The thousands of monuments to
the Confederacy and its leaders scattered across the South have become a national
political controversy that shows no signs of abating. The decision of the City
Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee,
mounted on his horse on a 20-foot high pedestal in the center of town, prompted
three
public rallies of white supremacists in 2017. At the Unite the Right rally
in August last year, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of
counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of people. He has just
been convicted of first-degree
murder. The statue still stands.
Of the approximately 1700
public memorials to the Confederacy, less
than 100 have been removed in the past few years. These visible symbols
represent the persistence of a cherished historical myth of American conservatives,
the honor of the “Lost Cause” of the Civil War. Developed immediately after the
defeat of the South in 1865, the Lost
Cause relies on two claims: the War was caused by a conflict over states’
rights, not slavery, and slavery itself was an honorable institution, in which
whites and blacks formed contented “families”. Thus the political and
military leaders of the Confederacy were engaged in a righteous struggle and
deserve to be honored as American heroes.
This interpretation of the
Civil War was a political tool used by Southern whites to fight against
Reconstruction and to disenfranchise and discriminate against African
Americans. Northern whites generally accepted this mythology as a means to
reunite the nation, since that was more comfortable for them than confronting
their own racial codes.
During most of the 160 years
since the end of the Civil War, the Lost Cause reigned as the official American
understanding of our history. The glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in the film
“Birth of a
Nation” (originally titled “the Clansman”) in 1915 was a landmark in the
nationalization of this ideology. The newly formed NAACP protested that the
film should be banned, but President Woodrow Wilson brought it into the White
House, and the KKK sprang to life again that year in both North and South.
Not as overtly supportive of
white supremacy as “Birth of a Nation”, “Gone With The
Wind” in 1939 reinforced the Lost Cause stereotypes of honorable plantation
owners, contented slaves unable to fend for themselves, and devious
Northerners. It broke attendance records everywhere, set a record by winning 8
Academy Awards, and is still considered “one of the most beloved movies
of all time”.
Generations of professional
historians, overwhelmingly white, transformed the Lost Cause into official
historical truth, especially in the South. Textbooks, like the 1908 History
of Virginia by Mary Tucker Magill, white-washed
slavery: “Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and
affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition.” This idea
prevailed half a century later in the textbook Virginia: History,
Government, Geography, used in seventh-grade classrooms into the 1970s: “Life
among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes
went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those
for whom they worked.” A high school text went into more fanciful detail about
the slave: “He enjoyed long holidays, especially at Christmas. He did not work
as hard as the average free laborer, since he did not have to worry about
losing his job. In fact, the slave enjoyed what we might call collective
security. Generally speaking, his food was plentiful, his clothing adequate,
his cabin warm, his health protected, his leisure carefree. He did not have to
worry about hard times, unemployment, or old age.” The texts were produced in
cooperation with the Virginia state government.
The Civil Rights struggles of
the 1960s not only overturned legal segregation, but they also prompted
revision of this discriminatory history. Historians have since thoroughly
rejected the tenets of the Lost Cause. All the leaders in the South openly
proclaimed that they were fighting to preserve slavery, based on their
belief in the inherent inferiority of the black race. Both official and
eyewitness sources clearly describe the physical, psychological and social
horrors of slavery.
But the defenders of the Lost
Cause have fought back against good history with tenacious persistence. In the
international context of the Cold War, the local journalists and academic
historians and forthright eyewitnesses, who investigated and reported on the
real race relations in American society, became potential traitors. These “terrorists”
of the 1950s cast doubt on the fiction of a morally superior America, as it
battled immoral Communism. The dominance of white Americans in every possible
field of American life was also threatened by a factual accounting of slavery
before, during, and after the Civil War.
Bad history persists because
those in power can enforce it by harassing its critics. It was easy for the FBI
and conservative organizations to pinpoint those academics, journalists, and
film directors who dissented from the Lost Cause ideology. They could then be
attacked for their associations with organizations that could be linked to
other organizations that could be linked to Communists. These crimes of
identification were made easier to concoct because of the leading role played
by American leftists in the fight against racism during the long 20th
century of Jim Crow.
Thus did Norman Cazden, an
assistant professor of music at the University of Illinois, lose his job in
1953. The FBI had typed an anonymous letter containing what Cazden called “unverified
allegations as to my past associations,” and sent it to the University
President. Cazden was among 400 high school and university teachers anonymously accused by the
FBI between 1951 and 1953.
The defenders of the Lost
Cause switched parties in my lifetime. Shocked by the white supremacist
violence of the Civil Rights years, popular movements and popular sentiment
forced both parties to end Jim Crow, using historical and political facts to
attack all facets of white supremacist ideology, including the Lost Cause.
The shift of Dixiecrat
Democrats to loyal Republicans is personified in the party shift of Strom Thurmond, Senator
from South Carolina and most prominent voice in favor of segregation, from
Democrat to Republican in 1964.
It still seemed appropriate
in 2002 for the Senate’s Republican leader, Trent Lott, to toast Thurmond on
his 100th birthday by saying he was proud to have voted for Thurmond
for President in 1948, and “if the rest of the country had followed our lead,
we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.” None of the
major news outlets, the “liberal media” reported the remark, dwelling instead
on the pathos of the old famous rich racist. Only a groundswell of criticism
forced the mainstream media to recognize Lott’s words as a hymn to white
supremacy.
By then, generations of
Americans, both in the South and in the North, had absorbed the bad historical
lessons that remain the basis for racist beliefs today.
The Lost Cause lives on in
the South, supported by federal and state tax dollars. An investigative
report published in Smithsonian magazine revealed that the official sites
and memorials of the history of the Confederacy still “pay homage to a
slave-owning society and serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African
Americans.” During the past decade, over $40 million in government funds have
been spent to preserve these sites, originally created by Jim Crow governments
to justify segregation. Schoolchildren continue to be taught Lost Cause
legends.
Politics keeps bad history
alive, because of the political expediency of the false narratives it tells.
American white supremacists have been created and encouraged by this version of
American history.
So the struggle over history
goes on. Most recently, several dozen graduate teaching assistants at the
University of North Carolina announced a “grade
strike” to protest the University’s plan to spend $5 million constructing a
new building to house a Confederate monument that protesters had pulled down in
August. They are refusing to turn in students’ grades.
The Lost Cause story itself
deserves an “F”, but it will persist as long as political leaders find its
fictions convenient.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
December 11, 2018
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