How did zippers become so important? You could have a perfect afternoon. You could be charming in your technical writing class, eliciting smiles of recognition with your perfectly clear explanation of bullet point punctuation'. You could engage in a somewhat strained political discussion with your uncle, but feel good about it because, although you’ll never agree, you understand him better—and you feel he understands you. You could even have a drink with your latest romantic interest--maybe even feel like that went well.
But then you discover that all that time, the zipper wasn’t where it was supposed to be. You were wearing underwear. No one saw anything. But that one silly mistake just re-wrote your whole day. Hasn’t everyone experienced something like that? You feel exposed, vulnerable.
But why? When a gazelle feels exposed and vulnerable, it’s real. The gazelle smells a big cat stalking it, and it knows it’s in trouble. But when a human feels embarrassed, there’s nothing real about it. We’ve developed some sort of unwritten social contract that says, our identity is intact when our uniform is buckled up appropriately, and our identity is not intact when our zipper is down. And yet, the unreal things in our lives have just as much power as the real things.
There’s a great 5-page meditation on military uniforms in Herman Broch’s novel, The Sleepwalkers.
If you’ve read The Sleepwalkers, you’ll know that I’m not doing it justice here, because I’m just extracting the ideas from the story. In fact, the story is much more nuanced— and like any novel of ideas, these ideas develop the story. I’m stripping all that good stuff out of it. Herman Broch might be spinning in his grave.
In the late 19th Century, the military uniform becomes what the clerical uniform used to be before the “secular” age. It becomes the enforcer of right and wrong. So the person who wears the uniform fills that office. That’s the idea of the uniform. This idea is not real. The identity of the person wearing the uniform is artificial. In our age, we would say the uniform and all it represents is a “social construction.” But unrealities have power. The idea changes “the man in the uniform into a property of the uniform.”
That’s the sociology part. Here’s the psychology part: We learn that the uniform gives the wearer purpose: “[T]he man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life,” and we learn that the uniform “is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and distinctly….”
So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide, and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to a distance.
There’s something brittle about all this. If our uniform is not hard-cased enough, our equality leaks out—and with our equality comes vulnerability.
All that is about literal military uniforms in the 19th century. But what about figurative uniforms? We encase our identities in our jobs, our social standing, our political parties, our religious sects, our gender and race. Don’t all of these aspects of our lives take on the attributes of the uniform? Attack that part of me, and you attack me.
We don’t always get to choose the uniforms we wear. Sometimes our uniforms are imposed on us. Other times, the hard casing of our uniforms isn’t hard enough.
I don’t know if Sergeant John Ordway would have been wearing a literal uniform at the camp in Wood River in March, 1803. But his figurative uniform had leaks in it.
Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were away, preparing for the upcoming expedition up the Missouri River, and then, hopefully, west to the Pacific Coast. The upcoming journey promised to be difficult. The men knew they would enter dangerous territory. In the meantime, there wasn’t much to do. These guys were bored.
Two men refused to take guard duty, and several other men disobeyed orders and snuck off for a night of drinking. Stephen Ambrose puts it this way in his book, Undaunted Courage: “they would be damned if they would take orders from anyone other than the captains.” There’s no footnote. I don’t know exactly who Ambrose is paraphrasing, or how he knows, but I believe him. The chain of command is a social construction, and it’s a wobbly one at that. Uniforms aren’t hermitically sealed. Our equality leaks out. The respect they would have shown to the Captains Lewis and Clark wasn’t there for Ordway. Sergeant Ordway’s equality leaked out.
If I were in Ordway’s shoes, I would have felt shattered. Our uniforms are supposed to transform us. They are supposed to give us a sense of respect. Our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our equality, are supposed to be sealed away beneath the hard case. When our uniforms fail us, we feel like we failed.
At the Jamestown Settlement in Virgina, there’s a timeline of the history of racism in the US. In 1619, the first Africans are imported into the continent. By 1640, a White escaped slave receives a more lenient punishment than a Black escapee. The term “Negro slave” appears in the law books in 1660. In 1661, lifelong slavery is codified in the law, and the next year, the offspring of an enslaved woman inherits the bondage of his or her mother. Over a period of 40 years, skin color becomes a uniform. So, by the time York joined the Lewis and Clark expedition as the property of William Clark, both his own and Clark’s identities are defined by the permanent uniform of their skin. York served heroically on the expedition, excelling as a woodsman and as a diplomat. The humane thing for Clark to do would have been to free him when they returned home. York asked. Clark took offense.
To state the obvious, Clark made two similar but distinct decisions. He chose not to free York. That was his legal right. He also chose to take offense. He was so mad at York for asking, that he sent him to the deep south, where conditions would be harsher. York took part in the country’s most ambitious expedition, then disappeared from history. I hate it that Clark couldn’t say yes. I understand that you can accuse me of “presentism,” for imposing the moral judgements of our time onto his. That’s another conversation, although I would point out that anti-slavery voices were present. But what about Clark’s other decision? Why did he take offense? It wasn’t unheard of for slaveowners to grant freedom to their slaves. Why did the ask hurt his feelings so much?
I think it’s because the White skin uniform took a life all its own. It defined Clark. It defined Clark’s relationship with York. York couldn’t ask for his own freedom without attacking Clark’s uniform, and he couldn’t attack Clark’s uniform without attacking the human being who wore it.
In my mind, “respect” has at least two different shades of meaning. There’s hierarchal respect, and there’s democratic respect. Hierarchal respect depends upon a ‘uniform’, a position in society. Flat respect depends upon a human being. It’s disrespectful to say “Hey, dude,” to a king. It’s perfectly respectful to say that to a friend. Respect for a king is based on position, all the stuff that is embodied in a uniform. Respect for a friend is based on all the stuff that a uniform seals off in the king. If the king has internalized his position, then disrespect is doubly dangerous to him. It’s an attack on his position, and it’s an attack on him, because there’s nothing left of him outside of his position.
Nikole Hannah-Jones tells the story of Issac Woodard in her book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Woodward rode the Greyhound bus home after serving in World War II for four years. He asked the bus driver to let him use a restroom at one of the stops. The bus driver refused. There was an argument. The bus driver drove on, but kicked Woodard off the bus a half hour later. “Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in the jail cell the next day, he could not see.”
It’s safe to say that the bus driver was wearing a literal uniform. The police officers were wearing literal uniforms. Issac Woodard was wearing a literal uniform.
Those weren’t the uniforms that mattered.