History Matters

Heather Cox Richardson

We cannot understand events of today unless we understand where we have been as a nation and world.  History matters.  History informs.  History ignored leads to mistakes repeated.  Kit and I begin each morning by reading “Letters from An American”— a daily blog by American historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson who teaches courses on nineteenth-century American history and the American Civil War at Boston College.  

On April 15, Richardson wrote in her blog about the death of Abraham Lincoln, shot by John Wilkes Booth— “a famous actor poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement as a part of the nation’s economy was tyranny.”

Richardson reminds readers of her blog that “since the 1830s southern Democratic leaders had gotten around the sticky problem of the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that ‘all men are created equal,’ by insisting that democracy simply meant that men could elect their leaders at the state level.”  They believed that if voters in a particular state passed laws to take indigenous lands, enslave Blacks, or impose taxes on Mexicans and Chinese and not on white men, that was their prerogative, and there was little the federal government could do to change them.

President Abraham Lincoln

To men like Lincoln and those who organized the Republican party, such actions that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few men would lead to oligarchy.  “The point of a democratic government, they believed, was to answer the will of the majority of voters in the whole country.  During the Civil War, the Republicans of Lincoln’s party used the government to provide homesteads for settlers, create public colleges, distribute seeds (no small thing in an era when seeds were handed down in families and poor men often had no access to such legacies), charter a national railroad, invent national taxation, and—finally—end systemic human enslavement.”  HCR blog, April 16, 2022

Richardson reminds us that “This system was wildly popular, but those determined to retain control of decision making in their states insisted it was tyranny.  No longer able to manipulate the political system in their favor, they turned to violence….  The old Democratic Party’s argument for state’s rights has reemerged in the present-day Republican Party.”  HCR blog, April 16, 2022

Following the 2016 presidential election, I felt a sense of disbelief.  Of dread.  Of something ominous lurking just ahead.  Absent was the hope, inclusion, change and sense of new possibilities that I’d felt during the prior eight years. The new administration quickly revealed itself to be lacking in character and without compassion for the people and causes I believe are what America should stand for.  I simply could not imagine how our nation could survive the assault on our institutions that just kept coming. 

Four years later, President Trump was voted out in an election that was scrutinized, challenged, re-challenged, and verified. Yet his loyal Republican base continued to promote his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Then, on January 6, 2021, when Congress gathered to count the Electoral College votes, America and the world watched in disbelief as our national Capitol building, legislators, and Capitol police were violently attacked by domestic terrorists. Enabled by President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and false claims of a stolen election, an armed mob set out to do his bidding and ‘take back the steal.’ 

“Adherents are operating in a false reality, believing that their vision of the nation is the only correct one, and that they must impose their will on the rest of us, no matter what we want.”  HCR blog, April 16, 2022.

This insurrection didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere.  It stemmed from a deep-seated culture of racism and sense of white privilege that surrounded the Trump administration.  We should have seen the chaos coming.

Since the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s second impeachment by the House of Representatives for his role in inciting the attack, Congress remains largely divided along party lines.  Focused on taking back control of the House and Senate, the Republican Party has shifted its focus to increasing the powers of states while voting lock step to obstruct the Biden administration’s efforts to Build America Better.  And in the Supreme Court with its “originalist” majority, Roe vs. Wade, birth control, and interracial marriage rights are under attack.

Following WWII, English novelist George Orwell warned of the dangers of tyranny.  In his classic novels Animal Farm (published 1945) and 1984 (published 1949) he cautioned us about leaders who repeatedly claimed that truth was fake news. Today, we once again live in such times. To quote Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose takes a constant struggle.” 

In the days and months ahead, we must be fully awake.  Ukraine’s heroic struggle to exist as a freely elected democracy is a reminder of the dangers of tyranny afoot in our own country.  History matters. It’s time as a nation to embrace truth, care about each other, be kind, and reclaim the soul of America. 

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower in a speech on March 6, 1956—