December 22, 2006
1812 and Historical Imagination Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:20 PM EST I was fascinated to learn, from reading this blog, that John Steele Gordon is a direct descendent of the sister of Capt. William Burrows, who commanded the sloop USS Enterprise in her victory over HMS Boxer. I also wonder whether I am of the last generation of Americans who will be fascinated by such a genealogy. When I was a kid a fair number of American boys still read and reread books about the famous engagements between American and British warships during the War of 1812. The most celebrated was a frigate duel, the USS Constitution, a ship boys in those days still knew as “Old Ironsides,” against HMS Guerriere, but I also vividly remember reading about USS Hornet engaging HMS Peacock, and USS United States engaging HMS Macedonia, and a fair number of other victories. I also remember reading about gallant defeats, and much less gallant disasters on land, along with the Battle of New Orleans. A song celebrating that last victory was actually a pop hit when I was a kid. It is tough to imagine such a thing today. I do not think I will be a member of the last American generation to know about Mr. Gordon’s relative, but if I am right, I regret that this may be despite rather than because of the labors of my own profession. In recent decades it has become the fashion to amend the history curriculum to put a lot less emphasis on events like frigate duels. The curriculum was amended for a number of reasons, but one influential theory held that wars bored kids and put them off the study of history. I think this was a large mistake. Boys, at least, are not quickly bored by stories of frigate duels. When they were taught about them, history was a popular subject, at least as popular as it is now. I do not think this was a quirk of 1950s culture. If you go into any chain bookstore, the military and naval history section is booming. It is not clear to me that the ’50s taste was a function of an apparently mono-cultural America. When I began teaching, at Columbia, an Asian-American student anxiously asked me if a volume in the college bookstore was likely to get marked down even more than its current discount of 40 percent; I asked which book and discovered that it was a volume titled Fighter Aircraft of the Second World War. Another theory justifying the transformation of the curriculum was the claim that history should be the study of what ordinary people did rather than what elites did, meaning (among other things) command warships. In the ’50s, of course, most people had relatives who had fought in wars, and this is still true of more people than you might think, although perhaps less true of people who teach in universities. But even if people cease to know people who fight in wars, it does not follow that people will cease to be interested in people who fight in wars. Wars are absorbing for many reasons, not least because they bring out the worst and the best in the species, and the most prominent class of people reliably bored by them seem to be the vast majority of modern academic historians. This goes for the history of elites generally. You do not have to be related to people who did something to be interested in people who did that thing. I remember a friend who taught British history to first-generation immigrant kids at Queens College in the 1980s and discovered that they were bored by analyses of the class and gender consciousness of coal miners and female munitions workers; they wanted to read about kings and queens. They were, I think, quite wrong to be bored by the subjects he was teaching but not wrong to want to know about those kings and queens. Those immigrant kids were Americans, which meant those kings and queens were now their history, in a more direct sense than that in which all history is everyone’s history. Some kings and queens are peculiarly interesting, especially the ones who say things like “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms.” You probably have to be a certain sort of academic to find that dull. Did the memory of frigate duels lead to a needlessly adversarial sense of history? Maybe once upon a time—an American politician is said to have once threatened to bust George III in the snoot if the man ever showed up in Chicago—but by the 1950s Americans were more Anglophile than Anglophobic, and that didn’t make the frigate duels less interesting to us. When we went on to study the War of 1812 in high school, there was a lot on sectional tensions, imperialism and threats of secession by people whose children would crush secession, and this interested us, but my guess is that those earlier enthusiasms for frigate duels primed us to be interested in another part of the story. This shift in curricular fashion extends to other disciplines. Once upon a time boys learning Greek, and many did, read the Anabasis, a book about a war. When I was in grad school, it became the fashion to have students read loopy Hippocratic medical theory about the uterus when learning Greek. This was supposed to make Greek more interesting and broaden its appeal. It does not seem to have worked. In any case, I am delighted to learn that John Steele Gordon is related to William Burrows, whose command is part of the history I was raised to think was mine, although no ancestor of mine had ever served in a navy or been resident in America in 1813. When I was a teenager it seemed both fitting and thrilling that a fantasy starship, later a real space shuttle, should be named Enterprise, and that an aircraft carrier had been named Enterprise and fought at Midway. This interest connected me to the past in ways I did not fully appreciate and had consequences I could not have predicted. Decades later I wrote a dissertation on naval mutinies. To the best of my knowledge at the time, I was under the influence of Foucault and John Keegan. Looking back on it, I think William Burrows did his bit too. And probably that long-dead queen, whose fate, and in the long run mine, rested on whether men sailing ships not wholly unlike the one Burrows captained had the skill and resolve he would someday show.
|
