You have to hand it to Donald Trump; no lack of knowledge or insight into history will stop him from becoming a MAD Magazine parody. We are told that the White House had made an inquiry about carving Trump’s head on Mount Rushmore. Could this be serious? If this was true, and despite the denials that it was his idea, there is no doubt that freak show originated with Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies, further evidence of his mental deterioration. Then today he asserted that that he will deliver his nomination speech from either the White House (violating the Hatch Act), or from the Gettysburg battle site (violating its historical significance as well as the blood spilled there). Trump claims he wants to give a “unifying” speech, but as Obi-Wan Kenobi observed, “Who is the greater fool? The fool or the fool who follows him?” Certainly Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany thinks there are plenty of those around, besides being one herself: "The president has done a lot to bring this country together."
It was at Gettysburg that Abraham Lincoln gave his most famous address, ending with
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
For a man with autocratic tendencies, who has trucked with dictators all over the globe, calls “friends” some of our greatest enemies, a man who has insulted and demonized our allies in democracy, a man who had it in his power to unify the country with a call to a higher moral purpose after Charlottesville, El Paso and the George Floyd killing and failed to do so, a man who characterized those who disagreed with him as “enemies” to be demonized, a man who has unselfconsciously played to a white nationalist and white grievance base, a man who has deliberately sowed racial and partisan division in this country due solely to his petty and mean-spirited personal whims and prejudices—Trump’s desecration of the meaning of Gettysburg cannot be gainsaid. Any talk of “unity” simply cannot be believed, because he will certainly contradict any such sentiment within a day, if not within an hour on twitter.
Trump has spent so much of his life—well, actually from the day he was born—in a fantasy world that comes with having a lot of money and a lot of time to burn, that it is simply impossible for him to understand that the large majority of people in this country find it as difficult to relate to him as he has to relate to them. He has been buoyed by people who “relate” to his racism and white nationalism, and everything else about him simply doesn’t matter to them. Obviously Trump cannot or will not learn from his mistakes and how they affect the country, let alone learn from the mistakes of the past—unless they are “mistakes” of his own imagination, of which his “solutions” are only worse mistakes.
Woodrow Wilson, like most white people in his lifetime, had racist attitudes that were considered “normal” for the time, but certainly not acceptable now. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t “learn” from history; in 1901 he wrote an article that was published in the Atlantic Monthly, in which he mused on the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Wilson admitted that former Confederates, while accepting the end of slavery, were in no hurry give former slaves the vote or rights that they were bound to respect. President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty order—with only the condition of the acceptance of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery—admittedly gave them free reign to ignore and abuse the civil rights of freedmen. A “reconstruction” period could have been avoided had white Southerners not chosen to mold the situation into something of their own “liking,” which Congress was in no mood to accept. Still, Wilson admitted that it wasn’t “strange” that white Southerners would want to “retrain” freedmen back into a kind of serfdom, describing them thus:
Here was a vast laboring, landless, homeless class, once slaves, now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure, — a host of dusky children untimely put out of school. In some of the states they outnumbered the whites, notably in Mississippi and South Carolina. They were a danger to themselves as well as to those whom they had once served, and now feared and suspected.
But Wilson also observed that the former Confederates passed laws and regulations that simply went too far in depriving freedmen of their rights and punishing them harshly for petty crimes, like “vagrancy” or “insolence.” And even further—to maintain their “right” to secede from the Union again:
That the legislatures which he (Johnson) had authorized them to call together had sought, in the very same sessions in which they gave their assent to the emancipating amendment, virtually to undo the work of emancipation, substituting a slavery of legal restraints and disabilities for a slavery of private ownership; and that these same legislatures had sent men to Washington, to seek admission to the Senate, who were known, many of them, still openly to avow their unshaken belief in the right of secession.
What had the “Rebels” learned after four years of war? Apparently, nothing. Wilson thus accepted that Reconstruction was inevitable due to the temper of northern Unionists and white Southerners refusal to accept the new reality by deliberately hindering, rather than helping, the integration of freedmen into society. After all, the Union had won the war, and white Southerners were acting like the war and all that bloodshed never happened, even to reestablish slavery in all but name. After Reconstruction, although Jim Crow laws, the peonage system and the use of the prisons for slave labor would soon be established, at least black suffrage (at least for black males) was the law of the land, although white Southerners still made efforts to suppress their right to vote.
We can say, for all his faults—his concerns were more for the maintenance of white hegemony without federal interference than for the “equality” of blacks—that Wilson was willing to at least recognize that the mistakes of the past sometimes required tough measures to reach those hard of head, if only to prevent worse outcomes. Trump is not of that kind; he is destined to be one of those hard-heads whose mistakes future generations must learn not to repeat if "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
No comments:
Post a Comment