History Through Today’s Lenses

Is the head-scratching in Washington over what to do with a statue of three suffragettes just a silly tiff? Or do the sharply differing views on this historical issue--and others--reflect soul-searching over America’s present as well as its past and how both should be assessed.

The suffragette memorial, presented to Congress in 1921 by the National Woman’s Party, depicts images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott rising out of a block of Italian marble. The figures are stoic, even severe; this was a time when memorials were solemn and history was made--and written--by men. A nearly all-male Congress accepted the 13-ton statue and then consigned it to storage beneath the Capitol Rotunda, where it has languished since.

Last year, on the 75th anniversary of when women won the right to vote, the Senate decided to have the monument hoisted upstairs and displayed amid statues honoring 11 men in American history. But several congresswomen have raised objections to its display. Some are put off by the suffragettes’ severe mien and would prefer something less dowdy and more in tune with the way women today view themselves: forceful, hip.

The historian Edward Hallett Carr wrote in 1961, “When we attempt to answer the question, What is history? our answer, consciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and forms part of our answer to the broader question, what view we take of the society in which we live.”

What is our history? Should the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibit last year have focused, as it did, on the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb as a symbol of America’s technological might? Or should it have addressed the bomb’s effect on Japanese victims? The answer may depend in part on how one regards America’s international role today--as still the preeminent superpower or, along with Japan, as one of several major powers.

Should the planned restoration of Manzanar, the Japanese American internment camp in the Owens Valley, center on camp life during World War II or include information on earlier Native American encampments in the area? Should the interned residents be termed “guests,” as some military veterans want, or are they accurately labeled as prisoners? Does the answer rest in part on how comfortable one is in today’s multicultural California?

Should the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial planned for Washington portray the president, a polio victim, in a wheelchair? Might that not depend a bit on our contemporary image of presidents as strong, almost invulnerable?

“The facts of history never come to us ‘pure,’J” Carr warned, “they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.” Indeed.