The history of the world is not always an easy topic of study — memorizing the dates of famous battles, the territorial changes from wars and names of kings in chronological order can be cumbersome.
In one of my college history classes, the professor brilliantly elucidated in less than 10 minutes how the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Jerusalem in A.D. 637 led directly to the Renaissance and Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World in A.D. 1492, primarily involving the naval arms race between Venetian and Spanish fleets shuttling pilgrims and crusaders to retake the Holy Land.
Such specialized analysis notwithstanding, we expect our teachers and educational leaders to have a rudimentary understanding of topics they teach, such as the date of Great Depression and the presidents who governed during it. Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal is apparently unaware that this information is important to know, and incredibly easy to check.
Huppenthal is currently in hot water for anonymously posting to political blogs, posing as another user and defending himself and his policies.
Over a year ago, I wrote an editorial: “Internet trolls have no sanctuary in our web comments,” addressing a few who attempted to anonymously post comments on our website. One local commenter in particular used three different user names to attack another local figure not realizing his IP address — i.e., the address of his computer on the Internet — was the same. The Arizona Republic used the same easy address check to confirm the comments from the pseudonym Falcon9 were from Huppenthal’s computer and when pressed by journalists, he confirmed he’d posted the comments.
Among Huppenthal’s rants, he called people receiving government assistance “lazy pigs” and compared the founder of Planned Parenthood to Nazi eugenicists.
Arizona is a politically diverse state — socialists, independents, Libertarians, progressives and tea partiers are often neighbors, and vocal political disagreements are part of what it means to live in the Grand Canyon State. Making brash political statements is part of our tumultuous discourse, but we don’t normally expect to see it from a politician in a supposedly nonpartisan position like school superintendent.
Politics notwithstanding, Huppenthal’s posts get simple dates wrong, stating President Franklin D. Roosevelt “was almost completely responsible for the Great Depression” and his economic policies “directly led to the rise of a no-name hack named Adolph [sic] Hitler was going nowhere until Germany’s economy went into the tank.”
The stock market crashed in 1929 when Roosevelt was governor of New York and four years before he became president in March 1933, defeating Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt was actually elected because he attacked Hoover’s years of failed economic policies.
Additionally Adolf — not “Adolph” — Hitler narrowly lost a presidential race in January 1932 and was appointed German chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg that summer. He had used the Reichstag Fire of Feb. 27, 1933 — five days before Roosevelt’s inauguration — to start quashing civil liberties and seize total power.
Huppenthal could have asked any high school student in Arizona to fact-check him with their history books. After all, Arizona’s high school seniors can’t graduate if they fail a basic world history test.
