H. W. Brands
Shoot the Messenger
So what if I’m a respected professor and an award-winning author (not to mention a grown-up)? When I talk about Texas history with seventh graders, I often feel as if I’m under siege at the Alamo. And they show me no mercy.
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I don’t know enough of the history of Texas public education to be able to say whether the timing is deliberate, but it would be an odd accident if the teaching of Texas history to middle school students at just the moment of life when Christian children are being confirmed and Jewish kids bar (and bat) mitzvahed is simply a coincidence. The seventh-grade Texas history class is as much a rite of passage, an initiation into the culture and belief system of Texas, as those other ceremonies are to their respective cultures and mind-sets. In each case the timing is critical: The initiates are mature enough intellectually to absorb and retain a complex body of information but immature enough emotionally not to question it too closely.
The parallel isn’t perfect. Not even the Daughters of the Republic of Texas claim that the canonical texts of Lone Star history were divinely inspired (although Travis’s Victory or Death letter from the Alamo is plausibly accounted sublime. And Travis himself wasn’t so diffident. “The Lord is on our side,” he wrote in a postscript to this letter). The elaborate rituals of religious initiation are missing (although the Texas Pledge of Allegiance—“Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible”—fills some of the gap. That the pledge used to begin “Honor the Texas Flag of 1836” makes the historical connection even clearer).
Texas isn’t unique in teaching the history of the state. Every state’s schools include something of local interest in the curriculum. But no state devotes anywhere near so much attention to its origin myths. Texans can argue, with a certain justification, that their myths are more compelling than those of other states. Texas, the seventh graders are told, is the only state to have been an independent country. (On this point they’ll get an argument from proud Vermonters who recall the Green Mountain Republic and from California descendants of the rebels who proclaimed the Bear Flag Republic of 1846.) And then there are those six flags, two more than any other. (Whether, as with Liz Taylor, Larry King, and other serial matrimonialists, this signifies great appeal or an incapacity to sustain attachment is an open question.)
Such interpretive issues are lost on the seventh graders—these days, at any rate. In an earlier, more confident era, the tale of Texas was delivered to students not merely interpreted but predigested. Starting in the twenties, four decades of schoolchildren took their cues from a cartoon book called Texas History Movies, which was originally drawn as a comic strip by Jack Patton and captioned by John Rosenfeld Jr. and later distributed by the Magnolia Petroleum Company. Though lighthearted and often witty, the vignettes conveyed a definite interpretation of Texas history, in which the right (that is, the white) side won the Texas Revolution. Mexicans weren’t all evil, but enough were to color (literally, which was to say, pictorially) the actions and motives of the rest.
The Texas story grew more complicated as the Jim Crow system disintegrated and the schools integrated in the sixties and seventies. Textbook writers made room for a valid Mexican point of view on the secession of Texas from the Mexican republic. Mexicans began appearing in the bold-faced type reserved for memorable characters and concepts. Indians and African Americans entered the picture as other than savages and Sambos. Eventually, even Santa Anna was rehabilitated. Texas and Texans, a current textbook, characterizes his order to execute the 350 Texans at Goliad as eminently reasonable: “He feared that if he let the Texans go, they would join others in the rebellion. He also relied on the Mexican law that required the execution of those who took up arms against the government.” The heroes of the revolution didn’t become less heroic, exactly, but the villains grew decidedly less villainous, till there weren’t any villains at all.
With no one to blame for the war that wrested Texas from Mexico, the seventh graders focused on facts. Facts aren’t simply the building blocks of interpretation, the paving stones of theory, although they are certainly that. Facts are the neutral ground of history, the incontestable little history of which big history is made. (To those radical postmodernists who deny the existence of facts, claiming that even these are constructed by observers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the appropriate response: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts.”) In the multiply inclusive, exquisitely sensitive world of modern public education, facts are comparatively safe. And in the chronically close contest for public education funding, they have the additional, inestimable value of being suited to multiple-choice, and hence inexpensive, testing.
The result of this confluence of culture, ideology, psychology, and economics is that Texas schools churn out armies of seventh graders, some 330,000 per year, who potentially know more facts about their state’s history than students anywhere else know of their states’ histories—and more than any but very specialized professional historians will ever know.
And when the most diligent of these students start peppering a particular nonspecialized historian with questions about the facts of Texas, things can get ugly. Their sweet faces turn suddenly serious; the note cards flash like sharks’ teeth rising hungrily from the depths. How long was Bowie’s famous knife? How many black beans were in that fatal jar? Was Sam Houston really born on Texas Independence Day? How large was the Indian army at Adobe Walls? Who was Angelina Eberly?
The historian retreats in the face of the onslaught. He ducks some of the questions (“Longer than anyone else’s knife”). He clouds the issue semantically (“The word ‘decimate’ comes from the Latin for ‘tenth’”). With a laugh, he tosses the issue back to the historical principals (“Ol’ Sam said he was, but Ol’ Sam said lots of things”). He pleads ongoing research (“Anthropologists are still digging”). He passes the buck, under the guise of professional courtesy (“That’s a question your teacher can probably answer better than I can. Coach Jones?”).
The bell rings, barely soon enough. Everyone has learned something valuable: the students that historians don’t know everything about history, the historian that whoever warned against messing with Texas wasn’t kidding around—not with the seventh graders on the case.
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