Unlike Oklahoma, King Wants Real History

Stephen King dreams America’s nightmares

For the first time in my life I’m teaching a novel by Stephen King, whom I have come to regard as today’s Edgar Allen Poe. Last week I talked about how King puts his finger on a deep strain of violence that runs through America. Today, after hearing about how Oklahoma legislators want to whitewash the new American history Advanced Placement curriculum, I return to It since the novel is filled with such instances of covering up.

Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed has a good account of what is happening in Oklahoma. Recently a legislative committee passed a bill declaring that the new curriculum is an “emergency” threatening the “public peace, health and safety.” It’s not entirely clear what’s in the new curriculum but one sees the rightwing fears at work in the concerns mentioned by Flaherty:

Among the Republican committee’s more specific concerns were that the framework “includes little or no discussion of the Founding Fathers, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the religious influences on our nation’s history and many other critical topics that have always been part of the APUSH course” and that it “excludes discussion of the U.S. military (no battles, commanders or heroes) and omits many other individuals and events that greatly shaped our nation’s history (for example, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Tuskegee Airmen, the Holocaust).”

In response to the criticism, the College Board released a practice exam for the new framework, hoping to reduce suspicions about the test. The questions suggest that, contrary to the Republican resolution, students will study the founding of the United States and the civil rights movement, but also will explore topics such as poverty in American life that are less triumphal than battle victories. 

The committee is being ingenuous when it mentions Parks and King since I doubt if it really wants its history teachers teaching anything but anodyne versions of these two radicals. If it mentions the Holocaust, I’m sure it has in mind Americans heroically liberating the concentration camps rather than, say, America sending back to Nazi Germany the boat filled with Jewish refugees. What the legislators really want is for students not to delve too deeply into our wars, our race history, and our class history.

Harold Bloom has said of Poe that he “dreamt America’s nightmares” and I see King doing the same. We have nightmares when we push under aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge. What gets repressed, of course, becomes toxic. In It, this other America is represented by Derry, Maine, whose bloody history reaches back to the 18th century.

King has a special vantage point from which to view America’s dark underside. Born in 1947 and raised in the hardscrabble industrial city of Lewiston, Maine by a single mother, he witnessed an America different than the one that people saw in Leave It to Beaver. Derry, which shares certain similarities with Lewiston, is the America that Americans want to pretend never happened.

Take, for example, how Derry sets up an “I love Derry” day:

A Canal Days Museum was installed in three empty storefronts downtown, and filled with exhibits by Michael Hanlon, a local librarian and amateur historian. The town’s oldest families loaned freely of their almost priceless treasures, and during the week of the festival nearly forty thousand visitors paid a quarter each to look at eating-house menus from the 1890’s, loggers’ bitts, axes, and peaveys from the 1880s, children’s toys from the 1920s, and over two thousand photographs and nine reels of movie film of life as it had been in Derry over the last hundred years.

The museum was sponsored by the Derry Ladies’ Society, which vetoed some of Hanlon’s proposed exhibits (such as the notorious tramp chair from the 1930s) and photographs (such as those of the Bradley Gang after the notorious shoot-out). But all agreed it was a great success, and no one really wanted to see those gory old things anyway. It was so much better to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as the old song said.

The dark side of Derry, symbolized by a horrible clown, is acknowledged only by the seven children who set about to defeat it. The year is 1958 and they are all 11, as was King in that year. One of the characters, now an adult who is returning to confront the return of the clown, explains why he is taking this awful trip down memory lane and why he has forgotten the reality he witnessed as a child:

I’m going because all I’ve ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that’s why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for…and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.

America is a great nation and one that I love very much. A lot of blood has been spilled to get where we are, however, and we will continue to make terrible mistakes if we don’t face up to our history. What the Oklahoma legislators fail to realize is that grappling with the past, the bad as well as the good, makes us stronger. Patriotic platitudes, by contrast, are dangerous because too many people act out their rage and disappointment when reality fails to go along.

Unfortunately, they may well get their way. Mike Hanlon, the Black librarian and unofficial historian who stays on the lookout for It, tells what happens when people reveal historical truth. The rich folk from Derry, he notes,

would take “my library” away from me in jig time (pun definitely intended) if I published anything about the Legion of Decency, the fire at the Black Spot, the execution of the Bradley Gang…or the affair of Claude Heroux and the Silver Dollar.

Just as the younger generation turns to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for news voices they feel they can trust, so they may, if the Oklahoma legislators prevail, turn to Stephen King for how history really works. Unlike their frightened and patronizing elders, he acknowledges the dirty secrets.

Further thought: George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Stephen King would say, “Those who refuse to remember the past will be driven mad by it.”