Why History?

 Interesting story - vignette that sounds familiar from about 80 years ago. February 1961 in Montgomery, AL where the seven states who seceded gathered to create the Confederacy one hundred years earlier … the city organized a weeklong celebration. White men dressed up as confederate colonels and women as confederate belles for a parade and fair attended by fifty thousand. There was also a pageant that told the dramatic story of secession and resistance to federal power. The parade passed directly in front of Dexter Avenue Baptist, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The pageant included a detailed reenactment and swearing-in of Jefferson Davis, played by a local attorney. 

Judge Walter Jones said white people had gained “a deeper appreciation of the things the Confederacy fought for, and helped them to realize that unrestrained federal power is destroying this nation.” Another newspaper comment was “Today the South is facing many of the same problems it faced in 1861. Federal dictatorship is literally being stuffed down our throats … We should stand up and fight as our forefathers did so we can lick this ever-present battle with the federal government as it continues to usurp rights delegated to the states.”

This was from the prologue in Blight’s American Oracle.

Blight also talks through the council organized to commemorate 100 years since the civil war. One coalition (obvious who) announced they considered any commemoration of Emancipation nothing but “propaganda … to reopen the wounds of the war.”

Please, if you don’t know, keep the dates in your mind … 1954 was the famous Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional. 1955 was the successful bus boycott in Montgomery. The March on Washington was 1963 where MLK said “I have a dream,” and also, directly connecting dots to the centennial “The struggle for freedom, Mr. President, of which the Civil War was but a bloody chapter, continues throughout our land today. The courage and heroism of Negro citizens at Montgomery, Little Rock, New Orleans, Prince Edward County, and Jackson, Mississippi is only a further effort to affirm the democratic heritage so painfully won, in part, upon the grassy battlefields of Antietam, Lookout Mountain, and Gettysburg.” 

So you see how our country history is always washing back and forth between past present and future? Do you see why their is always an old recalcitrance that must be known, discussed, understood? King knew it. He stood one hundred years after the emancipation proclamation in front of all the world (who today has never heard snippets from this speech?) and connected the dots. 

City officials in Montgomery gleefully portrayed and celebrated their secession one hundred years earlier. A committee preparing a proper celebration of the centennial of the end of the US Civil War, but with the NAACP and CORE and all the other groups on the loose trying to beat back segregation and Jim Crow, they deem any talk of Emancipation as deemed propaganda because they know that you can use the past to change the present. 

Not everyone was interested in the past. One President Kennedy who was to be at the celebration announced a schedule conflict and sent a video instead. His conflict? He preferred to attend the America’s Cup yacht races. 

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David Blight begins American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era telling us about Robert Penn (Red) Warren. Warren wrote poems, essays, and novels. His most famous work is All the Kings Men. Blights says it describes Warren’s Mellvillian views: “History, personal and collective, first shapes and then infests the present, making itself a struggle to fight against fate at every turn. It is always the past, as Warren like to put it, that ‘rebukes’ the present, especially when proud humanity thinks it can live above or overcome it.” 

This reminds me of the flat, blank pages that so many progressives seem to operate from. That is as unreal as the foggy myths and legends that haunt Lee and the old confederacy. I don’t think we are fated, but I do think if we look hard we will see that change is more difficult. That history shapes and infests the present, as Blight writes it. 

In Warren’s little book called The Legacy of the Civil War, which I have profitably read twice and could use another read soon, he writes “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” And further he goes on to, argue against the idea of fate. Melville, as FO Matthiessen wrote, “is not so concerned with individual sin as with the titanic uncontrollable forces which seem to dwarf man altogether.” And Warren certainly identified with Melville and Hawthorne over Emerson and Thoreau (called him a big fake meatball, haha). But here in Legacy he writes “Can we, in fact, learn only that we are victims of nature and history? Or can we learn that we can make, or at least have a hand in the making of, our future?” 

Yes. But for me it is a hard won yes. I have a Melville leaning myself, quickly identifying with the titanic forces and fate. Is it a conservative personality? In my mind, the riches of culture — whichever you love, music, novels, opera, government are only available if we conserve them. But maybe this is a false dichotomy I generate in my own mind. My more progressive minded friends don’t seem to have this struggle and look at me funny when I bring it up. 

And yet, history can make us sick. It can lead to a horrible kind of adult role play. I feel like the term cosplay (costume play) which people use for Dragon Con is analogous to the way people live and find meaning today … cosplay a cowboy, cosplay a zombie apocolypse surviver cosplay an independent wild man. 

Again from Legacy referring to the White Citizens’ Councils and the Klu Klux Klan — “Does the man who, in the relative safety of mob anonymity, stands howling vituperation at a little Negro girl being conducted into a school building, feel himself at one with those gaunt, barefoot, whiskery scarecrows who fought it out, breast to breast, to the death, at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, in May 1864? Can the man howling in the mob imagine General R. E. Lee, CSA, shaking hands with Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas?” (Note that in 1961 Negro was a preferred term used by MLK, etc.)

We see this cosplay constantly today. Performative politics is the way of this century with its clicks and likes and eyeball counts. I honestly think much of this comes from the giant canyon where meaning used to live that affects everyone. I shy from stating so emphatically as we can look back at the 60s (80 years ago) and see scenes like that above. So the hollow place was already there. A life empty of meaning is a void to be filled and for some a kind of nostalgia takes over. If we can be like the imagined heroes of old. 

Yet, as I said earlier, we cannot just blank out history and pretend that we now operate on an empty page. Morals, power, peoples and nations does not work that way. James Baldwin writes - “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” This is from The Fire Next Time. 

In a personal letter to his friend Mary Painter he said traveling back to the US in 1964 — “Returning to America has never made me joyful, but never before has it made me so sad … [tiring at the thought of more activist engagement] It is a doomed nation, a doomed people—if I were not an American I would say Tant mieux, Qu’il creve [all the better if it were to die]. Maybe, then, whoever is left will have learned something. But I am an American and cannot shrug my shoulders.”

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Thanks to David Blight’s American Oracle for helping me engage with history in such a personal way through Warren, Baldwin and the two historians. I also have a substack that I am starting to post on if you want to see this there it is HERE