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The United States of Amnesia

By Laura S. Washington

Historians are the ones who can separate the wheat from the chaff in the winnowing of history.
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In America, historians are rarely heard from and seldom honored. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was an exception to this rule. When he died on Feb. 28 at the age of 89, his historiography was praised and his person exulted in mass media and academic circles. His honors were manifold: the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize, among others. He was a consummate public intellectual before the coin was termed. His liberalism was eclipsed only by his ego.

Schlesinger’s trademark bow tie and coke-bottle spectacles strongly identified him in the public mind as a classic egghead. Alonzo L. Hamby, a distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, wrote in an obit for the History News Network, “Students of the historical profession may think of [Schlesinger] as the most prominent of a small group of scholars who kept the old Charles A. Beard-Vernon Parrington ‘progressive’ interpretation of American history alive against the onslaught of ‘consensus history.’ “

Our historians, like Schlesinger, are a precious link to our tenuous past. They construct a narrative that permits us to hold on to an ethereal present.

History is the glue that binds us. If there is anything that aggravates the bleep out of me, it is America’s utter failure to recognize and reflect on our forebears. Looking back at what has worked, and what hasn’t, in our past can illuminate possibilities for our future.

Take the American civil rights movement. The nexus of that movement revolved around the concept of non-violent civil disobedience. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. studied, then borrowed Mahatma Gandhi’s concept and adapted it to an American context. King reached back into history to plumb its lessons in ways that changed the world. Without that crucial insight, the movement would have failed.

It was a cross-cultural, transnational pollination of ideas that moved the zeitgeist.

Such lessons are not written on granite tablets; literal applications would be specious. Historians are the ones who can separate the wheat from the chaff in the winnowing of history.

Remember how extraordinarily bogus the “domino theory” of communist domination turned out to be. If one nation goes Communist, the rest are soon to follow, they said. History proved differently. Yet the Bush administration promptly turned around and applied the same discredited concept to its Iraq War rationale. Topple Saddam Hussein, they said, replace him with a democratically elected regime, and democracy will sprout in the Middle East. Yes, just like turnips in Uncle Remus’s briar patch. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was probably the only sucker who swallowed that whale of a lie.

History tells the tale. Divide and conquer in Chicago. For most of the last half century, a political dynasty has retained and exploited power by simple division. In 1955 Richard J. “Boss” Daley won control of the Windy City by consolidating his power among white ethnics and buying off the city’s budding black political class.

Harold Washington briefly wrested the city away from the Daley Machine in the ’80s, but his sudden death in 1987 buried his progressive coalition, which was quickly co-opted by Richard II. Chicago has been a majority-minority town since 1990. Yet Richard M. Daley, a conservative Democrat and buddy of George W. Bush, has carved out winning majorities from white ethnic, Latino and black votes, leaving progressives in the dust. Last month Daley won his sixth consecutive term.

Progressives in Chicago are still flunking the history test.

Historians tell us that, in America, independent presidential candidates can generate a lot of heat and some unintended consequences. In 1992 the Texas businessman Ross Perot stepped into the slugfest between Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and his challenger, Bill Clinton. Perot’s conservative pitch helped throw the election to Clinton.

Ralph Nader is a national pariah, at least among Democrats who believe that his independent foray in the 2000 presidential contest insured George W. Bush’s “win” over Al Gore.

History shows us that anything is possible, but be wary of anyone who flirts with an independent run in 2008. There are stirrings out of New York City that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg is contemplating a self-financed run as a moderate independent.

Maybe our celebrity-obsessed culture refuses to place historians on a pedestal, but that doesn’t mean we can’t honor them.

My favorite historian is also the founder of my favorite magazine. Jim Weinstein founded In These Times 30 years ago. He ensured that these pages would honor history as a tool for a dynamic Left. That’s a history lesson worth memorizing.

Laura S. Washington, an In These Times senior editor, teaches journalism at DePaul University and is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

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  • Reader Comments

    Pwogwessives in Chicago are not flunking any tests, they are simply a minority which is why Daley easily rolled over them. As did his Dad.
    And in Indochina for a while the domino theory proved true. Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam and a brutal Marxist junta in Burma.

    Posted by blondemike on Apr 10, 2007 at 10:23 AM

    A correction to Arthur Schlesinger’s “liberal” record is in order.  “Leading the fight against radical and multicultural revisionism have been such conservative historians as C. Van Woodward, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Eugene Genovese, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Daniel Boorstin.  The McCarthyite war they wage to suppress radical dissent is hpocritically portrayed by them as a valiant struggle on behalf of free speech.” [History as Mystery, (c) Michael Parenti 1999, City Lights, p. 182] Need I say more?

    As for posting by “blondmike” he’s obviously still suffering from the after-effects of the McCarthyite kool-aide passed as history by the above mentioned and celebrated historians.  I suggest he reads Parenti to get the antidote.

    Posted by Alexander Leon on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:42 AM

    Ms. Laura S. Washington,
    I am not steeped in Chicago’s history thus I have not commented on that topic.  However, I am curious on your thoughts regarding Parenti’s views on Schlesinger.
    Regards,
    A.Leon

    Posted by Alexander Leon on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:46 AM

    “radical multiculturalism, “ would that be a synonym for postmodernist, relativist defenses of female genital mutilation, and wearing a burka?
    Michael Parenti is a Stalinist. Back when he was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an isolated Communist Party (PDPA, read an acct. by a Pakistani socialist named Raja Anwar, “The Tragedy of Afghanistan, preface by ex-Trotskyist academic Fred Halliday, Verso Books) riven into two, murderous, fratricidal factions, he defended the intervention.
    I’ve read his books...same retrograde polemics of the type published by the CPUSA back when threy were calling Trotsky a Fascist.
    Quote from Parenti on, “Flashpoints, “ on KPFA, Pacifica Radio on March 20th, ‘03, IIRC, after bloviating about the injustice of Serbian friends of his being questioned over the assasination of Z. Djindic (who, btw, studied under Habermas) he raved vs, “Trotskyists, Greens and other anti-communists.” Trots are anti-communist? Jeesh.
    And, Schlesinger blurbed the book, “Overthrow, “ by Stephen Kinzer, a good history of the interventions to restore the Shah of Iran, overthrowing Arbenz of Guatemala, etc. Hardly the action of someone uncritical of the cold war liberals.

    Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 11:37 AM

    http://en.allexperts.com/e/m/mi/michael_parenti.htm
    Hail Milosevic, says Parenti! Hail the Chinese rape of Tibet!
    >...In the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, Parenti was highly critical of the USSR’s reformist moves of “perestroika” and “glasnost”, arguing that these had the effect of introducing capitalism into the country. He was critical of critical revisionist histories of Joseph Stalin and has maintained that accounts of his repression are regularly exaggerrated both in Russia and in the West. Parenti argued this most explicitly in Blackshirts and Reds, where he cites J. Arch Getty to put the number of executions in the Great Terror at 799,455. Getty’s numbers concern recorded executions during the period of 1921 and 1953 and are generally considered to be among the lower estimates of Stalinist terror. He does not offer his own estimates for deaths under Stalin, though he is quick to emphasize the importance of those charged with non-political crimes in the gulags. For Parenti, repression is compensated by what many claim were the country’s “dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights” under Stalin’s leadership. He characterizes Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s primary Bolshevik opponent, as being “among the more authoritarian Bolshevik leaders”.

    Parenti has also defended Serbia and in particular its former president Slobodan Milošević against accusations of intolerance, aggression, and war crimes during the Yugoslav wars, as he views these as exaggerations and propaganda on the part of Western media. According to Parenti, these wars were instead caused by a deliberate US and Western policy aiming at dismembering Yugoslavia in order to impose liberal capitalism there. He is a prominent member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodon Milosevic and heads its US chapter. In this capacity he has called for Slobodan’s release and defended both Milosevic and Serbs against allegations of atrocities:

    The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims, their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed. [1]

    Another influential essay, particularly among Maoists and supporters of China’s invasion of Tibet, is “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” which casts Tibet as an extremely corrupt feudal system sustained by slavery which has seen drastic improvements because of the invasion and subsequent policies of the Chinese government. [2]
    Notes
    # Specifically, Parenti cites “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence” by J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn and Victor Zemskov, American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993), pp. 1017-1049

    Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 11:44 AM

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