The History We Need to Remember
Trump wants to whitewash the past
17th June 1939: German Jewish refugees, looking through portholes aboard the Hamburg-Amerika liner 'St Louis' on arrival at Antwerp, where a temporary home was found for the 900 refugees aboard. Most were later deported. (Photo by Gerry Cranham/Fox Photos/Getty Images)
“It’s not one of the things that will go down in the long annals of good things America did. It goes in a different book,” Historian Deborah Lipstadt
Catching up:
Trump's US Open visit sparks boos and long security lines - AP
Trump loses $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll defamation appeal - CNBC
Happy Monday.
The Holocaust, Refugees, and Haunting echoes
ABC reported last week: “Upcoming 'upgrade' to Holocaust Museum exhibit sparks some staff concerns: Sources
An exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that takes a critical look at the United States' response to Nazi Germany is slated to temporarily close after Labor Day for upgrades, sparking concern among some staff over what potential changes could be made amid President Donald Trump's sweeping review of museums and their programming, sources tell ABC News….
Maybe…
A White House official told ABC News, "There are no plans to review the Holocaust Museum" and said that the closure of the exhibit is unrelated to the administration's review of the Smithsonian museums.
So, to be clear: we do not yet know for certain whether Trump’s campaign to whitewash American history will extend to the story of the Holocaust, but it seems self-evident by this point that the Trump Administration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
So, this seems a good time to re-up some things that we should not forget.
Back in 2022, my colleague Mona Charen urged me to watch Ken Burn’s “U.S. and the Holocaust,” and I had a hard time getting it out of my head — especially this sordid chapter in American history. This is what I wrote back then:
I don’t know how many Americans know the story of the St. Louis, but it should haunt us.
For decades we’ve told ourselves that we are a “nation of immigrants,” and we look back on the Thirties and the Forties as the Greatest Generation. And, of course, we are, and they were. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
As the Holocaust swept across Europe, Americans knew. And, yet, we kept the door shut, even as desperate refugees sought asylum here. Burns documents “the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America.”
“It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death,” Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1938.
But, really, it was so much worse than that.
We knew, and we turned them away anyway. It was an act of inhumanity that should be almost incomprehensible but, instead, it seems too familiar. Americans justified their indifference — and rationalized sending back Jews to certain death — using arguments that we will all recognize.
“If I had my way,” Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina declared, “I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this earth could possibly scale or ascend it.”
“They were afraid,” says Dr. Viola Bernard, “of the argument that Europe was trying to dump all its Jews on the United States and anti-Semitism certainly was a powerful ingredient, frequently covert instead of overt.”
Opponents posed as American patriots.
More than 100 patriotic societies insisted, "Charity begins at home." A cousin of the President, Laura Delano, commented, "Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults." The President was aware that the bill [to allow more refugees] was not politically popular and, pressed for his opinion, he elected to take no action. The bill eventually died in committee.
Burns reminds us that Father Charles Coughlin’s weekly radio broadcasts reached more than three million people. In the Thirties, he rallied opposition to helping Jews escape Hitler with a mixture of anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and rants against globalism. “The system of international finance which has crucified the world to the cross of depression,” Coughlin told his audience, “was evolved by Jews for holding the peoples of the world under control.”
And then there was the St. Louis.
In 1939, more than 900 Jews fleeing persecution boarded the ship, relying on promises that they could find safety in Cuba, as they awaited sanctuary in the United States. But when they arrived in Havana, Cuban officials reneged, giving into anti-Jewish agitation. Burns tells the tragic story.
Friends and relatives watched as despairing passengers waited aboard ship during a week of futile negotiations. The passengers telegraphed President Roosevelt, requesting temporary haven.
Their plea fell on deaf ears.
Finally, the ship was forced back to Europe, sailing first for days along the Florida coast. America would make no exception to its rigid immigration laws.
The New York Times described the St. Louis as the “saddest ship afloat today.”
No plague ship received a sorrier welcome. At Havana, the St. Louis’s decks became a stage for human misery. There seems to be no help for them now. The St. Louis will soon be home with its cargo of despair.
In Burns’s documentary, we see their faces and can feel their anguish and sense of betrayal, knowing that so many of them would later be killed in concentration camps and gas chambers. (Although they found temporary haven, more than 250 of the passengers would be killed after the Nazis invaded the countries where they had settled.)
Refugees arrive in Antwerp on the MS St. Louis after over a month at sea, during which they were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, 17th June 1939. The St. Louis had originally sailed from Hamburg to Cuba, carrying over 937 mainly German-Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. (Photo by Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
This is an appalling and sordid chapter in American history. But, for most Americans, the stain has been whitewashed, and we know why. With the advent of WWII, America had to rally the nation and in order to do so, it had to tell itself a different story. But propaganda is not history, and so it seems we’re doomed to repeat some of our darkest moments.
Burns very much wants us to hear the echoes: Charlottesville, with its chants of “Jews will not replace us,” the demonization of immigrants, the passion for walls, the xenophobia, and the brutal indifference to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
He completed the documentary before the latest stunts that used refugees as human pawns, but he would not have been surprised. We’ve been here before….
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But this is the haunting question: Was anyone responsible for turning back the St. Louis proud of their role? How does history remember them?
And…
How will their successors look back on their own mockery of human suffering?
And how will history remember them?
What is History For?
Back in 2021, I also wrote about another episode that had been memory-holed, and asked this question: What kind of history do we want? Stories that make us feel good about ourselves? A tool for teaching patriotism? Or do we see it as an opportunity for exploring inconvenient truths that might lead to self-criticism (and possibly redemption)?
During the debate in Texas over teaching about the history of racism, one of the sponsors of the legislation said in a statement to the Texas Tribune that schools should emphasize “traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals.”
Here’s another take:
This, of course, isn’t so much history as self-affirming happy talk. (The reference to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are perhaps giveaways.) At the margins, this kind of “positive” history becomes indistinguishable from propaganda.
But it also creates dilemmas: Where does the 1921 Tulsa race massacre fit into this rah-rah best-of-all-worlds notion?
All of this provided context for President Biden’s visit to Tulsa.
“For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence,” Mr. Biden said. “While darkness can hide much, it erases nothing.”
Mr. Biden… was in Tulsa to shed light on a painful part of the country’s history. He recalled in detail the horror that occurred from May 31 to June 1, 1921, when angry white people descended on Greenwood, killing as many as 300 people and destroying more than 1,250 homes.
“My fellow Americans, this was not a riot,” Mr. Biden said, as people in the crowd rose to their feet. “This was a massacre.”
A man was strapped to a truck and dragged through the street, the president said. The bodies of a murdered family were draped over a fence outside their home. An older couple was shot while praying.
Biden explicitly challenged the notion that it was somehow patriotic to whitewash our past.
“We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened,” Biden said.
“We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides.”
David French made two critical points:
It is not “hating America” to acknowledge this is part of our story. It is not unpatriotic to understand that much of our present reality exists because the legacy of past atrocities does not fade as quickly as their memory….
Humanity has not transformed its fundamental nature in the last 100 years. A nation full of people no better than us can do great good. A nation full of people no worse than us can commit great evil. Remembering our nation’s virtues helps give us hope. Remembering our sin gives us humility. Remembering both gives us the motivation and the inspiration necessary to repair our land.
Exit take: you also probably didn’t learn about this in school.
And you probably didn’t read these stories either.
HISTORY BONUS: Last week, my wife and I got to see something amazing: The shawl that Abraham Lincoln wore when he travelled to Washington DC after his election in 1860. You can read about it here.
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Monday dogs
Sunday evening Auggie listening to the piano.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."- George Orwell, 1984
Today, we have immigrants with a piece of paper with a stamp on it showing up to court houses for an immigration check in. Following the law. They are being dragged out of court houses, beaten and disappeared. The parallels with Nazi Germany are there for all to see. The inhumanity of our times indeed... Thank you Charlie as always for your insights.