Why is it important to understand the era of America’s seminal event? Part 1
Why is it important to understand the Civil War, America’s seminal event? How come we’re so confused about what led up to the war? And why is race still such an issue, so tinged with animosity even after the rise in interracial relationships and the 405 years White and Black people have been together – if not together in any normal sense of the word, at least on the same soil ? Those are three critically important questions because the answers explain a lot of the turmoil that America lives with today.
Last week I wrote about a monument to Civil Rights icon John Lewis replacing a monument to a soldier who took up arms against the United States as a Confederate. The Confederate Monument was placed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
A few years ago I chased down another monument to the Confederacy located in Helena Montana. The furthest west Confederate monument on public land in the country. It too was placed there by the Daughters. In writing that story, I discovered that many of the Confederate monuments were put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who then recruited high-ranking Klu Klux Klanners to dedicate the various and numerous monuments.
On their web site the Daughters describe themselves as being the oldest patriotic lineage organization in the country. They then go on to list their 7 missions. The first three are:
To honor the memory of those who served and those who fell in the service of the Confederate States.
To protect, preserve and mark the places made historic by Confederate valor.
To collect and preserve the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States.
That’s a lot of stuff that’s actually perplexing to read if you know anything about America’s history and the so-called “War of Northern Aggression”. What’s going on that allows people to claim the mantle of “patriot” when they honor those who took up arms against their country and fired the first shots in a war they fomented that killed between 650,000 and 850,000 Americans – which in today’s population would be between 7,000,000 and 9,000,000 deaths.
So who are the United Daughters other than a bunch of old ladies preserving a false history, and what do they have to do with any of those three critical questions? According to many historians, including historian and best-selling author James Loewen – Lies Across America, and Lies My Teacher Told Me - “For more than a hundred years, the United Daughters of the Confederacy have harmed Americans' understanding of the past by putting up triumphant counterfactual monuments and influencing timid textbook editors.”
That “Patriot” label tells you a lot about America and what we consider to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ the country, our thing with race then and now, and why we just cannot seem to get past it. “Kamala Harris? Oh she’s a DEI candidate!” A barley more subtle way of saying, “She must have gotten the job because she’s Black. What other reason could there possibly be?” Some have even used DEI as the blame for the fall of Silicon Valley Bank. “These banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the woke issues,” said Bernard Marcus, cofounder of Home Depot.
When Boeing began facing major air-safety issues, diversity was again the scapegoat. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “I’m sure this has nothing to do with mandated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices in the airline industry!!! Wheels don’t just fall off planes without gross incompetence in the equation!” Translation: Must be Black or Brown people.
When an emergency exit fell of a Boeing airliner…must’ve had to with DEI hiring a substandard (non-white) worker.
The Baltimore bridge collapse? Must’ve been a Brown-skinned DEI hire. No White man would have driven his boat into the bridge. “This is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens,” wrote Republican Utah state Rep. Phil Lyman. I’m guessing Representative Lyman didn’t realize that both the governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore are “DEI hires”. Never mind that the “Baltimore Bridge” was actually named after Francis Scott Key, the man who included a tribute to slavery in the third verse of the national anthem that he wrote – an ode to freedom - while he was keeping people in bondage and who wasn’t shy about what he thought: “Africans in America were a distinct and inferior race of people which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”
More recently, the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was blamed on DEI, this time because the Secret Service had hired women. “You are a DEI horror story,” said Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee while speaking to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. “You’ve let the American public down, and if it were up to me, you’d be gone.” Not a race issue, but it comes from the same place, harking back to our national narrative. “Only white men can get the job done.”
But the diversity blame game doesn’t stop there. Some have blamed the college affordability crisis, inflation, and even military recruitment issues on DEI. Billionaire and anti-DEI advocate Elon Musk recently implied that the global tech outage was related to CrowdStrike’s DEI efforts. Some pundits have even blamed DEI for soccer teams in the U.S. and U.K. losing big tournaments. Deeply rooted is our suspicion and distrust of Brown-skinned people.
Pew research has found that approximately 40% of American students, adults, and teachers do not know that the Civil War was about slavery. They tend to think it was about anything but slavery. In fact, historians call this the ABS syndrome… Anything But Slavery.
But many other historians, including Loewen, place that number much higher – as high as 90%. But why is it important to understand America’s Civil War era?
From the belief that that Civil War was about Anything But Slavery, it’s a very short step to the belief that slavery was benign. And if slavery was benign and had no lasting negative effects on the race America enslaved - as some believe and as White Supremacy groups promote to this day – then from there it is another very, very short leap to believing in the meritocracy narrative of America where everybody has exactly the same chance at the American Dream. If Black Americans are perennially on the bottom rung, and if slavery was benign with no lasting effect, than the blame for their status can only be placed on them. They’re not even real Americans. They shouldn’t even have the right to vote. Laziness, drugs, criminality, Black-on-Black crime.
Years of promoting a false and incomplete history and a false narrative, is what allowed Rudy Giuliani to talk so disparagingly about Barak Obama in 2015 without consequences. “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” His remarks were followed up by many other prominent Americans. Americans who didn’t know or who chose not to believe our history.
Five years ago I saved a well-written, in-depth piece that showed up in Facing South magazine that attempted to address all three of those critical questions: “Where does it come from, the ignorance that has been on display of late? In the college-age photos of white men, now elected officials, in blackface? In the simulated Klan lynchings for yearbook laughs? In mischaracterizations of black slaves as "indentured servants?" In the denials that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War?
Blackface was the procedure of painting a minstrels show’s actor jet black with ridiculous looking white eyes, hands, and lips during the 1th century into the 20th. The actors portrayed Black Americans as silly and stupid with a childish happiness. It contributed to the spread of racial stereotypes such as "Jim Crow", the "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation", and "Zip Coon" also known as the "dandified coon". Sometimes the actors were Black former slaves needing employment. The same images can also be seen in Doctor Zeus children books.
One answer is: from the 69,706,756.
That's how many students were enrolled in the South's public elementary and secondary schools between 1889, when the government began counting students, and 1969, the height of the segregationist Jim Crow era, according to the U.S. Department of Education statistics. There they were subjected to the alternative reality of the Lost Cause, a false version of U.S. history developed in response to Reconstruction - the post Civil War endeavor meant to re-patriot former slaves with the country that enslaved them – that minimizes slavery's central role in the Civil War, promotes the Confederacy's aim as a heroic one, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, and portrays the white South as the victim.
The poisonous Lost Cause lessons were taught to multiple generations of Southerners to uphold institutionalized white supremacy — in part through public school curriculums shaped by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). More famous these days for their controversial Confederate monuments, the UDC had an almost singular focus on making sure the Lost Cause propaganda was so ingrained in the minds of Southern youth that it would be perpetual. Their most effective tool? School textbooks.
The constitution of the UDC's North Carolina Division, for example, said the group aimed to insure that "the portion of American history relating to the Civil War shall be properly taught in the public schools of the State, and to use its influence towards this object in all private schools." That barebones concept was given flesh by Division President Mrs. I.W. Faison, at the group's annual convention in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909: “We must see that the correct history is taught our children and train them, not in hatred towards the North who differed from us, but in knowledge of true history of the South in the war between the States and the causes that led up to the war, so that they will be able to state facts and prove that they are right in the principles for which their fathers fought and died; and continue to preserve and defend their cause, until the whole civilized world will come to know that our cause was just and right. … There is an expression often used by our people as the "Lost Cause." Let us forget such, for it is not the truth. …No, our cause was not lost because it was not wrong”.
A few years earlier, national UDC President Mrs. James A. Rounsaville put it this way at the group's annual convention in Charleston, South Carolina: “It has ever been the cherished purpose of the Daughters of the Confederacy to secure greater educational opportunities for Confederate children, and by thorough training of their powers of mind, heart and hand, render it possible for these representatives of our Southern race to retain for that race its supremacy in its own land.”[1]
That’s the problem in not understanding the history of slavery, of the Civil War era, and of glorifying the Confederacy. America’s number one problem 163 years ago – a problem that tore the country apart – is still tearing America apart. And it’s still tearing at us because without understanding our history, we’re vulnerable to believing the ABS story that the Daughters and so many other White Supremacy groups and individuals promote.
I had one of my hips replaced a few years back. (And the other one a few years after that) I was fortunate to be able to latch onto a brilliant surgeon. He was probably 60 when he performed the surgery which means that he graduated from high school while his home state of WV was still using books approved by the Daughters. Nice man. Generous. But he had a very warped and dangerous understanding of the Civil War era. He despised Abraham Lincoln for invading the south, kinda hated Yankees, and was still bitter over the “War of Northern Aggression”. He eventually moved back to WV where he was surrounded by those who thought about race the same way he did.
The Daughters and other groups have done their job well
[1] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks