"What the American public always wants is tragedy with a happy ending." William Dean Howells
David Blight, Yale Professor of history and American Civil War scholar, in his lecture about Civil War Legacies talks about the 1900 Blue-Grey reunion in Atlanta:
Every Confederate veterans' organization had its textbook committee, and many Union veterans' posts and organizations had their textbook committee. They were competing with one another to control the story in America's textbooks and trying to lobby and control publishers. Anyway, Commander Shaw was a little exercised about this, and he said [in addressing the soldiers who had come to the reunion], among other things, . . . "Keeping alive sectional teachings as to the justice and rights of the cause of the South, in the hearts of your children, is all out of order. It is unwise and unjust." Uh huh.
The Commander of the United Confederate Veterans was none other than John B. Gordon. John B. Gordon had been a Confederate General. John B. Gordon was the Confederate General in charge of the stacking of the arms and the surrender at Appomattox. John B. Gordon then went on to get elected Governor and then Senator from Georgia during Reconstruction. He was also one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he lied through his teeth in the KKK Hearings of 1871 about it. But John B. Gordon, by the 1890s, became one of the most ubiquitous and popular Confederate Memorial Day speakers. And he was good at it. He got up to respond to Commander Shaw--and this is a final passage in what he said. John B. Gordon, 1900, head of the UCV, United Confederate Veterans. "When he tells me and my Southern comrades that teaching our children that the cause for which we fought and our comrades died is all wrong, I must earnestly protest. In the name of the future manhood of the South I protest. What are we to teach them? If we cannot teach them that their fathers were right, it follows that these Southern children must be taught that they were wrong. I never will be ready to have my children taught that I was ever wrong, or that the cause of my people was unjust and unholy. Oh my friends, you were right, but we were right too."
Everybody was right, nobody was wrong, in a war that killed 620,000 people and maimed about 1.2 million, and transformed the society. But no one was wrong. In fact, by the 1890s, as it is still today, it became very popular to be a Confederate veteran.
The thrust of Blight's lecture (and his longer study Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory) is to show how in the nation's desire for North and South to be reconciled after the bloodiest war in U.S. history, both North and South went into denial about the real issue that brought on the war--slavery--and its modified continuation in the Jim Crow laws, which were well in place by 1900. Shaw was being very rude to suggest the Confederacy was wrong, and would have been thought so by both blues and grays in the audience, because the narrative promoted by the Klansman Gordon had been by then broadly accepted by northerners. The perceptions of African-Americans were not relevant--they were expected to suffer in silence so white Americans could bury their animosities. If the price to be paid for the "union" was northern assent to the continued institutional oppression of black Americans, so be it.
Think about the post-war difference between southern supporters of the Confederacy and German supporters of Nazism after their respective wars. Most Germans had the decency to feel ashamed about what had been done by their power elite; but southerners after the Civil War instead celebrated the Confederacy and its mad ideology, saw it as something noble. The Confederate cause was never, ever noble. It defies common sense and common decency to even entertain the idea. Southerners confused true nobility with honor, an idea I tried to debunk in this post a few weeks ago.
The primitive honor impulse is driven by the need to be thought well of, and I think that the argument could be made that the southern elites' primitive sense of honor played a significant psychological role in shaping their motives for secession. If the North could not see the inherent nobility of the Southern way of life and give the southern elites the respect they were due, then the South's sense of honor required that there be no association with Northerners. In other words, the southern elite in its self-absorbed fantasy about itself could only relate to other people who participated in its fantasy. These elites knew deep down that history was not on their side, and they developed a bunker mentality in which they were prepared to fight to the death to prevent anyone from bursting the nobility bubble in which was their self-reinforcing delusion.
Whatever the complexity of motives for individuals who supported the confederacy might be, the fundamental rationale for the Confederacy and the choice of its member states to secede was not noble; it was sordid, delusional, and shameful, because it was driven primarily by the need to preserve its slave economy. This, Blight points out, is what most Americans wanted to forget or go into denial about when it came to the segregated society that took the place of the slave society.
Blight gives another example of how this Lost Cause fantasy became national boilerplate in the decades following the war:
... the Confederate Veteran magazine, which became a very popular magazine in the 1890s and lasted like thirty-five years into the twentieth century, ran this little story in 1894. It reported a story of a Southern woman, a white woman, and her son, attending a production, a theater production in Brooklyn, New York, of the play called Held by the Enemy. And theater productions, plays, about the Civil War, especially with some kind of reconciliationist theme, became wildly popular by the 1890s. The boy, sitting there with his mother, according to the anonymous author, asked his mother, "What did the Yankees fight for, Mother?" And as the orchestra strikes up "Marching Through Georgia," the woman answers, "For the Union, darling." Painful memories, we're told, bring sadness to the mother's face as she hears the Yankee victory song. And then earnestly the boy asks, "What did the Confederates fight for, Mother?" And before the mother can answer, the music changes to "Home Sweet Home," which fills the theater, says the author, with its depth of untold melody and pathos. The mother whispers her answer to her son. "Do you hear what they are playing? That is what Confederates fought for darling." And the boy counters, "Did they fight for their homes?" And with the parent's assurance, the boy bursts into tears, and with what the author calls "the intuition of right," he hugs his mother and announces, "Oh Mother, I will be a Confederate." They just fought for their homes, that's all you needed to know. Now it may be all a mother would want her little boy to know.
That's all they fought for, their homes--not for the preservation of the slave economy. These southerners were just minding their business and these marauders from the North, like the Goths of old, come swooping down to wreak havoc on their peaceable society. I'm not saying the North's motives or tactics were morally unambiguous. There's plenty to criticize about the way the North prosecuted the War [as there is about how the Allies prosecuted WWII], but as with the Allies vs. the Axis, there's no equivalency in moral justification for the North's casus belli compared to the South's. There just isn't, and it's largely because of the widespread acceptance that the South's cause was morally equivalent, that the Confederacy's was a noble, but lost cause, that we find the sick ideologies promulgated by the right wing today acceptable in mainstream discourse. We developed early on a bad collective habit of finding this kind of nonsense acceptable when it's given a patriotic patina, no matter how vicious the crimes committed in the name of that patriotism.
Reconciliation with one's enemies, of course, is a desirable goal, but reconciliation based upon a convenient lie breeds collective insanity. Just as accepting the Lost-Cause narrative should never have been acceptable, neither is the current narrative promoted by Obama and the mainstream media that we shouldn't get into recriminating investigations and prosecutions about torture. "Let's move forward. Let's forgive and forget," they tell us. But you can't forgive people who are proud of the crimes they have committed and the reasons for them. Like the apologists for the confederacy, people like Cheney are proud of what they did, think they did it for the noblest of reasons, that they are right, just as Gordon thought he was right. That cannot stand. If we let it go, it will come back to bite us. It's just common sense.
But when we just shrug our shoulders and let the truth hide behind our delusional effort to be reconciled around a lie, we allow a deep wound to fester. It emits toxins that sicken us and prevent healthful thinking in other areas of our collective life. Our current collective sickness is in so many ways caused by the many ways in which we have collectively allowed ourselves to believe convenient lies in this way, even though deep down we know better. Just as the nation's buying into the Lost-Cause narrative made northerners complicit with and enablers of Jim Crow, we now are equally complicit in and enablers of torture insofar as we shrug our shoulders and say, as the Obama people and the MSM seem to be saying: "Hey, bygones."
We're all too comfortable accepting the lame justifications of Americans who present themselves as noble patriots making difficult controversial choices. But people like Cheney are our contemporary versions of John L. Gordon, criminals who in their fantasy of themselves are noble patriots. We are as a people stupefied to the degree that we consent to live within this delusion. Allowing their crimes to go unindicted sickens the collective soul; it makes us crazy. And we have paid and are paying now and in the future will continue to pay dearly for it.