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By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost
This is the first of three articles on how the American Left is remembered, or not, in high school textbook American History. Part 1 deals with the larger society within which our textbooks exist. The deliberate elimination of inconvenient facts from textbooks mirrors their elimination from daily life. The misuse of language, specifically the use of faulty definitions, is as common in textbooks as it is in media.
Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.
Assata Shakur
Assata: An Autobiography 1987
In 1984 Winston Smith wanted to remember.
He wanted to remember details from the past as much as he wanted to remember the photograph that had just been destroyed. As punishment for wanting to remember he was made to repeat and repeat and repeat the slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
What was true in Orwell’s 1984 is true in our 2025. Historical memory is being eliminated by prohibiting the teaching of European settler campaigns against the Indigenous, institutionalized inequality and historical discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
As I write, the U.S. government is scrubbing critical environmental data from federal websites. The Pentagon is removing thousands of documents and photographs honoring the contributions of women and people of color.
Perhaps the ugliest and most petty attempt to bury inconvenient names is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s 2025 order to rename Navy ships which honor a variety of civil rights leaders. Here are some of the names to be eliminated. The pattern is unmistakable.
United States Naval Ship (USNS) Harvey Milk: Meant to honor the memory of the gay rights campaigner who served in the Navy during the Korean War before being discharged for his sexuality.
USNS Thurgood Marshall: Named in honor of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American U.S. Supreme Court Justice and a pioneering civil rights attorney.
USNS Cesar Chavez: Named after Cesar Chavez, a labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union.
USNS Medgar Evers: Commemorates Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist and World War II veteran assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963.
USNS Harriet Tubman: Honors Harriet Tubman, an Underground Railroad conductor and Union spy during the Civil War. She liberated over 700 enslaved individuals and was posthumously awarded the rank of brigadier general in the Maryland National Guard.
USNS Dolores Huerta: Honors a labor leader and co-founder of the United Farm Workers alongside Cesar Chavez.
USNS Lucy Stone: Honors a suffragist and abolitionist who was arrested for participating in protests for women’s suffrage. In prison she was beaten, tortured and force-fed.
USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Honors the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice known for her lifelong advocacy of gender equality and civil rights.
These efforts are recent, but they are not new. For decades much of the history in high school textbooks has been cleansed of inconvenient material. These are some of the “missing links” that I have written about in a series for ScheerPost. In this installment, I intend to explore the disappearance of historical contributions made by American socialists, communists and fellow travelers (aka the American Left) in establishing worker rights and civil rights for the American people.
Who controls the past controls the future
Did you ever learn that communists and socialists have made positive contributions to American society? Do you know that both groups worked to establish labor unions and to ensure the rights of American workers? Did you know that socialist labor unions are, at least partly, responsible for the 8-hour-workday?
Did you know that the American Communist Party contributed to the struggle for civil rights and racial justice in the early 20th century? Did you learn, in school, about the Scottsboro Boys and who came to their defense?
Are you aware that the left-wing has significant roots in American history? Did you learn that in the 1912 presidential election when the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene V. Debs, secured six percent of the popular vote, socialists already held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including, in 79 cities, the office of mayor.
According to a Brookings Institute paper, FDR’s New Deal drew on socialist proposals to create Social Security. Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” was inspired by the book The Other America written by Michael Harrington who, in 1968, became the chairman of the Socialist Party of America. Were you taught any of that?
Eliminating the history and accomplishments of the left-wing is deliberate. Burying selective parts of the past distorts our understanding of who we have been and who we are.
Who controls the present controls the past
Richard Hofstadter wrote in The Paranoid Style in American Politics that the “far-right” practiced a style of rhetoric consistent with paranoia. Political paranoia, he wrote, sees conspiracies to be “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not [only] himself but millions of others.” Such paranoia often manifests itself in exaggerated terminologies.
For example, Tea Party opposition to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) involved charges that it was a “socialist takeover.” Conservative commentator Bill Kristol compared Obamacare to communism. No matter what they said, the ACA was about expanded health care not a conspiracy. Paranoia and exaggeration go hand in hand and are most effective when directed at those who have no idea what the terms actually mean.
Take the recent attempt by Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, to justify use of National Guard Forces on the streets of Los Angeles. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor … have tried to insert into the city.” Who is she referring to?
Of course, claiming that LA needs to be liberated “from socialists” is nonsense, but such rhetoric can normalize disinformation especially when it is reported in the media without correction. A free press should be expected to correct what are obviously factual errors and state clearly, for example, that the National Guard was not in Los Angeles to liberate the city from anyone, let alone socialists.
Language is never neutral. It is deeply intertwined with the interests of those who dominate public discourse. As the meanings of political terms are transformed, they cease to be complex ideologies and often become justifications for dismissing anything that the powers that be wish dismissed.
As a result, terms like “socialism” and “communism” are transformed into labels to be afraid of, rather than ideas worth defining. In the end, history will be shaped by what is remembered.
Liberals are neither socialists nor communists
For a variety of reasons, many Americans continue to suffer from wide-spread ideological confusion. The confusion comes from more than one source, but mostly from inadequate schooling.
If students never learn to clearly define terms like “socialism,” “democracy,” “liberal/conservative” or “communism” they will be vulnerable to ever-present attempts at manipulation.
More than a few politicians take advantage of this, Senator Mike Lee (R-Ut) for example, reacted to a June 2025 assassination of two Minnesota lawmakers by posting on X, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” The term Marxist is here used as an epithet meant to discredit the suspected shooter or his supposed acquaintances. Or perhaps he was trying to discredit Karl Marx, it is hard to tell.
Donald Trump managed to top Sen. Lee with his own abuse of political labels. During the 2025 campaign, speaking in Arizona, he called Kamala Harris a “socialist, Marxist, communist, and fascist” in one campaign speech. That made so little sense that he might just as well have added cannibal and vegetarian.
Disappeared from textbooks
When artists, writers, social reformers, critics of war and union leaders self-identify as socialists or communists, or simply as sympathetic to the left, that is a fact not usually mentioned in the textbooks. But even when such individuals are too significant to leave out, their political convictions are ignored as much as possible. These are serious omissions with serious consequences.
For example, any history of the Harlem Renaissance will include Langston Hughes, but the fact that he spent decades supporting communist and socialist programs is seldom made clear. In his writing, however, his politics are clear. In 1935, his poem “Let America Be America Again” identified exactly what the Trump Administration is trying to remove from the history curriculum and thus from our common memory.
Say who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek
And finding only the same old stupid plan. Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
Manufactured ignorance or how we got here
As an adolescent, what I learned about communism and socialism did not come from a classroom. It was delivered most afternoons in syndicated repeats of two black and white television shows. When I was 8 and 9-years-old, for reasons beyond my control, television was both my babysitter and my favorite teacher.
Most of those political lessons came from “I Led 3 Lives” and “Superman”. The first was billed as the real-life story of Herbert A. Philbrick, an advertising executive recruited by J. Edgar Hoover to spy on “a network of subversive communist fronts.” The second featured a “mild-mannered reporter” who was also the embodiment of “truth, justice and the American way.”
Each episode of “3 Lives” began with unforgettable melodramatic music and a perilous voice-over assuring viewers that Philbrick had really been “a citizen, a communist, and a counterspy.” Never subtle, it was perfect for an 8-year-old. In total, 117 half-hour episodes “were broadcast over 600 stations in an overt attempt to take anti-Communism into mass culture.”
The fourth episode, Railroad Strike Attempt, is still worth watching (and discussing in a classroom). It presents a story of “satisfied railway workers” being manipulated, by their union bosses, into striking and thus harming American transport.
Superman usually battled gangsters and con artists, but there were episodes focused on the ever-present communist threat. In “The Monkey Mystery,” a young “Eastern European woman” is threatened by the same communists who had recently killed her scientist/father. Alfred Eaker, a filmmaker and critic, calls it “a delightfully far-fetched mystery.”
Occasionally, real teachers made things worse. My 8th grade teacher, a Franciscan nun, recommended a book by J. Edgar Hoover titled Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America. She read a section to the class and suggested that it would help us identify nearby communists. I looked forward to the challenge, but the only communists I could identify were in the convent because they lived communally and owned nothing individually.
The fact is that most of my generation entered high school having learned to fear stuff we did not understand. I can’t help but wonder how much, or if, that has changed. Ask yourself if you learned, in school, a useful understanding of communism?
But does it even matter what we learn or don’t learn in school? While I assume that, if you are reading this, you know that the Soviet Union no longer exists and you know that Russia is no longer a communist state. Most of us remember news reports from the Berlin Wall to Boris Yeltsin. But for many, after learning to fear the Soviets because they were communists, they couldn’t let go.
In a 2022 Economist/YouGov poll, 42% of Americans thought that Russia was still communist. This nostalgia for a communist Russia has even infected the Senate. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) asserted in 2022 that Russia had invaded Ukraine because, “It’s a communist country, so he [Putin] can’t feed his people, so they need more farmland.” You can’t make this up. Check the link.
Manufactured ignorance or the Russians are coming
On the flip side of a poorly defined but ominous enemy is the assumed validity of clichés like “My country, right or wrong.” Such simple sentiments manifest themselves in convictions that are passed from person to person like a virus. One example comes from the autobiography of an American political activist, Assata Shakur.
Midway through the book she recalls a discussion she had in 1964, when she was about 17. She tried to justify the growing U.S. role in Vietnam by suggesting that, “the U.S. was fighting for Democracy.” When she added that the communists “wanted to take over everything,” someone asked her what communism was and she quickly realized she had no idea.
“My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners… I knew I didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet I’d been dead set against it…. I never forgot that day…. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”
At the same age, my understanding of Cold War politics was similar. Her convictions had come from cartoons, mine had come from a couple of old television shows. I too did not know what communism was and I too might have imagined a secretive man wearing a black trench coat.
By the 1970s, Ms. Shakur had become a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. She became a target of COINTELPRO, an FBI counterintelligence program created to discredit and neutralize organizations including the Panthers and the Communist Party. Long story short, in 1984 she was granted political asylum in Cuba, where she still lives.
The first time I was called a communist I was 16. I had agreed to pass out flyers supporting the grape boycott in the parking lot of a Safeway. One woman, after glancing at the flyer, looked at me and grumbled, “You, young man, must be a communist!” As she dropped the flyer, she seemed unnecessarily angry.
I was supporting a farmworker strike in Delano, California, but I didn’t see how that was connected to communism, until I quickly realized that it made sense in an I-Led-3-Lives kind of way. That is, it made sense when almost any act of advocacy or dissent could be reframed as subversive.
Fortunately, by that time, I had come to the same conclusion as Assata Shakur: “Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”
Misleading definitions
The textbooks define the economic and political system of the United States as it is seen by most industrialists and most “successful” politicians. Thus, the United States is simply identified as capitalist. In the textbooks, unions, socialists, communists, and social anarchists are conversely portrayed as challengers to that capitalism. All of these terms are then defined carelessly and sometimes even incorrectly.
Capitalism as defined in textbooks
Adam Smith did not use the word “capitalism” in his work. Instead, he wrote about “commercial society” which, according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasizes his belief that the economic is only one component of the human condition.
Instead of using the term “capitalism,” “The Americans” uses the term “free enterprise” while “History Alive!” uses “capitalism,” but in both textbooks the essence of the definition is the same. Capitalism is “an economic system, in which private businesses and individuals control the means of production.”
Such a rudimentary definition is not very useful. In the United States, for example, governments (federal, state and local) have substantial ownership and substantial control. Government spending accounts for more than one third of GDP and the federal government owns about 28% of the land. So, it is not simply businesses that control “the means of production.”
According to the textbooks, Adam Smith was also a strong advocate of competition, but there is no discussion of currently existing monopolies. When monopolies are discussed, it is largely in the context of the early twentieth century (i.e., Carnegie and U.S. Steel, Rockefeller and Standard Oil and Teddy Roosevelt the “trust buster.”)
Socialism as defined in textbooks
Socialism is defined in “The Americans” as “An economic and political system based on government ownership of business and property, and an equal distribution of wealth.” The definition is basically the same in “History Alive!”. Neither is correct.
In the real world there are many political parties and various governments that claim the label socialist. An honest high school textbook might start there, but I would focus on what is called democratic socialism because that is the most relevant in the American context which includes Eugene V. Debs, Senator Bernie Sanders and others including Zohran Mamdani, the recent winner in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City.
Democratic socialism aims to achieve goals through democratic means, respecting civil liberties and political pluralism. Predictably, it didn’t take long for Trump to misuse clearly defined terms for his own purpose. On July 1, he called the democratic socialist a communist. “Look, we don’t need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him…”
Many European countries have active socialist parties including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the French Socialist Party (PS), and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Each of these parties advocates different policies, but in none of them does the government own “the businesses.” If you doubt this, look it up.
Among European countries, Norway seems to have the most state-owned enterprises. The Norwegian state owns about 9.6% of all non-agricultural business and that rises to almost 13% when companies with a minority share of ownership are included.
In France, the government also holds shares in some companies mostly in areas like energy, transportation, and finance, but private parties control the vast majority of businesses.
The second part of the textbook definition of socialism is “an equal distribution of wealth.” That statement is found in a number of textbooks. It implies that each person possesses the same amount of assets and income. It is not only untrue, but in all likelihood impossible to administer. No country that I know of has ever even attempted an equal distribution.
In the United States, the socialist Eugene V. Debs was a fierce critic of capitalism, but he never suggested an equal distribution of wealth. The most well-known socialist in the U.S. today is Senator Bernie Sanders, and he has never proposed an equal distribution of wealth.
Communism as defined in textbooks
Given that communism is so often referred to in the text, as “an enemy,” it is important for students to develop a real understanding of what it is and why it was labeled an enemy. At the very least the students should understand how basic ideas of communism developed as responses to the massive inequalities coming from industrial capitalism. None of that is what I have found in any high school text.
In “The Americans,” communism is defined as “An economic and political system based on one party government and state ownership of property.” In “History Alive!” it is “An economic or political system, in which the state owns all property and the means of production.”
If this definition is limited to the USSR and the post-WWII satellites in Eastern Europe it is at least minimally correct. The state did own “the means of production” and most of the businesses, but, according to most analysts, wide-spread state ownership was not very effective.
For that reason, in 1987, then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wrote Perestroika in which he outlined ideas for reforming the Soviet system. Then in 1990 the Soviet parliament approved a law allowing private ownership of small factories and businesses. Similar changes were made in some soon to be former satellite states, but soon after that the Soviet system fell apart.
Is confusedness a word?
Word or not, at this point confusion and uncertainty are what we have. As an example of one source of uncertainty, most of the national governments that Americans almost always refer to as communist (i.e., Cuba, China) claim to be socialist.
China is officially a communist state, but its economy is often referred to, by the Chinese, as a socialist market economy or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Communist Cuba calls itself a socialist state led by the Communist Party. Vietnam calls itself a socialist republic and is, importantly, no longer considered an enemy.
Another source of uncertainty may stem from the fact that Karl Marx called himself a socialist.
Some blame for confusion should also be assigned to the textbooks used in the required courses in world history. In general, those books neglect to explain the extraordinary differences among contemporary governments in places like Denmark, France and Germany versus that of the former Soviet Union or present-day North Korea.
Perhaps, publishers expect an increase in state adoptions (thus, increased revenue) for boldly confounding democratic socialism with authoritarian communism.
No matter what the pressure on publishers, history should never be written to propagandize, or to instill patriotism. History should never be cleansed just to please the reader or to inspire the student. Publishers should stick to facts; slavery was brutally real. Ethnic cleansing and genocide were and are real. Racism was and is real.
I began this with Winston Smith’s desperate attempts to remember. Near the end of Orwell’s prophetic novel, he summarized Big Brother’s work like this: The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
That should serve as a warning to all of us.
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Jim Mamer
Jim Mamer is a retired high school teacher. He was a William Robertson Coe Fellow for the Study of American History at Stanford University in 1984. He served as chair of the History and Social Sciences department for 20 years (first at Irvine High and then at Northwood High). He was a mentor teacher in both Modern American History and Student Assessment. In 1992 he was named History and Social Sciences Teacher of the Year by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).