Knowing and Making History

MOST AMERICANS don't know much about history, including their own. Arguably, nobody does, because history is such a monstrously huge academic area that, by encompassing all human endeavor, encompasses everything, including the universe and the human perception of it. And yet, the moment a political discussion heats up into an argument, all participants magically, mystically transition into historians, and history becomes the weapon of choice. Nobody understands history. Nobody knows much about it. The best historians in history confine themselves to an area of expertise, because a single human mind is inadequate to the task f comprehending all of human history. Who knew, for instance, except for a few scholars, that Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln wrote friendly letters to each other, letters of mutual admiration? Late in the Civil War, after Lincoln's reelection of 1864, Marx wrote a letter to Lincoln expressing admiration for Lincoln's crusading war against slavery. Lincoln responded by writing back to Marx, expressing gratitude for Marx's championing of the working class. In another statement, not directed exclusively at Marx, Lincoln famously stated that "Labor is prior to capital, and ought to be given the first consideration." Truly, a Marxist moment for the old rail splitter. Indeed, labor builds civilizations,and capitol pays for it, but only after labor has completed the task. Marx and Lincoln agreed on the important principle that sivilization is built from the bottom up, not the top down, with the social pyramed supporting the entire social structure from the ground level. Itis the so called "blue collar" workers who build society,and it is the "white collar class" which organizes and supports the working builders. What both Lincoln and Marx advocated was the organizing of labor by labor itself, by the workers, fully in control of itself, a universal brotherhood of workers under democratic self control,rather laboring under the control of a non laboring monied class in control of all financial resources, including the monetary system itself. Abraham Lincoln, who used tyrannical methods to hold the Union together during the great struggle between the halves of a nation broken assunder, was murdered because he freed enslaved people by proclamation from a system of exploitation which refused to die without a fight. Had he somehow survived John Wilkes Booth's bullet, or if Booth had had poor aim or cold feet, Lincoln almost certainly would have been murdered by some well dressed business owner,on behalf of capitol, not labor. Lincoln was caught up in history, in a whirlwind from which nobody could have been expected to escape alive. When one considers the enduring sectional discord between north and south since the Civil War, extending well into the twentieth century and beyond,it becomes tempting to believe that both north and south would have been better off, and that the world would have been better off, if two diffeent countries or more instead of one had inherited and lived the heritage of the founders and authors of the nation which united around the cause of independence from Great Britain in 1776. Difficult, nearly impossible though it is to comprehend history as it actually happened, a far more daunting task is contemplating the alternative historical possibilites which shall forever lurk in the shadows of a history which never happened, but very well could have. It would have been easy, and understandable, for John Wilkes Booth to have backed out. If he had, history would be entirely different. All of us are involved in making history, one way or another. We can't back out, even if and when we would prefer to.