Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (7 page)

We also polish our memories in the recounting. Primo Levi, who did so much to keep the memory of the Nazi concentration camps alive, warned, “A memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in stereotype … crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense.” As we learn more about the past, that knowledge can become part of our memory, too. The director of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Israel once said sadly that most of the oral histories that had been collected were unreliable. Holocaust survivors thought, for example, that they remembered witnessing well-known atrocities when in fact they were nowhere near the place where the events happened.

In the 1920s, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs coined the term “collective memory” for the things we think we know for certain about the past of our own societies. “Typically,” he wrote, “a collective memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group—usually tragic.” So the Poles remember the partitions of their country—”the Christ among nations”—in the eighteenth century as part of their martyrdom as a nation. The Serbs remember the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as their defeat on earth but their moral victory in their unending struggle
against Muslims. Often present-day concerns affect what we remember as a group. Kosovo acquired its particularly deep significance in the memory of the Serbs as they were struggling to become an independent nation in the nineteenth century. In earlier centuries, the battle was remembered as one incident in a much larger story. Collective memory is more about the present than the past because it is integral to how a group sees itself. And what that memory is can be and often is the subject of debate and argument where, in Halbwachs’s words, “competing narratives about central symbols in the collective past, and the collectivity’s relationship to that past, are disputed and negotiated in the interest of redefining the collective present.”

Peter Novick has argued forcefully in his book
The Holocaust in American Life
that for American Jews, the Holocaust became a central identifying feature of who they were only in the 1960s. In the years after World War II, few American Jews wanted to remember that their co-religionists had been victims. Jewish organizations urged their community to look to the future and not the past. It was only in the 1960s that attitudes began to change, partly, Novick argues, because victimhood began to acquire a more positive status and partly because the 1967 and 1973 wars showed both Israel’s strength and its continuing vulnerability.

As the nineteenth-century Zionists began their bold project of re-creating a Jewish state, they looked to Jewish history for symbols and lessons. They found, among much else, the story of Masada. In
A.D.
73, as the Romans stamped out the last remnants of Jewish resistance to their rule, a band of some thousand men, women, and children held out on the hilltop fortress of Masada. When it became clear that the garrison was doomed, its leader, Elazar Ben-Yair, convinced the men that it was better to die than submit to Rome. The men killed their women and children and then themselves. The story was recorded but did not assume importance
for Jews until the modern age. Masada has been taken up as a symbol not of submission to an inevitable fate but of the determination of the Jewish people to die if necessary in their struggle for freedom. In independent Israel, it became an inspiration and a site of pilgrimage for the Israeli military as well as for civilians. As a popular poem has it, “Never again shall Masada fall!” In recent years, as pessimism has grown in Israel over the prospects for peace with its neighbors, another collective memory about Masada has been taking shape: that it is a warning that Jews always face persecution at the hands of their enemies.

While collective memory is usually grounded in fact, it need not be. If you go to China, you will more than likely be told the story of the park in the foreign concession area of Shanghai which had on its gate a sign that read, “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted.” While it is true that the park was reserved for foreigners, insulting enough in itself, the real insult for most Chinese was their pairing with dogs. The only trouble is that there is no evidence the sign ever existed. When young Chinese historians expressed some doubts about the story in 1994, the official press reacted with anger. “Some people,” a well-known journalist wrote, “do not understand the humiliations of old China’s history or else they harbor skeptical attitudes and even go so far as to write off serious historical humiliation lightly; this is very dangerous.”

It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history. That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to remember and to forget, can become so politically charged.

We argue over history in part because it can have real significance in the present. We use it in a variety of ways: to mobilize ourselves to achieve goals in the future, to make claims—for land, for example—and, sadly, to attack and belittle others. Examining the past can be a sort of therapy as we uncover knowledge about our own societies that has been overlooked or repressed. For those who do not have power or who feel that they do not have enough, history can be a way of protesting against their marginalization, or against trends or ideas they do not like, such as globalization. Histories that show past injustices or crimes can be used to argue for redress in the present. For all of us, the powerful and weak alike, history helps to define and validate us.

Who am I? is one question we ask ourselves, but equally important is, who are we? We obtain much of our identity from the communities into which we are born or to which we choose to belong. Gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, class, nationality, religion, family, clan, geography, occupation, and, of course, history can go into the ways that we define our identity. As new
ways of defining ourselves appear, so do new communities. The idea of the teenager, for example, scarcely existed before 1900. People were either adults or children. In the twentieth century, in developed countries, children were staying in school much longer and hence were more dependent on their parents. The adolescent years became a long bridge between childhood and full adulthood. The market spotted an opportunity, and so we got special teenage clothes, music, magazines, books, and television and radio shows.

We see ourselves as individuals but equally as parts of groups. Sometimes our group is small, an extended family perhaps, sometimes vast. Benedict Anderson has coined the memorable phrase “imagined communities” for the groups, like nations or religions, that are so big that we can never know all the other members yet which still draw our loyalties. Groups mark out their identities by symbols, whether flags, colored shirts, or special songs. In that process of definition, history usually plays a key role. Army regiments have long understood the importance of history in creating a sense of cohesiveness. That is why they have regimental histories and battle honors from past campaigns. Not surprisingly, the stories from the past that are celebrated are often one-sided or simplistic.

Most Americans know the story of Paul Revere’s ride: the brave patriot galloping alone through that night in 1775 to warn his fellow revolutionaries that the British redcoats were about to attack. Eight decades later Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped to fix the ride in American memories with his epic poem. To the regret of historians, he got some of the key details wrong. Revere did not, for example, put the lanterns to signal the movements of the British (“one if by land, and two if by sea”) in the steeple of the Old North Church. Rather, they were a signal to him. Most important, perhaps, he acted not on his own but as part of a well-planned,
well-coordinated strategy. Several riders went out that night, in different directions. David Hackett Fischer, who has written what is the definitive study on the ride, finds this truer version preferable to the Longfellow one. “The more we learn about these messengers, the more interesting Paul Revere’s part becomes—not merely as a solitary courier, but as an organizer and promoter of a common effort in the cause of freedom.”

Historians have also been examining the myth of the American West. Hundreds of Western movies and thousands of novels by writers such as Zane Grey (who only went west on his honeymoon) and Karl May (who never went there at all) have helped to create a picture of a wild world where bold cowboys and determined settlers braved savage Indian hordes. The myth casts a powerful spell. From President Teddy Roosevelt to President George W. Bush, American political elites have liked to portray themselves as bold cowboys. Even Henry Kissinger, improbable as the image may seem, once fell under the spell. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,” he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. “He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time.” Yet the “real” old West, the time of the wagon trains moving through the ever-open and lawless frontier, lasted for a surprisingly short time, roughly from the 1840s, when settlers in increasing numbers moved west of the Missouri River, to the opening of the first transcontinental railway in 1869. Moreover, many of the familiar stereotypes dissolve into something more complex and even disturbing. The cowboys were often teenage gunslingers who today might well be in urban gangs or in jail. Billy the Kid was a charming and cold-blooded killer. Miss Kitty Russell, the warm and attractive saloon owner in the television series
Gunsmoke
, would have looked quite different in the real old West. Women of her sort on the frontier were miserable low-paid prostitutes, frequently
drunk and riddled with diseases. Many of them killed themselves.

Within the United States, the national organizing myths have been challenged by strong regional ones, particularly in the case of the South. Whites in the American South developed their own distinctive history after the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the old prewar South took on a golden glow, where men were gentlemen and women ladies, where gentility and courtesy marked relations among people, even between slave owners and their slaves. The Yankee victory brought an end to a civilization, and Reconstruction caused only loss and degradation. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, set up in 1894, were vigilant in monitoring school curricula to ensure that their approved version of the past was taught in Southern schools. Textbook publishers complied, publishing different versions of the American history texts: one for the South, which downplayed slavery and ignored its brutality, and the other for Northern schools. And so, even black children in their segregated schools were presented with a picture of the South in which slavery and racism were largely absent. They were told, though, that Africans were fortunate because they had been brought to America and so into contact with European civilization. It was a pity, the texts concluded sadly, that the Africans had not had the innate capacity to take advantage of the opportunity. Black teachers did their best to counteract such views by introducing African and African American history into their schools, but it was not always easy because the curricula had to be approved by white school boards.

Public commemorations, museums, and archives reinforced the white version of Southern history. Throughout the South, such public spaces as parks and squares were named after Confederate heroes and filled with their monuments. In 1957, the state of Virginia held a ceremony to celebrate the 350th anniversary
of the first settlement at Jamestown. The past being celebrated was entirely white; there was no mention of the local Indians or the African slaves who were going to be brought there a few years afterward. No blacks were among the invited guests in 1957; six had been invited by mistake, but their invitations had been hastily rescinded.

In the 1960s, with the growth of the civil rights movement, the balance of power in the South began to shift and Southern history shifted along with it. As state after state integrated its schools, the old-style textbooks became an embarrassment. Museums started to acknowledge the black presence in the South in their displays and exhibitions. It was surely a sign of changing times when the Museum of the Confederacy put leg irons on display. Southern blacks pushed to get their own museums of black history and the history of civil rights. Their task was not always easy, and not just because of diehard white opposition. Because black history had not been valued by white-dominated institutions, much documentation and many artifacts which could have illuminated the history of blacks in the South had simply not survived. Blacks increasingly demanded that their heroes be commemorated in public spaces. In Richmond, Virginia, which first elected a black-majority city council in 1977, a monument to the great black tennis player Arthur Ashe has been added to those to Civil War heroes along Monument Avenue, and in 2000 two bridges over the Potomac named after the great Civil War soldiers Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart were renamed after local civil rights fighters.