Tag: history

George C Marshall was a model soldier & civil servant. Winston Churchill called him the organizer of victory in World War II and FDR relied on him. He took his duty very seriously and was uniformly excellent the things he did. He was crucial both to winning the war and securing the peace after the fighting was over. The Marshall Plan is probably the greatest act by a victor in any conflict in world history. But he was a fantastically modest man. He never pushed himself forward and unlike most other great men of the time refused to keep a journal or write memoirs. Winston Churchill quipped, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Marshall refused to make is easy even for others to sing his praises.

Alex and I visited his house in Leesburg today. It is a modest place considering the greatness of the man, but houses were generally smaller back then. Marshall was attracted to the garden. Gardening was his hobby and preferred method of recreation. He also rode horses.
The house is modestly furnished, but the furnishings are interesting as they reflect Marshall’s career and many of the great people he knew. He spent a lot of time in China and has furniture and art from there. Madame Chiang stayed at the house her gifts are still there. There was a painting by Winston Churchill. A copy still hangs there depicting a scene in Morocco, but the original was worth too much and was sold at auction. There are two portraits of Robert E. Lee, one as a young man and the other the more familiar one when he was older. Marshall admired Lee and tried to model his own behavior on Lee’s.

This was the first house Marshall really owned, having lived in U.S. Army quarters most of the rest of his life. He and his wife shopped estate sales for most of the other furniture.
The house is complicated because parts of it accreted onto older structures. There is an original house literally swallowed by a newer one. You can see this in one of the halls, as the internal wall has windows that used to face outward.

This part of Loudon County is very pleasant, rolling hills and lots of green. It is full of historical sites, mostly well-maintained. We also went to a place called the Oatlands, not far from George C Marshall’s place. It was a big estate that grew mostly grains. Later it became mostly a residence. There is a wonderful garden in that traditional Virginia style.

The house at Oatlands had lots of interesting stories. We met a delightful old lady who seemed to know all of them.   She told us the about the family, related to “King” Carter, once the richest man in the colonies and about the Corcoron side of the family that endowed the famous galleries.   Behind a door was maybe the most interesting thing, if small.  It was a lock of George Washington’s hair. One of the extended family members, Robert Livingston, was the one who administered the presidential oath to Washington and got this as a gift.  The family had quite a network.

Westmoreland Davis lived a long and interesting life. He was born into a rich Virginia family that had most of its money investing in Virginia state bonds just before the Civil War. It seemed like a good safe investment. His father died and left his mother with those bonds and not much else. But Westmorland came back. He got a full-scholarship to VMI and then went to UVA and Columbia to study law, went into the law and made a fortune. After he made his fortune in the law, he decided to do something completely different and become a farmer.

Loudon County in those days was a backward, rural area with soil depleted by poor farming practices and tobacco. Most of the farmers still practiced farmed the way their grandfathers had but with less to work with. It was not an auspicious place to start, although I suppose no experience in farming might be a bit of an advantage when those with experience are doing things wrong.

There were other pluses. Westmorland was well-financed. He wanted his farm to make money, but it really didn’t need to. But his biggest advantage was his scientific mind. He scanned the world for best practices, tried them out in Virginia, improved them and then shared them with his neighbors.

Besides providing a good local example of what could work, his main vehicle to communicate was a magazine called “The Southern Planter.” In this, he discussed what he had learned and he never wrote about anything he had not understood or tried himself. He brought in better quality animals, including Guernsey cows to improve Loudon dairy herds. Among his biggest contributions was more extensive liming of the soil. Liming to sweeten soil was understood, but imperfectly. Westmorland discovered that it took a lot more than most people thought, or could afford, so he also worked with suppliers and railroads to lower the costs.

Besides farming, Westmorland’s passion was fox hunting. He was the master of the hunt, which meant that his job was to get permission from local landowners to cross their land and offer compensation for any damage. This and his farming examples put him in touch with lots of people and he became locally famous and well-esteemed. Which helped in his next unusual career move; he ran for governor of Virginia. And he won. He came into office at an interesting time, in 1918 just as the U.S. was getting into the full swing of World War I. Of course, troops from Virginia were participating.

Virginia governors, then as now, can serve only one four-year term. After his term, Westmorland ran unsuccessfully for Senate and then returned to his farming. He became one of America’s leading producers of turkeys.

I learned about this great man who I had never heard of before when I went with Alex to visit Morven Park, his home in Loudon County. As part of Alex’s classes on preservation, he has to visit various local historical sites in order to analyze how they are presented. My pictures show the outside of the Morven Mansion. Taking pictures inside was not allowed. Pity. Westmorland traveled the world and collected all sorts of things. The house is kind of a museum. It is very pleasant and bright. He had a whole wall of Flemish tapestries that were very nice, but you can imagine some of furniture in the collections on the set of the Adam’s family.

I had an Irish-American friend who hated the English, and he had good reason. Family oral history related how a few generations ago one of his ancestors had been shot and killed by an English officer in a land dispute.  As a result, his family lost the land and became destitute. These kinds of stories helped make my friend interested in tracing his family roots, which you can do now easier than ever with computer records. He was surprised to find that his family was Anglo-Irish and that his ancestors were “English” officers, the villains of the family saga. They could find no records of the specific land dispute of family legend, but if it happened his ancestors were on the other side of that gun.

Oral history is always like that, which is why it often has better stories.  Individuals do it with “fish stories” where their role get bigger and better defined with each telling and groups do it. It is not that people are trying to lie, although sometimes they can be, but memory must be recreated each time we tell.  Some of the details are forgotten, so we fill in what seems best.  Groups get messed up even faster than individuals.   Investigators know not to let eye-witnesses discuss what they saw before they get it down on paper individually.  When people get together, they produce a shared narrative. They help each other remember details.  Some of those details are things that never happened, but the confirmation of the group makes everyone more certain of their memory.  In memory, certainty does not correlate strongly with accuracy.

Oral histories sometimes retain enough facts to make them useful and enticing. The Iliad and Odyssey were passed orally for centuries before they were written down. The 19th Century archeologist Heinrich Schliemann used the books to find the location of Troy. But the details of the war and the personalities are legend.   When I was a nerdy classicist, my friends and I played a game of finding things mentioned in Homer that did not exist during the time of the Trojan War, but were evidently added in the telling, or things that Homer did not understand from the time of the Trojan War and so explained poorly.

Accurate sources and assessing all sources is a challenge for anyone who writes history or even is interested in it. We really can study only the written sources. Some cultures do not produce written sources and no written sources comprehensively cover all the things we may want to know.  People write what THEY think is important. We might want to know something completely different.

There is an advantage to being unknown. I recall reading an essay about the great warrior Crazy Horse.  Little is really known about him.  There are no confirmed pictures.  He made his reputation as a warrior by going on raids of other tribes.  In the raid, people are killed in brutal ways, women are abused and generally misery is inflicted.  What would a detailed and accurate history do to Crazy Horse’s reputation?   If we are doing a history of the West, can we compare the oral legend of Crazy Horse with the historical record of his adversary, George Armstrong Custer?  Crazy Horse’s “history” is much more akin to the legends Libby Custer told about her husband after his death.

Oral history is useful more as a way of understanding what a group thinks about itself today than about actual events of the past.  The narrative is a group effort.  It both shapes the thinking of the group and is shaped by it. That is why it is so popular.  If you don’t have to worry about being proved wrong by a written source, you can speculate and make up better stories.  This might make me an apostate as a historian, but I think maybe it is not so bad to “improve” outcomes.  It is depressing to know your family was a bunch of losers for six generations. Do yourself and your posterity a favor and insert a few stories of overcoming adversity and coming out on top.  You don’t even need to make anything up, just re-frame it.  My ancestors were not driven out of Europe by Cossacks because they were drunks, draft dodgers and ne’er-do-wells.  No. They were freedom loving rebels who could not abide spending another day in those oppressive precincts. 

BTW – the story I told up top is not accurate.  I was correct in the general thrust, but my telling had some addiOral history not worth the paper it’s printed on?tional details.  I think they might be true, but I have no real reason to think so.  If I retell it to my friend, he may like my version better and I have no doubt will incorporate parts of it into family lore.  When the story is told in the next generation, some of my story telling DNA will be among the heritage.  Who knows, maybe I got this right by random chance.

That is why when we really want to know we need to find a contemporary written source.  And don’t believe what people tell you about the past, especially if the say it will lots of passion. 

DNA studies are turning out some interesting findings and solving some of the mysteries of history and sometimes creating some interesting paradoxes. For example, African-Americans who trace their genetic ancestry through the male line are often finding that their ancestors came from the British Isles. Deeper in history, recent DNA investigations show that the “native” populations of Europe were all but obliterated by migrations into the continent in the Neolithic age from around 4000-6000 years ago.

The invaders brought with them new skills and farming cultures that likely simply overwhelmed the local hunters and gatherers. This would be similar to what happened in North America with European contact. Only a very small percentage of the North American population is genetically related to the population that lived on the continent in 1492, although in the ancient case the process took 2000 years and not only a couple hundred. 

 This replacement, however, is evidently not as common as we might think. When I learned anthropology, we were still influenced by the experience of European colonization. Even if “modern” scholars of the 1960s rejected the theories of the 19th Century, they – we – were still living in their patterns. We knew that populations could be replaced because we had seen it done and we postulated that back into the past.

Our literature seemed to support this paradigm. There were heroic stories of ancient foundations and ancient people often claimed heritage from pioneers. Aeneas brought his Trojans to Italy and they formed the core of the Roman people, according to legend. Clearly languages spread geographically. Latin spread over most of Western Europe and it makes some intuitive sense to think that people came with it. The same goes for Arabic in later times. But the spread of English in modern times shows the flaw in that argument. Of the many modern speakers of English, only a minority have predominant or even significant ancestry in the English population of 1492, for example. The English migrated, that is true; their language migrated farther.

An interesting counter example is Finland. Finnish is a language of northern Asia and the “original” Finns were Asians. Over the centuries, a steady immigration from Scandinavia changed the genetic nature of the Finnish population while keeping the language intact

DNA is providing a more nuanced picture of migrations and assimilation. I read an article today that shows that the Minoans, the mysterious ancient people of Crete, whose language we still cannot read, were similar genetically to modern Europeans and modern Cretans. This tends to disprove 19th Century postulations, some of which I learned in school, that they were largest the product of some migration, maybe from Egypt or Africa. This supports a general observation that the core population of a place remains remarkably stable, despite significant changes in language, religion, customs and government. I recall an earlier study that indicated that most of the modern population of Lebanon was descended from the ancient Phoenicians. They are Arab in language and culture, but related more closely to the ancient people of Canaan than to the invaders who swept in form the Arab peninsula. In other words, the same families were at one time or another Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Syrians, Romans or Arabs.

It is tempting to take current situations and project them backward. One of things I really hate about some modern books or TV programs is when they take a contemporary map and project it back on past times. A modern map of Europe, for example, makes little sense when superimposed on the Europe of 1000 years ago. A few of the countries had similar names back then, most did not, but none of them were exactly where they are today nor was the culture the same.

The countries that became France, Germany, Spain or Italy just did not exist 1000 years ago, despite what current nationalists might assert, i.e. they were so different that it makes no sense to call them by those names. Most of eastern France had more in common with what became western Germany. They could easily have become the modern nation. Italy was divided up among people who could not understand each other’s languages. Spain was mostly occupied by Muslims. Anybody who guessed at the future disposition of these places would certainly have been wrong. Modern nationalities simply do not project very far into the past. The people occupying the territory are fairly mutable.

Of course, migrations do happen and Vikings, Mongols and other disruptive forces spread their DNA far and wide, (something like 8% of the population of the former Mongol Empire is related to Genghis Khan, probably the result of thousands of short-term non-consensual relationships and the Mongol habit of killing all the men around) Nevertheless, established populations evidently abide for long times. They were really a nasty bunch, but part of our common history too.

I study ancient history and even more ancient anthropology because I enjoy it and most of what I know has little practical value. But I think that this information is useful. It shows the adaptability of humans and how we are very similar to each other despite our purported ethnic heritage. When someone says that his ancestry is German or French or anything else, it really is not a meaningful concept in the longer run of things. We all can become something else and we are constantly in the process of becoming.

My general view of history is that after events pass from living memory, history belongs equally to all of the current generation of mankind. I don’t have to be a Greek to appreciate Greek history and there is no reason to believe that a contemporary Greek will understand the ancient history of “his” country any better than I can. We all are descended from the good people and the bad people of the past and none of us has any particular reason to be proud or ashamed of anything that happened long before we were born. But ALL of us should learn from the experience of the past and know it. As a Western man, I am an inheritor of Greek & Roman culture. I kind of see them as “my” people, but why? My ancestors were not primarily Greek or Roman. My ancestors were mostly those barbarians that the classical world disparaged and tried to keep out of the civilized empire. My relatives would be found farting in the Roman Forum just before breaking up the local shops and setting fires. If I was transported back to ancient Rome, they would see me as a barbaric Gaul or German. I would not be welcome. Yet it is not the ancient people of Gaul or Germany that inform most of my thought today.

My genetic ancestors have not very much to teach me from ancient times. They really were barbarians. They didn’t write; they constantly warred and they tended to do silly things like rub butter on their hair. The main thing they did that I do too is that, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, they drank beer. This is interesting in two ways. First it is interesting to find out what my ancient ancestors did, but more importantly, I have to learn about it from a Roman. It goes to show who ruled and who just slopped butter on their hair.