I wish I was in the Land of Cotton.
Old times there are not forgotten.
Or in Mississippian William Faulkner's apt phrase referring to his home region, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."
For a couple of years now we have been distracted and agonizing over monuments, songs, buildings, books and other supposed desiderata that have compromised or downright unpleasant connotations. For the moment I'm going to limit myself to the discussions around race, racism and the fetishizing of the Confederacy. So let's get one thing out of the way immediately.
The American Civil War was not a "War of Northern Aggression". The first shots fired in that war rained down on a Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in the harbor of the secessionist city of Charleston, South Carolina. Major Anderson did not fire on Charleston first. He was fired upon. Nor was the Civil War a "War for States Rights". The states kept their Constitutionally guaranteed rights but they had to acknowledge that they were parts of one nation and subject to the laws thereof. The whole point of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the ratification of our Constitution was to knit together what had been thirteen fiefdoms at war with one another and often with themselves. Our Civil War settled the fact that we are one nation in which states have rights but not rights that supersede those of the Federal Government.
The American Civil War was fought over slavery and the preservation of the plantation system that could not exist without slave labor. Every one of the secession documents and secession constitutions of the Confederate States make it absolutely clear that slavery was the issue behind secession and all that followed so let's be clear about that from the start.
Here we are more than one hundred and fifty years later and the freedom that a northern victory conferred on former slaves has never been fully realized. Too often we see minorities, black, brown, Native American and others cheated, denigrated and abandoned not to mention the every lengthening list of murder victims: Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille and on and on stretching both to past and future. We have forced African-American and other racial and ethnic groups into ghettos. Because Irish, Italians, Polish, Germans and Jews among other Europeans are considered "white" they assimilated quickly and within a century became part of the American majority. Perhaps the greatest assimilation factor was World War II during which members of many ethnic groups found themselves in the same foxholes trying to stay alive while fighting a common enemy both in the actual battlefield and in the movies shown at home.
African-Americans, unlike their pale, European cousins have always had their skin color to identify and exclude them. Too often they have been seen as Africans while their white sisters and brothers excise the "American" part of their group identity.
The past truly isn't even past. Lynchings now seldom involve a rope, at least outside of a jail cell. Today they involve a choke hold or an all too eager policeman's bullet. Yet it is those very bullets and the videos that allow bystanders to document the abuses of police and other citizens that have made the racism and discrimination obvious to those previously inclined to dismiss such claims. Thus having brought the Jim Crow past manifestly forward into the present we are also sensitive to the symbols of that horrible past that persist into our slightly less horrible present.
Much has been made of David Wark Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the inspiration for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th Century. That's a facile and largely wrong identification. The U. S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. For that decision to reach the Supreme Court there had to be segregation long before Homer Plessy was refused a seat in a rail car. If we are looking for a beginning to the Ku Klux Klan we have to look into the hearts of men who can observe another human being and find a difference that makes the observer superior to the person observed. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept freedom and equality for all human beings. We have to look at white women who valiantly fought for their right to vote but would not consider that their African-American sisters should have that right too. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept that the world that they knew and profited from was, to coin a phrase, "gone with the wind" and never would come back. We definitely have to look at "The Corrupt Bargain of 1877" that traded Reconstruction and Federal troops occupying the former Confederate states for the presidency of minority Republican Rutherford B. Hayes rather than the majority vote's choice of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Griffith's film and Woodrow Wilson's personal racism sure had an effect but the Klan hordes who came out from under their several rocks through the 1920s weren't new. They were just revealed. The Klan and other racist groups and individuals (e.g. the German-American Bund, America First, Westbrook van Voorhis or the popular Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin) were always lurking in the penumbra at the edges of our vision. They just came out into the centre of focus for a time. I am not defending Birth of a Nation. The script is an appalling racist screed and needs to be acknowledged as such. It is also, however, a work of art. The narrative may be vile but the skill and perception that went into making it is worth seeing. That is the dichotomy that I wish to discuss very shortly.
Much like Birth of a Nation is only one expression of the racism infecting our society, the statues now coming down or, more often, staying up long after their meaning gone from bad to worse have a complicated and fraught meaning. Many who want statues honoring soldier and figures of the Confederacy removed cite the fact that most were erected between the 1890s and 1920s, long after the Civil War was over and the battlefield dead turned to dust. That late advent is indisputable fact but I would suggest that we also consider that time in a slightly different light. The 1890s into the 1920s saw the passing of the great majority of the survivors of that war. The old veteran who might be seen at some local popular spot ready to tell stories of his youth in battle was no more. That his friends and neighbors and, yes, often fellow Klan members, might subscribe to erect a statue to their local veteran and all such veterans is no more perverse than the monuments to those who served in World War II, Korea or Vietnam that now stand on the National Mall. What is perverse is the cause for which that veteran fought.
When I was a boy and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War I found much that was admirable in Robert W. Lee, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, Joseph Johnson, Philip Kearney, Ulysses Grant and, perhaps the noblest next to Lincoln, William T. Sherman. As a Union man and admirer of Lincoln I could still feel the pain of Confederate General John Bell Hood after losing the Battle of Nashville and seeing his army destroyed. Hood had lost both an arm and a leg in the war. He had to be helped about the camp and strapped onto his horse. I have no sympathy for his cause but I do not have so stony a heart as to remain unmoved by this man, wracked with sobs, alone in his tent after the battle knowing that he had lost all of the Confederacy west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. Hood is as tragic a figure as King Lear and deserves a tear no less than Shakespeare's supremely tragic king despite his fight for wrong to his fellow men. He is not less worthy of remembrance than martyrs for the rights of all human beings like Medgar Evers or Fred Hampton. I am not about to set up a statue to John Bell Hood who is already remembered in Fort Hood, Texas nor will I oppose the removal of a single statue to him. His story, like those of the much more admirable Evers and Hampton, is worth remembering still.
The great problem for the Confederate symbols and statues and even the song, Dixie, is that they have been adopted by the worst of us, the new Klan, the casual racists and the neo-Nazi alt-Right, the white supremacists who, with every word and act, prove to the world and especially to this old white man that there's precious little that's supreme about being white.
The statues in question are tainted at the root from racism and they are further tainted by the inhuman and sub-human scum who cleave to them in support of their odious beliefs. Yet I can foresee a day, a day that the greatest hero of my lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also foresaw. That day is one when the past is at long last past. When we have acknowledged that humanity, equality and decency are the birthright of every human being and we can go to museums and parks and public buildings and view statues and monuments to men and women who attempted what they believed were great things but in service of an odious wrong.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemmings. Those actions are a great wrong yet Jefferson could also write that "all me are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." There is considerable irony in his authorship of those words but those words form the bedrock of all fights to realize every American's inalienable civil rights. We cannot pull down that larger than life statue of Jefferson in his Washington, D. C. Memorial without pulling down those words as well.
For our time and for a very long time we need to put away the Confederate battle flag, the statues and Dixie. Put them by, let them gather dust and be forgotten. Let the past finally be past. One day, however, let them be seen and heard again. Let the dust be removed when the white, black, brown or other child viewing those old symbols can look up at his or her grandfather who's just explained their meaning and say, "But, Grandpa, that was all wrong. Awfully wrong!" Then Grandpa can answer, "What a good, smart child you are! You make me so proud." Perhaps on that future day, should there be a band standing by, someone can quote the always generous Abraham Lincoln after receiving the news of Lee's surrender at Appomattox the day before, "I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard....I now request the band to favor me with its performance."
For the sake of our times and for all future times, let the old times there be forgotten so that we can one day remember them as part of history and not as part of current injustice.
African-Americans, unlike their pale, European cousins have always had their skin color to identify and exclude them. Too often they have been seen as Africans while their white sisters and brothers excise the "American" part of their group identity.
The past truly isn't even past. Lynchings now seldom involve a rope, at least outside of a jail cell. Today they involve a choke hold or an all too eager policeman's bullet. Yet it is those very bullets and the videos that allow bystanders to document the abuses of police and other citizens that have made the racism and discrimination obvious to those previously inclined to dismiss such claims. Thus having brought the Jim Crow past manifestly forward into the present we are also sensitive to the symbols of that horrible past that persist into our slightly less horrible present.
Much has been made of David Wark Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the inspiration for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th Century. That's a facile and largely wrong identification. The U. S. Supreme Court handed down the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. For that decision to reach the Supreme Court there had to be segregation long before Homer Plessy was refused a seat in a rail car. If we are looking for a beginning to the Ku Klux Klan we have to look into the hearts of men who can observe another human being and find a difference that makes the observer superior to the person observed. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept freedom and equality for all human beings. We have to look at white women who valiantly fought for their right to vote but would not consider that their African-American sisters should have that right too. We have to look at men and women who refused to accept that the world that they knew and profited from was, to coin a phrase, "gone with the wind" and never would come back. We definitely have to look at "The Corrupt Bargain of 1877" that traded Reconstruction and Federal troops occupying the former Confederate states for the presidency of minority Republican Rutherford B. Hayes rather than the majority vote's choice of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Griffith's film and Woodrow Wilson's personal racism sure had an effect but the Klan hordes who came out from under their several rocks through the 1920s weren't new. They were just revealed. The Klan and other racist groups and individuals (e.g. the German-American Bund, America First, Westbrook van Voorhis or the popular Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin) were always lurking in the penumbra at the edges of our vision. They just came out into the centre of focus for a time. I am not defending Birth of a Nation. The script is an appalling racist screed and needs to be acknowledged as such. It is also, however, a work of art. The narrative may be vile but the skill and perception that went into making it is worth seeing. That is the dichotomy that I wish to discuss very shortly.
Much like Birth of a Nation is only one expression of the racism infecting our society, the statues now coming down or, more often, staying up long after their meaning gone from bad to worse have a complicated and fraught meaning. Many who want statues honoring soldier and figures of the Confederacy removed cite the fact that most were erected between the 1890s and 1920s, long after the Civil War was over and the battlefield dead turned to dust. That late advent is indisputable fact but I would suggest that we also consider that time in a slightly different light. The 1890s into the 1920s saw the passing of the great majority of the survivors of that war. The old veteran who might be seen at some local popular spot ready to tell stories of his youth in battle was no more. That his friends and neighbors and, yes, often fellow Klan members, might subscribe to erect a statue to their local veteran and all such veterans is no more perverse than the monuments to those who served in World War II, Korea or Vietnam that now stand on the National Mall. What is perverse is the cause for which that veteran fought.
When I was a boy and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War I found much that was admirable in Robert W. Lee, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, Joseph Johnson, Philip Kearney, Ulysses Grant and, perhaps the noblest next to Lincoln, William T. Sherman. As a Union man and admirer of Lincoln I could still feel the pain of Confederate General John Bell Hood after losing the Battle of Nashville and seeing his army destroyed. Hood had lost both an arm and a leg in the war. He had to be helped about the camp and strapped onto his horse. I have no sympathy for his cause but I do not have so stony a heart as to remain unmoved by this man, wracked with sobs, alone in his tent after the battle knowing that he had lost all of the Confederacy west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. Hood is as tragic a figure as King Lear and deserves a tear no less than Shakespeare's supremely tragic king despite his fight for wrong to his fellow men. He is not less worthy of remembrance than martyrs for the rights of all human beings like Medgar Evers or Fred Hampton. I am not about to set up a statue to John Bell Hood who is already remembered in Fort Hood, Texas nor will I oppose the removal of a single statue to him. His story, like those of the much more admirable Evers and Hampton, is worth remembering still.
The great problem for the Confederate symbols and statues and even the song, Dixie, is that they have been adopted by the worst of us, the new Klan, the casual racists and the neo-Nazi alt-Right, the white supremacists who, with every word and act, prove to the world and especially to this old white man that there's precious little that's supreme about being white.
The statues in question are tainted at the root from racism and they are further tainted by the inhuman and sub-human scum who cleave to them in support of their odious beliefs. Yet I can foresee a day, a day that the greatest hero of my lifetime, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also foresaw. That day is one when the past is at long last past. When we have acknowledged that humanity, equality and decency are the birthright of every human being and we can go to museums and parks and public buildings and view statues and monuments to men and women who attempted what they believed were great things but in service of an odious wrong.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemmings. Those actions are a great wrong yet Jefferson could also write that "all me are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." There is considerable irony in his authorship of those words but those words form the bedrock of all fights to realize every American's inalienable civil rights. We cannot pull down that larger than life statue of Jefferson in his Washington, D. C. Memorial without pulling down those words as well.
For our time and for a very long time we need to put away the Confederate battle flag, the statues and Dixie. Put them by, let them gather dust and be forgotten. Let the past finally be past. One day, however, let them be seen and heard again. Let the dust be removed when the white, black, brown or other child viewing those old symbols can look up at his or her grandfather who's just explained their meaning and say, "But, Grandpa, that was all wrong. Awfully wrong!" Then Grandpa can answer, "What a good, smart child you are! You make me so proud." Perhaps on that future day, should there be a band standing by, someone can quote the always generous Abraham Lincoln after receiving the news of Lee's surrender at Appomattox the day before, "I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard....I now request the band to favor me with its performance."
For the sake of our times and for all future times, let the old times there be forgotten so that we can one day remember them as part of history and not as part of current injustice.
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