One tends to think of history as a collection of facts
and dates answering the questions “what happened and when.” But history is more than that; a historian
tells a tale of what happened and why in the past, but he/she tells it from the
perspective of someone living in the present.
And since the historian can pick and choose what is deemed important,
the historian is assembling an opinion, one which is intended to teach a lesson
to the modern reader. History thus becomes
critical in politics. There is no more vigorous
political dispute than that over who gets to say what is included in the history
textbooks provided to our children. Jill
Lepore provides a discussion of the issues relating a nation and its nationalism
to its view of its history. She provided
A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story as the opening article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a volume focused on “The
New Nationalism.”
Lepore provides us with some terminology and a
perspective.
“The United States is different
from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its
nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common
origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state
is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a
supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and
kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their
origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, ‘the French nation’ had
common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These
Truths, ‘Very often, histories of nation-states are little more
than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state’.”
Lepore attributes the first serious history of the nation
to George Bancroft, and his effort provides an example of the role a history
plays in creating viable politics.
“One way to turn a state into a
nation is to write its history. The first substantial history of the American
nation, Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the
Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and
1874. Bancroft wasn’t only a historian; he was also a politician who served in
the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war in
the age of American continental expansion. An architect of manifest destiny,
Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding
appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing
its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and
cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world…”
Assembling a “national story” for the United States is
complicated because it does not have a common past for its people to refer to—at
least not one whose inventions can be masked by resorting to ancient happenings. The United States was not formally
constructed as a nation-state. Rather,
it was a federation, one that must be recognized as such no matter what the intentions
of the founders might be. And it also
carried within its origins the issue that would constantly contradict the notion
that we are a single people with a single national story. When slavery was legalized, it created two
distinct regions, two distinct classes of people, and a minority population
whose story could never be consistent with that of a proud nation. The need to justify the enslavement of
African Americans required an assumption of white supremacy. This “truth” would inform attitudes toward
all nonwhite peoples. People in
non-slave states might also believe in white supremacy, but their societies,
livelihoods, and consciences did not demand it.
Within the non-slave states would arise a movement of abolitionists
determined to end slavery. Ultimately,
the Civil War would bring it to an end, but the “nation” was left with two
major stories to tell.
“…the nationalism of the North
and that of the South were in fact different, and much of U.S. history has been
a battle between them.”
“In 1861, the Confederacy’s
newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in
Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S.
Constitution ‘rested upon the assumption of the equality of races’—here ceding
Lincoln’s argument—but that ‘our new government is founded upon exactly the
opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great
truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural
and moral condition’.”
“The North won the war. But the
battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during
the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding
of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens
and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights,
universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens.”
Frederick Douglass would become an effective spokesperson
for a view that would support a liberal history and a liberal future for the
nation.
“The most significant statement
in this debate was made by a man born into slavery who had sought his own
freedom and fought for decades for emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights.
In 1869, in front of audiences across the country, Frederick Douglass delivered
one of the most important and least read speeches in American political
history, urging the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the spirit
of establishing a ‘composite nation.’ He spoke, he said, ‘to the question of
whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of
men.’ If nations, which are essential for progress, form from similarity, what
of nations like the United States, which are formed out of difference, Native
American, African, European, Asian, and every possible mixture, ‘the most
conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world’?”
But there would be no victory over the southern
viewpoint. Instead, whites from both north
and south would conspire to agree to disagree.
“Emancipation and
Reconstruction, the historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois would
write in 1935, was ‘the finest effort to achieve democracy . . . this world had
ever seen.’ But that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white
Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth
that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between
the nation and the states. ‘We fell under the leadership of those who would
compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,’ Du
Bois wrote bitterly. Douglass’ new Americanism was thus forgotten. So was Du
Bois’ reckoning with American history.”
Instead of coming to terms with the evil of slavery, the
South was left free to exercise its policies of white supremacy for almost
another century. And the story told by
the United States was that African Americans were not capable of governing
themselves. This view and its resultant
treatment of African Americans served as justification for the colonial powers
who needed to oppress native, darker-skinned populations in Africa and
Asia. Hitler recognized the Jim Crow
reign in our South as just the example he needed in order to begin his oppression
of Jews. Lepore provides this curiously
familiar observation.
“Hitler, for his part, expressed
admiration for the Confederacy and regret that ‘the beginnings of a great new
social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by
the war.’ As one arm of a campaign to widen divisions in the United States and
weaken American resolve, Nazi propaganda distributed in the Jim Crow South
called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments.”
There were, of course, historians who would write
histories of the postwar Reconstruction Era that would support southern
attitudes about racial inequality, and political scientists who would propagate
tales of racial inequality to support national oppression of other
peoples. But it was mostly tales of
liberal consensus that would emerge from white male historians.
“In the wake of World War II,
American historians wrote the history of the United States as a story of
consensus, an unvarying ‘liberal tradition in America,’ according to the
political scientist Louis Hartz, that appeared to stretch forward in time into
an unvarying liberal future. Schlesinger, writing in 1949, argued that liberals
occupied ‘the vital center’ of American politics. These historians had plenty
of blind spots—they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and
fundamentalism—but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of
the history of the American nation and the American people.”
It was not only people of color who needed liberation, there
were the women also.
“Beginning in the 1960s, women
and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich,
revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different
conclusions. Historical scholarship exploded, and got immeasurably richer and
more sophisticated.”
Emerging from Lepore’s criticism of the profession, is
one notable hero: Carl Degler.
“In a
there-goes-the-neighborhood moment, many older historians questioned the value
of this scholarship. Degler did not; instead, he contributed to it. Most
historians who wrote about race were not white and most historians who wrote
about women were not men, but Degler, a white man, was one of two male
co-founders of the National Organization for Women and won a Pulitzer in 1972
for a book called Neither Black nor White. Still, he
shared the concern expressed by Higham that most new American historical
scholarship was ‘not about the United States but merely in the United States’.”
She credits Degler with lecturing his profession on the reality
of nationalism and the need for historians to provide a story that will deal
with the two versions of the nation’s history that have been propagated.
“In 1986, the Pulitzer
Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered
something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner
disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the
American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history.
Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of
nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned
the study of the nation.”
“’We can write history that
implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that
flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,’
Degler said that night in Chicago. He issued a warning: ‘If we historians fail
to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed
will take over the job for us’.”
Parts of our nation have already become the “composite
nation” touted by Douglass—and that version of the nation works. And it is a composite nation towards which
economics, politics, and climate change are driving us. There is no escape—for us or any other
country. Somehow, a heroic story must
emerge that reconciles this composite world with that of people raised with a
tradition of white supremacy. Lepore
believes it is the duty of historians to create the necessary story.
“’The history of the United
States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,’
Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t
start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he
warned.”
And as Lepore points out, they have.
“They’ll echo Calhoun and
Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament ‘American carnage.’ They’ll call
immigrants ‘animals’ and other states ‘shithole countries.’ They’ll adopt the
slogan ‘America first.’ They’ll say they can ‘make America great again.’
They’ll call themselves ‘nationalists.’ Their history will be a fiction. They
will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.”
Lepore’s faith in historical writing may be misplaced in
this instance. Clearly, the nation would
be in better shape now if historians had done a better job years ago. However, there is another perspective that
suggests a more drastic chain of events is in our future. It took the tragedy of the Civil War to
eliminate explicit slavery. It took
blacks forging a revolution in the South to finally eliminate Jim Crow and
explicit racial discrimination. This
also involved sending troops into the South to enforce the law a second
time—Civil War Part II? Will it take a
Civil War Part III (or more) to finally reconcile our two nations?
Jill Lepore is a Professor of American History at Harvard
University, and has recently produced a comprehensive history of her own: These Truths: A History of the United States.
The interested reader might find
the following articles informative:
No comments:
Post a Comment