History's Tall Tales

My own introduction to history came in those earliest elementary school years when we were to commemorate Thanksgiving with our own special drawing. I earned a gold star for my crayon depiction of the Pilgrims and Indians as they shared a feast at the community table, part of the cartoon historical narrative we had been fed at the time.

My drawing somehow missed this English account of 1610 Jamestown:

“Soldiers were sent out ‘to take revenge.’ They fell upon the Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard ‘and shoteing owt their Braynes in the water.’ The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.”

The textbook history of our great nation is the tale told by the victors (Churchill). Our traditional historical accounts somehow come across as refined, sanitized, packaged for consumption — like so much sausage — to be fed to a credulous public. Missing is any sense of how the sausage was made.

Howard Zinn sought to fill in such blanks with the book that inspired our very first MM session (click: MM 7/5/16 A People's History Of the United States (the source of that above-cited English account). His work was intended to triangulate on the truth by retelling the historical narrative from the perspective of the actual human dynamics underpinning the signature events.

The book purports to provide a 360-degree view of history, as much from the perspective of the vanquished as that of the victors. The true motivations driving many historical events were often far less noble than as served up in the conventional retrospect. And, yes, there is much of the brutal and bloody detail, though the description of the violence is not gratuitous as it provides additional context to understanding our past (i.e. if we justify the breaking of eggs as necessary to make an omelet we need to at least understand something about egg breakage).

Orwell viewed history not as an objective record of facts but as a battleground for ideological control, where truth could be manipulated by those in power such that so-called facts become malleable if they conflict with ruling ideology. He warned against the dangers of losing objective truth in an environment beset by ideological distortion. Perhaps it has always been so.

Let us take as an example the events of January 6, 2020, a subject so loaded that many will refuse to even discuss it. But, if you were to take it on, how would you describe for future history books the capitol incursion that day: as an insurrection or an act of patriotism?

Just be aware of that initial reflex as it might itself amount to a kind of an ideological tell. Let us also stipulate that nobody can know with objective certainty what transpired that election cycle as to the integrity of the voting machines or the process itself. As such, the difference between labeling the event as an act of insurrection rather than one of patriotism comes down to the actors’ state of mind as to whether they genuinely believed it was a compromised election and, thus, itself amounted to an assault on democracy.

So where might one turn for such a first pass of history? Journalism, that so-called first draft of history? The hyperactive Id of social media? In a way the subsequent legal pardon of those thousand indictments cheated history of some needed clarification.

Our discussion is meant, not to relitigate that particular sordid chapter of unfolding history, but rather to examine the subjective way so much of history is similarly refracted. Instead of a focus article, maybe refer to the following chapter headings of the Zinn book for areas in which history may have been “made”:

Take Nothing by Conquest (taking Texas from the Mexicans); Emancipation without Freedom (the Civil War and Reconstruction); the Other Civil War (unionization); Robber Barons and Rebels (rise of the Industrialist); the Empire and the People (advent of foreign adventure); the Socialist Challenge (social reform movements); Self Help in Hard Times (the Depression); Or Does it Explode (Civil Rights Movement); The Impossible Victory: Vietnam (the domino theory); the Seventies (women, American Indian movements, Watergate); Carter-Reagan-Bush (post-“malaise”); the Clinton Presidency; the Coming Revolt of the Guards (the Great Recession, Occupy Movement).

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