Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 1: Nikki Haley and the Lost Cause

This year marks the 20th straight year I’ve been publishing daily posts every April as a counter-celebration of “Confederate Heritage Month,” a ceremonial tradition still practiced by some states to promote the rightwing revisionist “Lost Cause” account of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The former Confederate states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia have all officially celebrated Confederate Heritage Month at some time in the 2000s.

Confederate symbolism and arguments over them are still very much part of the practice of the Republicans Party and the Trump movement – if there can be said to be any meaningful difference between those two things at this moment.

We have a former President that is under indictment on serious charges relating to attempting to reverse the legitimate results of the 2020 election he lost who now has the Republican Presidential nomination tied up and has a good chance of being reelected.

Nikki Haley as the Republican Governor of South Carolina and a person of South Asian heritage herself, created a moderate image for herself on Confederate symbolism in 2015 by pushing to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds in the wake of the murder of nine African American churchgoers by a young white supremacist in Charleston, SC. As Sarah McCammon observes, Haley:

... threaded the needle pretty carefully on that. She noted that for many people in South Carolina, the flag stood for their heritage and their history. But she said for many others, it was a, quote, "deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past." And she said that it was - in the aftermath of that shooting, it was time to take the flag down. ... (1)

But during her 2024 campaign in the Republican Presidential primaries, she insisted on catering to the thoroughly dishonest trope which is a central claim for white nationalists about the Civil War that it had nothing to do with slavery:

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What was the cause of the United States Civil War?

NIKKI HALEY: Well, don't come with an easy question, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run - the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Thank you. And in the year 2023, it's astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.

Neo-Confederate symbolism and sentiments are still alive and well in the Republican Party and therefore in American politics.

I’ve used these annual Confederate “Heritage” Month post to cover both contemporary issues and historical issues related not only to the Civil War itself but to the wider segregationist/white supremacist ideologies and attitudes that have been the real focus of those who insisted on commemorating and honoring the history of treason, rebellion, slavery, and racism on which the Civil War was based.


Notes:

(1) McCammon, Sarah (2024): Nikki Haley went from Confederate flag removal to omitting slavery as Civil War cause. NPR 01/08/2024. <https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223567778/nikki-haley-went-from-confederate-flag-removal-to-omitting-slavery-as-civil-war-> (Accessed: 2024-18-03).