Which Jefferson?

Less Thomas Jefferson and more Jefferson Davis. Less Hip Hop and more Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, and Newt Gingrich. Under intense national scrutiny, these are the kinds of decisions that the Texas State Board of Education has been making while determining the content of history textbooks for the students of its state. And, because Texas is a major purchaser of textbooks nationally, the decisions made by the Board will have repercussions for the students of dozens of other states.

Even taking these decisions on the merits, however, there is room for debate. Take, for example, the Board’s decision to lower the profile of Thomas Jefferson while putting Jefferson Davis’ ideas on equal footing with Abraham Lincoln’s. Reportedly, the Board wanted to deemphasize the wall between church and state that Jefferson wrote about to a group of Danbury Baptists in 1802. But Jefferson was also a fierce advocate of state’s rights. When the Adams Administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, effectively criminalizing public commentary critical of the sitting government, Jefferson and Madison who drafted both the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Those Resolutions argued that State’s could effectively nullify Federal legislation. As more than a dozen state attorneys general are busy preparing challenges to national health care legislation, one would think Thomas Jefferson would receive a more favorable hearing. But history is a tricky thing.

Watching the School Board proceeding, however, makes one thing clear: these are not the impartial deliberations of dusty old historians. The members of the Board are elected—one is dentist, the other a lawyer--but the majority is unabashedly conservative. They have been given the responsibility of determining what their children learn and they detect a liberal tint to history. They see it as their duty to try to correct it.

The view that the history contained in school textbooks is biased towards the left is not limited to the Texas State Board of Education. More than a few people accept it as a fact, and it has become fashionable in some circles to claim that history is so inherently biased and the only way teach the subject fairly is to expose students to polarized political accounts—A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, next to A Patriot’s History of the United States, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen.

But acknowledging bias in history is nothing new. Historians have long known that writing history is, by definition, to exclude some things and include others. For example, a history of the American Revolution written in the 1960s will be different than a similar history written in the 1860s. The major events will undoubtedly be the same, but the fact that they were written a century parts means they will differ in certain details. The amount of time spent discussing slavery is the most obvious example, but hardly the only one. An account of the role women played would be excluded in the earlier account, but undoubtedly included in the second. Surely we would agree with the later account, but that fact notwithstanding, the earlier historian would be surprised to be accused of trying to pull one over on his readers. Indeed, although historians in the 1960s may have disagreed with what previous historians have written, they did not believe they had attempted to purposefully deceive the public. The fact is that history evolves as our understanding evolves—there is nothing ill intentioned about it. But there is an important distinction between unintentional bias and purposeful alteration that the current debate misses. And it is purposeful alteration that the Texas School Board and their supporters are charging.

The truth is history can never be completely without bias, no matter how far we get away from it. But the history we write tells future generations not only about what we’re writing, but about ourselves. The very act of writing history records the history not only of the intended subject, but also of the writer. This additional level of meaning is destroyed if instead of attempting to write an unbiased account, to the degree we are able, we purposefully subvert our history in order to account for what we perceive as previous distortions. Ultimately the question we need to ask ourselves is: What do we want our history we write say about us?