The Dark and Bloody Ground of Neo-Confederate Mythology

There is an extraordinary back-and-forth in Commentary’s “Contentions” between military historian Max Boot—who, though a conservative, admits to a lifelong aversion to riding up and down Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia—and defenders of “Southern heritage” who think otherwise, though many agree the Confederate battle flag must be removed from public places of honor.

I was stunned that anybody in this country really cared that passionately any longer about history. I still doubt that today’s younger generation, with tenuous family roots and personal identities no deeper than their Facebook pages, still do.

What we have here is the last or “in extremis” stage of the Neo-Confederate (not Neocon!) movement that traces back to the post-World War II backlash against the origins of the civil rights movement, to Southern massive resistance to integration during the 1950s and 1960s, to the “Emerging Republican Majority” thesis of Kevin Phillips, and to Pat Buchanan’s and Lee Atwater’s “Southern Strategy” for politically exploiting it.

Less well-known, at least in Jewish circles, is the cultural-intellectual dimension of this movement: a neo-Confederate revival that has become a cottage industry. I mean a ton of books arguing that that Johnny Rebs were not racist or at least no more racist than the Billy Yanks, that secession was really about Southern states rights constitutionalism and Northern “economic aggression” rather than about slavery, and that Lincoln was a “dictator” and no great liberal statesman. See, for example, James W. Loewen’s and Edward H. Sebasta’s The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010). The neo-Confederates are right at least to the extent that Lincoln (who suspended habeas corpus during the war) was willing to whatever it took (though no more than it took) to save the Union. They are also right that simple moral double entry bookkeeping doesn’t explain Southerners (like Robert E. Lee) who were personally opposed to slavery yet fought for the South, or Northern War Democrats from the Upper South who owned slaves yet fought for the Union.

The problem is the Neo-Confederate or “Southern heritage” revival of recent decades is more rooted in politics than culture. Though the Democrats had their own Southern strategy (electing both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton), it was conservative Republican politicians, some opportunistically, some sincerely,who were primarily responsible for exploiting the Southern mystique for partisan advantage during the Nixon-Reagan era. This for a while worked politically, but now we—and white Southerners—know that the whole thing was built on sand, a sort of Potemkin’s village that’s imploding hut by hut from reverberations of Dylann Root’s Charleston Church massacre. Root’s white supremacist Gotterdammerung was rooted in cyberage white supremacism, but also has an anti-Semitic flavor (he viewed Jews as “traitors” to the white race). Morally, there wasn’t enough “there there” (to borrow a phrase from Gertrude Stein) in the Southern heritage movement to sustain it. Despite the froth of books, it was intellectually more shallow than the politically less significant “Agrarian Movement” of Southern novelists and poets like Allen Tate from the 1930s to the 1950s.

To rephrase, “Southern heritage”—a lucrative tourist attraction from New Orleans to Charleston—is collapsing like a house of cards in response to a hurricane that is part justified moral outrage and part leftist media hype against stereotyped primitive southern whites right out of the movie Deliverance. Wal-Mart and Amazon may continue to sell Nazi memorabilia or board games, but regarding Confederatiana they have already joined the chorus to “The Night They Drove Dixie Down.”

The possibly politically incorrect thought occurs to me that white Southerners have something in common with the Palestinians whom Abba Eban said “never miss a chance to miss a chance.” In 1860, despite Lincoln’s election, the Slave South enjoyed a veto power in national politics that would have kept slavery alive within the Union indefinitely. Yet they bet on secession and the establishment of a slave Empire stretching from California to the Caribbean—and they lost. After World War II, they again had the opportunity to make their own peace with the civil rights movement which, as Reverend King shows, was at least as much Southern as they were. Instead, they chose massive resistance and then Southern cultural mystifications—and now, stripped of any pretense of moral authenticity—they are taking the cultural and political hit. Not only Confederate monuments, but even Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup and Uncle Ben’s rice may not survive in a de-Southernized national consumer culture.

Historically, I oversimplify in one respect. As David Blight shows in Race and Reunion (2002), cultural Southernism has pre-Civil War roots, but its real flowering was postwar as white Southerners rechanneled their sense of military prowess and regional pride into the national conversation. They gave their blood to fight on America’s overseas battlefields, from the Spanish American War to Vietnam. Yet they demanded as the price of regional reconciliation the acceptance of Neo-Confederate racist mythology. Hollywood was happy to pay in films ranging from the hard-core hate of Birth of a Nation (1915) to the soft-core prejudice of Gone With the Wind (1939).

Of course, Hollywood’s Jewish moguls have been arraigned at the bar of post hoc historical tribunals for these travesties, though D. W. Griffith, maker of Birth of a Nation, was every bit as much a Christian and a Southerner as Reverend King.