The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freed slave, is being scrutinized and reconsidered these days. But the dispute over the statue (also called the Freedmen’s statue) has had a remarkable result for historians: An 1876 letter by Frederick Douglass has been found in which he expressed disappointment in the statue.
For me, what is so intriguing is how it was discovered and how that illustrates the wonderful world that digital technology has brought to historians—a world in which artifacts of the past are readily available.
Some months ago I questioned the famous statement of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I argued that even if we remember the past we may end up repeating it.
And now, repetition is occurring. This month the Economist called its editorial about today’s racial conditions “The Fire This Time,” echoing James Baldwin’s passionate 1962 denunciation of the American legacy of racism.[1] The editorial also drew a parallel between today and the murderous year of 1968—even to the point of observing that a flu pandemic (called the Hong Kong flu) killed about 100,000 Americans that year.
Could a better understanding of the past have prevented the racial tragedies and tumult we are going through today? To begin answering that, let’s assume that someone did understand the relevant history. I suspect, for example, that Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele did.
Daniel P. Moynihan may have, too. But Moynihan’s experience indicates that no matter how much you know and how much involved in public affairs you are, your advice may fall on deaf ears. Continue reading “The Fire Last Time”
In 2012 President Obama outraged many people when he tried to argue for the value of government by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” His statement was wrong because, of course, you did build that.
But that doesn’t mean that you had no help. For many of us, that help goes back perhaps hundreds of years.
In my last post I wrote about some of the family histories my readers have sent me. I was struck by how “middle-class” their families were, even 100 or 150 years ago. I concluded that if you are a successful professional today, chances are good that you have a family history with a lot of solid middle-class people behind you, people who worked hard, sometimes back-breaking hard, who gave up leisure, and who sought education for themselves or their children.
That doesn’t mean your family history didn’t have some cads and misfits (mine did) but the general direction was toward discipline.
In other words, we have a cloud of witnesses who have predated us. Perhaps we received material goods from those ancestors, but far more important were the habits of mind—the mental strength that allows us to give up short-term rewards in the hope of longer-term gains. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part II)”
“The baby is sick. He has been sick a long time. He cries a lot and Pa sometimes spanks him to make him be good. When he sits in his high-chair he can’t hold up his head . . . Ma says she doesn’t have time to take care of him and anyway she is too busy to eat herself so she has no milk for the baby.”
So wrote Gertrude Willson in her diary in upper New York State during the mid-1880s. That starving baby grew up to be a school principal in New York City, although he died at age 56 because of his early malnutrition. Gertrude went to normal school and became a teacher. Her cousin became a school principal, then turned Methodist and became a circuit-riding preacher in Nebraska, and later was an Episcopal priest.
However poor her family was, Gertrude Willson’s family had pluck and determination and overcame odds.
A couple of months ago I asked readers to send me stories about their family history. I published one of them, by David Brook, and plan to publish the story of Gertrude Willson, a cousin of John Willson, in a future post.
The people who sent me stories are well-educated professionals. If there is one thing that has struck me about their family stories, it is how “middle class” they are, even going way back. That’s true of my family, too. By middle-class I mean that they worked hard, out of duty as much as necessity; they expected their children to do so, too; and they valued education. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part I)”
