"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 34

In this episode: Who Controls America's Past?

December 11, 2023

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 34

Episode 34: Who Controls America's Past?

Who Controls America’s Past?

Revisiting history is never simple. Especially the history of the United States which is often painful, and invariably, political. At dinner tables, school board meetings, and political protests, Americans disagree not only about how our past should be interpreted, but what actually happened in the first place. From the myth about George Washington’s teeth to the true cause of the Civil War, three historians bring us into the impassioned debates about America’s origins and ask, does the fight over America’s past threaten our security today?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Colonial Williamsburg Ad: In 18th century America, life was different. It still is. Come back in time to Colonial Williamsburg.

On a cloudy October day in 1994, actors wearing bonnets baked bread at the living history site Colonial Williamsburg. It was Columbus Day, and parents with the day off of work took their kids for rides on horse-drawn carriages.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Meanwhile, a young woman named Christy Coleman looked out anxiously at a crowd of thousands.

Christy Coleman: Everybody was on edge.

Coleman was then the director of African-American presentations for the vast living history museum. She and her team had gathered the crowd that day, to watch another routine practice of colonial life. But the very idea of performing this piece of history was provoking outrage.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: A controversial reenactment of a slave auction went ahead.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Several slaves were auctioned. A carpenter and his tools, a husband and wife separated at sale.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The NAACP called this reenactment sensationalism.

Opposition came from all sides. There were even donors who threatened to pull their funding, calling the performance anti-American. Up to that moment, Colonial Williamsburg had often held events where they reenacted auctions, but no actors had ever portrayed enslaved people at those events.

Christy Coleman: When it came to the Black people, they would say, ‘and a lot of slaves,’ as in a lot, being a number of slaves. They would do that with no representation of those human beings.

She felt strongly that because the site attempted to animate history, they had an opportunity: a reenactment of a slave auction could help people understand the realities of slavery in a way that reading a textbook never could.

Christy Coleman: So we decided in '94, myself and my team, that it was time to show what that looked like, that we were going to put a face to that.

[THEME MUSIC STARTS]

Revisiting history is never simple. Especially the American past, which is painful and invariably political. We see it play out again and again in today's news, from school board meetings…

ARCHIVAL School Board Meeting Attendee: It is divisive, biased, radically-left Marxism designed...

…to political protests…

ARCHIVAL Crowd: [Chanting] Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter!

Americans disagree not only about how our past should be interpreted, but they even disagree about what happened in the first place. Are these disagreements just the normal frictions of a diverse democracy? Or do they reveal a deeper rift that is turning Americans against each other? Does the fight over America’s past threaten its future?

I’m Peter Bergen. Welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Back to 1994. The reenactment of the slave auction is about to begin.

Christy Coleman: There was a crowd of about 2,000, 2,500 people who had gathered. The protesters, particularly from the NAACP, they sat on the steps where we were going to be doing this program and refused to move.

News coverage conveys just how fearful some of those protesters were. Even before Coleman came to work at Colonial Williamsburg, the museum had been challenging audiences to look at the more uncomfortable side of the site’s past: its history with slavery. But many still thought of Colonial Williamsburg as a nostalgic experience and treating this horrific history as a piece of stagecraft didn’t sit well with them.

ARCHIVAL Protestor 1: They trivialized the holocaust of African people.

ARCHIVAL Protestor 2: Could you imagine getting a group of rape victims together and portraying a rape in front of them?

But they didn’t know Coleman, who had crafted emotion and historical detail into the planned performance. She tried to calm their fears.

Christy Coleman: I spoke to the crowd as myself about what we were doing and why. And asked even the detractors, I said, ‘listen, let us do this program, and if you still, after you see it, have concerns about what we're doing, then by all means, continue to protest us. But for now, just let us do it. Don't let your fears stop you from a learning opportunity.’ And they agreed to do that.

Christy Coleman: I was in a pregnancy suit, because we wanted to show the separation of family. And we wanted to show how, even the unborn were considered property of someone else.

Christy Coleman: A hush falls over the entirety of the crowd.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

ARCHIVAL Auctioneer: Daniel is a house servant.

Christy Coleman: People were weeping as they were watching this.

ARCHIVAL Auctioneer: Do I have opening bid at 25 pounds?

A bid was accepted for the enslaved woman played by Coleman. Coleman wailed in agony.

Christy Coleman: It was all over within 20 minutes. And the crowd erupted in clapping and cheers. It was probably one of the most profound things I've ever done in my career. It was also one of the things that, I'll be honest, gave me a huge amount of anxiety. For a little while I even developed a fear of crowds because it was such a highly emotional moment. Even having experienced all of that, the lead up to it and all the misrepresentation and all of the fears that were being expressed about what we were doing and why, when it was all said and done, even some of our biggest detractors retracted.

One of the main organizers of the protest told a reporter that he had changed his mind, saying, “Pain had a face, indignity had a body. Suffering had tears.”

Christy Coleman: Museum peers and academics around the country were sending me letters after that event, 95 out of 100 of the letters that I got were thanking us for doing it. They were praising us for the historical accuracy of it. They were telling us it was past due.

In the years since, Coleman has held quite a number of influential jobs that are helping Americans understand history in new ways. As the first woman and Black American to head the American Civil War Museum, she worked to recast the way Americans think about that conflict, bringing in the stories of Native American and enslaved peoples.

Christy Coleman: As a Black woman, all of those stories, I felt like in many ways I was the embodiment of some of what had been left out and why it was important to get those narratives back into the collective American consciousness.

Coleman knew firsthand how emotional revisiting history can be.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

And then, in 2017, she was working on a Richmond, Virginia, committee that would decide what to do with the city’s many statues of Confederate leaders when something flashed across her phone.

Christy Coleman: I got a first ping about it on Twitter.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Hundreds of white nationalists from across the country descended upon the University of Virginia's campus ahead of a planned demonstration to protest the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

ARCHIVAL Crowd: [CHANTING] You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

Just over an hour away, Confederate flags, swastikas, and KKK symbols filled the streets of the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia.

ARCHIVAL Rally Attendee 1: People taking down Confederate statues and you know tearing everything that stands for the South, we're tired of it.

ARCHIVAL Rally Attendee 2: We're here to stand for Robert E. Lee. We're here to defend our heritage.

Then, counter-protesters arrived on the scene.

ARCHIVAL Crowd: [CHANTING] Shame on you! Shame on you!

ARCHIVAL Counter-protester: We just wanted to come together, stand together as a community, and say, You know what? We love each other. You're not from here. Don't come to our town.

And soon, an explosion… into violence.

ARCHIVAL Eyewitness: A car just plowed through hundreds of people downtown Charlottesville.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A 32-year old woman killed, a number of severe injuries, many life threatening.

The spark that ignited this inferno? A statue of a man who died in 1870 who led a treasonous revolt against his own country. Coleman and her colleagues were transfixed by the coverage.

Christy Coleman: We watched it with deep concern that Richmond could easily be next. And what steps could we take that weren't police-driven, but really community dialogue-driven to help advance the conversation that we needed to have, with some of the most iconic statues in America literally in our city.

[MUSIC SHIFT]

But then, the Confederate statues became a focal point in the nationwide fury that unfolded in reaction to the killing of George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer, in 2020 in Minneapolis.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF A STATUE BEING TORN DOWN, CROWD CHEERING]

ARCHIVAL Statues being taken down_CNN_200627: Reminders of the Confederacy have been toppling across the country. [SOUND OF A THUD] Following the death of George Floyd, many monuments to Confederate soldiers and slaveholders are being taken down, either by protesters or by local officials.

Richmond’s Confederate monuments were covered in graffiti by protestors and some were even toppled. The careful process of deciding what to do with the monuments was overtaken by events, and Richmond’s mayor decided to take matters into his own hands. By the end of 2020, most of Richmond’s Confederate statues had been removed to an undisclosed location.

In 2023, a prominent American institution made speedy work of removing many, many more Confederate memorials. I'm talking about the U.S. military.

[MUSIC AND CROWD SOUNDS FROM FORT WALKER CEREMONY]

Ft. Walker Emcee: Well, good morning, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us at this historic event. Where we will officially redesignate the installation in honor of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.

In ceremonies like this one, where the name of Confederate General AP Hill was removed from the military base in Bowling Green, Virginia, and replaced with Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.

Ft Walker Emcee: The first woman surgeon in the United States Army, a prisoner of war, and the only woman awarded the Medal of Honor.

The U.S. military renamed scores of monuments, bases, and displays that once had celebrated the Confederacy. Historian Ty Seidule was the Naming Commission’s vice chair.

Ty Seidule: I'd finally retired from the Army with the idea that I was going to try to figure some way to change these. I had no idea how I was going to do it. And the summer of George Floyd, when he was murdered, gave an impetus to change it. But they passed a law, saying to change everything in the Department of Defense that commemorated Confederates. So we found 1,111 things named after Confederates. And by the end of this year, every one of 'em will be changed.

Seidule talks kind of fast. So I want to go over this number again. One thousand… one hundred… and eleven military assets, from bases to street names, were once named for Confederate figures.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Forts Lee, Pickett and AP Hill in Virginia, USS Chancellorsville

Remember, these were the guys that fought against the U.S. Army. They were traitors.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: The oceanographic survey Ship USNS Maury…

And yet, over the past hundred and fifty years, that army had named those bases and monuments after the enemy!

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Fort Rucker, Fort Benning, Fort Gordon, Camp Beauregard…

Long before Seidule helped rename these monuments, he first had to unlearn the history he’d been raised on… beginning with the figure of Confederate hero, General Robert E. Lee.

Ty Seidule: I can't remember life without Robert E. Lee. I really can't.

As a kid growing up in Virginia, Seidule had been taught to worship Lee. And I'm not talking just about a revered military leader, I’m talking like a religious figure. In his book Robert E. Lee and Me, Seidule actually says that Lee was held in higher esteem in his Christian household than Jesus Christ himself.

Ty Seidule: My first chapter book was Meet Robert E. Lee and Lee is on the cover looking like a military God on loan from Mount Olympus, cradling his sword like a mace. And Traveler, his horse is so smart Lee doesn't even have his hands on the rein and behind him is this gigantic Confederate flag. And the last part of the book says that Lee is one of the last men of old Virginia, more like George Washington than anyone else. He was the true hero of the Civil War. And to me, he was the gentleman.And what a gentleman meant was power, status. It was the statues. It was the movies. It was the textbooks. It was the politicians. Every part of my society was founded in this Lost Cause myth.

This Lost Cause myth, which recasts the Civil War as being a battle over state's rights rather than about slavery, has haunted us to the present.

Ty Seidule: Remember that by making Lee a Christ-like figure, there's a pernicious purpose to this, and that is to ensure white political domination over black people.

It's telling that the figure of Robert E. Lee was everywhere, even at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy in New York where Seidule taught history. It was there that Seidule finally had an epiphany about the man who had loomed so large in his own childhood.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Ty Seidule: I'm living in Lee Road by Lee Gate in Lee housing area, by Lee Child Development Center. And I'm walking one day past our barracks, and the naming of barracks is the highest honor at West Point, dormitories really, and I go by MacArthur Barracks, Washington Barracks, Pershing Barracks, Eisenhower Barracks, Grant, Sherman, and I get to Lee Barracks, and I look at the sign for Lee, and I will go, “Huh, why is that there?” And I look, there's a new statue to Lee 20 yards to the east of that. And I go, huh, why is that? So I said, hey, historian, I can figure this out. I got to tell you, nobody cared about this for so long. So I go into the archives and what I find is that in the 19th century, after the Civil War, West Point graduates saw Confederates as traitors. And so there are no Confederates in our cemetery, none in our memorial hall, by law. So they're banished as traitors for slavery.

Ty Seidule: So when did they come back? The 1930s, the 1950s, the 1970s, so I said, well, why is that? It turns out that in the 1930s, black cadets come to West Point for the first time in over 50 years. Boom, we have a bunch of things named after Lee. In the early 1950s, we have this huge portrait of Lee in Confederate gray with an enslaved servant in the background. That's a reaction to the army being forced to integrate by President Truman. So the fact that Confederate memorialization is a reaction to integration just angered me so much, it made me mad at myself for not understanding this sooner.

Seidule wanted to make sure that even those without the benefit of a Ph.D. in history would be disabused of the Lost Cause Myth. So, he made a video while he was head of the history department at West Point. He’s dressed in his formal Army uniform, covered with medals and ribbons, and he radiates authority. The premise of the video is simple. To answer this question:

ARCHIVAL Ty Seidule: Was the American Civil War fought because of slavery? Many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the Southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn’t. The evidence is clear and overwhelming.

Within 24 hours, the video started going viral. Millions and millions of people have watched it.

ARCHIVAL Ty Seidule: Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War.

Peter Bergen: Why do you think you were getting death threats?

Ty Seidule: I think because of who I am. I wasn't some lefty professor saying that the Civil War was about slavery. Because listen, if you say the Civil War was about slavery, then the people who fought that war fought an immoral fight. When Lee went into Antietam campaign and Gettysburg campaign, every part of his army captured free black people and brought them back for sale in Virginia. His troops slaughtered black prisoners of war at the Battle of the Crater.

Ty Seidule: So if you think that slavery is immoral and that white southerners were fighting to protect and expand the institution of slavery. Then, therefore, those who fought for it fought in an immoral cause. And that means that everything that anybody learned growing up, this Lost Cause myth that white Southerners were honorable in fighting this, that they weren't honorable. And so that goes right at the identity of many, many people in this country, because they've heard something different for the last 150 years. And when you do that, then the person who brings that out, particularly if it's somebody like me, then the reaction is ferocious.

Peter Bergen: I thought it was very striking, in your book where you say what a lot of people refer to as plantations and they have this kind of romantic, Gone With the Wind kind of view of them... really they should be seen as slave labor farms.

Ty Seidule: Right, that's exactly right, because remember that they're growing two crops. The one crop is tobacco, rice, sugar, cotton, and every person who is enslaved has to do so much, and if they don't, they just stay out there, and they get whipped until they get it done.

Ty Seidule: The second thing is forced breeding, rape, to ensure that more enslaved people are being born. So if you look at the slave advertisements, they'll talk about the sexual nature of young women, or the fact that she's already had a kid. She's worth more because she's had one child, it'll be more likely that she'll have more children. We're going to force you to have sex, to breed. So the level of immorality, of evil of this system is so— we can't call them plantations because that word evinces the wind whispering through the Spanish moss and, and, Scarlett sitting on the veranda sipping iced tea and saying fiddle dee dee. No, it's more like a gulag. It's a site of mass atrocities. That's how we must look at this. There's nothing romantic about war. There's especially nothing romantic about this war. There's about 750,000 dead. If that war were to happen today, with our population in the U.S. today, there'd be 7.5 million dead. Two percent of the United States dies in this war.

It was the deadliest war in American history — by far. So, It’s no wonder, with so many people willing to give up their lives to defend slavery, or to eliminate it, that the war still reverberates today.

2023 saw the U.S. military rename bases that once honored Confederate leaders. But it was also the year that Florida adopted absurd curriculum to teach students that enslaved people somehow benefited from slavery because it taught them skills.

Christy Coleman, who’s now the Executive Director of a museum and living history site in Jamestown, Virginia, says that these reactions are routine during times of big social change.

Christy Coleman: The expanding of rights, the expanding ideas about who and what we are…

ARCHIVAL Crowd: [Chanting] Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter!

Christy Coleman: And then there has been a swift backlash against that, and that is a historical pattern. And we had this flash of anger and loss of patience in the 2020s.And the backlashes are often violent. They are often deadly. That potentially is a national security threat. We are certainly experiencing this idea of trying to pull back some of the gains of the last 40 or 50 years. Probably one of the longest periods of social expansion, of defining ‘American.’ So there's no question that it was going to be more violent. There's no question that it was going to raise some of the more extreme tenets, in political and social thought. The question simply is how long will it last?

Coleman says that clinging to an outdated, static history leads to and perpetuates something she calls “heritage-making” — basically coming up with an agreed-upon history based in nostalgia that we can all feel good about. The problem is that’s often done by excluding facts that don’t fit the narrative and ignoring voices that might introduce facts that make the history uncomfortable.

Christy Coleman: Heritage-making is around building cohesion within communities and a negotiated narrative, and if we remain stuck in heritage-making and nostalgia, it's harmful because it's negotiated and it is about cohesion. And sometimes cohesion can be a good thing, but at times that cohesion of one community means the exclusion of another.

Peter Bergen: I like this phrase, by the way, negotiated narrative, because you can also use it in perhaps in a more positive sense; the United States is renegotiating a narrative around the Civil War and its after effects. Across the United States, you're seeing this reckoning. So are we renegotiating, collectively, a narrative in a way that is helpful to our collective security and collective understanding of ourselves?

Christy Coleman: I think to a certain extent we are and I think that that's part of the reason why, in some pockets of the country we're experiencing a pretty virulent backlash against that re-examination of the past. But the truth of the matter is history has never been for the dead. It's never been for the dead.

[MUSIC SHIFT]

Alexis Coe: Hi!

Peter Bergen: Alexis, hi. Very nice to meet you.

Alexis Coe: Nice to meet you.

Peter Bergen: I really enjoyed the book…

I recently met up with historian Alexis Coe, a colleague of mine at New America, at a little museum in lower Manhattan to talk with her about another figure from America’s past, a guy named George Washington— the subject of her biography, You Never Forget Your First.

Alexis Coe: This is one of the many taverns that Washington stopped at, ate at, spent time at during the Revolutionary War, which is sort of a joke in eastern United States and in the South because of course, the war was quite long. So almost every oldest tavern claims George Washington slept here. George Washington, he ate here, he drank here, he had profound thoughts here, but no one can really pinpoint exactly what those were.

Peter Bergen: So, where do we find the tooth?

Alexis Coe: The teeth are usually in the other room, but let's see. I haven't been here since the pandemic.

You heard that right. I came here to see one of George Washington’s teeth. If you grew up in the United States, like most American children, you might have been taught that Washington had wooden teeth. Just as you might have learned that a young George chopped down a cherry tree but immediately fessed up to his father because he ‘could not tell a lie.’ Neither of those stories are remotely true. The thing about his teeth? — it’s a weird, but enduring myth. Also weird: this museum has one of his teeth on display.

Alexis Coe: That is the tooth, and that is a tooth fragment that came from Dr. John Greenwood, one of his dentists. And Greenwood was one of the few who dared to write Washington strongly worded letters about his oral hygiene, in which he thought that Washington had been soaking his teeth in port.

Alexis Coe: We're looking under a magnifying glass. It's something that almost looks like a woman's locket or keepsake, which is very common in early America. Usually it's filled with hair, but right now we're looking at a fragment of a tooth.

Peter Bergen: One of the myths that you debunk in your book is that Washington had wooden teeth…

Alexis Coe: Which is absurd, and it's so interesting, what it tells us about ourselves as a country and as a society. That we either accept this, which is ridiculous. If you know anything about wood, what happens when it gets wet?

Peter Bergen: It decays.

Alexis Coe: Yes, and if it decayed in his mouth, it wouldn't work, and he'd be spitting little fragments everywhere. There's absolutely nothing to suggest it. The Founding Fathers, who were quite reverent towards Washington, but also not above gossiping about each other in letters, would have talked about it.

Peter Bergen: So what were his dentures made of?

Alexis Coe: Washington was a poacher. And they're made of walrus teeth and other sorts of ivory, and they would be chiseled down and then fixed into these very uncomfortable, you know, nascent dentistry dentures, and so ill-fitting completely.

But during her research, Coe found that there might have been a more disturbing source for Washington’s fake teeth.

Alexis Coe: Dr. John Greenwood, who supplied this fragment that we're looking at, took out advertisements in the newspapers in which he's looking for teeth to purchase and the people who are usually selling these teeth were enslaved people.

Alexis Coe: They were, you know, in need of funds and in a desperate state.

Peter Bergen: So they would sell their own teeth.

Alexis Coe: They would sell their own teeth, and this was Washington's dentist, but he did not go to him often for teeth because why pay a higher price when you own five farms and you have hundreds of enslaved people at your disposal? We know from Washington's ledgers that he did pay for the teeth, but he paid them less than Dr. Greenwood was offering.

Peter Bergen: He was paying below market rate.

Alexis Coe: Yes. He loved a deal.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Coe’s conclusion, based on this research, is that some of the teeth Washington purchased very likely ended up in the president’s mouth.

Why does it matter if we go on believing that Washington had wooden teeth? Well, it hides important context for one.

Washington was a slave owner. Actually, I was surprised to learn that he was a very large-scale slave owner. During his lifetime, more than 500 enslaved people lived and worked at his estate in Virginia, Mount Vernon. And when some of those slaves escaped, Washington pursued them relentlessly.

By talking honestly about Washington’s teeth, a broader reality is revealed about his relationship to the human beings he owned, and about what life was like for those slaves whose bodies were considered property to be bought, sold, and exploited.

It also reflects a deeper complexity at the heart of the American experiment: a young nation declaring itself an exemplar of liberty and the pursuit of happiness — for some, but certainly not for all.

[MUSIC DROPS]

Alexis Coe: I think it… is… a point that we need to look at and one that I really insist upon, which is that we're holding two things at once here. The founding complexity is the founding hypocrisy.

Washington is supposed to be a more or less a vanilla figure for Americans, representing patriotism. A strong leader who unifies us. The personification of America at its best. He’s not supposed to be a flawed figure.

Alexis Coe: And my argument against that is we don't know who George Washington is because he's been assigned our hero at birth.

This new way of looking at Washington — warts, or in this case, dentures and all — is actually a radical departure from how Washington has been treated by historians and museums alike for hundreds of years. I wanted to talk with Coe some more, so we walked a few blocks over to a recording studio.

Peter Bergen: Are we ready to roll?

There she told me about what makes her biography of Washington so different.

Alexis Coe: Every biographer who came before me started out in the exact same manner and would say, ‘Oh, he's too marble to be real. It's really so unfortunate. We're so worried about him. How is he going to relate to future generations?’ And then they all did their best to make sure he was impenetrable. It's almost like they took an oath. 'Okay, I'm going to write a book about George Washington. I'm definitely going to break him out of the mold, and I'm going to do that by doing the exact same thing that everyone who came before me did.'

It may surprise you, or it may not, to learn that nearly everyone to write a biography of Washington in the last century was a white guy. Coe calls them the Thigh Men.

Alexis Coe: I began calling the Washington biographers the Thigh Men as shorthand for what I thought was very amusing at first, which was an obsession with Washington's body, but in particular his thighs, in a way that I have only seen romance novelists describe someone's body.

[ROMANTIC MUSIC PICKS UP]

ARCHIVAL Washington Biography 1: He possessed strong but narrow shoulders and wide, flaring hips with muscular thighs that made him a superb horseman.

ARCHIVAL Washington Biography 2: With very strong thighs and legs which allowed him to grip a horse's flanks tightly and hold his seat in the saddle with uncommon ease…

Alexis Coe: And I thought, how strange that they would spend so much time, I mean, pages upon pages, at every opportunity to remind us how good he looked in those gold pants.

ARCHIVAL Washington Biography 1: His wide hips and powerful thighs caused the most trouble…

[ROMANTIC MUSIC FLOURISHES, FADES]

Alexis Coe: It is just waxing rhapsodic and sort of worshipful in his direction.

Peter Bergen: Why do we put these kinds of leaders on a pedestal? Why aren't they allowed to be human beings?

Alexis Coe: It's a really good question. Why is our history reduced to bullet points? Because the details are hard. The details are not wholly pleasant. It's complicated. I don't know a person who is uncomplicated, who hasn't done bad things as well as good things. But that's not what we expect from our leaders.

Peter Bergen: How does that help our...understanding of ourselves, because obviously these are the facts that are true, that were either not known or glossed over or forgotten or whatever happened to them. How does that change our understanding of ourselves in a way that actually contributes to... perhaps a better society?

Alexis Coe: If you look at civil rights, if you look at Black Lives Matter, if you don't have any knowledge of American history, you might think these are isolated incidences, or that this was a problem of the 20th and 21st century. Everything relates to the past that is going on now. We will never be able to address the challenges to our society and to our world if we do not look at the origins. And if we mislead ourselves about them, we'll never be able to contend with them. We will be able to make them worse.

Ty Seidule wonders who or what he might've learned about if Robert E. Lee hadn’t loomed so large — or so heroically — in the culture of his childhood.

Ty Seidule: I missed the other stories of people that should have been my hero. For instance, Samuel Tucker, born in 1913, had to bootleg an education because there are no high schools in Alexandria for black people. And he went to Howard University. There was no law school that would take him so he just took the bar exam. And then he led the first sit-in in American history in 1939 at the Alexandria City Public Library, fought in World War II as a major in a segregated unit fighting in Italy in the infantry, then came back and did 150 civil rights cases. And Samuel Tucker should have been my hero growing up. But lies about Robert E. Lee meant that, especially in Alexandria where he was from, meant that he was the guy that we looked to. And I can be happy today that my elementary school, Robert E. Lee Elementary, is gone and there's now an elementary school named after Samuel Tucker.

Ty Seidule: What we're doing is making sure that the military represents the values of the United States of America. And it'll take some time to change. But remember it changes really, really rapidly. It's a very young force. So, yeah, we're going to get there.

Peter Bergen: What's the national security risk if we cannot come to a common agreement on what our past actually is?

Ty Seidule: Well, I don't think we've ever come to a common past. This is something that we have always fought over. The American people have fought over our narrative forever. When there has been a consensus on it, it has left out huge numbers of people. So the idea that we're going to have a contested past is par for the course. And guess what? We can handle it. The thing that we can't handle, I think, is saying, no, you can't talk about it. And so I'm not for less history. I'm for more. Give us more history. More history is what we need. And everybody can tell their story. You can tell it from every point of view possible. This country is great because we understand our past, not that we're great because we ignore it.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: Who controls history?

Christy Coleman: We all control history. I think we all own it. And that's okay. What we can't own and what we can't do to each other is to pretend like my viewpoint is the only one that matters.

Peter Bergen: Is all history revisionist history?

Alexis Coe: All history is in contention at all times, and that's a good thing. We should be arguing about what it means. Historians document the past, and we also interpret it. One part of that should not be up for debate. The other can be.

Peter Bergen: I think sometimes people resent these discussions about the legacy of slavery because they feel, ‘Why should I feel guilty about something I had nothing to do with that happened hundreds of years ago?’ What would you say to people like that?

Ty Seidule: I'm not asking any audience that hears me talk to feel guilty about that. I am asking them to acknowledge the past and to acknowledge that it is all around them. And the one problem that is fixed is there is nothing left in the Department of Defense that commemorates those who chose treason to preserve slavery, who killed U.S. Army soldiers to create a republic based on human bondage. We can change as Americans. I've seen it. So this can be a story about how positive we can be as Americans. It doesn't just have to be about a story about how terrible we were.

[MUSIC PULSES, FADES]

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If you’d like to learn more about the issues discussed in this episode, we recommend You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe, Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, and How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. All of these titles are available on Audible.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Laura Tillman, with help from Luke Cregan and Jamila Huxtable.

Our field producer was Ellen Rolfes.

Special thanks to Fraunces Tavern.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.