History All Around

The Guantánamo Beacon

Posted by John Dickson in International, Personal memory, Public Affairs, Public History on January 11, 2013

This month marks the second inaugural for President Obama. It’s also the fourth anniversary of his executive order requiring the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo within one year. That decision prompted a group of museum professionals and activists to launch a month later the Guantánamo Public Memory Project (GPMP), aimed at preserving the site for historical purposes, and thereby preventing it from being used again as a detention center.

In December, the GPMP hosted a conference in New York City in connection with the opening of an exhibit to explore the issues that the naval base and the prison hold for the U.S., and its place in the world. The exhibit consists of a series of panels in the windows of the Kimmel Center at NYU and an online collection of materials and interviews, collected by the project and its many partner institutions. Much transpired at the conference, including testimonials by Cuban and Haitian refugees from the 1990s, from military officers and lawyers, from historians and students. Most striking, and telling, were two questions posed by students.

The first student, let’s call Jose, stood up in front of the room of 100 people attending the conference to ask his question, stating that he was from the Dominican Republic, and while not enrolled in university, he was studying on his own. He said that where he was from and throughout all of Latin America, the United States stood like “a beacon” on issues of democracy and human rights. “What,” he asked, “happens now after Guantánamo? What can you say to us anymore?” His tone was clearly one of wanting to continue to see the U.S. as that beacon, in a region still struggling with consolidating its own democracies.

Several minutes later, another student called Katie asked what was happening to the lighthouse at Guantánamo Naval Base. “Were there any restoration plans?”

The former naval commander in charge of facilities on the base indicated that the lighthouse was in disrepair, that pieces were falling off it, and that there was no funding to restore or maintain it. In fact, it was closed off, surrounded by chain link fence.

The two questions were asked separately, but became connected metaphorically, since the second student had contributed to the GPMP on-line exhibit a page on the lighthouse, in which she referred to it as “a beacon.”

The physical disrepair of that lighthouse on Guantánamo takes on greater meaning in light of Jose’s question. The symbol of the U.S. as a beacon takes the form of the lighthouse on the naval base, damaged and surrounded by a fence.

The only answer to Jose and people around the region should be, watch our democratic practices take place to find the self-correcting mechanisms. It will take time, and there will be advances and setbacks. The conference and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project are part of that process by seeking

a) to raise awareness about the base and the detention center,

b) to use public history through exhibits, digital spaces and oral history to initiate a dialogue about the trade-offs between national security and human rights and

c) to re-think the use of Guantánamo as a detention center in the future.

For more information on the project, go to: http://hrcolumbia.org/Guantánamo/ . To see the final product go to: http://gitmomemory.org/stories/.

A beacon in disrepair. Photo: SouthCom

The Once and Future NRA

Posted by John Dickson in History in our surroundings, Public Affairs on January 3, 2013

This past July I “liked” on my Facebook page an article by Juan Cole entitled “How Long Will We Let the National Rifle Association and Corrupt Politicians Kill Our Children?” Cole, a history professor at Michigan, wrote his article on the heels of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting. He pointed out the shooter used a semi-automatic rifle to fire off multiple rounds of ammunition, quickly. It was a gun which had been restricted under the assault weapons ban which Congress allowed to lapse in 2004. It turns out it was the same gun used in the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Back in July, I thought the likely answer to Professor Cole’s question would have been: “At least until after the November elections.” I join the millions of others who reacted in anger and sadness to the Newtown tragedy with a more urgent, direct answer: “No longer.”

On the heels of this tragedy, opinion writers around the country have pounced on the subject of gun control, with comparisons that regulations for ladders are more stringent than for guns , or that it is easier to adopt a pet than to buy a gun, or that even toy guns have regulations.

The obstacle to any form of gun control, as Professor Cole pointed out, has been the NRA, which took a week to respond in any form, and then, when it finally did, it trotted out the same old talking points that had served them so well for so long. Their public relations playbook must read something like: “Hunker down. This too will pass. Don’t give an inch; blame people and the media. Any chink in the right to bear arms could result in the prohibition of all guns, tomorrow.” The face of the NRA was once again Wayne La Pierre, the same man who, in 2000, blamed Bill Clinton for tolerating gun shootings in order to promote gun control.

What’s interesting is that the NRA has only adopted that playbook within the last 30 years. It started out a different organization, in 1871 right after the Civil War, as a response to the poor marksmanship of the urban Northern soldiers. Well into this century, it focused its activities on hunting and the outdoors.

Given the rhetoric from the NRA recently, it is striking to learn that even they once advocated for gun control, as early as the 1930s and as recently as the 1960s. One president of the organization, Karl T. Frederick, developed model legislation for state gun control laws. His testimony during the Congressional deliberations in 1934 to pass the first major national gun control laws reveals the separation between the organization and its current all-out embrace of the Second Amendment. When a congressman asked if he thought the law under consideration “is unconstitutional or that it violates any constitutional provision,” Frederick responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view. I will be glad to submit in writing my views on that subject, but I do think it is a subject which deserves serious thought.” The National Firearms Act passed in 1934, and four years later the Federal Firearms Act passed. Among other provisions, these limited the ownership of automatic weapons through heavy taxes and licensed firearms sellers. Their target was principally organized crime.

Bill of Rights. Photo: National Archives

The NRA in the 1960s also advocated gun control legislation, first after the nation learned the Lee Harvey Oswald had purchased his rifle by mail order, through an ad in the NRA magazine. Laws were only passed following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Again, the NRA supported the legislation, with its Vice President, Franklin Orth, testifying before Congress in support of the proposed law to ban mail order sales of guns, among other provisions.

Since that time, the NRA has reversed course and consistently assumed its don’t-give-an-inch position, working to prevent passage of the Brady Bill, taking lawsuits all the way to the Supreme Court, and working to remove from office politicians who promote the slightest movement in the direction of safe use of guns in our society.

However, a look backwards shows us that, much like the limits on free speech (yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater,) we have accepted lines drawn to limit any absolute view of our right to bear arms. Even the NRA once supported drawing lines. In fact, if it really wants to protect the right of the people to bear arms, it might want to reconsider its stance, as its absolutism may actually be harming its cause. Imagine an organization which actually knows about arms, leading the way, like it once did, to advocate limits, to prevent the next Newtown, the next Aurora, the next Columbine. It could be an organization that would look back on the past 30 years as an exception, a tarnished period in its own history. Better, it could help avoid having to repeat Professor Cole’s question every few months.

Who is Jenni Rivera?

Posted by John Dickson in History in our surroundings, Immigration, International, Public Affairs, Public History on December 24, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, Jenni Rivera died in a plane crash. If you are at all like me, you wondered who is Jenni Rivera. Then, you may have moved, like me, to a better question: how could I not know of Jenni Rivera?

It’s not age, but certainly there are a slew of boy bands and other pop culture icons who have just passed me by. This one, Jenni Rivera, had to do with our ethnic and racial, perhaps geographic bubbles we live in.

Jenni Rivera turns out to be a Mexican-American singer, and not just any singer, but one who sold upwards of 15 million albums. She started out singing banda and ranchera music, which, when I lived in Mexico, sounded like a form of Mexican country-western distinct from mariachi. She then moved on to greater popularity with her own reality show on Spanish-language cable television. She was due to break out with her own English-language TV series this coming year.

She was American, born, raised and resident in California, right in front of our eyes, but only if we looked in her direction. That direction includes Spanish language television, music, churches, radio, neighborhoods and schools.

It turns out her parents were immigrants, from Mexico. Her story sounds like it fits into the American immigrant pattern. It is a pattern which is not supposed to exist, which is supposed to have changed from the earliest Irish and German immigrants (not counting the early settlers as immigrants.)

Those patterns are changing: language and culture are held on to longer, because it is easier with bilingual education, mass media and telecommunications, and proximity to the border and the native land. School achievement is lower than for previous second generation immigrants, but not in comparison to the first generation of Mexicans who are coming here with barely a primary education. The Jenni Riveras could thrive on her side of the immigrant boundary, unknown to those of us on the other side, in the receiving mainstream.

These changing patterns have caused academics since at least the 1960s to re-think the “melting pot” and assimilation that we once thought characterized our nation of immigrants. Instead, they see segments of some immigrants assimilating and moving up the economic ladder, and others spiraling downwards. They see exclusion and separation, not inclusion and integration. They may be seeing, and trying to explain, the present, before it has a chance to become the past. We are still too close to the current immigrant wave to see it play out.

For example, the ethnic enclaves where Jenni Rivera thrived also existed before. The once dominant French, Polish and Italian churches hold special services in Spanish, Korean and even Khmer. Sports, culture and politics still remain avenues of economic mobility and acculturation; yesterday’s Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson are today’s Alex Rodriguez and Pablo Sandovaal. The 2012 Presidential election saw, for the third straight time, the increasingly important Hispanic vote. And, of course, nativist reaction to immigrants still continues.

Despite the segmentation of our own cultural offerings, with hundreds of cable channels to allow us to stay in our own ethnic and political realms, Jenni Rivera made it, in death, on to both the front and op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Jenni in 2009 Performance. Photo: JEnriquez

Think I’ll go add Jenni Rivera to my playlist, and move the boundaries a little.

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In plain sight

Posted by John Dickson in Berkshires, Civil War, History in our surroundings, Public History on December 18, 2012

It’s an invisible monument, in plain sight. The Soldiers Memorial sits in a prominent position on Park Plaza, the small, central park of Pittsfield, at the crossroads of main thoroughfares in western Massachusetts. Thousands of people pass by it daily, but I wonder how many are like my wife who grew up in Pittsfield but did not know there was a monument in Park Plaza. The last time the memorial appeared in the press was on the 110^th anniversary of its dedication, in 1982.

On Park Plaza. Photo: JDickson

On the one hand, it’s hard to miss the 6-foot bronzed color guard soldier holding the flag, atop a 12-foot granite pedestal, dedicated just seven years after the end of the Civil War. Divided into their regiments, the names of 102 Pittsfield soldiers who died during the war are inscribed on plaques on the granite sides. Yet, so many of these statues of soldiers, or generals riding horses, populate our public places that they have lost meaning of memorializing the fallen, blending into the landscape almost like a telephone pole.

Each of the men on the plaque must have his own story worth telling, but lost now. The pamphlet[1] memorializing the dedication ceremony on September 24, 1872 adds a little flavor. The name of the conflict was “The Great Rebellion”, not the Civil War; the artist whose painting served as the model for the sculptor himself survived the Battle of Antietam but lost an arm. The booklet includes the names of the regiments of the Pittsfield volunteers, and their engagements, from the well-known Gettysburg or Chancellorsville to lesser known battles with names like Yellow River, Grim Swamp or Cane River Crossing. Soldiers “died from their wounds,” “killed in action,” “died in Libby Prison,” or simply “died.”

Reading from a 21^st century perspective, several other story-lines with gender and racial overtones emerge. The original idea for a monument was floated shortly after the end of the war, studied by several committees, including one of women who went on to raise money when the town delayed pursuing a memorial so that it could pay off its war debts first. With $3000 in the bank, these women stepped aside (or were shunted?) when an all-male town council took over the plan, appropriated public funds, but still drew on the collected monies. In addition, four soldiers from the all-black Massachusetts 54^th (highlighted in the film Glory) died during the war, but an additional ten from Pittsfield served, including the chaplain Samuel Harrison, whose names are all included in the booklet. An article from the local paper on September 25, 1872 which lists all the regiments of the 2000 soldiers who marched in the parade did not mention the 54th, leading to speculation on their absence – from the story or the parade?

An orator spoke at the dedication, a professional orator, winner of prizes and contests: a certain George William Curtis, from New York, who speculated on how posterity would interpret the war. Not once mentioning slavery, his reference was implicit but unmistakable: “equal rights of every citizen are the sacred care of the whole people.” Curtis thought to anticipate the day when a youth from Carolina or Georgia would stop at the statue and invoke that these “men died for me as well as for you. They saved Carolina as well as Massachusetts.” We’re not there yet.

How does this statue speak to us today? Hardly at all, unfortunately. This memorial invisible in plain sight, should tell us a lot, about a war which still divides us as it preserved and united, about the sacrifice it took to get to where we are, on race and gender, on patriotism, on loss.

[1] Proceedings of the Dedication of the Soldiers Monument, edited by J.E.A. Smith, Pittsfield MA, Chickering &Axtell, Steam Printers, 1872

: On Park Plaza. Photo: JDickson

Food, Luxurious Food

Posted by John Dickson in History in our surroundings, Personal memory, Public History on November 30, 2012

Thanksgiving has come and gone, now drowned out by the near-hysteria which television commercials promote to make us think we’re missing out if we don’t get out and shop.

Last course. Photo: JDickson

Let’s rewind to last week and consider food, specifically how far attitudes toward food have traveled, in the past two generations.

There’s such a difference between producing and preparing food in a time period of limits than in our current experience with abundancy. Since food is so connected with family, let me fall back on my own to make the point. Sunday evenings, after my mother had toiled over a fairly elaborate family Sunday dinner in the middle of the day, she turned over food matters to my father for the evening supper. A child of the depression who had never eaten an egg before he was 18 (and a man), he served us graham crackers and milk. Right. Broken up graham crackers in a bowl with milk poured over. His goal was to fill up the stomachs of his hungry brood, with as little time and knowledge as he could muster up.

It should go without saying that my mother’s approach was quite different, but there, I said it. With a little more disposable income, a little more time and know-how, she had a dual track approach to organizing the food for the family. First, she had her box of file card recipes and cookbooks and drew from it to make regular, fulsome, varied dinners for us and for guests. Yet, she also seemed to be first in line for the latest trends of convenience coming our way in the 1950s and 60s, ranging from frozen food dinners (chicken pot pies), freeze dried, preservatives, or mix-with-water foods (powdered gravies.) Her goal was convenience, and freeing up her time for other endeavors, some leisure but mostly other pursuits, like parenting, volunteering or socializing around hobbies. Her goal was convenience.

Oh, one other thing. Even with disposable income, we ate out so rarely that I remember vividly the first time at a restaurant and, outside of travel, can count on one hand the number of restaurants we ate at before high school.

References to food in our histories calls to mind first, the amount of meat consumed by the men on the Lewis and Clark expedition, an average of 8 pounds of meat per day, per person! Compare that to the annual single serving of meat for the family in Ireland at the brink of desperation before sending waves of family members to the U.S. and beyond in search of income. Move temporally back to the present, but beyond our shores to large swaths of entire continents where all things food remain on the subsistence level.

When did our view of food go from filling up our stomachs or getting through the preparation time quickly to our current , near obsession with so many layers of food from production and handling all the way through preparation and consumption?

The changing roles of gender in the past 50 years must account for much of this. With stay-at-home women traditionally more responsible for all things food moving into the workplace, the emphasis on convenience has extended beyond frozen food aisles in grocery stores to eating out or at least taking advantage of the fully prepared meals taking up large sections of stores.

At the same time as we are seeking convenience due to hectic working lives, though, we, with our expanded incomes, are able to spend more on differentiating food, into categories like sources or quality, or preparation and handling. That means of course, spending a little more of our precious time to investigating and studying foods, which means full sections of newspapers and separate television channels dedicated to food. We even have graduate history courses in our universities on food.

In a very real sense, food has become the new luxury. Luxury in terms of money and in terms of time, even in the contradiction of having no time. The Starbucks principle of people spending a little more of their money for quality, but also to have the luxury, has expanded to all our food. For those with money and time.

I recently attended a workshop on Foodways, a history workshop. I entered the room, one of two men, as a dissident, bucking against the current trend of luxuriating what had always been for me barely more than a bodily function. I left with an appreciation for food as a window into our history, even in its current luxuriated stage!

Thanksgiving is part of that. It’s not just how food at the table has changed, but the social history of Thanksgiving, offering a window into the daily lives of ordinary people. When millions of those ordinary people do the same thing, as we do with infinite variations on the theme, then that’s another window. Almost unique in setting aside a holiday exclusively for a meal and family with overtones of sharing, the country may merit exceptionalism, at least on that basis.

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