I really didn’t want to publish any more about the Salem City Seal saga here, but the closing meeting of the Task Force which has recommended its replacement was concerning in so many ways that I simply had to write about it (it was keeping me up at night). For those that haven’t followed this issue and are (really) interested, previous posts are here and here and here. I am going to write about the discourse and deliberations in this last meeting, but I’m not going to use names. I don’t see any need to get personal beyond public statements, but you can watch all of the recorded zoom meetings (which get very personal), including the November 1oth one, here. A very brief summary before I get into it. In the spring of 2024, several Salem residents, most of whom seem to be members of the North Shore Asian American and Pacific Islanders Coalition, expressed their opposition to the Salem City Seal, which features a depiction of a native of the Aceh province of Sumatra, a pepper plant, and an arriving ship, all of which represent the lucrative and impactful pepper trade which dominated Salem’s economy and society (and culture) in the first half of the nineteenth century and left a lasting imprint. The seal was adopted in 1839, and its central image was redesigned by Salem artist Ross Turner in the 1880s to represent a more general Asian figure, with the ship and pepper plant remaining. Those opposed to the seal perceived its central depiction as an offensive cartoonish character, and called for its replacement. The City’s Race Equity Commission voted to do just that, without consulting the residents of Salem in any way, but the Mayor and City Council recommended the appointment of a deliberative body to conduct historial research, gauge public opinion, and make a recommentation. And so the City Seal Task Force first met in March of this year, ostensibly for a period of 18 months, with members appointed from the Race Equity Commission and the Salem Cultural Council, two “credentialed” historians, and other mayoral appointees. By October they had concluded their business with a recommendation to replace the seal and since then they’ve been dealing with the cumbersome business of assembling their final report. The meeting on November 10th was the last meeting of the Task Force, and on the agenda was the approval of this report, which was created by the submission of individual sections by task force members and a editorial process to create a “unified” voice.

Paintings of the original seal and Ross Turner replacement, and the current seal. The former are in the public drive of the Task Force, where you can find presentations and other materials. I had never seen the original seal before.

The dynamic in this meeting was led largely by four people, the two designated historians and the editors of the draft final report.For reasons that were unclear to me, the charge to those writing sections of this report was to keep it short, very short: a page or two. This mandate was explained in the meeting by the two editors, who are the Chair and Vice Chair of the Task Force: attention spans. Anyone reading this report would have a short attention span. Since this report will be sent to the City Council for final approval I thought this was a little insulting to its members, and pretty condescending to the Salem public at large. Anyway, that was the charge and everyone obeyed, but the two historians had asked that citations be included in the report and excluded from the draconian word limitations since documentation is a requisite part of any historical analysis. Apparently that request was agreed upon, but the draft report has no citations: as the editors explained, they had included a bibliography which, in their view, was a sufficient replacement for footnotes. Now I am sure everyone reading this can understand the difference between footnotes and a bibliography. As I am typing this, I am taking a break (although I don’t really need one, as they are very good!) from a stack of rough drafts my students have submitted in our capstone seminar course, and I can assure you that these history students are documenting their assertions. What you have in the report are assertions without documentation, which to me looks like a device to render them mere opinion. Since there is a very stark contrast between the non-historical sections, in which the seal is presented in the company of strident images of nineteenth-century Orientalism and twentieth-century popular culture, and the historical sections which lay out the vastness of of the pepper trade and its impact in a more documentary manner, it’s almost impossible to discern between feelings and fact when you read this report unless you are independently knowledgeable about any of the information presented “in evidence.”

I’m going to let James Lindgren move my “story” along while demonstrating the use of a footnote, but I should say that the historians on the Task Force were trying to source and document primary sources as well as interpretive texts.

There was a lot of back and forth on this issue, and the citations are somehow going to be made public, but I don’t think they are going back in the text, because that would make it far too long for all those readers with short attention spans. But a larger issue loomed over all of this discussion, introduced at the beginning and never resolved. One of the historians asserted that his entire section had been rewritten by the editors, with the exception of one dangling (citation-less) quote!  Neither of the editors appeared to assume responsibility for this, and so the charge kept coming back, politely but assertively, with the final observation that the rewrite was so awkward that it must have been the work of ChatGPT. Immediately after this serious concern was raised, another task force member commented that the historians in the group were trying to dominate not only the discussion, but the report, with their voices—-immediately after her colleague declared that he had lost his! This exchange made everything so crystal clear to me: I had never seen erasure so up close and personal before. Generally historical erasure is about omission, or so I thought, but this seems much more pro-active. As soon as voices from Aceh, the people actually represented on the seal, spoke in its favor, they were diminished and dismissed. Salem’s long-running pepper trade was reduced to the Battle of Quallah-Battoo (Kuala Batu), a retaliatory attack by the US Navy on the Malays who had seized the ship Friendship and killed three of of her crew in 1831, an obvious overreaction which was questioned and even condemned up and down the eastern seaboard. A half-century of maritime history, with major reverbations on both sides of the world, reduced to one action, and attempts to introduce historical context rewritten, literally. Indeed, it seemed to me that the majority of the City Seal Task Force was intent on erasing not only Salem’s history, but the discipline of history itself.

200th Anniversary of PEM’s East India Hall this very year! At the dedication dinner in October of 1825, President John Quincy Adams gave a toast to Salem’s trade with the East Indies: No commercial nation has been great without it, may the experience of ages induce us to cherish this rich source of national wealth.