Ancestral politics

(Author's note: If you want to understand some of the how and why of what you think or do, simply study your ancestors' politics.)

As always, politically unedited.

Wanna know a secret? 

"A genealogist does not a politician make."

 Yeah, I know, I know. It may sound pretty obvious and even reductive on some level, but believe me it's true. The genealogist has no business in politics.

The reasons for this are many. First and foremost is that any seasoned genealogist (Okay, call me old...) has had, over the course of many years, the points of view of so many different family members and "branches" to "explore and defend." The genealogical truth is that as families and indeed as with people in general, it's pretty evident that one size does not fit all.

Now I'm not gonna go on about those raucous dinner table or backyard barbecue arguments. You know the ones, like about Stevenson or Eisenhower in '56. Frankly, those are as old as time itself and sadly will likely never change. However, as a genealogist, I think it behooves us to explore our political ancestry to see what we're made of, where we come from, and how well we might (outside of ignorance and damnable bias) carry ourselves at that next round table of backyard family barbecue arguments. Yay! I can hardly wait!

 

Like most folks, and like this great nation, I grew up in a divided house. Raised on the knees of a Civil War widow and very Mayflower great-grandmother, she being a "Red-eyed Republican," (a staunchly conservative Republican) her views seemed more of a religion than a political party. This was a woman who smoothed with great pride the creases in the folded pictures of Barry Goldwater in the pages of the Long Beach Press Tribune. She was a woman who never missed a meeting of the Women's Auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic or a Decoration Day celebration (an older term for Memorial Day). In some ways, she was a relic of another era - both good and bad. She embodied beautiful traditions and utter bravery of cause. Indeed, her sense of what it means to be an American has always been foundational in my life. 

She could also be stubbornly narrow minded.

   

     

However, on the genealogical playing field of my ancestry she was not alone or the only voice. That other voice was sometimes harder to distinguish (he was physically disabled), but no less passionate. He was my paternal grandfather, and he championed the labor rights and Democratic causes of a young man and not those of a someone born from a war-torn generation or two before. His were the causes for the working man: better pay, more jobs, and food on the table. 

For my grandfather, "his" politics were the people of the Dust Bowl Depression. As a young man he was full of ideals about making the world a better place; a world more fair to all people. In the late 1920s, he took to the road motoring about the Kansas countryside promoting the Great Chautauquas of the day. These huge revivalist meeting would bring together both the religious and the secular under one tent to learn and listen to new ideas. He was active in the unions, advocating for Roosevelt, and eventually being married by his friend and mentor, a local Kansas Democratic Congressman.   

He too, could also be very, very stubborn.

Can I help it if that Democratic idealist chose to marry the daughter of the very Republican Civil War widow mentioned above?

So was one side of my family more "American" than the other? Was one side necessarily more patriotic than the other? Yeah, tough call? 

And this was just Dad's side. Egads.

Yes, as genealogists, as family historians, we not only have to learn to explore the historicity of many points of view, we are also called upon by all of our ancestors to defend the finer points of each of them. So I guess that brings me round to "revisionist history." And yes, I know that it isn't genealogy per se, and that it should not directly effect how we see or study the political (or even religious) views of our ancestors. However, how we as individuals interpret or "tell" our ancestor's politics definitely effects how we feel about our ancestors themselves and indeed how we might preserve their memory. 

A genealogist's interpretation of historical facts (which can be influenced by revisionist perspectives) might color their (our our own) understanding of ancestral politics. More so, how we deal with the way we relate to others over our own family history is an obligation of tolerance and understanding we have to put out there for those future generations. 

It tells us something about ourselves.

Now, as a Mayflower descendant, I have always disliked the notion of "The 1619 Project." (A re-interpretation of history centering around previously marginalized perspectives and acknowledging historical injustices) It's a concept of American history somewhat proselytized by the New York Times a couple of years ago. For myself, I tend to agree with those historians who found "1619" a wee bit flawed and or lacking a fuller perspective. 

(We all know that I tend to be more of a "1620" kinda guy.)

True enough, too, is that I was greatly chagrined when my Mayflower brethren (at their great tribunals at Plymouth) felt politically compelled to change the name of Governor William Bradford's aptly named "Plymouth Plantation" to "Plimouth Patuxet Museum" all in some attempt to dispel the specter of not including the Wampanoag people in the area history. Neither have I enjoyed watching statues of Confederate soldiers that have stood for years fall to the ground in an attempt to ignore that part of who we were as a nation. It's always seemed ironic to me that even my all too Yankee great-grandmother (whom I wrote about above) would have never asked for the statues of the men who imprisoned her husband at a Richmond in 1864 to have ever come down - so the idea that they should "be removed" has never set well with me.

It seemed odd to me also when a few years ago Mt.McKinley came to be called Denali again, though I'm not sure why in this particular instance of "changing the name" of the mountain mattered. I guess my question is and always has been: What were these things first called? If the mountain was first called "Denali," then let it be so...even as much as I prefer it to be called Mt. McKinley - it should be called by its true name. This maxim should hold true for "Plymouth Plantation" as well. Let all things, in so far as possible, be called by their correct historical names. Further, renaming military bases, or pulling down statues based solely on the need to forget past historical transgressions seems (generally) superfluous to me; it seems "extra" and, yes, even wrong. 

But is it? I'm not the injured party. I cannot say.

I see this now on each side of the genealogical and political fence, though. Now we have "Gulf of America" as opposed to "Gulf of Mexico." (A renaming in recent months) It seems that both sides of the political spectrum choose to ignore the historicity of original names or to rename them to suit some particular agenda or vanity. It seems supercilious to change a name baptized into existence in the mid-1500s. Yes, even wrong. In this case, who was the injured party? I can't say as I ever knew. I suppose in truth it should be called whatever the Maya or Aztec called it way back when.

Whatever it was named, let it be.

Well, there I have gone and done it. I have allowed "the political genealogist" loose in the house and broken my own maxim that the two (genealogy and politics) do not go together. The trouble is that we do need to study the views of our ancestors to understand what drove them, to understand what their troubles were, and what viewpoints they needed or used to navigate their own lives. It's the only way we can understand how it is that we've arrived at our own. And hopefully, in the end, to help us to understand and not simply discount the political views of someone else. 

  

Imagine that! Genealogy: An ancestral source of reigniting tolerance by understanding the lives of those who came before us. 

I do wonder when tolerance went out of style. It seems a concept both well ahead and well past its time.

☮