Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 2: History is about "sides" and taking sides
History is a matter of facts but also of analysis and interpretation. There are different approaches to history: conservative, liberal, reactionary, left, Christian nationalist, and neo-Confederate being the most notable for American history at the moment. There was a Progressive strain of understanding American history associated particularly with Charles and Mary Beard. The Trumpista version of history associated with Trump’s “The 1776 Project”1 relies on a rightwing trend called the West Coast Straussians2.
These various frameworks for understanding history are not the same as “good” or “bad” history in the sense of meeting professional academic or journalistic standards. Even the most ideologically-obsessed historian may come up with important documentary material that others have missed. But just making up stuff that didn’t happen is faking it.
That said, some more sectarian trends have pretty bad reputations when it comes to making stuff up, notably the Christian-nationalist variety. The neo-Confederate variety hasn’t been known to be particularly scrupulous in its accuracy. But the most respectable versions of Lost Cause history - that had far more influence even in academia than they ever should have had - were also notable for their deceptively selective and highly ideological presentations of the facts.
The stuff specifically associated with the “1776 Project” is basically just propaganda trash, and that also holds for the more “highbrow” work of the West Coast Straussians associated with it.
There is a left, pro-labor, and antislavery tradition in telling American history that tends to focus on the development of democracy and the rule of law, and on the expansion of civil rights and personal freedoms. Notable even during the heyday of Lost Cause dominance in American historiography, there was an important academic trend that was represented by the Journal of Negro History, known after 2001 as the Journal of African-American History. That and other publications which dissented from the dominant Lost Cause narrative were there telling people who wanted to listen and who had access to them about the dishonesty and reactionary political bent of Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historiography.
The journalist and columnist Charlie Pierce takes something like a democracy-and-labor-focused view of US history, and he shows in this column about how Robert Kennedy used a vision of history to frame the challenges of his moment:
In the long perspective of history, knowing what we know now, the right of the United States to the "moral leadership of the planet" was a pretty dubious proposition. The coups in Iran and in Guatemala, and Kennedy's own involvement in plots to ice Fidel Castro give the lie to that particular phrase. But at that moment in 1968, Kennedy believed in it as a living aspiration, and people didn't look at it as a burlesque or an occasion for performative irony. The country was beginning to come apart, and the storm hadn't begun to break yet, and Kennedy had given himself to the hard-running tide.
I am impatient with appeals to lost American innocence. There are too many dead Indigenous people, too many enslaved, too many successful appeals to the money power back through time for me to take them seriously anymore. Which is why the current attempts to whitewash our history, and the success that tinpot hacks like Ronald DeSantis have had with it, climb atop my last nerve and never get off of it.
Because I grew up with that whitewashed history—only my version had a thick overlay of religion to it, since I went to Catholic schools throughout my primary and secondary education. (I also went to a Catholic college, too, but enough secular professors in my chosen courses made sure the history I learned was far less rigid.) It was an extremely weird history that I was taught.3 [my emphasis]
Pierce and people who take a similar perspective can look at the evils of the past, and at the struggles against them, and at the complicated reality that in individuals and political movements “evil can lie so close to truth.” (Kate Campbell)4
Adelbert Ames (1835-1933): Pro-Reconstruction Republican Governor of Mississippi, (1874-76) who made a desperate attempt to preserve democracy in the state against the rightwing “Redemption” movement. Born during Andrew Jackson’s Presidency, died three weeks after Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as President.
McKenna, Konstantin (2021): The 1776 Project Is a Desperate Search for the Right Enemies. Foreign Policy 01/21/2021. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/21/1776-project-desperate-search-enemies-identity-politics-unamerican/> (Accessed: 2023-02-04).
Tati, Joshua (2021): The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’. The Bulwark 01/22/2021. <https://www.thebulwark.com/the-origins-of-trumps-slapdash-last-second-1776-report/> (Accessed: 2023-02-04).
Pierce, Charles (2023): Robert Kennedy Spoke to Us Like History Was Living Around Us. Esquire Politics 03/18/2023. <https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a43352775/robert-kennedy-history/> (Accessed 2023-19-03).
Campbell, Kate (1997): Signs Following. Flowlez. <https://flowlez.com/en/songs/signs-following-874037/> (Accessed 2023-19-03).