Be it resolved. Since the truth may sting, but can set or keep us free, those who peg the unpalatable unprintable do us no favors. Indeed, they effectively push “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH;” so long as they do, adverse (and perhaps Orwellian) outcomes may loom.
Facing an embodiment of hell on Earth, one tends to look away- but sometimes can’t. In 1841, then-Illinois state legislator Abraham Lincoln rode a steamboat. In a letter (to one Josh Speed), he later recalled seeing, on board, “ten or twelve slaves, shackled together with irons”- and confided how the memory brought him long-term “torment.”
Granted, when (and if) today’s kids learn about shackling, whipping, legalized rape, and/or lynching, it’s not pleasant. But turning a blind eye to such horrors can imply they were ‘too bad to be true’- to the point of enabling tall tales of bygone felicities and beneficence.
As ever, out of sight, out of mind. And in your face, in your nightmares.
That is, unless you deny reality to the point of seeing human nature as (literally) skin-deep. Don’t look now, but Margaret Mitchell did just that. In Gone With the Wind (1936), she closely compares freed Blacks to “monkeys or small children turned loose” to pursue what she calls “wild...perverse pleasure in destruction.”
Come on, Margaret! Don’t hold back; tell us how you really feel!
Perhaps because her story is so riveting, one may get sucked into its realms of magnolia-shaded bigotry-writ-large. So much so, that in the second edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me (2007), sociologist/historian/author James W. Loewen cites a 1988 American Library Association survey hailing the saga of Scarlett O’Hara as “the best book...ever published.”
Yes, in that reckoning, it trumped The Bible.
Dr. Loewen’s magnum opus scrutinizes 18 less-than-candid textbooks. Only one of them quotes a substantial chunk of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Intentionally or not, that glaring omission (on the part of the other 17) could not help but play into the hands of those who’ve claimed “The Lost Cause” was not just Dixie’s, but Divinity’s.
For Lincoln was deeply religious. With (as it turned out) weeks to live, he openly prayed that “providence” might remove “this mighty scourge of war”- but feared the carnage would last “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword [and the musket].”
A drop for a drop. As in, an eye for an eye (cf. Exodus 21:24). Such, Lincoln posits, may be what “God wills….[for His] judgements are...true and righteous altogether” (cf. Revelation 19:2).
A century on, J. Edgar Hoover’s claim that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was America’s “most notorious liar” was itself a vile (not to say damnable) lie. So was his whopper that Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was rife with (no doubt Godless) communists.
Let it be stressed. One hundred years after said address, Dr. King effectively sought to make real Lincoln’s aim for “malice toward none.” For doing so, Hoover effectively declared war on him. Lavishing tax funds on phone taps and hotel room bugs, Hoover’s FBI went so far as to urge the nonviolent freedom fighter (in writing) to kill himself.
Pulitzer laureate Tony Horwitz writes that the Civil War remains “Unfinished.” Indeed. Just two years ago, a violent, nearly all-White search-and-destroy foray lugged Christian banners, Confederate battle flags, and Trump paraphernalia into our Capitol. Like it or not, report it or not, the once proud “Party of Lincoln” pegs that siege, that raid, that barely failed coup “legitimate political discourse.”
Ouch. In schools, news outlets, and elsewhere, we must strive to out the truth that may not tickle. Writing in ‘07, Dr. Loewen (who died in 2021) finds some parents “beginning to demand textbooks with real flavor.” Granted, they may turn out to ‘trouble one’s tummy.’ But (as Dr. Loewen concludes), to the point of fostering an “understanding of the past to inspire and legitimize one’s actions” going forward.
To that, amen.