• Sometimes our memories mix together several distinct events.

• Sometimes our memories mix together several distinct events. Alessandro Portelli asked several people about their recollections of political violence in Italy after the Second World War. On March 17, 1949, hundreds of workers were leaving the steel mill at the end of their shift in the northern Italian town of Terni. Many were on their way to an anti-NATO rally nearby. The police decided to halt what they claimed was an illegal march. Fighting broke out, the police loosed tear gas and bullets on the workers. They killed 21-year-old Luigi Trastulli. Years later, many workers remembered Luigi’s death as having occurred in 1953 during street fighting when the mill laid off 2000 workers. Portelli locates several reasons for the shift.

§ “In the first place, Trastulli’s death was such a dramatic shock that it created a need for adequate circumstances, causes, and consequences.” A peace rally (which it’s not clear Luigi even planned to attend) doesn’t carry the import and menace of a mass lay-off. Recalling Luigi’s death as a part of the massive resistance to the lay-off makes it seem more meaningful, less futile.

§ Highly politicized Italian workers, many of them communists, took a great deal of pride in their power and capacity to defend themselves. But they barely responded to Luigi’s death. It fit better with their collective sense of pride to recall the murder as a trigger of the “near insurrection” of 1953.

§ In later years the CP saw a chance to join the government, and they were muting their opposition to NATO. The earlier anti-NATO campaign was an embarrassment.

§ The different events were in fact related in important ways, as part of broad worker resistance to right-wing attacks. Conflating the events of 1949 and 1953 reflects a collective analysis that, seen in overview if not in detail, realistically links a number of issues.


• Sometimes we construct or reconstruct memories in the light of later events and perspectives.
At one point during the grim campaign in Russia, Adolf was feeling poorly. “The blanket of snow covering the area deepened his despondency. ‘I’ve always detested snow,’ he confided to his shadow. ‘Bormann, you know I’ve always hated it. Now I know why. It was a presentiment.’” (Adolf Hitler, by John Toland, 808.)



Known as “hindsight bias” (Wade,Tavris 1993 288), these conveniently prescient memories have wended their way into all sorts of political contexts, often in the form of prophecy. One of my neighbors told me that there’s a code in the Bible that names Osama bin Laden. He feels that this and other such examples constitute overwhelming proof that the Bible is god’s word, and anyone who doubts it must be stupid. I didn’t tell him I’d be more impressed if the Bible gave us Osama’s current address. I’ve met a lot of folks who remember dreams or visions that, in retrospect, seem to foreshadow a later event. These memories may impress us because they give us a sense of being participants in a readable world, but also because we exaggerate the meaning of coincidences:

. . . after the sinking of the Titanic many survivors and others came forward to claim they had had forebodings or premonitions of the disaster. But as Daniel Cohen points out:

A hundred or a thousand times in an average person’s life he or she may have a dream or some other vague premonition of disaster. When disaster really does strike, we tend to think it was foretold, forgetting all the times the dreams and hunches were wrong. Add to this very human response, a selective memory that tends to add or subtract details in order to make them conform to what actually happened, and we have the psychological conditions that create an outpouring of ‘I knew it was going to happen,’ every time some unexpected and dramatic tragedy takes place. And the sinking of the great ocean liner was surely laden with both drama and tragedy (Nickell 114).

Well, who cares if some people choose to flatter themselves about how smart they are? The problem is that "when we are sure we knew something ‘all along,’ we are less willing to find out what we need to know in order to make accurate predictions in the future” (Tavris & Wade 1195 p. 272).

As well as claiming we knew it all along, we may criticize the people who did not. Fischer (210) points to a dramatic event with parallels today: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For sixty years some conspiracy theorists have claimed that Roosevelt knew about the attack and let it happen, because he needed an excuse to go to war. They refer to the many forewarnings --intercepted messages, and so forth-- in the weeks leading up to the attack. What they don’t pay enough attention to is the vast sea of incoming intelligence in which these warning signs were embedded. It’s easy now to look back and pick out the relevant information from all the surrounding “noise”, because we know the outcome.

One difference between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is that Muslim terrorists had attacked U.S. targets before, including the World Trade Center itself. A lot of people gave Halliburton a pass for not recognizing the intentions of guys who signed up for flight school, learning how to take off but not to land; they couldn't pick this information out of the enormous data stream. I'm sure the problem has only gotten worse since 2001. Given the sheer range of terrorist threats, probably the first task of the security apparatus is to avoid drowning in data. After the next attack, we’ll be sure to hear from people who “knew it all along”.

Then there are the memories which seem important only in hindsight, but did not at the time. After a soldier heard about and reported the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam,

Suddenly, nearly every war correspondent who had been in Viet Nam had an atrocity story to tell. Time’s correspondent Frank McCulloch had had nothing to say about atrocities when, in December 1967, he had written a farewell assessment of Viet Nam after covering the war for four years. Now, McCulloch recalled having seen men pushed from aeroplanes, shot with their hands tied behind their backs, and drowned because they refused to answer questions.He recalled having seen Americal Division troops unleash a Doberman pinscher dog on an old man suspected of being a Vietcong and watch it tear the man from head to belly (Knightley 390).

Until that brave soldier took responsibility for making sure the murders were investigated, a lot of other people passed on it; Not my job.

So sometimes we have to improve our memories to include good intentions, as well. We hear that in the way national history is often retold: Lincoln went to war to free the slaves, the Kennedys saved Martin Luther King. I heard a guy on the radio explain the difference between moral and immoral wars. World War II was moral, because the U.S. was trying to save Jewish people (WKVL 2-4-07).


Metzgar examines a sad re-remembering in the aftermath of the great steel strike of 1959. It seems that a lot of people, including those directly involved, mistakenly recall the successful strike as a failure. How could participating union members lose the memory of a great victory? Metzgar points to several factors (7, 158ff):

• At the time, both union and corporate officials downplayed the magnitude of the union gains, to let the companies save face and avoid a right-wing backlash.
• Some union opponents of dictatorial USWA President David J. McDonald didn’t want him to get credit for the victory.
• The new contract basically held the line, protecting workers’ existing benefits, instead of breaking new ground.
• The strike was followed by years of recession and lay-offs.

Finally, Metzgar refers to the patronizing (when not virulently anti-union) attitude of the journalists and historians who wrote about the strike. Their insistence that the workers got “too much”, and caused the whole industry to fail, became enshrined as the official record of the event.

What we remember and what we forget is complexly determined not just by our own personal history, but by what our larger culture emphasizes, focuses on , and tells stories about. . . . It’s not just that the broader culture has become anti-union, though in many basic ways it has. It’s more fundamentally that our national culture, and therefore our national memory, is shaped by the professional middle class. . . . as long as workers could be easily viewed as victims in a social problem paradigm, they got the attention, and the support, of the liberal middle class. But once workers became empowered through their unions and were therefore no longer credible victims, the liberal middle class lost interest and left the conservative middle class free to portray them as perpetrators. . . . the principal perpetrators of racism, sexism, and narrow-mindedness in American society (7).

Metzgar describes a vital, creative, sustaining and subversive working class culture (comparable to the Hidden Transcript Scott attributes to slaves and peasants), but sees it as gradually losing power and independence. “Through the ubiquitous television and other forms of mass media and the explosion of educational opportunities, among other things, the period of my father’s maturity was precisely the period when the professional middle class established its cultural hegemony. . . . By 1981 the national middle-class culture could reach right into your memory, even while you were trying to make sense of things on your own, and only a professional middle-class son [Metzgar is speaking of himself and his memoir] could help you remember what had been basic to your way of looking at things” (8).

At least the Steelworkers held on to that experience of unity and shared sacrifice: “The most common memory was of ‘the hardship’ . . . . The second most common memory was of ‘how together we all were’” (159).

It will be interesting in 2019 to see how United Auto Workers recall the collapse of GM and Chrysler.