What Trump's Generation Learned About the Civil War

History textbooks used in New York City during the president’s childhood called the
Klan “patriotic,” and downplayed the role of slavery in “the War Between the States.”

By Matt Ford

A scene from the Gettysburg Cyclorama, an 1883 cyclorama painting depicting the climactic
clash between Union and Confederate forces during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. (Paul
Philippoteaux / Wikimedia Commons)
AUGUST 28, 2017

Editor’s Note: We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race
and racism in America. Find the collection here.
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In March, President Trump visited the Hermitage, a former slave plantation in

Tennessee once owned by Andrew Jackson, to pay homage to his 19th century
predecessor. For Trump and his then-chief strategist Steve Bannon, the parallels were
irresistible: An agrarian populist from the Tennessee frontier, Jackson was the first to
cast himself as the common man’s warrior against corrupt Washington elites and
moneyed political interests.

But even more revealing than their similarities was how Trump viewed his
predecessor's place in American history. In an interview a month after the trip, he
alleged that Jackson, who died in 1845, could have prevented the Civil War:

I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil
War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry
that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s
no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think
about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War?
Why could that one not have been worked out?

Historians today broadly agree that a slaveholding aristocracy was irreconcilable with
the nation’s founding pledges of liberty and equality, and that decades of
compromises between top American statesmen only delayed an inevitable
confrontation. But the president’s view that the conflict could’ve been “worked out”
would’ve fit at home in another place: the history classes of his youth.

Until the late 1960s, history curricula in Trump’s home state of New York largely
adhered to a narrow vision of American history, especially when discussing slavery,
the Civil War, and its aftermath. This was true in the predominately white public
schools throughout the country. The African American experience and its broader
significance received little to no attention. When textbooks did cover black
Americans, their portrayals were often based on racist tropes or otherwise negative
stereotypes. Trump’s understanding of the Civil War may be out of step with current
scholarship, but it’s one that was taught to millions of Americans for decades.

“The dominant story was that secession was a mistake, but so was Reconstruction,”
Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor who studies the history of
American education, told me. “And Reconstruction was a mistake because [the
North] put ‘childlike’ and ‘bestial’ blacks in charge of the South, and the only thing
that saved white womanhood was the Ku Klux Klan. When African Americans read
this in their textbooks, they obviously bristled.”

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Thanks to his family’s wealth, Trump did not attend public school in Queens, where
he grew up. In 1951, his father Fred enrolled him in the Kew-Forest School for
kindergarten, and he stayed there until seventh grade. When he was 13 years old, his
father sent him away to the New York Military Academy, a rigorous military-themed
boarding school in the Hudson Valley—to “get him in line” because he was too
“rambunctious,” Trump told The Washington Post last year. He completed his high-
school education there and graduated in 1964.

Attending private institutions would not have inoculated the president from the
retrograde learning of this era, because private schools often used the same history
textbooks and curricula as their public counterparts.

Trump’s high-school education coincided with the resurgence of the civil-rights

movement and its push to improve American history classes. The fight has its roots in
World War II. Defeating Nazi Germany and its racist ideology inspired a new
generation of black activists, Zimmerman said. Spurred by the wartime realignment of
the American economy, thousands of black families left the South for new
opportunities in the North and the West during the Second Great Migration in the
1940s. They quickly encountered stark differences in what their children learned about
America’s past. Segregated black schools in the South had often used works by black
scholars like Carter Woodson, who became known as the father of black history, and
W.E.B. Du Bois to teach history. Northern and Western schools followed a different
path. Their textbooks about slavery and the Civil War prompted protests from black
families and community leaders.

African American parents and students emerged as the strongest voices in protesting
history curricula. Major black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the New York
Amsterdam News regularly covered new developments in the fight. Civil-rights
organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League appointed committees to review
textbooks and push back on flawed material. They pressured public officials and
textbook publishers to present a more accurate and comprehensive view of black
Americans in history.

“For more than 100 years, the American educational system has revolved around four
basic R’s—reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, and racism,” historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote
in Ebony magazine in 1967. “By sins of commission and omission, by words said but
also by words not said, facts conveniently overlooked and images suppressed, the
American school system has made the fourth R—racism—the ground of the
traditional three-R fare.”

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New York’s schools were no different. A 1957 report found a textbook on the city’s
recommended list which, while roundly condemning its violence, said of the postwar
Ku Klux Klan, “Its purposes were patriotic, but its methods cannot be defended.”

In 1960, four years before Trump graduated high school, Albert Alexander, a
textbook analyst for the New York City Board of Education, complained that
publishers had warped their coverage of the Civil War so their products could be sold
in both the North and the South. He noted that four of the textbooks used in city
schools only referred to the conflict as the “War Between the States,” the
segregationist South’s preferred term.

In 1966, Irving Sloan, a New York social-studies teacher, published a study for the
American Federation of Teachers reviewing how contemporary American history
textbooks covered black history. He opened by observing that many publishers had
improved their coverage in recent years. But he also qualified his praise of their
progress, noting that “none of the texts have completely succeeded, and several are so
far from the target that they invite suspicion.”

Sloan noted, for example, that even some newer textbooks “still cling to the
romanticized versions of the happy slave life.” Abolitionism was mostly depicted as a
solely white movement. “No text gives enough attention to the participation of
Negroes in this struggle for their freedom,” he observed. Things got worse when
students moved past the Civil War. “In analysis after analysis of the texts, the reader
will find the statement that after Reconstruction ‘200-300 pages pass before we get a
reference to the Negro,’” Sloan wrote. “This is why whites do not always ‘see’
Negroes. As Ralph Ellison puts it, they are ‘invisible.’ And the reason they are unseen
is that they are left out from such a large part of American history.”

The quality of the textbooks reviewed by Sloan varied. He praised the junior-high
text Land of the Free for its quality, which he partly credits to eminent black historian
John Hope Franklin’s co-authorship. Others received more scathing treatments.
Sloan’s critiques of a senior-level high-school history textbook titled Our Nation From
Its Creation typify the most common errors he encountered.

In a section dealing with different opinions about the causes of the “War
Between the States,” the authors include the opinion of ‘more and more
Northerners and some Southerners … that slavery was a moral evil and had to
go.” The text's presentation of the Southern response to the moral question is
worth quoting in full: “Aren't our slaves much better off than your so-called
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free workers in the filthy factories of the North? One Southern writer
suggested that the so-called free laborers of the North would be better off if
the North turned them into slaves.”

[...]

Coming to the period after the war, the Reconstruction era, the authors discuss
the condition of the Freedmen. A statement such as, “Some thought that now
that they were free, life was going to be one long spree, without work,” is at
best gratuitous and at worst unsupportable. But it remains consistent with
much of the tone of this text's treatment of the Negro.

“Since the authors of the text are New York City teachers, it probably has wide use in
the city,” Sloan concluded. “What is more, it probably has wide use in the South.
Among high school texts, this gives one of the poorest treatments of the Negro
encountered in our study.”

Racist material permeated other sections of the American curriculum, well beyond the
field of history. Geography textbooks depicted Africa as “the dark continent” and
either ignored it or portrayed it as a place of cannibalism and barbarity. “[Black] critics
condemned biology textbooks, which often reflected eugenic theories of racial
hierarchy,” Zimmerman wrote in a 2004 article on U.S. textbook changes after the
Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. “Still other blacks attacked music
textbooks for including songs by [prolific 19th-century songwriter] Stephen Foster,
complete with Foster’s original lexicon—‘darkey,’ ‘nigger,’ and so on.”

These textbooks shouldn’t be interpreted as reflecting their readers’ views,

Zimmerman cautioned me. Instead, they offer a window into what students would
have learned in a previous era. “This tells us more about the culture of race as
expressed in the curriculum than it does about what any given individual imbibed or
not,” he explained.

With the horrors of slavery diminished and its presence occasionally justified, it’s easy
to see how someone from Trump’s generation could view the Civil War as a conflict
whose core tensions could be “worked out” without violence. Trump himself has
recently embraced other extraordinary views of that era. After a deadly attack on
demonstrators protesting a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier
this month, he became an avowed defender of Confederate statues.

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“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down,”
he said at a Trump Tower press conference on August 15, referring to two
Confederate generals’ statues. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is
it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” His embrace of the statues and the white-
nationalist movement defending them served clearly political purposes, but it also
betrayed a flimsy understanding of the country’s history: Washington and Jefferson
devoted their lives to setting the American experiment in motion; Lee and Jackson
killed thousands of their countrymen in an attempt to end it.

Of course, Trump is far from the only American politician with an outdated
understanding of the Civil War era. In a January 2016 town hall in Iowa, Hillary
Clinton—who is one year younger than Trump—said that had he not been killed,
Abraham Lincoln’s more tolerant policies may have hastened national reconciliation,
and that what actually happened left white Southerners “feeling totally discouraged
and defiant.” My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates noted similarities between Clinton’s
statement and the Lost Cause view “that Reconstruction was a mistake brought about
by vengeful Northern radicals.”

For Trump and Clinton’s generation, the curriculum’s impact may be measurable. In
August 2015, a McClatchy-Marist poll asked American adults whether schools should
teach that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Sixty percent of 18- to 29-year-
olds said they should, as did 59 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds and 57 percent of 45- to
59-year-olds. Support then dropped off markedly among those who would’ve been
offered more retrograde views of the Civil War in school: Only 49 percent of
Americans over the age of 65 thought slavery should be taught as its main cause, the
poll found.

By the 1970s, activist pressure brought about significant changes in how history
classes would be taught. But how American children learn the history of non-white
groups is still controversial, and led to a recent federal court battle in Arizona. During
a wider clash over laws targeting undocumented immigrants in 2010, the state
legislature banned classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,”
that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or that “advocate
ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Judge A. Wallace
Tashima ruled Wednesday that the law violated the First Amendment because “both
[its] enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus,” citing disparaging
blog posts about Mexican immigrants by the statute’s author.

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The fight over fair treatment in textbooks and curricula also continues. In 2015, an
African American student in Houston noticed his geography textbook described the
slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to plantations across the South, eliding
the difference between mass immigration and indentured servitude from Europe and
the enslavement of Africans. He sent a picture of it to his mother, whose criticism of
the phrasing went viral on social media. McGraw-Hill Education, the book’s
publisher, apologized and said it would revise future editions.

That incident, Zimmerman noted, evoked a previous generation of textbook battles

that had before reshaped American history education. “And again the reason that it
changed was that people of color objected, thank God,” he said.

Matt Ford is a former associate editor at The Atlantic.

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