Trump’s Takeover of Education Is Taking A Page From the Confederacy

The thread of partisan power and control is stitched through America’s public education system. In the name of the revisionist Lost Cause history — which holds that the South fought the Civil War over states’ rights and not to maintain the institution of slavery — the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the early 20th century leveraged the group’s considerable political influence and went after school curricula. The UDC lobbied for ahistorical, pro-South school materials, and its members joined Southern state textbook commissions where they helped control which books would be deemed suitable for children and which would not. For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.

In the 1950s, the American Legion partnered with the National Education Association to create anti-Communist curricula. Married couple and religious fundamentalists Norma and Mel Gabler imparted their brand of right-wing influence on childhood education through the Texas textbook committee circuit, suppressing science lessons on evolution and upholding “cultural heritage” and patriotism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 70s.

By commandeering state-level commissions and capitalizing on early 20th century state law, reactionaries managed to control the historical curriculum for generations of students, particularly in the South. 

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September announced the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”

“The reason there’s so much nostalgia in Trump’s politics,” Adam Laats, an education and history professor at Binghamton University, told TPM, “is because this popular memory that a certain type of American used to have more privilege than they do now and that that privilege can and should be restored. 

“And one of the things that can make it happen is a renewed push in schools away from inclusion, diversity, critical approaches to race, and instead a more old-fashioned inculcation in what they would call specifically quote unquote authentic American virtues.”

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan by pushing policy that propels the nation backward. Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans. With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th centuries.

The White House did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

“If this administration says Make America Great Again, again begs of any coverage to be historical,” Eddie R. Cole, professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles told TPM. “Because what is the ‘again?’”

‘Reject a Book That Says the South Fought to Hold Her Slaves’

Fueled by their determination to preserve the legacy of their deceased Confederate loved ones, the UDC decorated graves, put up monuments to dead soldiers and officials, and infiltrated the textbook commissions developing alongside public education in the South with intense and successful multi-year lobbying campaigns.

Those efforts were codified in 1919 when the UDC’s Mildred Lewis Rutherford published a “measuring rod” for textbooks. 

The fifth page of its 23-page pamphlet was explicit: 

• Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.
• Reject a book that speaks of a slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.
• Reject a text-book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865.

Rutherford then promised to release a rolling list of banned books monthly in a Tennessee-based Confederate publication.

“It was a rock-solid wall for school publishing for a long time,” Laats said of the hold the UDC had on textbook printers.

Textbook publishers, financially exposed to the zeitgeist and therefore averse to political controversy, published special editions of textbooks that whitewashed history, Laats said. 

“Publishers, because of people like Mildred Rutherford at the UDC, produced mint julep editions, as they were called,” Laats explained, “where they went way out of the way to make the former confederacy blameless or even heroic in terms of the war, in terms of things like slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous land.”

The United Daughters of the Confederacy textbook curriculum reigned in U.S. public schools through the 20th century, before being almost phased out by the 1970s, according to a 2019 article from the Washington Post, approved by state textbook commissions and school boards. Today, states and local authorities still control school curriculum, said Amy Loyd, executive director at a public education nonprofit called All4Ed.

“But the influence of the federal role is not to be underestimated. When the federal role is saying, we need to, cancel, quote unquote woke culture, and that leads to libraries…becoming a hotbed for our cultural wars because of book bans,” said Loyd, “that is harmful to learning.”

Trump’s Influence Over Curriculum Represents a Shift in Politics

The overt injection of partisan, ahistorical, and anti-diverse perspectives into grade-school curriculum from the highest levels of government illustrate how different politics and policy has become, even since Trump’s first term. Trumpism appears to be able to achieve what past versions of conservatism could not. 

“During the Reagan presidency, the [Education Department] employed pretty radical right-wingers,” Laats told TPM. “The huge difference between then and now is that in the past, conservative presidents tried to maintain some kind of respectability and deniability.”

The president’s America 250 Civics Education Coalition will be led by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), founded by former Trump administration officials, and business executive and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, according to a press release.

“A country cannot survive if its values are forgotten by its people,” McMahon said in the release.

The coalition will further be led by Katie Gorka, an anti-Islam activist who advocated designating Muslim groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations; Erika Donalds, a Florida school choice advocate and the wife of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL); and Ben Judge, president of AFPI.

Trump alarmed education activists over the summer when the White House partnered with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, for educational materials about the Revolutionary War. (The organization produced “AI-sloppified” depictions of the Founding Fathers, according to 404 Media). PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists, the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter and private) schooling appear to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

“Organizations like so many that we see today have always taken great interest in education,” said Cole of UCLA. “Because if they can get control over education, and get federal support of that control, for even five to 10 years, it has the potential to shape a future generation.”