I found this essay by Professor Robert S. McElvaine about how the Right uses fake history. “It is often said that history is a story told by the winners. It might be more accurate to say that those who tell their story as history and get others to believe it thereby make themselves the winners. That happened on a grand scale in the United States from the late 19th century into the 1960s. That fact is essential for us to understand as right-wing extremists again seek to dictate that a fraudulent version of the American past be taught in schools. Within a few decades after the Civil War, it came to be the losers’ stories of ‘a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields,’ moonlight and magnolias, kindly masters and happy slaves, a glorious ‘Lost Cause’ and a horrible period of ‘Black Reconstruction’ that were widely accepted as accurate history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union was indissoluble and white Americans outside the South accepted the Southern doctrine that people of African ancestry were innately inferior. That acceptance was facilitated by the popularity of the pseudoscience of social Darwinism and a fabricated story that Reconstruction had been a monstrous time of rule by ignorant black people, rather than the largely successful period of progressive and democratic reform that it actually was. This inverted history had an enormous impact on the lives of at least three generations of Americans that, though diminished, continues down to the present. The most consequential telling of it is found in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, ‘Birth of a Nation,’ a landmark work both of cinema and white supremacist propaganda. The movie represents enslavers as benevolent caretakers for a lower life form. Enslaved people are shown singing and dancing during the ‘two-hour interval given for dinner.’ Reconstruction is painted as a time in which the ‘natural order’ of white superiority was turned upside down. Griffith presents a frightening picture of ‘crazed negroes,’ with the necessary restraints of slavery removed, making ‘helpless whites’ their ‘victims.’ One of the title cards in the silent movie depicts the restoring of white man’s rule as a glorious event and describes it as ‘the former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.’ “
The essay continues, “The view that Reconstruction was a period of terrifying ‘black domination,’ and Restoration the rightful reaffirmation of the United States as ‘a white man’s country,’ was prevalent throughout the nation from the 1890s into the early 1960s. Pushed by followers of early 20th-century Columbia University historian William Dunning, this interpretation was routinely taught in schools. It was also reflected in popular culture, notably in Margaret Mitchell’s hugely successful 1936 novel ‘Gone With the Wind’ and its 1939 film adaptation. The 1950s — the time when Republicans today say America was ‘great’ — lasted well into the early 1960s. Though it is often referred to as an ‘age of innocence,’ in fact it was an age of ignorance of guilt. Restoring that ignorance is a major component of the authoritarians’ plan to ‘Take America Back.’ In 1964, songwriter and folk singer Tom Paxton recorded ‘What Did You Learn in School Today?’ It is a biting satirical attack on the misinformation that was still being taught about the American past. The son in the song responds to his father’s question by saying he learned that everyone in the United States is free, our country is always right and just, the police are always our friends, the wars America fights are always good and so on. Paxton’s lyrics again seem tailor-made for the ‘guilt-free’ mythology that Republicans today are seeking to impose on school curricula while calling it history. It was in 1964 that the dam holding back the truth about the American past cracked. ‘A Shadow Stretched Across Our History for a Hundred Years,’ read a New York Times Book Review headline on Sept. 13, 1964. That shadow, cast by the acceptance of the losers’ false history, which continued its pernicious effects through the Jim Crow era of segregation, was finally being lifted. Newer scholarship — and some older but largely ignored works, notably W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1936 ‘Black Reconstruction in America‘ — that presented a very different view of Reconstruction was brought to a wider public attention.”
According to Professor McElvaine, “Even more important in overturning the whitewashed history that had held sway for so long was the impact of the civil rights movement in awakening many Americans, particularly the young, to the fact that they had been spoon-fed a distorted version of the nation’s past. Particularly significant in that regard were the Freedom Schools set up during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. ‘Education in Mississippi is an institution which must be reconstructed from the bottom up,’ said Charles Cobb, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary who pushed the idea of Freedom Schools. The prospectus that was sent to volunteers who would teach in the schools, ‘Notes on Teaching in Mississippi,’ explained that Black students ‘have been denied free expression and free thought. Most of all … they have been denied the right to question.’ Students were encouraged to bring their own experiences with the institutions and practices of Mississippi into the discussion. Among the innovations of the Freedom Schools was the teaching of African American history. It was a revelation to many of the students that people like them had a history. The rise of Black history, as well as other areas of ethnic history and women’s history, as the ’60s blossomed was in part the result of what began in the Mississippi Freedom Schools in the summer of 1964.”
The essay goes on to tell us, “Today’s right-wing extremists seek to ‘Take Back America’ in two senses: back from those who are not white or not male and back to the time when straight white males were in charge. An essential part of their overall quest to effect a second ‘Restoration’ of white man’s rule is an attempt to restore the ignorance of American history that had prevailed before 1964. States under right-wing control have been passing laws restricting what may be taught in their schools, especially about racism. The Republican-controlled Texas state legislature enacted a law in 2021 specifying what should — and should not — be taught to students about their nation’s and state’s past. Excluded were the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and states from denying or abridging the right to vote ‘on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,’ the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ‘the history of Native Americans’ and documents on the separation of church and state and the women’s, Chicano and labor movements. Existing standards calling for teaching about the ways in which white supremacy, slavery, eugenics and the Ku Klux Klan are ‘morally wrong’ were removed. The law is unmistakably a formula for again making Texas, where non-Hispanic whites are already a minority, what it was before 1964: a white man’s state. At its state convention in June of this year, the Texas Republican Party adopted a platform requiring that lies be taught as history and insisting that the traitors who led the Enslavers’ Rebellion (aka the Civil War) be venerated.”
We read, “Not to be outdone in the Orwellian project of reconstructing the past to promote nefarious objectives in the present, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had the state Department of Education hold training sessions for teachers this summer, as part of a ‘civics excellence’ program. Teachers who attended reported that they were instructed to teach students that American slavery wasn’t really that bad, that the Founders didn’t want the separation of church and state, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and other flat-out lies. Mississippi racists in 1964 feared that knowing the truth would set people free. Across red-state America in 2022, zealous right-wingers who share that fear are conducting search-and-destroy missions against books and teachers that dare to tell the truth about the nation’s past. At the Freedom School in Canton, Mississippi, a small city just north of Jackson, an incident in July 1964 perfectly symbolized the views and purposes of opponents of truth and freedom, both then and now. Local white people broke into the building housing the school and its small library collection and urinated on the books. Freedom Schools were the antidote to unfree schools in 1964. In 2022, making schools and history unfree is intended to reinstate the ignorance of the past that prevailed six decades ago. A July story in the Washington Post reported on directives to schools and teachers in Florida to take all books on a list of those not ‘in compliance’ with state laws and hide them ‘in a classroom closet’ or elsewhere where students cannot see them. That’s a step above urinating on books, but still outrageous. (Some of the books on the no-read lists are about LGBTQ+ people; ordering them put ‘in the closet’ speaks volumes about where red-state suppression of truth and free inquiry is going.)”
Professor McElvaine concludes, “There is much about the history of the United States in which we can rightly take pride. But to pretend that there are not also dark and difficult truths in our past constitutes a Big Lie that serves the interests only of those who want to destroy the American experiment. Among the reasons why the times they were a-changin’ in 1964 and ‘the losers now will be later to win,’ as Bob Dylan said in a song released that January, was the displacement of a whitewashed version of the American past with a more truthful one. The authoritarians who seek to undermine democracy and freedom today understand that their success depends not only on disseminating fake news, but also on sowing ‘fake olds.’ The rest of us must understand that, too.”
Student of the American Civil War 
The problem with teaching history as I see it is that it is difficult to teach it to people, children, who are not experienced enough to understand how the real world works. It would be better to concentrate on what makes good citizens and upright people. Morality is the arena of religion . Although there should be no state religion, certain religious concepts are very useful in producing a strong citizenry. The fault of religion is often that it’s so called adherents often don’t adhere. Being human and not perfect this is understandable. Being self absorbed and not being self reflective magnifies the humanity problem.
“In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union was indissoluble and white Americans outside the South accepted the Southern doctrine that people of African ancestry were innately inferior.” This was not a part of my northern upbringing in the 50’s and despite limited contact with those of African ancestry was a concept I rejected when exposed to it.
“… they were instructed to teach students that American slavery wasn’t really that bad, that the Founders didn’t want the separation of church and state, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and other flat-out lies. ” I argue that the US was founded as a Christian nation. Of course not overtly but with most of the founders being Christian or part of a Judeo-Christian background, what else would they have based their thinking. It was a given.
History is often used to justify the accumulation of power by individuals or groups which may be seen by those as valid uses of it. Facts exist and may be interpreted to create a story, to whose benefit? Answer that question and the discussion may begin to construct a interpretation that meets a moral standard for human advancement.
Teaching history to children is an introduction. We’re building a framework in middle school. High school builds on that framework. For many adults, their high school experience will be their last contact with some actual history teaching. You can’t mandate all adults to take history classes after they have experience. People need to have that framework of historical knowledge as they try to navigate through life, so I don’t think we can look on that as “the problem.”
The United States was not founded as a Christian nation in any way, shape, or form. It was formed as a secular nation that had religious people and nonreligious people in it who would be equal before the law [white people, anyway, at the time]. Most of the Founders wore wigs. Does that mean the US was founded as a wig-wearing country?
The claim that the right is trying to falsify history is disingenuous. The narrative taught today in American schools is very much the equal and opposite mistake of what these articles claim. Instead of downplaying slavery, modern education blows its actual impacts out of proportion. Instead of disagreeing with [edit] claims that the white northern abolitionists hated the blacks they were trying to free, woke educators agree completely. Instead of pointing out how slavery degraded and weakened the old south, woke education pretends that slavery in America resembled teenage dystopian novels, where the whites lived like Versailles and the blacks were raped, murdered, and enslaved at leisure. How they managed to do it in that order is left to the reader’s imagination.
The author also tries to conflate sexual education with history, as if blacks and LGBT+ people are interchangeable. It’s a simple, easy oppressor-versus-oppressed collectivist way of seeing the world, but history is always more complex than such simplistic notions.
In the end, woke vs. [edit] is a false dichotomy between 2 fake histories created by leftists. The Dixiecrats were not right-wing in the past, and the only reason they’re considered “right-wing” today is because that’s the go-to argument when leftists have internal rivalries. Even Marx himself was labeled as a “conservative” by a rival communist. Doesn’t automatically make it so.
If you want a good example of right-wing education, Larry Schweikart’s book “A patriot’s history of the United States” is the easiest example, and Thomas Sowell has produced multiple works. Schweikart does not shy away from controversy, or claim the civil war wasn’t about slavery (he brings up the “Cornerstone Speech” very early), and Sowell brings up all sorts of obscure sources, such as northern blacks having higher IQs than southern whites in the 1917 Army Alpha/Beta tests. Right-wing history isn’t collectivist.
Thank you for your comment, and I have to disagree vociferously.
You sound as if you haven’t heard a K-12 history class in decades. I spend a lot of time in K-12 classrooms, and in my experience your belief about what happens in schools is completely false. I don’t think it’s possible to blow slavery’s horrors and its impact on US history out of proportion. White abolitionists were on a spectrum. The thing that united them was a desire to see slavery abolished. Many of them were also racists. Antislavery doesn’t mean not racist. There were also some, like Thaddeus Stevens, who truly looked on African Americans as equals. Your views of slavery and its effects are inaccurate. You also tell falsehoods about what educators believe and teach.
You completely misinterpret what the author is saying about LGBTQ+ books being censored.
You are wrong about the Dixiecrats. It’s interesting you claim Strom Thurmond wasn’t a conservative.
Dr. Schweikart’s book is propaganda, not history. It’s a bedtime fairy tale designed to make people feel good. If that’s what you want to read, fine. Just don’t pretend it’s history. History’s objective is to make you understand what happened and why, not to make you feel good or make you into a “patriot.” Thomas Sowell, likewise, is writing for a partisan political purpose, not to increase understanding. Don’t mistake his cherrypicked partisan propaganda for history.
To answer your responses:
1) It is absolutely possible to blow the horrors of slavery, and indeed any atrocity, out of proportion. Slaveowners didn’t torture their slaves for fun, they didn’t castrate them as a joke, and they didn’t gouge their eyes out for sport. Throughout most of human history, slavery’s greatest suffering has been the humiliations of being regarded as property, and not fully human.
Slavery made the old south regressive in every possible way, and this was observed in the 1858 book “The Impending Crisis of the South.” If the education system pointed out how slavery held back an entire part of the country for nearly 200 years, contrasting it with how the free states outperformed them, then that would be an accurate assessment of slavery’s true impact. Instead, we get educators claiming that slavery made America rich (it didn’t), that only white people ever enslaved other people (as if the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites never happened), and that laws which were repealed 50+ years ago/white people existing are the cause of modern woes, and not a welfare state which destroyed the black family. “Roots,” the 2016 “Birth of a Nation” remake which portrays Nat Turner’s rebellion as motivated by white rape, and “The Woman King” (an African “Gone With the Wind”) are three good examples of this counter-falsification of history.
2) White abolitionists were indeed on a spectrum. Woke education agrees with Lost Causers in pretending they were not.
3) What exactly am I misinterpreting? When parents read the pornographic LGBTQ+ books aloud to school boards, the school boards tell them to stop using such dirty language. And Black Americans tend to not like being lumped into the same “victimhood” collective as LGBTQ+s, so educators trying to conflate the two is a bunch of white pseudo-intellectuals claiming to speak for Black America when they, in fact, do not.
4) The Dixiecrats were 20th-century leftists, not right-wingers. They supported Woodrow Wilson’s, FDR’s, and LBJ’s progressive policies on welfare, and even the warming-up of Kennedy/Johnson to Civil Rights didn’t cause a break (the South didn’t switch parties until the 1980s). They collected donations for a revolutionary Mexican government that the Republican presidents openly called “Bolsheviks” in the 1920s. They were only called “right-wing” because they were anticommunists, and after the Reds failed to start a working-class revolution they switched tactics and started pretending to care about blacks. The Dixiecrats, being political prostitutes, were case aside in the process. Apart from “they’re racist authoritarians,” what else is your criteria for what is or isn’t “right-wing?”
5) So when Dr. Schweikart says that the Civil War was about slavery, and not states rights, it’s “Propaganda”? When Sowell cites primary sources that most educators miss, that’s “partisan”? Since they agree with your research and this blog, then you would seem to be claiming that you are a political propagandist yourself.
First of all, name names. Who makes the claims you say are being made? Hinton Helper’s book was propaganda, you should know. The wealthiest counties in the country were in the South. Economic studies show that slavery was a more efficient system than free labor, even when enslaved people tried sabotaging tools.
Again name names. Who claims only white people ever enslaved people? Which alleged “educators?” Who is making these alleged claims you say are being made?
Which educators say white abolitionists were not on a spectrum regarding racism? You make a lot of claims with nothing to back them up.
Nothing you say about LGBT+ is in the article, so you are misinterpreting it. Again, name names. Which educators specifically are you talking about?
It’s ludicrous to claim the Dixiecrats were leftists. That’s simply absurd and factually wrong. Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, Richard Russell, and Fielding Wright were all arch-conservatives. Their official name, after all, was the “States Rights Party.” This is from their platform: “We oppose the totalitarian, centralized bureaucratic government and the police nation called for by the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions.”
“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.”
“We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.”
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/platform-of-the-states-rights-democratic-party/
Here’s what Alabama has to say about them: “The Dixiecrats were a political party organized in the summer of 1948 by conservative white southern Democrats committed to states’ rights and the maintenance of segregation and opposed to federal intervention into race, and to a lesser degree, labor relations. The Dixiecrats, formally known as the States’ Rights Democratic Party, were disturbed by their region’s declining influence within the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats held their one and only convention in Birmingham. The roots of the Dixiecrat revolt lay in opposition to the New Deal policies, particularly the pro-labor reforms introduced by the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Wagner Act. The more immediate impetus for the movement, however, included President Harry Truman’s civil rights program, introduced in February 1948; the civil rights plank in the national Democratic Party’s 1948 presidential platform; and the unprecedented political mobilization of southern blacks in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright in 1944. In this Texas case, the Court ruled the white primary law violated the Fifteenth Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. The states of the Upper South acquiesced in the ruling, but the decision was a political bombshell in the Deep South. White legislators across the region sought ways to circumvent the ruling, and African Americans organized voter-registration campaigns. Across the South, more than a half million African Americans registered to vote in the 1946 Democratic Party primaries.”
https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/dixiecrats/
North Carolina says this: “Dixiecrats, officially members of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, formed after the 1947 publication of President Harry S Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights report, To Secure These Rights. This report, reflecting one of the most aggressively pro-civil rights positions taken by the federal government since Reconstruction, mobilized conservative southern Democrats to block civil rights legislation and contest Truman’s nomination for a second term. When the Democratic National Convention of 1948 voted for a stronger civil rights platform than even Truman supported, disgruntled southerners bolted. They reconvened in Birmingham, Ala., under the name States’ Rights Democratic Party and nominated South Carolina governor J. Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright for vice president. Citing southern tradition, the Dixiecrats combined a belief in decentralized government with a passionate defense of their racially hierarchical, segregated society.”
https://www.ncpedia.org/dixiecrats
South Carolina says this: “When southern conservatives failed to prevent the nomination of Harry Truman at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, some six thousand participants from thirteen southern states converged on Birmingham, Alabama, on July 17, 1948, to hold their own convention. Participants from South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi made up the majority of those in attendance. Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi were nominated as the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the States’ Rights Democrats. Their goal was to win the 127 electoral college votes of the southern states. This would prevent either Republican Party nominee Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman from winning the 266 electoral votes necessary for election, thus throwing the contest into the House of Representatives, where the South would hold eleven of the forty-eight votes. In the House election it was believed that southern Democrats would be able to deadlock the election until either party had agreed to drop its own civil rights plank.”
https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/dixiecrats/
It depends on what Schweikart says about it and how he presents it. Even propaganda has some truth in it. When Sowell cherrypicks parts of sources, that’s propaganda.
If your claims about history are indicative of what Schweikart writes, then his book isn’t worth the paper its printed on.