Let's Forget

My brain is stuffed with names and facts of history. I went to England to find places I read about, hoping to make history come alive.

Since I was a teenager, I loved English novels – Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, but my intense interest in English history developed in 1954, after our son Karl was born and his father enrolled in Northwestern University as a graduate student. One of the first courses Wally took was 18th Century English History.

I was trapped with a tiny baby (not much of an intellectual companion) in a tiny efficiency apartment in Chicago, a thousand miles away from family and friends. What did I do? I went to the library and checked out all the books I could find from 18th Century England. In the end I learned more than Wally about England in the time of the American Revolution.

I read about Sir Robert Walpole, Lord North, Charles James Fox, and others, famous in their day, whom most Americans never heard of. Sir Robert was England’s first Prime Minister, who upon Queen Ann’s death, negotiated to bring George I from Germany and established the constitutional monarchy that is England’s form of government today. Quite an accomplishment! Did you read about him in your history books?

The only place where that history came alive for me was when we went to Blenheim. I walked through that vast palace and imagined John and Sarah Churchill, Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, receiving guests under the enormous painting of the Duke leading his troops to victory at the Battle of Blenheim.

As I wandered around London later that week, I couldn’t conjure ghosts of any of the other 18th Century “great men.”

All this came to mind this week after that disastrous election. Like most people, I am disgusted with Republicans, Democrats, and those nuts in the Tea Party. But: Two hundred years from now Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush will just be names on a list school children will memorize. Nancy Pelosi, Rand Paul, and Sarah Palin will be as forgotten as Walpole, North, and Fox. I won’t be alive then, but somehow I find that thought strangely comforting.