A Times Editorial

Making a hash of history

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

Americans never have been comfortable with history: The past is messy and ambiguous, and it gets in the way of the flattering stories we like to tell ourselves.

Hollywood is positively hostile to history: The past is complicated, contradictory and interferes with the simplistic stories they like to tell us.

Too many Americans think the Civil War was like Gone With the Wind, with evil Yankees, loyal slaves and white columns everywhere. Too many of us are confident that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a weird cabal of CIA and Mafia operatives, or can't tell Moses from the president of the NRA, or are convinced that the United States won World War II single-handedly.

History used to be taught in schools; now it's taught on movie screens. But cultural might does not make historical right.

The French have long taken umbrage at American film's colonization of previous eras, but now the British, long our allies in war, peace and rock 'n' roll, have lost their tempers. Growled historian Andrew Roberts, "With their own record of killing 12-million Native Americans and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else."

First there was Braveheart, which depicted the Scottish national hero William Wallace as a woad-painted lout who talked like Glasgow trailer trash and had sex with a French princess who would, in reality, have been a little child at the time. Then came U-571, a World War II thriller in which brave American submariners capture a German Enigma machine, helping the Allies break the Nazis' code and win the war. Exciting stuff, except it's a lie: The British Navy snagged Enigma in 1941, before the United States even got in the fight.

Now there's The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic with Mel Gibson playing a virtuous South Carolina farmer with happy, free black workers going mano a mano with nasty, sneering Redcoats. Gibson's character, Benjamin Martin, is supposedly based on Francis Marion, the famous "Swamp Fox," with a little of Gen. Daniel Morgan, the hero of the 1781 Battle of Cowpens, thrown in, while the beastly William Tavington bears some relation to the historical Col. Banestre Tarleton, Morgan's adversary.

Now, Tarleton was a bit of a jerk, but not the vicious sadist he is portrayed as: He never shot children in cold blood, and he never locked a bunch of civilians in a church and set it on fire. Nor was 18th century South Carolina, controlled by slaveholders, a prototype for the integrated Land of the Free the film promises at the end. Come to think of it, South Carolina (the first state to secede, the last to haul down the Confederate battle flag) is still a little shaky on the racial tolerance front. And while many colonists fought for truth, justice and what became the American way, others fought for the freedom to keep owning plantations: The pesky British actually had the effrontery to offer emancipation to any slaves who ran off to join them.

Mel Gibson, who also bears blame for the atrociously inaccurate Braveheart, has shrugged and said the movie is "sheer fantasy." But it pretends to be based on reality and has an identifiable historical setting.

Though the British were responsible for a fair amount of historical fantasizing themselves in the past -- King Arthur was extrapolated from a semi-legendary sixth century Welsh warlord in order to justify medieval kings' territorial ambitions -- they have every right to be annoyed. Our stealing their World War II stories is particularly offensive: How would we feel if they made movies in which the Royal Marines hoisted a Union Jack at Iwo Jima?

History is not a science. It is always open to interpretation. But interpretation is not the same as travesty. That great voice of the American psyche, Huck Finn, said, "I don't take much stock in dead folks." Fair enough, but even the dead deserve a measure of accuracy.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.