Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 30: Can we find a “usable past”?

Sorting through Lost Cause themes inevitably involves looking at the facts and various narratives about those in a past before the lifetime of anyone still living today.

Andrew Bacevich gives a good summary about how historical memory works in a body politic, a process he describes “manufactured memory”:

Whether related to family, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or nation, the past is a human construct. lt is not fixed but malleable, not permanent but subject to perpetual reexamination and revision. The value of history correlates with purposefulness. Changing times render obsolete the past that we know and require the discovery of a "new" history better suited to the needs of the moment. (1) [my emphasis]

He's not talking here about just making up fake “facts” and claiming they are real. We do history by constructing understandable narratives that described what happened and how we understand it. That not only changes when increased factual information is discovered/released/uncovered. It also depends on the particular priority of the researchers. Facts always matter. So does understanding them a meaningful context.

It's worth recalling that the philosopher Hegel cautioned (with a heavy dose of irony) about the value of this whole learning-from-history concept:

History and experience teach us that peoples have not learned anything from history at all. Because every age lives in such an individual situation, out of which they make their decisions. This is the character of the time, which is always different. (2)

Hegel may well have been right about that. But it doesn’t stop us from trying.

And it matters how one goes about deriving “lessons” or interpretations from past events. People can do honest history that at the same time can serve as a “usable past.” But not all uses of history are honest.

Casey Nelson Blake credits the Progressives of the early 20th century in the US with the concept of a “usable past” "What is important for us?" asked cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks in his influential 1918 essay, "On Creating a Usable Past": "What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we to elect to remember?" (1993:225, emphasis in original). Brooks was concerned with his country's literary history, but his desire to approach the past "from the point of view not of the successful fact but of the creative impulse" was shared by many Progressive-era intellectuals who sought to mobilize American memory as a resource for a more democratic. To think of the American past as "usable," as opposed to a dry collection of facts or a completed tradition deserving mute reverence, was to take an essentially pragmatic approach to the study of history. "For the spiritual past has no objective reality," Brooks asserted; "it yields only what we are able to look for in it". The past would become "usable" when it allowed Americans to pry open spaces in the present for future innovation. (3) [my emphasis]

In the case of the Lost Cause narrative, from the very start its usability for those who wanted to minimize the significance of Confederate treason against the United States and the centrality of slavery and white racism in that context depended on falsifying the factual history and substituting dishonest ideological claims and maudlin sentimentality for a reality-based understanding of the events.

Notes:

(1) Bacevich, Andrew (2021): After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, 9. New York: Metropolitan Books.

(2) Hegel, G.W.F. (1822/23): Philosophie der allgemeinen Weltgeschichte (Hotho transcript). In Gesammelte Werke 27:1 (2015), 11. Dusseldorf: Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. My translation from the German.

(3) Blake, Casey Nelson (1999): Review: The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America. Cultural Anthropology 14: 3, 423-435.