Jewish Public Forum Archive

The Future of American Memory

By Elizabeth A. Cole                       

“Increasingly, memory provides the moral dimension to discussion of what makes up the individual, to quests for political justice, and to the desire to insure a better future.”

Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

From debates over popular and official Australian apologies for mistreatment of the Aborigines to expressions of contrition over the role of Korean soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, from litigation on behalf of children from Canada’s First Nations abused in residential schools to Belgian reckoning with atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold, reckoning with the past and the search for justice for historical crimes have become universal.  Demands for accountability for the past are growing, although accountability might take many forms: financial reparations; restitution of art, human remains or property, truth or historical commissions; trials; official apologies; the establishment of new monuments, museums and commemorative holidays; or the revision of history textbooks and other national narratives.  Historical memory movements appear to leap across national boundaries, and from one formerly unrepented event in a nation’s history to another, in what French scholar Ariel Colonomos calls the “spillover effect from one remembrance movement to another.”   Sociologist Daniel Levy notes that where national narratives once tended to be exemplary and glorifying, today increasingly they include events that “focus on past injustices of one’s own nation,” so that national narratives must now include the history and memory of the “Other.”[i]    

But while the historical memory movement has exploded worldwide, the U.S. has remained surprisingly immune.  As we look to the future, we need to consider the stakes of this immunity and consider what might alter this situation to make the U.S. more like other societies that have tried to come to terms with difficult pasts.   

As a Jew, I feel particularly committed to exploring this question.  Redemptive memory and the obligation to remember are integral to the Jewish tradition, as encapsulated by the exhortation to “remember when you were slaves in Egypt.” Even before the Shoah memory was deeply linked to ethics for Jews, and since the Shoah the commemoration of that historical event, even the wrestling with the limits to representing or commemorating it, are integral to Jewish identity.   In addition, the Holocaust has become paradigmatic for remembrance and the search for justice and accountability.  Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka has written that when Africans remember slavery and colonialism and ask the former colonial powers to remember and make restitution, “it is not possible to ignore the example of the Jews and the obsessed commitment of survivors of the Holocaust, and their descendants, to recover both their material patrimony and the humanity of which they were brutally deprived.”[ii]  Images and events such as German reparations to Israel, Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the lawsuits and historical commissions over the role of the Swiss government and private institutions in the Holocaust (which have undermined the famed opacity of Swiss banking practices, as well as the impunity of private institutions such as insurance companies, probably forever) have become part of what Daniel Levy calls the “cosmopolitanism” of memory.  They mark a universalization of the demand for truth and justice in the aftermath of major human rights atrocities.[iii]

 “All countries must regularly negotiate narratives of their past within the mutually constitutive frameworks of international relations and domestic social change and contend with the increasing interconnection between foreign and domestic pressures,” argue Laura Hein and Mark Selden in Censuring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States, a study of how history textbooks in Germany, Japan and the USA portray each nation’s role in twentieth century wars. Germany’s textbooks were first subject to official censorship by the Allies, but in the decades since World War II Germany has voluntarily taken part in joint history textbook commissions with all its neighbors and Israel.  Japan’s recent decision to issue a textbook with a revisionist, nationalist portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre and other World War II atrocities has led to increased levels of tension with both China and South Korea. But, Hein and Selden point out, “Americans are insulated from foreign criticism to a degree unimaginable in either Germany or Japan.  This luxury—actually an obstacle to engaging history—will not last forever.” [iv]  

Two issues from the history of the U.S. have yet to be addressed fully: One is the way our country remembers and commemorates slavery and its aftermath.  This includes the broken promise of reparations—forty acres and a mule— which left ex-slaves little better off than before slavery ended.  It also includes the Jim Crow period, lynchings and pogroms such as Rosewood and Tulsa, and the struggles of the Civil Rights movements.  The other issue is the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Most Americans probably have a general idea of the degree of death and suffering the bombings caused, yet the difficulty of discussing this historic decision—still the only use of nuclear weapons worldwide to date—remains highly controversial, nearly impossible, in fact, as the censorship of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in 1993 demonstrated.  

Other issues from U.S. history – lynchings,  retaliation against civilians during the Vietnam War, the massacre of Korean refugees under a bridge at No Gun Ri -- have been taken up in popular culture and in the work of religious and civil society institutions.  Yet slavery and its aftermath are, according to historian Eric Foner, subject to a high degree of amnesia.  And except for the internment of Japanese Americans, few historical injustices perpetrated by the U.S. receive official treatment in the form of formal apologies and reparations. 

Today in the United States, the virulence of lynchings and the existence of massacres like those in Tulsa and Rosewood remain unknown to large numbers of non-African-American citizens (until recently, myself included).  No official museum of African-American experience in the U.S. exists within the Smithsonian complex. Information on African-Americans is minimal there and no memorial to slavery and the long struggle for racial equality stands on the Mall in Washington, D.C.   This in spite of the fact that the memory of the Holocaust, which took place outside the U.S. boundaries, and the Vietnam War are represented there.   

But the very problematic call for reparations by the descendants of slaves through class action lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and insurance companies which either discriminated against blacks over the course of a century or benefited from slavery, an institution that ended in 1863, is forcing the issue into national consciousness.  This search for financial compensation through the adversarial process of suits is probably not by itself the most productive way to ask the nation to reflect on the legacy of slavery since slavery affected so many other national institutions beyond the Deep South, from Ivy League universities to newspapers such as the Hartford Courant to major life insurance companies.    

Is there another or a new form of remembrance, which would allow the U.S. to reckon with injustice whose root causes—slavery—ended well over a century ago, which has no direct victims, perpetrators or bystanders alive today?  Could we devise a mechanism that would allow the U.S. to address the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and their direct descendants, expressing deep regret over the enormous degree of suffering caused by bombs which took over 200,000 lives and yet avoiding apology, since to the best of our knowledge the bombs, while never uncontroversial, were perceived by leaders at the time to be the quickest and most humane way to end the war? The former would require open deliberation and creativity in finding a way to address an ancient injustice that would feel fair to a majority of living US citizens, African- and non-African-Americans.  One of the recent lawsuits on behalf of descendants of slaves against Aetna, CSX and FleetBoston Financial calls for the appointment of an independent historical commission, as well as for financial compensation to African-Americans in the form of a fund for education and health care.  An officially convoked independent commission on slavery and its legacy would be a novel development in the U.S. (although other countries are no strangers to historical and truth commissions). 

What might influence the direction American memory could take?  One possibility is that increased unilateralism and patriotic solidarity in the wake of 9/11 and the war on terrorism may make us less rather than more responsive to pressure from other peoples and countries to acknowledge suffering we have caused them.   The ethical need for the U.S. to recognize the suffering caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to be restricted by the country’s need for a “good war,” an uncomplicated narrative of American victory.  However, there is also the possibility that the need to confront the question of “why they hate us” may bring about more rather than less engagement with legal and moral trends in the international community.  This might push the U.S. to reckon with many of our actions abroad, which caused harm to other peoples, especially those carried out during the Cold War. 

Domestically, the U.S. reparations movement, led by academics like Charles Ogletree of Harvard, is about more than just reparations. In Ogletree’s words, it seeks to “generate a public debate on slavery and the role its legacy continues to play in our society”; but “litigation is required to promote this discussion.”[v]  Will the rise of suits for slavery reparations—the locating of memory in the legal sphere—inspire a search for new, less adversarial ways to overcome our national amnesia about the enormity of slavery and the failed promise of Reconstruction?  This is possible, although I could envision as well a backlash, increased hostility from non-African-Americans over the call for financial reparations at such a late date, and an unwillingness to engage the issue at all.  In addition, America’s changing demographics may affect this particular struggle over memory:  in regions where the major minority is now Hispanic, black-white relations in U.S. history are increasingly not seen to be a pressing issue. 

Despite the dangers inherent in our contemporary memory explosion, and there clearly are some, I believe new and more ethical ways of remembering are worth our national consideration.   Our sense of our group’s history and its moral nature go to the core of our identity both as individuals and as members of a group.   The challenge to our natural sense of ourselves as an essentially ethical nation is naturally bound to be both painful and potentially dangerous.  Yet I agree with Michael Ignatieff when he says in Warrior’s Honor, “No questions of national identity in the present can ever avoid encountering the painful secrets of the past.  In this sense, as long as these questions are alive…there can be no forgetting.”  

In 1929, at a meeting with military chiefs, Hitler praised the achievements of powerful men who committed mass murder, saying, “Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?”  With all its problems, if the insistence on the memory of history’s victims gives future perpetrators pause, I believe memory and the attendant search for justice are ethical activities to which we are obligated, especially as post-Holocaust Jews.

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