Scripts, memory, war, and disaster
I seem to be the only one posting on this Uni blog, but I don’t want to dominate things. Let me start by encouraging others to post comments on previous posts and to make posts of their own, of any variety and any length. I and others would like to hear what you’re doing, thinking, reading, and watching over the summer. I’ve been posting a lot because being basically alone in Canada, I don’t have people to bounce ideas off of, so I especially encourage you to respond to my posts and tell me what you think. (Note: you don’t have to log in to post a comment.)
Last week, I spent most of my time in the archives reading oral histories of the Halifax Explosion. In the mid and late 1980s, Janet Kitz, the most prolific of the local historians of the disaster, conducted 177 interviews of survivors–at that point, mostly old women who were younger than 25 or so at the time. I was reading these to get a sense of what people and organizations mobilized to provide aid, relief, comfort, and support in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
I ran into some problems of memory, and this is where I hope fellow Unis can help me, since oral histories and its problems touch on questions of neurology, psychology, ethnography, and narratology. I am eager and sincere in my request for comments and help, so please read past the jump and let me know what you think.
By far the most common thing in these oral histories is also the thing I am most certain to be untrue. Almost every one of the interviewees said that when the explosion first happened, they thought it was the Germans. They feared the Germans were invading. It was a German air-raid, they assumed. People described looking in the sky for more German airplanes. One person described at some length how people thought the Germans were shelling Halifax.
I can say with certainty that nobody thought that the Germans were bombing, nobody imagined it was an air-raid, and almost nobody feared invasion. In World War I, there was extremely limited civilian bombing, mostly unsuccessful, scattered, and with very low fatality rates. The term “air-raid” had been coined, but as far as I can figure, it was only used in technical literature and hadn’t gained wide currency. And even if people may have been afraid of bombs from above in Britain, no one could have imagined it in Canada. The first transatlantic flight wasn’t until 1919, and the first transatlantic non-stop flight didn’t happen for another two years after that.
It’s easy to explain these false memories. First of all, people really did think at first that the Germans may have been involved, but not in the ways people said in these interviews. People feared German saboteurs may have planted bombs (not dropped them), or that German agents may have caused the two boats to collide. But why would these fears be transmuted into anachronistic fears in the retelling? For everyone in the second half of the 20th century, and especially for the generation Kitz was interviewing, World War II became the model of war. People remember fear of German bombing in the idioms of the second, and in some ways more consequential, war.
This shouldn’t really surprise us. Oral historians like Alessandro Portelli have long written about the ways that people will conflate related but distinct events in their recall. (I think that Portelli’s essay “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” in a collection of essays by the same name, should be required reading for graduation.) People who study memory will tell you–as Elizabeth Loftus does in this excellent RadioLab show on memory–that memories are essentially creative and untrustworthy, and that they can be be manipulated and changed intentionally or unintentionally. If scientists like Loftus can convince us to “remember” a fictional story about being lost in the mall as children, it stands to reason that survivors of the Halifax Explosion could have their memories altered by the experience of World War II.
So here’s my problem. Some people–not nearly as many as remembered fearing German air-raids, but still a good number of people–remembered looting on the day of the explosion. Sociologists and other scholars of disaster argue–persuasively, in my view–that looting doesn’t happen the way we imagine it does in disasters. Yet, as we saw in coverage of flooded New Orleans, looting is part of the script we imagine for disaster and social breakdown. I am willing to dismiss these “memories” looting in the same way that I’m dismiss the “memories” of fears of a German air-raid. Just as people unconsciously subordinate their actual memories of World War I to the World War II-based script of what “war is like,” people subordinate their actual memories of the Halifax Explosion to the culturally inscribed script of how people behave in disasters. People’s memories have been corrupted by the social script that they imagine for these events.
Okay. But if I dismiss people’s memories of looting because I believe I know better, then what’s the point of this exercise at all? Why do I think they remember anything correctly? Aren’t I cherry-picking, choosing to believe what conforms to my hypothesis and tossing out as false memories what doesn’t? Or to put it somewhat less starkly (and, I hope, more fairly to myself) how can I know which memories are really what happened, and which ones are not?
Is the lesson of the imagined fear of air-raids that these oral histories are unreliable–that interviews 68 and 71 years after the fact are not useful as historical evidence? Or is there a more nuanced lesson that can be drawn? As we know from the case of Sally Hemings, sometimes oral traditions reaching back much further back in time carry more truth than “official” histories–and, of course, sometimes they don’t. Do those of you who have studied (do study) psychology and neurology have any suggestions for me? What about people who have done ethnographic work in other disciplines? How do you decide what to believe and what not to?
-jacob
The question of the reliability of memory is indeed a curious phenomenon, and one which poses itself not simply for long-ago events, but even for recent ones. I was thinking of this problem just recently, as the city of Durham decided to do work on the curbs (Bond Referendum 2005 – Your City at Work!) at the various driveway entrances at and near the Franklin Center to make them handicapped accessible. Invariably, residents of the FC were convinced that the curbs were already handicapped accessible and couldn’t understand why the city was doing this other than to “beautify” the curbs by inserting red brick along the downward slope. Obviously, someone with wheels, whether a wheelchair or a bike or a stroller, would have remembered the curbs differently. But it does go to show that it isn’t simply a matter of age that leads to incorrect remembering, but that there’s something to shared experience and culture that influences what and how we remember.
Another instance perhaps more similar to the one that you recount, Jacob, arose in a recent episode of “History Detectives” on PBS, an occasional guilty pleasure that I allow myself when seeking to veg out. In this episode, folks were trying to ascertain whether a certain clerical robe belonged to Peter Muhlenberg, a Lutheran pastor and Revolutionary War general, and furthermore, whether he actually removed it after giving a fiery sermon in his church to reveal military garb below. Historians were unable to find any contemporary accounts in newspapers, church documents, etc. of the disrobing, and it wasn’t until 75 years later that the story is first told in a biography of Muhlenberg by his great-nephew. That retelling coincided with an upsurge in immigration to the U.S., including many newly arrived from Germany. One historian suggested that the great-nephew fabricated the story – and published the biography – to demonstrate the patriotism of German-Americans and the assimilation of Germans into American culture. Since then, the story has persisted – it’s up on Wikipedia, for instance – and has become “truth.”
So, what to do in your case? Moving beyond oral histories, with the inevitable subjectiveness of memory, one would think contemporary newspaper accounts of the explosion would also recount episodes of looting. Perhaps there are other sources on which you could draw to verify or discount the “memory” of looting. However, if there are no other accounts from the time of the explosion itself, that doesn’t necessarily disprove it, although your suggestion of looting in the aftermath of a disaster as a cultural artifact has merit. After all, it seems just as necessary to have a reason for why people construct false memories as it is to verify real ones. Perhaps you can use the almighty footnote to interrogate this question of memory.
I am curious, too, to hear how psychologists, neurologists, and anthropologists, etc. out there explain how they come to decide what to believe and what not to.
I’ve been thinking more about the question of seeking other sources to corroborate or disprove the claims of looting in the aftermath of the explosion.
I don’t know the history of insurance as an industry, but I wonder whether there would be any kinds of insurance claims archived somewhere that you could explore to see whether any of the claims came from looting? Certainly, there were such claims filed after Katrina and also after the Rodney King riots in South Central L.A. in the early 90’s. Of course, it depends on whether people in Halifax typically carried insurance for such things at the time of the explosion. Also, if the reports of looting were from businesses vs. private residences, perhaps there are records of those businesses reporting losses somewhere.
Just wondering…
… which makes me think, too, about question related to the one that you pose about memory and how we decide what to believe and what not to: how does a historian decide which archives to explore and which materials from that archive are relevant and which to ignore or dismiss?
It sounds as though the interviewees weren’t even aware of their altered memories. You hypothesized, Jacob, that significant events (WWII) colored recollections of prior ones and that cultural inscription dictated that certain events should spawn concomitant memories. What about modification as a protective mechanism? We all know that leaky memories prevail when it’s convenient to believe in your own version of events, but the urgency of modification can transform it into a survival tool as well. On Sunday I heard an interview on “Fresh Air” with Carol Muske-Dukes, whose new novel, “Channeling Mark Twain,” is based on the author’s experiences teaching English to female inmates in the 1970s. Central to her discussion was her observation that the students, who were often prostitutes still pursued by pimps for whom they had worked, realized the liberation of departing from the truth when writing about themselves. Being in charge of their own expression enabled the women to create an “aesthetic truth,” affording them a level of control they were previously denied and to which they clung fiercely. (The author does distinguish between lying as refuge and lying to exploit idealistic young teachers.) The trauma of the explosion might have engendered a similar reaction. Perhaps your subjects’ revised memories were self-validating or deliberate on some level?
Closer to my field, here’s another example of the slippery memory slope making its way into public statements to redeem speakers and reputations alike:
I’m curious to know if the ivory-bill advocates caught themselves deflating the numbers and decided to keep going with it. Of course, Cornell is now mum on the issue, and evidence for ivory-bill activity has mysteriously relocated from Arkansas to Florida. There’s an entire session at the American Ornithologists’ Union conference this August on the ongoing hunt — I’ll let you know what the PIs report.
Thanks for your comments, which I promise to respond to later. For now I want to share something that makes my whole post rather questionable. I’m reading contemporaneous personal narratives written in the weeks and month or so following the explosion, and indeed people do mention that they imagined that a German airship (that is, Zeppelin) was bombing Halifax. So much for my idea that they couldn’t possibly have thought that.
Later: Also, I’m apparently wrong about the word air-raid not being in common circulation, because here it is. “Thought of an air-raid and that their house was hit,” in the words of the particular document I’m now looking at.