American Schoolbook.^41 In American history, even more than in literature,
publishers strive for a “balanced” approach to offend no one.
Publishers would undoubtedly think twice before including a hard-hitting
account of Columbus, for example. In Chapter 2, I used genocide to refer to the
destruction of the Arawaks in the Caribbean. When scholars used the same
term in applying for a grant for a television series on Columbus from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the endowment rejected them.^42
Lynne Cheney said that the word was a problem. The entire project, 1492:
Clash of Visions , was too pro-Indian for the endowment. “It’s okay to talk
about the barbarism of the Indians, but not about the barbarism of the
Europeans,” complained the series producer.^43
For publishers to avoid giving offense is getting increasingly difficult,
however. A dizzying array of critics—creationists, the radical right, civil
liberties groups, racial minorities, feminists, and even professional historians
—have entered the fray. No longer do textbooks get denounced only as
integrationist or liberal.^44 Now they are also attacked as colonialist,
Eurocentric, or East Coast- centric. Publishers must feel a bit flustered as they
delete a passage modestly critical of American policy to please right-wing
critics in one state, only to find they have offended left-wing critics in another.
Including a photograph of Henry Cisneros may please Hispanics but risk
denunciation by New Englanders demanding an image of John Adams.
Although publishers want to think of themselves as moral beings, they also
want to make money. “We want to do well while doing good,” the president of
Random House, the parent company of Pantheon, said to me as he inquired into
the commercial prospects of our Mississippi textbook.^45 Thoughts of the
bottom line narrow the range of thought publishers tolerate in textbooks.
Publishers risk over half a million dollars in production costs with every new
textbook. Understandably, this scares them.
What about the authors? Since every bad paragraph had to have an author,
surely authors lie at the heart of the process. It’s not always clear who the real
authors are, however. The names on the cover of a textbook are rarely those of
the people who really wrote it.^46 Lewis Todd and Merle Curti may have
written the first draft of Rise of the American Nation back in 1949, but by the
time its tenth edition came out in 1991, now titled Triumph of the American
Nation, Curti was ninety-five and in a nursing home and Todd was dead. The