Historian’s book a call to personal connection, reflection on Missouri’s first 200 years

Posted

Historian Dr. Gary R. Kremer PhD. speaks of Missouri and its people with equal parts reverence and exasperation.

They’re like family to him.

“Missouri is my home. It always has been. It always will be,” he stated in an address during the state’s Bicentennial Celebration on the Capitol steps last August.

“The state and its people sometimes confuse and confound me, even on occasion annoy and aggravate me, but I’ve never not loved it and them,” he insisted. “Missouri and its people belong to me and I to them.”

That familial affection and occasional angst are on full display in Dr. Kremer’s latest book, This Place of Promise: A Historian’s Perspective on 200 Years of Missouri History.

The fifth-generation Frankenstein native and State Historical Society of Missouri’s long-serving executive director completed the book in the fall of 2021 as part of a yearlong celebration of Missouri’s 200th anniversary of statehood.

“History is complex, it’s not always pretty,” he said in an interview with The Catholic Missourian. “This book contains my reflections on how Missouri came to be the way it is, and what it has meant to be a Missourian over the past 200 years.”

For Dr. Kremer, history and identity go hand-in-hand.

“That’s the message I’m always trying to bring: that we are the way we are because of the way we were,” he said.

To each his own

Dr. Kremer had already been thinking about penning a history of the state when the Historical Society’s Board of Trustees suggested that he do so for the state’s bicentennial.

“The more I thought about it, the more I thought about my own Missouri experience, how the state has shaped me,” he said.

That became the starting point for this new work.

“We are all products of our time and place,” he noted. “Mine was determined by where I was born, when I was born, who my parents were, my race, my religion, my gender, my socioeconomic standing.”

He illustrates that point in the introductory chapter, “My Missouri,” which tells a bit about his own family history and how it played into his upbringing.

“Not that my own personal history is any more important than anyone else’s,” he quickly stated. “What I’m encouraging everyone to do is reflect with me on why they are the way they are. And the answer to that question is our shared history.”

He reflects on his experience of growing up unabashedly Catholic in an unabashedly Catholic community.

He points to how tragic death touched several generations of his family, contributing to deep religious devotion as well as a culture of caution in his home.

He reveals how the turbulence of the 1960s and ’70s helped move him from religious certitude, in which he had even considered the Priesthood, into a failed marriage and then into a radically different religious tradition.

His return to being Catholic was less dramatic but no less sincere.

He concurrently grew in his passion for history, especially that of African Americans, women, Native Americans and other marginalized people.

He studied under and later worked with Dr. Lorenzo Greene, a distinguished professor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, who was a pioneer in the study of African American history.

“At some point in almost every lecture he gave,” Dr. Kremer recalled, “Dr. Greene would stop and rhetorically ask, ‘What is the goal of the historian?’ He would pause for effect and say, ‘To discover the truth.’”

Historical truth can be invigorating. Sometimes, it hurts.

“Whether or not it’s pleasant, whether or not it’s affirming, the historian’s responsibility and goal is to discover the truth,” Dr. Kremer insisted.

Dr. Kremer taught at Lincoln University for 15 years before serving for four years as the state archivist.

He got back into to teaching at William Woods University in Fulton from 1991 until 2004, when the trustees of the State Historical Society invited him to serve as its executive director.

He said scarcely a day goes by without him learning something new and interesting about the subject he has spent his adult life pursuing.

“History continues to surprise me, to intrigue me, to confound me,” he stated, “which is why I continue to pursue it at an age about a decade past when most people retire.”

In times of peril

In the 300 pages of This Place of Promise, Dr. Kremer accompanies his readers on a trip through some 20 decades of Missouri history, rendered in accessible, rhythmic and occasionally playful language.

He writes of how early settlement patterns were dictated by geography and opportunity.

Enslaved people from Africa, along with the native peoples who preceded the European settlers, are well represented in the narrative, but often with muffled voices.

He addresses head-on the cruelties of the state’s ties to slavery. He writes plainly and candidly of Celia, an enslaved woman in Callaway County who was sentenced to death for killing her slave-owner in order to prevent his repeated sexual abuse.

Dr. Kremer casts further light on the attendant dangers of frontier life, on cholera and other plagues, the Civil War, the mistreatment of immigrants, and the hopelessness that the Great Depression of the 1930s brought many Missourians.

He speaks to a great paradox, stating: “Arguably, we Missourians have been at our best when we faced common crises, whether it was a war, an economic depression or a natural disaster.”

Later chapters touch on the unbridled optimism and upheaval following World War II; the Civil Rights movement; and the rise of the suburbs and decline of family-run farms and the rural communities that support them.

Each chapter ends with a rundown of literary sources for people interested in learning more about that period in the state’s history.

“Part of a journey”

Dr. Kremer views history through the lens of his own personal experiences as a participant, as he believes all Missourians should do.

He originally thought about becoming a social worker in order to help make a troubled world better.

He settled on becoming a historian because it helped him understand the world around him.

“That has been a lifelong journey for me,” he said, “one that continues to this day.”

His stated goal for This Place of Promise is to shed light on certain shared experiences that over the course of 200 years help to explain who Missouri and Missourians are today.

“I never intended this to be a definitive, comprehensive history of Missouri,” he said. “That would be a huge task and beyond my abilities in a 300-page work. I wanted to do something simpler and more reflective.”

He points to threads that have run through Missouri’s history since its pre-statehood days, such as difficult race relations, distrust of federal authority, and the great divide between urban and rural interests.

“It’s not always positive, because history is messy,” he said. “In that regard, it’s not a celebratory book. I didn’t write it just to make people feel good.

“It’s not a destination,” he insisted. “It’s part of a journey.”

Shifting anchors

Missouri was once an epicenter for economic and population growth. A hundred years ago, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the nation, and Missouri was the fifth-largest state in the Union.

“In some ways, our first century of statehood was much more promising than the second,” Dr. Kremer asserted, pointing to such metrics as relative average life expectancy, support for education, and incidence of incarceration.

Nonetheless, he still believes in the promise of Missouri.

“I like to think we’re going to use this third century to figure out our history and how to get back on track,” he said.

The book’s final chapter includes a candid inventory of challenges the state must address in order to fulfill its promise, in areas such as education, economics, poverty and child welfare, and gun violence.

Dr. Kremer writes of the 21st-century decline of church membership across all denominations, a phenomenon not at all unique to Missouri.

He addresses the abuse scandal by clergy in the Catholic Church.

A one-time student of the Jefferson City diocese’s former high school seminary, he shares of his own sad reaction to the school’s closing 20 years ago this summer, amid revelations of sex abuse that had taken place there in the past.

“I write about this as part of a larger point that many of the societal anchors we used to look to in order to give our lives meaning no longer serve that function in ways they once did,” he said. “Which is worrisome to me.”

“Exalted destiny”

Dr. Kremer wants everyone who reads This Place of Promise to do so with an open mind and in the spirit in which it was written: as a search for truth and understanding.

He hopes readers will begin to explore their own personal history and come to an understanding of what historical forces have shaped them.

“I hope the book inspires some introspection, reflection, self-study and analysis,” he said. “I’d like to think that if it does, we would all appreciate and understand each other better.”

“Understanding is a great gift,” he stated. “It’s a great mercy.”

He’s cautiously optimistic that Missouri’s third century could be its best so far.

“This place of promise, our Missouri, the heart of the heart of the nation, can still be a beacon of light for the rest of the country,” he wrote in the book.

“Perhaps that is our real ‘exalted destiny,’ one for which both time and history have prepared us.”

Comments