Steve Bailey's Blog : Teachers Know

Re “Teachers, advocacy groups angered by Virginia’s proposed changes to history education” (Nov. 16): The kerfuffle over the history Standards of Learning is déja vu for any middle school social studies teacher working in Virginia when the first SOLs came out in 1998. I recall reading those SOLs and making discoveries indicating a partisan bias.

The Democratic Party became firmly established during the controversial presidency of Andrew Jackson, but these SOLs said nothing about the man or his tenure in the oval office. The most glaring example came in the section on the 20th century, where the standards gave more attention to Richard Nixon and his foreign policy than they did to Franklin Roosevelt. The former was a Republican who became the first American president to resign in disgrace, and the latter was a Democrat who was elected four times in a row and led the country out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II.

Did the SOLs change my approach to my subject? No. I still taught about Jackson and the start of the Democratic Party. I gave more time to the four-term president than the standards called for and balanced Nixon’s foreign policy with his corruption. I believed then, as I do now, that the teacher in the classroom knows more about his or her subject and how to teach it than the politicians who attempt to use curriculum as a tool for partisan propaganda.

Steve Bailey

Richmond

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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