The good news is, explicit neo-Confederate groups seem to have declined recently. As the SPLC's Neo-Confederate page puts it as of 05/08/2022:
Neo-Confederate group numbers declined between 2019 and 2020, when the largest neo-Confederate hate group, the League of the South, lost several chapters. Long the central organization within this branch of white nationalism, the League of the South has not rebounded from fallout from its attendance at the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. This has continued to impede recruiting. Neo-Confederate group Identity Dixie also faltered in 2020, still reeling from revelations about the group’s leaders that the SPLC exposed in 2019. Today, Identity Dixie is down to one chapter. In 2021, SPLC’s analysts documented a significant decrease with the Neo-Confederate category. Analysts documented 31 groups in 2020, with a steep drop to 16 groups in 2021. The decrease occurred, in part, from the financial challenges facing neo-Confederate groups in the wake of a civil lawsuit brought against group leaders by Integrity First for America. In addition, without significant protests from the Left to rally against, the neo-Confederate groups that newly appeared in 2020 have been sidelined. A dedicated and loyal following of neo-Confederate extremists continue to plot online and will use efforts to remove Confederate monuments, rename parks, schools and other public spaces as a way to rally other extremists to their ideology, recruit new members and fundraise from the larger radical right movement. [my emphasis]
The bad news is: with explicit insurrectionist ideas and practices (the storming of the Capitol on 01/06/2021) and white supremacist ideology and attitude having been so mainstreamed by the Republican Party itself, the spirit of John Calhoun is alive and well.
The Republican embrace of the crackpot moral-panic campaign over "critical race theory," whose anti-CRT rhetoric draws from what began as a hard-right, anti-Semitic theory about what they called "Cultural Marxism," is a sign of how deeply neo-Confederate-type pseudohistory has made inroads into the national Republican Party.
The SPLC page notes:
In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, the term “neo-Confederacy” is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early 1980s in such publications as Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The SPLC also calls attention to the role that "Christian dominionism" plays in neo-Confederate thinking.
Kevin Levin is a historian and teacher who has put a lot of time, effort, and thought into interpreting Confederate monuments. He is the author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (2019), in which he investigates and debunks one of the favorite tropes of advocates of the neo-Confederate Lost Cause narrative.
There are plenty of ways to introduce students to the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction that don’t involve a personal conversation or interview.
Let’s also acknowledge that many of these people who embrace a Lost Cause narrative have problematic views on a wide range of contemporary issues related to race. If an interview is to take place at all, it should only happen after the individual in question has been properly vetted. ...
For well over 100 years the Lost Cause functioned as something close to the official narrative of the Civil War in many parts of the country. You could find it in school textbooks, on street signs, the names of buildings, and, of course, in the hundreds of Confederate monuments and flags featured prominently in public spaces around the country.
It has never suffered for a lack of exposure. [my emphasis]
We can talk about what historical narrative inform and influence people's views. But there is no need to pretend that lies and racist ideology should be treated on an equal basis as honest history, solid research, and views that recognize the humanity of people who were and often still are despised.
Secession fantasies are once again rumbling on America’s fringes, where a small but growing cadre of disaffected nationalists say they’ve had it with the U.S. and want out.
While secession movements are nothing new in the U.S., experts say the energy feels different now. It’s partly because, for the first time in recent history, the movements are drawing support from state-level GOP officials and right-wing media personalities with huge platforms, who are entertaining these fringe ideas. ...
The renewed energy behind these secession and separatist movements —specifically the “Texit” movement in Texas—comes during intense polarization, raging culture wars, a surge in political violence and in the wake of a conspiracy-driven insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A poll last month from Quinnipiac University found that 76% of self-identified Republicans believe the lie that the 2020 election was plagued by widespread fraud, which offers some insight into how many people question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration. [my emphasis]
The white supremacist tradition in the US is strong. And the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative still plays a big role in it. It's not just for elderly John Birch Society cranks, either. Many younger cranks - and a large portion of the Republican Parrty - are on board with the current secessionist sentiment.
As president, Wilson imposed Jim Crow–style segregation on the federal civil service and the Navy, which had been integrated for the previous century, and when he hosted the first-ever screening of a feature film in the White House, the honor went to The Birth of a Nation. An adaptation of the Thomas Dixon Jr. novel The Clansman, the film brought the myth of the Lost Cause to the silver screen in a racist paean to the defeat of Reconstruction through the terrorist violence of the KKK.
Woodrow Wilson, looking very white and a bit Dracula-ish
This is one of several reasons that I generally find Woodrow Wilson an unsympathetic character. He did pass reforms to limit abuses by corporations. And his ideas on international law were tremendously influential in shaping the United Nations and today's international structure. Anticolonial leaders like Gandhi and many more were inspired by his ideas on national independence, even though he had little interest in seeing them applied outside of Europe.
But he was also a rigid moralist, which badly distorted his view of other countries. And his morality obviously did not include a meaningful notion of racial equality. He's remembered as kind of a tragic hero because the Versailles Treaty with his Fourteen Points idea was rejected by the Senate and he suffered a crippling stroke while campaigning for it. But the truth is that Versailles, and the other treaties at the end of World War I, were a mess, and did a lot to bring on World War II. Hungary to this day still has (far-fetched) notions of taking parts of Slovakia, Rumania, and Serbia that they lost then. Part of the problem was that Wilson fell seriously ill with the Spanish flu when he was in Paris for the peace conference and never got his normal focus on the negotiations back. Pandemics cause all kinds of problems.
The article focuses on how Wilson used Confederate symbolism to recruit Southern men to the US Army for the First World War:
The peculiarity of naming Army bases after Confederate generals did not go unnoticed at the time. A pointed op-ed in e Cleveland Gazette lamented, “Since 1861 to 1865, the South has won back all that it lost in that memorable struggle except its slaves.” And e Boston Globe reported the announcement of the new bases with a raised eyebrow: “In the list of names announced tonight, Lee, Gordon, Beauregard, and Wheeler take their places beside Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade and more than a score of others who fought for the Union.”
The Lost Cause had won. Fort Bragg and Fort Benning were established the following year. Then, in the mobilization for the Second World War, new Army bases built in the states of the former Confederacy were christened with the names of Confederate generals — including Fort A. P. Hill, Fort Hood, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk, and Fort Rucker.
Public symbols like statues and state flags embody symbolism that changes over time based on the public narrative that develops over time. It also has to do with power, as we see in cases of authoritarian regimes that create huge monuments to the leader of the moment. In the end, all of them wind up like Percy Shelley's famous Ozymandias:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or, as John Maynard Keynes also famously put it, in the long run, we are all dead.
But if we crank our time range down from millennia to a century or two or a couple of decades, we get to the span in which public icons have some contemporary emotional and ideological meaning.
But, obviously, not every historical figure or event has equal meaning. In the United States, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War loom large in the national collective memory. Wars and revolutions generally play prominent roles in national symbolism in because they represent significant collective turning points that help us to break up history into understandable chunks. In our world of sovereign national states, national symbolism matters to people.
Civil War symbolism in the US has been more contentious than most, largely because of the continuing, toxic role that white racism against black people has always played in the US. The symbolism of the American Revolution didn't have the same enduring divisive role, because there was never huge constituency aiming to reverse the substance of the US becoming its own independent country, the Hartford Convention (1814-15) being the last gasp of such sentiments as any kind of political force.
Confederate symbolism has been a live topic of political contention since essentially the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The infamous public Confederate monuments, as we've recently been reminded, were used in the post-Civil War era to be symbols and advertisements for Southern continuing white resistance to equal rights for blacks citizens, although that clinical phrasing doesn't come close to capturing the brutality, cruelty, and just plain meanness of Southern US apartheid.
Arguing over the meaning of the Civil War isn't restricted to public monuments or the names of military bases. It's also been an intensive subject of contention in professional history, and has attracted an huge amount of interest in amateur history and popular culture. Including movies, of course. What to Know When Watching Gone With the WindTurner Classic Movies 06/26/2020:
The Confederate symbolism is pervasive enough and has been around long enough that everyone in America basically knows that the symbolism is about white racism and white supremacy, both of which are poison for democracy and the rule of law. Of course, it's part of white supremacist narratives to deny that it is about race. But essentially no one of voting age actually takes that seriously.
Building different narratives around other issues is more difficult, because the shared understanding of the symbols is rarely so clear as with the celebration of the Confederacy. Also, the Confederate States of America was also explicitly treason to the United States. The enemy soldiers Confederate generals and their armies were killing soldiers of the United States Army. The contradiction between celebrating the violence and treason of the Confederacy and the idolatry of the US military that is practiced primarily by present-day conservatives is so painfully obvious.
Most other historical periods in the US just don't have symbolism as intense and widely understood in common ways. And that's the context for discussions over what other historical symbols should be newly contested.
Woodrow Wilson has come in for condign attention, for instance:
I don't ever recall having been a particular fan of Woodrow Wilson. So I don't particularly care how many buildings or streets may be name after him.
But I also doubt that the renaming has much resonance for most other people, either. When it comes to university buildings, very few of them are named after respected historical figures or innovative scientists are star professors from decades past. They're name after rich people who made large donations to the universitiy. So talking Wilson's name off a college building is a fundraising opportunity. The Planet Princeton article above notes, "The university had already planned to close Wilson College and retire its name after opening two new residential colleges currently under construction."
Wilson is known for being the President during the First World War. And he is also known as a tragic figure who tried unsuccessfully to get an isolationist-minded Senate to join the League of Nations. He also had a progressive-leaning economic policy by the standards of the time. I tend to take a generally dim view of Wilson's Presidency. The Versailles Treaty that produced the League of Nations was on the whole a bad treaty, that did a great deal to lay the ground for a second world war. The "Spanish flu" pandemic may have a direct effect on Wilson's performance in the negotiations, as Steve Coll discusses in Woodrow Wilson's Case of the Flu, and How Pademics Change HistoryNew Yorker 04/17/2020
Sigmund Freud and American diplomat William Bullitt did a joint biography of Wilson that was first published in 1967, Thomas Woodrow Wilson A Psychological Study, that expressed their shared dim view of the late President. (Ben Yagoda, What Drove Sigmund Freud to Write a Scandalous Biography of Woodrow Wilson?Smithsonian Magazine Sept 2018) Their book focuses on Wilson's tendency to dogmatic moralism, which arguably inclined to poor decisions in regard to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, an issue in which Bullitt in his diplomatic role had been intensely involved at the time.
Wilson's racism, as described by Dick Lehr in the article linked above, was also real.
Yet Wilson stood in American politics and diplomacy for the importance of international law, however poorly his attempt to integrate his concepts into his negotiations with the victorious diplomats of the British and French Empires may have been. But his general commitment to international law particularly influenced Franklin Roosevelt and the diplomatic worldviews of the architects of the post-Second World War order. Wilson's anti-imperialist ideas also had a significant influence on the ideas and aspirations of independence leaders in countries held as colonies. (Joshua Keating, The Accidental Anti-ImperialistSlate 06/30/2020)
So, despite being an unreconstructed Southern racist and and despite his failure to effectively push through his position in the Versailles negotiations, Wilson's actual subsequent influence developed in ways that he might not have expected or entirely approved. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Wilson Quarterly are good sources for establishment-minded but center-left analysis of foreign policy issues.
In other words, in contrast to the defined and long-standing nature of Confederate symbolism, the symbolism of Woodrow Wilson doesn't have the contemporary ideological intensity that Confederate symbolism has in American politics. I doubt there are many people who much care whether Princeton clears up a couple of Wilson-designated items so that donors can buy the building names for themselves.
Donald Trump has emphasized Robert E. Lee as a hero for his white nationalist movement.
One thing about about fanaticism is that its motivational claims don't have to be based on empirical reality. It's often said, for instance, that you don't need Jews to have anti-Semitism. If people in Poland, for instance, believe the world is controlled by a sinister Jewish conspriracy, the notion came become a big influence politically even though very few people in the country have any regular contact with actual Jews at all. In some ways, not having actual contact with a stigmatized group make be helpful in making a politics targeting them as the enemy earsier. Polls in Germany, Austria, and the US repeatedly show that areas with higher proportions of immigrants are less open to xenophobic appeals that areas with a much lower immigrant presence.
Neo-Confederate ideology also doesn't have to bear any close resemblance to actual history for it to serve as pseudohistorical ideology for present-day white supremacist politics.
But facts do matter, even in historical outlooks. I haven't seen any polls on the topic. But I think there is more awareness among Americans today than, say, 20 years ago that neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory does play a role in current political ideology, and that it's based on shameless distortions of history.
Adam Serwer did a helpful article a couple of years ago addressing the scam version of Trump's hero Robert E. Lee, The Myth of the Kindly General Lee 06/04/2017:
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
[my emphasis]
His article debunks Lee's postwar status as an advocate for racial moderation and political reconcilation in the South. The Lost Cause narrative served to facilitate a post-Reconstrution political reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners, very much at the expense of African-American rights, particularly but by no means exclusively in the former Confederate states.
Apparently Trump wants to be the star of Confederate "Heritage" Month, too: Katie Galioto, Trump says he answered Charlottesville questions 'perfectly'Politico 04/26/2019. He defended his notorious praise for neo-Nazis ("very fine people") at the murderous 2017 Charlottesville rally where demonstrators nominally supporting the retention of a Robert E. Lee statue chanted "Jews will not replace us!"
“If you look at what I said you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn ahead of a trip to Indianapolis to speak at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
The president has received repeated criticism from those arguing he offered moral equivalence between the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who incited the rally and those who protested against them. In the days following the deadly protests, Trump did not denounce the marchers, instead condemning violence on both sides and calling for Americans to “come together.”
This is an illustration of how neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory and ideology is very much a part of the worldview projected by today's Trumpified, white nationalist Republican Party.
Here is Trump, who probably couldn't tell you in what century Lee lived, Trump Defends His 2017 Charlottesville Response, Praises Robert E. LeeTicToc by Bloomberg 04/26/2019. The Charlottesville comment comes just after 2:30.
He comically claims just after 1:10, "I'm a student of history." He also claims "I'm a young, vibrant man."
The reporter that asked the Charlottesville question didn't directly mention Joe Biden's reference to Trump's comment about Charlottesville in his video Thursday formally announcing his Presidential campaign. But Biden - who has some shaky history on civil rights himself - did raise it in that video. And good for him for doing so. This is an MSNBC report with commentary on Trump's doubling-down on neo-Nazis being "very fine people", President Donald Trump Makes His Own Argument On Charlottesville WorseDeadline 04/26/2019:
It's worth noting here that in his last Presidential run, Biden couldn't resist a touch of neo-Confederate type talk himself (Xuan Thai and Ted Barrett, Biden's description of Obama draws scrutiny CNN 02/09/2007):
In a June 2006 appearance in New Hampshire, the senator [Biden] commented on the growth of the Indian-American population in Delaware by saying, "You cannot go into a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. Oh, I'm not joking."
Two months later, responding to a question in an August interview on Fox News Sunday, Biden was asked how a "Northeast liberal" could compete against more conservative southern candidates.
"Better than everybody else. You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state is the eighth largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a northeast liberal state," Biden said.
He repeated the comment during a visit to South Carolina in December 2006 at an event before the Columbia Rotary Club, according to a story published in The State newspaper. The State reported that Biden referred to Delaware as a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way." [my emphasis]
When pundits talk about Biden being gaffe-prone, this is what they mean. His glad-handing, respond-to-the-crowd-in-front-of-you style is appealing and makes him come across as likable.
But when he goes with the flow in that way, he sometimes lets out some blunders. I heard Biden speak live at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit in 2014, and that likability aspect was very evident. VP Joe Biden speaks about Marriage Equality at Netroots Nation:
But just after 13:40, he begins an impassioned portion denouncing physical abuse of women, using the somewhat old-fashioned euphemism of a man raising his hand against a woman, i.e., calling it a "cardinal sin" and declaring. "No man has a right to raise his hand to a woman for whatever reason." He continued in a peroration, "No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman under any circumstances" and completed the sentence "except self-defense. Period."
It didn't come off though he was making excuses for domestic violence. On the contrary. But it also sounded really awkward and did distract from his attempt to unequivocally condemn it.
And I think his reliance on the metaphor (or I guess it's technically a synecdoche) of a man "raising his hand against a woman" was part of the problem. It probably occurred to him or his speechwriter that he needed to make the statement a bit more generic, because domestic violence happens in same-sex couples and involves not just spouses but children, as well. And, yes, men are sometimes also victims of violence initiated by a female spouse or partner, though the inverse is obviously far more often the case. If he had framed the speech in terms of "domestic violence" and violence against "partners," he could have avoided the awkward moment. And in a speech like that, he would have buried his point if he tried to put in all the variations I mention in this paragraph.
But that's Biden. I don't know if his Delaware-was-a-slave-state gaffe in 2006 was a similar case of his trying to duck the neo-Confederate issue by being humorous, or if it was a line he's been using for years to signal that he agreed with segregationists on some things like court-ordered busing for desegregating schools. Either way, it's a reminder of how broadly Lost Cause talking points have affected the US political vocabulary.
Lucian Truscotto IV in Slow motion civil warSalon 11/17/2019 draws on Confederate symbolism and uses it as negative in today's context, not as favorable and not in the sense of glorifying the Confederacy.
He recalls Trump's response to the infamous demonstrations of "white supremacists, neo-nazis, neo-confederates, white nationalists, and neo-fascists" in Charlottesville August 2017 in which Heather Heyer was murdered by a radical white extremist:
Later the day she died, President Trump went before the cameras at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and said, "We all must be united and condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let's come together as one!" Responding to a question, he went on to say, "we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides." He was roundly criticized that day and the next for blaming the violence that caused multiple injuries and the death of Heather Heyer on “many sides.”
Responding to the criticism three days later, Trump addressed the media at Trump Tower and repeated his claim that there was “blame on both sides.” Responding to another question, Trump asserted, "Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.” He went on to criticize the movement to take down Confederate statues as “an attempt to change history,” and criticized “the very, very violent alt-left.” He went on to defend the protest by the alt-right in Charlottesville by saying “there were very fine people on both sides.”
...
At a rally in Phoenix, Arizona a week later, Trump defended his statements at the Trump Tower press conference and again criticized the movement to take down Confederate statues. “They're trying to take away our culture, they're trying to take away our history,” Trump said. “And our weak leaders, they do it overnight.” ...
It was crystal clear who “our” refers to, crystal clear why Trump felt compelled to note that “not all” of the demonstrators in Charlottesville were “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists.” He stood with those defending the celebration of the Confederacy with statues of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. ”Our” people are white people. [my emphasis]
More particularly, white people who honor the images and symbols and the white supremacist cause of the Confederacy.
Truscotto goes on to describe some the acts of white supremacist violence in the US in the Age of Trump. and otes that Trump "he is their Jefferson Davis."
I have reservations about using "civil war" to describe our current level of far right terrorism, as Truscotto does. But he's right to understand it as very much in the spirit of the Confederate revolt of the 19th century.
Carl Weinberg provided an example several years ago of using Virginia Confederate History Month proclamations to debunk the Lost Cause narrative behind them: The Strange Career of Confederate History MonthOAH Magazine of History 25:2 April 2011. The "history" month was April, Confederate Heritage Month by another name.
This particular incident has to do with the 2010 proclamation. "Republican Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell issued a Confederate
History Month proclamation that omitted any mention of slavery. Less than a week later and after many protests, McDonnell reissued a new text that prominently included slavery."
A key part of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistorical account is to deny or minimize the role of slavery as the cause of the war. The revised version of the 2010 proclamation, included as a sidebar in the article, opened with, "WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse." Weinberg takes off from that passage to provide this helpful dose of real history:
For one thing, there were 500,000 enslaved "people" in Virginia at the time who were legally considered property and could not have taken part in this decision. Further, the [1861] Virginia Ordinance of Secession makes it plain - by reference to "the oppression of the Southern slaveholding states" - that slavery was, once again, the key.
But even if we acknowledge that the Virginia Secession Convention voted to leave the Union on April 17, 1861, the white "people" of Virginia were hardly of one mind on this point. When voting on delegates to that convention took place two months earlier on February 4-the very day that the new Confederate government was seated in Montgomery, Alabama-a majority voted for men known to be against secession. This sentiment was especially strong west of the Blue Ridge mountains, where it prevailed by a five-to-one margin. Once assembled in Richmond February 13, pro-secession delegates failed to win a majority. Meanwhile, western delegates denounced taxation policies (partial exemptions on slaves) and political representation policies (the state version of the 3/5 clause) that favored slaveholders, who were more numerous in the eastern Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Only the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers broke the two-month deadlock. Despite the outbreak of war, western Virginia leaders emerged from the convention determined to stay in the Union. At a convention in June in the western city of Wheeling, they renounced secession and formed a new rival state government. Two years later, after much maneuvering, and under the condition that the gradual abolition of slavery be included in its new constitution, the state of West Virginia was admitted to the Union. They had seceded from the secessionists. [my emphasis]
Another clause of the revised proclamation states that slavery was the cause of the war:
"WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Vrrginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history ..."
But another clause picks up parts of the Lost Cause narrative:
WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace, following the instruction of General Robert E. Lee of Virginia, who wrote that, "... all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace."
It is a stock piece of the neo-Confederate case that the South lost because they were just crushed by the sheer numbers of the Union forces. This diverts attention from mistakes and problems of the Confederate generals and state governments, as well as from factors like the undermining of the Confederate economy by mass desertions of slaves from plantations after the Emancipatio Proclamation. It also frames the Confederate loss as an inevitable tragedy, rather than a disaster created by the fanaticism, greed, and treason of the planter class and their supporters in mounting a armed revolt against the Union.
That latter clause also perpetuates the unhistorical image of Robert E. Lee as a patriotic, benevolent figure after the war. Lee did urge reconcilation, which for conservative Southern whites meant reconcilation between Northern and Southrn white people at the expense of the freedom and well-being of black citizens.
Historian Kevin Levin has a long-running blog called Civil War Memory where he regularly engages with issues related to Lost Cause ideology. He is particularly known for his systematic debunking of the neo-Confederate myth of black Confederate soldiers.
I really enjoyed the focus last night on DuBois, whose *Black Reconstruction in America* (1935) was decades ahead of its time. Here is a blog post I wrote some time ago to help place his book and textbooks today in historical context. https://t.co/miS2lJDVIo#ReconstructionPBS
In his 2017 post, he recommends teachers to use the selections from history books included by W.E.B. DuBois in his Reconstruction book:
Students will likely be surprised by many of the historical claims made in these textbooks. Start by making sure they have some understanding of Jim Crow culture in the 1930s. From there, ask your students to do the following:
List some of the most significant differences with how their own sources interpret Reconstruction.
Ask students to consider the roles that African Americans performed both during the Civil War as soldiers and activists and as politicians throughout Reconstruction.
Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s.
Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s. To what extent did this history serve to justify the political and racial oppression during the Jim Crow Era[?]
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 FlagNew 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.
Lee is pretty much in open neo-Confederate mode here. It's hard to see how this can be understood as other than a threat and encouragement to violence by the Radical Right in pursuit of their goals.
