Yacovone also makes some puzzling choices about which thinkers and writers to emphasize. He seems to see 19th-century New York publisher and Democratic propagandist John H. Van Hevry as the skeletal key to understanding white supremacy embedded in curriculum materials. is. Van Every was a propagator of scientific racism, including the absurd polygenesis theory that claimed that blacks and whites were separate species and that slavery was the natural state of affairs for the lower black order.
Van Every was “a toxic combination of Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch,” Jacobohn wrote, and his thoughts are circulated today on white supremacist websites.
But the connective tissue connecting Van Evrie to the classroom is thin. Yacovone devoted his 40 pages to his work on Van Evrie, most of which was published in the popular press. Only four of his pages detail the contents of his one textbook, Children’s History of the Civil War. The racist myths in the book persisted for generations, such as that enslaved peoples freed by the Union Army clung to their masters rather than embrace their freedom. Lie. In fact, he only records his one school in Boston that actually used his Van Evrie textbooks.
In a later chapter, Yacovone provides more evidence that the textbooks he examined were in widespread use. Between 1936 and his 1957, at least a dozen states adopted Frémont P. Worth’s “American Development” high school textbook, which called slavery a “necessary evil” for the nation’s economic growth. . Harold Rag, a progressive educator and professor at Columbia University, sold millions of textbooks in the years before World War II. But even Wragg described the conditions of slavery as “no worse than those of the northern factories and some of the factory workers.”
“From textbook to textbook, slaves lived in comfortable huts, ate plenty of nourishing food, and spent their nights singing around campfires.” The author and publisher ignored the atrocities of middle passage, rape, and family separation.
Yacovone downplays the history of activism on curriculum materials, but mentions the NAACP’s protests against racist textbooks. He also writes that the Union Daughters of the Confederate Army, an organization that still exists today, worked to place positive books about the Ku Klux Klan in schools throughout the South in his early 20th century.