The articles of succession of the individual confederate states can answer that question for you. I’ll save you some reading: it’s what you think it is.
Second paragraph of the Texas declaration: "maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits".
South Carolina's declaration makes it clear what it's all about while kind of torpedoing the idea that they were champions of "states' rights" as it's presented today, a struggle of smaller states against a dominant central power. They wanted very much for the states, the Northern states in particular, to obey the federal power. They just wanted the federal power to reflect their priorities. No bonus points for guessing what type of disobedience they found particularly troublesome.
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
You are correct that slavery was the "trigger", but just as it shouldn't be purely about states' rights it also shouldn't be purely about slavery. It's more complex than that and including the discussion on states' rights sets the groundwork to understand a lot of the attitudes still present in the South about limited power and government (not just Federal) overreach in general.
It seems that without the catalyst of slavery, and the vitriol towards blacks and the idea that they might obtain equal rights, was probably the only way these issues of states rights would have come to war.
I think the history of the world paints a different picture. Worldwide, and since our earliest recordings of history, governments have tried to expand themselves to encompass ever greater regions and ultimately grant themselves ever more expansive power. And invariably there is a backlash, frequently a war, and then a dissolution before another great power emerges and starts combining the disparate pieces into a new whole to repeat the entire process all over again.
The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution.
The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others.
Probably, but that wasn't my point at all. Yes, it's unlikely that something like tobacco or cotton tariffs would have escalated to war, but they _could_ have. As with anything in history it's helpful to have a broader picture and not simply focus on one aspect.
Eliminating the states' rights aspect entirely leaves you without valuable context when you're looking at modern day political debates and makes it easier to view the entire thing from an absolutist standpoint that simply demonizes the south - everyone in the south was evil because they did this thing that was wrong, but that would clearly never happen to _us_.
> Eliminating the states' rights aspect entirely leaves you without valuable context
Except claims about states' rights are without any historical basis. They were concocted fifty plus years after the fact to cast the Confederates in a noble light. As others here have pointed out, articles of secession specifically call out preservation of the institution of slavery without any assertion of states' rights.
If you wanted to apply an interpretation that was extremely generous to the confederate states (for the sake of understanding people who say such things) you could make a comparison to the EU.
The EU has 'union' right there in its name, but it isn't a single country and there are a bunch of things it doesn't try to homogenise. Every time the EU broadens its control over member countries, there are mutterings about sovereignty until one day, something like Brexit happens.
No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" they say "Britain should leave the EU because of its ever-expanding infringement on our sovereignty; an illustrative example of this is the proposed ban on high power kettles"
The "states' rights" claim is the same: that it was about the ever-expanding powers of the federal government, and slavery was just an illustrative example of such an expansion.
Of course, as albntomat0 points out the Mississippi declaration of secession supports slavery in the second sentence, so what I just said has a big dose of historical revisionism.
> No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles"
I mean, that sort of (usually untrue; your example has never even been considered by the EU and would make no sense) trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign.
As with modern elections and surely the civil war, people tend to over-value publicly visible campaigning (and the subjects thereof) as reasons for outcomes they don't understand. Since justifications can't easily be quantified, assumptions based on the most visible rhetoric tend to get made.
your example has never even been considered
by the EU [...] trivia was a HUGE part of
the leave campaign.
My post didn't say I was for or against Brexit; rather, I described a possible mindset of someone who was pro-Brexit, to illuminate my proud-soverignty-of-states-within-larger-unions analogy.
I'm glad to hear you found my illustration of a Brexiter's rationale plausible!
A State's right to all Powers not enumerated in the Constitution (10A).
That and the Confederate States tried to pull a 1776, since they didn't have a single representative who polled for Lincoln in the EC, the Union states had effective super majorities in Congress, ergo time to form their own system of government, representative of themselves.
The southern states were all in favor of federal power over states in the matter of the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the states' rights story only picked up momentum after it became clear that the federal government was not, in practice, going to enforce those acts on those states that opposed them.
For what it’s worth, I spent a lot of time studying the CW for the past few years as a hobby. The states rights thing came down to equal enforcement of federal policy.
Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias. This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while most spending benefited the north.
The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that nobody on either side wants to talk about.
The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years ago or not, we still feel the effects today.
I’ll have to go dig up the citation but if I recall the benefits were mostly paid out to the northern fishing industry. There are several really interesting reads on the economics aspects that go into much more detail.
Sure, states always have had causes against the federal government. But their declaration of causes didn't include anything but issues surrounding slavery.
One might suspect that SC was a bit more savvy in how it presented its case to the world. Britain, a major trading party for the southern states (and having been as guilty as the US in establishing and profiting from slavery in the Americas, and was still profiting indirectly), had by then abolished slavery in its own colonies, and was divided in its attitude to the Confederacy.
Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the majority.
I don’t think it’s a matter of weight so much as people just having different priorities. There were only 4 declarations of causes despite 11 states secession.
4 of them seceded specifically in response to being requisitioned for troops without congressional approval. Virginia’s articles even went so far as to say they would rejoin.
You're creating a distinction here that does not exist in any shape or fashion, except for size. The difference between a state government and a federal government is simply over the scope of their decisions. In other words a federal government is no more guaranteed to make good decisions than a state government bad. The exact same sort of powers that enabled the US federal government to abolish slavery are the same sort that enabled governments time immemorial to enforce it. In contemporary times it's the same power that enabled the Nazis to enact their agenda on a national level. Many people try to convince themselves that such wrongs might never happen again on a national level, but is there any logic for this? To me it seems to be simply cognitive dissonance.
So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.
Slavery was already on the way out. It was all about protectionist laws. Slavery doesn't create wealth, it actually holds back industrialization. There are countries in Africa where slavery is still rampant and it does not create wealth for them. The Civil War was about nothing but crony capitalism.
It is incredibly important that the idea of slavery is pushed as the cause for the civil war. Without that it becomes obvious the path we took was not for the better of the country. Without the civil war slavery would still have been abolished yet states would still have strong rights. Our country was lost.
On its way out? Slave states were fighting tooth and nail to keep it.
An institution doesn't have to create wealth for an entire country, in order to persist. It only has to create wealth for the rich and powerful.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The South sure thought it was. The amount of ink it spilled on the subject of protecting that one particular right of a state was staggering. It was the one thing that apparently, they could compromise on. It's almost as if preserving the right to keep human beings like cattle was the whole bloody point of their secession.
Go read all of Lincoln's racist quotes. He is on record saying he would keep the slaves slaves if that meant the country stayed together. He wanted them all exported back to Africa. Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population. The south did not rise up to defend slave owners. They rose up to defend themselves.
Lincoln was in favor of maintaining the status quo in order to keep the country intact. However, the Southern states were planning secession prior to his election.
What were the Northern states planning to do to the South? What was the South defending themselves from?
They were defending themselves from protectionism. The states had every right to secede. Lincoln ushered in the era of crony capitalism. All wars are a racket, every single one.
> Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population. The south did not rise up to defend slave owners. They rose up to defend themselves.
This is a really important point and you have been severely misinformed. The states that succeeded were not shy about why. My own home state, South Carolina, after an extensive legal argument that they're allowed to succeed, revealed the great violation of their rights was the refusal to return fugitive slaves.
> Slave owners in the south were a very small percentage of the population.
This is an especially pernicious lie. A very small percentage owned vast plantations with hundreds of slaves, but the deeper into the south you went the higher the percentage of slave owners. 32% of all households in the south owned slaves. 49% of all Mississippi households and 46% of all in South Carolina households owned slaves. A slave was an aspirational purchase in the south; for those households that did not own a slave it was more likely to be due to poverty than principles.
in 1861 more than 1/10th of what would later become the army of northern virginia owned slaves— 1 in 12 enlisted men and over half of the officers.
"only" 1 in 20 white southerners in the confederacy personally owned slaves on paper, but this is like making an org chart of the institution of slavery & only counting senior management.
if you look at the 1860 us census & expand the analysis to slave owning households of the
confederacy, the rate was closer to 1 in 3.
Yet the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the south. Slavery was not outlawed for the northern states and over 3 million remained slaves in the north until 1865. That is called hypocrisy. It wasn't about the slaves.
this is a hollow charge of hypocrisy, as i am not currently in 1865 arguing against the 13th amendment by saying the emancipation proclamation was enough. neither does the insufficiency of reconstruction absolve the butchers of the confederacy of their crimes.
I mean to order all slaves free in the southern states while keeping slavery legal and active in the north for 5 years is pure hypocrisy that proves it was not about the moral issue of slavery. It was a federal takeover and we are still reeling from the results. As long as everyone believes the south was just a bunch of evil racists we can't talk about the true effects of the war and the path it sent the nation down.
this may seem like a coherent view of history if you view it as a series of decisions made by great men based solely on their personal beliefs, as opposed to protracted contests over resources & power by organized groups, like the radical abolitionists who waged a generational liberation struggle on every front to force concessions from the institutions of the day.
This sounds very strange to me too, but I assume that in other countries history teachers also have to follow a curriculum given to them by some central authority, no?
Every country does, it is just the case that in most of them you do not vote on the people who set curriculum standards directly. Who decided what would be in your history textbook and how it would be presented? I can promise you that some politician is at the top of that food chain. In some ways the UK is far worse because it is carefully hidden behind layers of ossified class hierarchy and centuries of a toxic mix of arrogance and prejudice.
This is very much a state-by-state issue. Of note, however, because Texas is so large and orders so many textbooks, and because publishers don't want to customize their titles for all 50 states, the Texas version winds up elsewhere. And in Texas, successful candidates for the state Board of Education are often right-wing ideologues.
They already learned that slavery played a central role. They new changes are going to have it listed as the only cause, rather than one of three causes.
Texan here who was educated in the "state's rights" regime and had to learn about the slavery 'angle' in college...
As opposed to most wars, where history was written by the victors, in the US Civil War was mostly written about by the losers. They immediately went about reinventing the war in order to ease their conscience. I mean, the South deliberate started the war to defend an absolutely evil act (slavery), and in the ensuing conflict brought utter ruin on their society. The North was complicit in this rewriting because their main interest was in reintegration and reunification of the country.
Unfortunately, fast forward 100+ years, and now we have people talking about state's rights, and not about slavery. Counterrevisionism, in this case, is more than justified.
Also Texan, we learned slavery was the primary motivation and the discussion concerning states rights was based on the outcome dovetailing into a pattern of federalism henceforth.
Weird, married a Texan and have a Texan teacher as a mother in law. They both know about Texas dancing around the slavery issue defining it entirely as a states rights issue, while also glossing over the fact that the South started the war by firing on Fort Sumter. Seems rather inconsistent in Texas.
>Wow, I had no idea they were so blatant about it. I thought it was all caped in "state's rights" at the time.
As far as Southern states were concerned, slavery was perfectly legal, culturally acceptable and morally correct, so they wouldn't see a need to mince words. It's only in the modern context of historical revisionism that such whitewashing is necessary.
I agree slavery has a central role, I was just saying that it was also presented as a central role previously, just not as the only role. The headline implies, at least to me, that slavery wasn't being taught as having a role at all. From the article:
"The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order."
"The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order."
I have emphasized the part that shows how, while that position avoids being formally completely wrong, it fundamentally misrepresents the situation. The reality is that the only significant issues (significant enough to lead to secession), with regard to the first two causes stated here, were over slavery. We don't have to guess about motives here, because the leaders were not shy about stating clearly, on the record, what their issues were.
The board also decided to keep Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller in the curriculum, reversing a decision that made headlines in September. Clinton and Keller were initially removed, along with other historical figures, in an effort to "streamline" the state's social studies standards.
Having gotten a close-up sample of California's approach to teaching history, any coverage that Texas may have been giving to Clinton and Keller would probably have amounted to one bullet point at best in practice. This is just political posturing.
This is often the case as I see it due to the differences between the perceived methods of teaching/learning history and the actual methods (coupled with the differences in value too). Once reasonable comprehension can occur in youth, knowledge is obtained these days from a multitude of sources. Also history teachers, more than others, tend to deviate based on personal preferences making centralized bullet points only as valuable as their disseminators. While this may sound scary, good teachers like historical orators of the past can do wonders with narratives. Regardless, children obtain so much from the internet, documentaries, and other avenues of self learning that specific textbook statements are often overvalued simply out of fear of misrepresentation.
> These efforts at controlling production, intended to protect both the independent operators and the major producers, were largely unsuccessful at first and led to widespread oil smuggling.
The largest producers demanded the governor to shutdown competition. They did this with the help of the Texan National Guard to protect their cartel and thus the Railroad Commission was born.
Upton Sinclair or Howard Zinn are much more accurate than Wikipedia.
The other prominent high-profile Texan criminals are either still alive or just died, so their rosy view of history is still censored in their favor.
On the other hand the Coal Wars Wikipedia article is pretty accurate, but this didn't happen in Texas.
Last time I visited Austin I went to the state capital and was pretty surprised to see how history was told on the monuments there. I don't remember the wording exactly, but there were references to the "war of northern aggression" and Confederate soldiers who died "protecting states rights". I wonder how this disconnect between how civil war history is told in school and how it's told in public spaces will play out in the long run.
68 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAnd it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.
The articles of succession of the individual confederate states can answer that question for you. I’ll save you some reading: it’s what you think it is.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." [0]
[0]: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
> Article I Section 9(4)
> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
And, unsurprisingly, the politicians of the time were much less saccharine about states' rights and other garbage, like the guy who said:
"We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel."
This is all from this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitutio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution.
The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck
Eliminating the states' rights aspect entirely leaves you without valuable context when you're looking at modern day political debates and makes it easier to view the entire thing from an absolutist standpoint that simply demonizes the south - everyone in the south was evil because they did this thing that was wrong, but that would clearly never happen to _us_.
Except claims about states' rights are without any historical basis. They were concocted fifty plus years after the fact to cast the Confederates in a noble light. As others here have pointed out, articles of secession specifically call out preservation of the institution of slavery without any assertion of states' rights.
The EU has 'union' right there in its name, but it isn't a single country and there are a bunch of things it doesn't try to homogenise. Every time the EU broadens its control over member countries, there are mutterings about sovereignty until one day, something like Brexit happens.
No brit says "Britain should leave the EU because they want to ban our high power kettles" they say "Britain should leave the EU because of its ever-expanding infringement on our sovereignty; an illustrative example of this is the proposed ban on high power kettles"
The "states' rights" claim is the same: that it was about the ever-expanding powers of the federal government, and slavery was just an illustrative example of such an expansion.
Of course, as albntomat0 points out the Mississippi declaration of secession supports slavery in the second sentence, so what I just said has a big dose of historical revisionism.
I mean, that sort of (usually untrue; your example has never even been considered by the EU and would make no sense) trivia was a HUGE part of the leave campaign.
I'm glad to hear you found my illustration of a Brexiter's rationale plausible!
That and the Confederate States tried to pull a 1776, since they didn't have a single representative who polled for Lincoln in the EC, the Union states had effective super majorities in Congress, ergo time to form their own system of government, representative of themselves.
They just weren't expecting Sherman.
Around 1830 prior, South Carolina was denied the ability to set its own port tariff when it tried to assert states rights. See Tariff of Abominations. When the fugitive slave act wasn’t enforced it was seen as northern legal bias. This was a big deal because it was already seen as big problem. Around the time of the war, 80% of the US federal tax revenue came from the south while most spending benefited the north.
The root cause of the war was absolutely slavery, but when people say there were a lot of contributing factors...they aren’t kidding. Including parts that nobody on either side wants to talk about.
The history is really interesting and studying it goes a long way toward helping to understand how we got to where we are as a country today. 150 years ago or not, we still feel the effects today.
That's super interesting was it mostly from cash crops? What benefits were paid to the north exclusively from that?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180312074805/http://www.teachi...
There’s a breakdown here:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/reasons-secessio...
Also, fwiw, that site used to be civilwar.org. I’m not sure when it was rebranded.
Regardless of what considerations went into that particular declaration, it is clearly a minority position and so should not be given greater weight than the majority.
4 of them seceded specifically in response to being requisitioned for troops without congressional approval. Virginia’s articles even went so far as to say they would rejoin.
So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.
It is incredibly important that the idea of slavery is pushed as the cause for the civil war. Without that it becomes obvious the path we took was not for the better of the country. Without the civil war slavery would still have been abolished yet states would still have strong rights. Our country was lost.
An institution doesn't have to create wealth for an entire country, in order to persist. It only has to create wealth for the rich and powerful.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery. The South sure thought it was. The amount of ink it spilled on the subject of protecting that one particular right of a state was staggering. It was the one thing that apparently, they could compromise on. It's almost as if preserving the right to keep human beings like cattle was the whole bloody point of their secession.
This is a really important point and you have been severely misinformed. The states that succeeded were not shy about why. My own home state, South Carolina, after an extensive legal argument that they're allowed to succeed, revealed the great violation of their rights was the refusal to return fugitive slaves.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Someone else already linked to Mississippi. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18474740
Slavery, to slave holders, was a state's right. That's the right they fought for.
This is an especially pernicious lie. A very small percentage owned vast plantations with hundreds of slaves, but the deeper into the south you went the higher the percentage of slave owners. 32% of all households in the south owned slaves. 49% of all Mississippi households and 46% of all in South Carolina households owned slaves. A slave was an aspirational purchase in the south; for those households that did not own a slave it was more likely to be due to poverty than principles.
"only" 1 in 20 white southerners in the confederacy personally owned slaves on paper, but this is like making an org chart of the institution of slavery & only counting senior management.
if you look at the 1860 us census & expand the analysis to slave owning households of the confederacy, the rate was closer to 1 in 3.
https://www.jacksonville.com/news/national/2017-08-22/how-ci...
"How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us" https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/21/how-texas-inflic...
Would you prefer the history curriculum be overseen by an unelected group of party cadres?
Voting is a lot better than many systems currently in use. If there's an issue, at least you have the chance to influence things for the better.
Slavery was the first order cause, so it would be correct to present slavery as having a central role.
source: Texas Declaration of Secession: http://www.civil-war.net/pages/texas_declaration.asp
"maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery - the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits"
As opposed to most wars, where history was written by the victors, in the US Civil War was mostly written about by the losers. They immediately went about reinventing the war in order to ease their conscience. I mean, the South deliberate started the war to defend an absolutely evil act (slavery), and in the ensuing conflict brought utter ruin on their society. The North was complicit in this rewriting because their main interest was in reintegration and reunification of the country.
Unfortunately, fast forward 100+ years, and now we have people talking about state's rights, and not about slavery. Counterrevisionism, in this case, is more than justified.
As far as Southern states were concerned, slavery was perfectly legal, culturally acceptable and morally correct, so they wouldn't see a need to mince words. It's only in the modern context of historical revisionism that such whitewashing is necessary.
"The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order."
I have emphasized the part that shows how, while that position avoids being formally completely wrong, it fundamentally misrepresents the situation. The reality is that the only significant issues (significant enough to lead to secession), with regard to the first two causes stated here, were over slavery. We don't have to guess about motives here, because the leaders were not shy about stating clearly, on the record, what their issues were.
Having gotten a close-up sample of California's approach to teaching history, any coverage that Texas may have been giving to Clinton and Keller would probably have amounted to one bullet point at best in practice. This is just political posturing.
This is often the case as I see it due to the differences between the perceived methods of teaching/learning history and the actual methods (coupled with the differences in value too). Once reasonable comprehension can occur in youth, knowledge is obtained these days from a multitude of sources. Also history teachers, more than others, tend to deviate based on personal preferences making centralized bullet points only as valuable as their disseminators. While this may sound scary, good teachers like historical orators of the past can do wonders with narratives. Regardless, children obtain so much from the internet, documentaries, and other avenues of self learning that specific textbook statements are often overvalued simply out of fear of misrepresentation.
> These efforts at controlling production, intended to protect both the independent operators and the major producers, were largely unsuccessful at first and led to widespread oil smuggling.
The largest producers demanded the governor to shutdown competition. They did this with the help of the Texan National Guard to protect their cartel and thus the Railroad Commission was born. Upton Sinclair or Howard Zinn are much more accurate than Wikipedia.
The other prominent high-profile Texan criminals are either still alive or just died, so their rosy view of history is still censored in their favor.
On the other hand the Coal Wars Wikipedia article is pretty accurate, but this didn't happen in Texas.