Commentary | Laura Hein, Thinking about Fights over U.S. History as an American Citizen, an Historian, and an Asianist
As a citizen of the United States it is chilling to follow the news of proposed legislation of House Bill 2988 in Oklahoma, and similar legislation in other states designed to prohibit teaching the fact that slavery was central to early American history. Freedom of speech and publication is enshrined in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution and such attempts to impose government censorship are shocking.
As a professional historian, too, I am committed to the idea that my political community can only survive if beliefs are grounded in reality. This is why the American Historical Association’s response to this and a similar bill introduced in Texas was to note that “a whitewashed view of history cannot change what happened in the past. A free and open society depends on the unrestricted pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.” Or, as historian Timothy Snyder put it, “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual — and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism.”[1] Believing crazy stuff is bad for democracy.
“We honor past actors by understanding them far more than we do by venerating them.”
Moreover, the fear that facing reality means losing our communal anchors is misplaced. We honor past actors by understanding them far more than we do by venerating them. It inflicts no harm on previous generations when we acknowledge actions that in retrospect seem not just unethical and cruel, but also systematically so. Rather, like them, we are threading our way through an inevitably and constantly changing world. When we assess the political system bequeathed us by its architects, we recognize them as imperfect human beings — making it easier, not harder, to try to live up to the best ideals they articulated.
In fact, engaging with the past by changing long-standing practices that undermine the goal of forming a more perfect union strengthens the “circle of us” as a shared national community. While we inherited a system in which many people were excluded from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unlike the 18th and 19th centuries America today is formally committed to equal treatment of people of all races and genders. Acknowledging how much the past still structures contemporary institutions reveals precisely how those older – now rejected – choices still shape our world even in the absence of racist or sexist intent. There need be no race-minded intentionality when structures of thought and practice are already institutionalized. This point is too often lost.
The former president of the American Historical Association, Tyler Stovall, has argued that in both the United States and Europe, “the ideal of freedom, like many other aspects of modern human politics and society has had a racial dimension.” This is precisely the argument that the Oklahoma bill writers find so discomfiting. His argument — substantiated in the history of the Statue of Liberty, among other examples — is that in the past “liberty and white racial identity were not only positive values but also in many ways inseparable,” and his goal is to disentangle the two heading into the future. Stovall adds, “Today the push for white freedom is in many ways a response to the inability of modern societies to provide those achievements [security, peace, adequate food and shelter, enjoyment in our communities, hope for our children’s future]…that freedom was supposed to ensure, and as long as that remains the case, racialized visons of liberty will retain their ability to inspire and motivate those searching for a better life.” He concludes that our task is thus to build better societies for everyone, ones that “will overcome the need for white freedom by assuring a good life for all their members.”[2]
But, given that these fights over history education in the United States are mainly about American history and usually framed in Americentric idioms, how does my Asianist expertise help me think about this topic?
One way is to remember how and why it matters to others beyond America’s shores that Americans articulated a tradition of open democracy, and to try, however fitfully, to maintain it. I say this in full recognition of the fact that America’s record of living up to these ideals internationally is at least as flawed as is the record at home. Hypocrisy of practitioners does not invalidate good ideas when viewed internationally any more than domestically. American democracy — even in its imperfect state — has long served as a model across the globe, and drawing on that model does not mean submitting to US foreign policy priorities, betraying one’s own nation, or excusing all American actions. As is well-known, Ho Chi Minh took inspiration from the Declaration of Independence for his vision of Vietnamese nationalism. When we reaffirm commitment to the democratic ideal, we also honor Asians such as Ho. The concepts and practices of democracy — and, alas, fascism — belong to the modern, not the western world. Two hundred years ago it may have made sense to think of them as foreign imports but those days are long past everywhere. When an Asian argues that democracy is alien to local culture, this is a political stance within an indigenous and thoroughly modern debate. Democracy is a large and inclusive transnational “circle of us,” one that complements and strengthens democratic communities everywhere.
And global attention to American attempts to live up to our own ideals is not such a bad thing for America in other ways as well. As scholars such as Mary Dudziak have told us, American leaders in the 1950s and 1960s who enacted new civil liberties protections were responding not just to the domestic civil rights movement but also to their knowledge that the world was watching that response.[3]
In my own research, I see this transnational dynamic occurring during the Occupation of Japan. The Americans there were undeniably snobbish, self-righteous, and ignorant about the country in which they lived. Yet for many Japanese the changes made possible by the defeat of the old regime were far more important to them. New freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, along with prohibitions on arbitrary police torture and imprisonment modeled on the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights transformed political life in Japan. These changes were broadly welcomed by a society that had been brought to the brink of starvation by the actions of its own leaders, a group who in 1945 had teetered on the verge of ordering the suicide of every civilian as — somehow — an appropriate response to certain defeat in a disastrous war.
Post-defeat Japanese were wrestling with the fact that they had succumbed to precisely the rejection of reality described by Snyder. Most Japanese who cared about their political community focused on why so many of them had accepted magical thinking akin to the educated German man Snyder quotes, who implored his former teacher to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.”[4] Making sense of that past and debating how to build a better polity themselves was the center of their concern rather than the presence of Occupation forces, irritating though the Americans often were.
We know what most engaged postwar Japanese because students across the country embraced the freedom to explore new ideas in and out of the classroom, just as did older people. Japan experienced a wild explosion of publication of every genre, political perspective, and level of accessibility. People read like crazy about all kinds of things, often while standing at bookstalls or borrowing from friends to avoid the expense of purchase. They were not just consumers either: postwar Japan was a riot of professional and amateur theater, musical performance, film, visual art, and written expression in many forms.
In other words, even though the Occupation practiced censorship, the early postwar years were an era of enormous intellectual creativity, in part because the range of permitted content was far greater than had been the case in Japan for the last fifteen years. This expressive output makes dubious the claim, first made by Etō Jun, that Occupation censorship stifled “normal” patriotic expression (note that the Oklahoma bill makes the opposite assertion — that protecting “normal” patriotic expression requires censorship).[5] And since there was no great rush of praise for Japan’s wartime leaders in 1952 when the Occupation ended, he argues farther that Occupation censorship — but not the wartime version — had inflicted psychological damage on Japanese writers, preventing that natural behavior. Etō put the Americans at the center of the Japanese story only in order to silence and discredit his compatriots, and, as Americans, we have an obligation to understand the Japanese politics of these arguments.
Etō’s argument has been picked up and expanded today by the group of contemporary individuals who have waged a determined campaign to label all Japanese “masochists” who are critical of Japan’s conduct as a colonial power and wartime aggressor, both conflating personal identity with (past) national identity and defining all self-criticism as self-harm. They reserve their hottest ire for Japanese who acknowledge the well-established fact that the wartime military forced Asian women into sexual labor in the so-called “comfort woman system,” seeking to evade reflection on Japan’s own ugly past. They also complain that they are persecuted by international “censorship,” although they mean informed criticism by historians rather than official government acts that prevent or punish expression.
This demand that patriotism requires supporting ones own past and current government — no matter what — links the Oklahoma bill writers to the most extreme celebrants of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War. So does the rejection of reality that underpins it. Each reinforces the other. Each requires repression within the national “circle of us,” and each damages democracy everywhere.
Dr. Laura Hein is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of Japan in the 20th century, its international relations, and the effects of WWII and the Cold War.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Laura Hein, “Thinking about Fights over U.S. History as an American Citizen, an Historian, and an Asianist,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, April 25, 2022; https://doi.org/ 10.52698/BYYO5977.
Notes:
[1] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, New York: Penguin Random House, 2017, p. 66.
[2] Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Quotes on pp. 6, 11, 320-21.
[3] Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
[4] Snyder, p. 68.
[5] Jay Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation, “The Journal of Japanese Studies, 1985-01-01, Vol.11.1, (Winter 1985): pp. 71-103.