I think Eisenhower was hated in the South. In the 1950’s the South was still “Solid” Democrat and earlier had been the only region to vote for a Catholic Al Smith rather than a Republican. Kitty’s point about Brown v Board of Ed is spot on, the entire region went into a strategy called Massive Resistance to implementation of the Supreme Court’s decision. Aspects of Massive Resistance tactics are still in evidence although it has switched parties. Also there is historical writing on the post Brown rise of private, often religious affiliated schools to avoid integrated public schools.
That they let them get away with so many decades of Jim Crow, segregation and racism is a stain on our country.
What people of color went through in this country is a damn crying shame. Never, should anyone have let that continue never mind capitulate to them for political expedience.
And now we have a repub nominee that wants to takes us back to those “good old days”. Unbelievable!
Let’s get the facts straight. Despite its name, the National Cathedral isn’t really a national cathedral. It is the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington (on St. Alban’s Mound). It is an Episcopal Cathedral, and gets no regular allocation from the federal government. It is the site of some nationally important ceremonies… primarily funerals, because the U.S. doesn’t actually have a national cathedral such as Westminster or St. Paul’s in the UK. In those cases it does receive payments for hosting the event, but it is, and cannot be, a national cathedral. The cathedral receives its income both from the local parish and, to a much greater extent, from private donors living throughout the U.S.
No…they are ‘whitewashing’ history. You are too delicate to KNOW that at one time the South fought against the North and LOST. We will not show that history in a stained glass window because, you know, freedom or something…
I guess you and your ‘likes’ did not in fact LOOK at the window which is displaying two sides. One WON one lost. We do not need to irradicate history. We need to LEARN from it.
We don’t have a national cathedral. When people build a cathedral, they can put in anything they choose. They can also call it The National Cathedral, but that don’t make it so.
Because the white North and the South reconciled by turning their collective back on black Americans. The South continued to proclaim it’s “proud” “aristocratic” heritage and the North agreed to worship it with them, all along with the agreement to look the other way as black citizens were terrorized out of governing, protesting, or successful businesses.
The keynote speaker for the dedication of the Klan’s monument to the Confederacy in Stone Mountain Ga was the mayor of NYC. The first film ever screened in the White House was the racist Birth Of A Nation. The so-called gentility of prewar southerners became a myth that both North and South embraced in the name of reconciliation, and every raising of the Confederate flag at any state capitol was accompanied by attacks on black political power.
The South surrendered in 1865, and the North has been apologizing for it almost ever since. I hope to god that’s finally ending.
Bullshit. I just came off a history tour of which I was the tour director and we did in fact visit Andersonville. We always have a professional historian of great standing on all our tours and we never, ever, if you’ll forgive the phrase, whitewash anything. You cannot go to a place like Andersonville and not discuss the atrocities. You should go there. Perhaps you might even check out the Prisoner of War Museum there which covers not only the Civil War, but Vietnam, Korea, WW 1 and WW2 prisoner of war experiences. There are two short movies you can watch where letters of prisoners who suffered that hell hole of Andersonville are read by an actor and then you can watch men and women who actually experienced such atrocities as POWs in other wars, including John McCain, several Vietnam, Korea & WW2 vets and a few men and a woman from the Iraq war tell their stories. It’s quite moving.
When our group was there the 3rd week in May, there happen to be two bus loads of current men and women in uniform who were visiting from a nearby training base. Now THAT was something to behold.
Saying that our National Parks with Civil War commemoration exhibits are not allowed to accurately depict or characterize the mass atrocities that took place at Andersonville or anywhere else is just plain bullshit. The very existence of the remnants of Andersonville as a National Historic site flies in the face of your “theory”.
PS-There is a 30 minute film on Andersonville at the POW Museum, I watched it, there was plenty of atrocity explanation going on in it!
I do not own Horwitz’ book, I borrowed it from the local library so, I will not be able to quote you exact language.
However, his chapter on the POW museum you mention criticizes the whole concept of diverting attention from the atrocities committed there by turning the museum into one honoring American POWs from all other wars. The same chapter of the book, covers the local monument (nand yearly parade and memorial service for the warden of Andersonville, who was the only war criminal tried ,convicted and executed after the Civil War. A monument to the warden still exists.
Maybe after Horwitz’ book was published in 1998 the Park Service felt pressured into including more testimonials of Andersonville inmates or tour documentary on the many deaths that occurred there from pure neglect of basic health, shelter and sanitation. But, the book recounts the author’s attendance at a tour such as the one you attended, and the observation about the information and characterization of the atrocities is explicitly narrated.
Additionally in 1953 District of Columbia city government was run by a congressional committee chaired by no shock, Dixiecrats who had little regard for the heavily African American population. Many of whom went to the National Cathedral or were more than OK with as many tributes to the lost cause as possible. Home rule did not exist until 1973 after the 1967 federal act which created a local government. Apparently a Dixiecrat congressman from South Carolina was so upset at home rule and losing his hold on the district that he sent a truckload of watermelons to the 1st mayor, Walter Washington.
The National Cathedral window panes in question were installed in 1953 in order “foster reconciliation between parts of the nation that had been divided by the Civil War”…
Reconciliation which has proven to be disastrous. Had the South been required to atone for their traitorous acts and crimes against humanity instead of being coddled in remorse because the nation the audacity to beat them back, all this talk of secession and the claim of states’ rights that we endure to this day would have been preempted.
True reconciliation should have demanded just the opposite: that no respectability be offered to their heinous crimes and vile symbols, and no hero status afforded their leaders, as was done in Germany at the end of WWII.
Not hard to find a copy of Santa Fe Trail on YouTube, or a library. It’s a proficient piece of late 30’s Warners filmmaking. It’s also an exemplar of that attitude you mention. Pauline Kael wrote that it was reactionary even for the time, and more so considering that Warners was one of the more progressive studios. Hero Jeb Stuart lectures an abolitionist classmate at West Point about letting the South solve its own problems; John Brown is portrayed as a deranged psychopath–which is not too far off the mark, except we never see the evil of the system that deranged him.
Pick the worst county of the Old Confederacy now, and that’s the average c.1953. The reconciliation may have been a wedge to split the moderates from the neolithics.
Missouri, 1960:
Interesting you bring up that movie. Unless the 1940s version is not the one you mean (there were two), Ronald Reagan played George Armstrong Custer in that movie. I have read books on Ronald Reagan’s political evolution. After I became an empty nester, my friends took me to buy a Roku. I guess because I did not already watch enough TV. After I binge watched stuff like The Wire, Homeland and True Detective, I installed a station called Red Manifesto, figuring what the hell. There are about 8 Cold War Era anti communist documentaries on the station.I watched a very long documentary narrated by Ronald Reagan and most of it was reasonable enough given the political climate in the US when it was produced. However, nearly the entire last 45 minutes of the documentary consists of absolute fictional slander of the Spanish Republic, the causes of the Spanish Civil War, and praise of Francisco Franco. After basing its entire inclusion of the Spanish Civil War in the documentary on the initial Soviet support for the Spanish Republic, it conveniently omits any mention at all of Stalin’s agreement with Hitler and the resulting abandonment of the Republic which was unsupported by the US and European democracies (except for international volunteer brigades).
Reagan’s evolution was also influenced by McCarthy’s witch hunt on Hollywood, and he is believed to have “named names” when he was the president of the actor’s union. Finally, prior to becoming Gov of California, he became a regular paid corporate speaker, on the topic of Communism. When I was a kid and he was Governor, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In included at least one Reagan joke every week. Even as they rehabilitated Nixon with his self deprecating “Sock it to me” cameos.
