Missing Links in Textbook History: War
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
In the late 1980s I had a student in an American history class who said that the United States won the war in Vietnam. I felt dizzy. Maybe I had misunderstood. So, I asked him to explain. “My father,” he told the class, “said that we had won the war because we won most of the battles and we killed more of them than they killed of us.”
My instinct was to attempt to impose logic on the discussion. American aircraft, I said, dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than twice what the U.S. dropped in all of World War II. That, of course, killed a lot of people, but it did not win the war.
That student was not convinced and I quickly realized that I would not change his mind. Not long after, I discovered that he and his father were not alone.
Ignorance or Amnesia?
The late Gore Vidal famously referred to this country as the “United States of Amnesia.” He had a point. As a society, we don’t seem to learn much from past experiences and even what we think we remember is often blurry.
In a 2003 episode of “Democracy Now!” Vidal reported that George W. Bush had managed to have a number of presidential papers put beyond the reach of historians for a great length of time. Making historical records unavailable, he predicted, will worsen America’s amnesia: “There will be no functioning historical memory … we are creating a lobotomized nation wherein the connections between essential parts of our history are severed from what is taught.”
In Nov. 2000, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam after the war ended in 1975. A Gallup poll taken at that time found that while “at least” 70% of Americans acknowledged that the United States had lost the war, almost 30% did not.
Even more unexpected, the same poll found that nearly one in five Americans believed that the U.S. had fought on the side of the North Vietnamese. What could account for this? Was it wishful thinking? Was it a result of bad teaching or bad textbooks? Or was it simply willful ignorance?
Glenn Greenwald blames some of the misunderstanding on journalists. He began a recent edition of System Update by talking about how journalists report on war. “One of the most important parts of journalism, when it comes to war, is to scrutinize, and investigate and debunk propaganda that comes from every side in every war.” Unfortunately, he concludes, journalists often fail to scrutinize, investigate and debunk.
I have argued some of the blame should be put on state approved textbooks which often fail, in Vidal’s words, to make the vital connections, due to what I call “missing links.”
The Often-Invisible Agenda of Corporate Media
In 2005, Norman Solomon wrote an article titled “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” where he describes the connections of the military-industrial complex to corporate media.
“Firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant.”
Because so much of the media is now tied to corporate sponsors or serves the agenda of one political party most Americans are never exposed to real debate. Highly paid broadcasters may be fearful of offending their corporate paymasters when they report on a war involving the United States, especially when their reports have been given a veneer of credibility from “experts” drawn from the ranks of retired military officers, retired CIA personnel and former FBI officials.
As a result, there is virtually no media coverage of weapons manufacturers and the profits they make. Just imagine the impact it would make if reports from war zones that we are deeply involved with, like Gaza or Ukraine, were followed by listings of the profits made by various weapon-making conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Boeing, General Dynamics or Raytheon?
How much do we know about American Wars?
To understand the gravity of the situation it helps to have a sense of how many American wars have been fought and how many conflicts we are currently involved with. The numbers differ according to the source largely because wars are sometimes grouped under umbrella terms like the Caribbean wars, the Cold War or the War on Terror.
According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 107 wars since its founding and 41 of these were fought against the Indigenous peoples of North America. Most of these wars are ignored by schools, textbooks and the media, but the pressure to become involved in additional conflict is ever-present and comes from a variety of sources.
When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for President George Bush Sr., he contracted engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root (then part of Halliburton) to identify traditional military jobs that could be taken over by private sector contractors. It turned out there were a lot of jobs for the private sector and ever since the use of contractors has grown in positions like conducting intelligence, training local military, handling security and assisting in drone warfare.
At times the number of private contractors has been larger than that of enlisted troops. In April 2008, there were 163,900 contractors and 160,000 enlisted troops in Iraq. But when most media reported the number of Americans in the war zone, they reported the number of enlisted troops and not the contractors. This results in a predictable under-estimate of American involvement and additional earnings for contractor providers.
According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies: “The most highly prized attribute of private contractors is that they reduce troop requirements by replacing military personnel. This reduces the military and political resources that must be dedicated to the war.”
Public Citizen reports that “Every year, the defense industry donates millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress, creating pressure on the legislative branch to fund specific weapons systems, maintain an extremely high Pentagon budget, and add ever more military spending.”
They also report that the pressure to spend more is constant, even though “nearly 50% of the Pentagon budget” already goes to private contractors. According to the report, in 2022 the weapons/defense industry donated $10.2 million to the 84 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
Even the language employed to report on war is structured to confuse. Invented phrases resemble Orwell’s Newspeak, from the novel 1984, meant to prevent too much thought. How else to explain the birth of misleading terms like “protective reaction strike” (an attack) “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture), “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping), “collateral damage” (extra dead), or “targeted killings” (usually with a lot of collateral damage).
We have a government financed and influenced by Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex idea, and a population which seems either uninformed or uninterested.
The combination invites a future of permanent war.
The Art of Promoting Misunderstanding
What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is,
What can you make people believe that you have done?
“A Study in Scarlet”
Arthur Conan Doyle
Simplistic appeals to self-defense and patriotism are common ways to garner support for almost any war effort. Unfortunately, such appeals are rarely questioned until after the killing stops. Even worse, after the killing stops, there is very little effort put into examining the usually bogus claim of self-defense.
Self-defense is the most common justification for war, but given the complexity of most wars it does not explain anything. In the early years of the U.S., the most significant motivation for war was the insatiable drive to steal more land occupied by people not regarded as white.
From the inception of the country, Native Americans were framed as “savage” threats. The phrase used in the Declaration of Independence was “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” How many of you were even made aware of that sentence that appears near the end of a document that begins with “all men were created equal?”
Bluntly put, the real motivation for expansionist wars was a desire for more land justified by some version of white supremacy.
In 1821, President James Monroe admitted that America’s westward growth “has constantly driven the [Indigenous Tribes] back, with almost the total sacrifice of the lands which they have been compelled to abandon.”
When President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, he ordered the removal of about 50,000 eastern Indigenous people from their tribal lands to reservations west of the Mississippi. He didn’t even bother to claim self-defense. The assumption of white supremacy was apparently enough.
By 1845 the ideology of Manifest Destiny inspired expansion and a variety of measures designed to remove or destroy the native population. Basically, Manifest Destiny meant white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent of North America.
High school textbooks all discuss early American wars, but usually without analysis. What follows are examples of how three early wars are discussed in textbooks. They date from the early years of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.
These wars: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War each facilitated expansion in different ways. However, in the textbooks, the justifications for war are sometimes misrepresented, combatants are sometimes left out and the extent of the conflict is sometimes shortened and the results disguised.
The War of 1812
This war is described differently in different texts and all of the descriptions are incomplete. In one way or another it is described as a fight between the United States and Britain (sometimes including British North America). But that description is not completely accurate.
Who Fought?
| Side A | The United States, the Choctaw Nation, the Cherokee Nation and their Creek |
| Side B | The United Kingdom, British North America including the two Canadas (Referred to as Upper and Lower and later as East and West) and Tecumseh’s Confederacy. |
In “History Alive!,” this war between the United States and Britain was fought to “defend neutrality.” In “The Americans,” it is said to have been caused by anger at the British practice of seizing Americans at sea in order to “draft” them into the British navy.
Some textbooks also mention that at the end of the war, in 1814, the British burned the president’s residence and the Capitol building.
Near the end of the section in “The Americans,” the narrative gets close, but not close enough, to identify an important reason for the war when it reports that those who favored the war were upset that some Indigenous Shawnee remained in Indiana Territory, preventing white settlement.
The text also mentions Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his confederacy, but unfortunately the interesting fact that Indigenous people fought on both sides of the war and the fact that the indigenous were defending their homeland is simply ignored.
This is from Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States,”:
“[Andrew] Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the war of 1812, which was not just a war against England for survival but a war for the expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory. Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against white invasion.”
Who Won and Who Lost?
| * The War of 1812 ended in a draw between the main white combatants. The Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814. |
| * The losers were the Indigenous tribes on both sides of the conflict. (This is rarely in any textbook and the Indigenous are rarely cited as combatants) |
Zinn correctly stated that this was a war for expansion, but the textbooks don’t always make it clear. The fact that Indigenous peoples suffered the greatest losses is purposely unrecognized. Significantly, even the Indigenous allies of the United States, including the Creek and the Cherokee, were forced to negotiate a series of treaties ceding land.
Tecumseh was killed in 1813 while leading a fight against the Americans. His confederation was destroyed, but because it had been created to unite various tribes against white settlers it should have been considered, in the text, as an important example of self-defense.
“The Americans” concludes this section with a creative summary of the war’s three consequences. First, the war led to the end of the Federalist party. Second, it encouraged American manufacturing, and third, it confirmed the United States “as a free and independent nation.”
By leaving out the war’s effects on Indigenous nations this myopic summary illustrates how deliberate omission can mislead.
The Mexican-American War (1846-1848)
Any honest textbook should begin this section something like this: The Mexican-American War happened because white American expansionists and advocates of manifest destiny, like President Polk, wanted to steal Mexican land.
Of course no state approved textbook introduces the Mexican-American War that way.
Who Fought?
| Side A | The United States, Texas, and California (Texas and California were both still claimed by Mexico) |
| Side B | Mexico |
The following information is not in the textbooks, but it is found in a number of academic histories like those of Howard Zinn and occasionally in Wikipedia: In 1829 Texas had broken from Mexico largely because Mexico had abolished slavery and Texas slaveholders wanted to maintain their enslaved labor. This was also one reason enslavers, like President Polk, who kept 56 enslaved people, hoped annexation would help shift the balance of states in Congress. Soon after his inauguration he annexed Texas.
Polk’s electoral campaign had focused on westward expansion. On the night of his inauguration, he “…confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the acquisition of California.”
Conveniently for Polk, Texans insisted that their southern border extended to the Rio Grande while Mexico claimed the border stopped at the Nueces River. So, in order to provoke a conflict with Mexico, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to enter the disputed territory.
This is in all of the textbooks I’ve seen:
In the area between the two rivers, 11 American soldiers were killed by Mexican troops. So, President Polk declared that the Mexicans had “shed American blood on American soil.” This was a thinly veiled suggestion that the U.S. needed a war for reasons of self-defense. Congress quickly voted for war.
The following year, when Abraham Lincoln took his seat in Congress, he challenged Polk to specify the exact spot where American blood was shed “on American soil.” These challenges are now called Lincoln’s spot resolutions and they are likely to have cost him reelection.
When the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848 at the end of the war, Mexico ceded more than forty percent of its territory to the U.S. It is estimated that 25,000 Mexican soldiers and 15,000 American soldiers had been killed.
All of the textbooks that I am familiar with admit that the war with Mexico was a war for expansion. But I have never seen a textbook that explores Lincoln’s spot resolutions. That is unfortunate because Polk’s cynical charge that “American blood was shed on American soil” was not unique in the history of American wars.
Who Won and Who Lost?
| * The United States won taking from Mexico California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. |
| * Mexico lost almost half its territory. |
The Spanish-American War
I should welcome almost any war, for I think this
country needs one.
— Theodore Roosevelt, 1897
In 1890, the U.S. Bureau of the Census officially declared that the North American frontier was closed. Put more descriptively, one could say that due to a combination of racism, genocide and the creation of reservations, the Indigenous peoples were no longer able to offer much resistance. If the U.S. were to continue expansion it would have to look “overseas.”
From 1787 to 1890 the U.S. had been taking the lands of the Indigenous peoples. It is clear that the country was never isolationist so an overseas search for a bigger empire would not require a philosophical change in foreign policy.
Who Fought?
| Side A | The United States, Cuban Revolutionaries (until the U.S. turned against them after the defeat of Spain), Filipino Revolutionaries (until the U.S. turned against them in 1899) |
| Side B | Spain, Spanish Cuba, Spanish Guam, Spanish Philippines, Spanish Puerto Rico |
Background
The political and philosophical debates about what would be necessary to shift the targets of conquest overseas are important. As such, the written work and speeches of naval historian and strategist Captain A.T. Mahan and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. are central to the growing movement supporting overseas conquest.
Prominent supporters of overseas expansion often used racist arguments such as “The White Man’s Burden” or “Benevolent Assimilation” to justify the annexation of the former Spanish colonies.
What most high school textbooks report about overseas expansion is technically accurate, but what is not said is at least equally important. Reporting American conquests in a chronological sequence creates a distraction from the philosophical debates which were often based on the racist assumptions of white supremacy.
In “The Americans,” there is some discussion of philosophical justifications for imperialism, but that discussion ends quickly when the students (usually 15 or 16 years old) are presented with a mysteriously awkward and purposefully dense sentence: “One factor in imperial conquest is a belief in the racial and cultural superiority of people of Anglo-Saxon descent especially in comparison with non-white people.”
In “History Alive!,” there is little more than a listing of the new territories acquired, but the Spanish-American War is said to have lasted “only a few months” while its results were “especially dramatic.”
This claim, that the war lasted only a few months, is misleading. And that is made worse because extended fighting in both Cuba and the Philippines are part of the chapter titled “The Spanish-American war.”
Although unmentioned in the textbooks, when the U.S. signed the peace treaty, it made a dangerously arrogant assumption that Spain “owned” these countries. Consistent with that assumption, and without consulting the Cubans and Filipinos, the U.S. paid Spain $20 million to assume control of all the former colonies.
After 1898, fighting in Cuba continued until Cuba became an unwilling American protectorate.
Fighting also continued in the Philippines. The position of the American governmentwas “that the Filipino people, lacking education and political training, were by no means ready for a popular government.” Many Filipinos did not agree and fought with the U.S. for another three years until 1902.
About 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine and disease. The United States lost about 4,200 soldiers.
In “History Alive!,” Secretary of State John Hay is quoted describing the Spanish-American War as “a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.”
A splendid little war indeed. Any textbook quoting such nonsense should have an obligation to point out that Secretary Hay was lying. The war was not little. It took three years. The motives were expansionist and combat involved the use of torture. “History Alive!” does not do this, so it is left up to the teachers to explain, if they have time.
Who Won and Who Lost?
| * The United States won |
| * Spain lost and signed a treaty with the U.S. which paid Spain $20 million for their colonies. Puerto Rico and Guam became American properties. Cuba and the Philippines lost their respective fights for independence, first from Spain and then from the United States. |
There were a number of prominent Americans against overseas expansion. They called themselves the “American Anti-Imperialist League.” In textbooks they are given very little, if any, space. Among the members were George Boutwell (President of the League), Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie, John Dewey, Henry and William James and Mark Twain.
It would be worthwhile to explore what they said in depth. But, as is done in “The Americans,” the League could be represented with a quote from Mark Twain’s satirical essay “To the Person Sitting in the Darkness.”
In this he points out the obvious fact, that the U.S. could have done business with the former Spanish colonies without “owning” them. Here is how he advised the U.S. to think before doing:
“Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first? Would it not be prudent to get our civilization-tools together, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of glass beads and theology, and Maxim guns and hymn books…”
Are we headed toward Forever Wars?
Republicans and Democrats disagree today on many issues, but they are united in their resolve that the United States must remain the world’s greatest military power. This bipartisan commitment to maintaining American supremacy has become a political signature of our times.
— Andrew J. Bacevich, American Imperium 2016
The assertion that history is “one damn thing after another” has often been mis-attributed to Arnold Toynbee, but he didn’t say it or write it. Perhaps we might agree on something a little more applicable like describing our history as one damn war after another.
How else to respond to the Wikipedia list of 107 wars involving the United States since 1787. And the wars continue. In his book “The United States of War,” David Vine reports that, “In the nearly two decades since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has fought in at least 22 countries.”
In his analysis of American wars Andrew Bacevich writes that “the constructed image of the past to which most Americans habitually subscribe prevents them from seeing other possibilities.” This “constructed image” is basically one of the United States as largely innocent of aggression, but forced by circumstance to defend itself.
In order to identify the missing links in the textbook treatments of American wars, it is important to look beyond the minutiae of single events and the unique characteristics of each conflict and look for common threads in the motivations towards engaging in war.
Common threads include the ever-present assertion that the United States is defending itself whenever it goes to war and that includes wars engaged in while assembling a nation that would span the continent, as the song goes, “from sea to shining sea.”
How accurate were American claims of self-defense regarding American participation in the three early wars I reviewed?
The War of 1812, for example, was, in part, fought against the British which could qualify as self-defense. Ironically, the same claim of self-defense could be made by the Indigenous tribes against the U.S. in the same war.
The Mexican-American War began with Polk’s disingenuous claim that U.S. forces were attacked and 11 killed on American soil. Once he made that charge, he used it to get a congressional declaration of war. Manifest destiny is not self-defense.
The Spanish-American War was the result of a growing movement, which included members of the American government, supporting an American overseas empire. That war cannot logically be considered self-defense. Self-defense is likely to be the first justification used by any country entering any war. Sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes it’s not, but it is always debatable.
If Andrew Bacevich is correct in saying we in the U.S. have a bipartisan congressional commitment to maintaining American supremacy, then more wars are inevitable. If we are to escape a future of forever wars, all justifications for war should be questioned and debated before the killing starts.