Tagged: history

February 6, 2011

The Long Recall

In this sesquicentennial of the Civil War, The American Interest has been running The Long Recall, a history of the Civil War in “real time.” Drawing on original sources–newspapers, magazines, sermons–it summarizes the events of each day, and often provides some poetry, art, and culture in the context of the time.

The most striking thing about telling the history of the war this way is that it is presented without foresight: we know now the horrors of Antietam and Shilo, but in the early days of 1861, before Lincoln took office, the posturing secessionists and vacillating Buchanan administration could not imagine the path they were stepping onto. So far, we’ve read about the rumors of gun running to the South (smugglers arrested in New York City!), the reinforcement of Federal forts on the Southern coast (Major Robert Anderson of Fort Sumter became quite a media celebrity in the North), and the Peace Conference that sought to reach a compromise before Lincoln could take office. And not a shot has been fired yet: we’re still more than two months away from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

When I read Thucydides in college, it was explained that the ancient Greeks had a different view of time than we have. We imagine ourselves moving forward on time’s river, faces to the future and the past receding behind us; we seldom glance over our shoulders. The ancients drifted down the same river backwards: blind to the future, but very much aware of the past, time could not be understood until it had gone by. I’m sure this is a gross over-simplification, but a useful one: the Whig interpretation of history, with its inescapable telos of freedom and progress, is the dominant one in the modern world, as much an axiom of the modern left as of the right.

The Long Recall is a great antidote to the Whig interpretation, and of any attempt to squeeze history into a story of inevitability. Immersed in the events, trying to block out the foresight that 150 years have given us, we see that there were points all along the way when things could have been different: possibly better (opinion in Virginia was divided on secession, and had the Unionists won the debate there, the Confederacy would have lost much of its leadership and momentum); possibly worse (the Peace Convention could have ended with another compromise on slavery, and dragged out the sectional tensions for another decade even while avoiding immediate war). The way things actually happened wasn’t the result of the guiding hand of historical narrative, but of decisions made by people who couldn’t see the future.

When I try to explain history to the boys, I find myself telling it backwards. To understand Martin Luther King, Jr., you need to know more than a little about Reconstruction and Jim Crow; but that means talking about the Civil War, and the early compromises about slavery; and that ought to lead to a discussion of the Atlantic trade and why slavery came to the Americas to begin with. And so on and so on, backwards through time. The future is fuzzy, but the past is a sparkling if confusing constellation.

November 21, 2010

The Lampshade

With this lampshade you can say it had a first history, which is that identification with the Buchenwald camp and people like Isle Koch. … Then there is the second history. The history with you. Your adventures and your thoughts. There is the strange and frightening idea that someone would make a lampshade out of a person and it has arrived in New Orleans after a storm.

Mark Jacobson, a New York Magazine writer who splits his time between New Orleans and New York City, acquired, third-hand, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a lampshade apparently made of human skin. Four almost four years he tried to determine its actual provenance, and to find a fitting home for it; it proved to be an artifact that no one wanted, a horrible “white elephant” shunned by mainstream Holocaust historians and Holocaust deniers alike. The lampshade’s wanderings, in a custom-made carrying case, take it to Buchenwald, Jerusalem, New Orleans, and New York City, stitching together the threads of the Holocaust, the Jim Crow South, 9/11, Katrina, and the “Faust” legend (both in Goethe’s native woodlands and at the midnight crossroad where Robert Johnson sold his soul).

As a “Holocaust detective story,” The Lampshade has few actual clues. Jacobson has a DNA profile made at the lab that identified the meager remains of many 9/11 victims, which shows that the lampshade is likely to be human, though the age and degradation of the material makes an absolute determination impossible. Antique dealers place the metal frame of the lamp in the first half of the twentieth century, of a middle European style: the atrocities at Buchenwald fit within this broad historical geography, but it’s insufficient evidence to pinpoint the lampshade’s origins. The official record, in particular the Nuremberg trials and the trial of Ilse Koch, the infamous “Hexe von Buchenwald,” alludes to lampshades made of human skin, but there is little direct evidence of these particular horrors within the context of the greater horror of the Holocaust. In short, there’s little opportunity for a Sherlock Holmes to deduce the lampshade’s origins with much clarity.

But the heart of “The Lampshade” is less the quest for the lampshade’s origins, than it is an investigation of the tangled stories of racism and injustice in Germany and the United States. The book starts with Goethe, whose favorite walking site would become the location of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and with Robert Johnson at the crossroads in Clarksville, Mississippi, where the man who gives the lampshade to Jacobson spent years trying to get fitting recognition paid to the area’s rich musical legacy. Throughout the book, Jacobson illuminates connections between lynchings, neo-Nazi marches, grave robbing, medical cadavers, Mardi Gras krewes, and care for the dead. He interviews a wide range of characters, from Louisiana racist David Duke to the Jewish American communications officer in charge of opening Buchenwald to the world after the camp’s liberation; he discovers that Holocaust deniers are more open to the lampshade’s possible Holocaust connections than are the Holocaust museums in Washington, DC, and Jerusalem, and that Buchenwald itself, tainted for half a century by East Germany’s Cold War interpretation of the camp and struggling to overcome the heroic anti-fascist myths of the Communist era, isn’t particularly interested in a homecoming.

Though unsatisfying as a detective story, “The Lampshade” is a fascinating look at history through a macabre lens. The lampshade is both illuminating and obfuscating, directing light to interesting places and blocking the light from some hidden corners. It may not provide new insight into either the Holocaust or the history of New Orleans, but it raises uncomfortable questions.

May 7, 2010

The Slaves’ War

They stole away on a Sunday night . . . with her mother and another pair of slaves, and made the distance, more than fifty miles, to Fredericksburg, in fourteen hours, and Mr. Ballton declares they were not tired because they had something to walk for.

The Slaves’ War, Andrew Ward

Inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site, I’ve been trying to fill out my understanding of the Civil War this past month. I was a Civil War buff as a kid, and had the great good fortune of spending a summer moving from Maine to Kansas with my family, visiting as many Civil War battle fields along the way as we could. In graduate school I was exposed to some Civil War history–studies of Quaker and Methodist reactions to the war, quantitative histories of the economics of slavery, ante-bellum splits within Baptist churches over the morality of slavery. Until reading Andrew Ward’s book, though, I was largely ignorant of the people whose lives were most altered by the war.

Ward relies on interviews and written accounts of former slaves, many gathered through the WPA in the 1930s. Coates discusses the three sides of the war: Secessionists seeking to maintain slavery, Unionists seeking to maintain the Union, and slaves fighting for freedom. The voices in this collection represent what may be a fourth side: most of the accounts are from people who were unable to leave slavery during the war, who didn’t enlist in the Union army, and who were in many ways caught in the middle of great events over which they had very little control. There is a great deal of ambivalence in their stories: hopeful that the Union would prevail and free them, fearful that the war would make things worse on the plantations, sometimes personally loyal to masters and suspicious of the Northerners who cut a bloody path across the South, and finally bitter that liberty was not the prelude to equality that many had hoped for.

A complex portrait of slavery arises from the accounts Ward gathers. We hear the voices of field slaves, who are viciously worked on the plantations; slaves from the manor houses who have internalized the mores and habits of aristocracy; and urban slaves who have a strange and attenuated sort of liberty. The “Peculiar Institution” appears to be a sort of distributed totalitarianism, with its subjects kept in ignorance of the world around them, and great variation from owner to owner, and from year to year, in how the slaves’ daily lives are managed. It is also a system riven with internal contradictions: enforcing an ideology of white supremacy required tactics that implicitly recognized the slaves’ human potential, like prohibitions on literacy and communication.

The slaves’ accounts of the cruelties of slavery–not only the physical violence, but the merciless breaking up of families, the soul-crushing restrictions on news and travel, the constant fear and ignorance–are truly horrible. But what is also striking in these stories is the resolve that the slaves exhibit: they aren’t mere victims, but approach their lives with humor, wisdom, and candor.

Ward’s account of their lives after slavery is as harrowing as their lives before and during the war. Ward calls the Civil War “the Second American Revolution,” which surely it was: the cynical compromises that allowed the United States to be half free, half slave, came crashing down at Appomattox Courthouse. But it was an imperfect revolution, resulting in nominal liberty but not equality for the four million people freed by the war’s end. De facto re-enslavement was the experience of far too many freedmen, who were liberated with no attempt at reparation or justice. Coates’ “three sides” argument comes into stark relief in the last chapters of “The Slaves’ War”: the Secessionists lost, the Union was restored, and a shabby sort of freedom indeed was left in the wake of the war. This is a failure–a failure of planning, of vision, of justice–whose effects we suffer still, a century and a half after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

December 13, 2009

Cyclists’ Special, 1955

This short film is the perfect bucolic antidote to the cold, slush, and wind of the last week here in Minneapolis, December 2009. The weather forecast for next week looks to bring more of the same, at least in the first couple days; I’m hoping to squeeze a bike ride into the narrow window of Monday morning, but fear that the roads won’t be clear again until Thursday. Though these cyclists on their solid old bikes with their stiff upper lips would probably not be dissuaded by a little ice.

“There’s a bit of rough weather about; we can take it if we have to.”

Indeed!

July 15, 2009

fair, but not neutral

The “strict constructionist” trope on the Right is an odd and disingenuous position. Like “Biblical literalism,” it implies a simple unity to a complex body of writing; I can’t say whether it’s bad jurisprudence, but it’s certainly bad history.

The U.S. Constitution, its amendments, and the thousands of laws emanating from Congress are hardly a disinterested, neutral clockwork. It’s a mishmash of contradictory goals, high-minded sentiment, and bald self-interest. The 1787 Constitution was shaped by the conflicting interests of agrarian, mercantile, and working classes (cf. Charles Beard and Forrest McDonald), by ideological conflicts between radicals and conservatives, by the sectional conflicts (not only between North and South, but between East and West, coastal and inland) that shaped American history for its first hundred years. The founders’ “original intent” was in the main to strike uneasy compromises and gain advantage for their own positions; all those white-wigged gentleman look the same in the hazy engravings of history, but they were different as can be from each other.

Given the conflict at the heart of our political and legal system, it is unreasonable to expect a Supreme Court justice to be nothing more than a provider of learned exegesis on clear rules. If the Court’s job were simply to say what the Constitution clearly says, there would be no need for nine justices; indeed, in the digital age, a single computer program could handle the job if the Constitution and laws passed by Congress were really so clear.

A Justice should be expected to be fair–should be able to weigh arguments and evidence without prejudice–but a Justice should hardly be expected to be neutral. The Court’s decisions need to be made in the context of not only what the law states, but also the larger society; trying to apply an imagined 18th century rationalism to modern laws and conditions would not be especially useful. A Justice who doesn’t bring her personal experience to the role is not doing her job.

I have a lot of sympathy for the cautious conservatism expressed by Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott. Skepticism of radical change is a healthy sentiment; the unintended consequences of change need to be considered, not only on the court but in Congress. This is reflected in the Court’s reliance on precedence; precedence is not, though, a straitjacket: the law evolves with society, and needs to reflect social changes that happen outside the control of law and politics.

The Republican “strict constructionism” is not a version of skeptical conservatism, though. It is a power strategy, pure and simple, to ensure that particular kinds of laws are reviewed favorably by the Courts. The Right on the Supreme Court can be just as “activist” as the Left, but avoids the Republicans’ criticism. I would much rather have an “active” court that wrestles with the implications of their decisions, than a “passive” rubber stamp on an odd literalist reading of law.