[On December 4th,
2016, James Monroe was elected the
fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five
histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]
On whether and
how to better remember a lesser-known president.
I’ve written
before about the problem with our over-emphasis on presidents in our
collective memories (which is the reason why I only included a couple
presidents in my roster of
Memory Day nominees), and would stand by that perspective. The problem is
particularly acute with those Rushmore presidents, who often become the central
(if not the sole) way in which we remember eras and histories that are far more
multi-layered and complex than any individual could capture. But I believe even
lesser-known presidents consistently receive far too much space in our
collective memories, a trend that might make for successful performances on
standardized tests or quiz shows (I myself memorized every president and vice
president in chronological order for my high school quiz team, a personal
history toward which I feel a precise mixture of pride and shame) but that can
only tell us so much about our national histories and stories (if it does not
indeed warp our understanding more than it positively shapes it). So you could
argue that we shouldn’t remember James Monroe much better than we already do,
and I’d be inclined to agree.
Part of the
problem with those presidential memories, though, isn’t about the presidents
themselves; it’s the emphasis on things like the dates of their terms or their
number in the sequence, those standardized-test kinds of facts that have
precious little to offer our historical understanding. So what would it mean if
we remembered a president like James Monroe in our collective memories through
a handful of key, complex historical facts like those about which I’ve written
this week? If we wrote those facts in shorthand on the elementary school
portraits, even? Monroe the plantation owner, Monroe the Revolutionary War
officer, Monroe the ambassador to France, Monroe and African colonization, Monroe
and Latin American revolutions, and so on. Those facts and phrases themselves only
scratch the surface of the multi-layered histories to which they gesture, but
they’re certainly starting points for further investigation, analysis, and
conversation in a much more direct and meaningful way than are dates of terms
or the like. Presidents and presidencies themselves, after all, are a kind of
historical shorthand for those underlying and more broadly significant issues,
and this form of collective memory would help use our presidents in precisely
that way.
At the same time
that we could better remember those broader histories through a president like
Monroe, however, I also believe we could do a better job thinking about the
individual human story and identity that he (like all of us) featured. By the
time he was 20 years old, Monroe had both inherited a slave plantation after
his father’s death and volunteered to fight in the Revolutionary War—and while
those dual details nicely encapsulate the more and less inspiring sides to both
the man and the era, they’re also two hugely complex and formative moments in
the life of someone not yet two decades old. By the time of his death at age 73,
on July 4th, 1831 (making him the third
Founding Father and president to die on July 4th!), Monroe had
been forced by debts to sell his plantations, was a widower who had moved to
New York City to live with daughter and her family, and continued to be active
in support of the American Colonization Society, to name three equally complex biographical
details. Psychoanalyzing historical figures is always a fraught proposition,
but we don’t have to put Monroe on the couch to consider what such details
could help us understand about the man and the many histories to which he
connects. One more way to better remember our fifth president.
November Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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