Not Quite Sundown

 

The other day I came across a long (5 hours!) YouTube video that's a string a lectures by, and a tribute to, James Loewen -- sociologist, historian and author, who died last August.  The lectures were about his three most famous books: "Lies My Teachers Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong", "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers And Monuments Get Wrong", and "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension To American Racism".  Listening to only part of it, I could readily tell that Loewen was an earnest modern Progressive who was mostly concerned with "the concealed history of racism", not the forgotten history of anything else.  I could also tell that he was guilty of the same sin as the textbooks and monuments he was complaining about -- lying by omission to make his ideological point.  

In "Lies My Teachers Told Me", for instance, he mentions a briefly mentioned and whitewashed incident wherein the US Army attacked an Iroquois settlement, killed some 900 of them and drove the rest out of the county so as to give the land to White farmers.  I happen to know something about that incident -- through histories told, written, and sometimes published (but never used as school textbooks) by my Meti and Chippewa relatives, and the truth is a good bit more complex than Loewen said.  The raid was performed not at the request of White farmers but because of complaints by the Chippewa, neighbors of the Iroquois, who were quite tired of being raided and oppressed by them.  Whatever they may be today, the Iroquois of two centuries ago were not nice people;  they were robbers and opportunistic cannibals who much preferred raiding their neighbors to farming or hunting for themselves.  The Chippewa, who had had dealings with White men (the Vikings) centuries earlier, were quite willing to make a deal with the English/American White men for the same purpose;  stomping the troublesome Iroquois.  The Native Americans had a long and complex history both before and after the founding of the American colonies, and this did have considerable impact on subsequent American history.  For example, Hianwatha (a real person), tiring of the endless tribal wars around the Great Lakes, made peace between the tribes and founded the Assiniboian Confederacy -- whose constitution so greatly impressed Thomas Jefferson that he included some of its features into his proposals for the Constitution of the United States.  Loewen made no mention of any of that.

In "Lies Across America" he complains about historic markers and monuments that omit or prettify or outright lie about historical incidents of slavery and White racism, but he doesn't mention monuments to Black settlers or pioneers, or Asian entrepreneurs, Native American achievements, or markers telling of battles during the Labor Wars which stretched from the 1870s to the 1950s.  Possibly this is because, during and after World War Two, the working classes of western Europe and America made great enough financial and political gains (largely due to those Labor Wars) that they were no longer seriously oppressed by the middle-to-upper classes -- thus putting an end to all the hopes of the Marxist intelligentsia for a Class Revolution that they could ride to power as Lenin did in Russia.  Rather than give up their dreams, the Marxist intellectuals -- particularly one Herbert Marcuse -- abandoned the working class that had been their original excuse and went looking for another oppressed class to propagandize and exploit.  They found it in the "colonialized races".  Marcuse called this the "Critical Theory", and originally applied it to various Marxist rebellions in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and of course to the Vietnam War.  When the war wound down, his followers decided to apply his opportunism to Blacks in the United States, so they re-named their campaign the "Critical Race Theory" -- the claim that race is everything and everything is racist -- and have been applying it, particularly in the schools, ever since.  Loewen seems to have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. 

I had a particularly good giggle over his complaint that the state of New Jersey had somehow lost the list of its state historical monuments and markers, and so he didn't go looking for them.  If he had, he might have learned that the New Jersey troops made a poor account of themselves during the Revolution, that they were known as the "two-shot runaways" because that was generally what they did, and that George Washington made use of this proclivity to draw British troops into an ambush at one particular battle.  Loewen might also have learned that the principle conflict in pre-20th-century New Jersey was between the English settlers and the Dutch, who owned much of the best land and often refused to learn English up until World War One.  

In "Sundown Towns" he claims that, for reasons never made entirely clear, the US turned its back on the gains made during the Civil War and began driving non-Whites and even Jews out of some 10,000 towns and small cities, pushing them into the larger cities, by use of variously-worded "sundown" laws.  These, supposedly, forbade non-Whites -- particularly Blacks, of course -- to stay in town after sundown.  He links this to the continued existence of "White only"  towns, which manage to exist despite the Civil Rights Act and multiple lawsuits that followed it.  

This theory overlooks one obvious problem;  how were the wealthier families in those towns to keep their non-White servants (and entertainers) after dark?

As it happens, I have an answer for that.  The town I was born in, one of the Oranges of New Jersey, had been a "sundown town" until World War Two.  The weasel-worded local statutes did not say exactly that all non-Whites had to be out of town by sundown;  only that they were not allowed in public, on the street after dark.  "Servants", live-in or hired for the occasion, could remain in town as long as they stayed indoors, behind drawn curtains, and couldn't be seen from the street until dawn.  The bigger and obviously wealthier the house, the less it was likely to be examined or questioned by the police.  This also applied to certain businesses, including the local theater -- which could hold "minstrel shows" with real Blacks, so long as the performers would spend the night in the building.  I suspect that this is how a lot, if not most, of those "sundown towns" operated, right up until the war obliged them to change.

The irony is that, in my town at least, one of the biggest and most "respectable" of those homes was the town whorehouse.  It was a grand old mansion, owned by a wealthy (White) widow whose late husband had kept a large number of servants in the house.  Nobody thought to notice how, when her husband was dead, the widow replaced almost all of the male servants with pretty young women.  They were of all colors, and wore livery in the house that was oddly scanty, but they were quite well-behaved and nobody thought it odd that there were so many of them.  The widow was also reputed to give quiet formal dinners almost every night (never on Sunday) which lasted very late, so that often the attendees spent the night in the house.  When the servants appeared outdoors, it was always by daylight and they were always quite respectably dressed.  Apparently nobody either said or suspected a thing, not for a good twenty years, until the old widow died.  Her fortune, her house and her "business" passed to her heirs, who were quite scandalized when they learned what had been going on in there.  The heirs promptly dismissed the "servants", sold the house, and moved to another town.  The story broke in the local papers after they left, and it was a great joke for years afterward.  Thus did a "sundown" law lead to a House of the Rising Sun.

I wonder if Loewen would have appreciated the joke.

--Leslie <;)))><