‘Our Past Judges Our Present’: History Taken Slantwise

Consideration of the past is not always an indictment of the present, but Americans can definitely benefit from learning from our history.

Members of the New York National Guard carry a large flag during the annual Veterans Day parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, Nov. 11, 2013. The parade honored all veterans with a special salute to women in uniform. Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

In 1963, at the request of its editors, President John F. Kennedy submitted a preface for the 16-volume “The American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States.” Following his assassination, American Heritage reprinted this preface, “On History,” in its February 1964 issue of the magazine.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy signs the order for a naval blockade of Cuba on Oct. 24, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. AFP via Getty Images

Kennedy begins by writing “there is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country.” He then explains that this knowledge of the past strengthens both individual citizens and the country at large, serving as a fountainhead of judgment and responsibility, and as a vehicle for understanding the struggles of other peoples.

As I skimmed Kennedy’s essay, five words—“Our past judges our present”—jumped off the page and brought my reading to a screeching halt.

The Dangers of Presentism

In the 21st century, “our present judges our past” is the usual practice. While evaluating the successes and failures of the past is natural, this approach can all too easily devolve into “presentism,” meaning that we interpret, critique, and condemn past events and people solely by the standards of our own time, criteria which we frequently bring unexamined to the courtroom.

Recently, for instance, the priests and practitioners of presentism in our nation have torn down statues, changed the names of roadways and schools, savaged the reputations of men and women once regarded as heroes, and edited history texts, all to erase evidence they deemed offensive.

In the last century, the leaders of other nations, like Russia and, more recently, China, have carried out similar cultural revolutions, ridding themselves, often at the point of a gun, of the historic icons which were a part of their nations’ bone and blood. Dreaming of utopia, they cleared away what they regarded as deadwood standing in the way of enlightenment and progress, seeking to create a heaven but usually building a hell instead.

And so, the living sometimes pass judgment on the dead. But what did Kennedy mean by “Our past judges our present?” How is that possible? How can the dead judge the living?

Examples will best answer these questions.

Two Fires

In 1871, a massive fire destroyed most of Chicago. With smoke still rising from the embers, Chicago Tribune co-owner William Bross declared in the paper, “In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years’ accumulations, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN.”

Within two years, most of the city was rebuilt as it once was. By the 1880s, delayed by the financial Panic of 1873, buildings more resistant to fire also came to the city. Skyscrapers quickly followed, and, by 1893, the year the city hosted a world’s fair, the population had reached 1 million inhabitants.

More than 20 years after the Great Fire, "The World Columbian Exposition of 1893," known as the "White City," was lit up with newly invented light bulbs and electric power. Public Domain

In August 2023, wildfires wreaked massive damage on Hawaii’s Maui and destroyed the town of Lahaina, leaving 2,000 homes and businesses on the island either burned to the ground or severely damaged. As of late January 2025, only three of those houses had been rebuilt. One online article reports that “a thicket of red tape has made the island’s rebuilding efforts painfully slow.”

Chicago’s rebuilding stands as a judgment of history and a rebuke to today’s bureaucratic government.

Battlefields

On June 6, 1944, some 73,000 Americans either landed on the beaches of Normandy or parachuted into that French province. The movie “Saving Private Ryan” vividly depicted the battle for Omaha Beach, where Americans met a stiff and deadly German resistance. The fighting on the beach that day left 2,400 Americans dead, wounded, or missing in action.

In his 2019 article “If D-Day Were Today, Would Millennials Step Up to the Challenge?” Hans von Spakovsky asks, “Would these young Americans display the same courage, determination, and resolve that the young Americans of the Depression era showed if our country needed them?” He is not at all certain of the answer to that question.

Here, history once again serves as a court of judgment and standards.

On the battlefield at Gettysburg stands the dramatic North Carolina monument. In action throughout the battle, North Carolinians suffered 25 percent of the Southern casualties in this three-day battle. Though these Tar Heels are often condemned for fighting on the wrong side of history—in this case, as defenders of slavery—when we deepen our knowledge of the past, we find that most of them had gone to war because the North had invaded what they regarded as their homeland.

The North Carolina State Monument found in Gettysburg. Marciam30/CC BY-SA 4.0

In this instance, the past judges the present for its ignorance and lack of historical nuance.

Words from the Grave

At the end of the Declaration of Independence is a vow: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” The men who signed that document were serious about liberty. They knew they were putting themselves in grave danger. By that standard, they force us who read those words to weigh our own commitment to freedom.

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States", 1940, by Howard Chandler Christy. Public Domain

Here, we note that Franklin said nothing of a democracy, a form of government loathed by the most of the Founding Fathers, yet today we hear much about democracy and little talk about our republic. Again, the past gazes down on us with an arched eyebrow.

In the speech he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  More than 60 years later, that dream still haunts us, asking whether we have yet learned to judge by character rather than by skin color.

Positives From the Past

Not all the judgments of the dead on the living are negative.

The men who fought and died in places like Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Antietam, Château-Thierry, Tarawa, and scores of other battles have already opened their ranks and welcomed those Americans who have given their lives in the service of their country in the 21st century.

Those Americans who shared their inventions with mankind, like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Wilbur and Orville Wright, would surely applaud the men and women who sent Americans to the moon and who brought the world into our living rooms via our computers.

Those who have stood against tyranny and injustice and consequently preserved and expanded the ideals of freedom—men and women like Patrick Henry, Harriet Tubman, and Ronald Reagan—would approve those living today who seek to uphold the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Covenant

If we consider the matter, most of us unwittingly seek out the opinions and judgments of the dead. We arrive at some sort of dilemma, moral or otherwise, and suddenly find ourselves wondering what some departed mentor—a mother, a grandfather, a teacher—might do. Figures and events from the American past possess this same talent for counsel, giving us by their words and deeds a means of evaluating, or judging, if you will, our own course of action.

Near the end of his essay, John Kennedy reminds us that “a knowledge of history is, above all, a means of responsibility—of responsibility to the past and of responsibility to the future ... of responsibility to those who came before us and struggled and sacrificed to pass on to us our precious inheritance of freedom ... and of responsibility to those who will come after us and to whom we must pass on that inheritance with what new strength and substance it is within our power to add.”

Or as British statesman Edmund Burke more succinctly put it, “History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.”

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