Why History Matters

A Case That Few Historians Make

Some preliminary notes on this essay:

I put this essay (below) together and scehduled it for today seven days ago because I knew I was going to be wrapped up in multiple administrative and household tasks and thus without time for writing on the weekend of October 15-16.

Under normal circumstances, I would have written today’s piece about the remarkable Thursday, October 13th House January 6th Committee hearing. It was supposedly the final one. The most remarkable revelation last Thursday was Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony showing that Trump was fully aware in late December of 2020 that he had lost the presidential election the previous month. This relates to criminal intent: the orange-hued malignancy Trump has no basis for claiming that he thought he won: he clearly knew he didn’t. Also notable were revelations on the Secret Service’s advance knowledge of the violence being planned for January 6th and newly released video footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi begging law enforcement and military officials to suppress the Attack on the Capital and and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer asking the Acting Attorney General to tell Trump to call off the bloody assault. The committee voted unanimously to subpeona Herr Trumpler himself - a remarkable step that will almost certianly be blown off by the tangerine-tinted tyrant and wannabe fascist strongman.

The New York Times last Friday provided an apt summation of the January 6th hearings so far: “Over the course of its nine hearings, the panel established that Mr. Trump had been told repeatedly by his own advisers that he had lost the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. but lied to the public anyway, advancing conspiracy theories and fantasies that had been debunked by his own team. The committee presented evidence on Thursday that Mr. Trump had planned months before the election to claim fraud if he lost, regardless of the facts…To that end, the panel showed how he had used the power of his office to pressure governors, state officials and legislators, congressional allies, Justice Department leaders and his own vice president, Mike Pence, to put aside the judgment of the voters and keep him in office anyway. He encouraged the mob when he knew some of them were armed and did little to stop the attack once it was underway; he is even said to have reacted approvingly to some rioters’ call to hang Mr. Pence.”

Let’s be crystal clear about something: if US Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t indict and prosecute Trump for any of the multiple grave felonies Trump committed in connection with Trump’s clear attempts to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election and/or Trump’s insane theft of classified government documents, the United States of America can kiss a final goodbye to its pretense of being based on “the rule of law.”

It really is that stark: prosecute the malevolent fascist monster Trump or openly admit that the United States’ claim to be a democratic republic based on constitutional rule of law is an abject farce.

This drama relates to the subject matter of today’s essay — the lessons of history — in numerous ways but I want to mention two in particular: (i) attempted coups that go wiithout serious punishment become training exercises for future successful coups; (ii) tyrants who escape serious punishment for their crimes grow in stature in sick followers’ deranged minds, their mystique fed by their seeming invincibility and their freedom to transgress with impunity above and beyond the rule of law.

Now for today’s essay, which could also be titled “Why Study History?”….

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controles the past.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four

Trump and Biden v. Frederick Douglass

United States American historians had a field day mocking Donald Trump’s recurrent clueless comments on United States history during the fascist Trump presidency. As president Trump earned the mockery with a series of ridiculous and false statements as president about the nation’s past, including his laughable belief that the great 19th century Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still alive and his risible claim that Andrew Jackson had been “really angry” about the American Civil War (which broke out sixteen years after Jackson’s death). Responding to these and other egregious historical gaffes by the nation’s 45th president, historian Paul Starobin told the New York Times that “Trump seems almost uniquely ill equipped to process history, whether because of his lack of empathy, his allergy to complexity, or his tendency to keep distant from anything that might carry the whiff of defeat.”

If Starobin is like most American historians, he’s a liberal Democrat. I wonder what he thought of the historical numbskullery of the next and Democratic president Joe Biden, who actually said this two nights after the 2020 presidential election and two months before Donald Trump’s January 6th insurrectionists descended on the US Capitol: “Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

What wise counsel that was: “Patience, underlings, your globally unmatched democracy will reward your forbearance!” Please. What was Rosa Parks thinking when she refused to get up from that bus seat in 1956? What came over those Hunger Marchers and sit-down strikers who helped force through the New Deal and the emergence of mass production unionism during the 1930s? What went through the minds of the hundreds of thousands of Black slaves who left their masters’ plantations and flocked to places occupied by the Union Army during the American Civil War? What were those antiwar marchers thinking when they took to the streets to protest the US crucifixion of Southeast Asia, responsible for the death of 3 to 5 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians between 1962 and 1975? What was with those feminists who rose up against back-alley abortions to win the Roe v Wade decision (viciously undone by Trump’s Handmaid Supreme Court last June 24th)?  Surely the great Black American escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass needed to be more patient and feel more grateful about living in a great “democracy” that was “the envy of the world” when he offered these hotheaded reflections in his magisterial 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”:   

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival

“Democracy”? Seriously? Biden might want to read The Federalist Papers and the proceedings of the United States’ 1787 Constitutional Convention.  Popular sovereignty was the dead last thing the nation’s militantly propertarian and aristo-republican Founders ever wanted to see breakout in their new nation. They designed a governmental structure brilliantly crafted precisely to prevent any such occurrence with such anti-democratic mechanisms as the Electoral College, a bicameral legislature with an extremely powerful and mal-apportioned upper branch, an unelected appointed-for-life Supreme Court, states rights, and more.

Will we ever break the taboo that protects the United States’ absurdly venerated 18th Century United States slaveowners’ charter – the holy Constitution that William Lloyd Garrison (accompanied by Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau) called “a covenant with death” and  then burned (along with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act) outside Boston on July 4, 1854 – from the radical criticism and replacement it has long deserved? We are still plagued by its purposefully anti-democratic strictures 24 decades after its passage.

Also historically idiotic: Biden’s recurrent claim that Trumpian white supremacism and “semi-fascism” (actually full-on fascism) are contrary to “the soul of our nation.” The president needs to read the sixth chapter, titled “America Was Never Great,” in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. It is a relentless depiction of precisely how and why Trumpism reflects and channels ugly and interrelated main currents of American history from the Mystic River Massacre and the bloody suppression of the Stono Rebellion through the mass-murderous US theft of the Southwestern United States from Mexico, the state murders of the Molly Maguires and the Haymarket Martyrs, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the bloody occupation of the Philippines, the executions of Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Hampton, the Philadelphia police firebombing of the radical Black organization MOVE’s headquarters, the monumentally criminal and mass-murder US invasion of Iraq (on absurdly false Orwellian pretexts) and much more horrible to contemplate. 

Mass Amnesia as Dehumanization

Trump and Biden’s historical foolishness is symptomatic of a broader national amnesia that stalks the United States. As numerous depressing surveys have long shown, the preponderant majority of U.S.-of-Americans is vastly ignorant about their nation’s past and that of other nations and people. The whole country seems “almost uniquely ill equipped to process history.”

It’s a very lethal way for a Superpower’s citizenry to live. And it is fundamentally dehumanizing, a terrible negation of our potentially magnificent species being.  Homo sapiens, with its unique capacity for complex language, is distinct from other species in its ability to recall, record, interpret, and communicate the lessons – negative, positive, neutral, and potential (as yet unknown) – of its past experience and to turn those lessons into tools for present and future liberation and development.

Let’s look at some of what history imparts to human advancement.

Negative Lessons

Consistent with the evolutionary-psychological “negativity bias” buried deep in our “old brains,” we can start with some of history’s negative teachings – instructions on what NOT to think and do, consistent with the Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s oft-quoted maxim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Those who fail to register past horrors are likely to engage in terrible crimes or stand by silently while others commit them.

Mass US ignorance about the Nazi Holocaust is chilling in a time when Republi-fascist governors in Florida, Texas, and Arizona feel entitled to pack Latin American asylum-seekers onto buses and planes and contemptuously dump them like human garbage without warning in Washington DC, Chicago, New York City, and Martha’s Vineyard (how far a step is that from leading demonized racial Others into boxcars?) 

History done right tells us to look askance at national “leaders’” recurrent claim that their wars will be concluded quickly with little human and financial cost. The promises of neat, rapidly ended, and “splendid little” wars are rarely fulfilled (ask Vladimir Putin). 

History properly understood teaches us that what rulers often later call well-intended “mistakes” are actually deliberate imperialist crimes (the US War on Vietnam and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq are classic examples). It demonstrates the recurrent folly of imperial and environmental overreach and the related terrible consequences of the excessive concentration of wealth and power.

It tells us that rising and severe inequality beckons economic and political disaster, major depressions and authoritarian takeovers.

It counsels against permitting one group’s rights to be taken away, showing that repression is commonly extended to others once an initial target is brutalized. This is consistent with the dark recollection of the German anti-Nazi protestant minister Martin Niemöller:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Positive Lessons

But history is also full of positive lessons. It tells remarkable and inspiring stories of popular resistance, rebellion, and revolution – of people making history from the bottom up with radical and egalitarian ideals, movements, courage, leaders, and parties. It is full of teachings on how ordinary people and radical activists have rejected, confronted, and even overthrown ruling class ideologies and institutions.

One positive lesson of particular significance is that, as Frederick Douglass said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

In United States history again and again, the rejection of submission and the setting of limits to tyranny have required transcendence of the magical belief that, in the radical historian Howard Zinn’s critical words 14 years ago, “the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple-choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.” Beyond the nation’s deeply flawed electoral process, Zinn rightly argued, “government, whether in the hands of conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war…Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

History done right points to contingency and alternatives, reminding us that radical and even revolutionary social and political change is possible. It shows that class rule and inequality and repressive states built to protect that hierarchy are not inherent in the species and not even characteristic of most of the human past.  It tells us that the environmentally ruinous bourgeois system of political economy is historically specific, recent, and potentially transient, not the “end of history.”

Getting to the Roots of Contemporary Problems

History done right also help us get to the roots of present-day problems. It’s not for nothing that an effective physician seeks to know her patients’ biological and medical histories. Proper diagnosis and treatment requires knowledge of the patients’ past.

Think of all humanity as a body in need of healing – an apt metaphor in our current moment of extreme ecological and military peril. How properly grasp today’s shocking economic inequalities both within and between nations and regions without investigating the hisorical nature of the world capitalist-imperial system? How understand the environmental crisis and modern imperial warfare and militarism without digging into that same history?  How understand contemporary US racial inequality and oppression with no grasp of the origins and nature of Black chattel slavery in British Colonial North America and the United States? With no sense of the Jim Crow era and the history of modern racial segregation? How grasp contemporary US patriarchy – currently on horrific display in dozens of states that have stripped away women’s abortion rights – without knowing its historical origins in a “democracy” that didn’t grant women the elementary right to vote until 1920?

Baseline Understandings and Decoding Propaganda

History done right also helps us recognize and identify deadly developments in the present. It’s important to know what classic fascism was about in Italy and Germany as neofascism menaces the US, Brazil, Europe and the world today. Those who don’t know what classic fascism was and how and why it arose in the 20th century are mentally handicapped when it comes to identifying and resisting 21st century neoliberal-era versions of the same political pathology. Those who don’t know how and why past global wars took place and what their consequences were are mentally handicapped when it comes to identifying and reversing movements toward World War III. Those who don’t know what life was like for women when abortion was a crime in the United States are mentally and morally handicapped when it comes to fighting back against the current Christian Republic-fascist war on abortion rights. Those who don’t know what the blood-soaked United States Empire has done to millions of mostly nonwhite people around the world – the foreign death toll of US intervention runs well into the millions – since the turn of the 20th Century and especially since the end of World War II (please see my essay “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony”) are mentally and morally handicapped when it comes to identifying and resisting US imperial foreign policy in the present and future.  Without a baseline understanding of such elementary things, “democratic citizenship” is dark comedy.

Done well, history helps us de-code propaganda by providing us with an informational basis with which to respond to rulers’ purposefully distorted narratives about the past. It’s essential,  for example, to know a thing or two about what the nation’s militantly propertarian Founders were really all about the next time you hear some politician invoke them to advance or oppose some policy or candidate in the name of “democracy.”

It’s useful to know a thing or about the history of capitalism the next time some politician or talking head tries to convince you that unleashing “the free market” and reducing business regulation is the way to serve the common good. (How’d that work out in the 1870s-1890s, the 1930s, and in subsequent mass downturns? How’s that working for livable ecology these days and in the past?)

Historical knowledge gives us benchmarks to evaluate elite claims of “progress” and/or “decline.”  How do you know if things are really getting “better” or “worse” if you don’t know what existed before? How evaluate narratives of improvement and/or regression with no substantive grasp of the past?  

It would have been good for more US-Americans to know a serious thing or two about their country’s history when the neofascist president Trump came to power promising to “Make America Great Again” – and when the neoliberal President Elect Biden told Americans that the United States has been the democratic “envy of the world for 240 years.” What part of America’s “great” past do “MAGA Republicans” want to restore? What part of the nation’s history is “enviable” for Biden? When American children toiled in coal mines and textile mills?  When Black Americans were mercilessly tortured, raped, and exploited under chattel slavery? The Jim Crow years, which included Black disenfranchisement, formal racial segregation, and savage anti-Black violence – including thousands of racist lynchings – in the US South? When women couldn’t vote and were expected to remain in their homes and died in back-alley abortions? When single women were derided as “old maids”? When gay people were beaten and consigned to the closet? When Chinese people were beaten, murdered, and excluded? When Japanese Americans were herded into internment camps? When armed Pinkerton detectives, federal troops, and state militias beat and shot union organizers? When Chicago’s top capitalist Marshall Field essentially ordered the execution of radical anarchist leaders (the Haymarket Martyrs) for advocating working-class revolution? When labor organizers and intellectuals were fired, blacklisted, jailed, imprisoned, and shamed for holding (or allegedly holding) socialist and commuist views? When white North American settlers butchered Native Americans and pushed them off their ancestral lands to make way for slave plantations and commodity farming? When the United States criminally and unnecessarily atom-bombed two cities in an already defeated Japan?

It might be good to know a thing or two about the history of United States and other nations when American political elites and cultural authorities routinely speak the nationally narcissistic language of “American exceptionalism.”  Among the things one might learn is that the ruling classes in all modern nations have disseminated myths about their countries’ purported greatness and “unique” and far-seeing excellence. The United States is no, well, exception in that and other regards.   Its doctrinal claim to having a special shining beacon of human freedom, democracy, and justice has long been egregiously false, as serious historical investigation shows.

The Teenage Nightmare of High School History

For these and other reasons, history done right (left) is a radically democratic weapon in the people’s struggle for social justice, ecological sustainability, and popular sovereignty. And that’s precisely why it is done so poorly in US-American K-12 education – so badly that USA-ers routinely report history to be their least favorite topic in high school.  The most frequent complaint is that history classes were mind-numbing exercises in the rote memorization of facts, dates, and names.

Facts, names, and dates matter, of course.  If you think World War II happened in the 19th century or that Abraham Lincoln was one of the United States’ Founding Fathers then you are not going to have much chance of making sense of modern history.  But what makes facts interesting, worth remembering, and easily remembered is the bigger story of where and how they fit into a truthful rendering of the great story of human triumph and tragedy. (I used to say this to students: “when you fall in love, you have no problem gathering up and retaining the facts of your beloved’s life and telling them your own, right?  Fall in love with history and its lessons and the facts will fall into place.”)  

It is no small dark accomplishment to render “BORING” fascinating (if often distressing and difficult) topics like the American Revolution, the near eradication of North American Indigenous people, the horrific crimes of  Black chattel slavery, Native American and slave resistance, the Civil War, the feminist struggle against patirarchy the Industrial Revolution, the rise of corporation capitalism, the recurrent fierce class struggles that came with industrialization, the Great Depression, US participation in the global war against fascism (World War II), and the great popular social movements of the 1960s and so much more.   

The biggest problem with K-12 history is that the drearily narrow ideological confines in which it is presented precludes proper excitement. The sterile hegemony of the nationally narcissistic “American Exceptionalist” narrative enforced by textbook companies, right-wing ideological watchdogs, and local school boards reeks with bad faith and cringing service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of class, race, gender, and empire. It’s that more than anything else that drags so much junior high and high school history down to the monotonous recording, regurgitation, and forgetting of names and dates. With the real stories that matter marked as too radical, “controversial,” and now "traumatic” to be told, the subject matter devolves into all too disconnected facts to be trotted out at test time and then deleted from memory. It doesn’t help that high school history is all too commonly taught by sports coaches who bring less moral and intellectual substance to the past record of the human race than is found in Drivers Ed classes – a reflection among other things of the depressingly low status in which history is held at the high school level.  

(And now we have Republic-fascist red states literally outlawing the honest teaching of American history in the name of opposing a mythical “Marxist” conspiracy demonized as “Critical Race Theory.” )

The Higher (Ed) Abdication: Problems Howard Zinn Didn’t Have

One might say, “well, but that’s just high school.  Things get better in colleges and universities.” History teaching and curriculum does improve in “higher education.” But how much better is an open question. Most academic history professors are at leftmost liberal Democrats and thus remain stuck in dominant capitalist, imperialist, and nationalist narratives. That’s dull and depressing.  It’s part of why campuses couldn’t muster a serious movement even against something as historically and morally outrageous as George W. Bush’s arch-criminal and mass-murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq – and of why so many academics (including hundreds of historians) were so foolishly enthralled by the corporatist, imperialist, and “American exceptionalist” candidacy and presidency of Barack Obama.

Even if college and university history, taught mainly by semi-sophisticated and occasionally leftish liberals, is superior to the high school history that is often taught by right-wing football coaches, moreover, the great majority of Americans never take a single college-level history class.

To make matter worse, academic historians do very little to tell people why their subject matter matters. During my many years in and around academic history departments – as a graduate student, teaching assistant, adjunct professor (in at least five different colleges and universities in an around Chicago), and a visiting professor – I was often struck by the field’s taboo against strongly and explicitly connecting its subject matter to contemporary problems and politics. Historians’ nasty name for doing that is “presentism” – the sin of not appreciating history on its own terms and for its own sake. 

Academic historians love to bitch and moan about everyday Americans’ ignorance of and indifference to history but they rarely if ever make the political case for why History matters. They don’t argue the case in the public sphere, to each other, or even to their students

All the reasons I just gave for why history matters are from an opening lecture – titled “Why Study History?” – I used to give in every History course I ever taught.  It was a highly effective talk. I was not aware of a single other history professor who opened their classes like that. 

Sadly, many historians are ill-equipped to make the case even if they want to because they have fallen so far from “big narratives” into an ever-multiplying panoply of excessively disconnected and often highly identitarian sub-specialties that encourage a paralyzing incapacity to think in relevant, grand, and synthetic terms. It’s all very “post-modern,” nonsensical, microscopic, and depressing – a great moral, political, and intellectual surrender.

These are problems Howard Zinn didn’t have.  It’s no wonder that Zinn always had a certain suspect reputation among academic historians even as many college and university professors assigned his monumental and bestselling People’s History of the United States in US history survey classes. The book is not without empirical and interpretive flaws that any well-trained academic historian can discover in his or her s area of expertise. Still, many historians over the years have felt compelled to use it in introductory classes for the simple reason that it gets students to read and discuss.  The better, more radical (I’m biased) US- American historians (there’s a hardy few) assign it also because it encourages students to think deeply and radically about why history matters and their responsibility to engage in making as well as understanding history.

A tenured know-it-all liberal historian once admonished me for my “presentism” by saying that “we don’t need any more Howard Zinns.” I’m no Howard Zinn and actually identify on Zinn’s revolutionary portside, but I disagree: we need a Hell of a lot more Howard Zinns both within and before so-called higher Ed.