Steven J. Ross, chairman of the USC history department and author of Working–Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, has an op–ed piece in the LAT today about Lynne Cheney’s efforts to destroy 300,000 Education Department booklets.

Cheney objected to the booklet’s reference to the National Standards for History, guidelines for teaching history in secondary schools that were developed at UCLA in the 1990s and that suggest that American history should be taught with an eye not only to America’s successes but to its struggles and dark moments as well.

Cheney could learn important lessons from the kind of history she apparently finds so un-American.

One is that the lines between authoritarianism and democracy have never been as sharply drawn as we might think. In his latest novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth describes what the United States might have been like if voters had spurned Franklin D. Roosevelt and elected Charles A. Lindbergh, an anti–Semite and admirer of Adolf Hitler, as their president in 1940. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here presented a scenario in which newly elected President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the demagogic darling of big business and religious extremists, stripped Americans of their rights, destroying the power of the legislature and judiciary and installing a fascist dictatorship.

What was so horrible about the National Standards for History that any reference to them would merit the mass destruction of several hundred thousand volumes of knowledge?