"THE ANCIENT GRUDGE."
[To tlw Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—The Spectator has done me a service by publishing Mr. Harvey M. Watts's letter in which he attacks my stand on the American history text-book agitation. My argument is rendered doubly effective by such an apt sample of the viewpoint I set out to deplore. Mr. Watts makes sweeping charges against me of inaccuracies and unfairness which lie fails to support with definite citations ; nor does he do any- thing to refute the conclusions I draw from my facts. He accuses me of insincerity, though he does not know who I am. He blames MC for an anonymity for which I was not responsible. I-k says that the movement to " purify " our history text-books so as to remove " pro-British " influence has the approval of" high-class scholars and even historians." But he does not name them, and would have difficulty to do so. All that Mr. Watts says about Bemis's work on Jay's treaty and Mahony's brochure on the Monroe Doctrine is beside the point. I confined my article to the subject of text-books, and these treatises were beyond my domain. He has misread a large part of my article, for I have" heaped" no abuse on the Knights of Columbus. I stated three or four facts about them which he does not challenge. My phrase, "dark abysses of vulgar and insolent ignorance,' was not applied to them, as Mr. Watts alleges, but to those who charge that a British conspiracy has been behind the text-books in which England's role in our history is treated with fairness to her. My words were incapable of ambiguous interpretation.
That the War of Independence should be shown to our pupils as an incident in world events, I still maintain. It is, of course, an incident in which we Americans are particularly interested, and therefore should be treated in greater detail than others of perhaps more importance for the world at large. But unless our children arc taught to see our Revolu- tion in its background of world events, and particularly of Britain's imperial expansion, their knowledge of history will suffer from a narrowness of perspective that will foster an exaggerated notion of their country's importance. Mr. Watts does point out one error of fact in my article to which I plead guilty. Charles Grant Miller is not, as I wrote, the president of the " Patriot League." instead, he is its "Organizing Director," and he has written me that he does all the work and a good deal of the financing. Ile is thus more important in the League than the honorary president.
My critic makes a great point of the way I slighted the report of the "Committee of Twenty-one" New York School officials on the New York history text-books. He calls this report "admirable, scholarly, and well tempered," and says it "lays down what all historians will regard as a common- sense canon as to what history text-books meant for children should contain." After having thus praised this report, he says further on that my worst fault is that I omitted to mention the efforts of English publicists during the last half century "to garble American histories." He here fails to remember the findings of his Committee of Twenty-one, who exonerated all the text-Gook writers Of unpatriotic, motives and con- cluded "there is no evidence to support the charge that any of the text-books was written as the result of organized propaganda." At most, therefore, I was guilty of omitting something which had no influence. It is noteworthy that Mr. Watts fails to name the English publicists who have tried to "garble " our history text-books. He is unable to do so. Men like Samuel Plimsoll have merely asked us for justice in our treatment of the British role in the Revolution, so that we should cease reviling the Mother Country in order to set off the greater glory of our own land.
Mr. Watts asserts that the Committee of Twenty-one found certain text-book writers to have acted " practically as counsel for the Crown," and that they did so " for a certain purpose." The sinister implication of this latter phrase is false, for the Committee, as I have said, expressly released the text-book writers Of the charge of unpatriotic motives. Furthermore, Mr. Watts's reference is inaciawate, for the comparison to the Crown advocate was applied by the Committee to only one obscure writer, and not to " certain writers." As there are many Americans like Mr. Watts who think highly of the report of the Committee of Twenty-one, I hope you can allow me space to point out its failings, which
are all the more grave because of the obvious sincerity of the compilers. The Committee lays down this basic ruling for the treatment of the American Revolution in all our text- books : " Throughout there should be but one aim : to impress upon the pupils the sublime spectacle of thi:teca weak colonies spread along fifteen hundred miles of sea-coust, poorly equipped and poorly disciplined, giving battle to the strongest military and naval power in the world." The writers fail to say that fairness would require equal emphasis: fir the fact that the " mightiest power " was engaged at the time in war with two other nations second only to her in strength, that in those days even the greatest naval power had only sailboats for transports, that our enemy was fighting 3,000 miles from its base, and that we were on our home grounds.
One more citation. Here is the first, and presumably
most important, of the " General Principles," laid down by the Committee, with which all good text-books are expected to comply : " The text-book must contain no statement in derogation or in disparagement of the achievements of American heroes. It must not question the sincerity of the aims and purposes of the founders of the Republic or of those who have guided its destinies." Many will not side with Mr. Watts in thinking this rule to be " admirable, scholarly, and well tempered." Nor will all historians regard it as a collation- sense canon for children's history text-books. There are some of us who find in this arbitrary dogma a strong echo of the intellectual obscurantism that has often been charged against the Holy See. There arc some of us who feel in this diigina the self-same spirit that saturated Prussian education in recent times and that helped to galvanize Prussia into the
monster of tun, Sir, &e.,
R. Jonnox WAssoN.
221. Park Street, New Haccn, Connecticut.
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