A Straight Deal; Or, The Ancient GrudgeWister, Owen
History
A Straight Deal; Or, The Ancient Grudge
Wister, Owen
Great Britain -- Relations -- United States; United States -- Relations -- Great Britain
If the reader has followed me from the beginning, he will recollect
a letter, parts of which I quoted, from a correspondent who spoke of
Montgomery’s history, giving passages in which a fair and adequate
recognition of Pitt and our English sympathizers and their opposition to
George III is made. This would seem to indicate a revision of the work
since Mr. Altschul published his lists, and to substantiate the hope I
expressed in my original article, and which I here repeat. Surely
the publishers of these books will revise them! Surely any patriotic
American publisher and any patriotic board of education, school
principal, or educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other
sinister influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school
histories! Whatever excuse they once had, be it the explanation I have
offered above, or some other, there is no excuse to-day. These books
have laid the foundation from which has sprung the popular prejudice
against England. It has descended from father to son. It has been
further solidified by many tales for boys and girls, written by men and
women who acquired their inaccurate knowledge at our schools. And it
plays straight into the hands of our enemies.
Chapter IX: Concerning a Complex
All of these books, history and fiction, drop into the American mind
during its early springtime the seed of antagonism, establish in fact
an anti-English “complex.” It is as pretty a case of complex on the
wholesale as could well be found by either historian or psychologist.
It is not so violent as the complex which has been planted in the German
people by forty years of very adroitly and carefully planned training:
they were taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider
themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it
in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the
priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex
dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English
com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it
savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would
tell you---it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of
American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should
automatically exclaim whenever the right button is pressed, “England is
a land-grabber,” and “What has England done in the War?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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