History vs Hysteria
Once again, an editorial on current social conditions viewed through a Pelley lens.
If you visit Asheville with a mind toward local history, you might soon find yourself nosing around the North Carolina Room downstairs at Pack Library. It is a wonderful archive and photo collection. At least until recent years it housed quite an assortment of Pelley material. Perhaps most of it is still there. I wouldn’t trust that it will remain for long and certainly won’t be celebrated and publicized in the way the queer collection is.
I have observed something while working closely with the collection over the years. They are nervous about the Pelley material. Until now they have been reluctant to warehouse it, but there has been a changing of the guard. The old historians, while assuredly liberal, were of a more traditional mindset. People interested in whatever stripe of history will come in search of it.
The modern slant is to correct perceived injustices of the past, promote neglected minority interests to the detriment of popular portrayals. Young people learning the local history for the first time won’t hear about the old white men celebrated by previous generations or, if they do, they will be reminded that they were enslavers, racists, misogynists, etc. ad infinitum.
Recently one of the library staff has inquired in a public forum if other institutions have a protocol for handling “hate speech,” with specific reference to Pelley and the Ku Klux Klan materials in the collection, as if someone might accidentally be offended by the presence of KKK literature in the special collections stacks.
And here is the troublesome and immediate concern. Will the public continue to have free access to these materials? The public library collection is readily available to anyone who strolls in. Most historians like it that way. I have communicated with liberal local historians, more than one jewish, who are concerned about “unpopular” history, by the current standard, going away. I know that parts of the collection, including some Pelley stuff, have been rotated out to less accessible facilities such as at UNC Asheville and the Western Regional State Archives. I can’t say that any of it has been sold or destroyed. I can’t say that it hasn’t. All I know is that some material has been warehoused in effect.
The selection of what material goes is entirely at the whim of the current administration, a few years out of indoctrination camp. It is not going on the chopping block for lack of relevance or interest. The same administrators who got behind the effort to tear down the town’s landmark obelisk to Governor Zeb Vance are concerned about the need for warning labels on so-called hate literature. Given the choice of leaving it out there or shoving it down the memory hole, how do you think they will treat WDP?
How much knowledge will be erased in the name of modern optics?