US History

I'm skimming through "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James K. Loewen right now. There are some interesting "omissions" that the author cites. One is the Helen Keller story. According to Loewen, Keller grew up to be a radical Socialist who openly praised communism. Here is a sample of her voice:


"In the East a new star has risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East an new man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!"


Keller's conversion to Socialism caused the same people who lauded her courage and determination for overcoming her handicap to assert that her handicap was causing her to make this mistake. The Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that Keller's:


"mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development."


Why didn't I learn this in my U.S. History class in high school? Instead all I learned about was her heroism, not her shameful turn to communism. Shameful to historians, anyway.

Her political beliefs detract nothing from her heroic struggle to overcome the multiple disablilities as she did. Whyever would you think it would?


Conversely,


Does the fact that Osama Bin Laden praises God in his diatribes detract from his maniacal terrorism?


Does the fact that Hitler was kind to animals

detract from his butchery of six million people?


Does the fact that Michael Jackson loves children detract from the fact the Michael Jackson "loves" children?


I think not..therefore I am /images/smile.gif

Lots of intellectuals had a fascination with Communism at that time. Certainly Keller's remarkable achievement in overcoming her handicaps is the important part of her life. She was not a politician and her political views were not as important as, say, Harry Truman's political views because she was not a politician or a diplomat.

Lots of intellectuals were communists, they didn't just have a fascination for it. I would be more concerned that the history books don't teach how certain communists actually did hurt the country than with Helen Keller's relatively irrelevant political views though. The stupid excesses and basic evil of McCarthyism are taught, but not the influence of communists on various things like the State Department.

History is written by the victors. It is also written to spin the victors' culture.

My concern is that we're taught only half of the story. Helen Keller's belief in communism makes her story MORE interesting, but historians worry that if they tell the whole truth, that it might detract from her heroism. So we wind up with a watered down version of her life. I don't hold it against her. It must have taken great courage to openly admit to her beliefs during that time period.

There have been blind people from the beginning of time that have overcome alot more than her.

I think we've both bordered on the hyperbolic with our word "lots." Maybe we should have said "many."


Anyway, we were in a Cold War with the Russians. I'm sure we spied on them and no doubt they had spies here. There are a lot of books that have been published in the past few years detailing some of their activities. Historical narrative tends to go in cycles of orthodoxy, revisionism and re-revisionism.

The Russian link is explored in this book, too. The author says the Woodrow Wilson sent monetary support to the White Russians in 1917 to aid them in the civil war there. In 1918 he used a naval blockade of Russia and sent troops in to help thwart the Russian Revolution. The mission failed and our troops left Russia in 1920. The book cited this intervention by the U.S. as "agression that fueled the Soviets during the cold war, and until its breakup, the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion."


Again, not a word of this during my U.S. History classes in high school. If our citizens only get half of the story, how can we make intelligent decisions? How arrogant and stupid we must look to the rest of the world.

Does that make a difference to you?

Yeah, not many people know either that Helen Keller had leftist political views or that the U.S. invaded Russia during the Revolution.


But writing history is a selective process and a political process. When I was in high school, we were taught about the "winning" of the west, not about the slaughter of a people. And what I saw of "popular" history, on TV and in the movies, verified that interpretation.


Read a lot, from different sources, consider the source, and learn. HDPM points out that the Founding Fathers considered democracy a troublesome thing, they preferred a republic to a democracy, not trusting people less intelligent and cultured than they were. I would guess not many people are aware of this either.