False history and its unwitting victims

If I were president, the first thing I would do is create a new Cabinet department: the Department of Fatuous Gestures (DFG).  Virtue-signaling is way too disorganized to reach its full potential.  Schools, streets, sports teams, military bases…even elements of the Periodic Table need to be renamed in order to fulfill the demands of woke sensibilities.

Kidding aside, what used to be Fort Bragg, North Carolina is now Fort Liberty because Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general.  Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, California is still called Fort Bragg because ol’ Braxton was still an officer in the U.S. army when he was stationed there.  He, along with about 70% of the officers in the U.S. army, defected to the Confederacy when the Civil War broke out.  And the process of erasing the memory of how slavery was finally abolished continues, as statues are taken down and names are being changed.

It is often said that when a people forget their history, they are condemned to repeat it.  I prefer to rephrase that by saying that when people either forget their history or never knew it in the first place, they make it easy for demagogues to get away with lying to them about it.  Nothing fits this scenario better than slavery and the Civil War.  Two-bit demagogues have for years stoked racial tensions for political gain.  This, however, is finally starting to lose some of its fizz.  Trump’s presidency began to significantly peel away blue-collar folks of all ethnic persuasions from the Democrat plantation.  The quest for reparations amounts to nothing more than a “hail Mary” to stem this tide.

History is what it is, regardless of fictionalized “interpretations.”  Kamala Harris cannot deny that she is descended from Jamaican slave-owners.  She and her friends in the media just never mention it.  Most of the soldiers in the Confederate army were not slave-owners, and they may have ultimately benefited from the Confederacy’s defeat — because they then competed for real wages in a true labor market that was not skewed by slavery.  Karl Marx intensely followed the Civil War in the European press and declared the Union’s victory a major triumph for the working man.

Perhaps a suitable poster boy for the perpetrators of fraudulent history would be the notorious academic charlatan Ward Churchill.  One of many fallacies attributed to him is the deliberate provision of smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans in the early days of the settling of America.  There may well be many who still believe this to be true, since it fits the “white man bad, noble savage good” narrative.  I mentioned this to a professor I know who teaches at a local college, and he told me that the chair of their Native American Studies department confirmed my version. 

This is not to say that European settlers did not bring various diseases with them, which then decimated the native population.  It’s just that back then, there was no real knowledge of how and why such tragedies occurred.  Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, describes how Europeans had long ago developed immunity to many diseases through their cultivation of livestock, which acted as conduits for all forms of contagion.  Not intending to spread disease, they brought a lot of these animals with them when they relocated to the Americas.

A particular focus of false history (AKA mythology) is Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He legitimately deserves a prominent place in history, having been elected to an unprecedented four consecutive terms of the presidency.  The mythology mostly involves his relationship with the Great Depression and its end.  Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, claims that the Depression was not the pivotal issue in the election of 1932, in which FDR defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover.  At that time, the Depression was still in its infancy.  Instead, the repeal of Prohibition was the deciding factor.  I posed this to my mother, who voted in that year for the first time.  She slapped her face and exclaimed, “That’s right!  Roosevelt was a ‘wet’ and Hoover was a ‘dry.'”

Johnson does blame Hoover for having some responsibility for causing the Depression — not as president, but as secretary of commerce under Coolidge, where he shipped boatloads of taxpayer dollars to Latin American countries in order to stimulate their purchase of U.S. exports — only to have regimes change and the money disappear once it arrived.

It continues to remain common false knowledge that FDR deserves credit for ending the Depression.  When he took office in 1933, unemployment was at 24.9%.  Five years later, it was still at 19%.  Then, at the end of 1941, the Japanese navy stepped in, and unemployment went down to 1.9% by 1943.  Various conservative economists have claimed that FDR actually prolonged the Depression.  Amity Shlaes, in The Forgotten Man, describes a federal edict that mandated corporations to pass through all profits to stockholders in the form of dividends.  The intention was to put more money into circulation, but the unintended consequence was to thwart self-financed corporate modernization, which would lead to increased productivity.  Incurring debt for the same purpose would add significantly to its cost.

Since history is written by fallible human beings, to help filter out much of the bias contained therein, it comes in handy to read several different authors’ treatments of the same general period.  Including context is also quite important.  Public TV’s darling, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2013 combined biography of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, The Bully Pulpit, consumed 752 pages without ever mentioning the Panama Canal.  Go figure.

Image via Picryl.