Maintaining the tradition of committing the absurd

In keeping with its tradition of never ending a session without doing something absurd, the General Assembly is expected to pass at least one piece of legislation that qualifies for the label and leave unrepaired another that sneaked through last year.

The General Assembly has passed and the governor is sure to sign a bill that directs the Department of Education to prepare a curriculum schools can use to teach the history of organized labor. 

This will join others the Legislature has previously passed that call for constituent-pleasing courses in Native American, African American and Puerto Rican history along with the history of the 1848 potato famine in Ireland that led to the migration of the ancestors of the state’s Irish population.

Out of this, one can safely conclude that if all the histories encouraged by the Connecticut General Assembly were laid end to end, our children would have time to learn nothing else, not even the courses in CPR training and how to use the defibrillator lawmakers previously recommended along with the various special interest histories. 

Now I appreciate and laud the contributions of different racial ethnic groups and the labor movement to our nation’s history while wondering how the legislature managed to omit women, but I question how it can be done when our kids aren’t learning the basic stuff. 

The truth is, the schools have only half of each year to teach our children the things they need to know to advance to a higher grade until 12 are completed. In high school, they are required to study three or four years of basic subjects like English, mathematics, science and social studies. The latter consists of a required year of American history, a year of government or civics and a year to cover what remains of history, geography and other social studies. In the unit on American history, therefore, it’s hard enough to do justice to even the main events, never mind the supporting cast.

This is sufficiently challenging without the assistance of the Legislature or a course on the Irish potato famine.

Then, there is the matter of legislative meddling in history or, if you will, actually rewriting it. This it surely did in 2013 by making a slight change in a little noted state observance known as Powered Flight Day, held to honor the achievements of the Wright Brothers and Connecticut’s rich aviation heritage. The change entailed crossing out the Wrights’ names and replacing them with Gustave Whitehead, a Bridgeport resident, and doing so on rather slender evidence, to put it kindly. 

The evidence consists mostly of a story in one Bridgeport newspaper describing a short flight by a plane built by Gustave in Fairfield County two years before Orville and Wilbur and Kitty Hawk. The story did not appear in the four other papers in that highly competitive newspaper town, nor in the rest of the world. 

But the myth took flight once again in 2013 when the authoritative Jane’s “All the World’s Aircraft,” spiced up an anniversary edition with an article declaring Whitehead number one. Since then, Jane’s, seeking to retain its authority as the bible of aircraftery, “backpedaled considerably,” as The New York Times reported, dismissing its own article as “purely one writer’s opinion, not holy writ.”

And now we have Wright biographer David McCullough, winner of two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards for biography and history, telling NPR “there’s no evidence whatever” of Whitehead’s flight, a view shared by 35 other historians.

None of this has deterred the Whitehead cabal, geographically located, by coincidence, in Fairfield County, the site of Gustave’s dubious achievement.

They were behind passage of the Wright Brothers’ rewrite that got by in a bill also designating four new months to honor various voting blocs, naming a second state song and the first state polka and making note of the 14th anniversary’s of the sister state relationship between Connecticut and Taiwan. These too will stand in 2015.

Despite some righteous indignation being vented by legislative resolutions passed in Ohio, the Wrights’ home state and North Carolina, the home of Kitty Hawk, our fake history creators say they intend to celebrate Gustave Whitehead and his first flight that never happened this Aug. 14.

Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, up for re-election, is even going further, proposing the adoption of “First in Flight” as a state motto. As I wrote previously on this silliness, why not “Alone in History.”

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.