August 17, 2017
by Robert Parry
Exclusive: By defending
“beautiful” Confederate statues, President Trump shows how little he
understands about the evils of slavery and the cruelty on lynchings and
segregation, but he is by no means alone, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The blindness of President
Trump regarding racial bigotry – and indeed that of many white Americans – is
that whatever they say to the contrary, they really don’t appreciate the evils
of slavery or the ensuing century of lynchings and segregation.
And, much of that ignorance
comes from the systematic rationalizing and romanticizing of the ante-bellum
South while shielding from criticism many of slavery’s historical apologists,
including both Confederate “heroes” and earlier icons such as Thomas Jefferson
who became a staunch advocate for expanding slavery all the better to increase
his financial bottom line.
Although I grew up in
Massachusetts in the 1950s and 1960s, our “history” textbooks could easily have
passed muster in the Deep South. They treated slavery as an unfortunate feature
of America’s past but not really all that bad, an institution in which most
slave owners were kindly masters but a few employed cruel overseers who
committed some isolated abuses like whippings.
And, if that recollection of
my grade-school experience sounds hard to believe, just watch the 1939 movie
classic “Gone with the Wind,” which presents Tara’s plantation slaves as mostly
content with their enslavement and loyal to their masters. That was pretty much
what Americans were taught for generations and explains why the 1977 TV
miniseries “Roots” was such a shocking event, because it showed the systematic
cruelty of slavery from the perspective of the slaves.
By 1980, the decades-old
“conventional wisdom” about the quaint-and-misguided-but-mostly-okay
institution of human bondage was shattered not only by TV’s dramatic portrayal
of slavery but also by sound historic scholarship, which gained greater
attention due to the Civil Rights Movement and growing popular resistance to
“patriotic” propaganda.
Reagan’s Dog Whistle
Still, many white Americans
rejected the notion of white guilt for those past crimes and rallied to Ronald
Reagan’s crude caricatures about “welfare queens” and people who used food
stamps to buy vodka and other luxuries. While Reagan was careful not to say
outright that he was referring to blacks, he didn’t have to because his
listeners understood the coded messages.
Similarly, when Reagan’s Vice
President George H.W. Bush ran for and won the presidency in 1988, he exploited
the story of Willie Horton, a black convict who raped a white woman while on a
Massachusetts prison furlough that Bush blamed on his Democratic rival,
Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Indeed, the Republican Party
had been playing the race card since Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 1968.
It’s not a coincidence that this racial messaging swung the Democrats’
once-solid South overwhelmingly into the Republican electoral column.
So, it’s a bit ironic when the
U.S. mainstream media cites Republicans who have benefited from these
race-baiting dog whistles as responsible leaders when they decry Trump’s
slightly more overt appeals to white nationalists and other racists. On the
immediate issue of Confederate statues and other honors, the Republicans have
long led the way in protecting these tributes to white supremacy under the
guise of “defending history.”
On Thursday, Trump retreated
to that safer GOP position after days of criticism for his rhetorical excuse-making
and moral equivalence following last Saturday’s violent rally by
neo-Nazis, the KKK and white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in
defense of a Confederate monument to Gen. Robert E. Lee, which the local
government had voted to remove.
Trump tweeted: “Sad to see the
history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of
our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can
learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington,
Jefferson? So foolish!”
Neo-Confederate Thinking
But that is the classic
defense of neo-Confederate racist thinking. The pretense is that these
monuments and other honors are simply a recognition of history when they were
clearly intended to glorify the Confederacy and its rebellion against the
United States over the Southern fear that slavery would be abolished and the
wealth of plantation owners effectively negated.
Most of these monuments were
erected in the Twentieth Century, often as symbolic rebukes to progress being
made by the descendants of African-American slaves. These were monuments to
white supremacy — and for Trump and other white Americans to pretend otherwise
is anti-historical nonsense.
Beyond monuments, other public
spaces were named after Confederate leaders. For instance, in the 1920s – at
the height of the Jim Crow era as lynchings were used to terrorize black
communities energized by the return of African-American soldiers from World War
I – the Daughters of the Confederacy succeeded in attaching the name of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis to sections of Route 1, including in
Arlington County, Virginia, near predominately black neighborhoods.
In 1964, as Martin Luther King
Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement gained passage of a landmark civil rights law,
the Virginia legislature added Jefferson Davis’s name to a section of Route 110
that passed by the Pentagon and near Arlington National Cemetery, which was
begun in the Civil War to bury dead Union soldiers, including black troops who
joined the Army to fight for their freedom.
On Jefferson Davis’s
authority, Confederate soldiers were permitted to summarily
execute African-American Union soldiers upon their surrender, a practice
that was carried out in several notorious massacres, such as at Fort Pillow,
Tennessee, on April 12, 1864; the Battle of Poison Springs, Arkansas, in April
1864; and the Battle of the Crater in Virginia. Scores of black prisoners were
executed in Saltville, Virginia, on Oct. 2, 1864. It should be noted that the
Confederate troops of Virginia were under the command of the esteemed Gen.
Robert E. Lee.
Democratic Cowardice
A few years back, I wrote
to the five members of the Arlington County Board and urged them to rename
Jefferson Davis Highway. When my letter went public, it was treated with some
amusement by the local paper, the Sun-Gazette, which described me as “rankled,”
and prompted some hate mail.
One angry letter from an
Arlington resident declared that it was now her turn to be “RANKLED by
outsiders like Mr. Parry who want to change history because it is not to his
liking. I am very proud of my Commonwealth’s history, but not of the current
times, as I’m sure many others are.” Those current times included the election of
Barack Obama, the first African-American president.
I was even confronted by a
senior Democratic county official at a meeting about a different topic and
urged to desist in my proposal to give the highway a new name because the idea
would alienate state politicians in Richmond who would think that “liberal”
Arlington County had gone crazy.
However, since a number of
Arlington residents apparently shared my disgust over Jefferson Davis Highway,
the county board eventually agreed to send a request to the state legislature
that the road’s name be changed, but it was clearly not a priority for the
board or for other Virginia Democratic officials who feared offending
pro-Confederate voters (although in the wake of the bloody Charlottesville
riot, Gov. Terry McAuliffe has finally come out in favor of removing the
monuments honoring the Confederacy).
Honoring Treason
The dishonesty of Trump’s
“history” argument – and its well-worn use by Confederate apologists – is
underscored by the obvious fact that statues and other honors are meant to
transform historical figures into icons to be emulated. Governments do not
bestow these honors on criminals or traitors just because they are historical
figures.
You don’t see many government
statues to Al Capone or Benedict Arnold. And, Americans would be rightly
alarmed if Germany began erecting statues to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi
henchmen. So, to pretend that these Confederate statues are not meant to
glorify the South’s battle to protect the institution (or industry) of slavery
is simply a lie.
Arguably, Trump does have a
point about the historical ambiguity surrounding the nation’s Founders, many of
whom owned slaves although Trump’s argument amounts to another rhetorical
dodge. There is a distinct difference between George Washington who led the War
for Independence, presided at the Constitutional Convention and served as the
first President (and who grew increasingly uncomfortable with slavery) and the
Confederates who turned their guns against the United States in a disastrous
war to protect the interests of slaveholders.
In any evaluation of history,
distinctions must be made. Nobody is perfect. Even Founders who were opposed to
slavery, such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, can be rightly criticized
for other political positions that they took as the United States sought to
find its footing in its early years.
Jefferson’s Hypocrisy
More troubling is the legacy
of Thomas Jefferson, who is hailed for penning the Declaration of Independence
and its noble words that “all men are created equal” – although Jefferson in
his other writings, such as Notes on the State of Virginia, made clear that he
did not believe that at all. Jefferson
was a hypocrite of the first order.
Recent historical revelations
also reveal Jefferson to have been a much more ruthless slave master than his
admirers have wanted to believe. He countenanced the whipping of boys,
calculated the financial value of child-bearing females, and apparently helped
the “breeding” along by imposing himself sexually on one and likely more of his
slave girls.
Also, left out of many
Jefferson biographies is why he established the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville. It wasn’t simply his devotion to learning; he feared that
young Southern aristocrats going north to school would be contaminated by the
arguments against slavery and in favor of a strong national government, twin
evils that the erudite Jefferson called “‘anti-Missourism,’” and
“Consolidationism.”
Further contributing to the
nation’s divisions, Jefferson propounded theories about state secession and
pushed for expansion of slavery throughout the Louisiana Territories. In his
later years, he became what you might call a pre-Confederate. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “Thomas
Jefferson: America’s Founding Sociopath.”]
Still, even in his hypocrisy,
Jefferson deserves credit for enunciating what would become an important
American contribution to global human rights, the proposition that governments
should treat all citizens equally, a principle that Martin Luther King Jr. and
other civil rights leaders wielded in their own battles against racial
injustice.
Despite their faults, to put
Washington and Jefferson on the same historical plane as Jefferson Davis and
the Confederates makes a mockery of historical distinctions.
That the United States would
honor people responsible for a horrific war designed to perpetuate slavery –
leaders who authorized the outright murder of unarmed soldiers just because of
the color of their skin – should shock the conscience of any moral human being
although apparently not President Trump.
