From the OAH President

History Matters: Organizing for Mutual Support

James O. Horton

I recently received an email from a middle school teacher in Texas asking me to help her construct an argument on the causes of the Civil War. This is a seasoned teacher who has taught this subject for a number of years, emphasizing slavery as the central cause of the war. She has recently moved from an urban to a suburban school district, however, and has met resistance to her focus on slavery. Some of her students’ parents have strongly objected, arguing that states’ rights and perhaps tax policy are the only topics that should be explored as causes of the war.

My response to this request was two-fold. First, I sketched out an argument for her, using a great many primary sources, including statements from the Texas secession convention. Next, I sent her the text of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 with an argument that included a statement from Jefferson Davis about what proslavery southerners argued as the need for its enforcement, overriding the state personal liberty laws in Massachusetts and other northern states. All in all, I enjoyed lending assistance to this teacher in distress, but it was not a pleasant situation. Apparently, parent voices have grown loud enough to pose a potential threat to this teacher who, because of her school transfer, is currently without tenure. So far her administration has been supportive, but she is concerned about what might happen if the pressure from parents increases.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique. The Civil War remains a sensitive aspect of our history and some Americans feel strongly that there should be no hint of connection between the war and the issue of slavery. They take this stand despite the massive historical evidence to the contrary. To suggest that the war was fought over slavery, or to criticize Confederate actions or heroes, is to risk a substantial and highly organized response. A case last year involving George Ewert, the director of the Museum of Mobile, illustrates the pressures our fellow historians can sometimes face on this issue. Ewert wrote “Whitewashing the Confederacy,” a critical review of the film Gods and Generals, which appeared in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Quarterly. The reaction from neo-Confederate groups was swift and direct. Ben George, leader of a group calling itself the Lee-Moses-Dixon Vindicator Camp #408, Sons of Confederate Veterans, publically condemned Ewert for his criticism of the movie, especially his remarks critical of Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and the Confederacy. In his review Ewert had taken particular exception to one scene in which a free black man cheers the rebel soldiers as they march off to war. Ewert made his point directly. “Most important, the war was clearly, at base, about slavery.”

At the meeting of the Mobile Museum Board in late September of 2003, Mobile area resident Harry Teaford addressed the membership and called for Ewert’s dismissal. A month later, Teaford and Ben George addressed the Mobile City Council, demanding that Ewert be fired from the museum. Meanwhile, a number of Mobile citizens have taken a great interest in the museum’s Civil War exhibit. They have apparently pressed the museum board to have the exhibit refer to the Civil War as “The War Between the States” and the Confederacy as the “Second American Confederacy,” the first being that governed by the Articles of Confederation before the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Some residents have demanded that the South and the Confederacy be portrayed more positively and that no reference be made to slavery in discussions of the Civil War.

There are similar instances of this kind of public reaction from highly organized groups with their own special view of American history. Centered mainly in the South but with members throughout the nation, many neo-Confederate heritage groups view themselves as the watchdogs against what they call revisionist history, a label that often translates as any history that confronts their vision of America’s past. These groups can react quickly, as when historian John Latschar, National Park Service superintendent at Gettysburg National Military Park, suggested in a public lecture that the war may have been fought over slavery. Almost immediately the Southern Heritage Coalition condemned his words. Soon after, 1,100 preprinted postcards calling for his resignation flooded the Office of the Secretary of the Interior. The controversy over the interpretation of slavery at National Park Service Civil War sites has heightened in the past few years. In 2000, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., inserted language into a Department of the Interior’s appropriation bill, commenting on the state of Civil War battlefield sites. The final provision directed the Secretary of the Interior “to encourage Civil War battle sites to recognize and include in all of their public displays and multimedia educational presentations, the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War.” In reality, over a year before the congressional mandate, superintendents at National Park Service Civil War historic battlefields had decided to reevaluate the history presented at their sites on the question of slavery. Representative Jackson’s call simply reinforced efforts already underway, yet reaction to it was predictably intense. At last count more than 2,400 protest communications, most in the form of pre-printed postcards and individual letters bearing the same language as the preprinted postcards, are on file at the office of the NPS Chief Historian.

Clearly, public historians and teachers of history face significant pressure when they attempt to present controversial history. This is true even when their interpretations are those generally accepted as the best scholarship available. Those of us who have urged that historians&emdash;no matter the conditions under which they teach&emdash;ground their presentations in the most solid scholarship have a responsibility to lend maximum support when they face serious consequences for doing so. Many academic historians have gotten involved in aiding those who find themselves under attack or have their careers threatened. Michael Thomason and Richmond F. Brown, both of the University of South Alabama’s history department, wrote letters to the Mayor of Mobile protesting the campaign to remove George Ewert from his position as museum director. They appealed for good history in the museum and urged that the mayor not allow “propagandists for a long discredited myth” to dictate the exhibition policy of this important educational facility in the city.

Wherever such controversies have arisen, our members have spoken out as individuals. It seems to me that one of the most important jobs of any professional association is to provide support for colleagues who face threats to their professional integrity. To this end, last spring the OAH established a Committee on Academic Freedom. Headed by David Montgomery (see p. 5 of this Newsletter), this committee is in the process of investigating cases of attacks on academic freedom wherever they occur. The job of this committee is to bring information about such situations before our membership so that we are aware of the pressures that our colleagues face in teaching or historical research. With this kind of information available to us, the OAH can and should play a vital role in supporting those under attack for attempting to bring sound history to the public.

Our colleagues working in public history are particularly vulnerable to popular reaction to what many indict as “revisionist history.” The situation in which they find themselves is sometimes dire. National Park Service historians, for example, took considerable heat after Congress changed the name of the Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991. Although this was a reinstatement of a place name that long preceded George Armstrong Custer and the infamous battle of 1876, detractors condemned the name change as revisionist history. This controversy became far more than academic when the first Native American to serve as superintendent of that site received death threats and was forced to carry a bulletproof vest in his car. Obviously, to many, history is serious business, and although it is sometimes uncomfortable, it is always necessary that we stand for the best that our discipline can provide to our nation. I applaud the new committee and all those who have already offered their support. We all understand that history matters. Historians can matter too.