One notable entry in that annual set of reflections was by Philip Deloria, The Invention of Thanksgiving New Yorker 11/18/2019. Definitely worth a read for anyone trying to take the history seriously.
My own general perspective on American history is to valorize the people and political/social trends that led to the establishment and further development of democracy, equality, and human rights.
But history should be contested. On the professional level, if historians never challenged established assumptions, they would be doing a lousy job.
The historian Robert Remini (1921–2013) is best known for his three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson, whose image Donald Trump has appropriated for his white nationalism movement, though assuredly with Trump having no idea about the politics of Jackson's day and no interest in it. Although Jackson was long honored as a founder of the Democratic Party along with Thomas Jefferson, Democrats and the left generally have essentially bought in to the right's use of Jackson symbolism.
This is another way in which history is contested. Since conservatism if particularly associated with an idealized past, political appropriation of images from the past comes more easily to Republicans than Democrats. Which is politically problematic, because American voters generally cherish an idealized version of the past. It's also frankly lazy on the part of the left and center-left.
The need for good academic history, the need for a focus on important trends good and bad, the reality that historical symbolism becomes part of contemporary political polemics and campaign marketing - these are different things but are nevertheless connected. And often hard to cleanly distinguish from each other.
Remini did an additional book on Jackson beyond his trilogy, in which he focused on Old Hickory's Indian policies, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). In the Preface, Remini writes, referring in the first sentence quoted here to Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor:
As a result of this climate of fear and mistrust [against Japanese-American citizens], the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt ruthlessly rounded up and removed Japanese-Americans from their homes in California and interned them in concentration camps away from the coast in order to bolster the defense of the country in case of a Japanese invasion. But these people were not foreign enemies. They were American citizens who were denied their basic civil rights as well as their property because of the nation's perceived need and fear.I read Remini's statement there as a straightforward expression of the dilemma of an honest historian engaged with the problem of how to deal with evil in history, keeping in mind that understanding the dark actions of the past is not the same as justifying them. And explaining how bad, even horrible events took place is not the same as making excuses for them.
We today must remember that in the past a great many normally decent and upright Americans have repeatedly mistreated other people: Native Americans, African-Americans, and Japanese-Americans. And invariably those actions were justified under the rubric of national security or economic need or both. Moreover, this did not happen in some bygone era among unenlightened people. The present generation - the so-called greatest generation - let it happen to their fellow citizens. So before anyone today assumes a high moral tone about what happened a century ago, let that person take a long view of American history and remember that fear and mistrust at any time can and probably will lead to despicable crimes that disgrace the nation and blacken its history.
I'll also mention, in line with what I take to be his main point here, that 100 years from now, a lot of people will very likely look back at those of us who have been around for the last several decades and criticize us collectively for our unbelievable lack of a responsible attitude on climate change. And they won't be wrong to do so, although some will understand what they are talking about better than others. All of this assumes, of course, that our collective irresponsibility about nuclear arms proliferation doesn't compound the climate crisis by orders of magnitude.
Remini, himself a US veteran of the Second World War, invokes the internment of Japanese-Americans in a way that addresses the third use of history listed above, evoking the images and ideals of the past in service of present-day political concerns. Today liberals and most everyone farther left have no trouble paying tribute (however reluctantly in the case of corporate Democrats) to Roosevelt's New Deal, even while acknowledging straightforwardly that the Japanese-American internment was wrong and that the New Deal made shameful concessions to segregation. But the concept of a Green New Deal is something the left invokes in the US and Europe as a way to validate a new idea by connecting it to the image of a progressive period in the past.
It's also the case that the Republicans are happy to remind people of the heinousness of the Second World War internment as a criticism of the Democrats. At the same time they justify the vicious policies of the Trump Administration kidnapping newborn babies from refugees in Trump's border concentration camps. And the further in the past an incident inevitably becomes, the easier it is to make cheap propaganda points out of them. There are plenty of people still alive who weren't necessarily around during the Second World War who remember that Earl Warren, the liberal Republican who became a bogeyman to conservatives of both parties as Chief Justice of the "Warren Court", was Governor of California at the time and was one of the most influential politicians pushing for the internment. Bipartisanship in action!
But nobody alive remembers from their own experiences in real time what any of the political leaders of the 19th century were doing before or after the Civil War in the US. So when Republican propagandists try to identify racist attitudes of the Democratic Party of that time as the same on race as the Democratic Party of 2019, they are invoking a historical legacy that is not well known by American voters today and understood even less. Political junkies who follow daily developments in politics are normally not immediately current on the politics of even major events prior to the Civil War, like the Missouri Compromise or the Nullification Controversy.
And the Republican crowds who howl in rage during Trump's Nuremburg rallies don't care in the least about what actually happened in the 19th century, however fired up they may get about tribal white nationalist symbols like statues of the traitor Robert E. Lee.
When it comes to trying to understand history in terms of political theory for the present or in formulating some theory of history, Remini's reflections quoted above are very relevant. The folksinger Kate Campbell who has a sharp sense for the messiness of historical conflicts combined with an intense appreciation of the need to fight historical wrongs, has a song called "Signs Following," which her fans often call the Snake Song. It's about the real case of a snake-handling Pentacostal minister in Alabama who tried to murder his wife by holding her arm in a rattlesnake cage where she got bitten. The closing lines of the song are:
But somewhere on Sand Mountain a woman needs no proofIt's that very thing that makes history so frustrating for anyone who would like to believe that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the Martin Luther King, Jr., quote that Barack Obama liked to use. Mychal Denzel Smith offered a caution about a lazy historical determinism in connection with that notion in The Truth About ‘The Arc Of The Moral Universe’ Huffpost 01/18/2018:
That evil can lie so close to truth
The dawn of the age of President Donald Trump has restored to that quote some of the meaning lost in Obama’s repeated use. We say it to ourselves now because we need to believe, even as all visible signs of progress are eroded, that the world we seek lies waiting for us, just on the other side of this hellscape. It is not going to show up tomorrow, but knowing that it will show up someday should help fortify us for the fight ahead.My understanding of the moral importance of realistically dealing with the past is draws heavily from two sources. One is my experience and understanding of segregation and desegregation from growing up in Mississippi. I have a black-and-white photo hanging on my wall at home. It's a picture from 1960 or 1961 of the first through sixth grade classes in the small town where I grew up. I was in the second grade, and visitors have fun trying to figure out which little boy was me. (The ears are the giveaway.) It's a picture that I really like and associate with fond memories. I'm still in contact with some of the people in the photo.
This use of the quotation, though, carries the risk of magical thinking. After all, if the arc of the moral universe will inevitably bend toward justice, then there is no reason for us to work toward that justice, as it’s preordained. If it is only a matter of cosmic influence, if there is no human role, then we are off the hook. This isn’t how King meant it, as evidenced by the work to which he dedicated his own life.
It's a photo that has only white kids in it. The town where I grew up had a majority black population. Robert Kennedy's Justice Department showed in federal court that none of the black citizens in the county was registered to vote, due to segregationist voter suppression. The black kids had their own school. That's how it was in Mississippi. It was a terrible system, and it was just plain wrong. At some level, all the white people knew it was wrong. But they pertetuated it anyway. So that photo tells a story in what it shows, and what it does not show. The history of those kids in the photo can't actually be understood meaningfully outside the context of what is missing.
Or, to use a far better-known example, the slaveowner, radical Democrat (for white men with property), and later President James Madison, famously wrote, "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary." (Federalist Papers #51) The people who developed the principles by which we now judge the actions of the past as evil were deeply flawed human beings. But some fought to make the world better, more humane, more democratic, even when they were also doing things that were bad or destructive. If we take understanding history seriously, we have to be able to distinguish between those who were pioneers for humane principles, those who were later convinced of what the pioneers were advocating, and those who consciously did things that were evil by the standards which they themselves professed.
The second major source of my understanding of drawing moral conclusions and lessons from history came from learning about and engaging with the German and Austrian struggles over how to understand the Holocaust. That was not a case of how "evil can lie so close to truth." That was a case of people doing something that they knew was unquestionably wrong by the standards and laws of their time. "Truth" wasn't anywhere close by.
But the "working through" (Aufarbeitung) that past was and is a complicated matter. One of the complications is the swamp-dwellers' ideology of Holocaust denial. People who have made an effort to understand that dark corner of the world of politics and history have had some encounter with how the Holocaust deniers try to use a form of "whataboutism" to justify the mass murders of the Holocaust or to deflect consideration of it. The Allied bombing of Dresden became a favorite topic for that kind of argument. Look, the Allies were trying to commit genocide against the Germans, so they retaliated by murdering Jews, the argument goes. In the Historikerstreit controversy of the late 1980s, the argument that Hitler got the idea of concentration camps and the Holocaust from Stalin and therefore the Rooskies were really to blame for the Holocaust was seriously advocated by people not physically brain-damaged.
So, when we are talking about the evils of the past like the fate of the native populations in the Western Hemisphere, it's important to get the story right so far as possible. And, for me, that means not promoting some simplistic, feel-good history about the benevolent mission of the white settlers in the Americas. It means being critical toward the prominent narrative that treats the history of white Americans and the native populations as a tragedy, a blind fate playing out against the will of the actors. I don't think that narrative is entirely wrong because I've never been able to envision what a Happy Ending to that story could have looked like. But it's far from the whole story.
It also means being careful not to create a superficial, moralistic narrative of a monstrous, intentional genocide that could too easily lend itself to a Holocaust-denier type of whataboutism. Or one that pictures the native peoples as idyllic peaceful communities living in harmony with nature, a romantic notion that is also deeply rooted in a flawed historical narrative that is a kind of mirror-image version of the Indians-as-murderous-savages notion.
Here is a useful and thought-provoking piece from before Thanksgiving 2018, which notes that the tendency to erase Indians from much of the telling of American history not only serves to ignore the general brutality and catastrophic effects of the US version of settler colonialism on the aboriginal population. It can also obscure the history of the Indians' own agency in dealing with the Americans: Colin Calloway, George Washington Lived in an Indian World, But His Biographies Have Erased Native People Longreads 11/07/2018.
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