About 800 words or two pages
Keywords: history, debate
In 22 years of formal education, I
had but one course in US history. I’m
not sure how that exactly came to be—and
I wonder more on the extensive 22 years part than the one history course part.
Why the one US history course part I know:
I read the book and took the US history exam at UGA, so then my
obligatory history courses became more juicy elective classes which featured
Henry marrying another wife (it was three Catherines, two Annes, and a Jane,
right?) or Alexander the Great’s warring escapades through South Asia (there were
concubines too numerous to mention here).
The one US history course came in
eighth grade, at a junior high right outside Washington, DC, and was taught by
a little old lady from New York, Mrs. Rotkin. It was in the late 1960’s, and
Mrs. Rotkin seemed about 84 years old then, but she implanted in our class a
curiosity for how things came to be in history.
She did this by having many classes as a debate between at least “two
sides.” It was a forensics approach--and
more than that--it was in reality us confronting ourselves instead of us being
moralistic about figures from the past. We learned to explore what those people
then probably thought about, and hence faced something about our own lives.
Even though I had been living in
the DC area for a couple of years, having lived nowhere else but Georgia
before, I still had the hint of a southern drawl. Because of my twang, when it came to dissect
the US Civil War, I got cast as the slave owner in the mock debates over that
horrible issue. Interestingly an
African-American classmate had volunteered to take the slave owner’s side in
the spirit of curiosity—truly a young man ready for the diplomatic corps—but
Mrs. Rotkin instead gave the dreaded role to me.
Thus, I began to prepare, already
knowing something first hand of the Jim Crow South, but knowing very little
about the slavery debate. There was not much to find on defending the owner’s side
from a morality perspective, of course:
the biblical argument tilted toward slaves’ rights and freedom
(Jubilee), and in fact the Middle Ages had basically eliminated slavery from Europe
during the millennium of the Church’s direct social superintendency (AD 400 -
1400). By the way, that Old World’s slavery which was done away with was mostly
about punishment, either booty of war or prisoners of debt; an ancient king as
well as an ancient pauper lived but one battle or one debt away from slavery. After
the Plague, it was the so-called era of Enlightenment and Age of Discovery that
eventually restarted the despicable institution of slavery in yet an even more
heinous commercial way, based conveniently--at least for the owning class--on
skin color.
My eighth-grade self fretted over
the upcoming debate. I was angry at the casting, but somehow had some trust in
Mrs. Rotkin’s decision. The debate came,
and I yielded completely and immediately on the moral ground. But then I
offered the only defense I could think of:
economics. How willing were you,
oh Northerners, to pay twice as much for cotton? Did you boycott and wear only wool in
protest? And then I threw in the cost of
war: even though only a small minority
of Southerners were slave owners, do you not expect all those living in the
South to defend their land with vigor once an invading army comes? Thankfully, I lost the debate, but got an
A. And I learned a lesson about looking
for answers.
I remember one more lesson from
Mrs. Rotkins’ class: the student teacher
disappeared. I forget her name, but she seemed
almost as young as we were, had long dark hair and dressed in the sort of
hippie fashion of the day. Mrs. Rotkin
had some errand to run, so the student teacher filled in on a lecture about the
contentious event of the time—the Vietnam War.
She was to prepare us for our upcoming debate assignment. The young
teacher concluded the preparatory talk, wrote summary notes on the chalkboard,
and started to assign the teams for the debate.
Mrs. Rotkin suddenly entered the classroom and glanced at the notes on
the board and surmised what was going on.
“Does this [pointing to the
chalkboard] represent all you’re going to tell them?” asked Mrs. Rotkin, and the young teacher
nodded and said proudly, “Yes. It’s all very true.”
Mrs. Rotkin breathed deeply, fixed
her piercing eyes on the student teacher, and stated loudly, “Maybe so, but
it’s only one side of the truth.” The
student teacher retrieved her denim purse and left the room. We never saw her again; she left having
taught us but one lesson in history. It was not forgotten.
©Copyright 2023 by John P.
Harrison. All rights reserved.
