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The Virginia History Standards and the Cold War
Glenn C. Altschuler
Cornell University
Eric Rauchway
University of California, Davis
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PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH's approach to education policy has earned
him cautious plaudits from otherwise hostile critics, who see much
to admire in the implementation of standards for education. However
useful such standards prove for testing students' technical skills
like arithmetic and reading, they create problems for less-standardized
processes like thinking about history. Some states, including Virginia,
have already instituted "Standards of Learning" (SOLs) to lend coherence
to history teaching throughout the state. But the Virginia SOLs'
treatment of the Cold War provides ample warning about the perils
of such state standardization.
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Promoted six years ago by Governor
George Allen as part of a "back to basics" reform of Virginia's
public schools, SOLs set forth the "essential knowledge" students
should know to pass standardized tests in the eighth grade, and
are distributed to every teacher. The "essential knowledge" in the
SOLs provides a basis for testing students' understanding of history.
Indeed, history has a special place in the "back to basics" agenda.
According to the Virginia Board of Education, the SOLs put history
at "the integrative core of the curriculum" so that students can
grapple with "fundamental questions of truth, justice, and personal
responsibility." Unfortunately, in what they omit as well as what
they promote, the SOLs now in use for eighth-grade United States
history provide few, if any, occasions for middle-schoolers to understand
the role of the United States in the complicated moral universe
of the Cold War, which the Virginia program treats with nostalgic
enthusiasm as a time when the free peoples of the globe stood steadfast
against the Red Menace. |
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Consider for example the Cuban missile
crisis. Virginia's "essential knowledge" is that Soviet missiles
placed in Cuba "caused" a United States blockade of the island.
This is true—but only in the way that it is true that United Nations
sanctions in Iraq caused Saddam Hussein to starve his people. These
stories need contexts. The larger context of the Cuban action (whether
it was justified or not) included NATO missiles in Turkey, and Kennedy
administration efforts to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and to
assassinate Fidel Castro—none of which is mentioned in the SOLs.
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The Cuban Missile Crisis ended peaceably
as much because of John Kennedy's famous luck (so reliable till
it suddenly ran out) as because of good policy or good leadership.
The President didn't know that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev
had delegated responsibility for nuclear weapons in Cuba to the
same trigger-happy Russian commander who had shot down an American
U-2 at the height of the crisis. The Russian field commander in
Cuba could at any time, at the slightest American provocation, have
fired off a tactical nuclear missile, which would surely have set
off American retaliation. The world had been closer to nuclear incineration
than Kennedy knew. |
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These details of the Cuban Missile
Crisis are now well-known, and can be found in books covering the
specific topic and in brief, well-written Cold War surveys. (See
for example Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, One Hell
of a Gamble (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) and Walter LaFeber,
America, Russia, and the Cold War, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1997).) But Virginia blithely tells its students, without mentioning
costs or alternatives, that the deterrent strategy of Mutual Assured
Destruction—abbreviated, of course, as MAD—"prevented another
world war" and the arms race brought down the Soviet Union. |
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For the Vietnam War, Virginia's "essential
knowledge" is that the United States resisted the "Soviet-backed"
invasion of the South by the North. This too is true, but in a way
that obscures a larger and more important truth, that the war in
Vietnam was essentially a war for independence from colonization
in which the United States was only the last opponent. Vietnam's
war belatedly became part of the Cold War when President Lyndon
Johnson invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalating
American military involvement and to prevent himself from looking
soft on Communism overseas. Before that escalation, Ho Chi Minh,
a fervent nationalist who had rebuffed aid from China in expelling
the French from Vietnam, received only limited aid from the Soviet
Union, whose leaders did not encourage his aggressive approach to
unifying the North and the South. Johnson's failure to deal with
the complicated history of Vietnam, and his willingness to reduce
it to the blacks and whites of the Cold War as seen from America,
was for both countries a terrible tragedy. |
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That Johnson's mistakes should become
Virginia's historical facts is a travesty. Again, the detailed story
of Johnson and Vietnam is well known and often told in easily-obtained
books on the subject. Robert Schulzinger's A Time for War,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) provides a historian's
perspective; teachers might also look directly to Johnson's own
transcribed words in Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes,
1963-1964, edited by Michael Beschloss (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997). |
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Perhaps least satisfactory is Virginia's
treatment of the Cold War's effects in the United States. The SOLs
explain the Red Scare by noting that "There were Communist Party
members in the United States and many people feared their influence."
This is both true and irrelevant—Americans' fears of Communism
were more nearly a consequence than a cause of the Truman administration's
enforced loyalty oaths and Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings. |
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There were, as historians now know,
plenty of real Communists and real Soviet spies in the United States
(though McCarthy for one was useless at finding them). In the later
Cold War, published memoirs like those of journalist Michael Straight,
onetime friend of the spy Guy Burgess, reveal the casual ease with
which Soviet agents moved through the secret circles of Washington
DC even at the height of the Korean War. More recently, declassified
files (the VENONA transcripts chief among them) have revealed the
guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, among other spies in the
United States. They have also shown that the leaders of the Communist
Party of the USA were slavishly loyal to their masters in Moscow.
Many of these transcripts have been published and are easily available:
see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet
Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999);
Klehr, Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American
Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Klehr, Haynes,
and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Moreover, historians have
examined these new documents and incorporated them into accounts
of Cold War espionage: see Allen Weinstein, The Haunted Wood
(New York: Random House, 1999). |
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The presence and activity of those
spies notwithstanding, the point remains that President Truman and
other American leaders deliberately misrepresented the seriousness
of the Communist threat in order to get Americans to support a new
world (cold) war immediately after the end of the old one. As Senator
Arthur Vandenberg privately told Truman, if he wanted Congress to
support massive increases in income tax to support a war against
Communism, he couldn't discuss it in dry, realistic terms, he would
have to "scare hell out of the American people." The loyalty program
and the rest of the Red Scare did that. Again, eminent historians
have carefully investigated, using new sources, what the Truman
administration did, and have argued that it was more than was necessary
to prosecute a successful containment of the Communists. See for
example Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S Truman and
the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). |
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The Cold War is worth studying because
it is full of complexities and misunderstandings. It can teach valuable
lessons about justice and the consequences of ideas. For example,
as a consequence of the idea that even a dictatorship was preferable
to a communist government, the United States helped make Augusto
Pinochet the leader of Chile, Daniel Ortega the leader of Nicaragua,
and apartheid the order of the day in South Africa. At the same
time, as a consequence of the idea that democracy must win everywhere
for the United States to win the Cold War, American leaders supported
the Civil Rights movement at home and the Peace Corps abroad. |
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Only once, and then obliquely, do
the SOLs acknowledge the mixed record of American Cold War policy,
when they mention that "the 'free nations' and the Soviet Union
divided the world." These are brave quotation marks but, standing
alone, they are easy for teachers to miss. Virginia's treatment
of the Cold War is the more troubling because the SOLs elsewhere
admit of much greater complexity to American history, as for example
when they discuss the uneven impact of the consumerism and prosperity
of the 1920s. We can only conclude, however tentatively, that the
Cold War even today forms too considerable a portion of the national
myth of greatness for it to earn serious consideration in the eyes
of the state of Virginia. Yet the students now studying United States
history in Virginia schools were born during the New World Order,
after the Cold War had ended. They deserve better than to be indoctrinated
in its myths. |
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To win the Cold War, Secretary of
State Dean Acheson once remarked, politicians had to tell stories
"clearer than the truth." Before the Berlin Wall came down, there
may have been some merit to this position. But times have changed.
Yes, Virginia, there was a Cold War, and sensible people the world
over are glad the United States won. Now, as we "teach to the test,"
let's provide teachers with the tools to tell eighth graders a more
complete, more interesting, and more important story about it. |
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