History Teacher
I did a lot of things in my career in public education. I was high school Dean of Students, President of the Teacher’s Union, and a track, cross country, and wrestling coach. But for the vast majority of my career, I was a social studies teacher. I taught American Government, American History, World History, Economics, Current Affairs, and even Psychology to sixth graders through seniors over twenty-six years.
So the word “history” has deep meaning to me. And I took my mission as a history teacher seriously. I understood that, for most of my students, this would be the foundation of what they knew about the “American Experience” for the rest of their lives. They would participate (or not) as citizens, making decisions about the direction of the Nation, based in part on what they learned in “my” history class.
That didn’t mean that I wanted them to have a specific “political” view. I wasn’t indoctrinating my students into any particular ideology, including mine. In fact, many of those students are shocked reading “Trump World” essays today. They had no idea of my affiliations. And that’s how it should be.
So when people today talk about “erasing” history, I take that very seriously.
Texas History
I went to school in the 1960’s and 70’s. There was no such thing as “Black Studies” back then. Our textbooks were written with few African American participants. Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were the apparent extent of Black participation in America.
What I didn’t find out until much later, was that our textbooks were written to the specifications of the Texas State Board of Education. The entire state of Texas purchased a single American History textbook, a massive sale for any publisher. So texts were written to appeal to them. There were more pages on the Texas War of Independence, the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto, than on World War I. In the 1960’s, Texans weren’t interested in the contributions of African Americans, and so neither were we.
The First Casualty
It wasn’t until college, and my first years as a teacher that I realized the vast contribution of Black Americans to the “American Experience”. I spent a great deal of time re-learning the American story, this time from the perspective of those brought in chains. I learned that there was a lot of “erasing” in our history, even before the Revolutionary War. Take Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution. He was shot in the “Boston Massacre”, when British troops returned thrown snowballs with musket fire.
Crispus Attucks was a Black man, a man who escaped slavery. But when Paul Revere engraved the scene of the massacre, he made Attucks white for the prints headed South. The revolutionaries in Boston needed the support of the South; it wouldn’t do for the first martyr of the Revolution to be Black. Erasing history goes back a long way.
Monuments Today
So what about all of the statues and monuments that are in question today? In the museums and on the battlefields, those monuments make sense. The figure of Robert E. Lee on horseback, posted on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg should remain. He forever overlooks his greatest failure with Pickett’s Charge, a fitting fate for the “greatest” general of his time.
But his position in Richmond on Monument Avenue isn’t about his actions. That statue was erected in 1890, when the history of the Civil War was being “revised” by Southerners into the mythological “lost cause”. It was part of the regression of the South to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were treated as little more than the slaves they had been. It was only a few years later, about when the Lee Monument was erected in Charlottesville, that the Ku Klux Klan became a national power for racism and hate.
Many of the Confederate “memorials” that are being attacked today were erected as part of that revisionist history movement. They were put up to “erase” the history of slavery and rebellion that caused the Civil War. Memorials are in places like Brandenburg, Kentucky, just down the Ohio River from Louisville, a town that was part of the Union for the entire Civil War. They celebrate the losing side of the rebellion, and they stand for those who refused to give up their slaves.
American Sin
The incredibly fierce reaction to the removal of monuments is based on one of two things. The first is the “Santa Claus” effect. Through perhaps no fault of their own, long cherished beliefs people had about American history are being challenged. The “noble” Confederates, battling for states’ rights and their homeland, was a story long told to the American people.
I saw it again in a middle school curriculum this year: “…slavery was not the cause of the Civil War”. Just like Santa Claus, that’s just not true. But for slavery there would have been no cause for the Civil War. No one likes being told that there is no Santa Claus, or that Robert E. Lee, the noble stalwart of the South, was, in fact, a traitor to the nation to which he had devoted his entire adult life. He chose to defend sin rather than stand against it.
Or there may be a second, and more insidious reason. To admit the flaws of the United States, a nation that is a long way from reaching the “more perfect” union of our fore fathers goal, is to admit that the nation was built upon evil institutions. Slavery was a bedrock of the United States economy, and when slavery was no longer available, folks were still abused to maintain that economic system. And of course, there is the ultimate sin: that the United States was built upon land stolen away from its original owners.
Those are the lessons of history that we choose not to remember. Those are acts that we choose not to take responsibility for. And that makes us worse than ignorant: it makes us accomplices in the original sins.
In Its Place
The flag of the Confederacy still deserves to be flown. Even here in Columbus, Ohio, it has a place. Camp Chase, located on the west side of town, was a Civil War prison camp. Two thousand Confederate soldiers died, mostly of smallpox, during their internment. They are buried there today, and the flag they fought for still waves over their graves.
Museums, battlefields, and cemeteries: all are suitable places for Confederate symbology and statues. But their rebellion to maintain slavery should not be celebrated as some “mythic” history created by their apologists after the thunder of the guns stopped and the smoke cleared. Those writers erased and re-wrote histories for their own political gain. It’s time Americans learn the real story.
