My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #4, August 2, 1999

A SENSE OF WHO WE ARE

When we were young, we had no history.
The Swans

"History is bunk," said Henry Ford -- the man who painstakingly reconstructed Greenfield Village (including Thomas Edison's rebuilt laboratory), to preserve the self-contained small-town world that he and Edison between them had done so much to destroy.

Once, I suspect, many of us would have agreed with him. Because so many of our ancestors came here to escape the future their history had destined them for, as peasants, or victims of persecution, we have always paid far more attention to the future than the past, to what we could become rather than to what shaped us. But I see signs that, as our country grows older, we have begun to appreciate our need for the past.

Mathew Brady thought people would want and need his photographs from the battlefields and ruins of the civil war, but he discovered that people just wanted to forget the war. Indeed, many of his photographs were lost forever because so few people wanted to preserve them. During World War II, the military took no such chance with its history; it sent official military historians into battle, to collect data for campaign histories while hiding out in foxholes beside the soldiers.

We lost large chunks of our entertainment history because it didn't remotely occur to producers they were making film history as well as movies, and should preserve their work. Many films were lost forever, to fire, to decay, to unconcern. Radio shows of the twenties mostly disappeared into the air they were broadcast into, virtually none of them recorded. The early days of television also largely vanished; the networks occasionally made kinescopes, but made no systematic effort to preserve them. That's why we've now built museums and libraries of broadcasting and film, to store and display the treasures that remain. With video and audio tapes, we don't even have to rely on museums and libraries but can preserve programs and films and our own home movies ourselves.

Sometimes our need to cherish history is triggered by the threat of loss. When Disney wanted to erect a historical theme park in Virginia near civil war battlefields, citizens and historians united in outrage; they didn't want real history Disneyfied, nor did it suit our sense of sacred ground to have these battlefields ringed with tickytacky tourist development. Faced with lawsuits and a public relations disaster, Disney backed down.

Sometimes the threatened loss is not of a place, but of a story. When historians revise our history, telling us new stories that make us seem less wise and just, we fight back. The insertion of the history of women and ethnic groups into an American history we liked just fine as it was has produced loud protests against political correctness. When the historians at the Smithsonian, in an exhibit centered around the Enola Gay, introduced new historical evidence that the atom bomb might not have been necessary, veterans' groups and politicians demanded they omit that, and disturbing photos of bomb victims, from the display, and stick to telling the correct story: that atomic bombs saved the lives of our own fighting men and were an appropriate close to a war that began with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

In the last 50 years we have built many monuments and museums to remind ourselves who we are and how we got here. The Ellis Island Museum preserves photographs, letters, and immigration records of our ancestors' arrivals at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Lest the sacrifices many of them made in their hard early days in New York be forgotten by their descendants, one of the original tenement buildings has been turned into a museum where we can view the lightless, narrow rooms so many lives were crowded into.

We have inscribed the names of our young men, loved and dead too soon, on the Vietnam War Memorial. Every year, the number of visitors to the wall increases, as perhaps our need becomes greater to make some sense of that war, come to terms with the way it set us against each other in the sixties, and express, at last, our sadness.

We have sewn onto a quilt the life stories of people dead too soon from AIDS, and built a museum to honor the victims of the holocaust, to remind us of what mere numbers of victims cannot ever convey -- the immensity of our loss.

Having abandoned our cities and fled to soulless suburbs that have no history, we have begun to appreciate the beauty and craftsmanship of our old buildings. Many cities have helped people restore and live in the beautiful old houses, and have encouraged developers to convert old buildings -- factories, warehouses, train stations -- into apartments, lofts, stores and restaurants. Restoration has encouraged people to live there who then create art and music, start galleries, bookstores, bakeries, nightclubs, that give people from the suburbs a reason to venture back downtown again.

Many of us have become amateur historians ourselves, trying to piece together the story of our family from fading photographs and anecdotes our mothers used to tell. Because we are such a wandering lot, many of us have had to do research to even find the names of uncles and cousins we never knew, only dimly heard of. We maybe have learned, a little late, that a nuclear family is too small to connect us with our past.

Perhaps even Henry Ford understood that history is better than rootlessness. It may be that a landscape of identical suburbs, officeplexes and malls does as much to make us anonymous as our workplace cubicles do. Perhaps we have begun to find, restore, and cherish our past because we have so little sense of where we are, who we are, and how we got here. It may be that we need our past to make us real.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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