Sunday, April 01, 2018

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 1: The continuing power of neo-Confederate symbolism

I started doing an anti-neo-Confederate daily series of posts during April, back in 2004, the first April after I started blogging. This year makes the 15th year I've been doing it. Neo-Confederate groups promote April as Confederate Heritage Month and it has often been officially proclaimed in some states as Confederate Heritage Month. In Texas, for instance, the state legislature in 1999 established it as a recurring designation. (Bryan Register, Texas perpetuates myths with Confederate Heritage Month Austin-American Statesman 03/29-30/2018)

The neo-Confederate ideology and its public symbols, like the Confederate battle flag and statues honoring Confederate leaders who betrayed the United States by engaging in an armed revolt to defend and extend human slavery, have been actively contested in many places over the last year. Most notably and tragically in Charlottesville in August 2017, where neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in support of a statue of Robert E. Lee chanting, among other things, "Blood and Soil" (one of the most famous German Nazi slogans, "Blut und Boden) and "Jews Will Not Replace Us." That incident ended, of course, with the murder of Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other counter-protesters by one of the pro-Confederate protesters showing his Honor and Courage by ramming his car into a crowd. (Joe Heim, Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death Washington Post 08/14/2017)

This post from the SPLC explains more about the context of the kind of people who were celebrating the memory of Robert E. Lee there: Alleged Charlottesville Driver Who Killed One Rallied With Alt-Right Vanguard America Group 08/12/2018.

President Trump infamously defended the neo-Confederates in Charlottesville (Rosie Gray, Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides' The Atlantic 08/15/2018):
Speaking in the lobby of Trump Tower at what had been billed as a statement on infrastructure, a combative Trump defended his slowness to condemn white nationalists and neo-Nazis after the melee in central Virginia, which ended in the death of one woman and injuries to dozens of others, and compared the tearing down of Confederate monuments to the hypothetical removal of monuments to the Founding Fathers. He also said that counter-protesters deserve an equal amount of blame for the violence.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” he said.

“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

“You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he said.
Despite the weasel-words ("I’ve condemned neo-Nazis"), Trump was clearly defending the neo-Confederates and their ideology, and refraining from a straightforward condemnation of their violence and anti-Semitism or the Nazi slogans they were chanting.

This story shows in a vivid way the role that symbolism and the narratives attached to them can play in current politics. I've wondered to what extent Trump's identifying himself with Nazis, or at least refused to unequivocally condemn them and the murder associated with their demonstration, has contributed to his unpopularity among everyone but his hardcore 35%. Because Americans have seen an endless series of movies, TV programs, documentaries, articles, and pictures in which the German Nazis are depicted as Evil Incarnate. If any symbolism is identified in America as a symbol of Evil, it would be the swastika and other images particularly associated with the Nazis.

There's a bit of a perverse kind of internationalism in neo-Nazis choosing a Confederate symbol as a rallying point and even a motive for murder. In Germany and Austria and some other European countries, overt Nazi symbolism is illegal to display publicly. So at least by the early 1990s and probably earlier, the Confederate battle flag was used by rightwing extremists as substitutes for the swastika. I remember in the 1990s visiting in the German tourist area of the Spanish island of Mallorca and seeing a door of what appeared to be a shop that had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. I knew immediately it was a symbol of far-right politics.

Facts matter. And the neo-Confederate ideology is a significant kind of pseudohistory in the United States. It originated with post-Civil War efforts by Southern planters and white leaders to minimize the seriousness of the Confederate rebellion and specifically to dissociate it from the cause of slavery. Northern whites disliked slavery prior to the war, and many hated it. Some supported it. But white supremacy was pervasive in the North as well as the South, though clearly in a more intense, toxic, and treasonous form in the Confederate states. Even intense opposition to slavery could and did co-exist with white racism against blacks.

By the end of the Civil War, not only had the consequences of slavery proved to be excessively deadly and destructive to white people. But many soldiers from the North had seen slavery and slave plantations and fugitive slaves live and in person. So the prewar justifications of slavery as benevolent and necessary had been effectively completely discredited in the North. Anti-Reconstruction white Southerners recognized that they needed to distance themselves from the cause of slavery in order to have any effective credibility even among Northern conservatives.

The revisionist narrative of the history of slavery began immediately after the war and soon acquired the lable "Lost Cause." Historian Caroline Janney writes (The Lost Cause Encyclopedia Virginia 1999):
The term "Lost Cause" is not a product of today's historians; rather, it appears to have been coined by Edward A. Pollard, an influential wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner. In 1866 Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting the popular use of the term.
Today, "Lost Cause" and "neo-Confederate" can be used interchangeably to describe the same apologetic view of the Civil War and the white supremacist ideology and narrative that was always an integral part of it.

Janney summarizes the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of Civil War history as based on six claims:

  1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
  2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
  3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
  4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
  5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
  6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

Neo-Confederacy incorporates the Lost Cause view of history but is a broader ideology. The SPLC describes the Lost Cause narrative this way (Neo-Confederate n/d, accessed 03/31/2018):
The term “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” refers to a collection of political and historical myths that form the bedrock of many notable neo-Confederate slogans. “Heritage not hate” and “states’ rights” have shared roots in the post-Reconstruction effort to revise the indisputable fact of why the South seceded from the union in the 1860s: slavery.
They define neo-Confederacy this way:
“Neo-Confederacy” refers to a reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession — in the specific context of the antebellum South — which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile toward democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy.

An overall conservative ideology, neo-Confederacy has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.

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, neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like 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 article goes on to note that the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of history is still influential well beyond the circle of those who would identify with it so closely as groups like the CCC or the SCV. When thinking about groups involved in promoting that worldview, it's important to remember that sectarianism is rampant on the far right and is fought out over slogans and issues that may seem indistinguishable to those not following them closely.

I've generally tried to focus on debunking the pseudohistory aspect of the neo-Confederate narrative in these posts. One recent book I'll be discussing this year is From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) by Forrest Nabors, which looks at the ways in which the slavery system, known to opponents at the time as the Slave Power, was perceived by Americans as being in opposition to the basic republican form of government established by the American Revolution and the Constitution. The only Americans who enjoyed full citizenship included voting rights in 1860 were, of course, essentially white men, though free blacks, women, and even slaves were making their demands for citizenship and equality in very significant ways.

Nabors in his Introduction defines the project of his book:
The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. [my emphasis]
Slavery was at the center of the controversies that led to the Civil War. But in early America and antebellum times, that conflict manifested itself in particular ways and the understanding of it by slaveowners and their opponents evolved from existing understandings of the country and the American political community. Understanding that share a lot with the understandings of 1865 and even 2018. But our time is also separated from there's by radical transformations.

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