[A holiday
special post, making the case for a different way to celebrate Presidents’ Day.
I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions in comments!]
On how we can
make this national holiday into a more meaningful remembrance of our leaders
and histories.
One of the most nonsensical of our
current, shared national narratives (emphasis on the “shared national”—the top
ten thousand most nonsensical current narratives stem from the general area of
one Mr. Trump, but I’m focusing here on narratives that have achieved a pretty
broad, bipartisan, and cross-community level of support and buy-in) is the idea
that we have lost a certain kind of civility in our public or political
discourse, and that one of our main goals should be finding and reemphasizing
it. Civility may or may not be a worthy goal in and of itself, but it has most
definitely never been central to our public and political cultures; even a few
minutes’ reading of the materials related to the Federalist/Anti-Federalist
debates over the Constitution, the controversies over the
Alien and Sedition Acts, the extremely heated
and divisive Adams v. Jefferson election of 1800, and many other
foundational and Early Republic moments should be more than enough to make
clear how uncivil those public and political cultures have often been from the
outset.
That isn’t necessarily a good
thing, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s a historical reality thing,
and the goodness or badness of it would have a lot more to do with our own
perspectives and agendas in narrating the histories. And the truth of the
matter, as it so often is when it comes to our national narratives—hence this
blog, at least in significant measure—is that we have precious little interest
in understanding or narrating the historical realities, especially since they
so often refuse to fit neatly into our simplifying ideas (such as “We used to
be one big happy family who were nice to each other, and now we’re so divided
and partisan and mean”). A few years back, much was made of a particular line
from President Obama’s
speech at the Tucson memorial service, when he expressed his hope that the
tragedy’s deaths could “help usher in more civility in our public discourse”;
but I would contend that the far more significant sentiment came later in the
same sentence, when he called instead for “a more civil and honest public
discourse.” Again, whether or not civility is a worthwhile pursuit, I believe
that honesty is most definitely a more worthwhile and valuable one—and, not
unrelatedly, that an honest assessment of our history would force us to admit
that we have never been particularly civil.
So on this President’s Day, I’d
like to set, in my own small way and space, a precedent for future remembrances
of our national leaders: honesty rather than celebration, accuracy to history’s
complexities rather than “respect for the office of the president” (which is
really just another way of saying civility) and all that. This does not, I hope
it goes without saying, mean simply revisionist attacks on our presidents;
those are just as simplifying, just as dishonest, as any hagiographies could
be. Instead, I mean genuinely complex, honest engagement with the whole
pictures; not necessarily of every president (to put it uncivilly, who really
gives a fuck about Chester Arthur?), but of the ones we particularly want to
remember as prominent parts of our histories and identities. Obviously such honest
engagement would require more time and effort than a simple President’s Day
remark allows, but still, even in the shortest lines we can work in starting
points toward it: Thomas Jefferson, articulate defender of democracy and
slaveowner who almost certainly conducted a multi-decade affair with a slave,
impassioned opponent of the Alien and Sedition Acts and imperialist who more
than doubled the nation’s lands with the likely unconstitutional Louisiana
Purchase; Abraham Lincoln, who held a nation together and in the process
decimated fundamental civil liberties like habeas corpus, who without question
would have been willing to sacrifice any pretense of abolitionism to preserve
the union but who once the war had begun was a vocal and steadfast defender of
African American rights; Ulysses Grant, who presided over the most corrupt
administration of the century but wrote and worked ceaselessly for freedmen’s
rights; Teddy Roosevelt, who contributed greatly to negative stereotypes of
Native Americans and the Filipino insurgency but helped solidify the National
Park System and entrench Progressive reforms; and so on.
None of those
get close to capturing the complexities of each man and administration, and the
precedent would be most ideal if it just inspired more reading and research,
more investigation and analysis of these historical figures and periods and the
many issues and questions to which they connect. And if in so doing we got a
bit closer to the historical realities of who and what we’ve been, and started
to emphasize honesty and accuracy more than either agendas or civility, well,
that’d be a day worth celebrating each year. Annual non-favorites series starts
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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