Sanitizing history

 

There’s an old saying that most of us have heard a thousand times, with a hundred variations: Who doesn’t know the past is doomed to repeat its mistakes. If we don’t study history, we’ll bring ourselves down by repeating the follies of earlier generations. It seems, though, in our rush toward patriotism, that bit of advice is being left behind. But that’s not new.

I read today that schoolchildren are not being taught about the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of about 60,000 Native Americans from Florida and the Deep South to Oklahoma in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead of being taught how the people of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were marched under guard, with many dying, school children are told that the Indians agreed to move to make room for new settlement. A blatant and horrible distortion of the truth. They were moved to make way for white greed.

Similarly, at least one textbook informs children that Africans came here as “workers”—no mention of slave ships, slavery, cruel overseers, families torn apart. I suppose children are also not being taught about the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII. Another big blot on our history. I’m reading a novel called Clark and Division right now—the title being the name of an intersection on Chicago’s North Side, in a community where many Nisei (first generation) and Issei (born in Japan) were settled when transferred from internment camps.

Truth in history is giving way today to the current furor over critical race theory. If it weren’t sad, I’d be amused by the people who are so emphatic that CRT (as it is called) should never be taught in K-12. If only these loud voices knew that they make themselves look stupid. CRT is a graduate school discipline which studies the effects of racism on our society. It is mostly confined to law schools and would never be taught to school children. I love the response of an elementary school teacher who said, “If I can get them to read and write and do basic math, I’m a success. Who would have time to teach anything more?”

Here in Texas our governor has decided to enter the history fray. He was probably happy in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller were banished from the classroom, as was slavery as the cause of the Civil War, and Moses was credited with the principles espoused by America’s Founding Fathers. (Better go back up on that mountain again, Moses). I think those extreme standards have been relaxed, but now Governor Abbott has proclaimed that teachers must always use the word heroic in describing the defenders of the Alamo. That, he said, is not debatable.

That of course ties right into the controversy about the current myth-breaking book, Forget the Alamo, which essentially says that the Texas Revolution was all about slavery and the heroes were really a less-than-heroic bunch, many of them adventurers and mercenaries. Reviews ranged from recommending its pages if extra toilet paper is needed on a camping trip to “Well-written, compelling and meticulously foot-noted, [this is] an excellent analysis of the Alamo as both a significant historical event and an enduring Texas legend.”

All this reflects a burning desire on the part of some Americans and many Texans to portray our history in flawless patriotic terms. It’s not a new argument for education. From the seventies into this century, Mel and Norma Gabler from East Texas held sway over the choice of textbooks with their mom-and-pop business called Educational Research Analysts. They were fierce enemies of what they described as humanism—anything anti-American, anti-family, and anti-God. Textbook publishers, needing a profit, couldn’t do one set of books for Texas and another for the rest of the country, yet Texas was a big market. The upshot was that the Gablers basically dictated what was taught across the country—and the truth suffered.

And therein, lies the origins of today’s sanitized history. When I asked one of my grown children what they knew what the Trail of Tears was, the answer was negative. I’m afraid to ask the grandchildren. Enough, Sunday evening rant over.

 

The wrong side of history

 

When we talk today about people on the wrong side of history, we generally mean those alt-right types who would take us back to the nineteenth century when misogyny and slavery flourished, men could do no wrong, and the rich got rich while the poor suffered. But it occurred to me recently that I, who always consider myself liberal and progressive, am also on the wrong side of history.

I got back edits on a manuscript in which my language had been dramatically changed. My Indians became Native Americans, my settlers were Euro-Americans, and my slaves became “enslaved persons.” I objected, partly because of what the changes did to the flow of the language but more because they changed the story I thought I was telling.

My rather long writing career has focused on the experiences of women in the American West—Anglo women, those women who followed their men west, raised their families, saw too many babies die young, endured the terror of Indian raids, prairie fires, drought, and famine. And brought civilization to the West, settled towns, built schools and churches. They were strong women, and I admire them.

But since the 1980s the “new West” historians have told us how wrong these women (and their men) were. They didn’t “civilize” the West—they exploited it, conquered the natives, destroyed one civilization (yes, the native tribes had highly complex civilizations) to build another. And that, we are now told, is wrong.

It’s time to play “What if?” What if settlers had never come west? There be an unbelievable population jam on the East Coast. Time to go back a step, “What if Puritans had never landed on Plymouth Rock?” Well, yes, natives in North America might live in an undisturbed paradise, but what would have happened to the rest of the world? And if Columbus had never discovered America? (Okay, I know he really didn’t, but I used him figuratively as the symbol.) You see where I’m going? Maybe history just rolls along, one civilization replacing another. We’re too close to see it today, but our technological civilization has replaced that of the Industrial Revolution. Is that cause for rewriting history?

Two of the heroes of my life were C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen, who called himself a “below the salt” historian, and Texas novelist, the late Elmer Kelton. Doc, a Harvard-educated native of Iowa, took on the job of teaching English at the Texas College of Metallurgy and Mines (now University of Texas, El Paso). Elmer was the author of probably over sixty novels, many award-winners, that chronicled the settlement of Texas and the American West from the early 1800s until the end of the twentieth century. One of lessons I learned from both men was the importance of text, fiction and nonfiction, being appropriate to time and place. You couldn’t, they both believed, blame Grandpa for plowing up the prairie and making possible the great dust storms of the Depression, because Grandpa was doing what in that time and place, he believed was right.

I like to apply that theory to my writing about the nineteenth century. Back then, an Indian was an Indian. That doesn’t diminish my respect for today’s descendants of the Kiowa or the Comanche or the Apache. But it speaks honestly about history.  What happened, happened, and changing the language or tearing down statues won’t change the past. The Monroe Doctrine, which called for extending American dominance over the land from coast to coast? Sure, it seems wrong and insensitive today, but in that time and place the American West was considered a bounteous wonderland just waiting for men to settle it and make their fortunes. We can’t rewrite history.

I admire the women I’ve written about, and I’ll keep telling their stories in my own way. Though there’s a caveat—several of them were married to men who were failures. George Armstrong Custer led his men into a trap and lost his golden curls; John Charles Frémont was a failure at almost everything he tried, from the conquering of California (he returned east in chains and disgrace) to his unsuccessful run for the presidency. But that’s another story.

Rant over.

PS: It’s now why I wrote this blog, but my historical novels, Libbie (Elizabeth Bacon Custer) and Jessie (Jessie Benton Frémont), will be available in reprint this May. And no, the language in them was not changed. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌