PUBLIC FUNDING FOR SCHOOLS HAS ALWAYS BEEN CENSORSHIP PER SE.

Just before the celebration of a hundred years of American Independence, an obscure cavalry commander disregarded his orders and got his entire regiment wiped out.

What does that have to do with public funding of schools?  A lot, as General Custer had a politically active wife, who understood the right procedural buttons to push.

[H]ow did a defeat become viewed as one of the greatest noble tragedies in American history? A persistent lobbying campaign by Custer’s widow, for one, and because the story of Custer as a martyr fit neatly in the larger story that Americans wanted to tell about the nation’s push westward after the Civil War, historians say. Only in recent years have we begun to learn more about the perspective of Little Bighorn from its Native American victors, whose roots at that site go back decades before the settlers arrived—and started to rethink the legacy of the man who led the charge.

The focus of the article is on the efforts of a nearby historian to set the record straight about what happened in the Black Hills.

“When we think of Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Little Bighorn… we should think of it as a successful defense by Native people against an attempted act of genocide,” says Lindsay Stallones Marshall, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, who got her start teaching about Custer as an AP U.S. History teacher.

Marshall is writing a book on how distorted narratives about the “Indian wars” after the Civil War made their way into schools. The answer reveals a potent mix of the powerful who engage in history making: soldiers burnishing their own reputations, loved ones honoring family members, lawmakers lobbying for federal dollars, and textbook writers mythologizing American Manifest Destiny.

“Textbooks are a specific kind of document designed for a specific purpose, and it’s not simply to tell students what happened in the past, but to give them a particular view, particularly of the American past,” says Marshall.

That's serious work in itself, and I regret that there will probably never be an accurate accounting of the effect of those new arrivals in the Americas with their sailing ships and iron tools, and by the time of the Black Hawk War, steamboats and steam trains, on the First Nations.  In that "Textbooks are a specific kind of document," though, is the prima facie case that public curriculum decisions are censorship, whether it's adding Howard Zinn or removing Gender Queer, or adding Special Creation to the science books or Manifest Destiny to American History.  That the Native Americans get to tell their side of the story is only right and proper.  School boards still have to decide what to include and exclude, and, as those are public officials, that's a government action.  I dare call it censorship, no matter what the criteria for inclusion and exclusion might be.

I choose to focus on the Contemporary Relevance.  Mrs Custer, apparently, was quite the activist for her day (this being well before Nation-wide women's suffrage).

Marshall says a bigger reason ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ is so well known is because of the military officer’s widow, Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon Custer, who worked to burnish her husband’s legacy. She published the 1876 bestseller A Popular Life of General Custer with Frederick Whittaker and a memoir Boots and Saddles in 1885, both of which glorified Custer’s exploits in battle. She also came out with a pamphlet defending her husband after one of the men who commanded a separate operation, Frederick Benteen, claimed that Custer recklessly endangered his troops. Over the next few decades, she wrote, and encouraged journalists to write, newspaper articles about her husband and organized commemorations of the battle and statues of him.

Then came the rent-seeking.

During that time, several Indian wars veterans associations were also schmoozing members of Congress and valorizing Custer for introducing “civilization” to the West as a way to try to increase the size of military pensions and expand eligibility. They were pushing for the government to offer pensions to everyone who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn and all Indian wars beyond enlisted soldiers, as well as expand access to soldiers’ homes and healthcare for those who had been wounded. In 1917, in part thanks to these lobbying efforts, Congress approved a new system of compensation for military veterans that included more people who served in the post-Civil War Indian wars.

Not surprisingly, the recent "contextualizing" of monuments included the Custer monument in Monroe, Michigan.  That effort has since stalled, which might be fitting.  Monroe residents once grumbled that when Lieutenant Custer went off to the Civil War, he told people not to change anything until he came back, and that the town took it seriously.