“Contrary to popular opinion, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary.”
Dave Faries here, not at all dismayed that historian Stephanie Coontz was compelled to make that statement.
In 1992—in response to a decade of evangelism about American “family values,” she published a study The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, detailing the distortions and myths Americans believe about the nation’s past, in this case focused on home, marriage, family and gender roles. It’s a point that should be understood regarding other aspects of life, as well.
Perhaps because history is dense and packed with contradiction, we tend to package it into something agreeable. This is the case whether one is conservative, liberal or somewhere in between.
Case in point the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision extending the right of marriage to same-sex couples. In his dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that from the beginning of civilization, marriage referred to “the union of a man and a woman” for the purpose of raising children in “stable conditions.” Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that the union of two people in marriage has always “promised nobility and dignity to all.”
As Coontz pointed out in a later edition of her research, both opinions are at odds with historical reality, which is much more inconsistent.
Of course, it doesn’t help that most people receive little scholarly instruction in the subject, but pick up a wealth of material from other sources. For example, I have a cousin who believed—and may still believe—that the portrayal of slavery and the South in the movie Gone With The Wind is accurate.
I spent a decade at universities studying history—American history in general, American military history in particular. I left graduate school a few credits and a dissertation shy of a Ph.D. because of an invitation to write features for the Penn State football highlights show.
College football, auto racing, golf, pre-1990s baseball—all are distractions more powerful than a research library. But inspired by Coontz and the assault on historical reality being waged by Donald Trump and others, especially as the nation’s 250th anniversary approached, I returned to the past for this week’s cover story.
As Coontz wrote, selective memory is not always a bad thing. After all, that time I struck out with the bases loaded is not something I want to bring up too often. But, she noted, “it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.”
There are ugly moments throughout this nation’s past. There are also simple differences of opinion. In the early 1980s, in response to calls for gun control, the city council of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a measure requiring all households to own a gun.
This is who we are. Some people push one way, others push back. Through this, we eventually find progress. And also through this difficult process, the greatness of this nation emerges—although sometimes we might have to wade through a little reflecting pool lunacy to get there.
Have a great Fourth of July. And keep it real. Remember, even Leave It to Beaver had an Eddie Haskell.