Yacovone also makes confusing choices about which thinkers and writers to highlight. He seems to regard John H. Van Evrie, a 19th-century New York publisher and Democratic Party propagandist, as the key to understanding white supremacy embedded in school materials. Van Evrie was a popularizer of scientific racism, such as the absurd theory of polygenesis, which held that blacks and whites were separate species, with slavery a natural state for the black lower order.
Van Evrie was “a toxic combination of Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch,” Yacovone writes, noting that his ideas are being spread on white supremacist websites today.
But the connective tissue connecting Van Evrie to the classroom is thin. Yacovone devotes 40 pages to Van Evrie’s writings, the vast majority of which appeared in the popular press. Only four of those pages detail the contents of his only textbook, a children’s story of the Civil War. While the racist myths in this book have endured for generations—for example, that slaves freed by the Union Army clung to their masters rather than embrace freedom—Yacovone does not argue that Van Evrie was largely responsible for exposing teachers and students to these widespread lies. Indeed, he documents only one school, in Boston, that actually used Van Evrie’s textbook.
In later chapters, Yacovone offers more evidence that the textbooks he examines were widely used. Between 1936 and 1957, at least 12 states adopted a high school textbook called “The Development of America”, by Fremont P. Wirth, which called slavery a “necessary evil” for the nation’s economic growth. Progressive educator and Columbia professor Harold Rugg sold millions of textbooks in the years before World War II, some of which were burned by the American Legion for their supposed communist sympathies. But even Rugg described the conditions of slavery as “no worse than those of some workers in factories and mills in the North”.
“Manual after manual describes slaves as living in comfortable shacks,” Yacovone wrote, “with plenty of nourishing food and spending their evenings singing around campfires.” Authors and publishers evaded the brutality of Middle Passage, the rape and family separation.
Yacovone treads lightly on the history of activism around school supplies, but notes the NAACP’s protests against racist textbooks. He also writes that the United Daughters of the Confederacy – an organization that still exists – worked in the early 20th century to place positive Ku Klux Klan books in Southern schools.