far more than any other nation. Journey hedges: air pollution “could be a
factor.” And four books never mention the subject.^47
Why are textbook treatments of environmental issues so feeble? If authors
revised their closing pages to jettison the unthinking devotion to progress, their
final chapters would sit in uneasy dissonance with earlier chapters. Their tone
throughout might have to change. From their titles on, American history
textbooks are celebratory, and the idea of progress legitimates the celebration.
Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from
race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as
a period of Yankee usurpation and Negro debauchery fits with the upward
curve of progress, for if relations were bad in Reconstruction, perhaps not as
bad as in slavery but surely worse than what came later, then we can imagine
that race relations have gradually been getting better. However, the facts about
Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in many ways race relations in
this country have yet to return to the point reached in, say, 1870. In that year, to
take a small but symbolic example, A. T. Morgan, a white state senator from
Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from
New York, and was reelected.^48 Today this probably could not happen, not in
Hinds County, Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States.
Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to
conclude that black Americans have no legitimate claim on our attention today
because the problem of race relations has surely been ameliorated.^49
A. T. Morgan’s marriage is hard for us to make sense of, because Americans
have so internalized the cultural archetype of progress that by now we have a
built-in tendency to assume that we are more tolerant, more sophisticated,
more, well, progressive than we were in the past. Even a trivial illustration—
Abraham Lincoln’s beard—can teach us otherwise. In 1860 a clean-shaven
Lincoln won the presidency; in 1864, with a beard, he was reelected. Could
that happen nowadays? Today many institutions, from investment banking firms
to Brigham Young University, are closed to white males with facial hair. No
white presidential candidate or successful Supreme Court nominee has
ventured even a mustache since Tom Dewey in 1948. Beards may not in
themselves be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my
thinking, but we have reached an arresting state of intolerance when the huge
Disney corporation, founded by a man with a mustache, will not allow any
employee to wear one. On a more profound note, consider that Lincoln was