On May 18, 2007, at 3:05 PM, qvarizona wrote:
> . . . Something else comes to mind that was touched on by Fred Fausz
> in a recent article about Jamestown (see History News Network
> http://hnn.us/articles/38375.html ) He wrote, "Historians used to
> be taught to evaluate evidence, to question everything, but that is
> rarely the case today..."
>
Fred's article is terrific: no matter what period of history we
research, and whether we agree with most or all of its points or not,
like strong medicine, it should make every last one of us at least a
little uncomfortable and stimulate a healthy bout of soul-searching.
Some of the article's sharpest points remind me of a comment made to me
recently by a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of
Congress: she said she finds that increasingly, historians are coming
to the archives looking for materials that will support the argument
they want to make, rather than looking for all available evidence in
order to evaluate it judiciously and allow it to generate their
argument. Her comment shocked me, perhaps the moreso because she is
herself a relatively young historian whose own area of research lies
outside the bounds of traditional political history: in other words, no
one could accuse her of being an old fogey resistant to the
generational shift in scholarly subjects that has been occurring since
the 1960s. Her concern wasn't historians' subjects; it
was--increasingly, as she sees it--their methods.
So at the risk of the wrath of the copyright gods, I copy Fred's
article below. Fred, thank you for serving as a righteously
cantankerous conscience for us all.
--Jurretta Heckscher
http://hnn.us/articles/38375.html
5-07-07
Jamestown at 400: Caught Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope
By Fred Fausz
[Mr. Fausz, an ethnohistorian at the University of Missouri-St. Louis,
is in the process of completing two books on early Jamestown. Portions
of this essay were delivered at the April 2007 Virginia Forum in
Richmond.]
Readers seldom take the pain to gather together all that hath been
written on any subject but usually content themselves with one or two
books and some former treatises, whereby they gain but a lame and
partial knowledge, and so prejudice the Truth. -- Edward Waterhouse,
Virginia Company Secretary, 1622
The Commonwealth of Virginia is hosting an ambitious 400th birthday
bash on May 11-13 to commemorate Jamestown as England's first permanent
colony in North America. That festive weekend is expected to attract
90,000 visitors to the tiny, uninhabited tidal peninsula, still so
heavily wooded that it belies the estimated $200 million spent to
herald its prominent place in American History.
Virginia has celebrated Jamestown anniversaries every fifty years since
1807, but until Queen Elizabeth II's participation in 1957, those were
largely local affairs, attracting little national or transatlantic
attention. Global recognition and respect for the significance of
Jamestown is the goal in 2007.
But that carefully-coordinated public relations campaign will be hard
pressed to compete with the more extensively-publicized random tragedy
at Virginia Tech--symbolizing Jamestown's perennial problem of a
reputation tarnished by violence and cruelty. That colony's X-rated
history, which included internecine feuds, interethnic warfare, and the
introduction into Anglo-America of African and Indian slavery,
capitalistic profiteering, nicotine addiction, massive terrorism, and
even cannibalism, has never been able to compete with the G-rated
fairytale of the Plymouth "Pilgrims" in the beloved, mythic memories of
our citizenry. Obsessing about the bogus Rock of Plymouth--the Cape Cod
Conundrum--as the cause of popular ignorance and indifference toward
the senior Virginia colony, historians in this overly-hyped anniversary
season have descended down a slippery slope of shameful pandering and
inexcusable errors that are symptomatic of a sick profession corrupted
by commercialism and cavalier attitudes about accuracy.
In his 1818 biography of Patrick Henry, William Wirt condemned previous
accounts of the famous patriot because they were "extremely careless
and full of errors.” He discovered so many contradictions about Henry’s
"Caesar-Brutus Speech" of 1765 that he “began to doubt whether the
whole might not be fiction.” Only after interviewing esteemed
eyewitnesses was Wirt convinced that the event qualified as "authentic
history." In 2007 we do not have the luxury of conversing with
participants from the Revolutionary era, much less the early years at
Jamestown. Determining what is "authentic history" today is more
difficult than it was for Wirt, because the hoariest myths originated
after his death in 1834, and subsequent eras have added new layers of
errors to the growing pile. The following chart identifies issues that
make "authentic history" so problematical today, when mistakes, like
computer viruses, proliferate with lightning speed, blur the line
between factual and fictional "stories," and erode confidence in a
profession (once) dependent upon accuracy, integrity, and reliability.
While no historian in four hundred years has yet provided a complete
and compelling analysis of why Jamestown was founded when it was,
authors continue to screw up even simpler details--such as how many
colonists first landed at Jamestown? Despite the quest for accuracy
implied by the best-selling college reader, After the Fact: The Art of
Historical Detection, its celebrated authors perpetuate the error that
"only 105 of the original 144 settlers reached Chesapeake Bay." That
mistake results from ignoring original documents, which traditionally
provided historians with the Joy of Text. A total of 144 colonists and
crewmen left England in December 1606, but 39 of them were sailors who
had to take the ships back! Only one death was recorded on the voyage,
leaving 104 males as the original founders. The September 2006 issue of
Cobblestone and the "America at 400" issue (May 7) of Time magazine got
it right, but Edmund S. Morgan did not in his New York Review of Books
essay of April 26.
Establishing correct statistics based on primary source evidence does
not constitute an antiquarian obsession with trivia, because
immigration and depopulation are central factors in evaluating
Jamestown's development.
Another example of statistical confusion involves the colonial death
toll in the "Barbarous Massacre" of March 22, 1622. Although historians
ignore its larger implications as the major watershed event in early
Virginia, they continue to play a ridiculous numbers game with the
official death toll of 347 published by the Virginia Company in August
1622. Most scholars today accept that total without questioning, since
it was set in type, but an actual analysis shows that Edward
Waterhouse, who compiled the report, included merely missing colonists,
as well as confirmed corpses; duplicated names; and then added
incorrectly. For the sake of convenience rather than accuracy, other
historians round up to 350 or even 400, convinced that the Company
fudged the figures to save face. Why then did the London directors rush
to publish a name-by-name, settlement-by-settlement butcher's bill at
all? Legal and financial factors dictated that a "True List" of victims
be as accurate as possible, "to the end that . . . lawful heirs may
take speedy order for the inheriting of their lands and estates there."
But the colony's sponsors went even further, listing dozens of only
partially-named victims, including many landless servants--six of whom
were so badly mutilated as to be identifiable only by sex. In-depth
investigation reveals that 320 colonists were killed on March 22,
including 255 men (80% of the total), 35 women (11%), and 30 children
(9%)--or 26 percent of the colonial population.
Historians used to be taught to evaluate evidence, to question
everything, but that is rarely the case today, as the most enduring old
myth about Jamestown reveals. The "Good Friday Fallacy" associated with
the 1622 Massacre originated 136 years ago and was still misleading the
general public as recently as the May 7 issue of Time magazine and the
January 2007 special Jamestown issue of U.S. News & World Report. Good
Friday fell on April 19 in both the 1622 and 1644 years of massive
Powhatan offensives, and that led to the creation of the
myth--unforgivably by a clergyman. In 1871 the Rev. Edward D. Neill got
his massacres mixed up; thought the 1644 attack occurred on Good
Friday, rather than on Maundy Thursday; and then inadvertently reversed
the years! A Neill admirer, Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, embraced the symbolism
of heathens slaying Anglicans on that special day of Christian
sacrifice. A careless slip became an enduring myth because both men
were popular celebrity authors, more prolific than careful, with Neill
restating his error in multiple, repetitious books from 1871-1885,
while Tyler did likewise from 1904-1915.
The indifference paid to or paid by copyeditors and proofreaders is
even more telling in the publication industry today, as the Good Friday
Fallacy is more widely disseminated than ever before. At least three
Oxford University Press books perpetuate that error--including the 25th
anniversary edition of T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes's popular "Myne
Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore,
1640-1676--while notable scholars, such as Breen, John Murrin, and Jill
Lepore, keep it alive in their college textbooks. Such errors also live
on in cyberspace, where "history viruses" proliferate like all the
others. They have "infected" the Jamestowne.org website, which has an
entire section under a prominent heading, "Good Friday Massacre," as
well as the 2005 online book by the National Park Service, A Study of
Virginia Indians and Jamestown: The First Century.
In our technologically-advanced Mis-Information Age, the historical
equivalent of spam or intellectual pornography abounds on the Internet.
In February 2007 the "Revolutionary Times" website of Colonial
Williamsburg--the official source for news about the
quadricentennial--introduced errors into its "Little-Known Facts about
Jamestown" feature. It read: "The British king revoked the Virginia
Company charter in 1622 [should be 1624] and Virginia became the first
British [instead of royal] colony." Another website portrays the 1607
ship Susan Constant flying the 1801 flag of the United Kingdom.
Tobacco.org credits smoking with an important role in Manifest Destiny,
adding gratuitous anti-Hispanic prejudice: "Few realize that this
seminal event in American history [John Rolfe's hybridization of
Virginia tobacco] may well be why the lower half of the United States
speaks English instead of Spanish today"!
Another dubious trend in our age of computerization is the reliance on
and reprinting of old, obsolete books that are readable but not
reliable. The Ancestry.com website reproduces all of William Broaddus
Cridlin's 1923 History of Colonial Virginia as its Jamestown source,
while Jamestowne.org makes extensive use of Mary Newton Stanard's 1928
Story of Virginia's First Century, which has been reprinted for the
2007 anniversary. The website of the First North Carolina Company of
the Jamestowne Society promotes its sale by proclaiming that "every
high school in the nation should have a copy of this book in its
library."
Why does the general public continue to embrace such flawed, dated
information when it would be unthinkable to rely on medical advice from
the 1920s? The quantitative and qualitative decline in the study of
history has left most lay readers ill-equipped to comprehend
cutting-edge scholarship. But academic historians should be capable of
producing well-written, compelling narratives that demonstrate the
value of continual, cumulative Re-Searching and constant Re-Vision
without alienating the reader with theorizing jargon. J. H. Hexter
wrote that "dull history is bad history to the extent to which it is
dull." If being "up to date" means being "out of touch" with the huge
audience outside of academe, then well-paid "interpreters" will
continue to reap profits by writing engaging best-sellers that exploit
the indispensable research of lower-paid experts.
The disjunction between what professional historians are interested in
and what the public wants to read is very apparent in 2007. Major
national anniversaries used to be occasions for citizens to reconnect
and recommit to a common heritage of unique significance. But the
quadricentennial has generated much negative commentary about political
correctness and the ways in which Jamestown's unique contributions are
being ignored, condemned, marginalized, trivialized, eviscerated, or at
least overshadowed by a broad focus on comparative, contemporaneous
events in a global context. Historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a staunch
proponent of the new Atlantic History, wrote in 2005 that "in recent
decades study of Jamestown became stuck in a narrow focus on the events
of the early colony,” and she cautioned against “isolating Jamestown’s
founding as the beginning of American history.” That is precisely what
the newsmagazines and popular books are emphasizing to drum up interest
in 1607--albeit vastly overstating the "origins of America," the
"foundations of democracy," the "beginning of the American dream," or,
as the May 7 Time cover stated, "How Jamestown colony made us who we
are"!
The dilemma of such different approaches and audiences is symbolized in
two contradictory anniversary exhibitions at the Virginia Historical
Society. "Jamestown, Quebec, and Santa Fe: Three North American
Beginnings" follows the trendy Atlantic History model by diluting the
unique heritage of Jamestown as merely one piece of the nationally- and
ethnically-mixed jigsaw puzzle of colonization on this continent. The
second exhibit, "Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend," caters to the
traditional romantic fascination with a native celebrity revered by
whites then and now because she seemingly recognized their "superior"
civilization and religion. The recent True Story of Pocahontas: The
Other Side of History, by Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela
L. Daniel "Silver Star," may make such a patronizing display a
poisonous reminder of Anglocentric abuse in future anniversaries.
Citing "sacred oral Mattapani traditions," those authors claim that
Pocahontas was raped during her captivity (possibly by Sir Thomas
Dale); gave birth to her son, Thomas, prior to marrying Rolfe; and was
poisoned to death in England before she could return home.
No wonder the public is perplexed by contradictory perspectives that
run the gamut from the New Fad of Global Inclusiveness, to the
Traditional Rut of Insular Eurocentric Antiquarianism, to the Latest
Privileging of Native American Victimology. As serious book readers die
off and younger generations embrace visual imagery from electronic
media, it is museums that have emerged as the preferred purveyors of
historical information-as-entertainment for anniversary audiences.
Taking a cue from Marshall McLuhan and noting the success of The
History Channel and video game technology, three new museums at
Jamestown use high-tech media to deliver their messages.
The National Park Service has a new $58 million Visitors Center at
"Historic Jamestowne" (i.e., the "Island"), featuring a 360-degree
theater for viewing an excellent orientation film, in addition to state
of the art exhibits organized around the theme, "The Atlantic World in
1607." Much-enhanced coverage of Indian relations includes commentary
written by members of Virginia's eight surviving historic tribes. On
the nearby mainland, "Jamestown Settlement" is a major $80 million
refurbishment and enlargement of the old "Jamestown Festival Park"
built for the 1957 anniversary. Although its major focus is on Living
History by costumed reenactors at the replica James Fort, on the three
reconstructed ships that made the first voyage, and in the Powhatan
Village, the "Settlement" also features $24 million of much revised
(and revisionist) exhibit galleries occupying 40,000-square feet. The
most scholarly of the new museums is the Archaearium (ark ee air ee
um)--the $5 million, 7,500-square foot building operated by the
Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), which
displays the most fascinating of the one million artifacts unearthed
since 1994 at the "lost" original fort. Dr. William Kelso and his
Jamestown Rediscovery Project team of talented archaeologists are to be
congratulated not only for finding that site, but for imparting a sense
of shared humanity across the centuries without compromising high
scholarly standards or ignoring comparative contexts.
Archaeologists remind historians that factual accuracy is essential if
any book or exhibit is to be credible. Quadricentennial histories have
a deplorable track record in that regard, becoming just another hyped
commodity in Oprah's Entertainment Universe. The pursuit of profit and
celebrity status has tainted the marketplace of ideas, making Harry
Potter-type popularity, measured by revenue, a more desirable goal than
reliable research. Cover designers have obviously commandeered the
salaries once paid to copyeditors as anniversary titles vie with one
another for the most sensationalized means of conveying misinformation.
Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement
of America, by British broadcaster Benjamin Woolley, is misleading
enough with regard to the Indians who really settled Virginia. But an
even more egregious deception is perpetrated by the title of A Land As
God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, by respected scholar
James Horn. Such misleading marketing revives the hoariest colonial
myth of all--America as a "virgin land"--and denigrates decades of
ethnohistorical scholarship that thoroughly refuted such "Cant of
Conquest." The "First Americans" cover of U.S. News & World Report
(January 2007) is similarly so Anglocentric and dismissive of Native
American and Spanish precedents as to call into question what the terms
"America," "Americans," and even "First" really mean.
G. M. Trevelyan wrote that "in the realm of history, the moment we have
reason to think we are being given fiction instead of fact, be the
fiction ever so brilliant, our interest collapses like a pricked
balloon." Once credibility is so severely compromised, it is only a
short step to caricatures and cartoons--such as Disney's Pocahontas,
Terrence Malick's The New World, and the September 2006 Cobblestone
parody of "Jamestown Island" as another site of the "Survivor" TV
series. A more serious challenge to chronological accuracy are the
19th-century illustrations invariably used to portray the people and
events of 17th-century Jamestown. The same anachronistic Victorian era
engraving of Indians wearing Teton Lakota headdresses and standing
beside Ojibwe birchbark canoes has already appeared in anniversary
issues of Time, U.S. News & World Report, and History Channel Magazine.
The persistent fascination with Pocahontas is symptomatic of how avidly
historians trivialize and mythologize our heritage if there is some
financial reward. Stephen Colbert's tongue-in-cheek "truthiness" has
nothing on the overly-hyped obsession with a 10-12-year-old child who
neither "saved" nor romanced Captain Smith, who may have been castrated
years before as a slave of the Ottoman Turks. The best-selling Love and
Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New
Nation (!) by journalist David A. Price, merely recasts Smith's
accounts into a soap opera, while missing the opportunity to add new
information. Anthropologist Helen C. Rountree's Pocahontas, Powhatan,
Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, in contrast,
is too creative in peddling a purported Indian view of Virginia
colonization to anniversary readers, but the passive tense of her
subtitle shows the problem of that approach. Camilla Townsend's
seriously-flawed Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma is misleading due
to a misreading of critical original sources. Referring to a famous
1590 De Bry engraving of an Indian girl and her mother, Townsend
contends that the child is "holding a powder horn," which "has often
been taken [by other historians] to be a doll in Elizabethan dress."
But it is clearly that, and Thomas Harriot's caption directly
underneath the picture confirms that the English at Roanoke brought
dolls to give to Indian children.
Paula Gunn Allen's even worse book, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy,
Entrepreneur, Diplomat, is a fictionalized, error-filled study
masquerading as biography. The Laguna Pueblo author considers
Pocahontas the "female counterpart to . . . George Washington," and she
credits the "inspiration" she received by "soak[ing] up . . . Algonquin
whispers . . . of the Wampanoag women" at Plimouth Plantation--as well
as "direct and startling messages" communicated by the spirit of
Pocahontas herself!
Allen's claim that the "battle" of March 22, 1622 "resulted in few
deaths among the English" (my italics) reveals the historical
dishonesty in so-called "Native American views" of the Powhatan
Massacre, which Rountree and Frederic W. Gleach similarly promote (see
my essay, "The First Act of Terrorism in English America," HNN, January
16, 2006). Twisted terminology and suspect "evidence" produce ethnic
polemics, not "authentic history."
The Virginia legislature recently apologized for enslaving Africans and
dispossessing Indians and installed a highway marker honoring
Opechancanough as a great--but greatly sanitized--"resistance leader."
That "Great General" of the Powhatans was a brilliant strategist whose
most innovative achievement was using the tactic of massive terrorism
against Anglo-Americans for the first time in world history. An
equitable empathy for all victims of violence must replace PC and PR
fabrications, if we are to accommodate our different heritages within a
Virginia history that is greater than the sum of its parts. Let's begin
by dumping inaccurate and limiting characterizations, such as the
oft-used official anniversary phrase, "the meeting of three cultures."
Multiple Indian, African, and European cultures from three continents
shaped the Jamestown colony.
Despite almost a half century of ethnohistorical publications,
Anglo-Indian relations are still the Achilles heel of many reputable
historians. Bernard Bailyn is a prime example of the
Bigger-They-Are-the-Less-They-Are-Edited trend in celebrity
scholarship. In Atlantic History, he confused the First Anglo-Powhatan
War of 1609-1614 with the Second Anglo-Powhatan War of 1622-1632--an
error as huge as placing WWI doughboys on the beaches of D-Day--which
invalidated some key conclusions. His Harvard colleague, Joyce Chaplin,
in Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the
Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676, similarly mixed up the two periods,
"proving" an erroneous point about English-Chickahominy relations in
1622 by citing as her sole source Ralph Hamor's 1615 account. He was a
gifted chronicler but no Nostradamus.
Edmund S. Morgan and Bailyn are most responsible for stigmatizing
Jamestown as a chaotic, confused "Fiasco" of unrelenting violence, and
both interpret the post-Massacre period as "'a perpetual war without
peace or truce'--a project of extermination in which the conquerors
were largely successful." But they, like many other historians, confuse
the genocidal and dispossession rhetoric in London with the opposite
reality of limited, pragmatic combat in Virginia, which actually
encouraged the Powhatans to stay on the land. Governor Sir Francis
Wyatt never actually attempted the much-quoted "Expulsion of the
Savages," and Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia and other
contemporaries reported how creatively the colonists solved their
perennial Indian and subsistence problems simultaneously with one
ingenious military tactic, known as the "feed fight." The colonists'
intermittent, harvesting raids of Powhatan fields made red peasants of
their Indian enemies, allowing English servants to eat well and
concentrate their labors on the record production of the international
drug crop that demonstrated Virginia's viability and value to Britain.
The fact that the Powhatans were neither exterminated nor driven away
explains why Virginia created the first Indian reservations in the
1640s and the survival of eight original tribes in the state today.
Morgan's 1975 diatribe in American Slavery, American Freedom about "the
suicidal impulse that led the hungry English to destroy [Indian] corn
that might have fed them" is the source of the confusion about the
intent of "feed fights." He was still advocating that view in the April
26, 2007 New York Review of Books, despite revisionist interpretations
to the contrary over the last twenty-five years. Morgan's critical
error was misreading the "cutting down" of maize plants as an act of
destruction rather than confiscation by the very sensible, non-suicidal
survivors of the Massacre. Even such a far-fetched explanation catches
on, unfortunately, when written by a scholar of Morgan's magnitude. In
his 2005 book, The First Way of War, John Grenier stated that of
Wyatt's 180 troops in 1623, "80 took up 'carrying corn,' that is,
destroying Powhatan fields"! Obviously, however, "carrying" referred to
the transport of cut corn stalks from Powhatan villages to Jamestown,
and many original documents describe maize as "spoil" and
"booty"--worth up to L1 sterling per bushel for war profiteers like Sir
George Yeardley.
Most of the anniversary publications do not reflect great credit on the
historical profession, either in terms of careful research or creative
perspectives. With only a few exceptions, all recent books merely focus
on the Virginia Company period between 1607-1624. Such tiresome
rehashings of familiar information only demonstrate innovation and
imagination in the fresh errors they introduce, so that knowledgeable
readers begin to feel like Charles Dickens, when he lamented that "the
life of Shakespeare is a fine Mystery, and I tremble every day that
something should turn up!"
Historians in the future will hopefully redirect their attention to the
exciting and refreshing period from 1624-1641. That's when Virginians
enjoyed unprecedented independence and experimentation--adapting
creatively to a wider regional environment; making enlightened
alliances with distant Indians, who became indispensable partners to
the Chesapeake beaver trade; and exploiting that intercultural commerce
for greater integra-tion into the transatlantic economy.
With such a huge price tag, Jamestown's 400th anniversary efforts to
engage and educate Americans about their history is as big a gamble, as
ambitious and expensive an experiment, as the original effort to found
and sustain that colony. History, as the marketing arm of national
identity, is at a critical crossroads, and if we cannot figure out why
1607 is deserving of a "celebration" without exaggerating or emending
the past, we will be left only with legislative apologies and
irrelevant musical entertainment. This may be Jamestown's last
milestone anniversary with any historical content that the general
public can grasp or even care about, and we should seize the
opportunity to embrace Jamestown, warts and all, as a fitting model for
a 21st century society grappling anew with terrorism, transoceanic
invasion, and the exploitation of its own citizens. Jamestown's
tragedies are particularly relevant for our post-Katrina, Iraq-mired
nation still trying to decide if the U.S.A. should be judged by its
victories or its victims. Our failure as historians to interpret those
issues honestly and accurately would represent Jamestown's greatest
disappointment and most tragic legacy of all.
[Professor Fausz includes the following schema with his article:]
Stratigraphy of History
Era of Anniversary Marketing
* Rock music revelry is preferred over rock solid pedagogy
* Museums prosper while most schools are left behind
* Visual displays are more "fun" than reading books
Era of Apology and Political Correctness
* Official rhetoric of remorse merges PC with PR
* "Commemoration" is preferable to "Celebration"
* Victimology perpetuates ethnic bias in reverse
* Conflicts between knowledge and belief
Period of Proliferating Mis-Information
* History scandals of plagiarism, fraud, and lies
* History Channel "video games" play with accuracy
* World Wide Web disseminates endless errors
* Wikipedia Syndrome privileges amateurs over academics
* Harry Potter Syndrome equates profits with "greatness"
* Mega-publishers more prefer marketing over fact-checking
Period of Educational Decline
* Only journalists and amateur historians can engage the public
* The Academy and the Society engage in cyclical dumbing down
* Each generation demands less knowledge of the next one
* Grade inflation favors self-esteem over criticism
Age of Mythical Romanticism: Lies Feel Good
* Great White Fathers rule, now as then
* Triumphalism is our Manifest Destiny
* Delusional propaganda is patriotic
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