Ron DeSantis is partying like it’s 1994. You could almost hear Mariah Carey and Ace of Base playing in the background at the news conference where the Florida governor announced he was banning the new AP course on African American studies. Squint hard enough at the photos taken at the presser and I think you can see Lynne Cheney hovering over the proceedings. Three decades ago, Cheney got that party started.
In 1986 Ronald Reagan appointed Cheney to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, a chair she sat in until George H.W. Bush left office in January 1993. Way back then, a lot of folks worried about the state of K-12 education in the nation’s schools, and history education in particular. In an effort to improve the situation, the National Council for History Standards was created in 1992. The group was charged with creating a set of voluntary guidelines to make the teaching of history more uniform across the country and to improve the quality of what kids learned.
The council brought together a wide group of educators from across the spectrum, and they worked for the better part of two years to develop a consensus about what frameworks should shape the standards. They planned to release the standards late in 1994. Oh, and the whole project was funded by Lynne Cheney’s NEH.
Cheney beat the group to the punch. In October 1994, by then ex-chair Cheney published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal denouncing the standards, which had not yet been released. Had she read them? Probably not, but she had inside information from unnamed informants about the contents. “Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance,” she fulminated, “Or in which the foundings of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first gathering of the U.S. Congress is not.” Her piece ignited a national outcry of Limbaughian proportions.
Was this all true? Well ... the standards did incorporate several decades of academic research into the history of working people, women, Black and Native Americans, immigrants, and others who had been left out of the old-fashioned narratives of presidents and generals. That research, in turn, had helped foster a broader recognition that the United States is a multicultural experiment and always has been. The history standards broadened and deepened what ought to be taught. George Washington wasn’t out in the new standards, but the Parson Weems version of him was.