Debate: Thomas Jefferson Is Still Alive and Well

(April 19) -- For the last month I have been reading scary headlines. "Texas Crusade Rewrites History Texts," shouts an editorial in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. "Texas Textbook MASSACRE: 'Ultraconservatives' Approve Radical Changes to State Education Curriculum," screams The Huffington Post.

The headlines are everywhere. Thomas Jefferson is to be eliminated from textbooks, I read, again and again. These reports of the Texas standards and their supposed impact have warped the public view. The fear mongering is out of control, and we will see more of it, I imagine, before Texas board hearings on history standards end in mid-May. (A monthlong public comment period on the standards began Friday.)

Because of its size and policy, Texas has unique influence on the content of textbooks nationally. Both sides of this elected Texas board -- the Christians and multiculturalists equally, none of them historians -- know this. They are using these hearings to try to get the spotlight and make political hay. The camera wants spectacle or the testy exchange between board members, and the camera is getting what it wants.

Only a few liberals, historian Jonathan Zimmerman in the Los Angeles Times and Russell Shorto in The New York Times, have tried to grasp the facts of the case. Almost no reporters, it seems, have bothered to look at the actual Texas Education Agency markups. It is easier for folks to shudder at the "ultraconservative" assault on Thomas Jefferson. It makes a better story.

Millions of Americans are being led to believe Christian extremists have engineered what will result in a radical overhaul of American history textbooks. This is not true. The standards add up to a mainstream curriculum guide. Textbooks will not undergo major changes or forgo diversity. Jefferson is not at risk. (The entire Jefferson controversy arose from an awkward change in a "world studies" section on the Enlightenment and political revolutions from 1750 to the present -- one that excluded Jefferson and that could very well be revisited.)

But the left is doing its best to create a different picture. The Texas Freedom Network has cynically fanned the Jefferson story on slender evidence, looking for trouble.

"They are rewriting history," says Mary Helen Berlanga, a longtime Texas board member and Hispanic activist. She told The New York Times, "They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist."

For board members like Berlanga, no matter what concessions are made, they are never enough. Berlanga and her fellow multiculturalists want to remake history their way, victim by victim.

For two decades, multiculturalists have tried to supplant the older view of Americans as religious dissenters, pioneers and immigrants intent on a making a freer and better life, a force for good in the world, a nation that regulated reform and advanced civil rights to all.

When American history is taught, parents often discover to their dismay, it is a setting for power struggles between groups, or as an unjust and patriarchal society whose rapacity -- from Jamestown to Vietnam -- needs exposure and explication. At the extremes, Christopher Columbus is an invader. Dolores Huerta is an icon. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks are saints. Thomas Jefferson is recast as a slaveholder and miscegenate. End of story.

So Christian conservatives in Texas are trying to set things right.

The problem is the messenger, since many amendments come from the same board members who wanted creationism in science textbooks last year. One Christian history adviser called the standards process a battle for the soul of the nation, reflecting a religious zeal that is disturbing to people of all political stripes.

Board members' convictions about a Christian nation and American exceptionalism are hugely open to question. Phyllis Schlafly is not a textbook essential. I for one find Texas board members' views on Darwin and evolution absurd.

But a "crusade" or right-wing rewrite of the history textbooks? Not so.

In fact, overall, the revised Texas history standards are pretty much middle of the road. Most fair-minded historians will have little quarrel with them. They are ordinary fare.

And in the Texas standards, have no fear. In several grades and different subjects, Thomas Jefferson (included several times, including his "political philosophy"), the Declaration of Independence (included), the Louisiana Purchase (included) and states rights (included) are all still there. Jefferson remains very much alive and well in Texas and in the textbooks.

Gilbert T. Sewall is the director of the American Textbook Council, an independent research center in New York City that reviews history textbooks and curricula.


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