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Don’t
Know Much About 20 Years Ago
When
I was in high school, my U.S. History 2 class started with
the post-Civil War Reconstruction (a repeat of the end of
U.S. History 1, but the teachers didn’t trust each other to
get it right) and made it through the Great Depression. We
were supposed to get right on up into the Reagan years, by
the curriculum (and by the AP test that I then had to cram
for wildly. Luckily, there was an essay question on the Reconstruction).
But I had an idiosyncratic teacher who had us read The
Wizard of Oz to understand William Jennings Bryan’s campaign
against the gold standard (he swears they’re related) and
yelled at us that we weren’t in the Army when we asked permission
(as we were required by school rules to do) to go to the bathroom.
He took his own sweet time. And all things considered, I vastly
preferred that class to any full-speed-ahead, plowing-through-the-facts
approach.
But the fact remains that my coverage of American history
after the 1930s consisted of a rushed textbook skim; and a
quick survey of my peers indicates that, aside from the few
who went to college-like private schools and took whole classes
on the Vietnam War, I’m not alone. Most of us never studied
“recent history.”
I was made well aware of this with Reagan’s death. I remember
when he was first elected—barely. Basically I remember we
were at a “party” with the TV on and all the adults were depressed.
I remember a grade-school mock debate four years later in
which I represented Geraldine Ferraro. But for the most part
I was not old enough or tuned in enough to really understand
what was going on while it was happening—nor was I ever taught
about in the years thereafter.
I filled in the history of what happened under his watch,
mostly, as I got older and became more well-read. I got it
in dribs and drabs from Audre Lorde’s essay on Grenada, from
my background reading on Latin American politics before I
traveled to Guatemala, from economics debates, and all sorts
of other sources. I won’t say it’s complete, though it was
enough that I felt able to deconstruct the hyperbolic plaudits
that have come around since he died.
There’s something of a hiatus between when something is no
longer in the papers and when the (thoughtful) analysis comes
out. On the local level, you don’t even get the quick-as-lightning
memoirs masquerading as analysis that we’re saturated with
on the national politicians-as-celebrities circuit. As a result,
young adults can easily end up with a historical blind spot,
one that is longer or shorter (sometimes extending past what
could reasonably be called young adulthood) depending on the
thoroughness of our education and the time at which we start
to pay attention to politics. That blind spot means that even
when we do start, we lack context.
I actually started thinking about this column before Reagan
died, and what was on my mind was Take City Hall!,
the biography by Daniel Button of Mayor Tom Whalen, Jerry
Jennings’ predecessor, which I had just finished. Whalen is
known for starting with the Corning administration and the
longtime machine (or “Organization” as it was called), but
then taking Albany forward into pioneering territory of fiscal
responsibility, open government, and accountability.
I could make a lot of complaints about the writing style of
Take City Hall! (what former journalist would put so
much of the important information into the footnotes?), but
the fact is that such a comprehensive work on what was happening
in Albany in the 1980s, and really quite a bit from before
then, was incomparably helpful to a relative newcomer to town
like myself. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government report
on community policing in the APD was a similar gap-bridging
type of work, sadly not something that’s likely to be picked
up by the average reader.
My enthusiasm for delving into this stuff is not merely an
academic point about the value of completing the assigned
curriculum. The people who spoke out against the deifying
of Reagan, besides being understandably cranky, had one point
that they brought up frequently: Yes, it does matter how we
remember him, because the effects of his policies are still
with us and made where we are now possible in a myriad of
different ways. If we don’t understand how we got here, it’s
a lot harder to figure out how to move on. I am far, far,
far from being an expert on any of these issues, but I at
least aim to get enough groundwork to know what questions
to ask of whom.
Ditto on the local level. Knowing the fights that surrounded
ending Albany’s long and ugly history of no-bid contracts
gives a significantly different spin on whether we should
be worried about expenditures from an unsupervised police
account that gives business to the companies of its moonlighting
officers. Knowing how weak the Common Council used to be gives
us a significant understanding of how far they’ve come, and
why the position of liaison to the mayor (president pro tempore)
was/is such a powerful one. Knowing about the long-standing
debate over the centrality of job procurement to the Democratic
Party’s mission provides a connecting theme between the recent
fight between Jennings and departing Superintendent Michael
Johnson over work permits for failing students and the absentee-ballot
scandal that involved public housing residents often reliant
on those summer jobs.
Context is key, and not just for policy wonks and newshounds.
As one 20-year-old recently told me, not having context is
one big reason that many young adults are politically apathetic—it’s
hard to grasp why things matter. If we’re worried about youth
voter participation, maybe it’s worth paying a little more
attention to how to navigate the murky waters between current
events and history, even if the gold standard gets short shrift
now and then.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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