Discussion for article #237783
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Conservatives, whether democratic or republican, rely on the triad of fear, hatred and ignorance. The irony of a country, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, but accepting, embracing, slavery as a cornerstone, taints and diminishes what we, as citizens, can be.
From the deaths in Charleston, let us draw inspiration to dedicate, to work as hard as we can, to finally, finally, put this stain aside. Let us be the best of what humanity can offer. Let us, in other words, be America.
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It was also at this time that the flag appeared atop Southern statehouses, first in South Carolina and then in Alabama, where Governor George Wallace raised it ahead of a hostile meeting in 1963 with Robert F. Kennedy, then U.S. Attorney General. A few months earlier, Wallace stood beside a rebel flag as he took his oath of office at the precise spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as Confederate president.
George Corley Wallace, Jr. was an American politician and the 45th Governor of Alabama, having served two nonconsecutive terms and two consecutive terms as a Democrat: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987.
Oh my! Another one who did not receive or read the memo about the “Southern Strategy” and never turned Republican. The list keeps growing.
Good article.
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Fast forward 150 years after the end of the Civil War. Racism is ingrained in education, job hunting, law enforcement, the courts, voting access, etc.
When will the North stop with the flag focus and realize this is not just a Southern problem?
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Really great article; thank you for this. The narrative of the civil war was lost in a large part due to the death of Lincoln. Andrew Johnson screwed the racial pooch when he rushed to gather the southern states back into the Union without any protection to the enslaved population. He essentially pardoned all Southern rebels, from generals to judges and infantry, and left them in power to continue to do what they saw as fit. This is part of the reason Reformation was some of the deadliest years for Southern Blacks.
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Exactly my argument . I don’t give a shit about the flag . Just a convenient symbol “See we removed the flag , racism is dead”
They need to worry about voter suppression by all these Stars and Bars States (as well as select RED wanabe southern states). You know the ones that about a nanosecond after the Supreme Court killed the voting rights ,put the new Jim Crow voting restrictions in effect as fast as they could.
It is only going to get worse as their little club diminishes in size
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No doubt it’s socially convenient to lionize soldiers instead of paying them market wages, but exactly no admiration of the enlisted or conscripted men should be transferrable to the traitors in the military and political leadership. Conversely, naming parks and schools after the traitors confers precisely zero honor on the poor souls who gave their lives for nothing.
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Sigh.
I guess you never heard of the “Dixe-crats”?
The Dixiecrats were a political party organized in the summer of 1948 by conservative white southern Democrats committed to states’ rights and the maintenance of segregation and opposed to federal intervention into race, and to a lesser degree, labor relations.
You also completely ignore George Wallace’s transformation from unrepentant segregationist to progressive populist.
During his final years, Wallace recanted his racist views and asked for forgiveness from African Americans.
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Great article! The narrative was so compelling, it was even exported. For example, the two eldest sons of Joseph Osgood Boswell, a Georgia merchant who served as first lieutenant in the “Dawson Grays” and later as a member of the Georgia legislature, advised two of his sons to go west at the turn of the century. James G, set up shop first as a cotton trader in Pasadena, but then went on to create the largest privately owned farm in America in Kings County north of Bakersfield. Not only did he drain the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi (the Great Tulare Lake), he was a patron of Cal Tech and the Claremont Colleges. Even with the crazy conservatism of Pasadena, he liked to work out of the spotlight. His second wife, Ruth Chandler, was the daughter of the first Otis Chandler, publisher of the LA Times, a paper so bad, so right wing, that, according to Henrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker:
The great S. J. Perelman, in an account of a train trip to California, wrote, “I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times.”
JG Boswell decided who got the legislate in California, and even who sat on the bench. His man Earl Warren, served both as governor and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan, in part, was a third-generation Boswell creation, to the extent he helped set up the north-south water dynamic. The Rehnquist court overturned the one-man one-vote principle in a Tulare water district case.
The values of the Confederacy, particularly the privilege of landed gentry to set the rules live on even today in the Southern San Joaquin Valley. If you call Bakersfield “Nashville West” they’ll correct you and point out that Nashville is “Bakersfield East.”
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Confederate flag – the ® South’s new underground symbol.
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Probably not really the proper place for this observation but it really struck me as strange and what the hell. I just started reading a book called Sahara by Clive Cussler. The first chapter (for some reason unknown to me yet maybe it will be clearer later in the book) starts out with a civil war scene of the Confederate ship Texas leaving out of the James river trying to bust through Union blockades. At the last minute they are brought a Prisoner in chains, I’m assuming a white guy. The captain orders him brought on board and put in lower quarters. But before he’s taken down the Captain orders him taken out of the chains. Then he thinks the strangest thought, “I will not be captain of a slave ship”. That that just seems the the strangest , and somewhat hypocritical thought for a confederate soldier to have, but then again many white people then and sadly still today do not think of black people as fully human or at least a lower class of human.
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Just like with the Iraq War, repubs are driving the narrative for history. I know old white guys who are going insane over the thought of the country changing. Well I’m a white woman and women have been held down over the years too. That could explain why most women vote for the Dems. We know who is on our side. Every time a repub talks about destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid I cringe. I can’t help but wonder if the rank and file are so stupid that they don’t realize that those programs are mostly used by women and children? This is why I consider any woman who votes for the repubs to be a traitor to her gender. I do have concerns though, that is will be the repubs who drive this narrative to favor these traitors too.
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gauzy fiction
Great historical background but when I think of gauy fiction I only think media and GOP…
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“but what we truly need to bury is the gauzy fiction that the antebellum South was in any way benign, or that slavery and white supremacy weren’t the cornerstone of the Confederacy.”
Correcting that is so much harder than preventing it…If we had listened to some righteous abolitionists in 1865, and sent abolitionist teachers AND preachers to manage the schools and churches down south, along with troops to defend them, the nation would be a Union, a real one, and not this fake unified nation of two completely different ideologies, one of them jealously vying to rise again from its own worthless ashes.
I never thought I would say this, because I always thought that would be a very harsh way to treat the south, but looking at what has happened because of the lost-cause lies we allowed them to teach in their schools and churches, the jim crow hypocrisy and abject violence it has unleashed like some demon from the past is now one of our nations worst curses.
If we had the sense then to listen to righteous people who demanded strict reconstruction, this might have been so different.
I have few disagreements with Abe Lincoln, but the more I watch the hate and violence that has been spawned since that awful war, the more I think he was just wrong when he said “Let em’ up easy.”
I think he might even agree.
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Wallace was a reprehensible racist for most of his life.
But when he finally saw the error of his beliefs, he changed and asked forgiveness from the black community he had so grievously wronged.
The vast majority of the racists in the South left the Democratic party after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—and were welcomed into the increasingly racist GOP.
No matter how many times you deny the facts, those facts will remain.
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I think it’s impossible to understate the role of Gone With The Wind in spreading a pro-Southern interpretation of the Civil War. The book has sold 30 million copies and remains popular today, and the movie has been seen by tens of millions of Americans as well.
Margaret Mitchell used the novel (which I recently re-read) as a platform to indoctrinate her readers with the notion that Reconstruction was a far worse evil than the war itself, and that blacks were somewhere between useless and dangerous when they weren’t under the authority of whites. My recollection is that the movie isn’t much better.
FWIW, Mitchell’s account of Reconstruction is totally at odds with the historical record. Big surprise, huh?
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Nathan Bedford Forrest, perhaps the greatest calvery leader in history [sic]
Now roasting in Hell. May his admirers join him anon.
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Nationwide, Americans still cling to a deeply sanitized and Southern-fried understanding of the Civil War.
Not in the 1950s household I grew up in, where the racist South was deeply reviled by my Missouri-born parents.
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Evidently, he must believe that providing examples of how Democrats in the past were as bad as Republicans are today somehow makes Democrats look bad.
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