Oh, those pilgrims.
They’re the founders of the feast, the people with the turkey, the folksy folks with the bonnets and belt-buckle hats and, to hear Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s recent comments on the Senate floor, the newest targets of the dreaded Great American Culture War.
In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Cotton took a break from not passing COVID relief bills to give a speech on the Senate floor bemoaning what he deemed an insufficient amount of celebrations honoring the Pilgrims and expressing horror that the New York Times Food Section referred to his children’s book version of history as a ‘caricature.’
This holiday divergence comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order to launch The 1776 Project, a commission dedicated to pushing ‘patriotic education’ that will “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”
The executive order came as the culmination of months spent by the president railing against Critical Race Theory, the works of historian Howard Zinn and The 1619 Project for supposedly rewriting history to stoke division and racial tension, raising American children to ‘hate their own country.’
With the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden just 50 days away, we may never again need hear about the 1776 Project or what manner of ‘patriotic education’ it would have churned out. But it is clear from Senator Cotton’s speech that certain factions are not about to relinquish history class as a battleground in their endless culture war. The cries against the 'liberal agenda' allegedly rewriting American history began long before Trump and will continue long after him.
The dystopian, propagandist connotations of ‘patriotic education’ aside – the purpose of education is to construe facts, not dictate personal values – the way we communicate our history has direct ramifications for our present and our future. For a pertinent example of how this plays out, one needs look no further than those pernicious Pilgrims whose criticism so broke Tom Cotton’s heart this November.
The truth is, yes, the settlers of the Plymouth Colony shared some manner of feast with the Wampanoag people in 1621, as recorded by settlers William Bradford and Edward Winslow. However, the story, as with all of history, does not end there. Just 50 years after the fabled ‘First Thanksgiving,’ war broke out between the ever-expanding colonists and the Wampanoags. By the end of the conflict, the tribe was nearly exterminated, with many of the survivors sold into slavery. And yet that conflict, known as King Philip’s War (for the English name given to the elected chief Metacom) is conveniently forgotten by mainstream history.
Nearly any American on the street can give, if prompted, a fairly rudimentary retelling of “The Story of the First Thanksgiving” at the drop of a hat. However, if pressed on any further details on the relationship between the settlers and native tribes, the luck of the questioner is sure to run very low very quickly. Even the Trail of Tears is poorly recollected at best, much less events such as King Philip’s War. And of course, there is that Italian elephant in the room – Christopher Columbus – whose own deplorable brutality was for decades painted over to make room for cartoonish holiday celebrations.
When the collective memory of our nation's founding prioritizes a single instance of peace while neglecting centuries of brutality, we are left with, just as the Times said, a myth and a caricature. Americans disconnected from the reality of history lack the context to rationalize centuries of division and oppression, compounded by a continued refusal to come to grips with past crimes.
This lack of proper context has most publicly played out in recent years in the ongoing fights over Confederate flags and monuments, with millions of Americans caught in a narrative of 'southern pride' and 'honoring history,' unable to comprehend opposing views that are rooted in a historical context completely alien to what has been filtered down through locally approved curriculum.
This gets to the root of the problem. It is not so much that the history taught in American schools is wrong, but that it is incomplete. Do you know what happened at Wounded Knee, why the American Bison was nearly hunted to extinction or who Chief Joseph was? Did you know that Reconstruction was voluntarily ended by Northern Republicans, exchanging the security of freed former slaves for a victory in a contested presidential race? Was HBO’s ficitional series ‘Watchmen’ the first time you learned of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre? Were you aware that sodomy laws banning "homosexual behavior" stood in several states until this century? The list goes on and on.
We have erased the portions of our past that are inconvenient for the triumphant American narrative, leaving us with a story that ends when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech and magically fixed all of our problems, with nothing important happening since.
Attempts to amend the gaps in curriculum and more critically examine the events of our past have for decades now been met with opposition from the right wing of politics, with Trump’s 1776 Project only being the most recent. In the words of his Executive Order, “failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”
That really says it all – the mission of ‘patriotic education’ is to value unity over truth. Leaders who push such nationalistic schlock would have we the citizenry live in a peaceful lie, rather than examine the reality that we have been born out of. Because once people begin to pull at the threads of our binding narratives, questions begin to be asked that those in power do not want to have to answer. Instead, a red, white and blue shroud is placed over history, crippling our ability to discuss our differences or understand our world.
This is a trap we can no longer afford to fall for. If we want true unity as a nation, we must come to grips with the full history of how we got to where we are, the context that frames each of our lives and the issues we face today. Only then can healing begin. And after the healing, working together to build a better future with the lessons from our past.
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