W
oods (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
) argues that the history lessons schoolchildren learn are ideologically driven distortions aimed at producing citizens who believe that big government is good and big business is evil. He aims to set the record straight. He says that Americans have been fed propaganda about the origins of Social Security, which is nothing more than a tax. Indeed, Woods thinks nothing good came out of the New Deal, which, far from lifting the U.S. out of the Great Depression, actually prolonged the nation's economic woes. Much of the book touches on issues of race: desegregating public schools hasn't really helped black children; racial discrimination is not the main cause of the gap between blacks' and whites' salaries; and Martin Luther King Jr. was a dangerous radical who “sought an immediate, palpable improvement in blacks' material condition,” a vision he thought could be achieved by “racial quotas” and socialism. Blacks, according to Woods, should model themselves not on King, but on an enterprising if oft forgotten 20th-century self-made man, S.B. Fuller. (July 10)
