Carlos1
Advisors, Authors A-H, Gender, Race & Ethnicity, Religious Diversity

Renewing Diversity #13: Diversity History as a Foreign Country – by Carlos Cortés

In his mesmerizing novel, The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley wrote one of the finest opening lines of any novel I have ever read:  “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

That certainly holds true for the historical trajectory of diversity.  At age 91, I’ve lived through myriad changes in the American diversity landscape.  As we wrestle with ongoing, inevitable challenges faced by the diversity movement, it behooves us to thoughtfully consider our past trajectory.  Yet to actually learn from that trajectory, we need to recognize how our presentist lenses can distort the very past that we are trying to understand.

As a professional historian, I wrestle continuously with the dilemma of presentism as I consult, speak, and write.  Consider the case of my first novel, Scouts’  Honor, which was published this past August by Inlandia.  The novel was set in a foreign country: a rugged, isolated Boy Scout camp in southwestern Missouri in 1948.  While trying to make the book a compelling read, I also faced the challenge of rendering that foreign country true to the realities of those ancient times yet comprehensible to today’s readers, whose vision of diversity has been partially shaped by such latter-day ideas as microaggressions, critical race theory, and DEI. 

Scouts’ Honor is not about diversity.  However, diversity plays a critical role in the book’s context, plot, and character motivations.  To make the novel reflective of its time, I had to capture diversity as it operated in 1948.  If not, the book would fail in its goal of transporting readers into the real word of that foreign country. 

The novel revolves around the death of a 14-year-old boy named Harry Vincent.  On page one his body is discovered on a path leading down to a six-hole outhouse in fictional Boy Scout Camp Matulia.  From there the mystery evolves through a series of questions.  Was Vincent killed or was it an accidental death?  If he was killed, who did it and why?  If his death was accidental, why does there appear to be an elaborate cover-up?  Diversity, 1948-style, complicates the answers to these and other questions.  

From 1947 through 1951 I attended such a Boy Scout camp while growing up in Kansas City, Missouri (I graduated from high school in 1952).  It was a time of rigid legal racial segregation involving neighborhoods, public schools, swimming pools, and, yes, the Boy Scouts.  In my high school freshman civics class I once asked my teacher if we were going to study racial segregation and he replied tersely with an emphatic no.

While racial segregation was imposed by law, religious separation was enforced nearly as rigidly by custom.  Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had their individual trajectories, sometimes separate, sometimes intersecting.  I recall only one K-12 classmate who had a religion other than those three, a Greek American boy of the Orthodox faith.  

Religious separation seldom involved open animosity, but rather operated via myriad social guardrails.   We played together in neighborhood parks, but Protestants and Jews attended public school, while all Catholics went to parochial school.  We visited and often spent nights in each others’ homes.  But as we got older, new rules set in.

When picking up a girl for a date, arriving boys were often quizzed by parents about their religion.  With a Mexican-American Catholic father and an Austro-Ukrainian Jewish mother, I found those encounters to be perilous, requiring mental and linguistic agility, maybe deviousness.   Some high school clubs restricted membership by religion.  In the aftermath of World War II, many Jews took action to lower their visibility, such as by changing their surnames.  

Then there was religion-based humor, often of the sordid variety.  One of the physical markers separating Catholics from both Jews and Protestants was foreskins.  Most Catholic boys had them.  Almost no Jews or Protestants did, since they had been circumcized.  Foreskin jokes became a regular dimension of snotty young male humor uniting Protestant and Jewish boys. 

These religious tensions are central to Scouts’ Honor.  The deceased Harry Vincent had reveled in distributing religious insults.  In particular, he had targeted two fellow scouts in his Hawk patrol.  

One of the scouts is named Benjamin Green.  His folks had recently changed their surname from Greenberg.  Vincent was not about to let that obstruct him.  He incessantly refers to him as Greenberg despite Benny’s requests that he stop.  Then there is Freddy Collins, one of the few Catholics in the troop.  Vincent immediately dubs him “Foreskin Freddy.”   By the time of Vincent’s death, Harry had created deep animosities with both Benny and Freddy through his religious taunts.

Then there was the diversity dimension of what we used to call boys and girls.  In 1948 gender simply was.  Nobody talked about the difference between sex and gender identity.  That would not become a widespread topic until nearly a half century later.  But workplace discrimination against women was standard operating procedure.

Matulia was the summer camp for big Kaioga City (my stand-in for Kansas City).  The city editor at the Kaioga City daily newspaper decides to do a story on Harry Vincent and Camp Matulia.  For reasons that become clearer as the book evolves, the editor selects his lone, insecure female reporter named Ardith Millett to write the story.  An outsider both in the newsroom and at Matulia, Ardith becomes suspicious because of the evasive answers she receives during her Matulia visit.  Her determination to get to the bottom of the situation, despite the male blockade formed by both the scouts and her editor, becomes a driving force of the book.

Finally there is homophobia, which had a substantially different meaning in that foreign country called the past.   This was two decades before “I’m here, I’m queer, now deal with it.”  Growing up, we didn’t hate homosexuals (the word gay was not yet in use).  To the best of my knowledge I made it through high school without once meeting a publicly-identified homosexual or lesbian (remaining in the closet was a matter of survival).  However, scummy anti-homosexual humor was widespread.  For teenagers of the 1940’s, homophobia meant the fear of being viewed and pilloried as a homo, that era’s operative slur.  That dimension of homophobia plays an important role in my novel.   

I didn’t write Scouts’ Honor as a book of history.  Rather I tried to write a fast-paced and compelling mystery, a maybe-murder story, and a possible institutional cover-up.  But I also felt the responsibility to vividly and accurately portray the Midwestern teenage world as I experienced it, even if it clashed with twenty-first-century perspectives and sensitivities.  

My struggle in writing the novel reflects an ongoing challenge that diversity advocates continue to face.  In renewing diversity, we need to more fully understand that the present is not just a replay of the past or that the past was merely a prelude to the present.  That foreign country called the past had rhythms of its own, as bizarre as some of its elements might seem when viewed through 2026 eyes.  

We also need the humility to recognize that, many decades from now, 2026 will be viewed and judged through future generations’ eyes.  Let’s hope they will understand and assess us with a recognition of the context in which we are living, making decisions, and acting.  It’s just a matter of time. 

Dr. Carlos E. Cortés
Latest posts by Dr. Carlos E. Cortés (see all)