Rhetorical Analysis I

With irreverent and cynical colloquialisms, Loewen wages literary rebellion against the heroified perception of Woodrow Wilson. His candor of speech attempts to awaken the reader to the historical truth.

Passage I/468
All twelve of the textbooks I surveyed mention Wilson’s 1914 invasion of Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson’s fault. “President Wilson was irged to send military forces into Mevico to protect American investments and to restore law and order,” according to Triumph of the American Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene. But “as the months passed even President Wilson began to lose patience,” Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the facts—the invasion was Wilson’s idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American people. According to Karp, Wilson’s intervention was so outrageous that leaders of both sides of Mexico’s ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S. forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.
Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw, but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information in a passive voice helps to insulate historic figures from their own unheroic or unethical deeds.

Passage II/475
[Answering the question, “Why don’t they let the public in on these matters?”]
Heroification itself supplies a first answer. Socialism is repugnant to most Americans. So are racisms and colonialism. Michael Kammen suggests that authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. The textbook critic Norma Gabler has testified that textbooks “should present our nation’s patriots in a way that would honor and respect them”; in her eyes, admitting Keller’s socialism and Wilson’s racism would hardly do that. In the early 1920s the American Legion said that authors of textbooks “are at fault in placing before immature pupils the blunders, foibles, and frailties of prominent heroes and patriots of our Nation.” The Legion would hardly be able to fault today’s history textbooks on this account.