I’m a reformed politician. I know why they want to rewrite Kansas and Missouri history | Opinion
Tyrants ancient and modern have controlled history to secure their power.
The pharaohs’ court historians designed their sovereigns’ pyramid inscriptions. The Chinese Communist Party dictated maximum leader Xi Jinping’s glorified biography. Those who fear their people always fear an honest history of their people.
Across the American heartland — and our nation — Republican politicians from Washington, D.C., to Jefferson City and Topeka are pushing to control our common American history. They pretend to worry about “leftist indoctrination,” so-called “critical race theory” and “woke brainwashing.”
What they really fear is more straightforward: the truth, open debate and honesty about America’s complicated past.
I’ve been a working historian for nearly a quarter-century. I’ve taught U.S. history, the American Revolution and the interwar decades when Babe Ruth and Cal Coolidge made our daily news. A proud University of Kansas history professor, I’ve both lectured to hundreds of freshmen and steered a doctoral seminar of 10.
So when politicians claim to promote “all-American patriotic history,” I believe they are really pushing anti-Americanism down to its most dangerous level.
What’s more anti-American than dictating what subjects will and won’t be taught in our schools’ history classes? What’s more hostile to our founding principles of free inquiry and vigorous debate?
Seventy years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower stood up to his era’s “patriotic” tyrants. Senator Joe McCarthy and his rabble were demanding American overseas libraries purge books they deemed “socialistic.” Ike used his 1953 Dartmouth commencement address to denounce McCarthyites as “book burners” who feared people actually reading and arguing more than they claimed to fear anti-Americanism.
Growing up in Idaho, our required sixth-grade state histories portrayed the original Idahoans — the Nez Perce, Shoshone and Kootenai tribes — as shiftless, backward impediments to white settlement of our forested mountains and sagebrush plains.
While working in New Mexico, I learned how a decorated World War II veteran, from a Pueblo community that had inhabited the Rio Grande Valley for more than 10,000 years, led the court fight to shatter the state’s half-century barrier to Native people voting in state elections, although they had been officially designated as American citizens since the 1920s.
Idahoans and New Mexicans, historians and ordinary people, undermined the fake histories they had been forced to learn. And they were better for it, thanks to open debate and, yes, teaching about controversy and conflict.
A former Idaho state senator, I understand that politicians instinctively grandstand under the cliché du jour, like today’s “critical race theory” and “wokeism.” Did it myself a few times.
But I also know the insidious threat posed by dictating supposedly “patriotic” histories that erase or gloss over the full American story. Our past presents a tangled skein of perspectives, memories, and stories. When governments pick certain stories, that presages eliminating some people’s experiences.
When governments define some histories as “bad” or “dangerous,” that draws a road map for tyrants to create fake history to elevate favored groups and diminish those lacking political clout to tell their own story.
Missouri and Kansas are because of brutal battles over race, exploitation and power. Our common histories blend examples of cruelty with creativity, degradation with dignity. As we learn, we question. As we question, we understand. As we understand, we improve.
Preventing teachers from teaching that kind of history replaces knowledge with propaganda. Beware politicians who bellow one day about “freedom from government control,” and the next day try on tyrants’ robes to suit their partisan purposes.
Karl Brooks is a professor at the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration. He has a doctorate in history from KU and is a former Idaho state senator.
