People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [375]
A Portland, Oregon, teacher named Bill Bigelow, who helped put together Rethinking Schools, took a year off from his regular job to tour the country in 1992, giving workshops to other teachers, so that they could begin to tell those truths about the Columbus experience that were omitted from the traditional books and class curricula.
One of Bigelow’s own students wrote to the publisher Allyn and Bacon with a critique of their history text The American Spirit:
I’ll just pick one topic to keep it simple. How about Columbus. No, you didn’t lie, but saying, “Though they had a keen interest in the peoples of the Caribbean, Columbus and his crews were never able to live peacefully among them,” makes it seem as if Columbus did no wrong. The reason for not being able to live peacefully is that he and crew took slaves and killed thousands of Indians for not bringing enough gold.
Another student wrote: “It seemed to me as if the publishers had just printed up some ‘glory story’ that was supposed to make us feel more patriotic about our country. . . . They want us to look at our country as great and powerful and forever right. . . .”
A student named Rebecca wrote: “Of course, the writers of the books probably think it’s harmless enough—what does it matter who discovered America, really. . . . But the thought that I have been lied to all my life about this, and who knows what else, really makes me angry.”
A group was formed on the West Coast called Italian-Americans Against Christopher Columbus, saying: “When Italian-Americans identify with Native people . . . we are bringing ourselves, each of us, closer to possible change in the world.”
In Los Angeles, a high school student named Blake Lindsey went before the city council to argue against celebrating the quincentennial. She spoke to the council about the genocide of the Arawaks, but she got no official response. However, when she told her story on a talk show, a woman phoned in who said she was from Haiti: “The girl is right. We have no Indians left. At our last uprising in Haiti people destroyed the statue of Columbus. Let’s have statues for the aborigines.”
There were counter-Columbus activities all over the country, unmentioned in the press or on television. In Minnesota alone, a listing of such activities for 1992 reported dozens of workshops, meetings, films, art shows. At Lincoln Center in New York City, on October 12, there was a performance of Leonard Lehrmann’s New World: An Opera About What Columbus Did to the Indians. In Baltimore, there was a multimedia show about Columbus. In Boston and then in a national tour, the Underground Railway Theater performed The Christopher Columbus Follies to packed audiences.
The protests, the dozens of new books that were appearing about Indian history, the discussions taking place all over the country, were bringing about an extraordinary transformation in the educational world. For generations, exactly the same story had been told all American schoolchildren about Columbus, a romantic, admiring story. Now, thousands of teachers around the country were beginning to tell that story differently.
This aroused anger among defenders of the old history, who derided what they called a movement for “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” They resented the critical treatment of Western expansion and imperialism, which they considered an attack on Western civilization. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, had called Western civilization “our common culture . . . its highest ideas and aspirations.”
A much-publicized book by a philosopher named Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, expressed horror at what the social movements of the sixties had done to change the educational atmosphere