The Uses & Abuses of Presentism

In recent years, some students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have called for the removal of this statue of Lincoln on their campus because of his complicated history with Native Americans. (Photograph by David B. Wiegers)

The Uses & Abuses of Presentism

By Rob Kaplan

 

“The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there,” wrote L. P. Hartley in his novel The Go-Between. For good or ill, we cannot literally travel to that foreign country. But if we could, as thoughtful visitors we would presumably endeavor to learn something of the local customs and practices, and, so as not to give offense, emulate them to the greatest extent possible. Failing that, we could at least be expected to be cognizant of them. To be sure, if we did not go too far back in time, many if not most of the practices of that other country would be familiar to us. Even so, there would in all likelihood be at least some that made us uncomfortable, and possibly others that would outrage us. This is a situation in which many people find themselves today. That is, when visiting the past, by whatever means possible, they are offended by some of the practices they find there, largely because those practices do not conform to our modern sensibilities. This, in essence, is what is referred to as presentism.

 

Notwithstanding the apparent modernness of the word itself, the philosophy of presentism, even if not by that name, has been practiced in one form or another for at least 200 years. In his book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, David Hackett Fischer identified the “classic example” of presentism as “Whig history,” citing several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British authors who presented the past through the lens of their own political beliefs rather than placing it in historical context, and then used that history as validation of those beliefs. The first citation for the word “presentism” in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1916, but it may have been used in the same sense as early as the 1870s. Its meaning has, in any case, remained essentially constant, and is defined by the OED as “a bias towards the present or present-day attitudes, esp. in the interpretation of history.” Somewhat more expansively, Oxford Languages, the modern offspring of the OED, defines it as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.”

 

All History is Revisionist History

 

Much as we might sometimes wish it were possible, we cannot change the past. We can, however, and do, change our interpretation of it, and have always done so. As James M. Banner points out in his essay “All History is Revisionist History” (2021), “At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other, debating the purposes and uses of historical knowledge, choosing different subjects to pursue, and arguing about how to pursue them. That is, in the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we call ‘revisionist history’—writing coexisting, diverse and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before.” Moreover, all historians are products of their times and cannot be otherwise.

 

Every period in human history has been one of change, but the last 150 years, and particularly the last fifty, have seen changes in virtually every field of human endeavor that go far beyond what occurred in any comparable period in the more distant past. One of the most important of these changes is in the appreciation of the value of human beings and, accordingly, the way in which they are treated. This can be seen most clearly in the United States in the way we now think of people—both in the present and the past—who until quite recently were thought of, and as a result treated, as second-class citizens. This change can even be seen in how our society approaches the teaching of history. As late as the 1970s—and later in many parts of the country—American history was still being taught as almost entirely about white men of European extraction, and the contributions of other members of society were only slightly, if at all, taken into account.

 

These issues have now been recognized and are finally being addressed,  even if not as completely as many would like. Presentism, whether we choose to see it as such or not, is both a cause and an effect of these changes. It is a cause in that it has encouraged us, as Abraham Lincoln suggested in his second annual message to Congress in December 1862, to “think anew and act anew,” to look at the past through new eyes and recognize the many injustices that have been visited upon some of our citizens. And it is an effect in that it has resulted in our making efforts to eliminate those injustices to the greatest extent possible. But in the same way that individuals who have become converts to a new way of thinking—whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or otherwise—sometimes become overzealous in their efforts to remedy what they consider past errors, some people have taken presentism to such an extreme as to require a remedy itself. This is a form of negative presentism.

 

Varieties of Presentism

 

An example of negative presentism is the 2019 publication of The New York Times’s “The 1619 Project” and the publication of the material two years later in book form under the title The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The project was developed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and writers from The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, and was intended to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” Publication of the material was followed by a podcast, live public events, a film on Hulu, and the development of lesson plans for schools, all of them advocating the idea that the history of America is essentially the history of slavery. In 2020, the Pulitzer Committee gave its imprimatur to the project by awarding Hannah-Jones its prize for Commentary for the project’s introductory essay.

 

Reaction to the project came quickly—and vehemently—from historians on the right as well as on the left. James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Gordon S. Wood, Victoria E. Bynum, and James Oakes, among others, jointly wrote a letter that was published in The New York Times in December 2019 expressing their “strong reservations” about the project, requesting corrections of what they considered factual errors, and accusing its creators of replacing “historical understanding by ideology.” The Times eventually made some changes, albeit reluctantly, leading some proponents of the project to complain that the paper was backing away from some of its more controversial positions.

 

Politicians also expressed opinions about the validity of the project’s claims. Then-Democratic senator Kamala Harris praised it, saying that it was “a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history,” but there was considerably more reaction from the right than from the left. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton all roundly condemned the project; Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill outlawing the teaching of Critical Race Theory, specifically including any materials from the project; and then-President Donald Trump established a “1776 Commission” whose purpose was to develop a “patriotic” curriculum, presumably to counteract the one offered by the project. The commission was terminated by Joe Biden on his first day as president in January 2021, but the controversy continues.

 

A more recent example, if one that attracted less attention, occurred in January 2021 when the San Francisco school board voted to change the names of 44 of the district’s 121 schools. Three years earlier it had established a commission to consider renaming schools in order to “condemn any symbols of white supremacy and racism,” according to the board’s president, Gabriela Lopez. The commission, in turn, had suggested renaming any school named after an individual who had “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 

The list of the schools to be renamed was made public, along with very brief explanations of why they had been selected. A number of names on the list must have come as a considerable surprise to some of its readers. They included, for example, naturalist John Muir, for being “Racist and responsible for theft of Native lands”; American patriot Paul Revere, who “served as commander of land artillery in the disastrous Penobscot Expedition of 1779 . . . in connection to colonization”; poet James Russell Lowell, because “His commitment to the anti-slavery cause wavered over the years, as did his opinion of African-Americans”; and English politician Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon (1609–1694), after whom the street on which the school was built is named, who “was impeached by the House of Commons for blatant violations of Habeas Corpus,” and “for having sent prisoners out of England to places like Jersey and holding them there without benefit of trial.” The list also included several American presidents, among them Thomas Jefferson, for being a “slaveholder”; George Washington, for being both a “slaveholder” and a “colonizer”; William McKinley, because “at the conclusion of the Spanish American War in 1898” he “decided to annex the Philippines”; Franklin D. Roosevelt, because he “refused to support anti-lynching bill[s] . . . and [held] other racist policies/views”; James A. Garfield, because “Thirteen years before he took the office of president of the United States” he “predicted the extinction of American Indians”; and, not least of all, Abraham Lincoln.

 

The reasoning behind Lincoln’s name being on the list is perhaps particularly instructive in regard to how decisions are sometimes made in such cases. The commission’s explanation was that “Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations and Native peoples of the United States, as the majority [emphasis added] of his policies proved to be detrimental to them.” These included, among others, “the Homestead Act [which provided free land in the West to those willing to settle it] and the Pacific Railway Act of 1862” which “helped precipitate the construction of the transcontinental railroad, which led to the significant loss of land and natural resources, as well as the loss of lifestyle and culture, for many indigenous people.” Lincoln was also criticized on a number of other counts, including being “responsible for the Dakota 38+2, the largest mass hanging in US history.”

 

This controversial and “gruesome monument” to the mass hanging at Mankato, Minnesota, stood on several locations near the execution site from 1912 until 1995, when it mysteriously disappeared. Its whereabouts remain unknown. (Blue Earth County Historical Society)

It is true that Lincoln signed these two acts into law, and that he was responsible for allowing 38 Dakota warriors to be hanged in 1862. However, taking into account the unequaled achievements of the Lincoln presidency, selecting any three events—much less these three—as being representative of the majority of his policies is at best of questionable validity. More importantly, the commission’s report neglects to include several other significant factors. It’s true that both the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act caused considerable harm to some Native American groups, including displacing them from their traditional tribal lands, but they also represent landmark legislation that was instrumental—one might even argue vital—in the settlement of the West. And the truth about the “Dakota 38+2” is even more complicated.

 

In the summer of 1862, several bands of Dakota Indians in Minnesota rose up and killed more than 600 white settlers in response to their gross mistreatment by traders and Indian agents. Defeated by an army led by Col. Henry Hastings Sibley, the Dakota warriors were tried by a military commission which sentenced 303 of them to death. By all accounts, Abraham Lincoln was appalled at the thought of executing so many individuals. He accordingly reviewed the records of all the trials, and, except in 39 cases, commuted the sentences. One other individual was subsequently reprieved, but 38 were executed, the hangings constituting the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, as well as the largest mass commutation. And Lincoln did it in the face of white Minnesotans who wanted all 303 Dakota warriors hanged. In fact, when one Republican told Lincoln that the Republican Party would have done better in an election if he had executed more men, Lincoln replied, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.” So while the information included in the commission’s report was not inaccurate, the whole story puts Lincoln’s actions in a considerably different light.

 

Located across the street from the site of the 1862 hanging, Reconciliation Park is dedicated to promoting reflection and healing between Dakota and non-Dakota peoples. A large memorial scroll inscribed with the names of the 38 executed Dakota warriors was dedicated in 2012—the 150th anniversary of the hanging. (Blue Earth County Historical Society)

 

These stories represent examples of negative presentism, that is, instances in which reevaluating the past using a very narrow focus—one that does not seek to truly understand the historical context—results in clouding rather than clarifying the issue at hand. There are, however, positive examples as well. One of the first applications of presentism to attract the public’s attention was the movement to remove monuments and memorials commemorating the civil and military leaders of the Confederate States of America. According to a 2019 report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” there were 780 such monuments in the United States. Some of them were in northern and western states, including California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. The majority, however, were put up in the South, mostly during the Jim Crow era from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, and then again during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Although efforts to remove them had begun several years earlier, the movement was spurred by the murder of nine African Americans in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. It was further stimulated by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that was organized to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in 2017, and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.  As of April 2023, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a total of 482 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed or relocated from public spaces since 2015, some of them by state or local governments and some by protesters.

 

This monument to University of Virginia students who died while fighting for the Confederacy was erected in the university’s cemetery in 1893. Monuments to common soldiers still dot the landscape in both the North and the South. (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia)

Those who advocated taking down the statues argued that, as presented in a statement issued by the American Historical Association (AHA) in August 2017, the purpose of doing so was “not to remove history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history.” According to the AHA, erecting the monuments was intended not just to commemorate “the Confederacy, but also the ‘Redemption’ of the South after Reconstruction,” and was “part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement [of African Americans] across the South. Memorials to the Confederacy were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life.” Moreover, the AHA argued, “Decisions to remove memorials to Confederate generals and officials who have no other major historical accomplishments does not necessarily create a slippery slope towards removing the nation’s founders, former presidents, or other historical figures whose flaws have received substantial publicity in recent years. George Washington owned enslaved people, but the Washington Monument exists because of his contributions to the building of a nation. There is no logical equivalence between the builder and protectors of a nation—however imperfect—and the men who sought to sunder that nation in the name of slavery.” While this is all unquestionably true, the philosophy behind removing the statues clearly fits the definition of presentism, even if in a form that many—if not most—people would consider a good cause. (Regrettably, in some instances these efforts have been carried to extremes: A statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from New York’s City Hall and the fate of the equestrian statue of George Washington in Union Square is currently being debated.)

 

On April 20, 1861, more than 200,000 people gathered at Union Square in New York City to affirm their commitment to the Union. Maj. Robert Anderson brought with him the flag from Fort Sumter, and during the rally it hung on the 1856 equestrian statue of George Washington. The New York Herald proclaimed that this “united demonstration . . . will live forever in the world’s history.” Images of the flag atop the monument, such as this one from Harper’s Weekly (71200908408087), inspired Americans throughout the North. This photograph (New-York Historical Society) depicts the massive crowd around the monument to Washington. Today, sculptor Henry Kirke Brown’s historic statue is at risk of removal because of Washington’s status as a slaveholder.

 

Interestingly, historians, at least at the time, appeared to be divided on the question. For its July 2017 issue, Civil War Times magazine solicited a number of historians’ thoughts on the subject, and published them in an article titled “Empty Pedestals: What Should Be Done with Civil Monuments to the Confederacy and Its Leaders?” While none of them argued that the monuments be left standing without adding something to provide context, some were adamant about tearing them down. For example, Michael J. McAfee, then-curator of history at the West Point Museum, argued that the leaders of the Confederacy were traitors who “turned their backs on their nation, their oaths, and the sacrifices of their ancestors in the War for Independence. . . . They attempted to destroy their nation to defend chattel slavery and from a sense that as white men they were innately superior to all other races. They fought for white supremacy. That is why monuments glorifying them and their cause should be removed.” On the other hand, James J. Broomall, director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University, was against destroying them. “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “the bronze sentinels and stone plinths . . . offer an incomplete, even dangerous message if they remain silent. . . . Confederate monuments are at once symbols of white supremacy, works of art, affirmations of the Lost Cause, and tributes to white Southerners. Yet, public history and preservation suggest that Confederate monuments can be used as tools for education, deliberation, and even protest.” Megan Kate Nelson, author of several books on American history, took a very different approach. “Confederate memorials,” she wrote, “should neither be retained nor removed: They should be destroyed, and their broken pieces left in situ.” She offered the possibility that “Historians could put up a plaque next to the fragments, explaining the memorial’s history” but added that “These textual explanations may be unnecessary” because “the ruins of Confederate memorials in cities across the nation would suggest that while white supremacists have often made claims to power in American history, those who oppose them can, and will, fight back.”

 

Determining the Parameters of Presentism

 

The controversies cited here constitute only a small percentage of the many instances of presentism. In fact, barely a week goes by without a new one becoming a subject of public discussion. The question of how to deal with what members of today’s society regard as misdeeds by individuals from the past is extraordinarily complicated. To compound the problem, American society is both a fractured and a contentious one, and presentism is just one among many issues that divides its people. To be sure, there is no single solution, and even if such a solution were readily available, implementing it would be, at the least, very difficult. Nevertheless, as has been demonstrated, there have been both positive and negative examples of presentism, and attempting to develop at least some guidelines for fostering the former and eliminating the latter might be of some value.

 

For example, in considering if, and if so to what extent, an individual from the past who was previously considered worthy of being commemorated should be condemned for their beliefs or actions, there are several questions we could ask ourselves. First, “What did this individual do in their lifetime to warrant being remembered?” Second, “To what extent were their now-questionable views related to the reason for which we remember them?” Third, “Were these views or behaviors out of keeping with the general views or behaviors of the majority of people in the country at the time?” Fourth, “Provided that this individual’s questionable views were exposed, and assuming those views were not the primary reason for their being remembered, is there significant evidence to suggest that their continuing to be favorably remembered is likely to do harm to anyone in the future?”

 

It is essential that in answering these questions we take into account the fact that people from the past who are favorably looked upon today are so because they contributed something considered to be of value to society. Asking these questions, for example, about Thomas Jefferson, should accordingly be instructive. In regard to the first question, we can say that he is remembered, among other achievements, for having written the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States, without which the nation may very well have never existed. He was also the third president of the United States, and in that capacity was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the country. Second, although when he wrote “All men are created equal” Jefferson may not have intended to include anyone other than white men—and there is some debate about that—it does not detract from the value of the idea he was expounding. Third, although he was politically in the vanguard in his time in expressing such democratic views, he did nevertheless speak for many people in the country in making such statements. In addition, the fact that he was a slaveholder, while now justly considered reprehensible behavior, was to a great extent the norm in his own time—not only in the United States, but around the world. Fourth, and finally, although it is perfectly appropriate to make his shortcomings known, as they have been, there is no clear evidence that continuing to revere his words and the philosophy they express would cause any damage in the future.

 

Despite Robert E. Lee’s aversion to the public use of Confederate military symbols after the Civil War, battle flags of the Army of Northern Virginia were installed at his burial site in Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University in 1930. (Special Collections and Archives, James G. Leyburn Library, Washington and Lee University)

 

By contrast, if we were to respond to these same questions in regard to Jefferson Davis, the answers, and the effect of those answers, would be significantly different. As regards the first question, Davis is remembered because he was the president of the Confederate States of America. This was a nation, as noted by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, in his “Cornerstone Address” of March 21, 1861, that was founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” Moreover, Stephens continued, the Confederacy was “the first [nation], in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” In fact, this “great truth” is no truth at all, and accordingly undermines the entire underpinnings of the Confederate cause. The answer to the second question, then, is that Davis is ultimately remembered only because of his beliefs, and would not be remembered except for those beliefs. As to the third question, while many, if not most, people in the United States in Davis’s time believed that Black people were inherently inferior to white people, the majority—at least in the more populous northern states—was not in favor of keeping them enslaved. Finally, because the Confederacy was founded on a pernicious lie, continuing to honor its president in any way would appear to endorse his beliefs, and could cause considerable damage to a great many people.

 

In 2014, students at Washington and Lee successfully pressured the university to remove the Confederate flags. (Special Collections and Archives, James G. Leyburn Library, Washington and Lee University)

Toward a New American Tradition

 

For many years America’s Puritan tradition dictated that our politicians had to have impeccable morals to even be considered for government office. And in those cases in which they did not—and there certainly were such cases—the people who were aware of it conspired to keep it secret from the public. Recent events, however, suggest that this may no longer be the case. And perhaps at least partly because of that, we are now retroactively applying the same thinking to politicians as well as other well-known individuals from our past. Of course, no one is above reproach, but L. P. Hartley was right when he wrote “The past is a foreign country,” and it is well that we remember it. This is not to suggest that we should blind ourselves to the faults of those who came before us, but rather that we should remember them, and to whatever extent they deserve it, honor them despite those faults. As W. E. B. DuBois wrote about our sixteenth president in The Crisis in 1922, “The foibles and contradictions of the Great do not diminish but enhance the worth and meaning of their upward struggle. Of all the great figures of the 19th century, I love Lincoln not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed.” It is equally important to recognize that there can be benefits to presentism, that many of the strides we’ve made—and they are considerable—are a result of presentism, as we have reconsidered the practices of the past and, when appropriate, changed them to conform to presumably more enlightened modern sensibilities. Implementing thoughtful, well-considered, and carefully chosen applications of presentism will help us ensure that what we say about the past will be as true as we can determine it to be. At the same time, we must recognize that while we can pass our understanding of the past on to those who follow us, they will inevitably interpret that past according to their own lights, just as we have according to ours.

 

Rob Kaplan, a former book editor and writer, is president of The Lincoln Group of New York and editor of its newsletter, The Wide Awake Bulletin. He has been reading Lincoln Lore since he was a teenager in the 1960s.

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