Barely a week into international quarantining and social distancing, people are finding new activities, hobbies, pastimes, and strategies to maintain a semblance of normalcy. My husband and I are no exception: we discovered a set of presidential history flash cards under the bed. The cards are from 2001. Please don’t poke fun at our age, but he received the cards as a gift when he was seven or eight years old in 2001. Pouring through presidential history flash cards on an average Sunday night at home, we wondered who wrote them, and what was their angle? I concluded that an Eisenhower Republican wrote them and that they reaffirm Alexis Coe’s claim that exposing the “thigh men of dad history” is imperative for historical memory and understanding.
Hopefully you’re wondering what the flash cards had to say. Selected excerpts are below, and then historiographical analysis will follow.
GEORGE WASHINGTON: “Raised in the tradition of the gentleman farmer… Resigned [military] commission to manage his Mount Vernon plantation… These experiences, farming the land and fighting for it, awakened in him a vision of a vast agricultural American reaching into the unchartered West.”
Zero mention of slavery.[1]
THOMAS JEFFERSON: “Removed the pomp surrounding Presidential affairs, believing that the best government is the least government. In 1803, his Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation.”
I can’t decide whether the writer noticed that those sentences together epitomize Jefferson’s hypocrisy. Also, zero mention of slavery.[2]
JAMES MADISON: “Small and delicate man with a fierce intelligence.”
Once again, zero mention of slavery.
JAMES MONROE: “Faithful and competent, James Monroe benefitted from the company of men more brilliant than he.”
Ooof that hurts.
“He fought with Washington in the Revolutionary War and studied law under Thomas Jefferson.”
As always, zero mention of slavery.
ANDREW JACKSON: “Tennessee frontiersman, lawyer and military hero whose stunning defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815 launched [his] political career… Jackson wrestled the Presidency from Adams in 1829. His personal charisma, his penchant for plain talk and his image as a Washington outsider proved irresistible to Americans.”
The card included neither the Indian Removal Act nor the Trail of Tears.[3] And please don’t overlook gendered terms like “wrestled” Adams, or “irresistible.”
JAMES POLK: “Claimed America had a ‘manifest destiny’… Fulfilled all his campaign pledges.”
True, but not the whole truth: Card neglects to mention that Native Americans already lived on the lands.
ZACHARY TAYLOR: “Courageous and principled, he distinguished himself in the Indian campaigns… Though a slave-owning Southerner, Taylor was also a strong nationalist.”
The term “principled” should contrast colonizing and conquering Native Americans. But finally, a mention of slavery.
ULYSESSES GRANT: “Apart from his years in command of the victorious Union forces in the Civil War, the life of Ulysses S. Grant was filled with sorrow and setbacks. Alcoholism forced the unremarkable West Point graduate to resign from the Army after serving in the Mexican war.”
Technically correct, though interpreting the Civil War as a departure from sorrow and setbacks seems dicey.[4]
WILLIAM MCKINLEY: “A peace-loving man, whose very docility placed America in the hands of jingoists and big-business interests… The Spanish-American War, ignited by the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor, ended in swift victory for America with territorial gains.”
Frankly, “peace-loving” and “docile” are bizarre words to describe the President of an administration that dramatically escalated American imperialism and settler colonialism overseas.[5]
TR: “A sickly youth who overcame his frailty through physical exercise and sheer grit.”
You can guess the rest.
WOODROW WILSON: “Progressive reformer and idealist. He was also remote and rigid – righteous to a fault.”
True but not the whole truth: Card neglects to mention “Birth of A Nation” and re-segregating Washington, DC.
FDR: “He was crippled by polio… His vigor and charisma undimmed… Laid the groundwork of [United Nations] but did not live to see it, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.”
Hopefully we don’t use ablest language or derogatory terms anymore, opting instead for person-first descriptions. Furthermore, interesting that the cause of his death is more detailed than the card’s description of the Great Depression and World War II.
HARRY TRUMAN: “Noted for his candor and wit, Truman originated the line, ‘The buck stops here.’”
Still searching for the candor and wit.
IKE: “Fine athlete at West Point who went on to a distinguished military career.”
Ike’s entire description was stunningly positive, illuminating where the writer’s allegiance resided.
JFK: “Blessed with wealth, charm, intelligence, and good looks… Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba, but withdrew them after Kennedy imposed a naval blockade… A supporter of the arts, JFK was also mindful of the disadvantaged.”
What about the American missiles in Turkey? Reading the transcripts of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my high school students were not JFK’s biggest fans.[6] Furthermore, supporting the arts and thinking about the disadvantaged are not mutually exclusive.
LBJ: “Ever-mindful of his own impoverished childhood… devoted himself to bringing dignity and justice to the poor… War to save South Vietnam from the communist North escalated steadily under LBJ costing thousands of American lives and causing bitter protest at home. His popularity shattered.”
Shorter LBJ: domestically successful and internationally unsuccessful. But don’t overlook the card’s elimination of historical agency and savior complex while describing Vietnam.
RICHARD NIXON: “Significant achievements were sadly overshadowed by a constitutional crisis… Watergate building… Senior Administration Officials were caught in a cover-up that unraveled under mounting investigation.”
Unlikely positioning of historical agency. Also, zero mention of American military aggression in Cambodia or Laos.[7]
RONALD REAGAN: “A champion of individual freedom… Took a hard line against the Soviets.”
Perhaps not surprising that an Eisenhower Republican mentioned neither the AIDS crisis not the ‘war on drugs’ and mass incarceration.[8]
W: “Andover and Yale, before earning a Harvard MBA… Lifelong baseball fan… Casual and confident, he espoused a ‘compassionate conservatism’ favoring tax and crime reduction and education and tort reform.”
That’s a generous interpretation of his background and presidential campaign, but to be fair, these cards are from 2001 before the Bush administration really started. To be clear, “crime reduction” is a racist euphemism.[9]
Needless to say, my husband and I were laughing while reading through the cards. However, something more intentional, historically significant, and devious unfolds within them. First, historian Alexis Coe introduced the phrase “thigh men of dad history” to describe writers who fetishize powerful male historic figures’ physical features and masculine qualities, at the expense of historical problems like imperialism, settler colonialism, and slavery, among others. The “thigh men of dad history” is indeed a central strand through these presidential history flash cards.
Furthermore, since I was eight years old in 2001, and studied historical memory of the early republic for doctoral exams in 2017, I naively assumed that presidential history from the 2000s would include the Sally Hemings story. By then, academic historians were at least aware. Indeed, that historiographical intervention occurred in 1997 when Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Turns out that I was naïve at best to expect Jefferson’s African American offspring to receive mention in cards from 2001.
I hope that you take seriously or at the very least are entertained by the ideas and selection of information that were in the hands of eight-year-olds in 2001. The children who absorbed this interpretation are now adults, policymakers, voters, and both your students and your colleagues. While presidential historiography advanced considerably in recent years, it must travel much farther to reach the cultural objects and souvenirs that help to educate children.
Presidential History Flash Cards circa 2001
[1] For Washington’s treatment of enslaved persons, see Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave Ona Judge (2017); Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (New York: Random House, 2020).
[2] For enslaved persons at Monticello, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997); Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008); Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).
[3] For the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears see Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, ed., The Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears (New York: Penguin Books, 2007); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, ed., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Ethan Davis, The American Journal of Legal History, Volume 50, Number 1 (January 2008-2010) 49-100.
[4] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2008).
[5] For American imperialism see Thomas H. Bender, A nation among nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).
[6] “The World on the Brink: John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis Thirteen Days in October 1962,” The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (Accessed 2020) https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/.
[7] For American involvement in Vietnam, see “Remembering Vietnam: Online Exhibit,” National Archives and Record Administration (Accessed 2020) https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/remembering-vietnam-online-exhibit-home-page.
[8] For mass incarceration see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010).
[9] Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019).
3 Thoughts on this Post
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An interesting excavation of US history for primary students nineteen years ago. It made me wonder why we would want flash cards for the presidents. It would make more sense to have flash cards for Americans who made a difference. Some might be presidents, some might be iconic figures like Harriet Tubman, others might be people the nation as a whole never heard of but they did something that made a difference for their community. The idea that the history of the nation somehow has been embodied in the persons who have been president is disheartening actually, and seems a pointless way of teaching a national story to seven and eight year olds, who might actually be more engaged if the next card was going to be a surprise.
But then that got me thinking about official histories versus history as a critical discipline. Official histories are dumb by nature, and they can breed cynicism because those who don’t agree with an interpretation will see all the falsehood that goes into constructing a tidy story that conveys simple take-away points. I think this transcends ideology because a story that incorporates conquest and slavery can also be simplistic, even if in those aspects it’s more complete. How do we, can we teach history to primary school students in ways that work with and against evidence to arrive at the complexities of human events?
Well said!
I am already looking ten years down the road with dread…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/us/politics/donald-trump-childrens-books.html