Racists going to do what racists do

 In his biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight relays the following story about racist conspiracymongering as the Civil War came to an end.

What's the saying? History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Morality then, morality now

I am reading David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass -- with current arguments about monuments and Black Lives Matter very much in mind -- and I am freshly struck by how many slave-owners were rapists who treated their own children, their own flesh and blood, as property to be bought and sold. It was a terrible thing.

Not a new observation, of course. It's just hitting me anew again tonight. I don't think it's presentism to judge that behavior. Frederick Douglass, certainly, knew it was wrong at the time.

Bag O' Books: THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Three thoughts about THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Jill Lepore:

* The book follows two streams of thought -- one that weighs, from the earliest moments of European settlement in the Americas, whether the United States has lived up to its creeds, and another that follows how various technical and media developments (the rise of newspapers, telegraphs, radios, television and the internet) have affected the evolution of our democracy. Long story short: We've fallen short a lot but also progressed -- though Lepore doesn't elide the falling short in order to put on a happy face. As for the technology: America has seen a lot of utopianism that never really panned out.

* It's good to read history during these crazy times. America has "been there, done that" with division and dissension so much over the centuries -- and not just during the Civil War. It's good to remember that we're not experiencing much that is new, that hasn't been experienced, by generations prior to our own.

* If the book has a flaw, it's in the last chapter or two as the timeline moves into the modern era, where Lepore's evident rage at current events shines through. It's not exclusively reserved for the right, as you might expect: She rails against campus hate speech codes and deplatforming, as exercises that go against the debate and free speech that are at the heart of a vital democracy. She didn't sign "The Letter," and this book came out well ahead of that, but it seems likely she is sympatico with its sentiments. 

Trump, America and history

I keep thinking about Donald Trump's most recent interview with Fox News, in which he was asked what message he would send to Black Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. His response:

My message is that we have a great country, we have the greatest country on Earth. We have a heritage, we have a history and we should learn from the history, and if you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it, you take away that whole era and you’re going to go back to it sometime. People won’t know about it. They’re going to forget about it. It’s okay.

Now this is a lot of nothing masquerading as something. We know that Trump's knowledge of history is limited, and I've argued that he doesn't really have a sense of history -- if he could think beyond today's news cycle, this hour's tweet, he might take very different actions with an understanding that history's eye is on him.

I've come to suspect, though, that Trump sees and tells American history like he tells his own -- it's a narrative, one in which inconvenient facts are omitted or glossed over, so that the story is one of ever-greater triumphs, never mind all those bankruptcies and unpaid workers along the way. The end of the story is now, and the end of the story is that he's rich, so he must have won, right? It is history as PR.

A fundamental dividing line in this country is between those who want history to be public relations, and those who have a more tragic sense of how events have proceeded. It is probably easier to get elected if you hold the former view. But the people with the latter view, in my estimation, probably have a more realistic understanding of the country we live in.

Did progressivism cause the Tulsa Massacre?

Not going to link this. But still worth understanding the Trumpist perspective.

A couple of thoughts:

* AmGreatness is pretty closely associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative outfit whose primary role these days is to provide an intellectual sheen for Trumpism. There long-term project, though, sees the original sin of America mostly in terms of the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, along with with the "administrative state" it helped enable. Some of these critiques have merit -- Woodrow Wilson was really a racist asshole! -- but it is also the proverbial man with the hammer who sees the whole world as a nail. The errors of Herbert Croly explain everything bad in the United States, even when they don't, really. Ascribing the Tulsa massacre to progressivism is ridiculous. 

* Why? Because Americans were enslaving and killing African Americans long before progressivism reared its head in the United States. The KKK was not a left-leaning outfit. Americans didn't need ideology to kill black people. It's what we've always done. 

To be fair, AmGreatness acknowledges that, but only in throat-clearing fashion. 

* Anyway, for the AmGreatness crowd, racism doesn't seem to exist, except in that A) it can make the left look bad, or B) when it does happen, it's actually "multiculturalists" criticizing and opposing white conservatives on college campuses. Meanwhile, the AmGreatness crowd is pretty terrified of the influence of minorities in the country's culture. Make of that what you will.

I can honestly say that racism in American life has come from the left, the center, and the right. I don't think Trumpist conservatives are willing to make the same concession. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that position is held in good faith.

It's probably a good thing Pearl Harbor is fading into history

On this 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, there seems to be a great deal of hand-wringing that the event is soon to no longer be part of our collective living memory. Today's New York Times story is pretty typical of the angst:

The fact that this moment was inevitable has made this no less a difficult year for the survivors, some of whom are concerned that the event that defined their lives will soon be just another chapter in a history book, with no one left to go to schools and Rotary Club luncheons to offer a firsthand testimony of that day. As it is, speaking engagements by survivors like Mr. Kerr — who said he would miss church services on Sunday to commemorate the attack — can be discouraging affairs.

“I was talking in a school two years ago, and I was being introduced by a male teacher, and he said, ‘Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor,’ ” said Mr. Kerr. “And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’

“Can you imagine?” he said.

Well, yeah, I can imagine. I don't have any idea how old this girl was, but it's entirely conceivable—even probable—that Pearl Harbor took place before her grandparents were born. This isn't just history to today's elemetary school students: It's ancient history. Put it this way: If you were in elementary school 30 years ago—as I was—how much did you know and understand about World War I? I was a kid when this "Cheers" episode came out, and I remember being astonished as a child that there were any veterans of that war left.

This isn't a call to let Pearl Harbor slip from our collective memories. "Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed etc." But it's probably not a bad thing to let that memory become a little less urgent. There are plenty of cultures around the globe which harbor grudges from wars and battles that took place centuries upon centuries ago—those memories have remained urgent, often with the result that those cultures have a hard time moving into the future: They're too busy clinging to the past. There are still people who hate the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor. What a wasted, useless emotion.

And there are some folks who use their observance of the anniversary as a kind of "more American than thou" proclamation, a cudgel against those who don't keep the flame burning quite as bright. I guess I don't have much patience for that.

The longer our country and culture survive, the more battles we'll have under our belt. They'll be and seem incredibly life-shattering at the time. But we can remember them without living with them as part of our present, and we probably should: It's probably healthiest that we eventually let the old battles go. I salute the survivors of Pearl Harbor, but it's not a sin to let the memory fade, just a bit, as they fade away.

Talking Imprimis and Larry P. Arnn: America was built on the redistribution of wealth

I've recently become a subscriber to Imprimis -- the most influential conservative publication you've never heard of -- because A) I want to keep tabs on influential conservatives and B) it's free. It's published by Hillsdale College in Michigan, and consists mainly of reprinted speeches from notable conservative thinkers and writers. It's pleasantly old-fashioned, a throwback to the olden days of pamphleteering.

Just got my first issue in the mail today, and it's actually kind of a back issue, from back in December, featuring a speech by Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn. In it, he seeks to contrast the bullying and tyrannical nature of the U.S. government today -- exemplified by the mandates included in the Affordable Care Act -- with the liberating nature of the U.S. government in the early years of the republic ... as exemplified by the Homestead Act.

A quick primer on the Homestead Act, from Wikipedia:

The Homestead Act is one of several United States federal laws that gave an applicant freehold title to up to 160 acres (1/4 section, 65 hectares) of undeveloped federal land outside the original 13 colonies. The law required three steps: file an application, improve the land, and file for deed of title. Anyone who had never taken up arms against the U.S. government, including freed slaves, could file an application and evidence of improvements to a federal land office.

And here's Arnn, describing the act's liberating effects:

What the Homestead Act did was to take the western land of the United States—surely one of the greatest assets ever held by any government in history—and give 160-acre plots to anyone with the backbone to live on them and work them. These plots of land were granted regardless of who someone was and with the certainty that no one settling on them could ever vote for this congressman or that. It is one of the greatest impartial acts of legislation in all of human history. It, and things like it, built America and the character of the people who spread across it.

The principle that justified the Homestead Act has two parts, and both are found in the first 15 lines of the Declaration of Independence. The first is the idea of human equality—the idea that it does not matter what race or what family you come from, it only matters what you do—which has been the source of our greatest struggles in an attempt to live up to it.

Let's stop right there, because Arnn is committing a pretty overt act of historical amnesia in order to frame his critique of modern government this way. He's forgetting -- probably deliberately -- that people used to live on land that was "settled" under the Homestead Act. Native Americans. They may not have held title to the land that was taken by the settlers, but they surely owned it under any meaningful sense of the term.

In order for the settlers to claim and improve the land, the United States government had to send armies west to kill and clear out the Native Americans who'd lived on those lands for centuries, perhaps even millennia.

So the actual history of the Homestead Act is nearly the opposite of what Arnn advocates here: Rather than being predicated on the idea of human equality, it was steeped in racism -- the idea that the "Indians" who'd lived in America before Europeans were here were less than fully human. And interestingly, it may have been the most redistributive act the U.S. government has ever undertaken -- the genocidal-level force of arms used to take land (wealth!) and given to anybody who, well, wanted it.

I'm not suggesting that the land be given back: History has happened.

Maybe I'm being churlish. But Arnn offers up his Homestead Act example in the course of making the case that A) "absolute truth" exists and B) our leaders aren't well-educated or even believers in absolute truth -- and thank God there's Hillsdale College to offer a remedy! Arnn's version of history, though, omits huge swaths of context and fact in order to cast a tyrannical and socialistic act as embodying the most noble traditions of American freedom and equality. His example, it seems to me, greatly undermines the point he's trying to make.