Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 1: The complicated devevopment of democracy

Every year since 2004, when I was still in my first year of blogging, I've posted daily in a counter-celebration of Confederate Heritage Month, which is one the vehicles that neo-Coinfederates have used to spread their pseudohistory celebrating treason and rebellion in defense of slavery and the white supremacist politics so closely associated with that outlook.

I started paying particular attention to the neo-Confederate ideology in the 1990s, an interest that obviously continues. One notable moment in that corner of American politics was the 2001 referndum in my original home state of Mississippi in 2001 on whether to keep the state flag that includes the image of the Confederate battle flag or to adopt a proposed alternative version without an anti-American white supremacist image on it. Sadly, the Confederate version of the state flag one out. And is still contentious in Mississippi.

Since then-South Carolina Governor Nicki Haley, a Republican, unexpectedly decided to take down the Confederate flag displayed on the ground of the South Carolina statehouse after a white supremacist mass murder of nine people in a black church, the debate over Confederate-themed monuments and symbols got more intense. Her speech on that decision (Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag New York Times 06/22/2015) treaded lightly on pro-Confederate sympathy. But her speech did give this statement of how the meaning of public symbols changes over time:

There will be some in our state who see this as a sad moment. I respect that. But know this: For good and for bad, whether it is on the statehouse grounds or in a museum, the flag will always be a part of the soil of South Carolina.

But this is a moment in which we can say that that flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state. The murderer now locked up in Charleston said he hoped his actions would start a race war. We have an opportunity to show that not only was he wrong, but that just the opposite is happening.

My hope is that by removing a symbol that divides us, we can move forward as a state in harmony and we can honor the nine blessed souls who are now in heaven.

Of course, the neo-Confederate narrative was always more about politics than an attempt to understand history. And Haley is explicit in that quote that she's making a political statement with her action. In this case, a statement against racist mass murder.

Ironically - to me, anyway - this blog in its original incarnation at the now-long-departed AOL Blog function - was also affected by the changing meaning of symbols. (A full archive is available at the links on the upper right of this blog.) I originally called it "Old Hickory's Weblog" to invoke Andrew Jackson's famous nickname. For me, that was particular significant as an anti-Confederate symbol, because of Jackson's confrontation with John Calhoun and South Carolina over in the Nullification Crisis, a milestone moment in the political aggression of the Southern slaveowners. And, despite being a Southerner and slaveholder and an ideological supporter of slavery, when forced to take a side on South Carolina's secessionist stunt on nullification, Jackson stood on the side of American patriotism and democracy (such as it was then), even for a 19th-century version of "constitutional patriotism" and against the treason-minded Slave Power.

I was also aware that the Jacksonian movement was an important continuation and further development of the Jeffersonian one. And that it developed further in the antislavery movement and the then revolutionary-democratic Republican Party of the 1850s and 1860s. Abraham Lincoln cited Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his two most important models for his Presidency.

What I've learned since 2004, not least through these anti-neo-Confederate posts, has increased my knowledge and hopefully added some nuance to my understanding of the early American and antebellum periods of history. But it hasn't fundamentally changed my view of how the American Revolution established an important basis for democratic government, and how it developed through the Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and antislavery movements.

But once Donald Trump made such a big show in 2017 of adopting Andrew Jackson as a President to be greatly admired, I realized that the meaning of Andrew Jackson as a symbol could not for the moment effectively symbolize what I intended in my use of him. Not that Donald Trump knows anything about Jackson or his politics. And part of the problem is that the Democratic Party, for whom Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had been historically understood as the most sigificant founders of the party, just cheerfully let the Republicans steal their own symbol.

What I'm discussing in this post has to do with the search for a "usuable history". As Ben Alpers noted a few years ago in An Unusable Past? 06/17/2013 on the S-USIH blog, it can be kind of a tricky concept. The Carnegie Council provides a selection of comments from a conference on The Search for a Usable Past 10/10/2001, which also emphasize the complications of the notion. But it is still (excuse the pun) usuable.

This also recognizes that the construction of history involves actual empirical and academic research on what actually happened in the past, philosphical/ideological ways of framing them, and more purely instrumental uses of historical symbols in politics.

This year, part of what I'm going to do is rework some of my earlier posts, especially some on John Calhoun. Because in all three of ways I just mentioned, I see John Calhoun as the spirit that now motivates Trumpism in the US today.