Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays
Page 30
What happens with them next? I see two dangers. The first is that the next militia standoff over a federal land occupation in the West may end differently. It is hard to imagine Trump’s Justice Department firmly enforcing the law against people who so represent the concentrated essence of his base. Does that mean that the armed seizure of some National Forest land, say, might be unhindered and become permanent? And might that not, in turn, encourage dozens of similar land grabs? The rural areas of Western states are full of people—including thousands of county sheriffs’ deputies and other state and local office-holders—who believe no one has the authority to tell them where they can’t graze their cattle, hunt game, cut down a tree, or dig for gold. And hey, what right do the feds have to all that land, anyway? Promoting oil drilling in National Parks, Trump clearly feels the same way.
The second danger is this. Trump will probably be forced out of office—by defeat in 2020 if not by other means before then. If that occurs, we know it will be a stormy process, in which he will try in every possible way to inflame and rally his supporters, with dark charges of “rigged” voting if he loses the election. To anyone on the far Right, his defeat or removal will be virtual proof of a conspiracy to impose the New World Order. Will these gun-toting men in boots and camouflage flak jackets accept his departure from the White House quietly? And, if they can’t prevent it, will they somehow take revenge?
2018
The Continent of Words
FIGURE 7. The author at the ruins of the Butugychag prison camp, Russia.
TWENTY-THREE
You Never Know What’s Going to Happen Yesterday
KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL COUNCIL ON PUBLIC HISTORY
It’s only in the past few years that I’ve been aware of the meaning of “public history.” I feel grateful to be in a whole roomful of people practicing it, because now, at last, I know what to call myself. I’ve always felt uncomfortable when people introduce me as a historian, since I don’t teach in a history department and what interests me is writing history, not for other historians but for ordinary people. Now I feel like that character of Molière’s who was thrilled to discover that all his life he’d been speaking prose. When anyone asks me my profession, I can now say it’s public history.
I thought I would talk about a couple of my experiences in this craft of ours. They all follow the same pattern. When I was a student, I thought of history as unchangeable. It was what had happened in the past, so it couldn’t be undone. The historian’s job was to know what those events were and to understand why they happened. But the longer that I work with the past, the more I realize that it’s not unchangeable at all. What we see when we look at something that happened, say, two hundred years ago is very different from the way people remembered exactly the same thing fifty or a hundred years ago. These shifts take place not because previously hidden sources of information are newly discovered but because of events in the ever-changing present.
I first started thinking about this when I noticed how different the American history my children were learning in school was from the American history I had studied. When I went to high school in the 1950s, I learned that there had been slavery in the United States but that it was mainly important because it caused the Civil War. I never read a slave narrative; I never read a description of an American slave’s daily life. But when my children went to school in the 1980s, they learned who Frederick Douglass was, they read the extraordinary slave narratives gathered by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, and they learned a great deal about what life was like in the slave quarters and fields of a plantation. This transformation was due, of course, to the upheavals and victories of the 1950s and ’60s in the long American struggle for civil rights.
You can see another reflection of that change at one of the great public history sites in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg. If you had visited this collection of carefully restored buildings before about 1970, you would have seen no indication whatever that roughly half the population of the original Williamsburg were slaves. But if you visit today, you can see slave quarters, hear lectures about the slave trade, see black “reenactors” working in the fields, and see a host of other exhibits and demonstrations about the life and labor of a Williamsburg slave of several hundred years ago.
So, as I came to study other countries for the books that I’ve written, I’ve always been intrigued by how a nation’s lens on its past changes—often quite radically—over time. And sometimes these changes show up more quickly and dramatically in museums, films, pageants, and other public history sites than they do in monographs or scholarly journals. Let me take you to several such times and places.
• • •
I want to begin by talking about Russia, because there has seldom been a more spectacular example of tight control, for an amazingly long period of time, over what people were allowed to see in the past. From the 1920s until the late 1980s, history officially involved the glories of Soviet communism and the shortcomings of every other system. Furthermore, during the murderous Stalin era, there were constant changes to the official historical record as various leading communists were abruptly arrested and dispatched to the Gulag or the execution cellar. Historically speaking, they ceased to exist. Several times a year, librarians all over the Soviet Union received new pages that were to be immediately inserted into the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a vast compendium that eventually ran to some fifty volumes, in place of other pages that were to be torn out or pasted over. The joke in Soviet days when you spoke with people who were trying to study history was “You never know what’s going to happen . . . yesterday.”
When I traveled to Russia as a journalist in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, I was always fascinated by the discrepancies between private and public discussions of history. If someone trusted you, over the family kitchen table he or she might talk about a grandfather, an uncle, or aunt who had been sent to a Siberian prison camp or shot during the 1930s. But in school textbooks and newspapers, in museums, or on TV, there was never any mention of the fact that this country endured deaths on a genocidal scale in the quarter-century during which Joseph Stalin was dictator. Even today, historians are still unsure how many million perished during that time in man-made famines, far-flung prison camps, or execution sites. After Stalin’s death the mass murder ended, but, except for a brief and partial “thaw” under Khrushchev, there was no open discussion of that time. In the later editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the biographical entry on Stalin was very short: just a page and a half, with a bare-bones listing of posts he held and the dates he held them—and a cryptic remark that “certain of his character traits had negative repercussions.”
Then Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the mid-1980s. And by the end of that decade, enormous changes were in the works. The one that interested me most was that now at last it became possible to speak openly about the past, not just with friends in your home but in lecture halls, on the radio, in the press, in museums, in new history books. I lived in Russia for the first half of 1991, to look at that experience first-hand and write about it. What was it like to be in a country where free study of history had been totally forbidden for more than sixty years and now, so suddenly, was allowed?
The historians who were doing the most exciting work, I found, were generally not in university history departments, since these were mostly filled with tenured party hacks who had no interest in a searching reexamination of the past. Rather, the most interesting scholars were usually people who had day jobs doing something else. Many were affiliated with a national society called Memorial—in Russian the stress is on the last syllable—which had sprung up under Gorbachev, headquartered in Moscow with branches throughout the country. Some members were human rights activists, some were elderly survivors of the Gulag, some were younger people who had grown up haunted by stories of family members who had disappeared during the Stalin years. All of them were fiercely dedicated to looking at that previously
off-limits history and examining it deeply.
One group of historians in Memorial was constructing a comprehensive map of where all the hundreds of prison camps had been. Others were researching writers who had perished during the 1930s and after. One man was studying camp rebellions. Memorial put on lectures, film showings, exhibits, and conferences; its members spoke on radio and TV and wrote articles for newspapers. It was public history at its best.
Who were these people? Of those who were descendants of Stalin’s victims, I found, the sons and daughters had often spent their childhoods in such fear that they didn’t want to rock the boat; Memorial researchers were more likely to be from the next generation, the grandchildren. A surprisingly high percentage of Memorial activists made their living as scientists. Why? Because during the Soviet years, science was an area where you could be free to do research with few restrictions. I remember, for example, sitting in the apartment of a Moscow physicist who had become fascinated by a set of old prison camps along an abandoned railway line in the Arctic. He had first glimpsed their ruins years before, when working as a deckhand on a Siberian riverboat one summer while a student. The camps were for prisoners building the railway: Stalin had a penchant for grand railways and canals and had ordered the construction of this one despite the fact that engines and freight cars kept sinking into swamps. The work was stopped when he died. The physicist had returned to the area several times, taken photographs, and gone through the ruins of these buildings, now deserted and crumbling away in the wilderness, to collect old file cards on prisoners and other paperwork, which he spread out on his kitchen table to show me.
It was another scientist, active in his local chapter of Memorial in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, who took me to my first mass grave. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Russians began excavating dozens of such sites around the country. The one in Krasnoyarsk was on a hillside, with a view out over the city, the Trans-Siberian railway line, and the Yenisei River. You could reach down and pick up from the ground one earth-stained skull after another with a bullet hole through the forehead. For a moment, more than half a century was collapsed, and I was holding history in my hand.
Sadly, in Russia today the free study of history has become, once again, as risky as other forms of free speech. Vladimir Putin said recently that history books in schools “should cultivate in young people a feeling of pride” in their country. The curriculum has become much more restrictive, and some innovative textbooks are no longer allowed. In 2008, the St. Petersburg office of Memorial was raided by police in camouflage uniforms and ski masks. What did they take? Eleven computer hard drives containing documents, letters, oral histories, and the like, primarily relating to events that happened seventy or eighty years ago. It’s a reminder that in many parts of the world practicing public history is a dangerous business.*
• • •
I now want to switch continents and centuries and talk about another piece of history that has changed shape as time has passed. The Scramble for Africa that took place between 1870 and 1910 as Europe divided up the continent was a pretty bloody affair. One of the most brutal parts of it was the seizure and colonization of the area that today is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Formerly, it was the Belgian Congo, and before that, from 1885 to 1908, it was the personal, private possession of King Leopold II of Belgium.
During the time that Leopold owned the Congo, he made a huge fortune from it, primarily by harvesting rubber. Sparked by the invention of the inflatable bicycle tire, a worldwide rubber boom began in the early 1890s. The demand for rubber only increased with the automobile, with rubber’s many uses in industry and with the spread of rubber-coated telephone and telegraph wires across the world. A plantation of new rubber trees takes some fifteen years to reach maturity, but this valuable commodity grew wild throughout the great equatorial African rainforest, which covered about half of Leopold’s Congo.
This rubber came not from trees but from vines that were scattered through the forest, twining around palms and other trees upwards towards the sunlight. Leopold developed his notorious forced labor system to harvest it. The king’s private army of nineteen thousand officers and men would send units into village after village, holding the women hostage—there are photographs of them in chains—until the male villagers had gone into the rainforest for days or weeks at a time to gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. As the process continued, sometimes they had to walk for days to find rubber vines not yet drained dry. And as the price of rubber went up, the quota increased. Many women hostages starved, and many of the male forced laborers were in effect worked to death. When you have women held hostage and men doing forced labor, there is nobody left to plant and harvest crops, to hunt, to fish, and to do all the things through which a community feeds itself, and so people ran short of food. And in famine or near-famine conditions, people often succumb to diseases they otherwise would survive. In addition, tens of thousands of people were shot down by soldiers when they rose up in rebellions against the regime. Finally, hundreds of thousands fled to avoid getting conscripted as forced laborers, but the only place they could go was deep in the rainforest where there was little food and shelter—and they died. Not surprisingly, the population shrank by the millions.
After about 1920—by this point, Leopold was long dead and the territory had become the Belgian Congo—the system became much less murderous, in large part because Belgian colonial officials realized that if they continued with the forced labor system as harsh as it had been, they would soon have no workers left. You can actually find alarmed colonial bureaucrats saying this on paper.
But the territory remained a colony. By the mid-1950s, it was clear that independence was in the offing, in one way or another, for colonial Africa. Soon came the first stirrings of such a movement in the Congo itself, and the Belgians began reluctantly preparing for independence, although they assumed it was still decades away. One of the things they did was to construct a small Congo university. How did they deal with the study of history there? What would students think if they looked at the Holocaust-level loss of life in the territory under Leopold II, for instance? The colonial authorities had a simple solution: the new university had no history department.
After the Congo became independent in 1960, how was the colonial period remembered in Belgium itself? Until very recently, in Belgian schools and in officially sponsored public history institutions like museums, the colonial period was as whitewashed as anything the USSR did in trying to ignore or sanitize the Stalin era. A spectacular example for many years is on the outskirts of Brussels, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which is, so far as I know, the largest museum in the world specifically focused on Africa. It was started by Leopold with some of his Congo profits and is filled with an extraordinary wealth of African art, not to mention tools, plants, stuffed animals, and more. Its twenty large exhibit halls and vast archives contain seventy thousand maps, eight thousand African musical instruments, six hundred thousand photographs, and six million insect specimens. Up through the late 1990s, there was nothing on exhibit in this museum, not one single display case, that gave any indication whatever that during the time that this magnificent array of African art and artifacts was being brought back to Belgium, millions of Congolese were being worked to death as forced laborers. The exhibits even included a rubber vine, but no information about those who died harvesting rubber. As late as 2005, a special temporary exhibition that purported—falsely—to at last tell the truth about the colonial days made no mention whatever of the hostage system.
The Belgian government whitewashed that history in other ways as well. For years, for example, it has funded an institution called the Royal Academy of Overseas Studies, formerly the Royal Academy of Colonial Studies. Among other things, the Academy has published an eight-volume biographical encyclopedia mostly devoted to Belgians who worked in the Congo in colonial days. It also publishes a series of historical monographs in English, French, German, and Dutch, well
over a hundred volumes, which you can find in many university libraries. I can recall only two that even mention the forced labor system. In 1959—just a year before the Congo became independent—the Academy refused to publish two papers by one of its members, a missionary priest and scholar named Edmond Boelaert who had been interviewing Africans about their memories of the Leopold-era forced labor system—the only researcher to do anything like this for decades.
In school textbooks, the situation is much the same. Here’s a short quote from one that was in use in Belgium as of four years ago: “When the Belgians arrived in the Congo, they found a population that was a victim of bloody rivalries and the slave trade. Belgian civil servants, missionaries, doctors, colonists, and engineers civilized the black population step by step.” Not a word about forced labor or the massive number of deaths. Until the past dozen years or so, when the Royal Museum for Central Africa began at last to make some timid changes—e-mails from a dissident staff member first alerted me to behind-the-scenes tensions there—the subject of forced labor in the colonial Congo simply did not appear in Belgian public history.