Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • Confronting Confederate Heritage

    [This post on Confederate legacies has two parts. You can read the second, more comparative one, here.]

    The current proposal to rename U.S. military installations that currently bear the names of Confederate soldiers is long overdue. It comes as a time when many of us are thinking very deeply about how we, as Americans, confront this part of American history. I have no answers.

    Yet I cannot stop thinking about how I, as a white man who grew up in the north, learned about the Confederacy. I will note up front, because it will matter later, that roughly half of my ancestors come from Confederate states (it does not matter which ones). But I have never lived anywhere in the south.

    As a child, I never, ever saw the Confederate flag flown. I never saw it displayed either. I was familiar with it from history books, from visits to Gettysburg, and from my favorite TV show, The Dukes of Hazzard. The General Lee was their cool car, but it never occurred to me to notice the flag or the name, I was more interested in the fact that Bo and Luke entered through the windows. And I know now that that show was basically one big joke, mocking a certain type of southern white.

    There is privilege here, obviously, to be oblivious to what dark historical facts lay behind such cultural touchstones as the General Lee and Boss Hogg. Or to have not really understood what Ole Miss means until I was well into college.*

    There is also privilege to not even think about the names of our U.S. military installations. I did know until yesterday who John Bell Hood was (“I was yesterday years old when…”). I did not know until recently—like, this week—that Fort Bragg or Fort Hood or any of the others were named after Confederate generals. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I never knew. Why would I think about the names of military bases? I’m not in the military, and I’m not curious about base histories or about American Civil War generals.** So I blithely move through my life just not knowing.

    It is good that I think about these things now.

    But still, growing up, I never heard any defense of the Confederacy or “the Southern Cause.” Once a cousin got frustrated with me and called me a Yankee. (Fact check: True.) My extended family has a sort of pride of origin from our “family town” (again, it doesn’t matter where this is). And I identified early on—by junior high—a sort of causal racism both in the south and the north, examples of which I need not provide. I also saw incidents of blatant and overt racism many times, in several northern states. I remember learning in high school about Stone Mountain and being shocked by it. But the Confederacy? No. Never.

    I also have access to family letters from an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy. Those letters mostly detail, in abstract terms, that war is horrible and that it will all be better when the war is over. But they also briefly note the death of an enslaved man owned by that ancestor. I can only assume that that man was forced to support my ancestor in a fight to preserve slavery. When we are talking about chattel slavery, no one “chooses” anything.

    In those letters, my ancestor expresses a kind of remorse or sadness for the death of that enslaved man. One might read this as a recognition of their mutual humanity, but today I read this as even more horrible. My ancestor knew that this was a person, recognized his humanity, and kept him as property anyway. And then he was killed in a war to preserve his enslavement.

    Now I live in a very progressive small college town in the north. And I have seen the Confederate flag more times in the past year than I did in the first thirty years of my life.

    The last time I saw one was about a month ago, when I visited the local Walmart to buy a new battery for a riding mower. The man who helped me pick out the replacement wore a Confederate flag hat. Seeing that hat filled me with disgust. But because I am who I am, because I was wearing an old baseball cap, my lawn-mowing jeans, and my lawn-mowing shirt,*** we transacted our business without comment.

    I wrote above that my emotion was disgust at seeing that Confederate flag hat. But there were other emotions. Sadness, disdain. But also anger. Even rage. Knowing what the Confederacy stood for, the people it killed and the cause it sought to preserve, I cannot even imagine a defense of it. I cannot fathom wanting to display its symbols, although I know what they mean.

    Growing up, I never saw the Confederate flag flown, and I never had cause to think of it. Today, my children do. So they learn something different than I learned. They learn that the Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, flown by a group of people who killed many Americans to support an evil and indefensible cause.

    But of course, as we all know, today it’s more than just that.

    [Read the previous post here.]

    NOTES

    * In my defense, for family history reasons, I identify with Mississippi State and Auburn anyway.

    ** Ask me about the Soviet-era names of Russian cities, though…

    *** This is my lawn-mowing shirt.

  • Does Any Other Country Memorialize Traitors Like America Memorializes Disgraced Confederate Statesmen?

    [This post on Confederate legacies has two parts. You can read the second, more personal one, here.]

    The current proposal to rename U.S. military bases brings to light a troubling and peculiar feature of American politics. It is hard to think of any other country that so publicly memorializes those who killed its own citizens on behalf of a disgraced ideology in open insurrection against the state.

    This point may be brought to light for Americans by stepping back to consider the U.S. as if it were a foreign country. Imagine if you were to study, or to visit, a country that named military bases after disgraced statesmen and defeated generals who had fought a war of insurrection. Imagine if it did so specifically in a former secessionist zone, which also happens to have a distinct social structure and predictable voting patterns. Imagine if those names were associated with a flag which, today, inspired bitter hatred from half the population.

    What would you think? You would almost certainly conclude that this is evidence of a deep historical rift, of conflict lying just below the surface. You would conclude that this was a wound that had not healed, but rather been allowed to fester.

    The full details of this convention of naming military bases after Confederate generals are certainly complex, yet the core issue is not. Naming bases after Confederate soldiers was a practice to “placate disgruntled Southerners“. These politics are understandable, even if they are no excuse for the practice.

    But this makes the U.S. odd. Other countries do not name military bases after traitors and secessionists. You do not see monuments to Kartosuwiryo in Indonesia, to Abdullah Öcalan in Turkey (and if you try…), or Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, or Josu Urrutikoetxea in Spain. Look how China memorializes the traitor Qin Hui.

    You may counter by observing the abundance of monuments to Scottish nationalists in Scotland. And here my point is laid bare. Scotland almost voted to seceded from the UK just six years ago, and may do so again. And I would bet (although I do not know, and may be proven wrong) that not a single unit of the British Army in Scotland is named after (or maintains a barracks named after) a Scottish nationalist. My bet is that it’s “Queen’s This” and “Royal This” and “George That,” all the way down. I would wager the same bet, names adjusted, for any Spanish installations in the Basque Country. It would be interesting to know if there are any exceptions at all.

    The U.S. is certainly not alone in its monuments to disgraced, controversial, or plainly evil men. In Bristol UK, the statue of slaver Edward Colston was recently toppled. Several years back, the University of Cape Town took down a statue of Cecil Rhodes. And in the U.S., Confederate figures are certainly not the only historical figures with troubling histories who are memorialized. We can see this the debates over monuments to Christopher Columbus, and we still have monuments to Custer and the fraught history of Thomas Jefferson. Any country that excavates its history is bound to confront these painful memories.

    But what these cases share is that the figures represent the state’s founding myth, or the established historical narrative. Racist and imperialist views notwithstanding, Cecil Rhodes was neither anti-British nor anti-South African. In this, he resembles Jefferson: a figure of immense historical significance for the contemporary state. And Americans and Britons confront their past, so too do we confront these figures and their role in public life. Jefferson has figured prominently here. So, too, right now, does Rhodes.

    By contrast, Germany does not have monuments to Hitler or other Nazis; Norway has no monument to Quisling; France has no monument to Marshall Petain (it used to, but they are now gone). Monuments to communist leaders in Russia abound, but occupy an odd historical place in Russian memory, because the October Revolution is the founding moment for post-imperial Russia. And note how quickly cities were renamed after communism fell: Leningrad → St. Petersburg, Sverdlovsk → Yekaterinburg, Kuybyshev → Samara.

    I am certain that there are exceptions to counter my claim, and I have an inkling that countries like Italy and South Africa are where to look. It may be that the U.S. is not completely exceptional in its open and public memorialization of traitors and secessionists. But those cases will be in divided societies too, with festering historical wounds that deserve to be healed.

    [Read the follow-up post here.]