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Brands's 2nd law
History is complicated
Humans can be categorized along numerous spectra. There are the prompt and the procrastinators, with most people falling somewhere between these two poles. There are liberals and conservatives, believers and skeptics, militants and pacifists, night owls and morning larks, the tightly wound and the laid back.
And there are the simplifiers and the complicators. Isaiah Berlin, popularizing a taxonomy from the ancient Greeks, called them hedgehogs and foxes, and he divided thinkers between the two categories. “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing,” said Berlin, quoting Archilochus.
Had Berlin cast his net beyond intellectuals, he might have examined statesmen, soldiers, and others known for doing rather than thinking. And he might have noticed that the great doers fall on the side of simplification. Julius Caesar came, saw and conquered—simple as that. Alexander cut the Gordian knot. Napoleon streamlined a hodgepodge of feudal customs and practices into a single code of law.
Historians are thinkers rather than doers, and they tend to line up with the complicators. Or at least they should. A first lesson of history, for anyone who takes the subject seriously, is that the past was always more complicated than it seems to the present. As events recede into memory, their complications get smoothed over. Some of this is merely a matter of abridgment. James Joyce can get away with asking readers to spend more time on Leopold Bloom’s Dublin day than Bloom himself did, but historians have to leave things out. Not every detail is as important as every other, and the historian makes choices.
But which choices? Historians don’t agree among themselves, sometimes arguing with each other in real time, sometimes conducting the debate across generations. The arguments have less to do with history per se than with the uses to which history is put. Was the Civil War about slavery or states’ rights? Historians have taken both sides of the issue. Were the business leaders of the Gilded Age corporate statesmen or robber barons? Ditto. Was the New Deal a good deal or a bad deal? Was the Vietnam War a crime or a mistake? Was Richard Nixon a liberal or a conservative?
The reason for the disagreement among the historians is that the answer to each of these questions is: Both. And if the question is posed in multiple-choice terms, the best answer is usually: All of the above. Either/or questions make for vigorous arguments, and no small part of what historians do is argue for argument’s sake. Arguing keeps the profession, as a profession, alive. And the historians’ arguments are deployed by people who want to put the past to use in the present. Here again, the simplified version is tempting. If the Civil War was only about slavery, Confederate statues start wobbling. If it was only about states’ rights, they stand their monumental ground. But the reality is always more complicated than the single-factor responses allow.
The complications of history prevent it from becoming a morality tale. At this late day no one would argue that the indigenous peoples of America didn’t suffer from chronic bad faith and frequent outright violence at the hands of the U.S. government. No incident so characterizes their suffering as the “Trail of Tears”: the forced relocation of Cherokee men, women and children from Georgia to the trans-Mississippi West in the 1830s, in which several thousand died of disease and exposure. This humanitarian disaster was perhaps the worst ever inflicted by the American government on people under its control.
Yet the story was less simple than is usually portrayed. The policy of Indian removal pitted not only whites against Indians, but whites against whites and Indians against Indians. Andrew Jackson persuaded a majority of Congress to pass the 1830 Indian Removal Act, but the law had loud critics among reformers, Easterners, and Jackson opponents. The Cherokees themselves were similarly divided. One faction of the tribe, under a chief called John Ross, determined to remain in Georgia as long as physically possible, but another faction, following John Ridge, assessed the rapid growth of the white population near the Cherokee lands and concluded that the tribe’s future lay in the West. The Ridge group accepted the government’s offer of western land and assistance in relocating, and made the move without incident. The Ross group branded the Ridge faction as traitors; Ridge himself, who predicted something like the Trail of Tears if the Ross group refused to face reality, was assassinated for his pains.
Throughout the history of white-Indian conflict in America, almost never did the whites all line up on one side and the Indians all on the other. The French and Indian War was so called because it arrayed the French and their Indian allies against the British and their Indian allies. The Creek War of 1813-14 was a civil war among the Creeks amid the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans. When U.S. cavalry troops chased Indians across the Great Plains after the Civil War, their scouts were typically other Indians.
All this made sense to the participants in these conflicts, who weighed their interests and acted accordingly. George Custer’s Crow scouts at the Battle of the Little Bighorn disliked the warriors in blue jackets less than they hated their ancient enemies the Sioux. When Geronimo was tracked down by U.S. troops in the mountains of northern Mexico, the ones who did the tracking were members of Geronimo’s own Apache band. But this jumbled reality makes a hash of the whites-against-Indians version preferred by those who insist on having their history simple.
At times interested parties have tried to impose their simplified preferences on reality. Although the great majority of slaveowners in America were white, some were black, having purchased or otherwise acquired slaves. They did so for many of the same reasons white slaveowners did, and they suppressed such qualms as they harbored about owning human beings in the same way white slaveowners did. Economic advantage trumped racial solidarity. Meanwhile only a minority of whites owned slaves, with the rest prevented by economics, primarily, rather than ethics. As for the slaves, they were all black—or at least what counted as black under a regime that ascribed the status and therefore race of the mother to the child, even if the father was white, as was often the case in a system that allowed male slaveholders to force themselves upon enslaved women.
This confusion didn’t suit the template the ruling whites wished to impose on Southern society, one that equated black skin with servitude. During the first half of the nineteenth century, free blacks in the South, whether slave-owning or not, were made more uncomfortable, and the manumission of black slaves was made more difficult. The result was that by the Civil War nearly all Southern blacks were slaves, and essentially all slaveowners were white.
The imperatives of simplification become especially acute when a country goes to war. The American Revolution was not simply a war between Americans and British; it was also a conflict between American Whigs (or Patriots: the rebels) and American Tories (or Loyalists), between British Whigs and Tories, between American rebels and British-employed Hessians, between Patriot-leaning Indian tribes and British-leaning tribes, between Britain and France (and Spain), and between several of the permutations of the above. In the Southern theater, especially, the most savage fighting was between American Patriots and Loyalists, with each side doing its worst to compel fence-sitters to take sides.
Something similar occurred at the time of the Civil War. Ahead of secession, Southern opponents of that fateful step were relatively free to state their case, but once the choice had been made, Union sympathizers were harassed, driven out of the South and in some cases killed. The result was that a region once ambivalent on the prudence of dismantling the Union became a solid swath of rebels.
Except for the slaves, that is. To no one’s surprise, the enslaved men and women of the South weren’t consulted in the deliberations of the secession conventions. (Neither were the white women, for that matter.) And amid the fighting, many slaves seized opportunities to flee their bondage and take refuge behind Union lines. They weren’t always welcomed. During the first part of the war President Lincoln made clear that it wasn’t his purpose to free the slaves. When two of his generals—John Frémont and David Hunter—issued emancipation proclamations in their districts, Lincoln quickly rescinded them. Some Union generals returned the fugitive slaves to their owners, discouraging other slaves from breaking for freedom. Yet sufficient numbers of slaves persisted that the issue of the “contrabands”—the term of art for captured property in war, here applied to slaves—demanded Lincoln’s attention. After the battle of Antietam he made emancipation a war aim of the Union.
Yet confusion still reigned. Lincoln’s proclamation dealt only with slaves in rebel regions; slaves in the Union-loyal Border States would remain slaves. And until Lincoln’s armies subdued the rebellion, most of the slaves pronounced free would remain physically as bound as ever. Many Southern slaves didn’t learn of their decreed emancipation until Union troops arrived. Texas celebrates Juneteenth—June 19—the date in 1865 when the Emancipation Proclamation was publicly read in Galveston, two and a half years after its issuance in Washington. And not until several months later were the last slaves of the Border States freed, by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
If the Thirteenth Amendment simplified things, the Fourteenth Amendment promptly complicated them again. The wordiest of the amendments, the Fourteenth is now known for making citizens of the former slaves (and anyone else born on American soil), and for promising “equal protection” and “due process” to all persons. But its origins lay in a convoluted attempt by Republicans to retain their control over the national government as the Confederate states were being readmitted to the Union.
Indeed, the Republicans had cause to fear that the South would be stronger than ever. Before the Civil War, only sixty percent of slaves were counted toward representation in the House of Representatives, under the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution. With slavery abolished, all the former slaves would count, doubling the applicable population of South Carolina, nearly doubling that of several other Southern states, and boosting the population of the South as a whole by nearly fifty percent. Southern representation in the House would increase commensurately. This would be a disaster for the Republicans, who began to wonder which side had won the war.
To forestall the cataclysm, the Republicans sought to reimpose the three-fifths clause—and indeed to strengthen it. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, disenfranchised blacks wouldn’t count as three-fifths of a person, but zero-fifths. That is, for each black man deprived of the vote, the applicable population of the depriving state would be reduced by one.
The Republicans could have accomplished the same result by simply enfranchising all African Americans. But many Northern whites were almost as opposed to letting black people vote as Southern whites were. And so the Fourteenth Amendment attempted to strong-arm the South into extending the vote to former slaves while letting Northern states deny the vote to blacks within their own borders.
The ploy didn’t work. Its double standard grew unsustainable, and monitoring Southern voting practices became unmanageable. The result was the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the vote in all states. As a practical matter it mostly affected the South, where the great majority of blacks lived.
Except that before long white Southerners had devised new ways to disfranchise African Americans. Poll taxes, literacy tests and plain violence made politics in the South almost as completely white as it had ever been. Yet because Southern blacks were now counted five-fifths toward representation, the power of Southern whites in Congress was greater than ever.
When a simplified version of history persists over time, it congeals into myth. America views about World War II provide a telling example. During the war itself, efforts to portray the United States and its allies as the good guys and the Axis powers as the bad guys were entirely understandable. Hitler was a bad character indeed, and his Italian and Japanese accomplices weren’t much better. Besides, in every war every nation casts itself as the defender of right and justice against evil; how else for governments to ask their young to kill and die for the cause? On balance, the eventual victory of the American side certainly accomplished more for human freedom, dignity and happiness than an Axis victory would have.
But for Americans to call World War II the “good war,” and to canonize those who fought in it as the “greatest generation,” as Americans have ever since, pushes a plausible argument into the realm of . . . well, myth. Myths are sometimes false, but more often they are incompletely true. To call a conflict that killed perhaps fifty million people a “good war” is, at best, to convey an incomplete, simplified version of the truth. The outcome might have been the lesser of available evils. But that hardly makes it good. Harry Truman doubtless would have been convicted of war crimes for ordering the use of two atom bombs against largely civilian targets, thereby killing some 150,000 mostly women, children and elderly, had the United States not had charge of the postwar tribunals.
Nor did the end—victory over the Axis—indubitably justify the means. Hitler was a monster, but in terms of gratuitous evil inflicted on subject populations, he probably ranked third behind Joseph Stalin, a formal American ally, and Mao Zedong, a de facto ally. The victory of the American side terminated the Third Reich, but it strengthened Stalin’s rule and arguably consigned half of Europe to four decades of communist tyranny, and it positioned Mao to starve the Chinese people in the 1950s and terrorize them in the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet the myth of the good war endures. Academic historians make a habit of challenging received wisdom; it’s what justifies each new crop of dissertations. They have questioned the motivations and outcomes of every other war in American history, from the Revolutionary War (a power grab by land speculators and tax dodgers) to the Mexican War (armed robbery by James Polk to seize California) to World War I (profiteering by bankers and merchants of death) to Vietnam (containment of communism run amok). But they have given wide berth to the Greatest Generation.
Why? The answer, like everything else in history, is complicated. The cohort that took up arms in World War II was the largest war cohort in American history; for the rest of the twentieth century almost every family in the country counted a father, grandfather, uncle or cousin who had fought, and a sizable subset of that grouped had kinfolk who had died in the war. To challenge the war was to impugn the motives and accomplishments of relatives. Further, the discovery at the end of the war of the full enormity of the Holocaust placed Hitler and the Nazis in a circle of hell even Dante hadn’t imagined. Whatever complicated the story of the war could be construed as mitigating Hitler’s crimes. Down that slippery slope lay Holocaust denial, and no respectable person wanted to go there.
Finally, every nation needs its myths. Some nations have origin myths, often wrapped in religious belief: We are who we are, and we live where we do, because God ordained that we should. America has no single origin myth; the Mayflower was but one of ten thousand ships that brought foreigners to this country, most by their own choice, others in chains. Americans have mythologized various parts of their history: the Revolution (as noted above), the Civil War (which spawned dueling myths), the westward movement (whose cowboy has endured longer than any other element of American mythology), the “melting pot” of immigration (which gave way to the salad bowl before being abandoned amid terminal indigestion).
The myth of the good World War II is perhaps the latest in the series. As myths go, it’s relatively harmless. And quite possibly it too will be revised when the last of that great, if not greatest, generation dies. Sometimes history becomes myth; sometimes myth becomes history.