I always find it a bit amusing when someone, especially one of the talking heads from almost any news station has a hissy fit about what they call ‘revisionist history.’ They change their tone of voice to make it sound like something salacious, wicked, and morally wrong. Of course, in today’s cultural climate, politics seems to work its way into this discussion. Those two words, revisionist history’ have an odious smell about them, and always a bad reputation.
The truth of the matter is you and I do it all the time. So did our parents. With each retelling of their history, they might pad their high school or college test score a little or create a fib as to why they did not get into their first choice of school or their first job. My aunts all re-invented their weight; one went so far as to shave a few years off her age by having the wrong birth year carved into her tombstone. When it came to money and their investments, or their athletic ability in their youth, the uncles told the same, sometimes expanded stories so many times, after a while they came to believe them.
Long story short, we all do it to a greater or lesser extent, the better to position is in the world. Most of us don’t think there is any great harm or wickedness in it. We just do not want to get caught.
We are not the only ones doing it. Fiction writers, playwrights, and the movies all engage in the same fabrications. It is best summed up in one of the last scenes in the “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” An older Jimmy Stewart is telling a news reporter about the end of Valance, the town bully. Everyone thought he had shot the bad guy, but the truth was John Wayne pulled the trigger. In turn, Stewart used the favorable notoriety to propel himself up the political ranks until he was elected the Vice President.
When Stewart was finished talking, the reporter folded up his notebook and said, “When the story is better than the truth, print the story.” The movies have been creating an image rather than telling the truth since Thomas Edison hired Bronco Billy Anderson to star in the 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery.
According to the movies, every man in the Old West is carrying a pistol. That was far from the truth. Most of the young men who participated in the cattle drives could never afford a pistol and the bullets. Farmers didn’t want them; they preferred a shotgun. There are only two show-downs on Main Street. One was with Wild Bill Hickok, and the other at the OK Corral.
Or, there are the exciting scenes where the wagon train is under attack, and the wagon master orders them to circle the wagons. Never happened. The very unglamorous truth is that far more people died of disease than anything else.
The same sort of prevarication usually takes place with war movies, gangster films, and many others.
We don’t cry ‘foul!’ when it is a movie. We buy our tickets, pay for over-priced popcorn and watered down pop to be entertained, not take a history lesson.
There is where the problem arises. Next to the Bible, Koran, and Torah, and other religious texts, few things seem to be as sacred as history. That is especially true when it is our national history. Almost instantly, we revert back to whatever we learned in elementary school. That includes fact, myth, legend and complete falsehoods.
For example, we all remember the ditty: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and how he ‘discovered’ America. The errors abound: He did not land in America, he did not truly discover anything because the Native Americans were already here, and the only reason he landed on a Caribbean Island was because he was lost. As for a flat earth, people already knew it was round, and European exploration began centuries earlier when the Vikings or Norsemen, landed in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
The story about young George Washington being reprimanded by his father for cutting down a cherry tree? Phony. It was a much later written myth to emphasize how he was an honest man.
Later, the Battle of Bunker Hill didn’t take place there. It was one hill over, on Breeds Hill. Nor did Colonel Teddy Roosevelt lead the charge up San Juan Hill. He and his Rough Riders were a hill over on Kettle Hill. By the time he led his men over to San Juan Hill, Pershing and his Buffalo Soldiers were already there. The story was changed to fit into the racism of the era.
You get the general idea: A story is told and it gets set into our minds, and before long is understood to be absolute truth. Later, when someone challenges an old belief there is a very good possibility others will be angered. They will reject it and then claim it is nothing but ‘revisionist history’ which the other political party is using to destroy America.
Revisionist history has also shifted the emphasis on what is included or excluded. For centuries, historians have written about political and military leaders and sometimes included a handful of very wealthy and powerful individuals. For example, countless books have been written about men such as JP Morgan or Thomas Edison. The employees or the people who worked in research and development, The Help’ as they known, or on the factory floor were all but forgotten.
More recently, the working stiffs have been included, and rightfully so. Today, historians such as William Manchester and David McCullough, tell the story of the common man or woman, and not just a handful of leading lights.
We need to carefully and explore our history because sometimes mistakes were made, got into print, and were completely wrong. In computer-ese, “Garbage in; garbage out.”
For years there was a spooky and very elderly woman who worked in the attic of the museum in Rochester, Minnesota. Her job was to go through the early newspapers, stop at every name and story, put a three-by-five card in her Remington typewriter, and record the information. It was slow going, but at the end of the day she took all of her newly typed cards and put them in a library file drawer.
She started with the drawer on the upper right hand of the cabinet, and when it was full, moved to the drawer immediately to the left. When she got to the end of the top row, she moved down and began on the left drawer and worked right.
That was her system, but I dare anyone to sort out the mess she created.
When the historical society purchased the Stoppel Homestead, they told and retold the stories of their early pioneer years, sometimes using the file cards. More often, they engaged in some creative writing and editing as they told the story. The other night I was rereading some of this history when I realized that Marie (wife of FJ) and Eva (wife of George) are almost completely absent. We know they existed, but there was almost nothing about their contribution to their family and community. In short, a big chunk of local history, left out. One of these days, soon I hope, the project will be revised.
As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, right when he, Tom, and Ben were writing the Declaration of Independence, “Don’t forget the women!”
