For the past month or so, I’ve been considering the case of the Salem City Seal and various reactions to it. In the past, before last month, I’ve probably thought about the seal for 5 minutes; over the last month, I’ve been thinking about it for many hours—too many, certainly. If you haven’t read my previous posts, here is what happened, succinctly: several members of the Salem community complained that the seal, with its depiction of a Sumatran man, pepper plants, and Salem ship, was stereoptypical and insulting to Asian-Americans. Their condern and complaint was brought to the city’s Race Equity Commission, which had deliberations over the summer and concluded that “damage had been done” and the seal should be redesigned. The Race Equity Commission reported this finding to a subcommittee of the Salem City Council which concurred (I think), but somewhere in the process someone stepped in and suggested a public task force to add some transparency and public comment to what had heretofore been quite a closed process—I think at best 40 people knew that our circa 1839 seal was deemed suspect in a city of over 40,000. And this is what the City Council finally voted on: the creation of a task force which will sit for 18 months and hear public testimony and garner historical perspectives. So that’s where we are and I think that’s a good place, in theory. In practice, I have my concerns, because I’m just not sure those in positions of authority have the capacity to grasp historical perspectives, frankly. In the Salem of my experience, every single public history issue has been black and white, villains vs. heroes, the powerful and the powerless, with an overcast of green, for money. Nothing is nuanced, multi-causal, two-dimensional, or gray, and that’s a problem, because most of history is gray. Salem has been without a professional historical society for a long time, and it shows.
Salem Stereotypes: Seal and Patch
My first concern about how this whole process will play out relates to stereotypes. The original accusation against the seal was that it represents a generic “oriental” stereotype. I can understand that, at face value. But before I gave the seal much thought, I always thought it was really cool for its cosmopolitan character, depicting a ship over there rather than in Salem Harbor. So I sent a note to our city councillors asking them to consider the very global nature of this very early civic symbol. About half wrote back, all but one branding the seal’s figure a stereotype. This got my dander up as it indicated a general closed-mindedness before we had even delved into the matter, and of course I couldn’t help but think about the certain stereotype which is everywhere in the Witch City. Wasn’t this a hypocritical position on the part of our Councilors, given that there is a crone-like character with a pointy hat riding on a broomstick on all of our police cars? And you know, people died who were not witches. (Edit: a city councillor informed that the City Council does not approve “mascots,” only the seal, so the omnipresent witch is not under their jurisdiction—I have to say that it’s not particularly uplifting to know that the Salem schools would choose the witch as their “mascot”). No matter—there’s really no questioning this particular stereotype, and no constituency for its removal. The historical record regarding the intended depiction of the city seal’s character is pretty clear: he was supposed to be from the specific part of Sumatra (Aceh) which grew the pepper which was so sought after by Salem ship captains and merchants. He did look vaguely Asian to me except for the hat—the hat was a little different and a little distinctive and I thought I had seen it before. And then I remembered: Theodor de Bry, a Dutch engraver and publisher who specialized in depicting and disseminating images of “new” people as Europe intensified its voyages of expansion and conquest in the early modern era. Below is a 1599 engraving by de Bry’s son, and an image from nearly three centuries later of a group of Aceh men during the brutal Aceh War with the Dutch. Same hat, right? But again, it doesn’t matter:even if Salem’s seal features a unique provincial figure and not a general stereotype, if people label it as the latter it becomes one. There’s only so much history can do.
J.T. de Bry, Inhabitants of Sumatra, 1599, Bartele Gallery; Aceh envoys seeking British support against the Dutch in the Aceh War, 1873, Bridgman Images.
The “enormous condescension of posterity”.
George Peabody, Salem alderman and son of Joseph Peabody, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, chaired the committee that designed the seal following the adoption of a new city charter in 1836. As a Sumatra trader himself, Peabody had familiarity with Aceh and its people, but again, I’m not sure this really matters. As expressed by public opinion, it seems to me that those for a complete redesign of the seal and against are rather equally divided, but last week a long column was published in the Salem News which condemned support of the Sumatran image as “toxic nostalgia.” It’s a well-written piece, so it commanded my attention, as did its almost-complete ahistorical argument: it’s an excellent example of labor historian E.P. Thompson’s famous quote, “the enormous condescention of posterity.” According to the author, “regardless of what the seal was meant to celebrate, it must be acknowledged that George Peabody was a product of his times and that the seal he designed reflects a lot of the imagery that came to be associated with western notions of superiority over eastern peoples.” Coincidental with the adoption of the seal in 1839 was the beginning of the shameful Opium Wars instigated by Great Britain upon a weak China, and as “some American merchants (including no doubt some from Salem) did engage in the Opium Trade and benefitted from the British actions in China” we should reject the seal on the basis of this connection? Are we also to reject the East Asian collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, all the Federal Salem houses built with fortunes made by pepper and spices, and the navigational expertise of Nathaniel Bowditch, whose miraculous return from Sumatra in 1803 made The New Practical American Navigator authoritative? Are we to reject anybody who had anything to say in 1839 and just wallow around in the progressive present? If so, it’s going to be a bit difficult to learn from the past. George Peabody’s time seems far less toxic to me than later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions unleashed a cascade of anti-Asian vitriol in the United States, and we should all note that one of Salem’s most famous native sons, Joseph Hodge Choate, argued against the Act before the Supreme Court in 1893.
History is not cherry-picking.
Proponents of the seal tend to talk about “history-erasing” and its critics focus overwhelmingly on the violence which characterized the trade with Sumatra, which led to two US interventions after American ships were attacked by Malay pirates. Indeed, it’s not a pretty picture, but history seldom is. It is certainly not true that it was a one-way trade imposed upon the Acehnese: American ships brought a lot of silver over there. I’ve been reading as much scholarship as possible since this seal business began, and last week Anthony Guidone, an assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia, forwarded me his dissertion, “The Empire’s City: a Global History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1783-1820” (George Mason, 2023). It’s a detailed interdisciplinary study: I hope it gets published soon so everyone can read it. Guidone gives us the complete picture of Salem’s first global age: the black and the white, and lots of gray. Trade with Asia brought great wealth to Salem but also intensified its connections with slavery and the plantation economy in the Caribbean. But at the same time, it also benefitted a much wider slice of Salem’s population than I had realized, including African Americans and women, and facilitated the creation of a diverse community of sailors (he makes great use of the Salem Crew Lists 1799-1879 at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a great resource). In summary, Salem’s trade with Asia impacted “nearly all aspects of life in the town, changing Salem’s economy, politics, race relations, material culture, civic identity, and historical memory.” Whew! Even though the dissertation ends in 1820, Guidone expands it a bit further to discuss Salem’s anniversary moments in the next decades and the adoption of the city seal. He sees the commemorative focus on commerce by newish institutions such as the East India Marine Society and the Essex Historical Society as evidence of the desire to “construct a narrative that posed an alternative to the town’s witch-hunting past” even as (or because of ???) encroaching commercial decline. I agree completely: members of these institutions tended to identify the witch trials as a “stain” rather than an opportunity and waved no witch flags. How backward they were!
I’ve got to admit, Paul Revere’s first Massachusetts seal from 1775 is my favorite, even though its central figure cuts a rather simplistic figure.
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