A Bad Tradition, and One Barack Obama Should Break

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Edward Sebesta and James Loewen would have increased the chances for a positive response to their Memorial Day request of President Barack Obama had they sent him their May 18 letter a few weeks earlier. The letter, also signed by 62 other historians, scholars and researchers, urges the President to break a 95-year-old tradition dating back to when the racist Woodrow Wilson first laid a commemorative wreathe on the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.  

Without offering Obama a reasonable alternative to sending a wreathe, and by giving him less than a week to ponder an alternative of his own, they essentially were asking him to place himself in the role of scab-yanker on a holiday many Americans across the political spectrum view as a time of healing. Breaking this tradition can and should be done. But the proper foundation must be laid first so that white nationalists, remnant Klansmen and secession-loving neo-Confederate liars cannot turn it into a propaganda coup.

That proper foundation should include honoring Confederate dead in a cemetery where their repose is not poisoned by a monument built as shrine to the goals and ideals of the Rebel cause. Whatever side issues were included, those goals and ideals were constructed upon the “peculiar institution” of slavery, a monstrous institution maintained by violence and the threat of violence, and defended by a philosophy of racism epitomized by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in his infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution – African slavery as it exists amongst us – the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” …

The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. …

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

So what, you might say. That speech was 148 years ago, the Civil War ended 144 years ago with the crushing of slavery, and everyone who fought that war has been dead a half-century or more. Yes, but the violence and the threat of violence against African Americans did not end with the surrender at Appomattox.

Indeed, postwar Confederates espousing the Confederate ideals stated by the Rebel vice president quickly broke the back of Reconstruction, imposed another peculiar institution – the American apartheid called Jim Crow – craftily re-enslaved tens of thousands of blacks and lynched thousands of others for a hundred years after Robert E. Lee offered up his sword.

Today, latter-day Confederates and their white nationalist sympathizers, as Sebesta has pointed out in , continue to distort the record of what some of them still call the War of Northern Aggression, publicly pretend that their racist neo-secessionism is the highest form of patriotism and argue that the cause of their predecessors was just and is now unjustly vilified by biased historians who never speak of the “true” reasons they sought disunion.

What does the Arlington Confederate Memorial have to do with all that? As Sebesta, without whose research neo-Confederate sympathizer Trent Lott might never have been brought down, and Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, explain in their letter to the President, the memorial was built not as a simple eulogy for the Confederate dead but as a shrine to Confederate ideals, including the notion that Reconstruction was a “crime against civilization.” Behind the fund-raising effort to get the monument built was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who saw the Klan and the Red Shirts and White League that succeeded it as heroes for restoring white supremacy.  

As the letter states:

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes.  This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.

Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events.

If this seems a stretch or makes you want to roll your eyes, read the words that Fr. Alister C. Anderson, as Chaplain-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), gave in a lengthy speech at the 85th anniversary of the dedication of the monument 10 years ago:

… It reveals and concentrates in beautiful, rugged bronze nearly every idea that a true Southern historian, theologian, statesman, and patriotic citizen could present about the religion, culture, morals, economics, and politics of a civilization from out of which the Confederate States of America evolved. The monument captures the ideals and accomplishments that still existed at the end of the War for Southern Independence. Thank God it does not depict the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the most disgusting and destructive period in United States history from which the South has never really recovered.

Worse than Jim Crow and nearly a century of acts depicted in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America?

This year, the memorial speech at the monument will be given by Ron Maxwell, whose movie Gods and Generals was a torpid love letter to the Confederacy.

In her essay at Buzzflash, Why Obama Should Give Neo-Confederate Bigots What They Want This Memorial Day, Meg White implies that racism is a trivial issue compared with, say, health care. While handily putting the lie to neo-Confederate revisionism in his Washington Post Op-Ed, The President and the Confederacy, historian Kirk Savage suggests that Obama should lay a wreathe at the Rebel monument AND another at the African American Civil War Memorial. Seemingly evenhanded and Solomonic. But you cannot split the difference in this manner.

That’s because the rationales behind those two monuments are at counter-purposes to one another. The graves of the Confederate soldiers who were taken from scattered graves and reburied in Arlington in 1914 aren’t the problem. After all, the Confederacy conscripted most of its soldiers, forced men as old as 50 to join, exempting the rich and any man with more than 20 slaves. Ultimately, 20% of the Confederate armies consisted of draftees, while only 8% of the Union army did. Many of the men in gray buried around the monument were forced into service. And honoring their deaths is no bad thing. But the Confederate monument taints the ground where they lie.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush wisely chose to stop sending the wreathe to the Arlington Confederate Memorial on the birthday of Rebel President Jefferson Davis. On Memorial Day 2010, President Obama should send a wreathe to another cemetery where Confederate bones rest, one where there is no tendentious monument to a bad cause that killed more Americans than every other war in the country’s history. That change could easily be the occasion for one of the President’s finely crafted speeches, one which seeks to heal still-festering wounds, unlike those heard every year at the Arlington Confederate Monument.