Our house was built in 1923 by a fellow named Charlie Washburn. Charlie was a cheap s.o.b., but luckily for us, some of what was cheap in 1923 is dear in 2009. We’ve got some really beautiful oak floors, and a stunningly lovely maple floor in the kitchen. We’ve got wavy glass in the windows, and a fireplace that looks substantial, though simple.
Charlie owned “The Smokehouse” in town, a tobacco shop where all the local players hung out. He was apparently quite the muckety-muck, helping out the local college sports teams by providing favors to athletes. Some of what he did would probably be illegal by NCAA rules, now. When the main road near our house was widened, Charlie talked the town workers into trucking all the dug-out peat over to his backyard. It’s why our vegetable garden is so much more productive than our neighbors’. I learned from an elderly neighbor that Charlie had such a big cutting garden out back that he supplied all the churches in town with flowers.
I’ve been thinking about Charlie this week as Bob, our builder, has been ripping out the cheap-ass second floor bathroom that Charlie must have put in when he had our place built. I’ve often referred to that room as “the only bum room in the house” (true since Bob fixed the kitchen, anyway). I’m glad to see that bathroom gutted. It had seven different colors of tile, exposed plumbing, and a cabinet that was amazingly good at swallowing linens and toiletries. The tub was leaking into the kitchen. We could have lived with it a few more years—we’ve been in the house for over a decade—but we’re committed to dumping money into the sagging local economy, so now seemed like a good time to call Bob in.
As he was gutting the bathroom this week, Bob found a 1938 New York Times shoved in one wall. He brought it to me, as he knows I love to know the archeology of our house. (When Bob did the kitchen, we found an old snake oil medicine bottle in one wall.) Bob and I wondered to each other why a 1938 paper would be in the wall, when the house was clearly built in 1923 and that bathroom was clearly built with the house. Maybe Charlie renovated the bathroom in ’38? Or maybe Charlie was sitting on the can one day, in ’38, and decided to plug a hole in the wall with the paper he had just finished reading?
Who knows. So much of history is unknowable. I was struck by that this week, not just by Bob’s mysterious find, but also because I had just finished up my history of the Darkness in El Dorado controversy in anthropology. I’ll present the work in Philadelphia on December 2, at the American Anthropological Association, and then it will become part of the book on scientific controversies. I’ve tried, in this year of research, to figure out how and why Patrick Tierney got his work on James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon past the New Yorker and past Norton. In the end, I figured out some about Tierney, but not very much.
What I did learn about this whole mess confirmed the basic thesis of my controversy book: that most of the bad stuff that happens in academia, activism, science, and medicine happens not because the actors are bad, but because they forget that good people can do bad things.
The 1938 New York Times paper that Bob found included an article about Hitler’s birthday. I think a lot about Hitler as I work on the controversies book, because the “Nazi” card is played so often against researchers who are seen as fomenting evil. Hitler, Mengele—these are the characters to whom people logically make reference when they want to label something truly evil. So, for example, Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel alluded to Mengele when summarizing Tierney’s (false) findings to the heads of the American Anthropological Association.
But most people who do harm are not Hitlers or Mengeles. They are not pure evil. They are—like the people who ran the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and intersex clinical treatment in the late 20th century—people caught up in historical moments who forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and obsession with their own careers. To me, this is much more frightening. Because evil people are thankfully rare. Far more numerous are good people who forget about the buildings codes typically employed for constructing roads to hell. They think they’re building garden paths.
A friend to whom I read my AAA paper this week said I do not slam the AAA leadership nearly hard enough for what they did. But I look at that leadership and see humans who made the same mistakes humans will make over and over again. I don’t see evil; I see short-sightedness, overconfidence, tribalism. Humanity. When I look at the 1938 Times, inevitably I think of my mother as a girl in Poland, invaded the next year, and think of the choices her family was forced to make as good people caught in a terrible situation…. What humans will do to each other again and again. And it kicks up my urge to change history, to make it more just next time around.
I think of how a colleague said, in introducing me for a talk recently, that I see history as a “solvent.” He’s right—it is to me both a tool for breaking down a complicated fluid into its component parts, and a way to provide solution. Naive? I wonder. Well intentioned, yes. Thus dangerous.
In my dreams, lately, all the characters I’m studying keep changing places, sometimes with me. I have met the enemy, and they are us.
The boxes on the Darkness project proliferated over the last year. I ended up with four large file boxes worth of sources, not counting books. To make room for this, I had to put away source material from earlier projects. Where do the old sources go? Essentially into my walls. My mate has built for me a large windowseat with bookcases, in the family room right next to my attic-closet office. This wall-length built-in hides substantial storage places for old source material. My dissertation research is in there, under the windowseat. Now also is my research on conjoined twins, and on the Bailey book controversy, though those are hidden behind the bookcases. Stacks and stacks of folders hidden in there.
And I think: It’s funny to literally, intentionally, find myself putting history into the walls of my house.
Whatever else I can’t know about why that newspaper from 1938 ended up in the wall of my bathroom, what I can know, better than ever, is that our house has been inhabited before by people like us: people who read the New York Times; people who grow flowers to give to neighbors; people who establish powerful local relationships over shared indulgences downtown; people who probably, like most people, hurt when meaning to help. I mean, that bathroom! What were you thinking, Charlie?
Perhaps I will put a copy of my AAA paper in the wall of the bathroom, and have Bob seal it in.