From McDougal Littell's "The Americans":
First on the Credit Mobilier scandal:
"In one of the most infamous schemes, stockholders in the Union Pacific Railroad formed, in 1864, a construction company called Credit Mobilier. The stockholders gave this company a contract to lay track at two to three times the actual cost---and pocketed the profits. They donated shares of stock to about 20 representatives in Congress in 1867.
"A congressional investigation of the company, spurred by reports in the New York Sun, eventually found that the officers of the Union Pacific had taken up to $23 million in stocks, bonds, and cash. Testimony implicated such well-known and respected federal officials as Vice President Schulyer Colfax and Congressman James Garfield, who later became president. Although these public figures kept their profits and received little more than a slap on the wrist, the reputaton of the Republican Party was tarnished"
Now, if you're a high school student and you read this, wouldn't you ask how it was possible for a company to charge two to three times the actual cost of laying track? To an astute observer, the first paragraph makes no sense whatsoever. Where was the money coming from? Who granted the contract? Some company somewhere that was stupid enough to pay these exorbitant prices? Why is the victim not identified.
Because, of course, the victim is the taxpayer, and the money being paid to line the pockets of the shareholders was being doled out by Congress. Therefore, we can't mention this important fact because it confuses the point being made: that the free market was responsible for this whole mess!
Rockefeller:
"Rockefeller reaped huge profits by paying his employees extremely low wages and driving his competitors out of business by selling his oil at a lower price than it cost to produce it. Then, when he controlled the market, he hiked prices far above original levels."
This textbook is not that old, and despite predatory pricing theory being removed from high school economics textbooks (because its never happened), its application to Standard Oil remains. It seems to me that, with respect to economic history, textbook authors and historians simply scour the historical record and look for that charge which is repeated loud enough and often enough. The charge of predatory pricing was made against Rockefeller by his competitors. Because the Justice Department ultimately accepted these charges, historians simply take for granted that they were true.
This is how standard history is constructed, and so it is with the ICC, FDA, Federal Reserve, Department of Agriculture: there mere existence is evidence of real social and economic calamity spawned by capitalism.
And, of course, there is the highly analytical insight of "paying his workers extremely low wages."
Anyway, I was flipping through a high school text and had to share these gems. There are hundreds of them.
Thomas Woods had some good examples of this as well concerning the 1920-21 depression. Most textbooks either ignore it, gloss over it, or, most hilariously, say that it recovered quickly DESPITE the reduction in government intervention during that depression.
MR does a great job on this topic here http://mises.org/media/4492
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah