The Republican party’s war on history, which includes book banning, outlawing DEI instruction, and legislation policing what teachers say to students in a top-down effort to ensure that only inaccurate, harmful history “eduction” is offered in K-12 schools erases the racism, slavery, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and other problems of human nature contrary to the work of democratic rule that all nations have experienced in their past and struggle with today. That’s what this attack on history education in this country is intended to do. It’s part of the “magical past” dogma that locates the best of America in its past. Whether this is offered to us in 2024, 1990, 1940, or 1840, as it has been, the message is always the same: until very recently, America was “great”, but now, in the past 20-30 years, that greatness has been impaired by minorities, foreigners, and women who want to destroy all that was good in America by demanding equal rights and changing the status quo.
We hear about this anti-educational goal a lot, and there are myriad examples of it that we can find in the news today. But to show that it’s not just a 21st century effort, let’s examine the 1942 Warner Brothers release March On, America! – a short movie meant to inspire Americans as the nation finally entered World War II. Because there was still plenty of sentiment against entering the war, as we discussed in our recent short series called “WWII and wishful thinking”, Hollywood mobilized to help turn that ship around and galvanize pro-war energy.
It’s worth noting that today, the America of WWII is often held up as the time America was not just great but at its greatest, that this was the “greatest” generation in largest part because it fought the war against fascism. Yet if we travel back to 1942, we find a great deal of foot-dragging, which proves only that the mirage of the “magical past” so near, just a generation away but so dangerously out of reach, is just that–a mirage.
March On! is just 21 minutes long, but in that short time it tells the history of America from Pilgrim to Pearl Harbor. We saw it on Turner Classic Movies a while back, and recorded it so we could pull exact quotes to show that this is the kind of “history” anti-Americans are enforcing right now–a “history” that talks about the Civil War without ever mentioning slavery or showing a black American, a “history” that claims that eastern European immigrants arrived with the Puritans in the 1620s, and a “history” that promotes the myth of the “disappearing Indian” with seeming compassion that is more toxic than open hate could ever be.
By 1630 nearly a thousand immigrants had landed on the shores of Boston Harbor in Massachusetts Bay. The Joneses, and Smiths, and Browns, yes, and the Kellys and the Moskowitzes and the Pulaskis.
Where to begin? The easiest spot is the date and location: the Pilgrims arrived in North America in 1620, not 1630, and colonized the Wampanoag place called Patuxet, which they called Plimoth, not Boston Harbor–that was the Puritans, a different group arriving in the Massachusetts place called Shawmut and renaming it Boston in 1630.
Equally easy but much more alarming is the bald statement that Irish and Catholic or even Jewish eastern European emigrants were right there alongside the Pilgrims and Puritans. It’s so obviously not just untrue but ridiculous that its purpose is made neon-clear: since young men of every background were being drafted into the armed forces after a lifetime of segregation and fear-mongering, an attempt had to be made to suddenly create a sense of unity amongst them, so after three centuries of prejudice and institutional discrimination against eastern European Jewish and Catholic immigrants, this “history” suddenly includes them at the very start. The movie does, of course, show stately and self-controlled English people quietly disembarking from the Mayflower while the “Kellys and the Moskowitzes and the Pulaskis” are shorter, poorer, and goggle-eyed with their primitive excitement.
These immigrants cleared the land, because “it needed to be cleared”, and then we get this remarkable passage:
At first with stoic patience the Indians watched the white men inhabit their hunting grounds, then with distrust and alarm [showing them setting fire to gathered wheat]. “Indians on the warpath!” When that cry rang out, colonists gathered up their families and all else they could take with them and hurried off to a stockade. But all this was part of the work that had to be done in this land that had to be settled so a nation could be born. And after a while, the Indians knew the white man would always be here, even after the last Indian was gone.
It’s remarkable because it begins with a surprisingly frank acknowledgement of white colonizing destruction. Indigenous people were indeed patient and slow to anger as lands they belonged to were made off-limits to them by colonizers exploiting it for personal gain. We don’t expect this to be acknowledged. That’s what makes it even more painful when we zag from justifiable anger to “Indians on the warpath!”–suddenly, Indians are war-mongers, and colonizers innocents who just have to endure until they were free to do their good work of founding a nation. The implicit message is that these colonizers wanted to found a democracy–the U.S. that was drafted into existence in 1787–and this high-minded goal justified and ennobled their colonization. This of course is untrue. The proto-democracy of puritan New England, while leading to the government created by the Constitutional Convention, was in large part created to and by the right to personal profit that drives all colonization, then and now.
The shock of the last sentence–after a while, the Indians knew the white man would always be here, even after the last Indian was gone–lies again in its zag from accuracy to inaccuracy. Indigenous people did realize that there could be no turning back to their real, not at all magical pre-colonizing past, but there will never be a time when “the last Indian is gone”. Colonization insists on erasing indigenous people, and claims that “the last Indian is dead” began in the 1700s in the United States in order to wish away and remove legal personhood from Indigenous people who were and are very much alive.
The story moves along to the Civil War:
But once again storm clouds were gathering over our republic, as the Northern and Southern states of our own union took issue.
[Southern politician in a legislature] “Secession, gentlemen! the people of my state are in favor of it!” And again the truth was self-evident [newspaper headline “Southern States Withdraw from Union”]: the United States of America were no longer united, but a nation divided.
“Took issue”… over? We never find that out. Why did the southern states secede? We just don’t know. …This dangerous nonsense is again very clearly the result of the shamefully successful efforts of southern states to insist that American children be taught that the Civil War was fought strictly over the south’s loyalty to states’ rights to self-government: the north insisted on giving the federal government too much power, and the south stayed true to the Constitution. It’s so maddening that this poison is still being fed to American students to this day. The question of who really won the Civil War is still a live one.
We continue:
[after Fort Sumter is attacked President Lincoln is informed and prays with his son Tad] “That we may act calmly and justly in this time of great stress, and lastly, that we be given strength to hold one people in one union under one flag. Amen.”
[fade to a Southern general with his men] “…but deliver us from evil… Amen.”
This was no war of foreign aggression, but people against people, brother against brother. Both the North and the South believed their cause to be just. Final victory fell to the North. But the people at home had little heart for jubilation. They were only thankful that the weary struggle was at an end.
Lincoln, whose election sparked the war because southern enslavers knew he would move to make slavery unconstitutional, prays only that the U.S. act with “justice” (i.e., not anger or vengeance or revulsion) against the traitorous Confederacy. A Confederate general also prays, so people who breed human beings for profit are just as nobly Christian as those who fight to end slavery. Finally, both sides believe their cause–whatever that is??!!–to be just. By sheer chance, “final” victory “falls” to the North; the strong suggestion is that the Confederacy deserved to win but at the very end through no fault of its own or virtue of the U.S. Army, it lost. But no one–not even the Americans who won a war to end slavery–was happy. No one celebrated. Everyone just wanted the war to end because it was unjust and unnecessary and best forgotten as quickly as possible.
Normally we would say that it’s bizarre that the movie shows Lincoln giving the 1863 Gettysburg Address after the war is over in 1865, as a benediction on U.S. and Confederate deaths, but that’s par for the course when you’re doing fake “history”.
We move rapidly from this point, into the Manifest Destiny period:
Now began the great era of Reconstruction and development. Lumbering prairie schooners rolled westward over plains, through rivers… To the Indians, watching from hidden places, the spinning wagon wheels recalled the old story: the white man will build a campfire on your hunting ground. Then he’ll build a house. Then a fence—to keep you out. The Indian massacres wrote chapters of horror into the story of the west. But the lusty bustling western town springing up in a hundred places confirmed the end of the Indian wars.
Again, the whiplash of hearing real history–the “old story” of colonization beginning with a campfire and ending with massacres–is unexpected, and of course painful when the massacres are identified as being committed by Indigenous people rather than white colonizers. Again, Indigenous people are described as being cheated and harmed, and having a just cause for anger, but then as immediately leaping to all-out massacre and war, which simply is not true. And again, the inevitability of “Indian disappearance” is referenced. When the “Indian wars” end, we understand the “Indian” to end as well. This clip actually ends with a re-enactment of a railroad connection being finished as a crowd watches in the late 1800s; as the final spike is driven, two Plains Indigenous men in full feather regalia grab their heads in dismay and run off screen. It’s as plain a signaling of “past” making way for “future” as one could ever ask for.
We speed through Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin FDR right up to Pearl Harbor, and the movie concludes with a good deal of footage of draftees training and planes flying and ships sailing. We, the eternal audience of “modern” Americans, are asked to call upon our proud history as a nation in order to find the desire to fight this war. Our history of welcoming immigrants of all races and religions, of working toward democracy from day one in 1620, of rejecting war with “our brothers” as ridiculous and sad, of lusty economic development that banished the darkness of the primitive past with the light of the just and equal future… this is what we were meant to think of then, and are instructed to think of now.
There are many problems with fake history. First, it’s not convincing. Americans know from their own experience what this nation is like in their own time, and how previous times got them there. Second, and perhaps worse, that very unconvincing nature makes it believable–it’s the fantasy many people want to believe, because it makes discrimination in the present the fault of the victims: America has always been fair to everyone, so if you aren’t succeeding it’s your own fault. If I’m succeeding, it’s because I earned it. it’s history as wish fulfillment. Finally, for now, it makes history unnecessary and boring because it only retells the truth we already believe and want to believe. Maybe once in a while you need to relate parts of it, in order to shut people up who are complaining, but thinking that history matters is the same as thinking that we need to be taught what America is and what it’s meant to be. If you think real history is important, it’s because you think we still have something to learn or improve on, that the past wasn’t perfect, and that we need to do better. And that means you’ll question or challenge injustice today, which is not what the people leading the war on history want, in any time period. Not in 1942, and not today.
Any democracy that isn’t strong enough to learn about and from its mistakes will never stand. A war on history is a war on democracy. Let that be the moral you take away from any motivational short, and every attack on teaching real history in our schools.
The Historic Present 