Journal of the Plague Year: On History

History is the story we tell about our present, using the past as the main characters.

Up until I was ten, I lived in New Jersey.  For those readers who do not live in the United States, New Jersey is a small state (in terms of area, not population) located between two large metropolitan areas--New York and Philadelphia.  Where we were, in central New Jersey along the coast, we were in the orbit of New York, and so we got all of the New York media and New York oriented content.  And yet, Oceanport was not a suburb, at least in the newly-built post-World War II sense of a suburb.  It was really more of a small town--older, more conservative--that happened to be 90 or so minutes on the train from New York City.

Fourth grade was the last year I lived in Oceanport, and for social studies we spent the whole year on New Jersey history.  That study culminated in the fourth grade class putting on a play about New Jersey history.  I think about this play a lot, mostly because every time I tell this story people think I'm making this up, but I promise you I am not.  The premise was that Dorothy, of The Wizard of Oz fame, gets rerouted from Oz to New Jersey in the tornado.  Upon arriving in the Garden State, she immediately proceeds to, well, talk shit about New Jersey.  At which point, a group of New Jersey kids offer to show her the error of her ways, and lead her in a tour through time highlighting all of the interesting facts about New Jersey.  For example, did you know that parts of what became New Jersey were, for a brief time in the 17th Century, a Swedish colony?  Did you know that New Jersey had its own Tea Party a la the one in Boston?  Almost surely you did not know these things, but you would have if, like Dorothy, you were educated by eager New Jersey-oriented kids with the power to travel through time.

For my part, I played "the Wizard of Menlo Park [New Jersey]," Thomas Edison.  From what I remember, my message as Edison could be summarized as "do you like being able to see at night?  If so, you have me, and by extension New Jersey, to thank for that.  You're welcome."  I must say, based on what I have read about Edison subsequently to the role, I think my performance was pretty faithful to the character--Edison seems like a narcissistic, self-satisfied jerk, a kind of proto-Elon Musk.  I also wore my Mom's lab coat while playing Edison, which I thought was awesome and was probably the highlight for me personally.

That play, as silly as it might seem to analyze a school project for ten-year olds, actually says quite a lot about how the teachers and other adults in 1988, in a small town in New Jersey, thought about themselves and about the world.  As you can see with the Dorothy bit, people in New Jersey have a pervasive sense of being dismissed and disrespected, relegated to being an appendage to other, more glamorous places.  That play was a statement that this place matters on its own terms, not just as part of some larger entity.  My mother, born and raised in New Jersey, gets extremely defensive if people make fun of the Garden State, despite not having lived there for over 30 years.  Heck, I often reflexively defend New Jersey (seriously, it's actually pretty in many places and the beaches are great).  That play was an expression of the Underdog Story, of the Silent Majority Story, of the story of everyone whose accomplishments and achievements get swallowed up by the bigger, the more glamorous, the more popular.

But it is not just the tone; there is also the content.  If I remember correctly, Act 2 was all about the native inhabitants of New Jersey, the Lenape tribe.  We learned a lot about the Lenape tribe that year (I seem to remember some sort of museum we went to that was all about them).  And, unlike what previous generations probably would have received, everything we were told about them was positive--they were great farmers, using fish to fertilize the soil if I remember correctly.  But, when Act 2 turned into Act 3 and we were into the Swedish and English settlers, they disappeared, like a puff of smoke.  They were a thing that existed in the past, and then had no further interaction with the rest of the story that was being told.  They had no lineage, no legacy--here one moment, gone the next.  They were a prop, a bit of trivia.  They existed, but they didn't matter.

It's also interesting, in retrospect, that from Act 4 and the American Revolution, we jumped to Thomas Edison in Act 5.  Nothing at all about the Civil War.  Nothing about the Underground Railroad, or New Jersey's tardy (for a Northern state) abolition of slavery.  It's easy to talk about the Lost Cause and the Southern hagiography of the Confederacy, but I think not enough people talk about the profound ambiguity that the many in the North have regarding the Civil War and its outcome.

Which provides us a nice transition to what I really want to talk about, and that is the recent wave of tearing down statues in various public places of Confederates and/or racists.  Folks who are upset about this development have generally accused those pulling down the statutes of having an ideological agenda--usually rounded up into the vague category of "wokeness."  And, on a basic level, that's true.  Pulling down a statute is a ideological act.  But it was equally an ideological act to put the same statute up in the first place.  If statutes are a manifestation of history, and history is a story that we tell using the past to form our sense of ourselves now, then the statutes are a manifestation of that story.  There is not, and has never been, an ideologically neutral statue.

The vast majority of the Confederate statues that are being torn down were put up in the 1920s.  They were part of an ideological campaign, organized in the South but supported by individuals all over the country, to remove and whitewash the moral dimension to the Civil War.  This was done for two, interrelated reasons.  First, folks down South wanted to define themselves as Southerners, but didn't want to have that identity dominated by losing the war.  So, you get the "everyone on both sides was just doing their best" narrative that defines a certain strand of Civil War analysis, in which we can love and celebrate people on both sides, in a (fake) ideologically free manner.  It's the same basic idea as Avengers: Civil War--Iron Man and Captain America (or, in this case, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee) chose up sides and had a big fight over something that seemed important at the time, but actually really didn't matter all that much in the end, and certainly didn't matter enough to worry about when facing the threat of Thanos.  Losing the war, and the circumstances and consequences of that loss, become a side discussion to the core narrative of the brave fighters who had a brave fight for reasons that we try very hard to obscure.

The other reason, of course, is to avoid the conclusion that the Civil War was a struggle for liberation for the enslaved population of the South.  Certainly, this was done in part to provide cover for those who wanted to recreate and support systems that kept African-Americans in a grossly subordinate position, often functionally not must different from slavery.  But, I think even more critically, it allowed a large portion of Southerners to look at themselves as the good guys of the story.  If Lincoln and the Union were Team Emancipation and the Confederacy was Team Oppression, you have to be a pretty dedicated racist to sign on to Team Oppression.  But if the Civil War was Avengers: Civil War, about obscure amorphous political concepts like "state's rights," then one who is temperamentally inclined toward the Confederacy can do so much easier, without having to confront troubling moral questions.  

The "wokeness" campaign to tear down Confederate statutes is about challenging that narrative of neutrality.  The Civil War was a war of liberation versus tyranny, and the side of liberation won, thank God.  If Lee and Jackson and Forrest and the rest of them had succeeded in their objectives, hundreds of thousands of human beings would have continued under the slavemaster's lash.  Nothing about what the Confederacy fought for should be celebrated on any level, nor those who fought on its behalf.  It can be justified only through what we have seen for the last 100 years--a very conscious, concerted campaign of ideological whitewashing.

So, for my part--tear every single one of those statutes down.  Bury the false neutrality and all of its manifestations in the ash heap of history.  But, in doing so, let's not replace one false neutrality with another one.  Lots of people were mad that a statute to General Grant was torn down, but I actually think this was a positive development.  We can't forget that the folks who lead the charge to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery, as soon as that was over, embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Native Americans in the West.  If we can't accept that sort of criticism, then we will be accused of being hypocrites, and rightfully so.

What is ultimately at stake in the tearing down of the comforting, self-congratulatory narratives of the past is the extent to which one's identity can be grounded in some historical lineage while maintaining the moral high-ground.  Every history is problematic.  Heck, every modern group or identity is problematic.  No history, no identity, no group membership can guarantee us that we are going to be with the angels.  Indeed, the search for such an identity, the search for the moral high-ground, is itself a large measure of the problem.  "No one is actually woke," is a more modern, but nevertheless accurate and correct translation of Biblical observation that "no one is righteous, not even one."  All we can do is to try to stand up for what is right and what is just in our own time and place, as we see it.  Not so that we can become, or worse yet seen as, woke, but because it is part of our obligation to one another. 

In any event, there is no neutral, non-ideological history, and there never has been.  Fourth grade New Jersey history plays are deeply ideological, protests about history are ideological, statues are ideological.  The question is what sort of ideology they communicate.