The AHA Defends History—a Century Ago

The American Historical Association is leading the fight these days for teaching history with integrity, independent of political interference and partisan agendas. As it happens, the Association led a similar struggle a century ago, defending historians’ rights to write and teach about the American Revolution as they thought best, based on their research and professional judgment.

A facsimile of the Liberty Bell hung at the entrance to the 1926 Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. John D. Cardiwell/Library of Congress/public domain

In the late 19th century, the writing of American history largely had been dominated by facile writers who were not trained historians. Their texts idealized the founders and presented the revolution as a heroic revolt against tyranny. But by the second decade of the 20th century, history textbook authorship shifted to professionals trained in recently established PhD programs. These historians replaced the previous generation’s simplistic accounts with more complex narratives that drew on a wider array of sources and sometimes questioned the motives and tactics of the patriots.

This new approach brought attacks from a variety of newspapers, politicians, and patriotic groups in the early 1920s, calling for more patriotic books. These demands for more “Americanism” in the history texts resonated with the conservativism and complacency of the times. This decade was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan and the erection of statues commemorating the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In 1924, the US Congress severely restricted immigration from nations outside northern and western Europe. And most relevant here, the 150th anniversary of the American Revolution fell in 1926, one of several patriotic commemorations that decade.

Critics cherry-picked textbook passages that they deemed disloyal to America, claiming these books would teach students to disrespect the founders and their ideals. For instance, the argument that both colonists and the British bore some responsibility for the crises that ended in war drew criticism for not blaming only the British, as earlier writers had. The critics objected to the description of patriot John Hancock as a smuggler, Thomas Jefferson as a demagogue, and Benedict Arnold as someone with some legitimate complaints, while railing against the omission or mere mention of heroes such as Nathan Hale, Anthony Wayne, and Henry Knox. Overall, critics wanted a return to the less nuanced, more patriotic accounts that had previously prevailed.

Critics wanted a return to less nuanced, more patriotic accounts.

It was in this context that the textbook controversy burgeoned into a broad public debate. Some schools threatened to ban “disloyal” books; the mayors of New York and Chicago, among other cities, called for banning specific books in their city schools; and a few states passed laws outlining criteria for judging whether books were sufficiently patriotic and giving school administrators broad authority to ban books that they deemed fell short. Historians who found their books on the banned lists scrambled to explain and defend their works in speeches and letters to newspaper editors. But for individual historians fighting alone, it was an uphill battle.

That is where the AHA stepped in. Founded in 1884, the Association promoted the development of PhD programs, pushed for expanded coverage of history in K–12 education, and advocated for better training for history and social studies teachers. By the early 1920s, its membership had grown to over 2,500 members, including the country’s leading historians and writers of the books under attack, and it was recognized as the nation’s most prominent history organization.

The Association was taken by surprise by the textbook controversy. The AHA had been concentrating on maintaining history courses in the schools even as it was working to integrate into the emerging field of social studies. Yet it had never defended the discipline against such a widespread public attack.

American Historical Review editor and former AHA president J. Franklin Jameson led the way. An editorial in the journal’s July 1923 issue titled “A ‘Pure History Law’” mocked a new Wisconsin censorship statute. This censorship, Jameson wrote, was aimed at books written by “first-rate historical scholars” whose work has been marked by “an increasing ability and desire to see both sides” in historical controversies. People pushing censorship reflected “the prejudices of the uninformed . . . whose notions of American history have never advanced beyond the point at which they or their fathers were left . . . by the stale textbooks of an earlier time.”

That December, the Association also addressed the controversy at its annual meeting. Bessie Pierce (Univ. of Iowa) had been following developments closely (she would publish a study of this controversy in 1926). Pierce pushed for the membership to pass a strong resolution at the 1923 business meeting. The resolution, supported by AHA president Edward Cheyney (Univ. of Pennsylvania) and enthusiastically approved by the convention, noted the “agitation” and “propaganda” by newspapers and patriotic societies in favor of censorship. Teachers and textbook writers strive to present “a truthful picture of past and present.” Criticism should be based not on “grounds of patriotism but only upon grounds of faithfulness to fact as determined by specialists or tested by consideration of the evidence.” Ignoring or glossing over episodes where Americans have fallen short of their proclaimed ideals would not do. There must be “a willingness to face unpleasant facts” in history. “Attempts, however well meant, to foster national arrogance and boastfulness and indiscriminate worship of national ‘heroes’ can only tend to promote a harmful pseudo patriotism.” The assertion that many leading scholars are engaged in “treasonable propaganda” and that thousands of schoolteachers and school officials are “so stupid or disloyal” that they would give students treasonable books is “inherently and obviously absurd.” The Association made the resolution available to the press, and Cheyney told reporters that “history should teach facts and not propaganda and should be written by broadminded historians giving unbiased, fair information.”

Over the next few years, the AHA emerged as the public face of the historical discipline, responding to attacks, explaining what historians really do, and defending objective history. It made the public case for historians’ expertise and independence more forcefully than it had ever been made before. It also condemned attacks and censorship proposals, such as when the mayor of Chicago threatened to ban a list of books from the city’s schools. The AHA’s resolutions were cited and quoted in the press. Individual historians began referencing AHA statements in defending works by themselves and their colleagues. Teachers’ organizations, which already had begun to stand up to censorship as an attack on their integrity and judgment, began citing the AHA as a powerful ally and authority.

The AHA made the public case for historians’ expertise and independence.

The controversy was a wake-up call for historians. In his 1924 presidential address, Charles M. Andrews (Yale Univ.) noted that the public did not question the validity of science, medicine, and other professions, but “no such popular deference has been paid to the opinion of historical experts.” Andrews said, “There are those who decry the work of the historical specialist, believing that every man can be his own historian. . . . Among the people at large there would appear to be no accepted standards or principles to which historical writing is expected to conform.” (In 1931, Carl L. Becker would address his version of this idea in his presidential address, the oft-cited “Everyman His Own Historian.”)

These attacks demonstrated the difficulties historians faced in writing textbooks for public schools. Though controversy was cooling, Mississippi Valley Historical Review managing editor Milo M. Quaife wrote in 1928 that historians should understand “the simple fact, now demonstrated afresh, that the writing of history textbooks can never be made a purely scholarly matter.” Historians walked a fine line because their “subject matter constantly involves the dearest interests and most deeply cherished prejudices of the public for which he works.” Quaife concluded that “the scholar who would ignore the lesson [the recent debate] conveys must be exceedingly shortsighted. The public which controls the schools will dictate, whenever it sees fit, the history that is taught in them.”

The controversy died down by the end of the decade. Though a few states passed censorship laws, most were lightly enforced. School authorities exercised broad latitude in interpreting and applying censorship restrictions when selecting books. Some historians revised their texts. The press and the public lost interest in the topic, and so politicians turned to other issues.

These debates presented an opportunity for the AHA to expand its membership to include more high school teachers. But, as Robert B. Townsend explained in History’s Babel, the Association did not continue its newfound role as a champion of history textbook writers. Instead, the AHA turned its attention back to scholarly research, postsecondary teaching, and promoting the inclusion of history in schools (without focusing on the content or the texts being used). As the AHA did little to recruit teachers as members, they gravitated to other organizations such as the National Council for the Social Studies.

But the issues of what is taught in schools, the role of historians’ expertise, and who controls what young people learn about their nation’s history would arise repeatedly across the subsequent century. The AHA’s engagement with K–12 education has ebbed and flowed over many decades. Today, the AHA has re-established itself in the landscape of K–12 education. With teachers serving in leadership roles on the AHA Council and committees and the AHA becoming the rallying point for several organizations on education advocacy, the Association has reprised and expanded the role it played a century ago.

Former AHA president Dana Carleton Munro explained in 1928 that “the surest way to avoid mistakes in the future is by teaching our young people the truth, by showing how our institutions have developed, the bad features in the past which have been discarded, the evolution which is still continuing.” Today’s historians continue to emphasize the need for history to be taught in all its complexity.