Ronald Reagan, The Religion: Day 2 At The Reagan Library

A piece of the Berlin wall at the RRPL

This morning at breakfast I was shamelessly eavesdropping on a group of men who, I came to understand, are local car dealers.  I suspect that they are also the kind of guys who meet once or twice a week for breakfast because they like each others' company and it gives them a chance to have a real conversation at least once that day.  As I sat down at the next table, one of them was holding forth about hybrid and electric cars.  "The part I don't get," he said to his friends, "is that the people who buy them are actually believing the horse pucky that electric vehicles are better for the environment than gas powered vehicles."

"Yeah, well just wait until someone gets stuck out in the desert in one," his friend said.  They all contemplated that for a while.  "It's just like all the opposition to nuclear energy," another one of the guys volunteered. "More people get killed in Iraq in a month than have ever been killed by radiation."  The others agreed, and one added:  "Liberals spend too much time listening to conspiracy theories."

You cannot make this $hit up.  You cannot.  I wish I could come back for the Rotary Club lunch later today.

People, my friends, are primary sources, and while waiting for new pulls at the Reagan Library I've been collecting all kinds of data about what people who are not like me really think.  Let me just say:  you can only do this if you are not someone who is tempted to run up to other folks, smack them with your Ph.D., and set them straight. Nor is it a very good idea to reveal yourself as a historian in an uncontrolled setting.  I used to tell strangers what I do for a living, but one too many moments in a bed and breakfast where someone perked up and said " Really?  I love history!" and then bubbled on about World War II or their Daughters of the Confederacy chapter cured me of that.  Now I stuff a piece of toast in my mouth and, following Betty White, respond "BLAAAHRfingaahr!"

"Excuse me?" they ask.

"IRS," I say, swallowing the toast.  "I work for the IRS."

But one day I want to write an ethnography of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (RRPL), because I have never met so many people in one place who are so drawn to a particular history as those who are involved with Ronald Reagan.  The young man who checked me in on Tuesday night, who I will call Walt, is a perfect example.  He has a BA in history from a Cal State school in the region, and named about six history professors as wonderful and caring teachers.  Walt, like many people who live here, volunteers on Saturdays at the RRPL after working a five day week at the hotel.  He told me that his life's dream would be to get a job from the National Archives and go to work there full time.  "That place," he said reverently, "is the jewel in our crown here in Simi Valley."

The RRPL counts on volunteers for a significant percentage of its staffing needs as far as I can tell, although Walt is the youngest one I have met.  The docents that give tours to school children and the elderly are all volunteers, mostly retired women, and every once in a while I rush through my lunch  to join one on her rounds.  Yesterday, on a stop at the chunk of the Berlin Wall pictured above, one docent gave the Tea Party version of how the wall was removed in a popular uprising of Germans inspired by Ronald Reagan.  I scribbled it down in my notebook.  It went like this.

"When President Reagan ended communism," she explained to a group of children, "The bureaucrats talked and talked about how to take the Berlin Wall down and give the people back their freedoms.  But they couldn't figure it out.  So you know what?  One day the people just went and got their little hammers and they took it down themselves!"

Queerness at the RRPL?

I say in all seriousness:  if you are too focused on your own authority as a historian you will learn nothing from the people who love history and are out there practicing it beyond our scrutiny.  For example, I learn a great deal when I ask total strangers why they are visiting the RRPL and how often they come.  Informal research suggests that a great many elderly California Republicans who are hoovering up social security (while voting down the taxes that might allow anyone else to retire)  are frequent repeat visitors to the RRPL.  I suspect one reason is the desserts at the cafe, which are outstanding.  Ronald Reagan loved dessert and so do I; therefore, I often assume that other people come to the RRPL for the dessert too.

While eating dessert, or just hanging out in the sun, people tell me other things which indicate that the worship of Ronald Reagan is approaching a civil religion in this part of the world.  "I just come to be close to him," one woman said to me as we stood in front of the presidential grave.  Another commented, as we looked out over the replica of the South Lawn donated by Merv Griffin, TV talk show host and closet queen, "I find this to be a very spiritual place." Many non-Californians may visit for spiritual reasons too, as the numerous mobile homes with plates from other states in the parking lot suggest. Or the dessert.

The beauty of the building and grounds, which look out over vineyards, mountains, and neatly kept subdivisions, projects the grace and reassuring, modest, upper-class folksiness that Reagan himself embodied.  Reagan, we need to remind ourselves, cultivated his image as a cultural bulwark between order and disorder for a great many working and middle class white people who were dismayed and frightened by the determination of gays, feminists, and people of color to have full citizenship.   Because of this, the RRPL successfully evokes nostalgia for those  Cold War prosperity, with its white privilege and compulsory heterosexuality, that the president and his conservative allies, paradoxically, began to dismantle for good in the 1980s.

I strolled around the grounds before leaving for the day, and ended up back at the grave site where four women were discussing whether the two spotlights on either side were actually cleverly disguised security cameras.  I asked a couple of my questions, and one said, "Hey -- why are you here?"  and I admitted that I was a historian working on a book.  They wanted to know what it was about, so I told them:  campaigns against pornography during the Reagan administration.  They looked shocked, which people often are when you mention the p-word.  "Well I certainly hope you are writing about nabblah," one said.

"Excuse me?" I said, only belatedly realizing what she meant.  "Do you mean NAMBLA?  The North American Man Boy Love Association?"  Oh good Christ on a cracker, what had I done?  Why didn't I say I was writing about the IRS?  "Uh, no.  I'm writing a book about the Justice Department and attempts by the federal government to control pornography."

"Government certainly didn't do a very good job, did it?" said another member of the party tartly.

"Well," the first woman continued, "You should write about NAMBLA, because they are still responsible for most of the pornography in the United States.  I have a friend who works for the FBI, and he goes undercover to investigate them and the way they bring children into homosexuality with pornography."

"Oh," I said brightly, wondering what computer dating service she was using.  "That's interesting.  I'll have to think about that. Um," I decided to take the plunge and be a historian.  "You do know that most pornography is heterosexual?" I asked. "And that the majority of pornography is made and distributed by major media conglomerates, a number of which are in the Fortune 500?"  They all looked at me blankly.  No, they hadn't known that.

We said polite goodbyes and I toodled off.

Hey, Is This Going To Be On The Test? Confederates In The Classroom

Cartoon by Walt Handelsman.

Let's hear it for the Virginia Department of Education, which approved a textbook called Our Virginia: Past and Present for fourth graders in its public schools.   It features the information that, according to this story in USA Today "thousands of black troops fought for the Confederacy....author Joy Masoff told The Washington Post that she found the passage on the Internet."  In case your brain is busy stereotyping Masoff as a renegade Daughter of the Confederacy, she is from Westchester, NY, and is the author of numerous children's books.

Masoff's Wikipedia entry has one account of the three Internet sources Masoff used that it claims link back to this document generated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group which works hard to separate the rebellion from the stink of involuntary human servitude.   One way to do that is to imply massive black support for states' rights (as opposed to the right of states to pass laws that enslaved people because of their race.)  One wonders if it was these lines that Masoff cobbled into that one pithy sentence:

"There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty...as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets...." Frederick Douglas, former slave & abolitionist (Fall, 1861).

How many? Easily tens of thousands of blacks served the Confederacy as laborers, teamsters, cooks and even as soldiers. Some estimates indicate 25% of free blacks and 15% of slaves actively supported the South during the war.

Young historians:  beware the ellipse.  And honestly?  If you didn't know who Frederick Douglass actually was, that first line is impenetrably confusing. 

This was brought to the attention of the authorities in question by our colleague, Carol Sheriff of William and Mary, whose child was assigned the book. "Sheriff says blacks occasionally took up arms to defend their masters, but it was illegal to use blacks as soldiers in the Confederacy until toward the war's end. None of those companies saw action on the battlefront and most worked involuntarily as laborers." Note:  Sheriff is not claiming that no black person did service that supported the Confederacy, only pointing out that thousands of enslaved people did not sign up to risk their lives with the goal of perpetuating slavery -- which is what Masoff's odd little factoid strongly implies.

Textbooks do make mistakes, and they can be corrected.  And yet, an erroneous fact like this one would be field-changing were it true, and Masoff has to be criticized for not recognizing that and pursuing the question further.  That the text also then slipped through nnumerous other hands before ending up in Virginia classrooms is a scandal.

Guest Post From an Activist Historian: The AHA Blew It

A report on the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in San Diego guest posted by Jennifer Manion of Connecticut College.

To welcome back the start of another semester, let’s start with a multiple choice quiz:

For LGBTQ historians of an activist bent, this year’s AHA was:

a. alienating
b. disappointing
c. energizing
d. all of the above

For this activist historian the answer is “d.” So many things went so wrong in the AHA’s attempt to skirt around the local LGBTQ/labor boycott of the host hotel without appearing to support the politics of the hotel’s owner, Doug Manchester, who financed the initial petition drive to get Proposition 8 onto the ballot in California. For those of you living in a cave, the passage of Prop 8 overturned the legalization of gay marriage in California. The constitutionality of Prop 8 is now being contested by Perry v. Schwarzenager in federal court. Regardless of the ruling, the losing side will surely appeal it to the Supreme Court.

Before I go down that long slippery road listing of all the authoritarian, undermining, and dismissive actions of the AHA leadership, allow me to recognize their good intentions and acknowledge one quite significant positive outcome of this mess – more scholarship on the history of sexuality and LGBTQ people was featured in the conference program than ever before. How can this be a bad thing? Many (but not all) of these panels were featured in a special “Mini-Conference” on same-sex marriage to promote conversations about the history of marriage. It is unclear if any but the usual crowd of (mostly) queer historians who work the “sexuality-themed panel circuit” at the AHA actually went to them. But I like to think that they did. This, my friends, is pretty much where the goodness ends.

The AHA could have tried – or tried harder – to get out of its contract with minimal or no penalty. Other professional groups who had contracts with Manchester managed to do so. But let’s give the AHA the benefit of the doubt here: organizers in San Diego were not very organized when they first requested at the 2009 meeting that the AHA pull out of the Hyatt. Once the AHA decided not to pull out of the Hyatt, local organizers basically refused to collaborate with the LGBTQ historian activist set. I’m guessing the AHA was similarly iced.

One consequence of this is that several (to my knowledge) LGBTQ historians decided, agonizingly, that they could not attend the AHA this year. They would not violate the boycott on principle and could not stand to be outside, protesting, and missing the special historic and timely mini-conference on same-sex marriage inside. As one California-based historian (who is considering not renewing his membership to the AHA) said, “if the AHA would not respect the boycott, I would have to boycott the AHA.” Others decided to attend the AHA but refused to enter the Hyatt out of courage, conviction, and respect for the boycott. Ian Lekus, the chair of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History (an AHA affiliate) took this position. Already on the program myself, I settled on the strategy that I would enter the Hyatt for panels as necessary but not spend any money there. This was before the “official boycott” position was communicated to us by local activists, stating that a person should not “meet, greet, or eat” in the Hyatt. If local organizers were clearer about this in advance, I expect that more historians (myself included) may have adopted this stance.

That said, the rest of this essay will focus on actions the AHA could have taken to substantiate their claim that despite not being able to get out of the contract, they would actively support the effort to inform conference participants about the situation, promote the discussion of the history of sexuality and marriage, and open the special mini-conference to interested people not registered for the conference.

1. The AHA absolutely should have moved the mini-conference out of the Hyatt. This is the single most significant action they could have taken to support LGBTQ historians who were squeezed in the middle of this controversy. The mini-conference was open to the public for free. This gesture (a wonderful one at that) ended up being meaningless because the local LGBTQ activists at whom this invitation was targeted would not violate the boycott to enter the Hyatt. This also forced many LGBTQ historians (disproportionately represented in the mini-conference) INTO the Hyatt.

2. The AHA should have communicated clearly with all meeting registrants via email about the boycott in advance of the meeting rather than only those participants in the mini-conference. All registrants should have received an email stating the situation regarding the boycott: politics, finances, the AHA position, alternative housing options, resources for members who (voluntarily) wanted to support the local organizing effort and/or stand in solidarity with the membership of the AHA’s own Committee on LGBTQ History. I didn’t even realize that everyone was not getting this information until the meeting itself. The separate mode of communication to mini-conference presenters regarding the “problem” of dealing with the boycott was deeply problematic, presuming that only participants in the mini-conference would want or need to know. Did this presume our sexual orientation as well? Our political stance? What of all the LGBTQ historians not involved with the mini-conference? Committed activists of all orientations? Hetero-historians who study the history of marriage?

3. The AHA should have worked more sensitively and collaboratively with the longstanding Committee on LGBT History. CLGBTH issued a very informative and thoughtful press release in early November – this could and should have been sent out to AHA meeting registrants and prominently placed on the conference webpage. The suggestions could have been honored by the AHA rather than ripped apart and discounted in the official "talking points" bulletin they issued at the meeting. Nice one.

4. The AHA should have dropped the militarism, authoritarianism, and the divisive anti-gay activist position. I don’t care if the purpose of the security guards outside the door of my panel (and seemingly all of the panels in the mini-conference) were there to protect me. They made me nervous. Chairs of panels in the mini-conference received a “special” email in the days leading up to the conference. The tone of the message was bizarre (to put it nicely) or condescending, dictatorial, and ignorant (to be real). I heard (through the gay grapevine) that these documents were drafted by hired consultants to help the AHA deal with the situation. GET YOUR MONEY BACK. I would have helped the AHA devise its strategy for free. The documents listed the “official” AHA position regarding the boycott to share with audience members should questions arise (presuming I did not find these positions objectionable). They offered advice on how to regain control of the room should some hostile protestor storm the session to contest our presence in the Hyatt (presuming I would not welcome the perspective and presence of a gay activist). There was, apparently, a potential war on the horizon, between mini-conference panelists and local gay activists (this was the first I heard of it). The AHA was there to mediate and protect, I suppose, but all they did was generate anxiety, frustration, and anger for many of us. I thought to distribute the documents to some CLGBTH members for feedback, only to notice the “NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION” line running down the side of the documents, further signifying that I unknowingly was in the midst of a battle. Then, clarity. The angst of this situation was caused by the feeling that I was being enlisted for a side I was not on. I may be a historian, but the violence, harassment, and discrimination I face on a regular basis stems from my gender identity and sexual orientation. Those angry gay protestors are the people who fight for my dignity and humanity everyday. They – not other historians – have my back. Except for the few historians who are also angry gay protestors and I already know all 10 of them.

I actually understand why the AHA did not cancel its contract with the Hyatt. But a series of misguided, insensitive, and just plain bad decisions on the part of the AHA leading up to the meeting made it worse than it needed to be. We LGBTQ historians with an activist bent were experiencing an alternate reality from most other conference attendees who were generally oblivious to all of this. I educated friends and colleagues who were outside of my circle. They were shocked and appalled by what I told them – and wished the AHA communicated more directly with everyone registered about the boycott and the work of the CLGBTH. Lots of them stayed in the Hyatt, unaware of the politics involved. They simply jumped onto the AHA website and scooped up available hotel rooms at the host hotel, the way people do. The AHA did nothing to promote or supports its position that we could effectively prevent Manchester from profiting from our use of his hotel if we got people to not book rooms, eat, or shop in there.

At the Saturday afternoon protest, organizer Cleve Jones railed against LGBTQ historians who attended the conference as the lowest of the low, the first LGBTQ people to violate the boycott since its inception nearly two years ago. Admittedly, I shirked, wondering if I belonged there, if he was right. To some extent he was – AHA participants surely funneled tens of thousands of dollars right into Manchester’s pockets that weekend. As righteous, dogmatic, and uncompromising as he is, however, Jones is not the gatekeeper for the movement. Onward I marched – stung by the passive complicity of my liberal colleagues and well-meaning professional association – annoyed by the sloppy organizing efforts of the locals – moved by the integrity of my queer historian colleagues who honored the boycott – and energized by the company of those historians who, with passion and conviction, are dedicated to the political project of doing LGBTQ history. And we danced hard.

Note: Guest posts are welcome at Tenured Radical. They may be posted anonymously, but you must make yourself known to me.