Donald J. Trump fears that the removal or relocation of Confederate statues will mean the loss of our history. His view that these statues are neutral markers of the American Civil War—a war that took over a million lives, that ended the institution of slavery, and that almost permanently sundered the United States—is, at best, naïve. As many commentators have pointed out, the statues have their own history. They were erected to commemorate the southern cause at a time when it was being romanticized (along the lines of the portrayal of happy slaves, beautiful plantations, and dashing confederate soldiers depicted in Gone with the Wind). It was also a time when southern whites were using violence, intimidation, and economic power to suppress the aspirations of former slaves. Southern plantation owners and their descendants took away African Americans’ newly-won right to vote, they bound them to the plantations they had formerly worked as slaves using debt peonage, and they murdered those who tried to defy them. Far from being neutral, statues honoring the lost cause were highly political efforts to celebrate the slave past and to shape an unjust present.
The ignorance Trump displays in this case may of course be willful, in that it allows him to side with the violent racists who took to the streets in Charlottesville. But the larger conversation about history that this incident has prompted has a broader significance.
History is always an interpretive act. No such thing as history plain and simple exists. History is never an uncomplicated recounting of events that occurred in the past: it is what we know about those events and how we choose to remember them. Conservative attacks on the historical profession and on history education more generally try to deny this reality. They claim history is just what they think it is, and that it requires no further discussion. Those who have not thought deeply about these issues or who are unsettled by the idea of history changing can be duped by this ideologically-motivated effort to control the past. As citizens we need to oppose these manipulative attempts to deny the truth that all history involves an act of interpretation.
Take the events in Charlottesville for an example. Imagine that in two hundred years, all that survived of these events and the controversy swirling around them was a single account, and that a historian used that lone text to craft a view of that history. The document would have been produced by someone and for some reason. Perhaps the person was a white supremacist who traveled to Virginia from another state, heeding the call to fight the city’s decision to move a statue. The author might have been a person who responded to the arrival of a mass of protestors by going out to bear witness against the message of the marchers. Or the author could have been a resident of Charlottesville caught up in the events unintentionally, reporting on what they understood of what transpired. We can easily imagine that each of these varied perspectives would color the account, and that the historian—having access to only one viewpoint—would struggle to see the larger context in which the events occurred. The author might have written for a particular purpose: to defend their actions, to counter another perspective that left no record, or to recall a distant event many years later. Even if the writer attempted to be entirely neutral, what they knew and what they thought would affect their retelling. Every source that gives us access to the past is imperfect, and historians must consider those imperfections while constructing a history. Doing so, the historian knows that they can only arrive at a version of the truth.
Consider further that the hypothetical historian of the year 2217 would consider their text with knowledge of what came later. The researcher would find it impossible to avoid hindsight. They would know, as we do not, whether this resurgence of publicly- and proudly-expressed racism led to worse or was successfully suppressed. They would know whether such statues came down without further incident; if the President’s willingness to countenance hatred and violence led to his removal from office; and how the forces of hatred he helped unleash responded to his removal. They would know whether the romanticization of the slave south came to be seen for the intervention into racial politics that it was, or whether it carried on unquestioned in many circles. Later events would thus affect the historian’s understanding, in ways we cannot anticipate.
The idea that history is uncontested, simple, factual, and clear is obviously bogus. That claim is asserted by those who want to control history. They deny that they are doing so at all, saying that they want simply to return the facts. Their false claims help them to undermine the value of historical study, since they recast historians as messing with a pure and simple past that we would all agree unfolded just as they say it did if it weren’t for historians who perversely say otherwise. They manipulate our national politics through their false claims about the past. While it is possible that the President knows no better when asserting that statues are uncomplicated historical artifacts, such statements reflect the work of a generation of conservatives who have assailed the work of historians and who want to dictate the meaning of our history. We should not allow them to do so.