To the extent there is a “handling” [Bewaltigen] of the past, it consists in the retelling of what has happened; but even this retelling, which shapes history, does not solve problems and does not appease suffering, it does not cope with anything in the end. Rather, so long as the meaning of the event remains alive - and this can be the case for a very long time – it stimulates repetitive storytelling. (Quoted in "Erzählen formt Geschichte" Osteuropa 59/7-8 2009; my translation tfrom the German)Although Arendt herself notoriously criticized efforts to integrate American public schools in the 1950s. So we should probably be especially careful in applying her observation to debunking neo-Confederacy.
These days we're less likely to talk about, say, laws of history and instead talk about "narratives that describe historical processes in a form that resembles historical laws". Or something along those lines. And Arendt is doing something along those lines there.
There is no one alive today who was living during the Civil War of 1861-1865. But historical images and political themes in the US today still tap into the history of the Civil War. So we're still telling and refining stories about it. But it still is tied to current political passions. That doesn't mean that the events can't be evaluated "scientifically," i.e., in a scholarly and accurate way that takes facts seriously. But we also have aware that our understandings of the past and what others hear when we communicate it is shaped not only by the current passions around it, but by the decades of stories that have been told about it. And the passions wound up with those!
With American history, we also have a government that has a continuous history that goes back to the Constitution of 1789. It has had 27 Amendments, including the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments, that were adopted immediately by the first Congress. So The Federalist Papers, polemics in support of the adoption of the Constitution by James Madison, Alelxander Hamilton, and John Jay, are still used in present-day legal research to shed light on the original context and understanding of Constitutional provisions. 1789 is no longer our present. But the Constitution of 1789 is very much part of the American present.
Another way of thinking about the passage of time is to compare the age of living people to the age of the United States, Even if we count the founding of the United States as 1776 rather than 1789, a person who is 65 year old in 2020 has been alive during 27% of the history of the US. When Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was assassinated at age 56, he had been alive for 63% of the entire history of the United States.
Comparing time frames between events in diffferent periods can also add some helpful perspective. In my Confederate "Heritage" Month posts this year, I've discussed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That came 44 years after the Declaration of Independence, and provided a drmatic signal about how slavery and its defense had drastically changed within that time, not least because of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The Nullification Controversy came in 1932, 12 years after the Missouri Compromise, and it put secession in defense of slavery on the agenda, though it was nominally about a tariff.
The Mexican War (Guerra de Estados Unidos a México) ended in 1848, setting off a bitter new round of arguments over the territorial extension of slavery. That was 15 years after the Nullification Controversy was resolved in 1833. The Compromise of 1850, another major inflection point on slavery, came only two years later. The "Bleeding Kansas" controversy broke out four years later in 1854. The Dred Scott decision came down in 1857, essentially making armed conflict over slavery inevitable.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, two and a half years later (Oct 1859). John Calhoun's South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860.
To compare, 44 years ago (1976), the Democratic primary was down to a contest between Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter (both still alive), Ronald Reagan was challenging encumbent Prsident Jerry Ford, whose chief of staff was Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney served on Rummny's staff. At the time of Missouri Compromise, the public and major political figures still had as contemporary history the seven-year Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the War of 1812 when Britain occupied Washington and burned the White House (Presidential Mansion then) and the Capitol building and the Louisiana Purchase. The US had expanded from the original 13 colonies to include Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Maine. The main secession fear came from British sympathizers who promoted the idea of Northeastern states seceding, although it never came to anything as serious as the Nullification Controversy.
Twelve years ago (Missouri Compomise-Nullification Controvery) was 2008, the year Obama was elected President, when Britain was still a member of the European Union, and Russia was supporting armed secessionists in (the nation of) Georgia. Commentators and politicians still talk about events of that year in the assumption that they will be familiar to most of their listeners. We still discuss the Revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union as events whose consequences are still playing out and which still heavily define the politics of Europe and the world. In 1859, when John Brown raided Harper's Ferry, the European revolutions of 1848 were only 11 years in the past. That was the year democratic revolutions swept western and central Europe: France (of course!), Germany, Italy, the Netherlands. In the Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire, with revolts breaking out in large parts of the Empire, the Emperor and his court felt obliged to flee Vienna. Not since the America and French Revolutions of the 18th century had such an event taken place, and never of this scale.
Democracy - even in the now seemingly rudimentary form of universal male suffrage, representative parliaments, and republican rule of law, was very much a revolutionary notion at that time. And John Calhoun was scarcely the only partisan of slavery who was terrified of it. Especially if it took the form of slaves insisting that they were human beings with the same rights and abilities of white people.
That was the thought-world in which Americans of that time lived.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin had a way of viewing the past which may tell us something about how we still today can understand events that are no longer contemporary history for anyone living today as somehow vital to the current moment. In his younger days, Benjamin used this image for meditation.
In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) he expresses an idea that has fascinated me ever since I first read it:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Progress.We can't actually repair the past. Then again, as William Faulkner had one of his characters observe, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun, 1951)
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