I found a swastika in my front yard this afternoon.

I suppose I might have been worried about that if the swastika had been put there recently, but it wasn’t. As far as I can tell, most of the gang activity in my neighborhood is softball-related rather than neo-Nazi. This swastika was on a copper medal, about the size of a half-dollar, and it must have been dropped about seventy-five years ago. I found it while I was digging in a flowerbed. Odd things turn up when you dig around an old house.

With a little gentle cleaning, I was able to read most of the letters on the medal and make out most of the images. Below the swastika, which takes up most of one side (probably the reverse), are the words “GOOD LUCK”; around the edge of the medal is written “MEMBERSHIP EMBLEM OF THE BOY SCOUTS CLUB.” Inside the swastika are smaller images of a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, a wishbone, and something I can’t quite make out that might be Egyptian hieroglyphs. On the other side (the obverse, I suppose) is a boy scout on a horse; above him the words “BOY SCOUTS,” and around the edge, “MANUFACTURED BY THE EXCELSIOR SHOE C’POR…” (the rest being illegible).

I said “swastika,” and you thought Nazis, didn’t you? I certainly did when I saw a swastika glinting at me between the calendulas. But the swastika wasn’t always a Nazi symbol. Before the Nazis were invented, it was a popular emblem of good luck, and one of my neighbors pointed out that you can still see swastikas carved in the stone on some houses in Pittsburgh. It was an ancient Indian symbol; Rudyard Kipling used it as his personal logotype. (Few of his books made it through World War II unmutilated.)

The problem with understanding history is that we carry a lot of baggage with us when we try to go back in time. Every decent human being feels an instant and powerful revulsion at the sight of a swastika—probably even people who specialize in historical symbolism and know the history of the symbol far better than I do. But that revulsion is conditioned by some exceptionally ugly historical associations that are comparatively recent. In 1920, very few people would have identified the swastika as a symbol of evil. It was as harmless as a four-leaf clover.

Being able to set aside our historically conditioned revulsions is often what separates good history from history that misses the point. I did the natural thing when I found this medal in my front yard: I looked on the Internet to find out when and for how long the Boy Scouts used the swastika. Almost every site I came up with was like this one, revealing the SHOCKING TRUTH that the Boy Scouts once used the SYMBOL OF EVIL in their own literature and on their own medals. It may well be possible to establish that the swastika was introduced into America by an evil conspiracy (I doubt it, but I leave the possibility open), but it’s pretty obvious just by looking at this medal what the Boy Scouts thought of the swastika. It’s as happy and innocent as pulling on a wishbone.

I can never really succeed in seeing the swastika as a cheery token of good luck in a league with horseshoes and wishbones. The Nazis were just too horrible. To understand history, however, we have to know how the people who designed the medal felt about the symbol, even if we can’t feel that way ourselves.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.