The Civil War - Now 100% Slavery-Free!

Let me start by saying that I wrote the last essay before I learned that the Republican Governor of Virginia had declared a "Confederate History Month" purged of any mention of slavery. I confess as well that as a history professor - you know, a PhD in history, lots of courses in history, lots of courses I've taught, yadda yadda - I always thought the the Civil War was really fought over the issue of slavery. So I thank the Honorable Governor for setting me straight on this.

But it got me to thinking. If I've so completely misunderstood the Civil War, then perhaps I've misunderstood lots of other things about Southern history too. And if its time to celebrate the Confederacy, then why not party over those other things as well. Why stop at Confederate History Month in Virginia?! Here are some ideas for other celebrations we should mark throughout the calendar:

Segregation Appreciation Days! - Let's take a week and turn back the clock, back past 1954 (Brown v. Board) all the way back to 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson). For this week, let's bring back the rich traditions of segregation to the South. You know, like separate water fountains. Denny's Restaurants could refuse to serve black patrons and NOT have to worry about being sued. Because after all, segregation was really about "states' rights" - not about keeping negroes in their place.

Plantation Days! - Not too many people in the South actually own plantations any more, but we can update those good old days can't we? The plantations may be gone, but lots of white folks in the South have lawns right? And those lawns are often cared for by landscaping companies that employ Mexicans. So during Plantation Days, just don't pay them. Threaten to call the immigration authorities if they make a stink about it. They'll get back to mulching right quick I reckon. I'm thinking sometime in the spring when the magnolias are blooming for this.

Gov. Orval Faubus Week! - During the first week of the new school year let's honor the great states' rights champion, Arkansas' own Orval Faubus, by standing in the doorway of our local schools and refusing entrance to any non-white kids. Especially the Asians, who work harder than our kids and are getting better grades and going to better colleges. I hate that.

Secession Summertime! - All that talk by Gov. Rick Perry and others about seceding from the Union is just hot air. Southern states don't want to leave America - they can't afford it. Not with the balance of payments being what they are. Geez, if the South really did try to form its own country (again), its social statistics would resemble Nicaragua's, only without the charm and with much worse food. But during Secession Summertime all those Yankee tourists could be treated like foreign visitors, forced to show ID papers or passports, shaken down for cash at the border. That sort of thing. Who knows? maybe that would raise enough money to ease that balance of payments.

The Klan Kat Walk! - Let's face it: One of the reasons the Klan has dwindled of late is the fashion. Very few of us look all that good in nothing but white, the cuts on the robes and hoods aren't flattering and it's really tough to get the barbeque stains out. Why not put a little hipster edge into the ol' KKK by sponsoring some Klan fashion shows? See what creative variations on the old standard can be. Could be a way to promote young, up-and-coming designers, maybe raise a little money for the local John Birch Society. Just because you're going to a cross burning doesn't mean you have to look frumpy.

The Holiday Book Burning! - The Republican majority on the Texas State Board of Education pointed us in the right direction with their recent decision to re-write American history to make it more, well, Republican. So let's close out the year by having big book burnings around the South to celebrate the Christmas holiday. Preferably near one of those 10 commandments monuments. What a spectacular way to honor the baby Jesus, watching all those books about slavery, reconstruction, segregation and lynching go up in flames. Jesus doesn't want us to read those books, he wants us to handle snakes and watch preachers on the TV. Who doesn't love an old-fashioned book burning?

It's time to stop being ashamed of all that history. Embrace it, hold it, cherish it, and in so doing, make it up, ignore it and lie about it. After all, if the Confederacy had won the war, we'd all be a lot whiter, wouldn't we?

Not Ready for Democracy

While the rest of the nation expressed shock at Republican Congressman Joe Wilson and his “You lie!” outburst at President Obama, South Carolinians doubtless recognized it for what it was: the latest in a long, distinguished history of not-ready-for-democracy political behavior.

In fact, Wilson has got nothing on his predecessor Preston Brooks. Brooks was also a Congressman from the great state of South Carolina. Like Wilson, Brooks let his emotions get the better of him. So much so that on May 22, 1856, Brooks approached Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, seated at his desk on the floor of the Senate, and beat him savagely with a cane. Sumner collapsed unconscious, but Brooks kept flailing away.

Several other Senators tried to help their colleague but were held at bay by Laurence Keitt, another South Carolina politician, who pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. This is why it is so important that people be allowed to carry firearms: to prevent good Samaritans from intervening when your friend wants to beat someone up. Keitt was censured by Congress, which is probably one reason the NRA was founded.

The reason Sumner deserved his beating, as far as the good folks from the Palmetto State were concerned, was that Sumner was an abolitionist and he went to Harvard.

Brooks was right about Sumner, which puts him one up on Wilson, who got it wrong about health care for illegal immigrant. Sumner wanted slavery ended and he pulled no rhetorical punches on the floor of the Senate, though as far as I know he never actually punched anyone. He really was a threat to slavery.

South Carolina was home to some of the biggest, nastiest slave plantations in the Old South, and South Carolinians so loved their slave system that they were the very first to secede from the Union. Edmund Ruffin, a transplant to South Carolina from Virginia claimed to have fired the first shot on Fort Sumter, precipitating the Civil War. He would have bragged about that to his South Carolina neighbors for the rest of his natural days but he shot himself in the head after the South lost the war.

The most beloved South Carolina politician of the more recent past was Strom Thurmond, segregationist, bigot and all-around standard-bearer for South Carolina. Among his many accomplishments, Thurmond holds the record for conducting the longest filibuster in Senate history. He went on and on for 24 hours and 18 minutes to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1957. When Thurmond wasn’t busy defending segregation and opposing civil rights for African Americans, he found time to father a child with a black maid. And South Carolina voters so loved the original “Dixiecrat” that they elected him governor and then Senator eight times – 48 years.

Then, of course, there is Appalachian Trail-enthusiast Mark Sanford, the current governor. In a political landscape filled with narcissists and hypocrites Sanford has risen high above the crowd. Even in South Carolina’s illustrious political history, one is hard pressed to think of another politician who combines self-aggrandizing self-indulgence with a limitless sanctimoniousness in such generous portions. To announce to the world that his Argentine squeeze was his “soul-mate” (eeww!) but he was going to return to his wife anyway took a particularly kind of political courage.

So by comparison, Joe Wilson’s outburst seems pretty timid. Disappointing, really, by South Carolina standards. And Wilson got it wrong. His wimpy little yelp during the President’s health care speech has given analysts an excuse to point out how wrong he was. He should have caned an illegal immigrant instead.

Still, one wonders what it is about South Carolina that is seems to produce a disproportionate number of political socio-paths. And why do South Carolina voters keep elected them?

The only answer I can come up with is that Edmund Ruffin was right. South Carolinians don’t really want to be part of the United States, and they don’t have any use for the political rules and processes the rest of us pretty much agree to. Like civil rights, civil debate and keeping your soul-mates to yourself.

I suppose we should be happy that Hapless Joe Wilson didn’t get up to try to cane the President while Lindsay Graham fought off the Secret Service. But why don’t we finally give South Carolinians what they really want. Let them secede and form their own nation: The White People’s Republic of Upper Georgia, or some such.

Let’s wave farewell to South Carolina. Before some else gets caned.

The South Rising Again

I'd like to tag-team with John's excellent essay on the "southernification" (huh?) of American politics. There is no question that southern-ness has expanded well beyond the borders of the Old South, and it has re-shaped American politics from the presidential level down to the level of local school-board elections.

Some of this, I believe, is demographic. While much has been made over the last generation of northerners moving to the Sunbelt, less has been reported about Southerners moving North. In a post a few weeks ago, I pegged the new Mason-Dixon line at I-70 - which runs across the middle of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois on its way to Denver.

They came - late as it turned out - for jobs in those Northern factories. They kept coming even after those jobs disappeared to occupy the lowest rungs of the low-wage service sector economy. In Columbus, OH the person checking you out at the supermarket, or drawing your blood at the doctor's office, or cleaning your office late at night is probably from West Virginia, Kentucky or Tennessee. Dayton, though the factories are all closed, remains a hot-bed of bluegrass music.

Likewise, I-75, a boulevard of broken dreams if ever there was one, connects what was once the center of the auto industry with much of the south. Follow it south from Detroit, through Toledo, Lima and Dayton and eventually to the Gulf side of Florida. The traffic between the south and the rustbelt is heavy on this road.

But it is more than demographics. This phenomenon is sadder, in its own way, and deeper.

In the first episode of Ken Burns' series on the Civil War, novelist and historian Shelby Foote tells a story about General Patton. Exhorting his troops during some battle during WWII, Patton reminds the troops that Americans have never lost a war. At that point Foote smiles and says: Southerners know what it means to lose a war.

But almost immediately, and certainly by the turn of the twentieth century, that defeat had been recast as noble. The Glorious Lost Cause. Defeat turned, like straw into gold, into some kind of victory. And that continues right to the present moment. Americans remain fascinated by the southern side of the Civil War - at battle re-enactments it is not uncommon that twice as many people show up portraying Confederates than show up to play Union soldiers. We still use words like "honor" and "valiant" to describe soldiers who, when all is said and done, were fighting to keep 4 million people enslaved.

That cultural memory of the Civil War, I think, and the valorization of the Confederacy helps explain the Stars 'n Bars that John (and I) have seen across the midwest. Those white working class (especially) men whose horizons have shrunk with their non-union wages are the losers in our Darwinian economic struggles. Their hold on the American dream grows ever more tenuous and they know it. Waving the Confederate flag allows people both to reject the America that has rejected them, and to identify with a different, more genuine America.

Theirs is a sense of failure, not necessarily of oppression, and for that reason their politics tends toward the bitter rather than the aspirational. Some of them may not vote for Obama for purely racist reasons. In fact, I suspect, they didn't vote for Kerry either (or for Gore).

Rather, Democrats make them angry because Democrats tend to remind them of the things that hurt the most - their lack of good jobs, their lack of health care, the lousy education their kids are getting. Republicans, on the other hand, work to deflect their anger at scapegoats and trivialities. In that way, in much the same way that big plantation owners convinced poor farmers to fight for slavery, Republicans allow the white working class to identify with the losers out of whom our culture has made the biggest heroes: Johnny Reb and his brothers.