the political sophistication of American students?Before AmericaA DECADE AGO DAVID DONALD, A PROFESSOR OF American history at Harvard, stirred a squall on the op-ed page of The New York Times by publicly agonizing over whether his courses were still worth teaching. His students expected to learn how the past related to the present and to the future. But, Donald wrote, we had arrived at an era of dwindling resources, and the lessons of “incurable optimism” that students took from the American past were “not merely irrelevant but dangerous.” Was it not his first duty to stop misleading them, to “disenthrall them from the spell of history, to help them see the irrelevance of the past?”Professor Donald was worried for the wrong reasons. American history is not misleading because it is optimistic, though one wonders how to manage a sunny view of the slave trade, the Civil War, the Depression, or Vietnam. It is misleading because it is drastically insufficient on its own. We have taken to teaching it by itself, as though it were rooted nowhere—as though the American past, by which David Donald’s students hoped to understand themselves, reached back only to Columbus, rather than to Noah and before.The plain fact is that American history is not intelligible, and we are not intelligible to ourselves, without a firm grasp of the life and ideas of the ancient world, of Judaism and Christianity, of Islam and Christendom in the Middle Ages, of feudalism, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the English Revolution and the Enlightenment. The first settlers did not sail into view out of a void, their minds as blank as the Atlantic Ocean. They were shaped and scarred by tens of centuries of religious, social, literary, and political experience. Their notions of honor and heroism were learned from Greco-Roman myth and history, from the Bible and the lives of the saints of the Church, from stories of knights and Crusaders, explorers and sea dogs of the Renaissance, soldiers and martyrs of the wars of religion. Those who sailed west to America came in fact not to build a New World but to bring to life in a new setting what they treasured most from the Old World.In this perspective, ours is one of the great multifarious adventures of human history. Boring? Dull? It can fascinate the young, who want to find themselves in the stream of time, to see where their life histories join the history of the race. The blood of American students ran in men and women working the soil of Burgundy and the Ukraine, of China and Africa, before the Normans set out on their conquests. Our ideas of good, evil, honor, and shame weighed upon Jews and Greeks and Christians centuries before Rome fell, and came to us by way of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. But we do not like to look so far back. We prefer the myth of the New World, innocent of the sins of the old. It has been our own special sin of pride, shutting out the possibility of knowing ourselves or of understanding others. Its educational consequence has been the shrinking of American history to mean only United States history, and the near-total abandonment of ancient, European, and British history, of that Western civilization whose ever-changing works and ideas, both beneficent and destructive, have shaped most of our history and the modern world’s. Ignoring Tocqueville’s pleas not to forget our heritage, we leave the young to a kind of amnesia.The five leading American-history textbooks omit or dumb down the Old World background, as though it were of little importance. It is hard to tell whether the authors assume that students already know it all, know nothing, or, at seventeen, are incapable of comprehension above a grade-school level. Most of the books preserve the oldfashioned, cliché-ridden Protestant-progressive tone of the early 1900s. The Middle Ages, when they are mentioned at all, are dark and stagnant, their people without ideas or curiosity and interested only in life after the grave. There is no merit in the era, for even the happy results of the Crusades (“new products” and “new ideas”) were unintended. Then, suddenly, the Renaissance springs forth, as “Europe Awakens.” People begin to think for themselves and seek “new horizons.” Hence the explorers, and the discovery of America.In this kind of pop history there is no room for nuance, for mixtures of continuity and change, for the accomplishments of our medieval ancestors, or for the underside of the Renaissance. All is darkness and light, and America is born of the light. The only legacy to us from medieval times is their disappearance. There is nothing in these texts of medieval art and architecture, philosophy, universities, guilds, aspirations to moral communities where all aspects of life, particularly economic exchange, would be governed by rules ensuring justice to all classes. Nothing of the charities and hospitals that disappeared in more “enterprising” periods, or of the shattered dream of European peace and unity under international law. As for the story of democracy, there is nothing on the feudal system as the true source of constitutional government. On the contrary. In speaking of the seventeenth century Boorstin and Kelley, in their History of the United States, say of the English people that they were “moving from the medieval world of monarchy into a modern world of representative government,” obliterating 400 years of evolution that began with the Magna Carta and the medieval proliferation ot parliaments all over Europe.Strong monarchy, against which the struggle for free self-government would prove so long and bitter, was a product not of the Middle Ages but of the Renaissance and what followed. Here is a place at which to introduce students to the notion that good and bad, progressive and regressive, very often co-exist in history, as in their daily lives. Since they already suspect this, it might raise their confidence in us if we made clear that we know it too. The Renaissance was not progressive for most ordinary people. On those “new horizons” were their smashed guilds and lower wages, the violation of manorial contracts and titles to their land, the replacement of local town government with despots or oligarchy, unlimited taxation, mercenary armies of foreigners, corruption and profiteering in both business and the Church, and the flaunting of a new, secularized culture of the flesh and earthly pleasures.If this underside of the Renaissance and early modern Europe is not revealed, students will not understand that the Protestant Reformation was in large part a rebellion against the “new,” and an attempt to return to what many saw as an age of faith and spirituality, purity and simplicity, under the medieval Church, before it was corrupted by worldly innovators in the Renaissance papacy. And they will miss the larger, vital point that in every revolution there is a powerful longing for the good old days, a nostalgia for some golden age whose virtues have been betrayed by more recent evildoers.There is no understanding the fervor of the Puritans without this background, together with a clear account of the other causes of the Reformation and of the forces breaking up Christendom in the sixteenth century. Our textbooks do not provide this. The Puritans remain a mystery—yet their story is part of the human quest for freedom. They wanted not freedom from restraint but freedom to institutionalize the kind of restraints, and public mores, they saw as properly human, befitting God’s wishes for the community of Christians freed from sin. By failing to clarify their faith and aspirations, the texts leave the impression that they were hypocrites, or more hypocritical than we are, for wanting freedom for themselves but banishing those who questioned their theology and the authority of their church. The texts do not explain why they believed that they had compelling reasons to abhor unorthodox religious doctrine as we abhor, say, unorthodox political and economic doctrines.Todd and Curti, for example, in their Triumph of theAmerican Nation, devote less space to Calvinism than to Native American religion. The Puritans’ religious notions are expressed mainly in a description of their hounding of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and in a boxed account of the Salem witch trials that compares the trials to McCarthyism and ends with the moral that “Salem still symbolizes the difficulty of making moral choices in the face of community pressures.” The other texts take the same line in their easy approval of Williams and Hutchinson and disapproval of their treatment.Davidson and Lytle, in their United States; Bragdon and McCutchen, in their History of a Free People; and Risjord and Haywoode, in their People and Our Country, have boxed accounts of Anne Hutchinson’s role, the last remarking that she was “a victim of the times and the society in which she lived.” All is pictured as melodrama, where students could much better be introduced to tragedy—the clash of two right impulses.Students are left with the impression that toleration is the only “religious” idea worth remembering. It is, without question, a much-to-be-sought-after attitude in a democratic society. But its real meaning, its complexity and high cost, in those religious days is incomprehensible without a solid grounding in matters of faith. Modern readers, always ready to mistake their own indifference to religion for the virtue of toleration, could profit from a wider perspective.THE TEXTBOOKS FIND IT EASIER TO DEAL WITH political developments, the direct English legacy to the colonists. But teachers wishing to focus on the evolution of democracy will find the accounts brief, unexciting, and insufficient. Bragdon begins well, noting that the first eight amendments to the Constitution are rights for which we fought the Revolutionary War: “But every one of these was previously one of the ‘rights of Englishmen’ whose every phrase was hammered out in nearly five hundred years of struggle between the British people and their monarchs.” The point is made, but the uniqueness of the English experience, and the conditions for Parliament’s triumph over royal power, are not set forth. Indeed, Bragdon contains nothing at all about the English Revolution or what prepared its way.Boorstin devotes several paragraphs to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but only to explain why the American colonists were left alone for a time. Todd divides its recital of the English Revolution into two paragraphs ten pages apart, without analysis or background, and refers only to affairs on this side of the water. In a box headed “Sources” are a few items from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, left unexplained. Eighteen pages earlier appears a “Sources” box of three seemingly randomly chosen, unexplained items from the Magna Carta, not including the key point on new taxation! No doubt these boxes are counted as “features,” but they will add nothing to the student’s understanding.In general, the Old World sources of the American mind and of American institutions are only sketchily reviewed. Very little is said about the ideas, customs, and values brought from Europe by succeeding generations of immigrants, from the time of Plymouth Rock to that of Ellis Island and after. All of this would be less serious if the curriculum required earlier courses in Western civilization or world history. American-history texts could then assume some knowledge. They could refer at higher conceptual levels to earlier developments and build upon them with some confidence of being understood. But the American high school curriculum does not yet allow them this luxury. Either the authors are insufficiently aware of the curricular problems they must live with for now or they have too easily given up on the possibility of compensating for their readers’ lack of background. In any case, their histories of the United States, if not exactly springing from nowhere, are not well rooted in our longer past.“Heard Round the World”AS MIGHT BE EXTECTED, OUR AMERICAN HISTORY texts are generally full on the major events of the Revolution and its antecedents, but they are weak on the role of political leaders. Both Boorstin and Bragdon point out, in sketches of George Washington, that he was one of those men who are able both to fight and to govern, and also a man able to express and exemplify the ideals of the new nation. Bragdon calls him “perhaps the only indispensable man in the history of the United States.” None of the other three texts, however, provides a comparably well-rounded evaluation of Washington, though space is hardly lacking and the books abound with sketches of dozens of other figures. For example, Risjord provides, in the first 200 pages, boxed mini-biographies of Cabeza de Vaca, Cotton Mather, Anne Hutchinson, Blackboard the Pirate, John Peter Zenger, Samuel Adams, Nathan Hale, Benedict Arnold, Abigail Adams, Noah Webster, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Tecumseh.In the first 300 pages of Todd we find “profiles” of Nampeyo, Benjamin Franklin (though nothing about his ideas), Eliza Lucas, Phillis Wheatley, Crispus Attucks, James Armistead, Abigail Adams, John Fitch, George Bingham, John Jay, Tecumseh, Benjamin Banneker, and John Chapman. Davidson offers a similar array, adding “Fatt Hing: A Chinese Pioneer.” Meanwhile, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and even that old favorite Franklin all fail to earn adequate descriptions of their ideas, intellect, character, or work. Again, there is no lack of space. Boorstin and Bragdon, too, offer items on most of the supporting actors noted in the other three books. But they clearly take more seriously the importance of mind and personality in those who led—those who were given and who accepted the heaviest responsibility for actions that would profoundly affect all the people. In this respect their books are markedly more useful in the political education of students.In exploring the causes of revolution, all the texts name the usual ones. They differ in their coherence and their ability to be analytical. Bragdon begins its chapter “Road to Revolution” with a telling epigraph from John Adams: “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.” It turns directly to the question of why the “freest colonies of any European nation were the first to rebel,” and of what happened to change people’s minds about England in so few years before the Revolution. The chapter is clear on British errors and American obstinacy (not to say greed), but it also stresses the main principle at issue: “No taxation without representation.”Bragdon adds a boxed account on Sam Adams and the importance at such moments of men with “a genius for agitation,”who can keep tempers high in the lull between storms. Adams “believed in liberty,” it says, but it also notes that the Adams family’s fortune had been ruined by an act of Parliament: “This seemed to flavor Sam’s entire career, for, as Machiavelli wrote, ‘It is better to kill a man’s father than to destroy his inheritance.”' Such history-writing respects teachers and students and offers them much to talk about.All the texts, however, are weak on intellectual history, and they pay almost no attention to the outside world. On the latter point they have not caught up to the idea of the “Atlantic Revolution,” and so they ignore the reform movement in England that was directed against King and Parliament at the same time as our own. There, too, people complained of being taxed without representation at Westminster. And most curious, they do not stress nearly enough the worldwide impact of the American Revolution. The great expectations of national freedom and political self-government which our victory over George III launched around the globe are all but left aside. Once again Bragdon is the exception, with an eloquent page headed “Wide Influence of the American Revolution”:The success of the United States promoted ideas of freedom and equality. It gave new hope to the friends of the oppressed in Europe, and endangered the old system of monarchy and a privileged upper class. France was the country most immediately affected. . . . The example of America was a trump card in the hands of those who planned revolution in both society and government.“Emerson did not exaggerate,” Bragdon concludes, when he said that “the shot fired by the Minutemen on April 19, 1775, was ‘heard round the world.’”It was one of America’s greatest moments in history— perhaps the single greatest—and it was to be of tremendous importance to struggles for national independence and democracy everywhere. The other textbooks could have said much more to help students understand why Lincoln later could call us the best hope of the earth, and why so many Americans have ever since pleaded that we live up to our proclaimed ideals, at home and abroad.The intellectual background of the Revolution—and of the making of the Constitution—is weakly drawn in all the texts. There is no systematic treatment of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century climate of thought known as the Enlightenment, with which American leaders were wholly familiar. Only in Bragdon does the word Enlightenment appear in the index. And only in Bragdon and in Risjord are there substantive comments on the rational Newtonian universe of natural laws and the confidence this inspired among thinkers and reformers.In certain cases intellectual history is badly mauled. Basic ideas of the Enlightenment are ascribed to Americans alone. In listing the objects of eighteenth-century humanitarianism, texts ignore its contemporary British and European elements, and its long history in the Judeo-Christian devotion to social amelioration. That ideas have a history is left unsaid. Somehow Americans “came to believe” such things.Even the longer biographical sketches of the Founding Fathers do not reveal their education, reading, religious or philosophical stances, cosmopolitanism, regard for the ancients, respect for posterity, or place in the Enlightenment. At best they appear as versatile, energetic tinkerers with everything from lightning rods to constitutions. Students are given no way to reflect on the moral and intellectual ingredients of democratic statesmanship.The vogue of social history makes for imbalance here. The texts include dozens of pages on the social lives of blacks, Indians, women, and what the texts treat as ordinary people. Admittedly, political history and the doings of elites (though not intellectual or comparative history) were overemphasized in older books, and to judge, say, by the quantity of ink given to Jackson and the Bank, superficial political detail is still too heavy. But political history thoughtfully presented is indispensable to educating citizens. For what is democracy but that remarkable system in which “ordinary people” are expected to comprehend, and to judge, the choices made by their elites? They can do neither without studying political leadership in the past.Nor, for that matter, can students grasp the significance of social history when it remains unconnected to economic and political structures and turning points. Nor can they come to understand other people in their own society so long as the new material on women and minorities remains at the awkward stage found in these books. Many passages on “new people” are gratuitously squeezed in, out of place and out of proportion. Pictures and boxed features are more often than not unrelated to the neighboring narrative, and many are so patently condescending as to embarrass the reader. Just as world-history texts take a pious, uncritical approach to things non-Western, so these United States history texts treat women, minorities, and ordinary people much as Parson Weems treated George Washington: they can do no wrong. As “ordinary people” themselves, students know better.ON THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION THE TEXTS are generous with space and effective in presenting the main lines of debate and compromise. They all argue persuasively the greatness of the framers’ accomplishment, and explicate the Constitution’s virtues as an instrument of government that has lasted through the unpredictable transformations of American society to our own day. But they are less helpful in explaining how the framers managed it, so that students might see the many special conditions and the intellectual prowess that allow for successful democratic politics of the long run—as opposed to merely popular politics of the moment.For example, all the texts mention the critical role of the Federalist Papers in the campaign for ratification. But none reprints anything of their arguments and political philosophy, their views of human nature and the resulting political necessities. Students of high school age are ready and eager to argue about human nature and its consequences. If not exactly born liberal or conservative, as the Gilbert and Sullivan song has it, they soon lean in one or the other direction on at least some of the issues that can be related to Constitution-making.One such issue is the restriction on the right to vote in the new republic. The texts make clear that the framers did not create what we now accept as democracy. But instead of merely noting, usually with some embarrassment, that slaves, women, and poor free men were excluded, the textbooks might venture to explain why these groups could have been considered, even by the best-intentioned members of the elite, to lack certain qualifications for selfgovernment. What could these be, and how do they bear on various notions of human nature and of education? Why, for example, did the framers believe that leisure, or time to read and reflect, was critical to democratic citizens? Thus it would be possible to place American political thought in relation to the major debates of the time in Britain and Europe, especially the debate between bourgeois liberals and the “radical” republicans who demanded universal suffrage (and for whom, except for our strong presidency and the shame of slavery, the United States soon would stand as the model).These texts do not pause to illuminate the fundamental notion of a constitution as a contract among different free, competing groups or authorities, each holding its own tangible power. Obligations and rights are assigned, limiting the influence of each power-holder but also protecting the security of each. This most basic axiom—that free politics and the rule of law proceed from actual balances of power within a society—should be explicit throughout. The facts are there, in the arguments of the states and interests represented at Philadelphia. It would take little more space to explain the principle of the balance of power, and this in turn would show how much we owe to the past, from much-maligned “feudalism” through the British party system to the final triumph of Parliament. And it would challenge students to search out the sources and balances of power among classes, interests, and regions in the United States today, and then to speculate on the likely outcome of a new constitutional convention that would reflect the new balances of our time. In what we are repeatedly told is a dangerous world, would modern delegates create a government as free, as open, and as limited as the one the delegates created in the 1780s? Asking a question like this could help students comprehend what was at stake, and how important the framers’ qualities of mind and character were to their accomplishment. We do not have to worship the Constitution as flawless to acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of giants and to understand that they, in turn, drew strength from the work and ideas of countless generations before them. At stake was the survival of a free republic, and what emerged was both a triumph and the makings of tragedy—not for the first or the last time in history. Students might consider the limits to choice that even giants must admit. The Union had to be made, but circumstances—the real balances of power in the society—determined that it would not be made without the fateful compromise on slavery. Should the compromise have been refused and the Union not made? This is not a question to be settled by instant moralizing or by easy judgment of the framers. Many of them hoped, of course, that the new government would manage to reduce, and ultimately to abolish, slavery. Their hopes were in vain. The tragedy wrapped inside the triumph would be played out for generations to come.As If Five Million Had DiedIN 1619 SLAVERY WAS INTRODUCED INTO VIRGINIA. SO, too, in the founding of the House of Burgesses in the same year, was the principle of free government. For the fulfillment of the latter and the reversal of the former the price for the generation of the 1860s was to be 600,000 lives and the unmeasurable suffering of millions maimed, bereaved, and impoverished.What is there about the Civil War that textbooks might stress, to further the education of modern democratic citizens? The unrelenting depth and duration of the tragedy, to begin with. Second, the consequences, not only of that particular war but of war in general and of how wars are fought, for people and societies. Third, the difference leadership can make, to lessen tragedy—or to explain it, which itself is vital to a self-governing people. Finally, texts could make clear the uses of comparative history, to provoke interest and help students to achieve perspective.The portrayal of the Civil War years in each of our five texts is competent and often quite moving. But the books could do more to teach the difference between tragedy and the melodrama typical of television mini-series. Each side believed in the rightness of its cause. Neither understood the other’s fierce faith.Only one text, Davidson, reprints an eyewitness account—of hospital wards, from the diary of a Confederate nurse, who portrayed the agony of incomprehension.Gray-haired men—men in the pride of manhood— beardless boys—Federals and all, mutilated in every imaginable way, lying on the floor, just as they were taken from the battlefield; so close together that it was almost impossible to walk without stepping on them. . . . What can be in the minds of our enemies, who are now arrayed against us, who have never harmed them in any way, but simply claim our own, and nothing more!Only one text, Bragdon, makes the point that by 1860 reason had fled; fury, pride, and misconception of the other had taken over. There was, as ever in history, a universal inability to look ahead and to comprehend the possible costs.If the North had realized that it was going to cost the lives of 360,000 of their young men to subdue the Confederacy. ... If the leaders of the Confederacy had foreseen that the war would bring utter defeat, devastation, and destruction of their entire social system. . . .The texts could also do more to present the sheer magnitude of the tragedy. With our current population at about eight times that of 1861, comparable losses today would mean the deaths of five million men. Let students reflect on such trauma. No European conflict since the Thirty Years’ War had been so bloody in relation to the populations involved. All the nineteenth-century revolutions of Europe put together are dwarfed by the human cost of preserving the American Union. Yet somehow we manage to congratulate ourselves on two centuries of constitutional stability and even “peaceful evolution,'' in favorable contrast to other nations.Why did the Civil War not continue long afterward to haunt the American consciousness? One answer is that it did, in the defeated, devastated South. But the American consciousness, in literary, historical, and political utterance, was to be shaped much more commonly by northerners. Perhaps more important, the tremendous growth of population, the westward push, the enormous activity and mobility that accompanied the post-Civil War industrialization, rendered our self-inflicted scars less disfiguring than those of smaller, more static European societies. For the millions of immigrants arriving after 1865, the Civil War was not their war but something memorialized (as I remember from my own childhood) by those others, the “old Yankees” with “American names.”In reality, of course, a great many non-Anglo-Americans died for the Union, including blacks, who fought in increasing numbers. The textbooks are clear in that regard—a benefit of the new pluralist consciousness. But none puts the war’s enormity in large enough perspective. Some do not record the numbers of killed and wounded at all. And only Boorstin and Davidson try to explain why the losses were so high. The latter emphasizes the primitive medical practices of the era: “One Confederate officer wrote that his men had as much to fear from their own doctors as they did from Union troops.”Boorstin alone takes seriously the analysis of military history. Losses soared, he says, partly because officers on both sides clung to the doctrine, taught by out-of-date textbooks at West Point, that the attackers always had the advantage. But with the much more accurate longer-range rifle having replaced the musket, the defenders now had the advantage, especially when they also took care to dig in. “This was the start of trench warfare,” Boorstin says. “The spade was now as important as the gun.” No quick victory was likely.Military history has been out of favor for quite some time, and there is relatively little of it in modern textbooks. But events on the battlefield have profound and fateful effects on entire societies, and democratic peoples need to know more, if anything, of military matters than others do, in order to exercise proper oversight of their experts. It is a commonplace that most of the truly innovative methods and strategies in the World War of 1914-1918 sprang from civilians and the lower ranks, while the generals—having failed to learn the lessons of our Civil War— persisted in their murderous obsession with frontal assaults. That both wars dragged through four years of slaughter determined much of what followed in peacetime society. Citizens need to know why, and how even the best of military plans and preparations are almost always undone by the “fog of war,” the pressures and confusions of combat. And they need to learn that defeat may well be a step to victory, as Boorstin shrewdly observes of the first battle of Bull Run, in July, 1861.In the long run the South was actually hurt by this first victory. Now the Southerners made the mistake of believing that it would be easy to defeat the North. For the North, on the other hand, the defeat at Bull Run made people realize that the war could not be won in a few days. And they steeled themselves for the hard years ahead.The most surprising failure in these textbooks is that they do not provide a substantial biographical sketch of Abraham Lincoln. As with military affairs, democratic citizens need to know more about political leadership than others do. Although the textbooks sometimes suggest the importance of individual character in politics, they rarely pause to draw a character in full dimension. No man deserves such a portrait more than Lincoln, and none could be more instructive to students looking for the traits one would hope to find in democratic leaders, especially those destined to confront great crises. Granted, even the fullest biographies may miss the ultimate reasons for greatness in men or women, may fail to find the source for genius of any kind. But certain important characteristics deserve mention. In Lincoln’s case, texts should relate his formative experiences; what he read; some of what he knew and believed; the sources of his eloquence, his temperament, his humor, and his melancholy; and his conduct of affairs under the awful pressure of war. His convictions were rooted in the oldest American political and religious traditions, absorbed from his readings in history, law, and Scripture. His ideals were bonded to reality by his hard life and hard work on the frontier, and by his law practice and his politicking among the people of Illinois, both the ordinary and the powerful.Boorstin gives Lincoln six paragraphs, which constitute the longest portrait. But it does not reach Lincoln’s beliefs or the depth of his character. Boorstin, among others, offers instances of Lincoln’s political acumen, as in the debates with Douglas and in his widely different tactics in saving Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky for the Union. Davidson comments on Lincoln’s “political skills” but says nothing about where he might have learned them. In the chapters on the Civil War, Davidson finds room for at least seven pages’ worth of maps and special features, not counting pictures, but presents no biography of Lincoln. Risjord devotes twenty pages out of forty-three to pictures, maps, and special features (there are “Sidenotes” on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, women during the war, photography on the battlefield, and Lee’s crisis of conscience), but has no Lincoln sketch. Todd uses twenty-three of fifty pages for such items, including tips on study skills, review questions, summaries, a profile of John C. Frémont, and, inexplicably, even a two-page spread on regulating water rights today in the western states, but no analysis of Lincoln.Several texts do reprint the Gettysburg Address, and Davidson offers an excerpt from Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Surely all texts should reprint the latter in its entirety. It may be the greatest political utterance in American life, and is certainly superior to any other in its combination of moral power and historical realism. The closing passage, “With malice toward none, with charity for all . . . , ” is often quoted as testimony to Lincoln’s farsighted generosity. But for teachers of history, who strive to portray historical tragedy and the unyielding interrelatedness of events and generations, the preceding section, with its biblical recital of the law of consequences, is most revealing of Lincoln’s capacity of mind. It expresses the central truth about the war which he hoped Americans would comprehend.Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”Finally, the ultimate tragedy of the Civil War looms all the more bitter for its having failed to remove most of the oppressions of the slave system, despite its legal repudiation. These textbooks do explain the shortcomings of merely formal emancipation, without the lasting and constantly enforced state and local political guarantees—including education for both races—that would have been required to bring black people to something like emancipation in fact. But the books all fail to stress sufficiently the fundamental changes in economic conditions which would also have been needed. It is as if the authors shared the radical republicans’ view (still widespread in American politics) that political and civil rights alone, coupled with a certain amount of education, will make everything else come out all right in the end.On the economic plight of the ex-slaves, the texts could otfer students a look at the Russian counterpart of the American Emancipation: Czar Alexander II’s freeing of the serfs, in 1861. Comparative history could be very useful in survey courses—at all school levels, including the university—to capture students’ interest and to open up wider perspectives. The contrasts between the two contemporary efforts at emancipation are striking. The czarist program followed upon long planning and centered on the allocation of land to the serfs. Though often not enough, and not the best, land went to the ex-serfs, the Russian approach appears as a model of social responsibility in contrast to the American government’s lack of planning and utter failure to act on evident economic need.What would this exercise of comparative history illuminate? First, the contrast between the European monarchist, czarist ideology of conservative paternalism, which assumed the right of government to intervene in economic and social matters and the duty to regulate them for the general welfare, and the nineteenth-century version of European and American liberalism, which insisted on governmental laissez-faire (except, of course, for action that would directly benefit dominant business enterprise).Second, in point of contrast, the distribution of land to the serfs was always assumed to be necessary; there was an obvious need to provide subsistence for the 40 million ex-serfs, who were numerous everywhere in Russia. American northerners who ran the federal government found it far less urgent to think about the three and a half million ex-slaves, who were mostly out of their sight. Third, the Russian process was pursued in the (relative) calm of peace; planning was to be expected, for the serf-owners were not only the allies but the very pillars of czardom. In the heat of war the Union government was not likely to take the long view of any issue, least of all an enormous economic intervention contrary to its own ideology. But most significant, of course, is the racial contrast. Russian ex-serfs, however they might be despised, were mainly white and accepted as wholly Russian. The black ex-slaves were a people apart, regarded by many, North and South, as not wholly human.Tocqueville’s grim prophecy of thirty years before was borne out. Slavery might recede, but “the prejudice to which it has given birth is immovable,”he had said. “If I were called upon to predict the future, I should say that the abolition of slavery in the South will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for the blacks.”The terrible sacrifices of the war brought little improvement in the daily lives of blacks. In the short run the war brought greatly increased suffering, and, not long after its conclusion, the scourges of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. The North spent 360,000 lives, but the Union was not truly made, because the federal government turned its back on the South. The consequences of 1619 rolled on through the rest of the nineteenth century, and through the twentieth century as well. The textbooks designed for educating citizens should place the Civil War and the Emancipation in this long and bitter perspective.Go-GettersA CENTRAL THEME OF THESE American history texts is the explosive growth of industry, commerce, and finance, moving us from the status of a developing nation before the Civil War to a commanding position in the world’s economy by 1914. Their narratives are breathless about the energy and ingenuity of American entrepreneurs. But the texts much underplay the great advantages our enterprises enjoyed. And by leaving out the concurrent, or earlier, economic development of Britain and Western Europe, they create the impression that modern industrialization was mainly an American product and that we did it all by ourselves.This is, of course, a simplification of history, and as such it is dangerous to our hold on reality. It is particularly misleading when invoked as a “lesson of history” to guide us in economic policy-making at home or abroad. When textbooks fail to discuss such matters with the complexity they deserve, they spawn economic illiteracy at a moment when a realistic view of economics is more important than ever to us, struggling as we are with agricultural and industrial dislocation, with corporate mismanagement and faltering productivity, with the flight of capital and jobs, with overseas competition (some foreign, some from American-owned facilities), and with the entire range of issues posed by poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World. At the very least, the textbooks should explain the special, favorable conditions that allowed the rapid advances in the American economy of the nineteenth century, so that we do not deceive ourselves over how they happened or how they might be replicated, here or elsewhere.In many respects the new American nation and the Industrial Revolution were made for each other, children of the same generation. The machine found in America a tabula rasa; the organizers of industry had a free hand. Earlier development of commerce and industry in Britain and Europe had created reserves of capital ready for investment in the New World. Along with capital, technical assistance flowed to us, from James Watt, Samuel Slater, and Henry Bessemer, and, it must be said, flowed swiftly back in the other direction, as America’s own inventions proliferated. Encouraging the swift introduction of machines was the westward movement, the immense domestic market free of barriers, yearly adding a broad new margin of consumers. In such conditions building big was not so much a risk as a necessity. The frontier allowed the United States to escape the worst consequences of labor surplus, while immigration was insurance against labor shortage.How many of these circumstances do our textbooks describe, and how sharply do they portray their importance? The answer is disappointing. Most of the texts are satisfied to relate the parade of American inventions, the building of railroads and industry, the growth of cities, and the rise of the great corporations and their magnates, who are depicted as colorful “Go-Getters”—a term that Boorstin uses again and again. In every text Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and their careers and methods and aspirations, are given much more space than is Abraham Lincoln. The implicit message is that they were more important to what is essential, or special, about the United States. And by failing to analyze the broader setting in which they operated, the textbooks overplay their individual roles, presenting them as giants pulling themselves up by their giant bootstraps.Overall, Boorstin’s is the most admiring of the accounts of economic expansion. It describes a people “eager to learn,”creating a system of production that would build an “American standard of living,” run by “Go-Getters,” “a peculiarly American breed.” There is a good deal of truth here, but students will learn very little of gritty economic history from Boorstin, whose text concludes with the astonishing declaration that American go-getters have always been “makers of something out of nothing.”ONLY TWO OF THE TEXTS, RISJORD AND DAVIDSON, relate the notion of social Darwinism to laissezfaire, and say that business leaders seized upon both to justify aggressive tactics and to ward off government regulation. This connection is absent in the other three—a surprising lapse for Bragdon, which is usually the strongest in such matters. It does relieve them from explaining (as Risjord and Davidson also do not) why the one-sided, pro-business application of laissez-faire in the Western world of the nineteenth century was not what Adam Smith had in mind. But the ideas of Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo are missing from these books, so the students are not introduced to nineteenth-century ideologies of liberalism and classical economics—and how they were used and misused in debates over the role of government. Once more, the texts remain both parochial and feeble in ideas.They also miss the chance to instruct students in practical economics. Although Bragdon is more analytical than the others, even it does not say outright what is obvious: American economic expansion was heavily subsidized by American consumers, taxpayers, and workers, and also by slave labor in the South and by an earlier generation of British and Europeans, whose labor produced investment capital. Subsidy remains a bad word in the American lexicon, yet it is axiomatic that all enterprise must in some way be subsidized to one degree or other. Capital goods must be paid for by somebody, whether the economy is capitalist, communist, or somewhere between. The texts could say that there is nothing wrong with subsidy as such, provided that the gains and losses are reasonably distributed. It is another name for community effort.In stressing the individualistic, risk-taking side of entrepreneurship, the texts ignore another lesson in practical economics: the importance to free enterprise of a generous measure of predictability. It was, after all, to minimize risk and to ensure predictability that Rockefeller built Standard Oil. He did so by systematically destroying the predictability of his competitors’ business conditions. The drive to business concentration, to trusts horizontal and vertical, was then, and still is, a drive to escape the risks of a “free-market economy.” As the texts do point out, many if not most risk-takers failed. Those who succeeded did so by eliminating any risk that could be decisive. This aspect of free enterprise, so vital these days to developing countries—predictability of prices, of labor costs, of access to markets and credit—is left out, even though successful nineteenth-century businessmen enjoyed it all. The texts are needlessly weak on economic lessons.THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN LABOR UNIONS TO achieve their aims in this period is described by all these texts in sections directly following their accounts of industrial development in the post-Civil War era. It is, or should be, axiomatic by now that a free, strong labor-union movement is one of the indispensable supports of political democracy in the industrial age. The history of most of the world’s democratic societies reveals that effective labor unions gave workers some assurance that economic justice could be won by peaceful, gradual means. Where trade unionism was weak or oppressed, political democracy remained unstable or nonexistent and extremist movements on the left tended to prosper. None of the texts makes such connections. The most one hopes for, then, is a clear and balanced narrative of labor’s struggles from the Civil War onward, and in general that is provided—though why the student should regard unions as significant to the health of a democracy is not made clear, so teachers must add the point.Here Bragdon is the most analytical of the texts, explaining the difficulties of the labor movement under five general headings. First, American industrial labor was mobile and diverse, coming from farms and foreign countries. Second, there was a confusion of aims within the labor movement itself, between moderates and radicals. Third, employers enjoyed unlimited power, exercised by means of blacklists, lockouts, and scabs, to crush unions and their efforts. Fourth was the antipathy of “public opinion” toward unions that it pictured (or had pictured for it) as radical and greedy. Fifth was the unanimity of the courts in taking the side of employers, particularly by quickly issuing injunctions at the request of employers and local officials.Todd also stresses the allied power of employers and government as the big reason for labor’s defeats. The employers’ advantages were numerous: they could afford the best lawyers and lobbyists; they could buy favorable publicity; they could hire strikebreakers, private detectives, spies inside the unions, agents provocateurs to stir up violence, for which the newspapers dependent on them could blame the unions. State militias and federal troops were ready at the call of politicians friendly to, and also dependent on, the employers. “Most Americans,” Todd says, blamed industrial conflict on “power-hungry” labor leaders, and usually supported the businessmen. What “most Americans” thought is, of course, unknowable.With the exception of Boorstin, the textbooks are generally quite clear about the problems of working people and about the vastly uneven struggle they were forced to wage with employers. Boorstin manages to take a relatively sunny view of the worker’s life, starting with his defense of northern factory owners who were accused by southerners of discarding “worn-out workers just like worn-out machines.” The book asserts, “Free American workers could change jobs and learn new jobs.” That very many workers had no choice but to stay and wear themselves out to keep their families alive is left unsaid.Students could better grasp the drama of industrialization and the plight of labor, along with so many other things, if the American story were placed in the larger context of the Western world. Except for Bragdon, which does make helpful comparisons, the texts contain very few references to Europe, and these are as often confusing as they are helpful. Since “foreigners” are blamed for some of America’s labor conflict, the impression is left (a hundred years later!) that foreign labor unionism was markedly more radical or revolutionary than American unionism was. Boorstin is the most explicit on this point; it depicts the leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, as developing “a special American approach.”In those years many workers in Europe were organizing to make revolutions. Over there desperate workers were trying to abolish capitalism and take over the factories themselves. But Gompers was no revolutionary. A hardheaded, practical man, he believed that in the long run American workers would be better off if they organized swiftly for a larger share of the profits.The facts do not bear this out. Most European labor in Gompers’s day was also taking an evolutionary approach. In Scandinavia, Great Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, and even France most unions took the “bread and butter” line and their allied political parties pressed for social legislation in parliamentary fashion.Of them all, only France was as far behind by 1914 as the United States in providing protection for injured, disabled, unemployed, and retired workers, and primarily for the same, obvious reason: industrial labor did not yet make up a large proportion of the population. Moreover, in both nations the countryside and small towns still dominated national politics (this was most obvious in the two upper houses, the Senates). It was easy for employers to have their way in clashes with their workers, and easy to defeat social legislation because of what it would cost other segments of the population. Thus, both here and in France, leaders elected as “liberals”—Cleveland and Clemenceau—did not hesitate to send troops against strikers. Sheer numbers are, after all, important in democratic societies. The balance of power was against any reform that would accomplish much for workers and their families, and it remained so until the era of the New Deal.Progress?THE PERIOD FROM 1865 TO 1917 IS THE TURNING POINT for all the major themes in the American-history course. In foreign affairs the United States joined the imperial powers of the earth, intervened decisively in a general European war, and became the world’s leading creditor nation. In the gathering of our people some 25 million new immigrants arrived; millions of Americans, old and new, moved westward; tens of thousands of blacks moved out of the old Confederacy to the North and West. In economic matters the explosive growth of American capitalism created great new wealth, a new working class, new distances between rich and poor. In politics those who worried over democracy’s future saw the unprecedented concentration of privately held economic power—in railroads, banking, commerce, and manufacturing—threatening to hold millions in peonage as surely as history’s political tyrants had ever done. Would the ancient curse of plutocracy and pauperism destroy the middle ground and send modern democracy the way of Rome?It was a common question, posed by the people of every European nation aspiring to democracy as well as by Americans. What happened and did not happen in the United States could be much more easily grasped if it were taught in a wider, comparative, setting, and would be of considerably sharper interest to students—especially as the contrasts can well be explored through social and family history.In the years before the Great War the lives of most people of whatever class were shorter and harder than our lives are now, but hope for the future was high. In measuring their lives against those of their parents and grandparents even lower-class men and women saw good evidence of progress in most spheres of human life, and they saw greater promise for their children, as public education spread. Advances in sanitation, medicine, and surgery were especially striking when measured against the memories of their elders’ time. Science in those days appeared to be cleaning up the world. Invention and engineering offered comforts and novelties apparently unending: automobiles, airplanes, ocean liners, streetcars, electrically lighted streets and parks, telephones, phonographs, radio, and moving pictures.The same technology that challenged political democracy also produced a higher standard of living for most people, in food, clothing, shelter, housewares, and recreation. The puzzle was how to bring the gigantic forces of the modern age under democratic guidance without slowing the parade of benefits. We are still working at it. With luck we shall be working at it forever, but the first attempts to solve it were Populism, Progressivism, Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom.For the sake of focus and drama, textbooks should deal with these four major streams of reform all at once, uninterrupted by other matters, and focus on the most important question: What did the period demonstrate about democracy’s capacity to reform itself, to respond to change, to preserve and to extend itself under pressure? But none of the textbooks pursues that question explicitly, so a drama relevant to our own day is reduced to a recital of facts about the past. Still, teachers will find substance enough in any one of these books upon which to build memorable lessons—provided they manage to add supplementary readings. Two examples may be especially helpful. One, a success, is the vast expansion of public schooling. The other, the greatest failure, is the neglect of the rights and well-being of black Americans.To take up the second example first, “failure” is hardly the word, because no significant reform was tried. On the contrary, it was during the Progressive era, from the 1890s onward, that the outrages of Jim Crow and white supremacy reached their peak. Blacks were denied their rights to vote, hold office, or sit on juries. Segregation, exclusion, violence, and humiliation were the daily lot of men, women, and children in every aspect of life from school to work to prison, and, in Bragdon’s words, were “enforced not only by law, but by intimidation, which took its most extreme form in lynching and other forms of mob violence.”The other texts also relate the facts, though they soften their impact by doing so earlier, in the sections on the Civil War and Reconstruction. And no text can convey the depths of the black experience in an era otherwise progressive nearly so graphically as can memoirs, court records, and passages from literature. Students reading selections from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are not likely to forget that at the turn of the twentieth century, and long after, blacks remained a people apart, subject to unanswerable violence to body and spirit. Democracy for them was far removed, further than it had been in the deceptive years of Reconstruction.The positive side of the era is just as difficult to dramatize in textbooks. The sharp rise in the availability of education (even for blacks in some localities) emerges flat and dry from these pages. Absent is the wonder and sense of hope it instilled in so many parents of poor and immigrant children before the Great War. Curiously, the educators who write these books are uninspired and uncritical when they deal with schools. They are content to repeat other people’s clichés about the natural superiority of “progressive" over “traditional” education, as though either term ever described the realities of the classroom. None remarks, for example, that the traditional and common curriculum that the Committee of Ten in 1892 prescribed for all students, whether or not they planned to go on to college, was in fact democratic. In contrast, the progressive notions that later won the day were in fact elitist in their tracking of students into widely differing curricula according to their supposed abilities and economic and social prospects.Nowhere is it clearer than in the sections covering the Populist and Progressive eras that relentless mentioning without taking up central questions of drama and significance is confusing and soporific. Item after item appears; names, dates, laws, elections pass in review, often being well presented in themselves. But larger contexts are missing, as are the ideas, the contrasts, and the comparisons that might awaken students and help them grasp the issues involved. To take an issue still clouded by political rhetoric, each text refers in one way or another to the debate over government intervention in the economy as opposed to the doctrine of laissez-faire. But none is clear on the question, and some actively confuse it.Bragdon, for example, leaves it a mystery as to why liberal reformers of the pre-war years should abandon the principle of their great predecessor, Thomas Jefferson: That government is best that governs least. Yet the reformers saw no mystery. Times had changed. In earlier days, when private enterprise was open, widespread, and less powerful than government, laissez-faire was in the interest of the many. Government interference could hamstring the individual farmer or entrepreneur, and government activism would raise his taxes. Later, as the economy spawned giants of business and industry whose power to destroy or to exploit the free enterprise of others was greater than the government’s power, laissez-faire simply gave license to predators to pillage the majority. Government needed to set the rules of the game, reformers believed, precisely to preserve free enterprise, private initiative, and the possibility of a fair return for one’s labor or investment. As Bragdon notes, Theodore Roosevelt warned that capitalism had to be reformed or it would end by destroying itself. That Jefferson’s words are still invoked by some on the American right wing—as though Jefferson would not have recognized a new circumstance when he saw one— says little for our political discourse. Perhaps better textbooks would help, in time.By treating the pre-war era within a narrowly American frame, these books lose the chance to put the matter of government regulation into perspective. They leave students with the impression that government responsibility for protecting the public welfare was a novel idea on earth. They do not explain the economic and social legislation enacted by European nations at the time. Nor do they remind students that government action against price-gouging, cornering, false weights, adulteration of food, and shoddy goods, and against monopoly, usury, and exploitation of labor, dates back to medieval and ancient societies the world over, and has been called for by the tenets of every major religion and ethical system. In a well-ordered social-studies curriculum centered on history, students would, of course, already have encountered such realities.All these textbooks do nonetheless provide a factual basis for the study of Populism, Progressivism, and the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson years. Each text describes the widespread suffering of farmers between the Civil War and 1900. They differ only in the degree to which they blame the active greed of banks, railroads, and middlemen, on the one hand, and broader, impersonal forces, such as the worldwide instability of food prices and the coming of drought, on the other. Somewhere between lay the protective tariffs that drove up the prices of the manufactured goods that farmers had to buy. From what is presented about these forces, and about the lethargy of the two major parties, students may readily understand the need for a third party, the Populists, at this time. Risjord most clearly points up the importance of third parties, as illustrated by the Populist era.Radical though it seemed in its day, the Populist platform was a comprehensive response to the problems created by the growth of industry and the mechanization of farming. Marking an end to the sterile politics of the Gilded Age, the Populists proposed a genuine effort to bring the nation’s political thought in tune with its economic might. Moreover, nearly every Populist proposal—except for free silver and government ownership of rails and utilities—was enacted over the next 25 years.Most of the texts repeat William Jennings Bryan’s plea for national attention to farms instead of to city interests: “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”The appeal that Populism held in those days is clear enough, but no text exposes the two-sided nature of the populist impulse: its frequent bigotry and reformist ardor to protect small, vulnerable local interests and people on the one hand, and on the other its often paranoid view of the outside world (including other parts of the United States) and its perennial temptation to find villains among the “others.” Unhappily, the negative side of the populist impulse has been more evident in recent times, as the world has gotten more complex.FOR ALL THE HELPFUL PRECEDENTS SET IN STATE REFORM—new forms of taxation, the control of utilities, child labor laws, the regulation of hours of work, women’s suffrage, and much else—the major gains of the Progressive era had to be won at the national level. The leading actors were to be Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In their cases, unlike Lincoln’s and the founders’, the textbooks find room for biographical sketches. But the result is often no better. Little is said about the deeper reaches of character in Roosevelt and Wilson, about the religious and political principles they held, or about the substance of their reading and education. What, in effect, made them unusually productive leaders of reform for a democratic society?Not very much is explained by Roosevelt’s ferocious energy or by Wilson’s great determination. The same qualities drove some of the most dreadful figures in all of history. Only Bragdon probes beneath the surface and the amusing details of Roosevelt’s life to describe his reading and writing of history, his eagerness for all kinds of experience and to know all kinds of people, the several offices he held which demanded several sorts of talent, his ethical code, and—despite the flamboyance—his keen sense of the possible in political reform.It is the consensus of these textbooks that Roosevelt’s most significant contributions were his outspoken assaults on privilege and his spelling out of desirable change, most particularly in the Progressive Party platform of 1912. Davidson quotes Roosevelt’s famous answer to conservatives who blamed his “anti-business” attitude for the slump of 1907.Roosevelt denounced the “malefactors [evildoers] of great wealth” and promised to continue his campaign against “speculation, corruption, and fraud.” Executives of large companies, he said, had opposed “every measure for honesty in business that has been passed during the last six years,”But Davidson, like the other texts, is erratic in the coverage given to the party platforms for presidential elections. Closer detail on each could help students to follow at least the ostensible lines of party debate and party evolution, or lack thereof. But too often the texts highlight only the tactics and personalities of politicians, much as the media do today. The Bull Moose platform of 1912 is an exception. Although the texts fail to note Roosevelt’s apparent abandonment of the politics of the possible, they do list the remarkably progressive measures he espoused, from women’s suffrage to a minimum wage and unemployment insuranee. Implementation of that platform would have put the United States in the forefront of reform democracies on earth. Instead, of course, Roosevelt’s defeat handed the Republican Party over to its most conservative wing, and Woodrow Wilson, more conservative and cautious than Roosevelt, became the President of the United States.As the texts make clear, Wilson later evolved toward direct government intervention in economic and social matters (always excepting the interest of blacks, which he, at best, disregarded), but time was lost after 1912, the progressive impulse was divided by party, and America’s entrance into the First World War closed the era of reform, which was to be reopened only on the heels of another catastrophe, the Great Depression. When that time came, the Progressive platform of 1912 was revived and much of it became law.Finally, the texts are not explicit on the critical need for gifted leadership if democratic societies are to reform themselves. Nor do they remind students that both Roosevelt and Wilson arrived at the White House by chance— the assassination of McKinley, and the Republican Party split of 1912. Would either of these men, outstanding in the parade of Presidents from Lincoln to FDR, have reached the White House under the usual party practices? Texts do not suggest the necessary combination—sometimes accidental—of circumstances, ideas, and leadership that democracy requires to survive and to grow.It is easy for historians to minimize the significance of the Progressives. Many reforms were short-lived; others benefited the middle class and skilled workers but not the poor. Immigrants remained under suspicion, regulatory agencies were ignored or bypassed, and black Americans found no rescue. Why, then, do Bragdon and others say the movement restored faith in the processes of democracy? The best answer, which none of the texts explores, begins with the general historical lesson that reform in the face of powerful interests is always extraordinarily hard to accomplish peacefully. What is most impressive about the Progressives and their legacy to future generations is the degree of reform they were able to achieve, against the circumstances of their day, against the balance of power in American society at the time, which was still decidedly conservative—as the ensuing decade of the 1920s was to prove.It Tolls for UsONE OF THE INDISPENSABLE THEMES FOR A HIGH school course in American history is our changing role as a world power and how that role has affected the character of American political democracy. Like the other questions deserving close study, it must be brought down to the present day. It is as important in studying our foreign relations as it is in studying domestic affairs that our memories not be selective, repressing instances of error and failure and moments when we did not appear at our best, even to ourselves. Even less may we be parochial,leaving out what other peoples have thought about our behavior and its effects on them.Our victory over Spain in the 1890s and our seizure of empire brought us suddenly to the world stage (for the first time, it may be argued, since the American Revolution, when our role was a rather different one). Our part in and after the Great War, and the weakness of the European nations, put us squarely in the limelight. We were respected for our strength, envied for our wealth, resented for our easy winnings. We helped to win the war and to lose the peace. Thereafter we sought to avoid commitments, to avoid effort and expense, while seeking whatever economic advantages could be gained from Europe’s disarray.It is not the story we tell ourselves—or that textbooks tell. But it is what the world believed of us, from 1919 to Pearl Harbor. In presenting the record of the United States as a new world power, textbooks ought to make clear that to study foreign affairs without putting ourselves into others’ shoes is to deal in illusion and to prepare students for a lifelong misunderstanding of our place in the world.No event reveals the vulnerability of all nations to outside forces more sharply than the war of 1914-1918 and its consequences. None can better prove to students the need to see American history always in its world context. Historians cannot know whether war was inevitable, with or without the pistol shot at Sarajevo. But war came, and its causes should be at least as prominent in our history books as the details of progressive legislation.For the education of citizens the months of June, July, and August of 1914 carry historical lessons on the complexity of cause: the importance of the accidental and irrational in history; the particularity of events (the “lessons" of 1914 were wrong for the 1930s); the terrible consequences of earlier, seemingly minor decisions; the importance of individual character at moments of crisis; the role of armaments and military plans, of the daily press, of missed communications and mutual misunderstandings; the impotence of high personages and seasoned diplomats trapped in webs woven years before; the dubious worth of secret intelligence (good information was often ignored, and false was taken as vital, if it fit the policy already chosen).One feature of the time, not enough noted, was that the autocratic governments in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg were adrift and torn by distrust and insubordination. In contrast, the liberal, representative governments of Britain and France kept their staffs and policies in control, maintaining clear lines of civilian authority over the military, and making better use of the intelligence at hand. The belief that democracies were less prone than autocracies to rush to war was based on fact, at that time. But the entanglement of France and Britain with Russia was not to be escaped, and they fell into the abyss.American students need to know this story, and to reflect on what American, and European, journalists were choosing instead as the big news of July, 1914. Awash in the doings of high society in the glorious summer of that year, they were scarcely prescient. History has a way of hiding behind the headlines, on the inside pages. It is too bad to find it hidden, or ineffectively presented, in textbooks for the American-history course. As in the descriptions of our Revolution or of our industrial development in the nineteenth century, the global perspective is not much evident. The larger significance of the First World War to the United States, and thereby the significance to us of its causes, is not clear in any of these texts.To add to the student-citizen’s political acumen, the war’s effects must be related to its military character—the stalemate of trench warfare, the repeated and futile frontal assaults, the deaths by the millions—which resulted from the failure of the German victory plan of 1914. In the first six weeks one side or the other might have won, and cut the slaughter short. Neither did so. The greater tragedy ensued, sowing revolutions and wars to come. In this light the Battle of the Marne is more important to American history than all the battles later fought by our soldiers in France. Because the length and the losses of the war rendered the world far less safe for democracy than it had been in 1914, its military history is crucial. But as in the case of our Civil War, the textbooks largely ignore the import of military plans and their implications for postwar society and for democracy in particular.Some may object that it is unreasonable to expect textbooks in American history to include so much of the history of other nations and events. The answer has been given above. We must widen our focus. American history is what has happened to us and why, no matter where it happened. The European causes of the war are of prime importance; our reasons for entering are secondary. The Battle of the Marne is more important than those of the Argonne. What European diplomats failed to do in 1914, what the Big Four failed to do at Paris, shaped the lives of all of us, more directly than much of what takes up space in our history books. If we are to comprehend American history, we must learn it differently.LIKE AMERICAN ECONOMIC GROWTH BEFORE, THE FIRST World War, the coming of the Great Depression is merely narrated. Its causes—especially as they relate to the war—are not helpfully explained. Yet the depression that began in 1929 was one of the great shaping experiences of American history, ranking with the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War. This ought to be said to students at the outset. The personal and social disasters of the Depression raised the gravest challenge in history to democracy. In Germany the Weimar Republic was unable to withstand the strain, and Adolf Hitler strode to power. Though the American, British, and French democracies managed to survive (the French Republic expiring only after the military debacle of 1940), they had to fight off extremist groups on the right and left, which extolled the Fascist and Soviet systems and which agreed only on the coming collapse of “decadent" liberal democracy. Many Americans spoke seriously of the possibility of revolution as the Depression continued to deepen in the election year of 1932. Some feared, and some welcomed, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal precisely because they expected a dictatorial regime offering salvation by decree, outside constitutional procedures.On the New Deal and its works, the textbooks could be much clearer about how tax reform, labor legislation, union rights, and the regulation of business worked to shift economic power in American society from the overwhelming domination by capital that had characterized previous eras. The shift was only moderate, as subsequent events have shown, and it could hardly be called a “middle way” in European terms, since in Europe even conservative governments sponsor national health care, own and manage transport, communications, and utilities, and engage in investment planning for their economies.The textbooks agree that Roosevelt was forced to pause in 1938, ending the so-called Second New Deal. And they agree that only the coming of the Second World War ended widespread unemployment and raised the purchasing power of the mass of Americans. What they do not add is that the Second World War may well have saved American capitalism from greater shifts in the balance of power and a pursuit of the middle way of a mixed economy, as the world outside our textbooks generally defines it.The New Deal’s failure to achieve recovery and reasonably full employment, and its failure to raise blacks, migrant workers, the rural poor, and many farmers above the poverty level, suggests that economic problems analogous to those we now call structural were at work even then. Had the war not intervened to hide them, it is possible that a “Third New Deal” would have emerged in response to continuing economic crisis, perhaps extending to the words no politician dares utter even now—economic planning. Instead, the Second World War and our domination of a world economy largely free of competitors until the mid-1960s allowed us to postpone discussion of fundamental economic issues that, over the years, have taken on new and unforeseen forms.The textbooks do better on the subject of Nazism and our entrance into the Second World War. But their explanations of U.S. isolationism within the larger frame of Anglo-French appeasement are minimal, and again of little help to students’ grasp of foreign affairs—or of how the “lessons” of history can be misleading, or actively abused.What are the general lessons from the 1930s that the textbooks might present? First, that the prevailing opinions behind appeasement were predictable responses to oversimple explanations of the Great War current in schoolbooks and the press. Second, that political leaders will very often make the choices that are easiest to explain, given the prevailing notions of their day, for to do otherwise is to risk attack from simplifiers who have the public with them. Third, that leaders will likely take such a risk only with some assurance that the public is at a level of historical and political sophistication which permits it to listen attentively to unfashionable and unpleasant ideas.IF HISTORY IS TO CONTRIBUTE ALL IT CAN TO THE CIVIC education of students, it needs pursuing down to the present day. These textbooks tend to be bland about our history since 1945, and lacking in focus. Teachers who wish to follow the ups and downs of recent political democracy will have to provide their own framework. Among the many possible stopping places, six topics suggest themselves: democracy’s solutions for war-related problems at home and abroad and the strains on democracy produced by them, the Cold War response to the threat of Soviet power, the tragedy of Vietnam, the rise of the “imperial presidency,” the dramatic advances made by women and minorities in civil rights and in political and economic life, and the emergence of new economic and environmental problems that affect democratic society in the technological age.To begin with, the response of American democracy to the economic and political problems erupting from the Second World War is one of modern history’s great success stories. American life down to the present could have been markedly less comfortable if our government had failed as dismally in the 1940s as it had in the 1920s to face economic realities. Happily, American leaders proved that they could learn from history, reversing the policies that had so aggravated the economic and social problems of the 1920s and that had led to the Depression. Overseas relief aid continued, keeping farm exports and prices up. Instead of insisting on the collection of war debts that could not be paid and leaving loans to the short-term considerations of private banking, the United States offered the Marshall Plan, to help the economic rebuilding of Europe. At home the bonus was not delayed: the GI bill spurred the housing industry, farms, and small business, and got millions of veterans into school and out of jobless lines.The textbooks are weak on the importance of the Marshall Plan to our economic health at home and on the striking contrast it made with our foreign economic policies of the 1920s. Assuredly a great and generous gift to Europeans, it was also an act of enlightened self-interest which citizens must comprehend if our leaders are to enjoy the support they need to propose similar measures in the future. The Marshall Plan was an investment by American taxpayers to preserve exports and employment in the short run, to sustain troubled democracies, and to prepare healthy trading partners in the long run, for the sake of the next generation. It was costly. It was denounced as a “giveaway” by partisan opponents who could not, or would not, look beyond the quarterly balance sheet. Texts should meet such arguments straight on, for political sophistication requires a high tolerance for the long-range view that is a mark of enlightened self-interest.Intelligent citizens also know that governments, like individuals, often do the right thing for a different reason, and they know how fortunate this has been for human history. It is all but certain that the Marshall Plan would never have been adopted if it had not been for the Communist threat to Western Europe. The massive presence of the Red Army in Eastern and Central Europe, and the unprecedented activism of Communist parties in Western Europe, required decisive responses. Unlike the 1920s, when the British and the Americans could suppose they were safe, the Cold War forced them to take a much more sensible approach to economic problems, to the German question, and to the needs of collective security. Moderate and liberal Democrats and Republicans united to defeat opponents on the left who persisted in denying the danger to democracy and opponents on the right who resisted both the idea and the expense of commitments abroad. Textbooks could be more explicit on the success of the Western democracies since 1945.If a new world-consciousness and farsighted economic and political policies abroad were to the Cold War’s credit, no such silver lining appeared at home. The Communist threat became the staple of politicians and pundits, who made careers for themselves out of pushing what Boorstin and Risjord both call “the second red scare.”On the better reasons for the anti-Communist anxiety of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the texts are clear: Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe, the Soviet development of the atom bomb, the atomic-spy cases, the “loss” of China to the Communists, and the outbreak of the Korean War. The rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy are narrated more or less fully, but little is said about the effects of McCarthyism on American political discourse. Had the texts followed the theme of political democracy, they could have noted that the essence of free politics is open debate and that the anti-Communist mode of political argument and career-building sometimes amounted to censorship of alternative views—a form of political bullying not wholly dissimilar to that practiced by leftists in a later era. The epithet “soft on communism” forestalled searching discussion of policies toward our allies, the Third World and “neutralist” nations (few recalled our own neutrality in the 1930s), and China—until a politician whose career had been built on anti-communism, Richard Nixon, became President.The Vietnam War and the opposition to it are generally well narrated in these textbooks. No text says so outright, but John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as Democrats, were especially sensitive to charges of softness on communism, which seemed to have hurt their party after the “loss” of China and the Korean stalemate. Saying so would help students see the lasting influence of political polemic.Bragdon and Boorstin say that American officials assumed that without U.S. intervention all of Southeast Asia would fall to the Communists, and then Bragdon adds a vital point made by no other text. American military experts “grossly underestimated the will and the ability of the Viet Cong to continue fighting,” though it does not follow up the point. No text mentions the vastly mistaken faith in the efficacy of aerial bombardment. All texts note that the scale of bombing exceeded all American drops in the Second World War, but none underlines the war’s futility, or its horror. The texts say nothing about the American government’s decision to put aside the warnings of authorities and allies who were knowledgeable about Southeast Asia. So they miss the chance to emphasize the importance of knowing the particularities of an area’s geography, people, culture, and history before launching military actions. The texts underplay another unanticipated factor: the great difficulty of sustaining public support for a long, bloody war that is conducted in the open, on the nightly news.If Vietnam was the most tragic overseas example of zealousness spurred by the Cold War, the emergence of what some have called the “imperial presidency” was its leading expression at home. All the texts refer in one way or another to the growth of presidential power since the Second World War, particularly in foreign, military, and intelligence affairs, but none examines its full implications for a democratic system. There is, moreover, a problem associated with the imperial presidency which no text confronts directly. In the name of national security, violent covert action has been carried out abroad, contrary to international law and to other countries’ statutes, without public or congressional discussion. The texts could ask whether such action is compatible with the spirit of the Constitution. Few people would question the need for undercover intelligence-gathering, nor would most oppose undercover support for genuinely democratic forces abroad. But violence against foreign persons, parties, and governments outside of wartime is a different matter, despite the persistent coupling of the two functions by defenders of covert action.Opponents offer the argument that so many covert operations have failed or backfired, either in the short run or in the long run, because they cannot by their nature be subject to disinterested discussion beforehand. Second is the political argument: the essence of democracy is open government and the public discussion of political problems, their possible solutions, and the solutions’ likely costs. How to deal with Mossadegh in Iran, and with Castro in Cuba, were properly public questions, not matters for secret action, which, if handled differently, might not have led to problems far greater—the fundamentalist Iranian revolution and the Cuban missile crisis—than those that Eisenhower and Kennedy believed they had found quick answers for. Students know that this is often the way with shortcuts. Texts could say such commonsensical things wherever they apply.A third argument is moral. When Kennedy authorized assassination plots against Castro, he was, in a technical sense, not acting “above the law.” But is the law he was acting under true to the spirit of democratic principles? Murder is not the normal business of a government proclaiming the rule of law. CIA-sponsored booklets of advice on political tactics which advocate the murder in Central America of friends, in order to blacken enemies, are shameful, and cast our republic into the company of Borgia poisoners. The issue goes to the heart of the democratic polity and national security. In a world that is dangerous, how should we set limits on our responses to the lawless acts of others, including terrorists?There is, happily, another side to American democracy’s adventure since 1945: the great advance in civil rights for blacks, other minorities, and recent immigrants, and the wider opportunities in general for them and for women. The nation that fought the war to save democracy finally took the necessary (and long overdue) steps to extend political rights to all its citizens. In the past twenty-five years a second Reconstruction, this time enforced by the Union, has been largely accepted. As in the first Reconstruction, however, there is no guarantee that the letter of the law will be turned into equal social opportunity. None of the five texts says outright that the gains made, on paper and in actuality, may not even be held, much less extended, unless we manage to expand our economy to allow most people, of any race and background, to feel fairly confident about achieving decent economic and social lives for themselves and their children. The textbooks are simply not explicit on the degree to which good feeling among all the groups and regions of America depends on such confidence.In their closing pages the texts fail systematically to tackle the problems of structural changes in the economy—brought about by new technologies, foreign competition, agribusiness, the failure or emigration of industries—and how these problems can be addressed. No text raises the specter of a permanent underclass, unemployable by our evolving economy. And none forthrightly considers the nation’s aging, decaying infrastructure, or the immensely complicated relations between the economic and environmental choices before us. The lively students we most want to engage in the study of history and citizenship are perfectly well aware of most of these problems. To have textbooks end without treating them seriously is to leave such students with the impression that books and schooling have little to do with the realities they and their families confront in daily life.As it is, the books conclude with markedly different messages to students. Bragdon is downright subdued, its final chapter opening with words from Jimmy Carter: “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great nation has its recognizable limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.” Todd is broadly typical. Its more positive closing chapter, “Into the Future,” is a catalogue of problems set in tripartite form: first, challenge; second, concern; third, vague and optimistic allusions to forthcoming solutions. Boorstin provides the sunniest conclusion of all in an epilogue, “The Mysterious Future”: “If the future is a mystery story, then, that does not frighten Americans. For we Americans have always lived in the world’s greatest treasure house of the unexpected.”It is not surprising that the texts should close on varied notes, from Bragdon’s sobriety to Boorstin’s hearty optimism, for there are good historical reasons to take either position, or any stopping point between. But what more should we ask to make texts more effective tools of education for democracy? For one thing, some plain speaking on history’s lesson that hard work, high costs, and genuine sacrifice—toil, tears, and taxes—have been required to produce our great achievements and will be required again. For another, some suggestion that students and citizens be wary of those who promise deliverance without pain. As Bernard Baruch observed at the dawn of the atomic age, we are in a race between the quick and the dead. Democracy’s fate may hinge, as it has before and elsewhere, on the level of debate we manage to reach. It is not encouraging that government spokesmen and candidates for public office so often talk as though assuming their audience to be morally irresponsible, politically obtuse, and ignorant of history.Textbooks would not need to be partisan in order to point out the danger of the partisan skewing of public issues. Left and right so often prefer to cry wolf, or conspiracy, when dull fact says otherwise. And it is not only in children’s stories that when the facts justify alarm they are not heeded, because alarm has been so often abused. The quality of public debate is not helped by the left’s reluctance to find problems with Soviet power, military-bashing, quick disarmament, moral relativism, and the general leveling of society. It is not helped by the right’s reluctance to find problems with secret government and covert violence, environmental destruction, the arms race, overbearing corporate power and extreme disparities of wealth. Nor is it helped by the lack of understanding at both extremes of the consequences, in foreign as well as domestic affairs, of a weak central government. If the center is to hold—as the founders held in Philadelphia, against the simplifiers of their day—we will need an audience prepared and willing to listen to complications.