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Window Into Cultural Manipulation: the Conservative Attack on National History Standards, 1994-1995 Todd Blanchette

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Window Into Cultural Manipulation: the Conservative Attack on National History Standards, 1994-1995 Todd Blanchette The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fogler Library 5-2015 Window into Cultural Manipulation: The Conservative Attack on National History Standards, 1994-1995 Todd Blanchette Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd Recommended Citation Blanchette, Todd, "Window into Cultural Manipulation: The onC servative Attack on National History Standards, 1994-1995" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2293. http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/2293 This Campus-Only Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. A WINDOW INTO CULTURAL MANIPULATION: THE CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON NATIONAL HISTORY STANDARDS, 1994-1995 By Todd Blanchette B.A. University of Maine, 2008 A THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (in History) The Graduate School The University of Maine May 2015 Advisory Committee Howard Segal, Professor of History, Advisor Nathan Godfried, Professor of History Michael Lang, Professor of History A WINDOW INTO CULTURAL MANIPULATION: THE CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON NATIONAL HISTORY STANDARDS, 1994-1995 By Todd Blanchette Thesis Advisor: Dr. Howard Segal An Abstract of the Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (in History) May 2015 This research looks into the public debate surrounding the release of proposed voluntary National History Standards within the context of the 1990s culture wars in the United States. The goal is to offer a glimpse into how history education is tied with notions of culture, and how conceptions of history and national identity were manipulated by individuals, spear headed by former NEH chairwoman Lynne Cheney, with a political motive. The author gives a brief context of the United States’ during the mid-1990s, including tenuous issues of race, gender, sexuality and multiculturalism. The origins and development of the national history standards are laid out, including the internal debates over multiculturalism during their development. The focus shifts to the media attacks a number of conservatives launched against the standards, claiming they were too culturally liberal, and were an attempt at white washing our nations’ history. It is pointed out that these attacks coincided precisely at a pivotal political moment for conservatives in the Capitol, just at the time of the 1994 Republican takeover of the house, and that these attacks on the standards were a way to capitalize on conservatives’ new power. The conclusion focuses on the end of the debate after the Senate Resolution in January, 1995. The New York Times editorial pages became a hot bed for the debate, and reveal a behind-the-scenes connection among the conservatives criticizing the standards, further acting as evidence that the conservative assault was coordinated. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION........................................................................................ 1 Conceptions of Cultural History................................................................................... 4 The Context.......................................................................................................................7 Historiography................................................................................................................. 9 CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY OF CONTROVERSY...........................................................17 The History of History.................................................................................................. 18 The Push for Standards.................................................................................................25 Cultural Context and Its Effect................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER THREE: THE ATTACKS................................................................................... 35 The Attacks Spread....................................................................................................... 41 The Big Blow................................................................................................................. 46 CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION........................................................................................49 An Organized Defense..................................................................................................51 Wrapping It Up.............................................................................................................. 58 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................61 BIOGRAPHY OF AUTHOR...................................................................................................64 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In early October, 1994, after two years of painstaking negotiation and discussion went into their development, a set of voluntary national standards for history in grades kindergarten through twelve were set to be published and released to the public. Developers hoped that schools would choose to use them as a guideline in their history and social studies curriculums, bringing American students up to date on historical content as well as critical and analytical skills. This project was part of a larger vision which had been known under two different names since 1988: America 2000 and Goals 2000. Both had as their aim the establishment of accepted standards in certain core subjects in school. This was not a partisan issue to begin with. After all, it was Republican president George H.W. Bush who pushed for it in the 1980s under the name America 2000, and it was Democratic president Bill Clinton who continued it in 1994 with only minor changes under the name Goals 2000. The subjects of English, mathematics, science, history and geography were to have standards developed for them. Goals 2000 expanded the list of subjects to include foreign languages, civics and government, and economics. None of them met controversy, except history. Just before the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) was to release the mandated history standards to the public, former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney attacked them in the Wall Street Journal on October 4th, 1994 in an op-ed titled “The End of History.” This marked the beginning of a concerted effort by a number of conservatives to decry, via the media, the history standards as wrongheaded at best and aberrantly biased at worst. This offensive would ultimately defeat any impact the developers hoped the standards might have on history education. What unfolded next ended in a public relations victory for the political right, and the short-lived loud debate is a testament to how culture can be open to conscious manipulation “from above” by those with means to power and access to media. There has been a wonderful work on this controversy written by three individuals who were involved in most of the standards’ development. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn published History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching o f the Past in 1998 in order to situate “the attacks on the history standards in the larger culture wars of the last decade” in the hopes that it will allow “a greater appreciate of what is at stake and how history education in the schools can be held hostage to political agendas.” 1 The authors do a great job of tracing the development of the standards, and in doing so show they know the standards debate was used for political ends. Sometimes the authors find it hard to hide their own political biases; and, having been intimately invested in the process, they seemingly refuse to admit the Senate censure of the standards and its following re-edit by the moderately conservative Council for Basic Education (CBE) was an ultimate cultural and political victory for the Right. So completely were the original standards politically toxic that even the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton would eventually come out against them. 1 Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), xi. To its credit, the focus of History on Trial is how, after all the negative fanfare the standards received, the NCHS was able to go back, revise them, and re-release them on April 3, 1996. This second version of standards received far less negative attention from conservatives. Out of this second release, Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn chose to find their victory. The Senate did not censure or even vote on the revised standards, and they were distributed to schools nation-wide. However, the revised standards did not receive nearly as much media notice as the first ones did in late 1994 and early ’95. No one paid much attention; at this point every media outlet was mostly consumed by the upcoming presidential election. In this respect, the history standards and advocates of multicultural history lost the public contest. This thesis contends that the fight over public perception had been won by the conservative right. By controlling the direction of the media conversation over history, conservatives had managed to publicize and find support for traditional notions of American themes. And in so doing, derail the standards’ authors’ attempts to update school history
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