Teaching During Impeachment
On January 22, 2020, I walked into my Milton class at Barnard College, the first day of the spring semester. I’d been on leave for the fall for a sabbatical that was spent also taking care of my husband who was dying. But I was back to teaching my courses at Barnard, and looking forward to it..
I was giving an overview of the course to the eighteen students who were assembled there, some of them who had never read any of Milton. Some had read Paradise Lost, his great epic poem on the Fall, but none of my students had read Milton’s prose, or knew anything of his life. So, I explained that he’d always had the ambition to be a great poet, but he lived during England’s Civil War, which divided the nation, much as we are now.
Milton published polemical books in the 1640s and ‘50s attacking absolute monarchy as tyranny, and defending liberty of the press and speech, as well as of conscience and religion. All this before Paradise Lost, a book beloved by the early English settlers of America and popular through the end of the nineteenth century. I told my class that Milton’s prose played a role in the American Revolution more than a century later, and that later in the course we’d be reading about Milton’s influence on our founding fathers, and particularly, The Declaration of Independence.
It’s impossible to not teach history when you teach literature from an earlier period, so I always connect past and present, giving my students a sense of why it’s important to know history. In no time has Milton’s defense of liberty and his critique of unrestrained power been more current, or as my students say, “relatable.”
No one in this Milton class knew about the English Civil War, a revolution that lies at the chronological and intellectual center of Milton’s life and his writing. So I had ten to fifteen minutes to explain how that seventeenth-century civil war was partly a conflict over religion, but also a conflict between Parliament (the law-making part of government, like our Congress) and King Charles I (who claimed absolute authority). I also explained how the war went on for years, but how eventually the Parliamentary forces won. How the King was tried for crimes and treason against the English people (the king insisted that Parliament didn’t have the power to judge him, that he was “above the law”); and that Charles I was convicted and executed on January 30th, 1649.
Suddenly, as I was lecturing it hit me. We now have a president who insists he did nothing wrong, who repeatedly invokes his “executive privilege,” who boasts “I can do anything I want,” and additionally, here we were in the midst of Congress’ Impeachment hearings. In a few weeks, the class would be reading Milton’s Civil War pamphlets defending the right of a people to judge a magistrate, even a king, and remove him if necessary—the very notions that were central to the American Revolution and its founding.
“Oh my God,” I exclaimed, “Do you realize it is the end of January, almost 370 years later, the Senate is convening for arguments over Impeachment of our president? And we are heading into a trial next week, the very anniversary of the judgment on Charles I!” Yogi Berra would’ve said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
The next week, on Thursday January 30th (an eerily appropriate day), I found myself watching on TV the closing arguments of the “prosecution” (the House Managers) and the “defense” (the President’s lawyers). I’d been planning to go to a movie about the hidden children of the Holocaust, but thought I’d be too depressed. So, I chose to stay home and watch the trial instead. Also depressing, as I sensed the palpable contempt in that Senate room for Adam Schiff and others pleading for the rule of law.
But there was something more that I noticed. It was how the House Managers took an historical perspective. In describing the point of view of the Founding Fathers, the framers of the constitution, they repeatedly reminded the Senate that America’s Revolution (her unique experiment with democracy) was about rejecting a monarch (George III) who insisted on his absolute authority, who insisted (as Charles I had in the seventeenth century) he was above the law. In making its final case, the “prosecution” argued the principle that the rule of law, not a king or president, is supposed to be supreme in America. That is what the Constitution enshrines (and it is also what Parliament argued in the January 1649 trial of King Charles). On the other side, the President’s lawyers repeatedly argued that “executive privilege” was at stake, that if the President were impeached, it would damage “executive privilege” forever. But wasn’t that exactly what the American Revolution was about? Whatever side you might’ve taken regarding the Impeachment trial of Donald Trump, it seemed to me that his defense lawyers were purposely ignoring (erasing?) history in their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, stripping its words (and the original intent) of an essential part of their meaning.
The next Monday, February 3, I met my senior seminar, a tight yet diverse group of ten brilliant young women. We were reading early writings about religious toleration (Milton, John Locke, Spinoza) as a lead up to more contemporary writings we would be reading in the rest of the semester. The discussion was intense. At the end of class, the topic came up about the current political situation and the climate of intolerance. I asked my students, “how are you feeling?” Graduating seniors often feel anxious, but I wondered what effect the Impeachment was having on them, if any. Their comments stunned me. On February 9, 2020, an excellent op-ed in the Sunday New York Times would appear by Neal. K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer, about how the impeachment, “offered a sharp lesson in right and wrong,” declaring that, “the American people learned what’s right.” But the authors’ optimism about, “an American people that’s stronger for the journey our country has just taken,” seems to me far from the disillusion I heard from my students.
These senior women in my class are wonderfu, brilliant, critical and engaged thinkers hoping to make a positive difference in the world. Many of them I’ve taught before. They are the hope of the future and they give me hope. But their comments were grim about living in a time when truth is discredited. “I never heard of a trial with no witnesses or evidence.” “Where are people supposed to get their morality from or learn right from wrong?” “Our government isn’t capable of protecting us.” (They were surely thinking not just of the impeachment, but climate change, and gun violence.) “All the systems we have don’t work and we feel hopeless.”
I’m pretty good at providing hope, but that day I must admit, I didn’t know what to say.