The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-02)

B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020

1894 to a former comrade. Most problemati- cally for former Confederates, Mosby supported Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party, which most White Southerners deemed enemies of the region. Like his fellow Confederate general turned Republican James Longstreet, Mosby became a pariah in the South. He lost clients from his Warrenton, Va., law practice, his income plummeted, and even his young children were subjected to taunts that their father was a Judas. Having betrayed his Confederate identity, he felt forced to leave Virginia in 1877 for Washington, D.C. He would never again reside in his home state. Trump and his defenders, too, have long sought to drive perceived enemies from the GOP. He declined to consider hiring for his administration people who had opposed him in the primary campaign, a common practice. He has flayed Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a frequent foil, whose name was greeted with boos at the last Conservative Political Action Conference. When aides leave the White House on bad terms — including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — Trump accuses them of being plants, advancing agendas to undermine him or simply showing disloyalty. Conservatives say their allies who break with the president are RINOs, or “Republicans in Name Only.”

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he Lost Cause proved so enduring and powerful because, by the early 20th century, the White masses bought into it. In Trump’s case, it seems unlikely he’ll reach a wide audience with an analogous pitch. The “cancel culture” he frets about has doomed the legacies of far less prominent figures. Turn on the TV, look at recent Acade- my Award winners or glance at the bestseller lists to see that popular culture is not on Trump’s side. Still, he and his defenders have appropriat- ed the Lost Cause ethos: in a rigidity that allows for no dissenters, a dogmatic belief in the superiority of their position and a failure to comport with facts — even when there is a solid historical record to the contrary. There are even ideological parallels in the fear of changing demographics and norms. Some Republicans will challenge his movement’s grip on their party in the coming years, but it’s unclear how successful they will be at dislodg- ing it. And even if mainstream Republicans recapture control, Trumpism could have a long life in third parties and far-right congressional primary challenges. It could offer a banner of grievance politics that anyone dissatisfied with a Biden administration can rally around. When Mosby cast his ballot for Union general turned Republican presidential nomi- nee Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, he endured the wrath of the White South. “I ceased to be a Confederate soldier about eleven years ago, and became a citizen of the United States,” he informed another Confederate veteran. “I know very well the measure of denunciation which the expression of these sentiments will receive from the people in whose cause I shed my blood and sacrificed the prime of my life. Be it so. I wait on time for my vindication.” With the apparent dismantling of the Lost Cause more than 155 years after its making, Mosby might finally have his wish. Republi- cans who want to avoid posterity’s final repudiation should take note. Twitter: @CarrieJanney

Caroline E. Janney, the John L. Nau III professor in the history of American Civil War at the University of Virginia, is the author of “Re membering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation.”

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he Lost Cause was not born in defeat. Although most Confederates believed that their quest to create an indepen- dent slaveholding nation would triumph, they also laid the foundation for a new mythology long before Appomattox. In 1863, Walter Taylor, Lee’s adjutant, marveled at Confeder- ate success given “our numerical weakness, our limited resources and the great strength & equipments of the enemy.” Taylor did not believe that such odds were decisive, but when Lee’s army surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, the general managed to twist defeat into a moral victory. “After four years of arduous service,” his farewell address began, “marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been com- pelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Trump is already arguing that the odds are stacked against him: The man who claims to have worked tirelessly to put America back on track is being overwhelmed by left-wing extremism and political correctness. The “Fake News Media” prevents him from getting his message out. Millions of fraudulent votes were cast in 2016, and November’s election will be bogus, too, thanks to mail-in ballots. After the Civil War, distortions of the past evolved and gained followers over the course of generations, allowing White Southerners to shape the present. As African Americans challenged the strictures of segregation, dis- enfranchisement and the extralegal violence of lynching, the Lost Cause sought a nostalgic elevation of the antebellum South that mini- mized the agency of African Americans. Heri- tage organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy commemorated the tradi- tional privileges of whiteness by casting it as a “natural” part of the region’s history. Central to the Lost Cause message was a “correct and impartial history,” as the Daugh- ters put it. Through speeches, pamphlets and newspaper columns, Lost Cause proponents fought any version of the past that depicted the antebellum South and the Confederate war effort in anything less than a heroic light. Though never a majority of the population (in 1918 the Daughters could claim only 100,000 members), these boosters dotted the Southern landscape with monuments to Confederate soldiers. They established the auxiliary orga- nization Children of the Confederacy in 1896, replete with a catechism intended for study and memorization that instilled in children the tenets of the Lost Cause. They reviewed histories and textbooks for material they deemed “unjust” to the South, helping to shape how generations of White children came to understand the Civil War, Recon- struction and the enslavement of African Americans. “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone With the Wind” (Margaret Mitchell’s novel debuted in 1936, and the film followed three years later) distilled their ideas for popular culture. As historian Karen Cox has observed, the generation of children and

TRUMP FROM B1

How a Trump loss

could generate a

dangerous myth

myths, we might expect cable news outlets and right-wing websites to perpetuate his charges of “rigged elections.” MAGA and Trump flags will fly on private property along major interstates or highways, just as Confed- erate battle flags do today. And while it’s hard to envision a monument to Trump on the Tidal Basin, the president remains popular in many states and municipalities, any of which could memorialize him with Donald J. Trump Middle Schools and Donald J. Trump highways. One final mechanism to ensure that followers clung to the Lost Cause faith was the punishment of apostates; those who strayed from the message, such as former Confederate cavalry colonel John S. Mosby, were branded as traitors. In letters to fellow Confederates, Mosby refused to deny slavery’s centrality to secession. He avoided Confederate veterans reunions and declined to attend the 1890 unveiling of the Lee statue in Richmond. He did not see the point in dotting the South with monuments to the failed rebel cause. It is “both a waste of money & time,” he wrote in

adults who imbibed this Lost Cause message is the same generation that engaged in massive resistance against public school desegre- gation in the mid-20th century. In much the same fashion, Trump already recasts the past for his political and personal needs, most especially in his exhortation to “make America great again.” He even offers an explicit defense of Confederate symbols, al- most all of which have a subtext of White supremacy. (Those who wish to remove them “want to destroy our heritage,” he said last month.) He insists that the rebel banner is not a racist emblem and threatens to veto biparti- san congressional efforts to rename Army bases that commemorate Confederate gener- als. It’s easy to imagine Trump supporters looking backward at his presidency as a golden era, touting efforts to forestall illegal immigration, protect White suburbs and battle China — not unlike the ways Lost Cause boosters reimagined the antebellum South. Just as former Confederates relied on the press and popular culture to disseminate their

JOHN MCDONNELL/THE WASHINGTON POST A statue is removed from atop the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Richmond on July

Many such
markers across the
South were erected
decades after the
Civil War as
tributes to the “Lost
Cause” of the
Confederacy.

education” emphasizing “the rule of law, now so gravely endangered by crime, disorders, extremism and disobedience.” The board’s proposal contended: “There is abroad in this country an escalating unrest which has led already to unprecedented crime, discord and civil disobedience. If unchecked, this unrest could lead to revolution and the end of all freedom.” Is this why President Richard Nixon asked Powell to join the Supreme Court in 1969? Powell had not yet written the confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling for a coordinated campaign to defend American capitalism. He was only a name partner in the law firm that had defended Prince Edward County, the champion of “citizenship education” and, he told Nixon, an inadequate choice. Powell joined the court in 1972. Days after he was sworn in, the education board voted unanimously to withdraw the books. Yet they remained: Pat Lang, a McLean mother, pro- tested my fourth-grade book in a letter to The Washington Post in October 1977 — the fall I started at the University of Virginia and two decades after its initial dissemination. “Roll over, Kunta Kinte,” Lang wrote, appalled, and went on to quote some of the lies her fourth- grade daughter was being taught. The books by Simkins and his colleagues are gone, but everyone wants to make sure that young minds don’t read the “wrong” history. Some schools across the country intend to teach slavery by way of “The 1619 Project,” the essays published in the New York Times last year that won the Pulitzer Prize. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is so against its version of history that he has introduced a bill barring the use of federal funds to teach it. “As the Founding Fathers said,” Cotton told an inter- viewer in defending his stance, slavery “was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Two days after Richmond dismantled Stonewall Jackson’s statue, President Trump went to Mount Rushmore and claimed, in language recalling Powell’s: “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” Well, yes, that’s what political leaders have done for generations. Just read my Virginia history textbook.

Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.

Offensive and the erosion of our acceptance of the government’s assertions; the assassina- tions of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the riots outside the Democratic National Convention. By the time fifth grade started, I was reading this newspaper and questioning everything. My particu- lar curiosity propelled me beyond my textbook. But only while watching city workers take down Stonewall Jackson’s statue in Rich- mond did I wonder how that series of books came to be. Here’s what Simkins and Hunnicutt (and their colleagues) left out: the revolution that had begun in 1951 in their hometown. In Farmville, Black high school students went on strike over unequal facilities and then sued. The students, led by Barbara Johns, lost in trial court, but Dorothy E. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County became one of the five cases consolidated in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Mrs. Stall, bless her heart, didn’t mention that Virginia students — perhaps some of my classmates’ siblings — didn’t go to school for several years as state leaders executed “Mas- sive Resistance” in response to Brown’s direc- tive to integrate schools. We weren’t taught that most of the state’s newspapers participat- ed in an allied effort coordinated by the editor of the Richmond News Leader, James J. Kilpat- rick, who went on to a respectable career as a columnist and a slot on “60 Minutes” opposite Shana Alexander. No one told us that state Attorney General J. Lindsey Almond Jr., who described himself as “the most massive of all resisters,” Dean writes, was invited to edit the seventh-grade text. Or that (White) voters elected Almond governor with 63 percent of the vote in 1957, the year the textbooks first appeared in classrooms. Massive Resistance collapsed in 1959, when federal and state courts ruled, on the same day, that closing public schools was unconstitu- tional. Arlington schools, where I started kin- dergarten in 1963, quickly admitted Black students (I, a White kid, remember none in mine, after attending a predominantly Black preschool), but other districts slow-walked integration long after the Supreme Court ruled against Prince Edward County again in 1964. With the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Virginia politics shifted, but the books stayed. The State Board of Education renewed them in 1966 for six years despite growing criticism. In 1968 the board, led by Lewis F. Powell Jr., proposed a unit in “citizenship

edition included this: “Some of the Negro servants left the plantations because they heard President Lincoln was going to set them free. But most of the Negroes stayed on the plantations and went on with their work. Some of them risked their lives to protect the white people they loved.” And “General Lee was a handsome man with a kind, strong face. He sat straight and firm in his saddle. Traveller stepped proudly as if he knew that he carried a great general.” The lead historian for the seventh-grade edition was Francis Simkins, of Longwood College in Farmville. His 1947 book, “The South Old and New,” was an articulation of the Lost Cause. Slavery was “an educational pro- cess which transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilized person endowed with conceits, customs, industrial skills, Christian beliefs, and ideals, of the Anglo-Saxon of North America,” he wrote in that book. During the Civil War, enslaved people “remained so loyal to their masters [and] supported the war unanimously.” During Reconstruction, “blacks were aroused to political conscious- ness not of their own accord but by outside forces.” Spotswood Hunnicutt, a co-author, believed that as a result of post-bellum inter- pretations, students were “confused” that “slavery caused a war in 1861.” The commission was “looking after the best interest of the students.” The “primary function of history,” she concluded, was “to build patriotism.” In the fall of 1967, I suppose I digested what I was fed. But later in the school year, I would absorb events that defined an era: the Tet

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series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state’s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,” included these sentences: “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.” The masters “knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” Enslaved people “went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons.” “It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness.” Color illustra- tions featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably. This was the education diet that Virginia’s leaders fed me in 1967, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stall, issued me the first book in the series deep into the second decade of the civil rights movement. Today, Virginia’s symbols of the Lost Cause are falling. But banish- ing icons is the easy part. Statues aren’t history; they’re symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as “history” is harder to dislodge. How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginia’s White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters — and why for all of my six decades we have been intermittently dismantling the myth that the Confederacy repre- sented anything noble. That dismantling began with Reconstruction 155 years ago and still isn’t finished. Historian Adam Wesley Dean explored the origin of my textbook in his 2009 article “ ‘Who Controls the Past Controls the Future’: The Virginia History Textbook Controversy.” It was President Harry Truman’s 1948 integration of the armed forces that spurred Virginia’s leaders to create it. A state commission took control of the history curriculum from local school boards, choosing the writers and super- vising the text. The publisher, Charles Scrib- ner’s Sons, sold the books to every public school for the three grades. All students were taught the same narrative. My fourth-grade

The lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery

MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST A Virginia history textbook used from the 1950s through the 1970s painted a rosy picture of slavery: “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves,” it told seventh- graders.

Bennett Minton looks back at a steady diet of revisionist history pushed by the state’s leaders

The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-02)

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