Last Friday evening I was wandering along the Brooklyn waterfront, when I looked west across New York Harbor and into the setting sun and saw the mystical sight of the Statue of Liberty lit up against the evening sky.
Read MoreLike many who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up admiring Robert E. Lee. In an era when our history books stressed a consensus view of America’s past, Lee was seen as a noble figure: a respected leader, a skillful tactician, and an honorable man. President Lincoln offered him a major command in the Union Army, over which he agonized before resigning his commission and taking command of the forces of his beloved Virginia. In doing so, he chose to wage war against his country, a war that would claim more lives than all our future wars combined.
Lee’s whitewashed legacy reinforced the image of the Lost Cause– an antebellum South now Gone With the Wind, yet still struggling nobly to preserve its agrarian way of life. It’s an image that haunts us still. As the courtly symbol of that idyllic South, Lee has allowed us to gloss over its brutality.
Taking down his statue will not, as critics claim, erase history. On the contrary, it will enrich it by acknowledging historical truths we need to confront: four million slaves and over 4,000 lynchings, a century of Jim Crow and racism still strong enough to elect a president who will not condemn it. Robert E. Lee was a complex man, but there is nothing complicated about the symbol he has become. How can we fulfill Lincoln’s promise “to bind up the nation’s wounds” if we insist on venerating icons that rub salt in them?
Think like a mountain, Aldo Leopold exhorted us 68 years ago in A Sand County Almanac. But how does a mountain think, I wondered one recent peaceful morning in Acadia National Park, as I climbed Brown Mountain (elevation: 852 feet)?
Read MoreThe most controversial work in the biennial show at the Whitney Museum in New York is “Open Casket,” an oil painting by Dana Schutz.
Read MoreSakura Park lies just east of Grant’s tomb above the Hudson River on New York’s upper west side
Read MoreAs a one-time American history teacher, I wrestled with the deficiencies of textbooks, which are as much the product of Texas politics as historical scholarship and challenge teachers to breathe life into dull prose and dead people. In fairness, the text is hard to put together. When I was in school, ours ended with the Korean Conflict, traced the westward movement of Europeans across the continent, and relied on documents written by educated white men. Quite a bit has happened since then, including an array of tools enabling historians to uncover the long-stifled voices of marginalized peoples. Such changes have not sat well with everyone. In the recent tiff over Advanced Placement history standards, for example, some school boards, and the Republican National Committee, demanded changes in textbooks to extol patriotism and “American exceptionalism” and to show America in a more positive light – what we used to call propaganda.
Which brings me to newly unearthed histories at two of America’s most prominent universities: Georgetown’s sale of 272 slaves to plantations in the Deep South to raise operating funds and Harvard’s embrace of a eugenics movement that promoted racial purity and the forced sterilization of those who, in the words of U.S. Chief Justice – and Harvard pillar – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “sap the strength of the State.”
Shouldn’t the historian’s role be to uncover and confront the truth of our past, however painful, as Georgetown, and, I hope, Harvard, is doing, rather than airbrush it? True patriotism can’t be built on lies.
“There is nothing left for me to do,” said Robert E. Lee in the early morning of April 9, 1865, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths." A few hours later, Lee rode to Appomattox courthouse, where Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the most murderous war in American history. It is an article of American exceptionalism’s faith that what happened at Appomattox 150 years ago yesterday was steeped in honor and mutual respect, Grant generous in victory, Lee noble in defeat. The war was over, the union preserved, the nation ready to heal. Except, writes, Elizabeth Varon in Appomattox, “The two men represented competing visions of the peace. For Grant, the Union victory was one of right over wrong.” For Lee it “was one of might over right,” won by massive firepower and human slaughter. Grant foresaw a better future; Lee sought the restoration of a mythic past.
Grant won the war. Lee won the peace. Grant became the brutal “butcher,” despite a casualty rate half that of the gentlemanly Lee. “The Lost Cause” exemplified the South’s pastoral alternative to the North’s soulless factories and urban slums. And Tara, Gone With the Wind’s dreamy plantation, captured America's popular imagination as the "slave camps" that, Edward Baptist writes, “inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed,” never could.
It’s time, I think, to change our narrative and accept our past.
Yesterday I heard a song called "Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears" on my car radio, a song about Annie Moore, the teenage girl from Ireland who, on Jan. 1, 1892, became the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island. She was given a $10 gold piece, the equivalent of $200 today. Annie was one of 4 million people who left Ireland for America in the 19th century, and like immigrants everywhere, she carried hopes for a new beginning, even as she left forever her home in a land that had become unlivable. Over a million people died in Ireland's Great Famine, and between 1845 and 1895 death and starvation cut the country's population in half. The Irish came in disruptive, unwelcome droves, overrunning the cities and overwhelming the culture. Catholics in a Protestant country, most spoke no English and almost all were desperately poor. A rural people from a hardscrabble land, they brought few marketable skills, found no welcome mats rolled out, and crammed themselves into ethnic slums.
Annie married Joseph Augustus Schayer, the son of German immigrants, with whom she had “at least eleven children,” and so for her the process of assimilation – the “melting pot” – began almost immediately.
Yesterday, the descendants of those millions of immigrants celebrated their history as both Irish and American, and on Boston’s 114th St. Patrick’s Day Parade, its organizers, the South Boston Allied War Veterans, at last lifted their ban and invited gay and lesbian groups to march.
The melting part enlarged, I think of Annie smiling.
I had just finished Elizabeth Samet's thought-provoking article, “When is War Over?”, when I learned that Chuck Hagel had resigned under pressure. A Vietnam veteran, Hagel is the only former enlisted man ever to serve as Secretary of Defense. He leaves amid questions about his ability to manage America’s endless war – even as President Obama was once again extending the exit date for American forces from Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Samet is a professor of English at West Point, and she poses her question through the unusual prism of a course on world literature. It’s reassuring, in an age when the humanities have been deemed irrelevant, that our future military leaders continue to study them.
Samet focuses on Alexander the Great’s 13-year military campaign, which ended with his death at the age of 32. He assured those soldiers who balked at spending all their lives at war that “it is sweet to live bravely and die leaving behind an immortal fame.”
The only person who gained immortal fame from those interminable wars, of course, was the young emperor, and while his troops – and their victims – lived short, hard lives, the exploits of Alexander continue to nourish the glories of war two millennia later.
Chuck Hagel, whatever his shortcomings at the Pentagon, understood war from its underside – as did Coenus, a loyal Macedonian who dared tell Alexander, “If there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop.”
“Save your confederate money, boys, the South will rise again.” One-hundred-forty-nine years later, it doesn’t seem likely. And any revival of the old South will be financed, not by Confederate Greybacks (some of which pictured slaves working contentedly in the fields), but by Greenbacks issued by a federal government still reviled across much of the region. For despite the anti-Washington furor reaching its biennial crescendo this political season, southern states remain disproportionately dependent on the United States Treasury. South Carolina, for example, gets almost $8 in federal largesse for every tax dollar it sends north, a list whose top ten includes seven southern states. And despite what its politicians try to tell us, they need every dollar. For on almost any scale – from education to obesity, from household poverty to delinquent debt, from food stamps to unemployment – southern states lag far behind the rest of the nation. Nor does charity begin at home: the tax money they get from the citizens of Connecticut, California and New York is money they don’t have to get from their own citizens, who pay some of the lowest taxes in America.
Despite all this, southern political representatives in Washington, many of whom are the “career politicians” so disdained back home, continue to rail against a government that has become not just their employer but their benefactor. Next April will mark 150 years since Appomattox, and yet America remains both a divided nation and a poorer one because of the continuing sectional hostility.
On Good Friday 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. The assassination came five days after the surrender at Appomattox and the effective collapse of Southern resistance, and the two events have ever since shaped the narrative of American history. In her fascinating new book, Appomattox, Elizabeth Varon disputes the long-held myth that “Grant’s magnanimity” and “Lee’s stoic resignation” initiated “a process of national healing,” arguing instead that the two men interpreted the peace totally differently. For Grant the victory was one of “right over wrong,” and he looked forward to a transformed and prosperous nation. For Lee the defeat was one of “might over right,” and he sought a restoration, without slavery, of the old patrician order. Tragically, Lincoln’s murder helped ensure that Lee’s vision prevailed. We see it in depictions of Grant, “the butcher,” and of Sherman sowing carnage from Atlanta to the sea; of the “Birth of a Nation’s” ruthless Reconstruction when the Klan arose to restore honor and order to a lawless South; of greedy carpetbaggers deflowering a helpless land; of an age of gentility “Gone With the Wind.” And so, despite the Union’s overwhelming victory and the generous terms of the peace, the restoration of the old order – also known as Jim Crow – brutally repressed those whom the war had just emancipated. It took another century for the Civil Rights and Voting acts to address those wrongs – and 50 years more for the Roberts Court to roll them back.
The day after the Soviet Union launched sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, Earl Ubell wrote on the front page of The New York Herald Tribune, "Our planet has a new moon tonight,” one of the most haunting leads in newspaper history, which both captures the wonder and hints at the hubris of humankind’s future in space. Sputnik launched the space race, deepening Cold War anxieties that the Russians had beaten us into orbit and driving the American satellite program to make sure that the first flag planted on the moon was our own. Space had become the new frontier, a vast place for American pioneers to explore and a challenge for American technology to conquer. But there was always a deeper element at work, one that all the technocrats could never crush, exemplified by William Pogue, an astronaut who died last week. About halfway through his 84-day stint in space, Pogue led the three-man Skylab crew on strike, protesting the long hours and tedious work. He did not demand increased pay or compensatory time, but, Paul Vitello writes in his obituary, “he and the others just wanted more time to look out the window and think.” The crew on the ground thought he’d gone nuts, but in fact Pogue had become “much more inclined toward humanistic feeling toward other people.” I like to think it is just that urge to understand the human condition and our place in the universe, more than military rivalry and commercial exploitation, that sends humans into space.
“Saint Valentine is a third-century Roman saint associated since the High Middle Ages with a tradition of courtly love.” It wasn’t exactly courtly love that four members of Al Capone’s Italian South Side gang had in mind when they lined up seven members of Bugs Morans’ Irish North Side gang against a garage wall at 2122 North Clark Street and opened fire 85 years ago today. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre, fought to control the bootleg liquor business, is Prohibition’s defining event. It’s an era we tend to glorify, filled with wonderful names (“Machine Gun” McGurn, Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo, “Hop Toad” Giunta), although it was marked by murder, political corruption and income inequality (Capone made $100 million a year).
Nor did Ayatollah Khomeini seem in a loving mood 25 years ago when he issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for blaspheming Mohammed in Satanic Verses. That too led to a massacre, the Sivas Massacre, in which 37 people, primarily artists and writers, were incinerated when zealots set fire to their hotel.
Prohibition was the result of American fundamentalists trying to impose their personal morality on an unwilling people, who defied the law and eventually overturned it. Khomeini’s fatwa took things to a new level by making murder the goal, not a byproduct, of fanaticism. Like his predecessors, from Claudius (who beheaded Valentine for protecting persecuted Christians) to Stalin, he achieved his goal by making most of us afraid to speak out.
The heart is the source of love and courage. Happy St. Valentine’s Day.
The more I read about the great economic divide in America, the more its origins seem set in the 1980s. In his recent memo, “Which Side of the Barricade Are You On?”, former Clinton confidant Doug Sosnik traces “Americans’ alienation from our political system and its leaders” to “long-term domestic economic trends dating back to the early 1980s.” What are some of those trends? The concentration of income in the hands of the very rich and the corresponding stagnation of the middle class. (Last year one percent of Americans received 19% of all income, creating a gap not seen since 1928.) A 50% decline in unionized workers. A median household income unchanged since 1979. A “decoupling” of economic productivity from middle-class prosperity.
What happened?
“It’s morning again in America,” announced Ronald Reagan in 1984, as he asked for another four years to dismantle the country’s safety nets and blow holes in the belief that we were all in this together. Beneath the soothing pronouncement that America was “prouder, stronger, better”, the Reagan presidency accentuated class and racial divisions (“there is a welfare queen from Chicago’s South Side”), debunked environmental efforts (“trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”), and set us on an unprecedented path to indebtedness (the deficit more than doubled during Reagan’s eight years in office, and the national debt tripled – rates unrivaled before or since).
This side of Reaganism, which was evident in the 1980s, has disappeared in the soothing glow of historical revisionism. We have paid a heavy price for our amnesia.
On this day in 1646, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it a capital offense to deny the divine origin of the Bible. Only 16 years after a small group of Puritans had set up be a rigorously intolerant community of believers, enough people were questioning its basic principles to raise alarm among those in command. The dissenting had been going on for a while – Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had been exiled a decade earlier – but the death penalty indicates that harsher steps were required. Colonial Massachusetts did not execute people the way modern Texas does (506 in the last 30 years), but they did hang a few Quakers and other heretics who kept trying to undermine the social order. It didn’t work terribly well, as conditions in 17th-century New England were clearly not conducive to the persistence of a theocratic state. One reason, I think, was the evolution of individualism – both theologically (in the growing belief that one could talk directly with God) and socially (where the idea of a rigid hierarchy was under assault).
Individualism is itself under attack these days, viewed as the foundation of capitalist greed and the enemy of community. But America has a long history of dissenters who refused to be buckle under to the tyranny of the group, who followed their conscience and dared to dream. It takes courage to stand alone.
PS Today is also the day in 1884 when Grover Cleveland upset James G. Blaine to become president of the United States in 1884. We continue to demand a recount.
As I wander around Glasgow admiring the striking buildings produced during the Industrial Revolution, I remember reading somewhere that the worst job ever was that of chimney sweep. Beginning at the age of six, these “climbing boys” were made to shimmy up the flues of chimneys, 14 inches by 9 inches wide, with several sharp twists along the way. To harden the sweeps’ knees and elbows against the awful scraping, their masters would stand them nightly before a hot fire and rub brine into their bodies with a wire brush. Often the sweeps got stuck in the chimneys and suffocated in the soot – or burned to death from the heat. Almost all developed bodily deformities, blindness and “chimney sweep cancer”, an excruciating and fatal disease of the scrotum. The coal whose dust they “swept” was itself mined by men working under conditions only slightly better than their own. Glasgow was built by the Industrial Revolution. Its wealth came from textile mills that were powered by the vast coal deposits nearby, as well as from international trade in, among other things, tobacco and slaves. Glasgow became one of the richest cities in the world – “the Second City of the British Empire” – and its story reflects the history of the industrial age. In many ways it has been an extraordinary journey, propelled by human ingenuity, inquisitiveness and imagination, as well as human greed. But as the chimney sweeps’ short and miserable lives bear witness, it came also at enormous human cost.
Once upon a time long ago, there was a republic known for its civic tolerance, diverse cultures and passion for innovation. The glue that held it together was the people’s belief in an open political system and a tradition of civic debate. But hard times hit, and the republic went into a recession. The old communal bonds weakened. Parties purged their ranks of dissenters. Moderates became an endangered species. Demands for ideological purity triumphed over pragmatic efforts to build the coalitions required to govern in a pluralistic society. Voters increasingly turned out in support of extremists, and eventually the commitment to maintain the republic itself was called into question. There was plenty of blame to go around, but one right-wing group was especially relentless in pursuit of its agenda. Under the banner of patriotism, its members manipulated national symbols to vilify foreigners, non-whites, gays, Jews. They actively sought to shut down the government and ultimately to bring down the republic. Few took them seriously at first. They seemed a laughable bunch of bombastic buffoons, ranting against a society that was leaving them behind, shouting down their political opponents. One day powerful interests asked the leader of the party to become the leader of the nation so that order could be restored. And that’s where the fable ends. Because the rest is history: Immediately after being named Germany’s chancellor, “Hitler rushed to his headquarters and told Goebbels with tears in his eyes, ‘Now we are on our way.’”
(Drawn from Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman)
On this day in 1842 the second Seminole War came to an end, followed by the last forced march of Native Americans from the southeastern United States along the “trail of tears” to what is now Oklahoma. The relocations, which began right after Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, involved the resettlement of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to federal lands west of the Mississippi. The motive was simple: the expanding population of European-Americans wanted the land; and the Act, which overturned the nation’s earlier policy of respecting Native-American homelands, legitimized decades of removals across the continent. Wars of conquest and the subjugation of native peoples are not confined to 19th-century America. They are how empires are born. But in America it is hard to square the historical reality with the principles on which the country was founded – we are, after all, both the land of the free and the home of the brave – and so we ignore the unpleasant parts of our past. Witness today’s self-proclaimed patriots, who trace their political lineage to the Boston Tea Party, when “Sons of Liberty” dressed as, yes, Indians, dumped English tea into Boston Harbor. They talk of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that America is a unique country with a special mission, a "city on a hill." And it is exceptional the way they hold high the torch of liberty in one hand, while papering over 100 years of genocide with the other.
“Please, Daddy, please get up!” Fifty years ago last night, Medgar Evers was murdered in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, shot in the back by Byron De La Beckwith of the White Citizens Council. Because it collides head on with our national myths of liberty, democracy and equality, it is hard for white Americans to fully grasp – or accept – the often-subterranean violence that erupted into the open in the early 1960s. “They hate our freedoms,” George Bush told the nation after 9/11, “our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” These were precisely the freedoms that black Americans were demanding 40 years earlier and that led to a backlash of terror – a terror that so disfigured the tortured body of 14-year-old Emmett Till that his mother insisted on an open casket to wake up the world; that bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls; that kidnapped and killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner one night in Mississippi. It was, in fact, the kind of terrorism we associate with al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.
In the face of that terror arose one of the most extraordinary movements in history, as thousands of anonymous people rode buses, sat in at lunch counters and registered to vote, endured beatings and bombings unprotected by the state and unsupported by the public, and maintained a disciplined commitment to non-violence in the greatest demonstration of courage this country has ever witnessed.
Sixty years ago Wallace Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It’s a wonderful book about an extraordinary man, a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the first to navigate the Grand Canyon by boat, a journey so terrifying that three of his small crew took off at Separation Canyon, climbed the Colorado’s steep walls and were never seen again. Powell went on to a long career as an explorer and government agent. He was a staunch critic of the national obsession to overdevelop the west, arguing that its water resources couldn’t sustain the massive agriculture he foresaw. He pushed the novel idea of creating political boundaries based on natural watersheds. Stegner reprinted a rainfall map that shows why: east of the 100th meridian the country has plenty of rain; west to the Rockies it is mostly desert. But governments and homesteaders ignored Powell’s warnings. Embracing the widely held and thoroughly debunked theory that “rain follows the plow,” they made the Great Plains bloom –nowhere more so than Nebraska, which became one of America’s most productive agricultural states. What it lacked in rainfall, it made up by finding itself atop the huge Ogallala aquifer and its seemingly endless water.
But Powell’s vision of a west of small farms, animal grazing and land protection has proved prescient. According to a recent study, Nebraska has become the driest state in America, all of it in the grip of severe drought, which caused last year’s wheat production to decline by 18%.