“History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.”

— Clarence Darrow

As a history nerd, I would agree that history does repeat. For example, this country has had several periods of turmoil regarding immigration. I wrote about one of these, the Know-Nothing movement, in a January, 2024 column (https://www.bobwelbaum-author.com/revisiting-the-know-nothings/).

I was reminded of this repetition tendency as the current political administration has been accused of its own attempts to rewrite history, as evidenced by “National Parks Ordered to Police ‘Negative’ History Under Trump Directive,” by Olivia Hebert (https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/national-parks-negative-history-trump-20343308.php?). Has this ever happened before?

As a matter of fact… Recall the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. The impact was immediate. Its anti-slavery message had such a profound impact (including in Great Britain) that upon meeting Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln remarked “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”

We all know about the inhumanity of slavery. We also know how the American Civil War ended: a bloody victory to preserve the Union with a difficult period of Reconstruction that never healed the nation’s wounds. Evidence of this nonhealing was periodic attempts to rewrite the narrative. For proof, start with the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy)

In this case, I’ve recently learned that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted for the theater and performed long after the fighting ended. Of course, this was unpopular in some parts of the country. In fact, The United Daughters of the Confederacy in Lexington, Kentucky demanded a local theater no longer book what at the time was a very popular play. When that demand was rejected, they turned to the state legislature. The result was Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law of 1906 which allowed censorship of any production that cast an unfavorable light on past race relations.

Which reminds me of another quote:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana 

For more detail, see “The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky” by Anne E. Marshall at https://www.jstor.org/stable/26070140 (with free registration).