• Institutions adopt and promote the memories that serve their own interests.

• Institutions adopt and promote the memories that serve their own interests.
Metzgar noted how the United Steelworkers and the steel companies had a shared interest in downplaying the magnitude of the union’s victory in the strike of 1959. Portelli describes a similar interest on the part of the increasingly respectable Italian Communist Party to associate the shooting of Luigi Trastulli in 1949 with resistance to the steel mill lockout in 1953, rather than with the anti-NATO protests that Trastulli was actually involved in.

Portelli sees a more lasting and systematic bias in the way we often privilege the official record over oral history. By taking written documents such as newspaper articles and court testimony as the true record, while ignoring or undervaluing the spoken testimony of eyewitnesses (which, after all, is the original but heavily edited source of most documents), we hand over history to the police, the state, the corporations, and the “chattering classes” who understand and care little about the experience of working people. This is the history that gets sanitized and passed on to schoolkids, displacing the unsanctified stories of their own parents.

Once you start looking, you notice a lot of re-remembering. Journalists like Mencken and generations of professors recast the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 as the defining triumph of modern progress against backwoods superstition-- an interpretation not shared by millions of religious conservatives. When they reemerged in force on the political scene in the 1970s, they shocked the champions of modernism.

Denying the Holocaust, the murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, has become quite an industry in some right-wing circles. (And when Iran’s President Ahmedinajad repeats those lies as part of his anti-Israeli, anti-U.S. rhetoric, outraged U.S. critics rarely mention the very real Israeli and U.S. campaigns against Iran.)

The civil rights movement cresting in the 1950s and ‘60s has been both sanitized and trivialized by countless rituals and monuments. In Black History Month in schools across the land, children learn that a few saintly leaders saved black people. At the same time, rightists claim that civil rights leaders betrayed the people by depending too much on handouts from the white establishment. “The ideological right has successfully appropriated the movement’s history and reinscribed it to support the conservative line . . . ” writes Payne (362).

One could write encyclopedias about the our editing of the Viet Nam War. Just to offer one example: you may have heard how disgracefully draft dodgers and other liberal cowards treated the vets returning from Viet Nam, jeering and spitting. Jerry Lembcke, a Viet Nam vet and sociologist investigated the “the singular claim that antiwar protesters had regularly spit on returning vets. The spitters and hecklers, he found, were (with few exceptions) the hawkish veterans of previous wars, men who regarded the young GIs as losers because they hadn't come back victorious” (Faludi 1999, p. 299). Still yet, war investors continue to deploy the legend, quite effectively, to mute criticism of more recent adventures.


• Forgetting as policy.
Hard as it is to remember our experience accurately, it’s even harder to completely forget; and yet sometimes we try our best. The bosses like to see to it that remembering hurts too much.

In one class I taught we were talking about the importance of setting in fiction. I gave the example of spooky houses in horror movies, and asked the class what scary places they could remember fromtheir childhood. Three of the women said, “Daddy’s bedroom.” Needless to say, we didn’t get any farther with our literature discussion, though folks did talk a bit about the progress they’d made since the rapes. It happens fairly often in the adult GED class, stumbling on these zones of anguish and silence. And when the people in my class hesitate on the edge of these places, it’s not always clear whether they want to talk about them, and just don’t know how to start, or whether they don’t want to talk because they don’t know how to cope with remembering.

There was no mistaking the folks in a writing class I taught at a day shelter for the homeless. I thought it would be a great idea, getting people to talk about all the places they’ve been. After all, many long-term homeless people are great travelers. I pinned up a map and asked them to tell me where they’d been and what it was like and what were their favorite places.

“Look,” one guy explained to me, “we don’t want to think about all that. It just makes us feel bad.” Just about everyone agreed. That was the toughest class I ever had: getting folks to write who hated to discuss their personal experience. The best response I got from these learners was on the topic of Halloween; almost everyone could remember something good about being a kid at Halloween.

I think there may be two things going on here. First, to remember terrible events at all we need to encode them in stories that will lead us out of the wilderness of grief and rage. That’s what we mean by “closure,” and it can take months or years to develop such a story. But sometimes every turn brings us back to the central violence, and the guilt we may feel even as victims. We become trapped in destructive feelings. Then we can live only if we don’t speak at all.

If we see violence is a kind of cognitive dissonance between our experience and our love for ourselves, forgetting makes sense as a way to reduce that stress of competing ideas about the world (see Festinger 26).

Second, traumatic events are often very confusing in the first place; we can’t understand what’s happening, and too much happens at once for us to fully grasp. This would be especially true for kids. Add to that the fact that persistence violence and any subsequent drug abuse can change the chemistry of the brain, and it’s no wonder we have a hard time recalling terrible experience. I imagine that for some people, explaining what happened to them would be as difficult as it is for me to describe a dream. Just being asked to remember places an intolerable burden on them.

I remember one kid in my class who made evasion a way of life. He didn’t want to be held to a particular story about himself, perhaps because he didn’t have one he could trust. “Don’t bug me,” was the message. “Pretend I’m not here.” He spent a lot of time erasing the tracks of his own life, and bit by bit erasing himself.

Our institutions don’t help us much to remember our national past. The schools, the churches, the mass media risk losing money and political support when they dwell too much on the less pleasant episodes. It’s been often remarked that people in the U.S. too easily forget our past, though I don’t know if that’s more true of us than of any other people. I have to say that, after much struggle, high school history texts have gotten more truthful. Further, I can tell that the best journalists of my generation bring to their writing remembrance of the conflicts of twenty and thirty and forty years ago. Still, we like to think that historical ignorance is a good thing, a sign of our hopeful innocence; no millenia-long ethnic rivalries for us.

On the other hand, our institutional forgetfulness gets us in trouble, too, as when President Halliburton called for a global crusade against terror, blissfully ignorant of what “crusade” sounds like to a Muslim (try: hundreds of years of invasion and massacre). He could scarcely be unaware of Britain’s more recent conquests of Egypt and Iraq, since Tony Blair was Halliburton’s sole ally in the latest Iraq adventure; of U.S. support for both the Saudi dictatorship and the Afghan mujahideen, since his dad had been involved in both; and of previous U.S. deals with Saddam Hussein, involving both Cheney and Rumsfeld. But few war supporters in the U.S. are more than dimly aware of these.

Not knowing our own history also makes it easier for us to make racist assumptions about other people. When Iraqis lynched some Halliburton employees in April 2004, hanging their burned bodies from a bridge, one guy wrote to the Knoxville newspaper,

We, in America, find it extremely difficult to conceive of this type of cruelty. We can’t relate to a culture that would find joy in killing and mutilating a human being.
This is why this photo, regardless of how distressing, is so important for Americans to see. It is imperative for us to realize how many of the people in Iraq think, feel and believe. It certainly indicates the difficulty of making an impact on that country’s basic concepts of life and death, which is so different from ours. If we are to maintain our initial goals and objectives in helping the people of Iraq develop a culture that respects and values all human life, we have to realize what we are up against and what we are risking.

Evidently this fella forgot that in our grandfathers’ time white people lynched about 3,000 black people, with a smattering of Jews and Italians, not to mention hundreds of Asians just a couple decades previously. I guess he forgot the women and gay people who are beaten and tortured here on a daily basis. By pushing for war without investigating the issues, this letter-writer helped murder those men in Iraq as surely as did the Iraqis with the ropes.


What happens when a whole community forgets? In studying immigrant worker organizing at a poultry plant in North Carolina, Leon Fink found that many Guatemalans offered conflicting stories about the savage Guatemala war of the 1980s. While some guarded comments suggested several played active roles in the uprising or the murderous government reprisals, for the most part they tend to portray themselves as innocent victims, with equal disdain for all the combatants (40-43). There are plenty of psychological and political reasons for them to portray themselves this way in public (not least, their hopes for eventual permanent residence status). But I wonder what they tell their kids-- and how the kids will think about collective action when they grow up.

In the mid-’90s Judith Helfand and James Stoney and their team interviewed scores of textile factory managers and employees and their families for the film Uprising of ‘34. That was the year 400,000 textile workers went on strike throughout the Southeast. The strikers were trying to defend themselves against starvation wages and speed-up on the production line. The mill owners brought in thugs and the National Guard to beat, shoot and jail the strikers. The worst violence took place in Honea Path, South Carolina, where the owners’ gangsters fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing six of them. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the murders, though many strikers went to jail. The strike was crushed, and its leaders blackballed from the industry. An incredible story, and a very significant part of labor history. I’d never heard of it until Helfand’s film, and her opening sequence makes it clear why: there was a concerted effort to erase the memory.

I was over there. I took a man’s hat off his head, laying on the ground, fanned him till he died, till the breath left him. But I ain’t got more to say into it. I been trying to forget about all of that and and this is just bringing it all back up.

Over and over participants protested having to think or talk about the strike. They
gave at least three reasons for trying to forget: grief, fear, and shame.

I never remember the strike being brought up in school. It was like it was not to be mentioned. It was just like everybody was trying to keep everything quiet. Maybe it was just trying to get away from the sadness, what they had gone through.

Sadness is what you’d expect. But the fear, that surprised me. Uprising came out in 1995, and people were still afraid to talk about the strike.

Never mentioned. Never mentioned. After that happened down there union was never mentioned again because they knew they'd killed them. They were afraid and they still are afraid.

I watched Uprising at our local university, and there was a short discussion after the film. Union members in the audience pointed out that you can still lose your job for saying the wrong thing. The same social structures still operate in many small mill towns: a few wealthy families control access to jobs, education, legal representation and government and church services. So even today some people mention the strike only to reassure the unseen but evidently omniscient Marse John that they want no part of it.

It's rumors that there was a union back back maybe in the ‘30s, but nobody will talk about it and only to say, ‘I will not be a part of this union’ because of what happened a long time ago. But nobody tells you what happened a long time ago. I would like to know what happened and where’s the history of it.

For others, silence is the practical response.

My father, John Pollard, was a union organizer, and when I was about 18, 19, I went to work out of high school. And at that point I went to work for a big mill in town. Active as my father was in union, or organizing in the county, the only mention to me he made was, ‘make sure you don’t mention being related to John Pollard, you won’t be hired,’ that “It will get you in trouble.’ And to this day I guess I have not mentioned that I have been related to him.

Imagine not being able to acknowledge your own father.

For me, it’s the shame that requires the most explanation.

I can't understand why my daddy didn’t tell me. He could talk about the war, about people being blown to bits, but he couldn’t talk about his neighbors being killed. And it was like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their family. They’re ashamed of what happened to their families. We ought to be proud of them. They stood up when other people wouldn’t.

After all, win or lose, the strikers were fighting for a good cause. But as with rape victims, when the official institutions define you as the criminal, it’s hard not to feel shame. And whatever the bosses say, we have a very strong tendency to distance ourselves from terrifying injustice by saying that the victims did something to deserve it.

Moreover, in most situations of social conflict the lines are not drawn just between workers and bosses, but often run between and within families as well. Uprising only hints at this in passing, but there may have been a great deal of this kind of social stress: wives and husbands disagreeing about the risks, millhands feeling their co-workers had gone too far or not far enough. What about the working class people who opposed the strike out of fear or opportunism? They were at least indirectly complicit in the beatings and murders. But snitches and surviving strikers have to live together after the strike is over. Even when mass movements succeed, everyone has reason to downplay some aspects of the conflict.

What seems to me a particularly nasty feature of this process is the care people take to keep their kids in ignorance. One member of a striker’s family says,

I would imagine even a relative, me going to her, and saying, Granny, ‘Talk to me, What’s this about a union?’ Her memories are so frightening of the periods she’s gone through that I'm not burdening a younger generation with the horror I went through.

She’s talking about her grandmother’s fear, but possibly what she really means is her own fear that her kids could get in trouble if they talked about the strike or, god forbid, learned to stand up for themselves. According to another resident,

It’s the quietest thing I’ve ever known. I don’t know, they may think it may give their children a hard time.

And by so carefully silencing the true stories, many families are left only with lies:

At one time I tried to talk to my father about union. And he told me, he said, ‘Well, at one time there was a union, and they come in, and they took the money from the people, and they left them high and dry.’

I’d expect the strikers’ stories to be displaced over time by other kinds of official memories as well, redirected to safer rituals: high school graduations, opening the new bingo hall, the Blue Devils’ state championship, the Congressman’s annual Bar-B-Q, the triumphant return of (most of) Our Boys from Halliburton’s latest mission of democracy, worshipful state funerals for expired mass murderers.

Episodes like these weaken Scott’s thesis that wherever oppressed people gather subversive talk will arise. He writes that only intense isolation and continuous surveillance can suppress tales of solidarity and resistance --the “Hidden Transcript”-- that criticize the existing order and sometimes directly challenge it (1990, p. 83). Some communities do indeed cherish and nurture secret stories of resistance, but that’s not all that’s going on. The Southern textile mill owners employed no expensive or high-tech means to erase the 1934 strike from memory. All they had to work with was the old, tried and true practices of patronage and casual informing, with periodic doses of terror. Does it take a massacre once a generation to re-inoculate the community, or do you have to do it more often? No doubt the issue has been the subject of many a dissertation at Snitch School.

Last Memorial Day the news featured people who randomly lay flowers on the graves of soldiers every year. They don’t know these soldiers, but participating in so many deaths, even after the fact, leaves them in a state of exaltation. Instead of celebrating real people and remembering how they really died, they invent heroes and heroic deaths and an American Way of Life scrubbed clean of any contaminating shred of truth. Here the waving flags, the drum rolls, the solemn speeches unfurl the screen on which we can project our most pornographic fantasies of sacrifice. We reaffirm our faith that our children have not died in vain; that for each exploded 20-year-old we offer, we may slaughter hundreds, nay thousands, of Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Arabs . . . .