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Introduction

Bias, neglect, and invisibility: labor in high school textbooks. Imagine opening a high school U.S. history textbook and finding no mention of—or at most a passing sentence about—Valley Forge, the Missouri Compromise, or the League of Nations. Imagine not finding a word about Benjamin Franklin, Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, Andrew Carnegie, or Rosa Parks. Imagine if these key events and people just disappeared as if they’d never existed, or rated no more than a glancing phrase. That is what has happened in history textbooks when it comes to labor’s part in the American story, and to the men and women who led the labor movement.

 In the high school history textbooks our children read, too often we find that labor’s role in American history—

and labor’s important accomplishments, which changed American life forever—are misrepresented, downplayed

or ignored. That is a tragedy, because labor played (and continues to play) a key role in the development of American

democracy and the American way of life.  This report examines four high school textbooks published by some of the leading publishers in the country.

 *1. Together, the books in this study represent a significant percentage of the purchasing market for high school history

textbooks. Thus, their influence is enormous. As one scholar has noted, “School children in the United

States are one of the largest captive reading audiences in the world today and textbooks account for at least three-quarters of their in-school exposure to the written word. Textbooks are frequently the student’s major source of information on a particular subject taught in school, and may even constitute the only exposure the student receives on a given topic within a subject area. Playing such a central role in the dispensation of knowledge, the content of textbooks becomes a critical issue.”

 *2. It is not too much to say that the four textbooks considered in this report represent the version of American

history that hundreds of thousands of American students carry into their adult lives. Their omissions, errors, or biases

in covering labor’s story—and labor’s role in the American story—are therefore significant. A longstanding problem: American school textbooks’ neglect of labor In case someone, in the future, should want to learn the details of my case, from beginning to end, I would like to have it all together…  — Joe Hill, labor activist and songwriter framed and executed in 1915 for a murder he did not commit.

 *3. Spotty, inadequate, and slanted coverage of the labor movement in U.S. history textbooks is a problem that

dates back at least to the New Deal era. By the late 1960s, a number of scholars had begun documenting the biased

treatment of organized labor in high school curricula. In a 1966 study, Labor in Learning: Public School Treatment of the

World of Work, University of California researcher and high school history teacher Will Scoggins found that the history

and government textbooks used in most high schools either ignored or inadequately treated topics such as collective

bargaining, unfair labor practices, company unions, strikes, right-to-work laws, and the role of government in labor

dispute mediation and conciliation. Scoggins and other scholars understood that high schooltextbooks had come to reflect a negative view about unions that was prevalent in the American business community, as well as in politics—often expressed by various businessoriented and ultra-conservative factions of the Republican Party. (Progressive and moderate forces within the GOP have not always shared this anti-union outlook, as University of Wisconsin Professor William Cronon has pointed out in tracing the history of Wisconsin’s Republican party.)

 *4. In a sense, as Scoggins and others found, American history textbooks have taken sides in the nation’s intense

political debate about organized labor—and the result has been that generations of students have had little concept of

labor’s role in American history and the labor movement’s contributions to American workers’ rights and quality of life.

One illustration of this trend: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, *5 conservative, business-oriented groups launched

a highly successful attack on the supposedly “left-wing” textbook series written by Harold Rugg, a professor at

Columbia University’s Teachers College and a prominent and innovative educational theorist. Among other

complaints, the books’ critics denounced Rugg’s “positive” depiction of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike against General

Motors Corporation as union propaganda whose purpose was to convince students that there was nothing wrong with

the sit-down strike. (The Flint Sit-Down Strike led to the unionization of the U.S. auto industry, enabling the fledgling

United Automobile Workers to organize 100,000 workers almost at a stroke.)

 *6. In the early 1940s, these criticisms of Rugg gained traction and his books disappeared from public schools.

 *7. After the Second World War, the business community continued to devote significant resources to the development and promotion of a high school social studies curriculum that promoted its vision of society and perspective on U.S. history. This vision was skeptical of government programs and wary of organized labor, as documented in E.A. FonesWolf ’s 1994 study, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60.

 *8. Other studies of organized labor’s treatment in U.S. textbooks have found similar biases.

 *9.   In an August 2002 article in Labor History, labor historian Robert Shaffer found that U.S. history textbooks totally ignored the organization of public employee unions, one of the most important union trends in the past half-century.

 *10.  The dramatic growth of the American Federation of Teachers, beginning in the 1960s, for example, eventually caused its chief rival, the National Education Association, to turn to unionism. Together these two organizations now represent about 80 percent of teachers, making teachers the most highly organized sector of the American workforce. Public employee unionism has been a focus of intense political conflict and media attention in recent months, with attacks on public employees’ union rights and the public sector labor movement arising in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, and other states. Shaffer declared: [There is] an absence in virtually all survey textbooks, as well as in textbooks of the recent (post-1945) U.S., of any mention of the upsurge in public employee unionism in the 1960s and 1970s. This silence serves all of our students poorly, and reflects a lack of perspective about what has been one of the most important legacies of the 1960s to contemporary life.

 *11. As these studies found, the historic role of unions in America’s political, economic, social, and cultural life is

frequently left out of textbooks. The studies also repeatedly show that, in the few instances when unions are discussed,

textbooks rarely depict them as beneficial participants in the American story. 

 How do today’s leading textbooks shortchange labor? Today’s major high school history texts do not ignore unions and the labor movement altogether. Each of the books we reviewed presents a modicum of important information, including facts about organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Still, these textbooks provide what we believe to be a narrow and sometimes seriously misleading view of what unions are and have done in the past; they neglect the labor movement’s role in shaping and defending American democracy; and they pay hardly any attention to organized labor in the past half-century. The textbooks fall short in their coverage of labor in three specific ways.  First, they devote little space to the labor movement and the development of unions generally. Second, when they do cover the development of unions, the textbooks’ accounts are often biased against the positive contributions of unions to American history, focusing instead upon strikes and “labor unrest.” Third, their discussions of other important social, political, and economic movements (such as the civil rights movement or

the Progressive Movement and their gains) often downplay or ignore the important role unions and their members

played in these movements.   The following are some of the most significant examples of these problems, drawn from the four textbooks. The books:

■ often implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) represent labor organizing and labor disputes as inherently violent;

■ virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency;

■ ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement; and

■ pay scant attention to unionism after the 1950s, thus completely ignoring the rise of  public sector unionization, which brought generations of Americans into the middle class and gave new rights to public employees. This paper details the major problems with these books. Based on its findings, we ask the publishers of American history textbooks to provide a fairer and more accurate depiction of  trade union history and the labor movement. As we describe below, something valuable is lost when the version of history that American students learn fails to give labor its historic place in the American story.

To be continued…

Citations:

1 The textbooks examined for this report were: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, Albert S. Broussard, James M. McPherson, Donald A. Ritchie, The American Vision (New York:

McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2010); Edward L. Ayers, Robert D. Schulzinger, Jesus de la Teja, and Deborah White, American Anthem: Modern American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston/Harcourt, 2009); Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner, Peter B. Levy, Randy Roberts, and Alan Taylor, United States History (Boston: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2010); and Gerald

A. Danzer, Jorge Klor de Alva, Larry S. Krieger, Louis E. Wilson, Nancy Woloch, The Americans (New York: McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

2 Keith, Sherry, “The Determinants of Textbook Content,” in Textbooks in American Society: Politics, Policy, and Pedagogy, ed. Philip G. Altbach et al. (Albany: State University of

New York Press 1991), 43.

3 This quotation is from a letter Hill wrote to his attorney, Judge Orrin N. Hilton. The text of the letter can be found in Gibbs M. Smith, Joe Hill (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1984), 161-162. 

4 Cronon, a distinguished scholar and president-elect of the American Historical Association, described the Wisconsin Republican party’s progressive tradition in a March

2011 New York Times op ed: “Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Governor Robert M. La Follette

prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a ‘laboratory of democracy.’ … The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive

impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago. When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat,

sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans.

… Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with

a Republican Legislature. The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.” See: William Cronon,

“Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” New York Times, March 21, 2010. Available at: http://wwwnytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.

5 See: Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

6 During the strike, corporate and police brutality against the strikers led Michigan governor Frank Murphy to send in the U.S. National Guard, not to attack strikers or to evict

them from the GM plant they had occupied (ways in which as the National Guard was often used against strikers), but rather to protect them, both from the police, who used tear

gas against the strikers, and from corporate strikebreakers.

7 Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present, 245.

8 Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

9 For example, Jon Bekken’s 1994 analysis of journalism curricula found unions to be neglected or unrepresented. See: Jon Bekken, “The Portrayal of Labor in Reporting Textbooks: Critical Absences, Hostile Voices” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Atlanta, GA, August

10-13, 1994). Available at: http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED375414.pdf.

10 Shaffer, R. “Where are the organized public employees? The absence of public employee unionism from U.S. history textbooks, and why it matters,” Labor History 43(3) (2002) :

315-334. Available at: Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/clah/2002/00000043/00000003/art00008;jsessionid=h4tids32eeol.alexandra.