Nothing Happened
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NOTHING HAPPENED A History Susan A. Crane !"#$%&'( )$*+,'-*". /',-- Stanford, California !"#$%&'( )$*+,'-*". /',-- Stanford, California ©2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crane, Susan A., author. Title: Nothing happened : a history / Susan A. Crane. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020013808 (print) | LCCN 2020013809 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613478 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503614055 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: History—Philosophy. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC D16.9 .C73 2020 (print) | LCC D16.9 (ebook) | DDC 901—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013808 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013809 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover photos: Historical marker altered from photo (Brian Stansbury) of a plaque commemorating the Trail of Tears, Monteagle, TN, superimposed on photo of a country road (Paul Berzinn). Both via Wikimedia Commons. Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/15 Mercury Text G1 A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. J#$, A0-",$, E MMA CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Episodes in a History of Nothing 1 EPISODE 1 Studying How Nothing Happens 21 EPISODE 2 Nothing Is the Way It Was 67 EPISODE 3 Nothing Happened 143 CONCLUSION There Is Nothing Left to Say 217 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks for Nothing 223 Notes! 227 Index 239 NOTHING HAPPENED Introduction EPISODES IN A HISTORY OF NOTHING !"#$# %&'()"**# +'( ,#**-. on March 17, 1949. A steelworker in Terni, Italy, Trastulli was 21 years old when he took part in a rally outside his workplace. Workers poured into the streets to pro- test against the Italian government signing on to the North Atlantic Treaty, which was creating NATO. Police were called in to control what they termed an unauthorized march. Violence erupted: O/cial reports suggest that the protesters started the violence by brandishing sticks and handmade tin signs that proved to be e0ective weapons; the protesters claimed that they were defending themselves against police aggression. Shots were fired. Trastulli, witnesses remembered, was trying to get away by climbing a wall. He didn’t deserve to be shot; he didn’t deserve to die. The only victim of lethal police action that day, Trastulli became a political martyr. 2 Introduction What happened next only added pain to the su0ering: No one was held accountable for his death. No charges were brought, no trial was held, and no individual or agency ever publicly accepted responsibility. Nor did Trastulli’s fellow workers protest, strike, or seek vengeance. Instead, outrage smoldered in Terni for decades. The communities of Terni enshrined Trastulli’s name in memory, not only because of his tragic death and personal connections to local people but also because of the way his killing remained an open wound. The significance of Trastulli’s death grew in local memory such that more than thirty years later, when the historian Alessan- dro Portelli conducted interviews with Terni residents, they recalled not only Trastulli and their frustration with injustice following his death but also a host of related grievances, symbols, and myths that had formed around the incident. Their memories about when the death happened were also con- fused. Was Trastulli killed during the anti-NATO strike or during the even more significant one that followed in 1953, when thousands of workers walked out following a massive layo0? Strikes became a part of Italian life in the twentieth century; memories of them might have blurred together. And given that Trastulli’s death occurred only four years after the end of World War II, Italian memories of parti- san warfare were recent and vivid. Gun violence in war and police action in peacetime might have blended to form a context that made sense to people thirty years later. What was most important to them, what they vividly remembered, was that after Luigi Trastulli was killed, “nothing happened.” In his 1981 article “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” Portelli dis- cusses the memories held by participants, witnesses, and succeeding generations in Terni. As depicted in Portelli’s influential analysis, the death of Luigi Trastulli is a case study in the creation and impact of collective memories that reside outside the o/cial historical record. In one interview Portelli registers the powerful emotions released by the memories of injustice following Trastulli’s death. Episodes in a History of Nothing 3 12&)-**#: What happened afterwards? 3'*4#-&2 3'5'*#: Nothing! Nothing happened. Nothing hap- pened because—I don’t know why. We didn’t do anything because—of course, in those days, what could you do? They’d have blown us like bagpipes, if we’d attempted anything. And yet, there was so much bitterness inside your body, so much hatred! [Portelli’s reportage continues] The anger with which, thirty years later, workers still repeat that “Nothing was done after Trastulli’s death” (Canali repeats it three times, pound- ing the table with his fist) is symmetrical to the complacent tone of the o/cial sources announcing that “in the evening, the town was calm” (Il Messaggero) and that “order was re- stored and not further disturbed” (the district attorney).1 Those who witnessed or remembered hearing about this incident would tell Portelli that after Trastulli’s death, “nothing happened.” How was that possible? Obviously, life went on for everyone else and they remembered that nothing happened, so they were remember- ing not “nothing” but something they called “nothing happened.” What was that something? Why was it called “nothing”? Portelli’s initial assessment is that the failure of accountability was “symmetrical”—that is, proportionate—to the “complacent” media representation of o/cial statements. The police and press jointly ignored workers’ demands and recorded only successful sup- pression of the protest. “Nothing happened” after the protest was shut down, which is evident because o/cials claimed that the site of the protest became quiet: “Order was restored and not further disturbed.” But as Portelli heard in testimony o0ered decades later, that same calm was remembered as incommensurate to the crime of killing a young protester, inappropriate as a response, and inadequate to their demands for justice. In other words, both sides agreed that 4 Introduction “nothing happened,” and yet their understanding of that nothing was not identical. Memories of silence and failures to act lingered among the com- munities of Terni workers. When they remembered this particular event of the past, a sense of injustice remained—and in this way, the death of Luigi Trastulli was not over. The man’s life had ended, but the event continued to live on in memories that resisted the o/cial version of the story reported in the papers. Those memories reso- nated around a sense that “nothing happened.” André Gide remarked in his 1899 Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (Pro- metheus Misbound; 1953) that a man writes a book not so much because he has an idea to express but to excuse himself for having had it.2 The book you are reading is written by a historian who may be excused for noticing that Nothing happened and for realizing that this o0ers a way to understand the very nature of historical consciousness—that is, the way that we become aware that the past is somehow distant from but intimately connected to the present. Nothing, it turns out, is always Something, and in this book it’s al- ways Something about history. § THINKING ABOUT NOTHING AS A WAY OF DOING HISTORY The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about the past. Nothing could be simpler—or more complex. How could the past be Nothing, and how could a history be written about it? It’s going to take some (possibly considerable) mental ad- justment before you can see Nothing the way I have come to think of it, with a capital N. But to transform Nothing into a legitimate historical subject, all we have to do is see it that way. It’s actually been there all along, in plain sight. It’s just that no one valued it as having a history worth telling. We can thank the pioneering scientist Louis Pasteur for this in- sightful formulation of serendipity: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” But do we always remember the person who coined a cliché? Episodes in a History of Nothing 5 Or does the cliché persist regardless, even when we know Nothing else about it? The fact that I’m asking these questions already o0ers a clue that in this book I am always going to look behind the cur- tain, ask how something got there, wonder why Something came to be Nothing. In the case of the serendipity that has resulted in this book about Nothing, I was preparing to teach a class on historical research methods to history majors at the University of Arizona. I asked my colleague Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney, a specialist in Chilean history and a practitioner of oral history, to recommend an introduction to her methodology. She directed me to Portelli’s now classic article, where I found the story of Luigi Trastulli. I would never have guessed that choosing a text for class would result in this book. Inspiration, like chance, happens randomly, even among those of us trained to practice historical scholarship ethi- cally, responsibly, and as objectively as possible.