48 Liberal Lies About American History [Hardcover]

While I think the title of the book is needlessly provocative, I think this a very useful book for anyone who has been subjected to the kind of indoctrination that passes for history education in too many of our public schools and colleges. If you are looking for some quick information on these four dozen issues, this can help you pass on some solid information that probably runs counter to what your friends believe is so. I said the title is needlessly provocative because not all liberals buy into the points of view this book argues against. However, Larry Schweikart is correct that there is a general cultural agenda that supports the liberal view of things. He starts off each article with two or three short quotes from liberal histories that are countered in that article.

The articles cover notions of America's role in the world since the founding, the issues in the various wars we have fought, what FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, Truman and the Atomic Bomb, the JFK assassination, Reagan, key liberal causes such as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, the Scopes Trial, Columbus and the death of millions of Indians, that pesky wall between Church and State, Women's Rights in early American, the Settling of America and the Indians, and the Robber Barons. Modern issues such as Iraq, 9/11, Global Warming, Media Bias, Educational Bias, and the social theories about our Constitution are also covered. Schweikart admits that saying that the 9/11 conspiracy nuts are liberal is a stretch, but he says he wanted to head off the kind of shoulder shrugs modern texts give to the JFK assassination conspiracy nonsense.

The articles are all relatively short and pack a punch. I am absolutely positive that it will annoy liberals a great deal and some of them will attack the book without bothering to read it. I guess that is a side benefit of the book. Its real point is to push back against what some are trying to make dominant and accepted without critique. Of course, wanting to indoctrinate students is a matter of faith rather than scholarship or education.

If you home school you will definitely want that as an addition to your readings in American History.

You will also want to look at Schweikart's `A Patriot's History of the United States".

A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

We still have an edition World Book Encyclopedia published in 1984 and one published in 1965. It is interesting to verify his complaints about modern text books. The re-writing of history is most disburbing. Find an old encyclopedia and check it out for yourself unless you are old enough to actually remember some of the events of the 1940's till today like I am. Many of us are still around who remember when the nasty lies about the USA were told by our enemies; not by our text books, movies, etc. After verifying facts for yourself, please take action to break this pattern of self-destruction. Please confront your local school boards when you find lies in text books. Hit the text book publishers in the "pocket book." One test is that if a text gets Reagan right, it might be OK. Surely you are old enough to remember those actual events!

The fact that 48 Liberal Lies About American History has been anywhere near a publisher, let alone actually printed and sold, is a true testament to the First Amendment rights that United States citizens hold. It isn't just what Schweikart wrote that makes his book terrible: it's what he didn't write.

The book has many themes: lying liberals, liberal lies, LIEberals, and the stupid lies they say that any intelligent (read: conservative) person could rebuke. Each "lie" is presented with a short chapter, no more than three or four pages long. The reason the chapters can be so short is that Schweikart elects to leave all evidence of any kind out of his book. There are endnotes that the reader is expected to refer to, but he simply neglects to include any sort of persuasive argument or evidence at any point. Schweikart is content to make assumptions and accusations, without doing anything to let the reader know how or why he makes them. For anything even relatively like the subject of this book, a nuanced opinion is absolutely required, making plain the evidence for your argument and how it builds to the stance you take. His choice to leave it out makes every point smug and condescending, whether or not you agree with them. What makes it worse is that the author makes no real attempt to disprove opposing arguments; again, Schweikart is content to make statements without providing any sort of evidence or discourse on why he's right or why the reader should trust him.

When he does decide to present an opposing argument - rare as they may be - he leaves out crucial evidence that even the most basic study of the subject makes obvious. One accusation is that the men who wrote the United States Constitution never intended for church and state to be separate, and that the USA was intended to be a Christian nation. Which can be easily disproved by:

- Reading almost any primary source material, such as Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to a congregation of New England Baptists, spelling out exactly why the founding fathers unanimously decided that church and state needed to be separated.
- The fact that most of the founding fathers were either deists or atheists, some of whom wrote extensively on how they found religion despicable.

What Schweikart asserts is that laws requiring church attendance were on the books during the 17th century, and from this we can assume that there was literally no advancement in philosophy between the initial Puritan colonization and the writing of the US Constitution. He tells us that the founding fathers wrote "freedom of religion" into the constitutions of the states and the nation, but that (quote) "[t]he Founders never dreamed that subsequent generations would seek to take crosses off federal lands." Schweikart also tells us that each of them was deeply religious, and only created "freedom of religion" clauses to keep any one denomination from persecuting smaller denominations. Furthermore, they never actually intended that anyone in our country hold any non-Christian belief.

Or you could read literally anything that they wrote in confidence to each other.

"I may grow rich by an art I am compelled to follow; I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment; but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve and abhor." - Thomas Jefferson, 1776.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect." - James Madison, 1774.

There are many more; because of the prevalence of religion at the time and the strength with which people believed, publicly admitting to atheism would literally have a person tortured and killed. Because of this, every name he invokes belonged to a man that wrote privately and extensively on exactly why he hated religion and wanted to rid the world of it. His unfamiliarity with this subject is completely in line with every other subject he writes about, and it's obvious that Schweikart made no attempt at any time to examine primary sources, non-partisan sources, or sources that disagreed with his preconceived notions of history.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing a book with a political perspective. But Larry Schweikart has literally written down what he imagines to be true, without any amount of fact-checking or quality control, because it aligns with his political beliefs. There was one purpose in writing this book, and it was not the dissemination of truth. Rather than finding actual lies to disprove, he invented conspiracy theories which he could project onto liberals. When he wasn't inventing the lies liberals supposedly tell, he was inventing the history he wanted to tell. This book is completely devoid of any intellectual or factual value, opting for a revisionism that everyone should find offensive.

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