it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on America Revised by Frances FitzGerald:
At the beginning of the novel, The Prosecution, the defense lawyer, Joseph Antonelli, tells the story of what happened when, a small boy, he broke his mother’s favorite crystal bowl and tried to hide the evidence of his crime.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
“Holding one of the largest pieces in his hand, my father asked me that evening if I knew anything about it. I did what anyone would have done: I denied it.
“He did not seem to believe me. Sitting in his chair, he put his hand on my shoulder and started telling me about George Washington and the cherry tree. I knew then I was finished. That story was everywhere. You couldn’t run away from it. Every father told it to his son, and every schoolteacher told it to her class. You might go all the way through grade school without knowing anything about American history, but you knew young George had ruined it for the rest of us when he made his famous confession, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie.’”
It does not occur to the young Antonelli - or to anyone else who was ever taught that story as a child - to ask why George Washington chopped down the cherry tree in the first place. Washington could not lie, but he could destroy for no apparent reason a tree that may have taken ten, or even twenty or thirty, years to grow! It is worse than you might think. Cutting down a tree in an orchard was no innocent boyhood escapade. Under the English common law, damage to an orchard was a felony. Felonies in the l8th century were punishable by death. George Washington, the Father of our country, was not just a felon, he should have been hung!
If no one knows this, it is because of what we were taught in school; what, to be more precise, we learned from the American history textbooks we were given to read. We are always talking about history, debating what really happened in the past, but no one stops to wonder how much of our disagreements are because what we were taught in grade school and high school has changed; that what we think our history has a history of its own. No one, that is, until Frances FitzGerald wrote America Revised in 1979 and made the dull and prosaic business of textbook publishing come alive. FitzGerald begins with what seems obvious: Each generation reads only one generation of schoolbooks. “That transient history is those children’s history forever - their particular version of history.” More important than the historical facts they are taught are the impressions created, impressions which, like other things learned in childhood, become the unexamined assumptions on which most of us think and act for the rest of our lives.
FitzGerald grew up in the l950s when, according to the textbooks she was given to read, “America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress;” a country that “never changed in any important way.” When she read the textbooks that had been published over the two hundred years of American history, she discovered that there had been a number of different, and substantial, revisions. The history books of l890, for example, appeared to have originated in a different world than the ones written before. The American educational system had been completely transformed after the Civil War. Education had become public. For the first time public high schools had more students than private academies. One consequence was that the basic history textbooks became “a kind of lowest common denominator of American tastes.” This, in part, was because in the l890s three major publishers formed the American Book Company and almost immediately controlled between 75 and 80 percent of the market. Everything was treated with a dull uniformity, even the way Americans defined themselves.
In the nineteenth century, textbooks defined Americans by religion; in the twentieth, Americans were defined by race and culture. This was reflected most profoundly in the distinction drawn between ‘we Americans’ and ‘the immigrants.’ Immigrants, especially Irish and Germans, had been coming to America in large numbers since the 1840s, but between l881 and 1890 more than five million had arrived, a number that rose to more than fifteen million by 1920. This not only increased the population, it “altered the ethnic composition.” After 1900, immigrants from southern and eastern countries in Europe “vastly outnumbered those from northern and western ones.” Some textbooks went so far as to insist that some immigrants were undesirable; nearly all of them agreed with the law establishing quotas based on the national origin of the American population in l890. The texts asked the question: “‘Would it be possibleto absorb the millions of olive-skinned Italians and swarthy black-haired Slavs and dark-eyed Hebrews into the body of the American people.’” The answer was, “Yes, probably.”
Like most other things taught in the history textbooks, this gradually changed. In the l940s, the notion that the country was a ‘melting pot’ entered major history textbooks. Then, in the l960s, came the new orthodoxy, that America was a “nation of immigrants,” a change reflected in the often overlooked, and always under appreciated, fact that it was only in the late 1960s that history textbooks used in American high school contained pictures of Americans who were not white anglo Protestants. But the real “shattering of the single image of ‘an American’ took place with the civil rights movement of the l960s. To include a section on the civil rights movement, however, meant that “the whole of American history had to be rewritten to include blacks and their perspective on events. It was as if Tolstoy had first written War and Peace without the character of Pierre.” The most serious rewriting dealt with Reconstruction. Until 1900, Northern texts treated the South “almost as a foreign country.” The Confederacy was “the slave power;” the Civil War was “the great rebellion.” After 1900, the textbooks insisted that the situation in the South “improved only after ‘Reconstruction” ended, and “the Southerners regained control of their governments.” The speed of this change of perspective had been astonishing, but “it was matched by the one that took place in the nineteen sixties.”
With every change in what the textbooks taught about American history there was, almost always, a protest from an outraged public; protests which increased in size and intensity “with the establishment of universal secondary education in the twentieth century.” In 1939 the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Legion complained that a textbook by Harold Rugg intended for elementary and junior high school students, a book that had sold 239,000 copies that year, was socialistic and even communistic. Their protest was successful. In 1944, Rugg’s book sold only 21,000 copies. In the l950s, at the height of the ‘red scare,’ Ada White, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, decided that Robin Hood, with his policy of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, was clearly a Communist and urged that any book that included the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.
The most important protest, however, was the protest of the Detroit Board of Education in l962 demanding that a text treating slavery in a favorable light be withdrawn from the city’s schools. This protest began what FitzGerald describes as “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place in American schoolbooks.” In addition to changing what American history included, there was a new emphasis on economic forces, social groups and political institutions. Social and political problems became the central focus. Foreign policy, urban blight, racial discrimination were given more extensive treatment than they had been given before. American history, according to one textbook, was “a gnarled experience involving problems, turmoil, and conflict.” What changed in the textbooks, according to FitzGerald, was “nothing less than the character of the United States.”
The emphasis on movements, on structural changes, whether the massive influx of immigrants at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, or the changing relation of the races, changed not just what history included but how history was written. With all the attention now on the movement of forces, no one seemed very concerned with the question of who might have moved them. FitzGerald grasped what few others understood: “serious people who wield political power or influence are never credited by the textbooks with having thought anything.” A foreigner who read them “would have to conclude that American political life was completely mindless. For instance, the texts report that Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was an influential pamphlet without ever discussing what it says.” Major figures like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster “are stick figures deprived of speech,” while the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which involved some of the most brilliant men ever assembled to discuss the principles of government, “appears mainly as a product of interest group compromises….”
Contrary to the general belief that things are always getting better, that there is some kind of progressive movement always working beneath the surface of things, Frances FitzGerald does not hesitate to insist that earlier generations of American had the benefit of textbook writers who not only had a deeper understand of history, but knew how to write. The best of them was David Saville Muzzey whose American History was read by perhaps a majority of schoolchildren from the time it was published in l911 until the mid-nineteen seventies. The book is “wonderfully lively and colorful,” full of characters, “people with beliefs, emotions, and voices of their own.” He tells the story of Lincoln’s assassination in a way that makes the reader - especially the schoolchildren who were reading it - remember it as if they had seen it themselves:
“As Booth leaped down onto the stage after firing his fatal shot, his spur caught in the folds of the American flag which decorated the Presidential box, and he fell, breaking his leg. He made his escape from the theatre on a horse that was waiting at the stage door, but was afterward trapped in a barn in Virginia and shot.”
No one writes textbooks like this anymore, and perhaps for this reason no American textbook has ever come close to its popularity. It makes a difference how a story is told. In the old schoolbooks the young George Washington speaks in his own name, and the young reader sees with his own eyes, and hears with his own ears, that remarkable confession that ruined it for so many would be liars, “Father , I cannot tell a lie.” Told now in the flat dull prose of the social scientists who have come to dominant the American educational scene that same story would read something like: “Washington as a young man was said to have admitted to a violation of a legislative statute affecting the right to property. There is no record that this resulted in a formal prosecution or that he served any period of incarceration.”
And no one has written a book like the one Frances FitzGerald wrote, giving us the history of the history we have learned and, given our ignorance, think we know. Faced with the differences in the history we have been taught, we are forced to ask, not just which version of history is true, but to go deeper and ask what kind of history we should have. It is question seldom asked by anyone since it was asked, almost a hundred fifty years ago, not by an American, but by a European in a now largely forgotten essay appropriately entitled, The Use and Abuse of History. But that is a matter for a later discussion.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson.
--Marshal Zeringue