The Ol' Bloviator has felt much like a meteorologist in hurricane
season ever since last month's horror in Charlottesville, and is still
suffering the aftereffects of what he can only describe as "Sudden Onset
Relevance Syndrome," triggered by an unaccustomed spike in interest in his
opinion among members of the Fourth Estate. Bombarded with requests for
interviews and commentary on this monument mess, he has been pushed to the
brink of exhaustion by a steady procession of demands requiring his mouth or
keyboard to operate in sync with the erratic discharges of his alcohol-ravaged
synapses. The O.B. has been talking to reporters on a fairly regular basis over
the last 30 years or so, but the last few weeks have truly challenged his
capacity for saying the same thing again and again while trying to make it
sound original each time. He will say,
however, that his most recent journalistic encounters have in the main been
both rewarding and stimulating. A case in point is this interview with the
folks from the weekend version of NPR's "All Things Considered,"
where both his interrogator and the producer were kind enough to give him
enough time to connect a few of his thoughts into a commentary that a generous
sort might even deem semi-coherent. It was a bit of a different story in that
respect with the folks over in London at the Financial
Times, (Warning: Likely Pay-walled.) but if some 150 of the precious
words out of the submitted piece that follows wound up on the proverbial
cutting room floor, it must at least be said that they were excised as smartly
and skillfully as any of the O.B.'s many bon mots that have met with the same
fate. (The caption, on the other hand, reinforces the O.B.'s longstanding
perception that the task of writing these is invariably assigned to the biggest
dimwit on staff.)
"Although the implications of the recent tragedy in Charlottesville Virginia are clearly national in scope, it played out on a stage set by the historic insistence of generations of white Southerners on defining themselves by a defeat visited on their ancestors more than 150 years ago. Historian Carlton J. H. Hayes could have cited the example of the American South as those of Spain and Serbia when he observed that "a people may be more united and nationalistic through grief over defeat than through celebration of triumph."
Even before 1860s drew to a close, former
Confederate president Jefferson Davis and other high-ranking military leaders
began to assemble an arsenal of historical documents "from which the
defenders of our cause may draw any desired weapon." The carefully
cultivated reverence for the valorous defenders of the South's" Lost Cause"
ultimately made its biggest impact not in writing but the tidal wave of
physical representations of Confederate heroes which swept across the South
between roughly 1890 and 1910. Inscriptions on these monuments lauded the brave
guardians of "Anglo-Saxon," (i.e., "white') civilization in a period marked as well by the rise of legally mandated racial
segregation and the political disenfranchisement of all but a tiny fraction of the southern black
population. Not coincidentally, these years also witnessed the lynchings of
approximately 2,000 black people, for the campaigns to strip away the civil
rights of black southerners were fueled by highly incendiary racial
scapegoating, some of it by staunch advocates of plastering the landscape with Confederate
memorials
. Meanwhile,
measures like poll taxes or a literacy requirements for voting were critical
not only in restoring white supremacy
but in determining which whites would be supreme because these suffrage
restrictions sharply curtailed political participation by both poor whites as
well as blacks, the two groups most likely to vote against the conservative
Democratic establishment. In the wake of
disfranchisement, Republican turnout in South Carolina fell from 28% in 1880 to
just 3% in 1896. Similar figures from other states suggest that the so-called
solidly Democratic, white supremacist South was not born but made, and, if so, Lost
Cause monuments and mythology were among the critical construction materials. They are rightly condemned for their
connection to slavery, which, Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens
called the veritable "cornerstone" of the new nation, but such a narrow focus does
not do full justice to their pernicious importance to efforts to re-subjugate
black Southerners as comprehensively as the rest of the nation would allow.
Sadly, that turned out to be quite a lot, as
northern politicians quickly lost their stomach for efforts to aid and protect
the former slaves in the face of surging interest in exploiting the investment
potential of a rebuilding region now intent on rapid economic modernization. The
northern push for "reconciliation" entailed not only foreswearing
further interference in southern racial affairs, but swallowing the Lost Cause
propaganda package at a single gulp. Both requirements registered as faits accompli in
an 1890 New York Times report on the unveiling of a statue of Robert E.
Lee in Richmond, which declared that just as Lee's memory truly belonged to
"the American people," the monument was "itself a national possession." Noting a profusion of Confederate battle
flags at the ceremonies an elderly black man seized on the true meaning of the
occasion for him when he exclaimed "The Southern white folks is on top!"
Surprisingly, the flag's widespread
association with avowedly white supremacist organizations emerged only in the
mid-1940s when rising trepidation that the destabilizing forces unloosed by
World War II might undermine the entire Jim Crow system. The Confederate banner
was both more emotive and much easier to hoist at a cross-burning than a bust
of Stonewall Jackson, and it quickly became a fixture at rallies and marches,
not only of the Ku Klux Klan, but a variety of postwar neo-Nazi hate groups,
not mention a succession of fire-breathing segregationist politicians.
Despite the
Confederate flag's highly visible presence at the most appalling scenes of
violence and bigotry that erupted in the 1960s and not infrequently thereafter,
many white Southerners clung desperately to the idea that it actually symbolized
"heritage not hate." Ultimately, it would take the 2015 slaying of
nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by a young, Confederate
flag-obsessed white man to shatter this long-implausible argument. The various
furlings of the Rebel banner in the immediate aftermath of this atrocity
augured a similar fate for their bronze and concrete counterparts, at least ten
of which have been stripped of their prominent perches in the southern and
border-South states in 2017 alone.
If there is anything affirmative to be salvaged from the wreckage
of Charlottesville, it is that in descending on the city from all over the
country and moving on to such far-flung locales as Boston and Berkeley, the
rampaging alt-Right hordes may have finally vanquished the wishful notion that
racial hostility in America bears the the imprimatur of a single region. At
this juncture, certainly, the incalculable harm done by white Southerners and
who persisted in trying to separate "heritage" from "hate,"
leaves us only to tremble at the prospect of four years under a President who
seldom bothers even to make the attempt."
Despite all the vitriol elicited by conflicts over these
monuments, the O.B. has had but little flung at him-- on this side of the pond,
at least. On the other hand, the more than 200 comments affixed to the
foregoing piece online, indicate that he has thrown a good number of the devoted
readers of the FT into a state of high dudgeon. The trio that follow represent
some of the O.B's favorites among many excellent examples of the fine art of
disparagement. If there is any solace to be taken from such a mass of opinions
masquerading as fact, it could be that, as a group, the Brits are almost as
ignorant of American history as Americans are.
"The best
comments I have seen, and there have been many good ones, are those that
address surprise that the FT would publish an article like this, not only
incendiary but ignorant of the American south even at a basic level."
"Don't know
if the author ever lived in the American south but I expect not."
[And the O.B.'s personal
favorite:]
"Apparently
this guy actually wrote a book about the South. Imagine the poor sods who end
up reading it."
