Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995 TAG: 9505310016
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STANLEY I. KUTLER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Witness that perennial monument of misunderstanding: the Second Amendment. The National Rifle Association, virtually unknown three decades ago except to hunters and gun collectors, is now one of the nation's most potent lobbies, terrorizing political candidates from congressmen to aldermen who might deviate from the official party line on gun control.
The NRA has part of the Second Amendment emblazoned on its national headquarters: ``The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.'' In fact, the amendment does not begin with those words, but states: ``A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.'' The Supreme Court has maintained the amendment's ``obvious purpose'' was to maintain effective state militias, and that legislative restrictions on guns in no way curtailed ``constitutionally protected liberties.''
Alexander Hamilton, obviously familiar with the original intention of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist No. 29 that ``if a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly'' to be under the authority of the national government; in turn, the nation ensured itself against its abiding fear of maintaining a large standing army. That idea was ultimately incorporated into the Second Amendment - along with the right to bear arms as an obstacle to tyranny.
The contemporary evidence relates to an era of revolutionary ideology, repressive monarchies and an agrarian setting. Some Americans once felt compelled to resist government authority with armed force in defense of slavery. Some precedent. In any event, only the greatest leap of imagination can take us from the Second Amendment in 1791 to protecting the right to bear AK-47s and other weapons of destruction in 1995.
History is fighting ground and has many uses. It can be relatively benign: For example, Civil War historians and enthusiasts differ sharply over Robert E. Lee's strategy during the Gettysburg campaign. This is history for well-meaning buffs, for those who engage in counter-factuals or might-have-beens, as well as for professional scholars.
But history is also the stuff of serious, political engagement. There are those who ponder the future course of history if Dwight D. Eisenhower had been given a green light to march to Berlin in 1945 - however unlikely his chances of beating the Russians to it. Or it can become a weapon in an emotional, patriotic cause as, for example, in the recent furor over the Smithsonian's exhibit of the Enola Gay and the dropping of the first atomic bomb, or as a weapon to mobilize people in a cause. It is the latter that demonstrates the dangerous potential of a distorted history.
Adolf Hitler rose to power, to some extent, on the notion that Germany had not been defeated on any battlefield in 1918, but rather had been the victim of a ``stab in the back'' by Jews and communists at home. The world paid dearly for that flawed history, that heady brew of a poisoned, patriotic fervor. How disheartening, then, to hear Henry A. Kissinger, one of the more famed refugees from that regime, say in 1989, ``Southeast Asia would be free today if it weren't for Watergate.''
Kissinger pales as a historical revisionist when compared with that other inveterate rewriter of history, Richard M. Nixon. In an endless stream of memoirs and books, Nixon spent nearly two decades trying to persuade us that Watergate was a myth, while puffing up what he cited as the achievements of his presidency. Funny, then, how Nixon also spent those 20 years fighting to prevent the release of the whole body of presidential papers. We can be certain nothing in those materials will exonerate him from charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
History is an important battleground in the continuing fight over the Vietnam War that has raged since 1975 - and been fought on American soil. Here we have a variant on the ``stab in the back'' thesis. We lost because of a policy limited to ``gradual escalation,'' laid down by civilians with no understanding of war, who refused to delegate proper authority to the military who would have pushed for a decisive use of power.
A corollary to this is the notion that the war was lost by Congress, because of its timidity and fear of anti-war agitators. Nixon, Kissinger and Gerald R. Ford all charged Congress with giving up on the war. They want it both ways: Having secured ``peace with honor,'' Congress then defeated them where the North Vietnamese could not.
We could have won, revisionists insist, if only there were more will and more firepower. All this overlooks Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.'s devastating dismissal of the Paris agreement, which allowed Hanoi to keep its troops in the South. Two words, he said, did not characterize the document: ``peace'' and ``honor.''
Religion and race, two of the most volatile issues, have also been subject to historical distortion. To be sure, America was founded on the Puritans' pursuit of religious liberty; but their consistent record of intolerance hardly served the liberty of others. Those who advocate prayer in the public schools have, by some feat of magic, managed to put the establishment clause of the Constitution at war with the accompanying language guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.
For James Madison, who framed the amendment, they were two sides of the same coin. He wanted a government free from religious domination and religion to be free from governmental restraint. The advocates of ``hate speech'' legislation similarly pitted the free-speech guarantee of the First Amendment against the 14th Amendment's equal-protection-of-the-laws clause. The framers of the 14th would be astonished.
Much of the language of anger and alienation, particularly with and from government, is rooted in some mythical view of America - an America free of tax collectors, drivers' licenses, Jews, blacks, independent women and atheists, and, presumably, a land where one was always free to fire off assault weapons at government officials.
America, this message goes, has been diverted from its true history. Alas! such history is a product of twisted, fevered emotion. It has nothing to do with the real past. We live through our history, both of fact and symbol. Symbols possess men, and even myths have their uses. George Washington and the cherry-tree myth is part of civil religion and serves us all. Nations live by their legends; for us, it is such events as Valley Forge, the Alamo, San Juan Hill and Pearl Harbor. Perhaps nothing is more certain than death, taxes and historical revisionism.
But the distortions of an imagined past, fueled by anger and alienation, serve us not at all. It represents an America that never was and, most assuredly, is not.
Stanley I. Kutler, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is author of ``The Wars of Watergate.''
- Los Angeles Times
by CNB