of our overthrow of Mossadegh. The American Pageant provides this account:
The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by the Kremlin,
began to resist the power of the gigantic Western companies that
controlled Iranian petroleum. In response, the... CIA helped to
engineer a coup in 1953 that installed the youthful shah of Iran,
Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as a kind of dictator. Though
successful in the short run in securing Iranian oil for the West,
the American intervention left a bitter legacy of resentment
among many Iranians.These sentences do give students some means for understanding why Iranians
took over the American embassy in 1979, imprisoning its occupants for more
than a year.
Iran’s continuing hostility to U.S. policies in the Middle East may explain
why textbooks now cover our provocative actions there more fully.
Unfortunately, other than about Iran, textbooks have not improved in their
treatment of our foreign adventures. In Guatemala, in 1944, college students,
urban workers, and members of Guatemala’s middle class joined to overthrow
a dictator and set up a democratic government. During the next ten years,
elected governments extended the vote to American Indians, to the poor
(largely synonymous), and to women; ended forced labor on coffee plantations;
and enacted other reforms. All this came to an end in 1954, when the CIA
threatened the government of Jacobo Arbenz with an armed invasion. Arbenz
had antagonized the United Fruit Company by proposing land reform and
planning a highway and railroad that might break their trade monopoly. The
United States chose an obscure army colonel as the new president, and when
Arbenz panicked and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy, we flew our man
to the capital aboard the U.S. ambassador’s private plane. The result was a
repressive junta that treated its Indian majority brutally for another forty years.
Four of six recent textbooks do mention this event. The American Journey
provides a representative treatment:
The Eisenhower administration also faced Communist
challenges in Latin America. In 1954 the Central Intelligence
Agency helped overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala, which some American leaders feared was leaning
toward communism.