Separating Fact from Fiction
Created | Updated Jan 24, 2010
History is a funny thing. US history is possibly funnier than most. It is certainly hard to separate fact from fiction, most of the time. American history boasts a lot of weird characters.
Take the Philadelphia Biddles – used to be Quakers, and they should have stayed that way, but they seem to have been, well, too excitable for the Society of Friends. Since they became fighting Episcopalians, the Marine Corps got a manual on hand-to-hand combat called Do or Die (I lie not); we got a silly Disney movie out of the guy with the pet alligators, and at least one of them died in a duel. Thee should have listened to George Fox, Thomas Biddle1.
Major Biddle is somebody I sympathise with, even though I would never be fool enough to do what he did – to wit, fight a duel (this happened back in 1830) on an island in the Mississippi River. The cause was politics, which somehow doesn't surprise me. I have seen Fox News (no relation to George), and sometimes harbour a secret and un-pacifist wish that somebody would challenge Bill O'Reilly to 'Gatling guns at 10 paces'2.
The Honourable Spencer Pettis (the honorific appears to have been bestowed without irony) had said something nasty in a campaign speech about Major Biddle's brother, and the Major took umbrage. This umbrage was taken with a horse-whip, so the story goes, and after recovering, Pettis challenged Biddle to a duel. Duels were still fashionable in 1830, but not legal, so the event was held on a sandbar island near St Louis. At dawn, naturally. The unnatural part was why Biddle gets my sympathy - nobody that short-sighted had any business being in the Army. As the challenged party, it fell to Biddle to choose the distance for the pistol face-off.
He chose five paces. He couldn't see any farther.
Both parties died, which ought to teach us something, but I'm not sure what. It didn't seem to have taught the Biddles anything – either about fighting or common sense. Anthony J Biddle later became the author of the aforementioned combat manual (and sparred with the great Jack Johnson), while his grandson, a diplomat, died at the age of 79 when he was struck by an automobile – while roller-blading.
As the song says, I 'don't know much about history', at least about US history. But I'm good with the old Barney Google, and I know whom to ask. This is fortunate, as I have been the victim of such bad US history instruction as to make Parson Weems3 blush. From such misinformants as the vertically-challenged junior-high teacher who spent all his in-class time doing isometrics on his desk when not coaching the basketball team (a classic case of overcompensation, we pitied him, they always lost) to the college professor who never took his pipe from between his teeth while nattering on about Turner's idea of the frontier, with a side-trip past the 'Problems of Democracy' instructor who refused to teach us any of these problems on the grounds that the Time Magazine film review section was more interesting4, I would have remained totally ignorant of my country's past had it not been for Mr Sauer.
Like most American history teachers, Mr Sauer was hired primarily as a coach. Fortunately for us, he coached wrestling, not a team sport, and even more fortunately, his motto was not the ever-popular 'winning is the only thing', but the more philosophical 'wanting to win is the only thing'. For this he earned my admiration and my ear. For his approach to history, he earned my rapt attention.
For Mr Sauer, history was all about connectedness. Give him two events in history, and he would connect them somehow – for example, the invention of Spanish-heeled boots and the Alamo, or Horace Greeley and death by electrocution. Rather like one of those word puzzles:
W E E M S
W E E P S
S E E P S
S T E P S
S T E N S
S T E N O
In which is demonstrated that Parson Weems invented the Gregg Method of shorthand.
Mr Sauer's circumlocutory method of connecting events in history was similarly tenuous, but often instructive – and always highly entertaining. It also beat the European history teacher's retail version of movies he had seen, hands down5. Mr Sauer's version of US history had the virtue of being original. Very original.
From him I first learned, for instance, that Abraham Lincoln's death was a conspiracy, not of disaffected Southerners, but of the Radical Republicans – that Lincoln's Secretary of War, Stanton, had engineered the whole thing, and that the cover-up was so extensive that the files were sealed until this very day. Heady stuff, that6
Mr Sauer's tests were a snap – 25 short-answer questions, simply remember who did what, with what, to whom – according to Mr Sauer. Which might not be according to the massive history text which made such a convenient doorstop. We were beyond such things.
One evening at supper, my youngest sister sighed loudly. 'Do you know what that dumb Bobby Sauer said?' Mr Sauer's son was in her fourth-grade class, and – knowing his father – there was no telling.
'No, what?' I took the bait.
My sister was a champion eye-roller. She demonstrated this skill. "He said there was enough salt in the ocean to salt a million hamburgers."
I coughed politely. Mr Sauer also taught Senior Science in the general studies track. Our non-college-bound contemporaries were obviously getting an earful. I had seen the blackboard after one of his science classes – it sported thrilling phrases such as 'theory of relativity', and necessary numbers such as '186,000'. I wondered how he connected all of the dots...
Truth be told, I envied the Senior Science class. My chemistry teacher, who was working on his PhD, had the habit of saying things like, 'Now, the electron wants to jump to the next shell.' He reacted badly to my inquiry as to whether subatomic particles possessed volition.
Mr Sauer was Socratic in his wisdom. He did not claim to know everything. He claimed, however, to know where to find out everything.
That place, oh internet generation, was the school library. Where – fortunately for my fellow-students – I worked as a volunteer aide.
Thus, whenever Mr Sauer, when asked one question too many, such as 'Who won the Battle of Antietam?', replied, 'I don't know, but I will tomorrow – and so will you,' the implied threat ruined no one's TV evening.
Instead, the class flocked into the library before school, looking quizzically towards the circulation desk. I, standing behind it, pointed solemnly to the relevant reference book. Honour was served, and I didn't get beaten up by the wrestling team.
I also pointed out errors in the reference books. Mr Sauer loved encyclopedias. I suspected them of mistakes, and believed – unpatriotic as this might have been – that the Britannica was more trustworthy than its American cousins. When I pointed out that three different encyclopedias had given three different dates for a battle, Mr Sauer nodded sagely. 'Good research,' was his comment. He was only bull-headed on important subjects, such as the motivations of Greco-Roman wrestlers and the iniquities of Edwin M Stanton.
The fact that I am an historical autodidact I owe to teachers like Mr Sauer – the guy with the pipe in his teeth may be making it all up or regurgitating cinema plots. Check your facts. My penchant for seeking the telling detail is also due to him – at least, a little. (I've got a runaway historical imagination of my own.) I suspect my love for a good historical yarn started back in his class, as well.
A note to the young folk: When your elders start giving out the pay about the fabulous educations they got in the Golden Age, please take their maunderings cum grano salis7. I do.
It was in response to the spotty, quirky, and often downright mendacious history 'education' I got in the US public school system that I became the avid researcher I am today. I got to fact-checking in self-defence, which had the undesirable result (from the point of view of, say, J Edgar Hoover or a certain political party which shall remain nameless) of making me skeptical in civics class. This is unlikely to be reassuring to teachers and television pundits who enjoy a quiet life. This is probably not, all in all, a good thing for the patriotism industry.
Worse still – I now write history lessons for high school students.
Encyclopedias at five paces, anyone?
Fact and Fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni
