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So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.
This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.
Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).
Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):
We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.
First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.
This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.
Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.
Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.
In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.
Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.
I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.
Strategy games have always had a degree of DEI in the past, usually overstating the accomplishments of various factions. Even Civ itself had cope wonders.
I don’t understand (but in some sense I obviously do) the obsession with Tubman in particular. Frederick Douglass was vastly more prominent and famous in his lifetime, especially in the prewar period. Are black women leaders really that much more valuable to DEI types than black men? It’s not like we have any black men on currency either, so why not push for Douglass or some much more universally hallowed figure like MLK?
Edit: I'll just add, although seemingly forgotten by comparison Sojourner Truth was also a black woman and actually somewhat famous and moderately known pre-war, something that can't be claimed for Tubman.
Some stats: I searched newspapers up until 1860 on chroniclingamerica and although the record is extremely limited the relative frequencies should hold. Number of mentions:
Harriet Tubman: 1
Sojourner Truth: 104
Frederick Douglass: 2003
Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).
I assume they didn't choose MLK or Douglass because they're both men. If you have a black quota and a female quota, that limits your selection pool substantially.
That, and for a video game they also have to balance the type of leaders. Tubman works as a militaristic-type leader. There was a certain amount of criticism of past civ games in that most of the aggressive/warmonger type leaders came from extinct civilizations in Asia/Africa/MesoAmerica, while the financial/industrial leaders were clustered in Europe and America. The latter tend to be better leaders, and also feel more "civilized." In particular there were very few female war-type leaders.
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Also, it looks like Ben Franklin is the male leader option for America alongside Tubman.
He'd definitely hit that.
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