censorship of textbook authors. “You always run the risk, if you talk about
social class, of being labeled Marxist,” the editor for social studies and history
at one of the biggest publishing houses told me. This editor communicates the
taboo, formally or subtly, to every writer she works with, and she implied that
most other editors do, too.
Publisher pressure derives in part from textbook adoption boards and
committees in states and school districts. These are subject in turn to pressure
from organized groups and individuals who appear before them. Perhaps the
most robust such lobby is still Educational Research Analysts, led until 2004
by Mel Gabler of Texas. Gabler’s stable of right-wing critics regards even
alleging that a textbook contains some class analysis as a devastating criticism.
As one writer has put it, “Formulating issues in terms of class is unacceptable,
perhaps even un-American.”^39 Fear of not winning adoption in Texas is a
prime source of publisher angst and might help explain why Life and Liberty
limits its social-class analysis to colonial times in England. By contrast, “the
colonies were places of great opportunity,” even back then. Some Texans
cannot easily be placated, however. Deborah L. Brezina, a Gabler ally, wrote
that Life and Liberty describes America “as an unjust society,” unfair to lower
economic groups, and therefore should not be approved.^40 Such pressure is
hardly new. Harold Rugg’s Introduction to Problems of American Culture and
his popular history textbook, written during the Depression, included some
class analysis. In the early 1940s, according to Frances FitzGerald, the
National Association of Manufacturers attacked Rugg’s books, partly for this
feature, and “brought to an end” social and economic analysis in American
history textbooks.^41
More often the influence of the upper class is less direct. The most potent
rationale for class privilege in American history has been social Darwinism,
an archetype that still has great power in American culture. The notion that
people rise and fall in a survival of the fittest may not conform to the data on
intergenerational mobility in the United States, but that has hardly caused the
archetype to fade away from American education, particularly from American
history classes.^42 Facts that do not fit with the archetype, such as the entire
literature of social stratification, simply get left out.
Textbook authors may not even need pressure from publishers, the right
wing, the upper class, or cultural archetypes to avoid social stratification. As
part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a