Pride goeth before a fall
We know that. But sometimes forget, in moments of enthusiasm.
Such as in February, 2021. The Trump era had seemingly ended the month before. America as I understood her was back, and what better way to celebrate than to brag about our freedom?
It being Black History Month, I chose the bleakest chapter from our past. My column began: “You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets overlooked … ?”
A tease — what could be good about slavery? — leading to the reveal. The good thing about slavery was:
“That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it.”
To provide an example of countries that couldn’t, I decided to kick Poland. I did so because that winter two historians with Warsaw’s Polish Center for Holocaust Research had been hit by a lawsuit by the government-funded Polish League Against Defamation, which sued the authors, as I put it, “for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory.”
The column I wrote was peppered with translated quotes of Yiddish letters from my great uncle, Zalman Bramson, who lived in Stawiski, about life in Poland in the 1930s. Let’s just say Poles didn’t need the Germans to teach them to abuse Jews.
“The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale,” said one of the historians, “… which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists.”
Not forgotten. Actively suppressed. Nationalists have a habit of pushing their nations into the abyss. History teaches us this, so must be prettied up so as not to give away the game.
Feeling myself on safe ground, I indulged in some analysis.
“Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody ‘We are great!’ Over and over and over.”
The nation of Poland, through its embassy in Washington, demanded the column be taken down, while finding nits to pick — one supposed “historian” I cite, his degree was in sociology!
Steve Warmbir, the Sun-Times editor-in-chief at the time, told Poland, in essence, to get lost.
Then three Chicago Poles sued the paper for defaming them. The Sun-Times lawyer assured me the lawsuit would be laughed out of court, and it was.
At the time, I felt my slain relatives nearly avenged. Now of course, four and a half years later, the United States is in a very different place. We have joined Poland in the past-scrubbing business.
Since taking office, Trump has been busy purging government websites of history involving minorities, women, or LBGTQ people. Even positive history, of excellence and accomplishment. On Tuesday he turned up the heat on our nation’s premier museum.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” the president said in a social media post Tuesday. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
Written like a man who never visited the Smithsonian. I was just there, in July, while my granddaughter was taking naps, and I can assure you, there’s glory aplenty. The National Air and Space Museum has Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, worn on the moon, and the Spirit of St. Louis.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump complained that at the Smithsonian “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is.” He must have missed the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 movie version of “The Wizard of Oz,” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in a hall devoted to highlights of pop culture.
Neil Steinberg/Sun-Times
The American History Museum runs the gamut. Yes, there was a Ku Klux Klan hood. But there was also Lamb Chop, the Shari Lewis puppet. A lot on voting rights — that must irk the president. And Dorothy’s ruby slippers. A display on impeachment. And a “high relief” 1907 August Saint-Gaudens $20 gold piece. American glory in coin form.
History isn’t a pep talk. It isn’t a scolding. It is the story of what happened, soup to nuts. It must be constantly updated because times change, but the goal is always to be more accurate, more in-depth, more relevant, more compelling. Not to filter out everything difficult.
Toward the end of that column, I wrote:
“…forgetting is what nationalists do. Because the truth hurts them. Remembering is what a free people do. We are not hurt by our hard past. We are strengthened. The glorious and the ghastly.”
If we can’t remember the past, we are not free. Trump can scrub and scrub, but it doesn’t remove a moment of shame from our checkered past. In fact, he is adding new stains to the American tapestry.