Confederate "Heritage" Month April 27: A contemporary conservative Mississippi view of race

This post is about an article that doesn't look on its face like it has anything to do directly with the Civil War or Reconstruction. But once you start looking at it, Lost Cause ideology and pseudohistory are just dripping from it. It also shows how the habit of rewriting history became almost second-nature for white Southerners. The fable of the Lost Cause, with all the fuzzy headed-thinking and routine dishonesty that went with it, was one big way that the lesson was conveyed from one generation to the next. The article is, The past is not dead by Wyatt Emmerich Daily Times Leader (West Point MS) 12/09/04. Emmerich is the publisher of the Jackson Northside Sun weekly.

The title, by the way, refers to a famous passage from one of William Faulkner's books, which Emmerich even has the gall to quote in the last paragraph. That especially called my attention to this article, because unfortunately it's stock "Southern moderate" talk, and he tried to dress it up with a quotation from Faulkner. I just don't like to see people misuse Scripture that way. That's even worse than misusing Old Hickory's memory! (And, yes, I consider Faulkner's works part of the canon.)

The article is about a meeting of something called the LQC Lamar Society. I mentioned in an earlier post in this series that I regard LQC Lamar, a "Redeemer" post-Reconstruction political leader and Senator from Mississippi, as one of the least admirable characters in American history. He pretended in the North to be a conciliator between the (white people of) North and South. In Mississippi, he was a hardline racist, like all the "Redeemers" were.

I don't know if it was a reflection of how much the Lost Cause notions permeated the consciousness even of people who really should have known better, or whether it was a calculated Machiavellian notion. But the LQC Lamar Society was apparently set up during the segregation era and the civil rights movement so that Southerners who favored having the American form of democracy in the Deep South states could get their message across to whites.

So Emmerich attended an LQC Lamar Society event recalling the civil rights movement and the end of segregation. The keynote speaker was former Governor William Winter, the best governor Mississippi ever had after Adelbert Ames, the Reconstruction-era Republicans governors who was run out of the state by the "Redeemers." Winter is currently the grand old man of the Mississippi Democratic Party. And he's a real Democrat, of the kind that Andy Jackson would be proud to be in the same room with. The fact that LQC Lamar would have met the same kind of reception from the General as, say, Dick Cheney or Rummy is just one of those weird relics of Mississippi history.

So there's a tangled Lost Cause theme in even trying to explain the name of that group. Here's Emmerich's description of that wretched Lamar:

Lamar drafted Mississippi's secession ordinance in 1860. He later served as a lieutenant colonel for the Confederate States of America. After the war, he accepted defeat and delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history, calling on the South and North to bury their grievances and build a new country. He later served as a United States Senator, a U. S. Supreme Court Justice and U. S. Secretary for the Interior.

Here is how historian Richard Nelson Current describes the honorable gentleman Lamar's role in 1875, when Governor Ames was desperately trying to save democratic government in the state in the face of determined terrorist attempts to overthrow it by force and violence. From Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988):

[Various compromise measure agreed to by Gov. Ames and the Republicans] did nothing to appease the Democrats. They were infuriated by other legislation that Ames secured - a law authorizing him to reorganize the militia and to purchase rapid-fire, multiple barrel Catling guns - which they denounced as the "Gatling Gun Bill." The anti-Republican Brandon Republican [newspaper] advised "Mr. Adelbert Ames to pack his carpet bag and take his wife and babies to Massachusetts before he issues an order to his 'melish' to turn his Gatling guns on the white people of Mississippi." Regarding Ames and his prospective "negro regiments," the Mississippi congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar wrote to his own wife: "He will get them killed up, and then Grant will take possession for him." Lamar was to mastermind the strategy by which the Democrats, having learned their lesson from events in Vicksburg, would get enough blacks killed to carry the state election in the fall - and would do it in such a way as to keep Grant from taking possession for Ames.'' (my emphasis)

And this guy was remembered as a moderate! He only supported overthrowing democracy with violence and murder in a moderate way, you see. I could do a whole month of posts easily on Lamar's brand of Southern "moderates." For a reality check, Ames tried to raise a state militia consisting of both black and white citizens, not "negro regiments." Again, the old fear of "servile insurrection" pops up.

For what it's worth, Adelbert Ames for me ranks second only to Lincoln among the greatest Republicans of history. Running him out of the state was one of the most self-destructive things that Mississippi whites ever did.

Later that year, Lamar toured Mississippi with the former head of the Ku Klux Klan of Georgia. In a telegraph to President Grant, Ames observed, "The language they use is not of itself violent, but the conclusions they reach are that this election must be carried [by the Klan Democrats], even if violence be resorted to." Current wrote:

Lamar, now [1876] Alcorn's successor in the Senate, enjoyed throughout the North a reputation as the foremost Southern advocate of reconciliation between the sections and between the races. He was remembered for the eloquence of his eulogy of Charles Sumner after Sumner's death. "No; Lamar makes very different speeches in Mississippi from those he delivers for the Northern market," Ames replied to the newsman's query. "He made the most vituperative speeches during the last campaign, and he owes his election as United States Senator to that fact. He explained away his eulogy to Sumner as being a political necessity - to give the South a hearing in the North."

Current also explicitly addresses John Kennedy's dreadfully wrong assessment of Lamar:

When the prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956) came to their attention, Ames's daughters were understandably upset. This book, bearing on the title page the name of John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator from Massachusetts, lauded the Mississippi white-supremacist L. Q. C. Lamar as one of its exemplars of statesmanly courage. In doing so, it slurred Adelbert Ames. "No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi," the book asserted, and it exhumed the stale canard about "the extravagances of the reconstruction government" with its "heavy" state debt. By implication, Governor Ames was to blame. Ames's daughters protested repeatedly to Senator (and later President) Kennedy and to his special counsel, Theodore C. Sorensen. They got only evasive replies. No correction was ever made in any of the successive reissues of the Sorensen-Kennedy book.

No, it wasn't only Southerners who would seduced by the Lost Cause hokum. Kennedy learned an awful lot about Southern segregationists and their lying double-talk during his Presidency. Had he not been killed, there's good reason to think his later writing about the Reconstruction period would have reflected a very different viewpoint.

Back to the present and Emmerich's article. He claims to have been a long-time admirer of Winter's, although the rest of his article hardly seems consistent with that. He talks about attending a party after the speeches where an older lady, one of those hardcore Mississippi Democrats I appreciate so much, came over and scolded him, saying, "You put out a right-wing paper." Emmerich doesn't dispute the description, but sidesteps in paragraph quoted below.

Here are Emmerich's concluding paragraphs, picking up on the comment from the lady at the party, who had mentioned that his grandfather was "progressive":

I didn't know school pictures had one wing or the other, but her point was wrong anyway. My grandfather, Oliver Emmerich, was a Reagan Republican. He just didn't believe in subjugating blacks. Therefore, he was assumed to be liberal in all other matters. Indeed, back then everything was race and the battle. There was such a sense of purpose and camaraderie. The race issue defined the politics of all those who lived through it.

But I didn't live through it and my politics are not defined by it. There was a classic moment when Leroy Clemmons, head of the Neshoba County NAACP, told the crowd to lighten up and stop the gloom and doom. Clemmons, who is my age, said his grown children don't think racially and view the NAACP as somewhat racist. Ah, yes, as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead. It's not even past. To be sure, as Gov. Winter said, we must get over the problem of racial 'nuances.' We are far from a color-blind society. Let's just not forget the huge gap between nuance and dynamite, and what great progress that gap underscores.

Now, I don't know anything about Emmerich's grandfather. But I have a pretty hard time swallowing the idea that anyone who would have identified themselves as a "Reagan Republican" in the 1980s had any sympathy at all for the civil rights movement at that point in their lives. Especially in Mississippi. It fact, it's darn near unimaginable. People do change their perspectives on things. But what this article asks us to believe is that a guy who was hardline conservative in his politics was also somehow sympathetic tothe civil rights movement and to protecting minority rights.

Again, I don't know the particulars. But how many times in my life have I heard whites who were adults in the 1950s and 1960s described as never mistreating blacks, always treated them fairly, yadda, yadda. If all the whites who are described as being so eminently fair-minded really were like that, then you would pretty much have to assume that segregation never existed. Heck, maybe all the slaves really were happy and content and loyal to their masters. In fact, I was talking about this the other day with my friend from the Pleiades...

Given how Emmerich framed his article, I suspect his statement, "We are far from a color-blind society," is just conservative code-speak. For some reason, many Republicans today are fixated on making some kind of mirror-image arguments to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. So conservative critics of affirmative action - which was orginally put in place in the form we know it today by the Nixon administration as a conservative, pro-business way of enforcing anti-discrimination laws - like to say they want a "color-blind" society, meaning they want to get rid of all this affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws. If everyone is "color-blind," you see, then when a company has 900 qualified minority applicants and 100 white applicants for 50 jobs, and they hire 50 whites, no one should criticize them for that, because if we're "color-blind" we won't notice the races of the job applicants.

I have a hard time with this kind of doubletalk. But it seems to be chronic among today's conservative Republicans. And, in part, that a legacy of the dishonest manipulation of history that the Lost Cause dogma represents.

(See the Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month post 2005 for links to all this year's posts.)

Update:

The NAACP is racist? I guess if you think FOX News is real news, that Rush Limbaugh is a national treasure and that Clarence Thomas is a brilliant legal thinker, you could convince yourself that the NAACP is a "racist" organization. But this a classic rightwing practice: try to find some black person to quote what would sound extreme coming from a white person. Emmerich didn't mention whether he had asked that speaker about space aliens visiting from the Pleiades. But I should note that Emmerich doesn't quote Leroy Clemmons directly, so he may have been saying something entirely different about his kids' attitudes. My point is more what he chose to highlight in his article.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2005