...And There You Have the Facts of Life....

 

    Remember this?  Lyrics from the theme song of sitcom "The Facts of Life":

   You take the good, you take the bad,

you take them both and there you have

The facts of life, the facts of life.

There's a time you got to go and show

You're growin' now you know about

The facts of life, the facts of life.

When the world never seems

to be livin up to your dreams

And suddenly you're finding out

the facts of life are all about you, you.

It takes a lot to get 'em right

When you're learning the facts of life. (learning the facts of life)

Learning the facts of life (learning the facts of life)

Learning the facts of life.

Closing Theme:

You'll avoid a lot of damage

and enjoy the fun of managing

the facts of life.

They shed a lot of light.

If you hear them from your brother,

better clear them with your mother

better get them right,

Call her late at night.

You got the future in the palm of your hand.

All you gotta do to get you through is understand.

You think you rather do without,

you will never make through without the truth.

The facts of life are all about you.

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/thefactsoflifelyrics.html

    Like you, I've been drowning in arguments lately, arguments about how history should be taught. I am definitely not a disinterested party. For 30 years, I made teaching history my career. Before and after being a professional teacher, history has been and continues to be a very big and important part of my life, but I typically refrain from wading into the debate. Why? First, I don't thrive on conflict. Second, knowing that both sides are enflaming debate purely for the purpose of generating political capital and manipulating their ignorant bases for one purpose, power, I know the pendulum will swing back and forth. As much as I was limited in my classroom by state standards, standardized tests, and time, my goal in the classroom was never to teach a single perspective; my goal was to teach truth and to encourage my students to objectively search for truth. I tried to answer questions honestly as they were asked, or to set them on the path to finding the answers.  I never believed my goal as a history teacher was to propagandize or to indoctrinate. The fact is, there are many great things and people in American history, and there are many terrible things and people in American history.  Those are the facts of life, and you have to take the good with the bad to arrive at the truth.

    I've recently read three books that really focus on the bad. They are incredibly dark and are focused on the darkest aspects of human nature, out and out evil, the kind of evil that only humans are capable of inflicting on other humans. Some people, like my wife, would never read them because they are so dark. However, they tell stories that need to be told. 

    American Midnight was published in October 2022 by Adam Hochschild. I admire Hoschschild's writing, but he tends to write about dark topics. King Leopold's Ghost is about the atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo, and Spain In Our Hearts is about the Spanish Civil War. American Midnight is about America during World War I into the early 1920s, specifically about the anti-war, pro-civil rights, and pro-labor union movements active during the time, and the all-out war waged against them by local, state, and federal governments and by citizen-vigilantes.

    From Amazon: "From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor

    The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.  

    This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now."

    Hoschschild tells stories that I had never heard, stories that are never told. I learned a lot from this book, and it will probably end up being one of my best reads of 2023. I was a little disappointed when Hoschschild's political bias was made abundantly clear in the epilogue. To be fair, there were hints of his leaning throughout the book, but it was blatant in the epilogue, and he even makes a couple of intentionally misleading statements. I would still recommend the book to those looking for truth.

    

    Fordlandia, published in 2009 by Greg Grandin, tells the story of Henry Ford's failed attempt to build a rubber-producing colony in the Amazon forest. I have to admit that I have a definite bias against Henry Ford, one of the most racist and anti-Semitic Americans in history, and that's quite a feat, but this book really illuminated even more reasons to dislike the man. Ford had a definite vision for America, a small-town, white supremacist, Jew-free America, in which men would work in modern factories most days, and women would be the typical housewives, cooking, cleaning, volunteering, gardening, and raising children. Factory workers would spend only part of the year in factories, however. The rest of the year would be spent farming, being one with the agrarian lifestyle.

    Like every other American history teacher, I always taught the surface facts about Ford: that he masterminded the combination of assembly lines, automation, standardization of parts, and specialization of labor that transformed industry and made autos available to average Americans and that he paid his workers the unheard wages of $5 a day.  Grandin digs deeper, revealing that, while that was true, there was a price to be paid for being a Ford man. Ford employed an army of inspectors who could show up at the houses of his employees at any time for surprise inspections, taking note of cleanliness, reading material, foods, alcohol, and anything else that Ford might deem objectionable. He employed another army of "security forces" whose job was to bust heads and break bones of troublesome labor agitators.  Not only was Ford notorious for his suspicions about education, but he disliked "experts" in general, often refusing to hire experts (like a botanist or rubber expert for Fordlandia) and even firing employees who became too much of an expert.  When he became America's most famous collector of historical objects and built the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, he refused to hire museum curators or historians because they were experts, choosing to organize it himself.  And then there's the way, Ford treated his son and successor Edsel Ford.... Throughout his adult life, Ford belittled and undermined Edsel, even after Edsel became President of the company.  When Ford tried to export his vision to Brazil, it failed miserably. Altogether, the story is incredibly interesting.

    

    The third book is a step away from American history and into more recent history, Say Nothing by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. I really just discovered Keefe recently and had the opportunity to hear him speak at the Savannah Book Festival in February, but I'm a big fan of his writing. Say Nothing, published in 2019 is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was a child then, but I heard news stories of murders and violence in Northern Ireland and snatches here and there about the conflict, but I never understood it then, of course. I always wondered 1) How can somebody hate somebody else enough to kill them just because they are of a different religion? and 2) How does one distinguish between a Catholic and a Protestant on sight anyway?  Keefe tells the story of the Troubles through the stories of participants from both sides.  The main focus is on the kidnapping and murder of a Protestant widow and  mother of 10, Jean McConville, who was taken from her flat and her children by a masked, armed mob, interrogated, and disappeared. Her children only learned for sure that she was murdered a couple of decades later. That was just one of many unfathomable crimes committed by average citizens against fellow average citizens because they had different political and religious beliefs. American does not have a monopoly on horrible events and people, and, just like in the US, the repercussions of the Irish-Northern Irish-British conflict are still being felt today. This was a disturbing and challenging book to read, but well worth it.

    So just remember, the truth is out there but you have to be willing to take the good and to take the bad in order to get to it, and that should always be our ultimate goal.