STRIVING TO PERPETUATE THE ANCIENT GRUDGE.
ALMOST no attention has been drawn in England to a phase of anti-British intrigue in the United States which has gained portentous headway during the last three years. Those elements in America which are ever eager to promote dissension with the Motherland are now, under the guise of patriotism, forcing our free schools to adopt history text-books which exalt the nation's past into a chauvinistic national epic, at the expense mostly of England.
Since the 1890's the treatment in American school text-books of Anglo-American relations, and particularly of the Wars of Independence and of 1812, has been subjected to criticism. But until a few years ago all this criticism was directed against the flagrant anti-British bias of the highly coloured narratives, which only in recent years have been replaced by sober studies possessing qualities of scholarly impartiality. Since 1920, however, a violent and growing agitation has sprung up to rein- state the obnoxious, superseded versions, with all their virulent anti-British leanings.
The agitation has met with marked successes. In two states, Oregon and Wisconsin, laws have been enacted forbidding the employment of our eight history text_ books that have been drafted in the light of modern scholarship. In two others, New York and California, similar Bills have been introduced into the legislatures but have met defeat. The San Jose (California) public library has banned several of the histories from its shelves, on the pretext that they are wanting in patriotism, and the city council of Boston has ordered its library to do likewise. In Indiana and Idaho, according to the news- papers, the educational authorities have capitulated to the agitators by eliminating the text-books in question from the school lists. Finally, many cities have carried on widely advertised " inquiries " into the charges that pro-British propaganda has polluted our text-books. Chief among these investigations have been the two held in New York, which have resulted in the condemnation of our best text-books there and in the publication a few weeks ago of a 40,000-word report on the subject, drafted by a city official, Commissioner Hirshfield, at the behest of Mayor Hylan, the celebrated Irish politician. It is said that the outcry against the " polluted " text-books has led their publishers to cease printing them ; and the self-appointed monitors of American patriotism who are carrying on the campaign boast that all the volumes to which they object will have been scrapped within five years.
It is easy but dangerous to dismiss this text-book agitation as the lucubrations of malicious trouble-breeders and their narrow-minded dupes. We have here a bare- faced attempt to defile with international prejudice the popular education of one of the two strongest peoples on the globe ; and the late War has taught us what havoc can be wrought by a national mind so perverted. Is this anachronistic agitation in America the product of genuine but misguided patriotism, or has it its well-springs in less savoury waters?' The circumstantial evidence gives us a virtually conclusive answer.
Though the first outcry against a certain historical treatise, on the ground of its heretical lack of patriotism, came in 1912, the campaign did not begin in earnest till 1920, at the precise moment when the United States withdrew from European affairs and when the copper- head pro-German and Irish Press lifted its head once more. In April, 1920, Edward F. McSweeney, a well- known militant Irish American, published in Boston a pamphlet entitled De-Americanizing Young America, in which he quoted extensively from recent history text- books to show that the writers were toning down the traditionally heroic deeds of our apotheosized Revolu- tionary Fathers. He charged that this warping of our history was the result of a conspiracy in which Lord Northcliffe and George Haven Putnam were leagued to bring the United States once more into the fold of the British Empire, and shortly after, in November of the same year, the cry was taken up by the Sinn Fein "Friends of Irish Freedom," who repeated the same charges in a document printed in Washington and entitled America, Wake Up. In. the summer of 1921, the notoriously pro German Hearst Press carried a series of articles by Charles Grant Miller, all of them being merely elabora- tions of the textual criticisms and charges of British subterfuge that McSweeney had initiated. This man Miller is now the president of a "Patriot Society," created by himself, which is the central exchange 'for all attacks on the history text-books treating the period of the birth of our country with fairness to England. Ex- Representative James M. Graham, of Illinois, a Catholic born in Dublin, won a certain notoriety by a patriotic attack on our text-books on Independence Day last year, and his address was printed in full in the Illinois Catholic Historical Review last October. All Catholic and Irish journals always devote much space to this kind of " patriotic " material ; in the newspaper debates on the- subject and at public hearings it is generally persons bearing names like Higgins and O'Rourke who make the most impassioned appeals for reverence for " our " revolutionary forefathers. The cities that have carried on investigations are significantly almost always the ones, like New York and Boston, that are dominated politically by the Irish.
It is true that men like McSweeney spurn the charge that they are motived by hatred of England ; but is it not more than chance that the leadership in the agitation -should be-confined to Hearst and the Irish ? There has been, we must concede, an assortment of patriotic societies enlisted in the cause with them, such as all our veterans' organizations and the Sons of the American Revolution. But anyone familiar with the psychology of this kind of society easily understands how they have allowed themselves to become the tools of the inherently antagonistic propaganda of Hearst and the Irish. Societies which exist solely for the preservation of patriotic tra- ditions batten on the clap-trap of patriotism ; their aptitude for flag-waving exceeds their perspicacity.
This text-book agitation is intimately connected with two parallel manifestations of recent Irish propaganda in America. In 1919 one Morgan J. O'Brien published a book in which he undertook to prove that 38 per cent. of -George Washington's soldiers were Southern Irishmen, -and that the English element in the Thirteen Colonies had identified itself largely with the Tories who remained faithful to the tyrant, George III. The American Revolution was thus alehemized into one phase of the eternal struggle between Ireland and England ; and the" final step in the revision of our history text-books would presumably be the incorporation into them of O'Brien's findings.
Late in 1921 the Catholic fraternal Order of the Knights of Columbus made a flamboyant announcement that they were going to purge our American history books of all the poisonous propaganda that had seeped into them, and would themselves produce an "unbiased, pro- American" [sic] account of our past. Then they pro- ceeded to name Edward J. McSweeney chairman of their historical commission! Another member is Admiral Benson, whose one claim to fame rests upon his war-time statement that we would as lief fight the English as the Germans.
The charges against our modern history text-books never change. McSweeney's pamphlet, Miller's articles, Graham's address, and Hirshfield's report all repeat each other. They complain that our modern writers omit or tone down all those petty incidents of our early history, such as the Boston Massacre and Betsy Ross's making of the flag, upon which our early historians used to spread themselves in grandiloquence for the benefit of our children. Furthermore, the critics are outraged because in portraying the characters of our revolutionary ancestors our modern historians dare to point out their defects as well as their virtues, because at times the courage of the British troops is mentioned, and finally because the whole War of Independence is treated merely as an incident in the pageant of world events rather than the central feature of universal history.
The critics are so ignorant of the elements of historical _research that while attacking the school books they overlook entirely the work of the research scholars upon which the text-books are based. They profess to believe that British agents are dictating our histories, but do not perceive that if their charge were true it would mean that profound scholars like A. M. Schlessinger and -Charles McLean Andrews (of whom they have doubtless never heard) were either Britain's _paid agents or her dupes a charge that could proceed only from the dark abysses of vulgar and insolent ignorance. Not once has even the historical commission of the Knights of Columbus attempted a philosophical criticism of the economic inter- pretation of history that is the true cause of the passing of our florid legendary accounts of the Revolutionary Fathers.
When honest, the mentality of these history obscu. rantists is identical with that of the Fundamentalists in religion who are attempting to disestablish the Darwinian hypothesis by legislative enactment in the United States. They are incapable of -conceiving history as an accurate narrative of past events : it must be an epic of national self-glorification. "We must have an unsullied history" is Miller's naive dictum ; and "the chief purpose to be subserved by the teaching of history is the inculcation of patriotism "is the thoroughly Germanic thought expressed by the Sons of the American Revolution. It is not upon truth that they would found their patriotism, with a full recognition of national weaknesses that might -lead to their elimination, but upon romantic historical fictions that would lead our children to believe we were the divinely ordained people of God. If these patrioteers have their way, our children will be fed upon history stories dictated by sentimentalists and by unlettered demagogues who are willing to cultivate a dangerous national megalomania provided that thereby our traditional grudge against England can be maintained.
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