True Story: History Is Full Of Myth Starting With Columbus, Book Debunks False Stories
Every schoolkid knows the tale: Christopher Columbus, defying all the experts of his time, sails west to prove the world is round. His sailors are near mutiny, fearful that at any moment they will fall off the edge of the flat Earth.
Great story. Total hooey.
“In the 19th century it became popular to present Columbus not only as a brave navigator but as a modern man who knew the world was round when everyone else thought it was flat,” says historian Paul Boller Jr.
“It was repeated and repeated, and some people still believe it. It’s a myth, of course.”
Boller, a professor emeritus at Texas Christian University, came across plenty of myths in his career as teacher and author. Whether by deceit, malice or simple mix-ups, he says, history is laced with widely accepted misconceptions. His new book, “Not So!,” tries to fix a few.
“I just want to set the record straight,” he says. “Not all myths are bad. But people ought to know the truth.”
The truth about Columbus, for example, is that 15th-century Europeans disagreed about how big the world was, and very few suspected that two unknown continents blocked the ocean route to the Orient. But historians have documented that everyone from astronomers to church leaders believed their planet was shaped like a ball.
What happened? Washington Irving, one of the most popular American writers of his time, made up the heroic saga of Columbus battling the flat-Earthers for his 1828 book about the explorer.
Like George Washington’s wooden teeth, the poisoning of Warren Harding by his jealous wife or the notion that Harry Truman was an obscure politician suddenly thrust into the presidency, the myth just won’t die.
That isn’t necessarily bad, says Bryan LeBeau, a history professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., who teaches a course examining historical myths.
“The approach I use is first of all to debunk the myth but also to determine why that myth came about in the first place,” LeBeau says. “What does that myth tell us about its creators?”
In Washington Irving’s case, he says, “He was trying to emphasize the progressiveness of the men of reason and paint a dark picture of clerics and those who were clinging to the Dark Ages. This image of Columbus was supposed to be symbolic of what the United States was standing for in the 19th century.”
Or take the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then being unable to lie about it. That fanciful tale sprang from the imagination of Mason Weems, a parson who wrote children’s books in the early 1800s.
“They were supposed to be instructive stories, but they couldn’t be fictional, because fiction was seen then as a waste of time,” LeBeau says. “You had to take an actual historical figure or event. So he wrote this blurb to teach a lesson not to lie. Like many myths, that seems harmless enough.”
That isn’t always the case, of course. For every innocuous cherry tree story, there are many more lamentable episodes, such as omitting the American Indian perspective of the first Thanksgiving or turning the conquest of the American West into one big cowboy epic.
“The idea that it was our God-given right to occupy a vacant continent, that it was ours to civilize, gave the history a mythical quality,” LeBeau says. “So we swept aside any reference to the destruction of the civilization there and the loss of life. We even swept aside the fact that many of the cowboys weren’t white men.”
Factor in the background and uncover the truth, LeBeau and Boller say, and myths can make history a far more interesting subject.
They have an ally in James Loewen, a sociologist at the University of Vermont, who surveyed a dozen high school textbooks to document his premise that most history classes are shallow, misleading and just plain dull.
“Something like 13 percent of Americans ever take another American history class after high school,” Loewen says. “It’s no wonder.”
The professor reports his findings in a new book titled “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Only one of the 12 textbooks - which, by the way, averaged 4-1/2 pounds and 888 pages - still clings to the Columbus fable.
But his scathing book attacks myths that Loewen believes are much more harmful.
“The textbooks seem to have the view that an American citizen is someone who must be indoctrinated that everything the U.S. ever did was right and good,” he says. “And if it wasn’t, then at least it was done for the right reasons. It gives us a very simplistic version of history.”
High on his list of complaints is history’s treatment of American Indians, from Columbus to current attitudes and realities. He also thinks high school histories barely touch on the effects of racism on American society, from the earliest days of slavery to the present.
It’s not that the truth isn’t out there, says Loewen.
“The literature of history is pretty good,” he says. “But history textbooks aren’t based on that.
“They’re clones, based on each other. So mistakes that were made in 1910 are still repeated today. And most publishers are afraid of any kind of controversy.”
Rich Blumenthal, vice president of marketing for the Austin, Texas-based publishing company SteckVaughn, doesn’t excuse errors or omissions in textbooks. But he says publishers face a difficult task.
“There’s certainly a lot of controversy on how history should be taught,” he says. “Publishers are trying to meet all kinds of mandates of what needs to be in the books, what’s too controversial to be in the book - these kinds of issues. They’ve struggled with that.”
A Steck-Vaughn history textbook was one of those critiqued by Loewen, although it is out of print. The company now concentrates on smaller, more focused books to supplement the general texts.
A textbook, Blumenthal says, should be “one resource that’s used to teach. It’s a difficult task to produce a historical understanding, and teachers need more resources for the story to be well-told and the gaps to be filled in.”
In an impassioned historical narrative, Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” aims to challenge teachers and students to augment their textbooks with everything from Spike Lee movies to contests to correction of misinformation on roadside historical markers.
“I hope I can get people arguing,” Loewen says.
Boller wants to inspire the same kind of critical thinking with anecdotes and short essays. The technique has made him a successful author of mass-market history books, including “Presidential Anecdotes,” “Congressional Anecdotes,” “Presidential Campaigns” and “Presidential Wives.”
During years of research, he collected tidbits of misinformation that led to “They Never Said It,” a 1989 book he co-wrote with John George. From Cicero and Andrew Jackson to Nikita Khrushchev and Humphrey Bogart, history is full of good, but inaccurate, quotes.
Many misquoters, Boller says, have ulterior motives, putting words in the mouths of their enemies or practicing guilt by association.
Left-wingers are fond of attributing law-and-order statements to Adolf Hitler, while right-wingers quote Vladimir Lenin as favoring gun control and national health insurance.
“It’s the ‘kiss-of-death’ quote,” he says. “You try to show your opponents believe in something that Hitler or Lenin supported. But usually they never said them.”
Other mistakes are less sinister. W.C. Fields somehow gets credit for saying “Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.” Actually, humorist Leo Rosten once introduced Fields at a dinner by saying, “Anyone who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.”
In his memoirs, Mark Twain quoted Benjamin Disraeli as saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics,” but the line is usually attributed to Twain himself.
Boller says the book probably won’t change history, “but we do get letters from teachers thanking us for setting things straight.”
Cutting historical tall tales down to size seemed a logical next step.
“I really didn’t have an agenda,” Boller says. “I made kind of a general list of what I wanted to do.”
He’s happy to rehash the flat-Earth business and extract George Washington’s wooden teeth (they were ivory). But the historian, who retired from TCU seven years ago, also tackles weightier subjects and aims to reclassify a lot of conventional wisdom as myths.
We like to think the Founding Fathers gave us democracy, he writes, but many were aristocrats who were careful not to grant too much power to the people.
The alleged romance between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave, has been debated for years and was featured recently in the movie “Jefferson in Paris.”
Don’t believe it, says Boller: Most historians trace the rumor to one of the president’s political enemies and conclude that Sally Hemings was probably the concubine of one of Jefferson’s nephews.
He argues against the notion that Franklin Roosevelt gave away too much to Josef Stalin in their final summit at Yalta.
And if Harry Truman was just a failed haberdasher suddenly catapulted into the vice presidency, as the story goes, why was he already on the cover of Time in 1943?
Boller takes on Kennedy loyalists who believe John F. Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam and conspiracy buffs who accuse Franklin Roosevelt of letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor so the United States could enter World War II.
“We still would have been in the war no matter what happened,” Boller says. “And there’s no way he would have allowed that to happen to his beloved Navy. But some people still believe it.”
Nor does he have patience for people who can’t accept Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone assassin.
“I think some people just can’t face the idea that a simple punk killed a very popular president,” Boller says. “The fact is that a lot of things happen in history by accident.”
xxxx 1. TAKE THIS POP QUIZ IN HISTORY Here are some common historical beliefs. Which are true? 1. George Washington had wooden teeth. 2. When Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain, most people believed the world was flat. 3. Franklin Roosevelt knew that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, but he let the attack proceed so the United States would enter the war. 4. Uncle Tom, the slave from the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was submissive and obsequious. 5. Millard Fillmore installed the first White House bathtub. 6. President Warren G. Harding was poisoned by his jealous wife. 7. Modern presidential campaigns are dirtier than ever. 8. As commander in chief, the president must return all military salutes.
According to “Not So!” by Paul Boller Jr., all eight statements are historical myths. Here are his explanations: 1. Actually, George’s choppers were made of ivory. 2. Historians say that, by 1492, scholars had little doubt the world was round. The flat-earth tales came from a biography of Columbus written by Washington Irving in 1828. 3. Historians are virtually unanimous in denouncing the idea that FDR had any complicity in the Pearl Harbor attack. 4. Read the book, says Boller. Tom is young, powerful, brave and heroic. Although he dies a horrible death, the historian says, he doesn’t deserve to be the source of a derogatory term for a black who kowtows to whites. 5. It was Andrew Jackson, two decades earlier. The journalist H.L. Mencken made up the Fillmore bathtub story in a 1917 satirical essay and then watched in astonishment as historians and journalists routinely included the bathtub in recounting achievements of the Fillmore administration. 6. President Harding had high blood pressure, bad health and the pressures of burgeoning scandals. The poisoning allegation came in a best-selling book seven years after his death. The author turned out to be a convicted swindler; his co-author confessed it was a hoax. The story lives on. 7. Oh yeah? Opponents called John Adams a tyrant and a hypocrite, Thomas Jefferson a “howling atheist,” Andrew Jackson a drunken adulterer, Abe Lincoln a thieving ape and Ronald Reagan a mad bomber. The list goes on and on. 8. There’s no regulation requiring presidents to return salutes. Most presidents, including Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, rarely, if ever, did. But Ronald Reagan loved to salute and George Bush continued the practice. Bill Clinton began his presidency without saluting, but press criticism apparently turned him into a regular saluter. Michael Precker Dallas Morning News
2. DID THEY REALLY SAY THESE THINGS? Here are 10 famous quotations and the people commonly believed to have uttered them. Guess which ones are accurate: 1. George Gipp: “Win one for the Gipper!” 2. Horace Greeley: “Go west, young man.” 3. Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” 4. W.C. Fields: “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” 5. James Cagney: “You dirty rat!” 6. George Washington: “I cannot tell a lie.” 7. Jack Reed: “I have seen the future and it works.” 8. Herbert Hoover: “Prosperity is just around the corner.” 9. Humphrey Bogart: “Play it again, Sam.” 10. James Otis: “Taxation without representation is tyranny!”
Did they really say it? The answers to all 10 quotations range from probably not to absolutely not. Here are explanations, as taken from “They Never Said It,” by Paul Boller Jr. and John George: 1. Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne tended to make up inspirational tales for his team. The line was, however, uttered by Ronald Reagan when he played the dying football star in a movie. 2. Greeley’s New York Tribune reprinted the advice, offered by John Babsone Soule in an Indiana newspaper, but Greeley received the credit. 3. The quote originated in a 1906 book. Voltaire, who died in 1778, certainly believed it, but he left no record he ever said it. 4. This began as a joke in a 1920s magazine. It’s not on Fields’ tombstone, and it appears to have been attributed to him after his death. 5. Cagney played lots of gangsters, but he denied he ever said that in a movie. 6. Along with the entire scene of George chopping down the cherry tree, the quote was made up by biographer Mason Weems for a book shortly after Washington’s death. 7. This is attributed to the radical American journalist who witnessed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, but he didn’t say it. Lincoln Steffens, a famed muckraking reporter of the time, did say something similar. 8. As the Great Depression deepened, Hoover kept promising things would get better but never in such a succinct quote. 9. The actual line from Casablanca is “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.”’ But Ingrid Bergman says it. And Sam, by the way, only sings the song. The accompaniment is dubbed in. 10. That stirring cry against British rule, attributed to lawyer James Otis in 1761, does not appear in any contemporary records. John Adams made note of it in 1820, perhaps as a paraphrase rather than a quote. Michael Precker Dallas Morning News