Long Ago Textbook History
Not So Long Ago

Infidel753 writes with an interesting observation about the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, the amendment formalizing and guaranteeing the right of women to vote.

Incredible, in a way, that this was only a century ago. So many things we take for granted now came surprisingly late in history.

I had written about conversations with my grandmother about her experiences as an adult in those days.

Those of my generation have been privileged, in our own way. We are the last to have actually met and spoken with eye witnesses to, participants in, and victims of, history that most of humanity can only know from history books and video documentaries. As a society, we live with slight transmutations of many of the same issues. Our collective imagination puts us farther from history than a real perspective would permit.

Our discussions often went past written history to daily life. My grandmother talked with me about the excitement in the schoolhouse in which she and her cousin taught after she managed to obtain the schedule of a local doctor. The two teachers lined their pupils at the front of the one-room building so they could all watch as he drove by, witnessing the first automobile they had ever seen. My grandparents explained road construction in those days, including regularly spaced dips in roads at steep hills, dips into which wagon wheels fit, allowing horses briefly to rest.

I do not believe I ever met anyone who experienced slavery in the old south. But I do know that former slaves from pre-Civil-War days were alive and telling their stories as I was growing up. The children of slaves had their own stories. An elderly woman told me there were two places she never wanted to go: Hell and Mississippi. An old man talked with me about the harshness of treatment that greeted a young black passenger of a train when he objected to segregated seating. The old man chuckled at the absurdity of challenging the awesome violent power of white supremacy.

And, of course, a rare living witness came to the nation in the mid-1950s. I may have seen the television program. I was too young to understand the significance until later. I’ve got a Secret was hosted each week by Garry Moore, who would introduce a series of guests to a celebrity panel. Members of the panel would each ask a few yes-or-no questions and try to guess the secret.

One guest in 1956 was 95 year old Samuel J. Seymour. The studio audience was stunned. As a youngster, he had been taken to Ford’s Theater, where he saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He watched, with the limited understanding of a child, as the great man was gunned down. He was still alive to talk on national television about the terrible moments as he witnessed them.

We are not that far removed from the glory and shame of our history, the role played by those who some of us have met, from whom we have learned.

My grandchildren may one day be called upon to explain the events they witnessed, including the evils perpetrated with the acquiescence of so many of today’s adults.

Perhaps it is not too late to improve the account they might give when asked what their grandfather did about the horrors of the times in which he lived.