February 28, 2006
Eponymous II Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I always used to wonder what the term “Dickensian” meant. The Dickens novels I had read were distinguished by their sweeping grandeur, covering many different social classes, geographical areas, literary and conversational styles, and moods and humors. I assumed that “Dickensian” was meant to describe something similarly broad-ranging or ambitious, and it took me years to figure out that in fact it refers specifically to grinding poverty. I’ve never figured out why that is. Similarly, after reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and then encountering the term “Orwellian,” I wondered what it was supposed to mean. Allegorical? Making use of animals? Anti-Communist? But just recently I read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his military service with an anti-Fascist unit in the Spanish Civil War. It was published in 1937, while that war was still going on. Most of the book is devoted to describing the dangers and the physical and mental discomforts that went along with being in a war zone. That part is detailed, pungent, and extremely vivid, and well worth reading. Amid all the grimness, amusing notes often pop up, sometimes unintentionally, as when the author repeatedly and without irony discusses tobacco as a necessity on par with food and water. A few of the chapters, however, are devoted to describing the snake pit of leftist parties, factions, and organizations that struggled for power on the anti-Fascist side. (To his credit, Orwell does his best to keep this political material separate from the rest of the book.) Orwell had come to Spain with no strong allegiance, motivated by simple anti-Fascist zeal. He hooked on with a militia aligned with what was called, in the parlance of the times, the Anarchist faction. As the book goes on, he describes his growing disillusionment with the more powerful, Soviet-backed Communist faction, which came to dominate the left and sometimes seemed to be as much of an enemy as the Fascists. Far be it from me to defend the Communists, or any group fighting on any side in that uniformly awful war. But it’s interesting to note the points of doctrine on which Orwell faults the Communists. The Anarchists, who had seized control in Catalonia, ostensibly on behalf of the workers, were dedicated to revolution. They scorned Soviet-style communism as “state capitalism.” The Communists’ biggest problem, says Orwell, was that they weren’t interested in a working-class revolution in Spain; they just wanted to win the war against Franco. So to gain wider support at home and abroad, they made concessions to the status quo, accepting “bourgeois democracy” (i.e., democracy); letting peasants retain their landholdings; and leaving some businesses in the hands of their owners. In other words, the Communists allowed the people of Spain to choose their own leaders, instead of having labor-union officials run their lives; let them work their own plots, instead of assigning them to collective farms; and permitted shopkeepers to keep running their shops. By so doing, Orwell says, they stabbed Spain in the back and betrayed the workers. So now I understand what “Orwellian” means.
February 28, 2006
Eponymous Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:15 AM EST Another point Joshua Zeitz raises in his review of Taylor Branch’s book is the ever-vexing question of naming buildings (and monuments and institutions and such) after imperfect people. After mentioning J. Edgar Hoover’s long years of harassing and spying on his enemies, Josh wonders why Congress has not rechristened the FBI’s headquarters building, which is currently named after Hoover. There’s a lot of that going around. In recent years, numerous localities across the country have prohibited naming schools after people who owned slaves, including most of our early Presidents. Some Southerners object to naming parks, roads, or anything else after Confederates. Woodrow Wilson’s name has been removed from schools because of his racist views (he repeatedly praised the Ku Klux Klan, for example). I once read the autobiography of Thomas Hunter, the nineteenth-century founder of New York City’s Hunter College. As I recall, it ends with a bizarre disquisition on phrenology that purports to prove the inferiority of non-white races based on the shapes of their heads. Will Hunter College be next? It’s easy to make fun of this tendency?but then I remember something that I noticed at a recent college basketball game. The program listed the players’ high schools, and I saw that one of them had gone to Nathan Bedford Forrest H.S. The player in question was a black woman, and I wondered how she felt about attending a school named after the perpetrator of the Fort Pillow massacre and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps she didn’t care. Teenagers tend to be ironic about such things, and I can even imagine someone viewing her attendance as a way to posthumously stick it to General Forrest. But I can also readily understand someone objecting. This is a case where if a significant fraction of the area’s residents object, it’s probably best to change the name. In general, though, I wonder if we pay too much attention to such things. Sure, Hoover was a sneaky creep, but he also built a very effective law-enforcement operation that caught thousands of criminals. And what about Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who imprisoned hundreds of thousands of American on no charge except having the wrong ancestry? Should their names be stripped from our government buildings and public works? As I said, in the grand scheme of things, the name of a building is not very important. If people care enough to want to change it, we should be glad to see them taking an interest in history. But to avoid too sweeping a purge, it might be best to evaluate the people for whom we have named things in light of the time and place in which they lived. Owning slaves was not unusual in the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or even those of Ulysses S. Grant, who owned some slaves for a few years. In the states where those men lived, it was not even looked down upon. So from that standpoint, barring their names would seem a bit excessive. The views of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Hunter, strange as they sound today, were also quite widely accepted in their time. Forrest is a little harder to defend. There’s no question that he was brave and resourceful, and excuses can be made for his conduct, but my sense of the situation is that there are other soldiers with fewer blemishes on their records that we could honor just as well. Controversies of this sort make me think of Malcolm X. While I’m not a fan of his, I know that many people are, and most of them manage to draw inspiration from him without adopting his wilder ideas. So when I see Malcolm’s image on U.S. stamps and his name attached to schools and highways, I don’t protest the use of my tax dollars to glorify someone with whom I have severe differences; I accept it as part of living in a pluralistic society. I think a sizable dose of toleration, along with a healthy measure of teenage-style irony and whateverism, would leave everyone better off. Above all, however, I think that disputes of this kind show how strong America already is. Happy indeed is the country that has the leisure to spend its time worrying about building names and state flags.
February 27, 2006
Secrecy Is a Historian’s Best Friend Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST I have not read At Canaan’s Edge, Taylor Branch’s new book about Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement, but I have read several reviews of it, including one by our own Joshua Zeitz. As often happens, each reviewer brings his own perspective to the material. A conservative critic bemoans the movement’s degeneration from egalitarianism and peacefulness into separatism and violence; a liberal critic laments that King’s death kept him from leading the country in a new and radical direction; and Josh, a pro historian, while generally praising the book, points out some lapses in Branch’s scholarship and aspects of the story that he might have pursued more thoroughly. One point that all the reviews mention is that much of Branch’s information comes from records of bugs and other illegal surveillance conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It must have been a little creepy for Branch to listen to the tapes and jot down important revelations while thinking the whole time what a gross violation of civil liberties they were. Yet, as I wrote in the early days of President Clinton’s perjury scandal, since Revolutionary times, Americans have never shied away from using evidence obtained in questionable ways. And while nobody would defend illegal surveillance on the grounds that it helps historians, neither would anything be gained by ignoring the wealth of information that is contained in the FBI’s files. The larger question here has to do with secrecy and the historical profession. A few years ago our magazine ran a column by Richard Reeves criticizing President George W. Bush’s decision not to declassify some documents from the Reagan administration. While there may have been many possible reasons to oppose the decision, the focus of Reeves’s article was summed up in its headline: “A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.” And if you’re writing a book about the Reagan administration, as Reeves was at the time (see his article about the experience), that assessment is certainly true. In the long term, however, greater secrecy leads to greater openness. Reeves’s column points out that much of what we know about the Nixon administration comes from minutely detailed records obsessively collected by Nixon’s aides, which were later made available to historians. Those records had been compiled with the expectation that they would remain under Nixon’s control, as had been the case with Presidents since George Washington. The same is true of Hoover’s FBI archives; he never suspected that they would one day be made public. Only in the mid-1970s, prompted by the Watergate scandal, did laws and court decisions begin to seriously restrict the power of government officials to keep documents under wraps. The result? No more Oval Office taping, of course (a practice that began in Eisenhower’s day and has yielded important information about the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War). Nor would any President today be crazy enough to let his aides assemble a Nixon-style collection of revealing documents. In fact, when our current President took office, he announced that he would send no e-mails for the duration of his term in office, since if he did, they would be subject to subpoena. Around the Vatican it’s said that officers of the Catholic Church are trained to “think in centuries.” Historians need not be so farsighted, but they should at least think in decades. The sooner documents and records can be released to the public, the more effort will be made to destroy them, keep them secret forever, or avoid their creation in the first place. But if the secrecy of documents is assured for a couple of generations, they will eventually become available to scholars in much greater volume. This creates an awkward interval, after an event is over but before all the pertinent records are available, in which historians must rely on partial documentation—though, to be fair, it’s also the interval in which the participants are still around to be interviewed. And to be sure, there are far weightier arguments for and against government secrecy, ones that have nothing to do with the writing of history. To the extent, however, that history enters the discussion, it should weigh in on the side of greater privacy and confidentiality for longer periods. From a historian’s standpoint, more secrecy today means more openness tomorrow.
| 
