August 13, 2006
Becoming History II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:30 AM EST More on becoming history, and on history becoming startlingly more immediate: I wrote the other day about the eeriness of seeing what is vivid and immediate in one’s own times become someone else’s “history,” by which I meant decisively and irretrievably the past. A few years ago I had the opposite experience. I was talking to my girlfriend’s father about his boyhood in Western Pennsylvania, and he mentioned seeing Civil War vets marching at the head of the Memorial Day parade, and talking to them around town—he remarked that every small boy had known who they were. I am sure they did. He then added that these men had not been “real veterans,” just militia Lee had brushed aside on the way to Gettysburg. When I later quoted this to Richard Snow, the editor of this magazine, we agreed that this seemed a fairly stringent definition—we both thought people who chose leave a plough or dry goods store to get in the way of the Army of Northern Virginia, however briefly, might reasonably be considered veterans. But this man had been a combat engineer in the Bulge, which may yield a different frame of reference. What startled me about this was the sense of vanishing historical distance. The Civil War was history for me—infinitely moving and instructive, indeed constitutive of what I took to be one of history’s more profound lessons—but it was, in the sense defined above, “history”: something located across an impassible gulf of time. But now I was talking to a man who had talked to men who had fought in it, and it came much closer. This was not exactly a rational process—that gulf of time was still the same almost century and a half—but the sense of absolute otherness had definitely diminished. The experience of coming mysteriously closer to what in retrospect had previously felt like “mere” history was in part thrilling, in part uncanny. When I next saw my father, I happened to mention this, because I was still rather stupidly agog over this uncanniness. I’d met a man who’d seen Civil War vets! My father, born in the same year as my girlfriend’s father, was baffled by my astonishment. As a small boy he’d seen men marching at the head of the Memorial Day parade—my father called it Decoration Day—in Chicago in the 1920s. He’d never bothered to mention it, which made me remember that what any generation takes to be the accessible past becomes much less emotionally accessible history for the next generation. Pondering this, I then thought about something equally obvious: Things become history with different degrees of intensity, because historical distance is not the same thing as chronological distance. In 1961 the Civil War felt a lot closer than the Spanish-American War. The Civil War was particularly resonant history for my generation, because its centenary coincided with a dramatic period of the Civil Rights movement, which in the early 1960s seemed the war’s long-delayed conclusion, and that coincidence itself coincided with my generation’s first becoming conscious of politics. I remember children in the school yard chanting “Whistle while you work/Stevenson’s a jerk/Eisenhower’s got the power/whistle while you work,” although I cannot imagine why we chanted that. all of our parents seemed to be Democrats, and I don’t think that jingle meant a thing to us. The Civil War was different from the Spanish-American War because it illuminated our particular present and made a morally coherent narrative of American history. It didn’t hurt that the centenary came within shouting distance of the liberation of Buchenwald, which came at the end of a war everyone’s father seemed to have fought in. This meant that for part my generation, American armies were on extremely memorable occasions used to free slaves. Many of us would shortly form other views of American armies’ possible uses—Vietnam was around the corner—but for some of us that first sense, once formed, never entirely vanished. For many of my students, the Civil War seems less resonant, and possessed of smaller meanings. For some of their own teachers, also members of my generation, the Spanish-American may be the more resonant affair, for a number of reasons. More on this soon.
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