Contempt for History
by Franklin H Littell
Contempt for History
College teachers are generally agreed that one of the most dismaying things about today`s incoming students is their lack of a consciousness of history. One former student, a high school teacher himself, has suggested that this vacuum exists because many high school courses in history are taught by former coaches with fallen arches who can no longer do the work they were hired for.
Actually, the defect became apparent in their parents` generation, in the years when courses in American History, American Government, World History, and Literature classics fell away and Mathematics and cognate subjects took over. The education of informed citizens lost market value as training in technical proficiency gained ground.
However, many students, cut loose from a secure sense of time and place, lost the conviction that learning anything was worthwhile. During the last two decades we have heard colleagues exclaim in desperation about new freshman again and again: "They don`t know anything!" Yet the comment inevitably follows: "They`re bright enough. They can ask the right questions. But they have no sense of rime and place."
When young citizens are cut loose from the dialogue with the past, they are as dangerous as rogue cannons. One of our great novelists wrote a scene of conflict between an older man and young rebels "who were born without navels." The young rebels lacked a sense of history, sloganized, ignored the dialogue with the past, and mouthed abstractions and propositions they thought timeless. They were, in sum, religious or political fundamentalists with enormous zeal and no comprehension of how human societies, ideas, and practices develop.
We constantly confront the contempt for history; and this ignorance of how human affairs develop and change in young people who talk about the failings of Thomas Jefferson, Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon as though they were contemporaries making decision in the same situations. One of the advantages of judging everyone in a cloudy past from Cloud Nine is the escape from present awareness of time and place, decision, and personal moral responsibility.
An incident involving this escape mechanism at work, linked to uncertainty about time and place, decision, and moral responsibility, occurred recently at Iowa State University in Ames. One of Iowa State`s illustrious alumnae was Carrie Chapman Cart, one of the great women of American history. She died in 1947 at the age of 88 years, and a building has been re-named for her on the Iowa State campus.
There are several good reasons for giving her name to a building at her alma mater, but the chief are these: she founded the League of Women Voters, and she devised the political strategy that won by Constitutional amendment the long-delayed national voting rights for women (1920). (Item: the Freedmen gained the Constitutional right to vote more than half a century before women were guaranteed the franchise.)
Amidst general acclamation, someone has discovered that in her correspondence she said things that disparaged Negroes and native Americans. The African Americans and American Indians have been awakening politically in recent years, and they notice such things. She also said some things about voting by illiterate immigrants, but their grandchildren aren`t organized to nurse past wrongs: they are up and out.
Now the Ames chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is demanding that her name be removed from the building recently named for her. (What would happen to any white speaker who referred to "colored people.") The proposition stared the demand that the university "not tolerate racism in any form or fashion."
So far the President of Iowa State has kept his head and refused to be sloganized into denying the University`s famous graduate ("warts and all"). She said or wrote those opinions, after all, three-quarters of a century ago.
Let me stipulate that I would never approve of naming any university building for someone who today uttered views of African Americans, American Indians, or any other minority that we today recognize as racist. But if the Ames chapter of the NAACP wants honestly to stand for the principle that "racism in any form or fashion" is not to be tolerated, wouldn`t courageous criticism of Johnny Cochrane`s playing the race card to free a murderer or outspoken opposition to the racist viciousness of Louis Farrakhan be in order? Such civil courage would show a sense of time and place, of how history is shaped and where it may go.
Or are we, with the air full of flying absolutes and general propositions, good for all times and places, in a time warp where the centuries-old, mild cultural racism of a white woman is a more shining target than the vile overt demagoguery of black racists today?
This question cannot be answered responsibly by those ignorant of history, contemptuous of historical struggles of the past, and blind to their own time and place of decision and responsibility.
