Trump’s Takeover of Education Is Taking A Page From the Confederacy
The thread of partisan power and control is woven through the American public education system. In the name of revisionist Lost Cause history—that the South fought the Civil War for states’ rights, not to maintain the institution of slavery—the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) exploited the group’s considerable political influence in the early 20th century and attacked school curricula. The UDC lobbied for ahistorical, pro-South school materials, and its members joined Southern state textbook boards where they helped control which books would be deemed suitable for children and which would not. Over the next decades, nearly 70 million Southern students learned that slaves were actually servants and that Confederates were simply fighting to preserve a Southern way of life.
In the 1950s, the American Legion partnered with the National Education Association to create anticommunist programs. Norma and Mel Gabler, a married couple and religious fundamentalists, channeled their right-wing influence on children’s education through the Texas textbook committee circuit, suppressing science courses on evolution and championing “cultural heritage” and patriotism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s.
By commandeering state-level commissions and capitalizing on early 20th-century state laws, reactionaries managed to control the historical studies curriculum for generations of students, particularly in the South.
Under the presidency of Donald Trump, this plan was adapted and broadcast directly from the White House. The president announced in September the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations, including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the country.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renew patriotism” and “advance a common understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the country.”
“The reason there’s so much nostalgia in Trump’s politics,” Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University, told TPM, “is because of this popular memory that a certain type of American once had more privilege than they do today and that that privilege can and should be restored.
“And one of the things that can achieve that is a new push in schools, away from inclusion, away from diversity, from critical approaches to race, and instead towards a more old-fashioned inculcation of what they would specifically call, quote, authentic American virtues.”
Trump II leans heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan in pushing policies that propel the nation backwards. Experts told TPM that by associating with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exerting control over the narrative of history in hopes of shaping the political views of younger Americans. Led by groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come and revive the highly politicized and ahistorical educational campaigns of the early and mid-20th century.
The White House did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.
“If this administration says ‘Make America Great Again,’ it’s once again asking that all coverage be historical,” Eddie R. Cole, professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, told TPM. “Because what the hell is ‘again’?”
“Reject a book that says the South fought to retain its slaves”
Fueled by its determination to preserve the legacy of its deceased Confederate relatives, the UDC decorated graves, erected monuments to fallen soldiers and officials, and infiltrated the textbook boards that were growing alongside public education in the South through intense and successful lobbying campaigns over several years.
These efforts were codified in 1919 when Mildred Lewis Rutherford of the UDC published a “rule of measurement” for school textbooks.
The fifth page of his 23-page pamphlet was explicit:
- Reject a book that says the South fought to keep its slaves.
- Reject a book that talks about a Southern slave owner as being cruel and unfair to his slaves.
- Reject a textbook that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865.
Rutherford then promised to publish a monthly rolling list of banned books in a Confederate publication based in Tennessee.
“It has long been a solid wall for school publishing,” Laats said of the UDC’s hold on textbook printers.
Textbook publishers, financially exposed to the zeitgeist and therefore averse to political controversy, released special editions of textbooks that whitewashed history, Laats said.
“Publishers, through people like Mildred Rutherford of the UDC, produced Mint Julep editions, as they were called,” Laats explained, “where they did everything they could to make the old Confederacy look blameless, even heroic in terms of war, in terms of things like slavery and the dispossession of Native lands. »
The United Daughters of the Confederacy curriculum reigned in American public schools throughout the 20th century, before being nearly eliminated in the 1970s, according to a 2019 Washington Post article, endorsed by state school boards and boards. Today, state and local governments still control school curricula, said Amy Loyd, executive director of a public education nonprofit called All4Ed.
“But the influence of the federal role should not be underestimated. When the federal role says, we must, cancel, cite without citing woke culture, and that leads to libraries… becoming a hotbed of our culture wars over book bans,” Loyd said, “which harms learning.”
Trump’s influence on school curriculum represents a shift in policy
The overt injection of partisan, ahistorical, and anti-diverse perspectives into primary school curriculums from the highest levels of government illustrates how different policies and policies have become, even since Trump’s first term. Trumpism seems to be able to achieve what past versions of conservatism have not been able to achieve.
“Under the Reagan presidency, the [Education Department] “The big difference between then and now is that in the past, conservative presidents tried to maintain a certain form of respectability and denial.”
The America 250 Civics Education presidential coalition will be led by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), founded by former Trump administration officials, as well as business executive and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, according to a press release.
“A country cannot survive if its values are forgotten by its people,” McMahon said in the statement.
The coalition will further be led by Katie Gorka, an anti-Islam activist who has advocated designating Muslim groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations; Erika Donalds, Florida school choice advocate and wife of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL); and Ben Judge, President of AFPI.
Trump alarmed education activists over the summer when the White House partnered with PragerU, a conservative anti-DEI media nonprofit, to produce educational materials about the Revolutionary War. (The organization produced “AI-overlooked” depictions of the Founding Fathers, according to 404 Media). PragerU published documents containing false allegations about slavery and racism, echoing the philosophy of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th-century education activists, the group has lobbied for years for its materials to be distributed to schools. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and private and charter) education appear to be right-wing groups like PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.
“Organizations like the ones we see today have always had a strong interest in education,” said UCLA’s Cole. “Because if they can take control of education and get federal support for that control, even for five to 10 years, that has the potential to shape the future generation.” »
