I learned something new about political analyst Charlie Cook today. I got a better sense of where he’s coming from.
For me as a white Southerner, born in Louisiana and spending my first 18 years there, the Confederate flag is a complicated issue. I spent much of my childhood wearing a Confederate uniform with a Johnny Reb cap (with the battle flag on the front) and carrying a toy replica of a Civil War rifle, crawling across my backyard in a make-believe battle. From roughly age 7 to 12, I can remember my hometown newspaper, the Shreveport Times, carrying, often on the front page, an “On this day in…” feature with whatever notable Civil War events occurred exactly 100 years before. I can recall seeing the death notices of some of the last of the Confederate soldiers; generally they had been the young drummers of their hometown units. In the 1960s, the Confederate battle flag represented our heritage and our ancestors—and yes, both my wife and I had relatives who fought in the Confederate Army (though none to our knowledge owned, or could have afforded to own, slaves).
But over time, the balance has shifted. That flag has come to represent something different, something that should, as Bush pushed for while he was governor of Florida, move off the flagpoles and into the museums, out of respect for Americans, many of whom are the descendants of slaves, who are just as much citizens as we are. The symbolism shifted from heritage to hate; rather than paying homage to history, the flag came to make the South a prisoner of its history. It is time for the South and conservatives in the region to move on, and allow the Republican Party to move on as well, not hold it prisoner.
Now, first of all, I obviously agree with Cook’s overall point here.
And I am not going to blame a child for playing Civil War games even if they self-identified with the treasonous side that was fighting to preserve human bondage. It’s up to people’s parents to guide them, and we’re all products of our environment.
The problem here is that even with the benefit of retrospect, Cook still thinks that “something shifted” and the symbolism of the Confederate Army came to mean something different from what it had always meant.
This heritage argument has never held any water. I’m a child of the North, and I have ancestors who fought for the Union. I played with Civil War soldiers. But I never called any of that my heritage. Southerners made a decision to pay homage to their shameful past. There wasn’t anything inevitable about that.
It should not have just recently occurred to Charlie Cook that the descendants of slaves are citizens just like he is. Rather, he should have spent the last several decades thanking his lucky stars that we permitted him to be a citizen after his ancestors took up arms against us in the defense of enslaving people. If anyone’s right to citizenship should be in question, it isn’t the offspring of people who were enslaved but the offspring of people who either did the enslaving or, worse, the people who fought on the side of the enslavers despite not owning slaves themselves.
What kind of people allow their son to run around pretending to be a Confederate soldier as if that isn’t one of the most shameful things you could ever be?
The answer is pretty simple. If you can’t see the descendants of slaves as fully human, then it’s easy to whitewash them out of the celebration of your “heritage.”
This has always been a total bullshit mentality, and there have always been people who have been on the other side of this fight trying to affirm the humanity of our black citizens, redress the wrongs that were done to them, and convince people to stop celebrating slave-promoting treason.
Nothing actually shifted. The Confederate Flag has always meant exactly what it means today. And the flag is actually the symbol of an army. Let’s not make this all about the flag. Little Charlie Cook with his “Confederate uniform with a Johnny Reb cap” was doing something even more offensive than waving a flag that many people only dimly understand. He was identifying the Confederate Army as the good guys. You could blame his parents for that, but the problem was so pervasive that you can’t pick on one family or one little boy.
Just rewind the tape and look at the one hundred years between the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Who were the good guys in Louisiana again?
So, yeah, the Republican Party needs to change. But people like Charlie Cook need to go further. The Confederate flag shouldn’t be a “complicated” issue for Cook at all. Not anymore. He’s an adult. What’s offensive today was offensive in the 1950’s and the 1990’s and right up to last week. You don’t get to be proud of slavery and Jim Crow.
He’s still a slow learner because he still hasn’t fully grasped that there hasn’t been “a shift” at all, which you allude to. Is he talking about a shift in his realization? Or did this supposed “shift” happen when the flag was adopted as a symbol of Mass Resistance against desegregation? Maybe I have to read the whole thing to know.
As a kid in history, I’m pretty sure I had a pretty firm grasp that this war was always about slavery; I think fourth grade was the first learning of it (being the history class was the history of Virginia). But I was in Spotsylvania. The Confederate flag flies at a corner store doe the street (they also had a Romney/Ryan sign bigger than a car). There are civil war battle fields across the street from my parents’ neighborhood. And in this environment, my mind was temporarily poisoned to “it wasn’t just about slavery”. You know, like one of those “interesting” historical quips you can use should the topic come up to “correct” the record. It’s not like it was something I implanted as an identity though; more “oh I never knew that.” Studying the subject myself in AP US history shattered that little quip, and then I was still naive enough to think “those people were wrong, do they know they’re repeating a lie that they probably heard offhand from someone else?” But now I know, of course they knew. But that’s the power of The Big Lie.
And even then in that environment, as a child, I still never understood these “Civil War buffs” and their stupid civil war reenactments. Why reenact the war? I “get” it to a degree now…but even still it makes no sense.
And then I get to allude back to one of my political mentors as a kid, George Carlin. And when I first heard this bit, I think I was 11 or 12, all I could think was “YES!”
The Civil War really did have some very interesting military strategies and tactics. I personally really enjoyed reading about them and talking about them with people. It doesn’t mean I endorse the South (I’m a Yankee born and raised).
Church burning in SC.
I understand your point, but I’m going to have to call bullshit.
After the Civil War, a growing consensus of (white) historians – North and South – wrote slavery out of the narrative of the Civil War. In an effort to “bridge the bloody chasm” the narrative was literally and figuratively white-washed. (That was WEB DuBois contribution to American history – putting the slave back in.)
It was only during the ’60s and ’70s that historians really began to re-examine the role of slavery during the Civil Rights Movement and the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Reconstruction had been taught as a crime against the South until historians like Eric Foner “reconstructed” Reconstruction.
And obviously those changes in the academy take a long time to reach the ground.
If you ask people in both the North and South today, a surprising number will say that slavery was only a contributing factor in the Civil War, not the prime motivator. If anything the fact we are still having this debate is not entirely because of the malice of the racists who cling to the flag but the ignorance of the tens of millions of Americans who still don’t know their own history.
I read the AP US exam every year – ostensibly the best history students in the country – and I can tell you they are learning some seriously bizarre shit…
Booman, I think you are conflating admiration of the flag and Southern heritage (at the most basic level) with hatred or dehumanizing of African Americans.
This paragraph seems especially vindictive, and God’s honest truth (as a product of Texas education) if we (as progressives) are going to be holding great grandchildren responsible for the wars of their ancestors then how much better are we? “It should not have just recently occurred to Charlie Cook that the descendants of slaves are citizens just like he is. Rather, he should have spent the last several decades thanking his lucky stars that we permitted him to be a citizen after his ancestors took up arms against us in the defense of enslaving people. If anyone’s right to citizenship should be in question, it isn’t the offspring of people who were enslaved but the offspring of people who either did the enslaving or, worse, the people who fought on the side of the enslavers despite not owning slaves themselves.”
I doubt Charlie Cook ever questioned the right of AA to be citizens, we need to be able to separate people’s sense of self based on where they come from with their ACTUAL IDEAS about people. Now, if we find out Charlie was attending KKK meetings all his life then OK, but otherwise he was probably like me. You learned about the battles fought by Texas regiments, and how tragic it was that we ever raised arms against each other… but as a teenage boy you still want to know that your team “gave it to them good.” Today, that idea sounds stupid to me, but even when I thought it I didn’t hate my black friends or the North (except when people try to lord the fact that they were born on the winning side over me, get over it dudes).
Take a breath, and just because someone only now is realizing the implications of what they did before they were 18 by dressing up as a Southern soldier (which were relatively harmless but wrong) I don’t think that should count against them. I have no love for the Confederate flag, but if we don’t acknowledge how we ended up in a war started by one side for all the wrong reasons then we end up dividing the world into “us” and “them” again. Better education would fix a lot of this, and its the place that much of the South still lacks. Let’s start there.
When it comes to the Civil War era, I’m a Radical Republican.
That’s who I am.
I’m the one Lincoln is trying to restrain.
So, it’s not really about the descendants of anyone. But if you are a descendant of someone who took up arms against this country, then you should worry about your own legitimacy as a citizen in good standing before you start talking about the legitimacy of African American citizens.
Your heritage is treason and the promotion of slavery, and the blood spilled in that cause doesn’t wash away easily.
The problem isn’t specific to Cook, by any means, but he’s the only one who can do the thinking for himself.
I just don’t see that line of talk being productive. My mom’s family wasn’t even here until the beginning of the century, and they lived in Mobile where they made a point of hiring AA for their business. I don’t know about my dad’s side, but the point is that regardless of what my family did I grew up not knowing that the flag was a symbol of racism. It clearly is one now and I don’t know if it was one then, but my point is that people really ARE ignorant about some of this stuff because of the coded language of racism since the civil rights era.
Instead of attacking people and calling them idiots, I think the lesson learned here should be one about breaking open the purposeful ignorance that is a part of education in the South so that it isn’t something we only learn later in life. There are plenty of actual racists and bigots out there who actually believe that the AA have no rights and cannot think for themselves without putting everyone with any Southern heritage in the same bucket.
I don’t have the vitriol to be radical Republican, I see idiots who cling to ideas that give their lives meaning for all the wrong reasons and I want to fix that and I want to fix our nation so that it no longer breeds that mindset. While acknowledging the horrible history of slavery, I think it more important to deal with the hear and now so that we can solve the future and not pick fights with someone who doesn’t share the believes of the people whose heritage they are burdened with.
I also need to preview these before posting, apologies for all the horrible grammar.
I think you’re missing what Radical Republican is – i.e. Lincoln era R.R
Even in my youth in the South, 40 years, only the nastier racists waved the Traitor Flag. I can assure you they did hate and dehumanize blacks because I spent a large portion of my childhood arguing with them.
The Traitor Flag, since Reconstruction, has a slightly subtler meaning than Booman said. It’s the flag of excuses for racism and slavery. Southern discussion of the Civil War, once the slaveholding elites regained control after Reconstruction, has been all about covering up how horrible chattel slavery was and how the Southern secession was all about trying to maintain it. The Stars and Bars has been waved around to say people were fighting for the South because of “loyalty to their state” and similar nonsense. The truth is that everybody knew the South was seceding due to slavery and many, many Southerners opposed it and fought against it.
tldr; It’s just a big dogwhistle for racists.
Having spent the better part of the last 10 years reading everything I can about our American history, I made the very unsurprising discovery that most of what we “know” and are taught as historical fact in our schools is simply rife with utter bullshit. Even if it’s not technically factually incorrect, the context of events is almost never discussed or considered. Now this is really not a surprise to a lot of people, but the scope of the deception and the depth to which it is embedded in our collective brains would seem to make it inextricable.
It always seems to come down to the fact that we don’t form our opinions about almost anything using reason, logic and provable evidence. Just like our politics, we develop our sense of “knowing”, not by calculated analysis, but by how it “feels”.
I was raised in a family whose heritage is mainly southern. I don’t recall anyone clinging to the confederate symbols or rationalizing the South’s role in the war. I don’t recall that really even being a topic of conversation. I’m not sure why that is. In researching my family history, I discovered that one of my maternal grandfathers in Kentucky was a slave owner. I have a copy of his will where he doled out various slaves to his children. He was a highly respected figure in his day, and was one of the founding fathers of the town from which my mother’s family originated. But I have a hard time wrapping my mind around who he was when I sit and look at his will, in his own handwriting, outlining where his human possessions should go. I wonder that became of these people that he owned. I simply have no way to know. One of my paternal grandfathers, who was a Union sympathizer, was shot and killed by a Confederate Lieutenant in 1863. Again, I’m not sure how to process that piece of information in the context of history.
But I simply do not wrestle with these issues in the same manner as Charlie Cook. I don’t think our family has evolved or shifted to see all these events in some sort of new light, They are what they are, warts and all. I am a descendant of a slave owner. That is a fact. I am a descendant of a Union sympathizer who was killed by the Confederacy. I don’t need to try and rationalize any of this. All I can do is try and absorb the relevance and accept it for what it is. Charlie Cook should do the same.
Well, you’re right about calling bullshit … on your comment. I was raised “Southron” and it was ALL about keeping the “coloured in their place”. We didn’t even HAVE any black people within 50 miles, but “keeping our places clean” and “I don’t hate coloured, but I don’t want my daughter to have anything to do with them” figured prominently in my gestalt upbringing in souther Missouri.
Funny thing, tho. When I actually SAW the signs “white” and “coloured” above the bathrooms I wanted nothing to do with the “whites only” room. It was filthy and I wouldn’t let my dog do business in there.
I often find myself thinking that Booman see’s too many unicorns, and imputes too much goodness to mendaciousness. But this time he’s DEAD ON.
Imagine little Johann Koch (cook in German), the son of immigrants, playing WWII in his backyard with his little Waffen SS uniform, complete with swastika armband. Is he celebrating his heritage? Is it a complicated issue?
Little Johan Bush would be a better analogy considering that Prescott did bidness with the Third Reich. Zero evidence that Fred Koch had anything to do with Nazi Germany and his views on Hitler, if any, are unknown.
I just translated the name word for word.
I got the name wrong! so the example should be Karl Koch.
The only shift that has happened is that some of the fog of white privilege has cleared enough that more white people — North and South — are seeing what the Confederate flag actually stands for. Any “alternate symbology” is based on ignorance, intentional or otherwise.
The shift is that we might see the delegitimization by one state of one symbol of white supremacy. Will this trigger an avalanche of other states, counties, and municipalities doing the same? Time will tell. In time we will know whether enough Southerners have decided that the war is over to transform the conversation in those states going forward.
You can bet that Rush Limbaugh and the other shock jocks will move heaven and earth to try to prevent this transformation. If it occurs, they become irrelevant just like Father Coughlin.
Having grown up in a different part of the South than Charlie Cook, I understand where he is coming from, at least on this issue. I am looking hard for the word “celebrate” in the paragraphs you quote. The absence of that word points to what is complicated if you are standing within the culture of that time; it is the cognitive dissonance between the knowledge that the basis of the society was slavery and celebratory demands of patriotism for the previous regime.
You must remember that the segregated South was not a free and open society despite the national histories casting it as just another bunch of states. It was a total mutual surveillance culture. And what people were being observed for was departure from the limits of acceptable political and social thinking. For whites, like blacks, it could affect one’s social relationships, one’s relationship with a church congregation, one’s job, one’s business patronage, and if your views are too far out of line, your life. If the test for blacks was showing s deferential or subservient demeanor and being happy about it. For whites, it was the endless racist jokes and the expectation that one would retell them. Politics and religion were taboo subject de facto because they were most likely to expose unacceptable thinking. It was subtle and its was masked with denial. Those who were not on board with the white supremacy program tended to stay silent. For large parts of the South the Civil Rights movement removed that necessity for white silence. If you are maturing as a young white person through that era, it is quite a complicated path.
And for folks working in the Civil Rights movement it was equally complicated. How complicated? The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party used the Confederate flag as part of the design (which includes a black and a white hand jointly holding a kerosense lamp) of its buttons and possibly its logo.
Unlike Cook, my fantasy wars were World War II and the American Revolution. I had a Confederate cap and a 4″x6″ Confederate flag, souvenirs from a vacation trip to Lookout Mountain and the Chickamauga Battlefied in Tennesse and Georgia. My dad was a Civil War buff; we stopped at all the Civil War battlefields when we traveled, not as heritage but as history.
Both my parents had stories heard from their grandmothers, who were children at the time, about when Sherman came through Marlboro County SC and Nash County NC. Deconstructing the stories now, they amount the experience of having “the enemy” forcefully take provisions for supplying the troops. Neither reported destruction of crops. Livestock obviously were taken for provisions. I would not be surprised if the devastation of Sherman’s march was over-hyped by pity-seeking Southern propagandists.
The claim of Southern culture on its residents is to be patriotic to the past Confederacy in symbols, observances, and narratives. There are organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans whose purpose is to socially press that claim of patriotism.
The complication for Southerners arrives at sorting out the history, the heritage (the consequences good and bad that have been passed down), and this claim of patriotism. That is an intellectual sorting out process. Would that those outside the South understood that a part of their heritage of the Civil War is having let the South off the hook on surrender, in the 1876 deal that elected Rutherford B. Hayes and restored “home rule”, in the complicity in segregation when the South passed Jim Crow laws, in not pressing Brown v. Board of Education, in electing Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush and all the Republican members of Congress that went with them, in failing to desegregate themselves, in running to the suburbs as cities were being pressed to desegregate. There is a national heritage or moral failure that the Confederate flag has now come to symbolize.
The complication is accepting all of the history, without denial or evasion or celebrating. It is a tragic national history baked into the settling of this country.
At the moment we are talking about a tiny, baby step forward: removing government legitimacy for one symbol of the ideology of white supremacy.
It’s too easy to make moral judgements on how quickly someone saw the light. The always important thing is that they saw the light. Heritage doesn’t mean being proud; you can inherit a huge amount of debt. Celebrating or honoring; there are in fact huge areas of our heritage that need to be dishonored. Slavery, the Indian wars, Guantanamo and secret prisons. No one gets away with clean hands.
I was hoping that you’d do a post like this to explain our common heritage from growing up in the South and coming of age during the height of the Civil Rights Era.
I identify with Charlie Cook’s take on the flag and as much as I like, respect, and learn from Booman, I am inclined to pushback when anyone wants to add another load of guilt to my already overloaded back. You are so right to point out this:
That quote you pulled from Tarheel is a great summary of my problem with Booman’s post as well. I don’t need to stand in judgement of others do or don’t know which is not always in their control, and especially not what their fore-bearers may have done. I think it is best to actually just judge people on how they live and act today.
Your paragraph about the segregated South having been a “total mutual surveillance culture” is absolutely right; thanks for describing it so succinctly. The surprisingly sudden turnaround about the flag that we’ve been seeing might be partly driven by a long-overdue pushback against that culture… at least, I hope so.
“…thanking his lucky stars that we permitted him to be a citizen after his ancestors took up arms against us…”
This. They lost. They don’t get to pretend they won.
There is a very stupid book out there. Its title is “Every War Must End”. It was a scrub-up of the doctoral dissertation of one Fred C. Ikle, whom you may remember as one of Nixon’s henchmen. The stupidity of it resides in the fact that no modern war has ever ended, where the cutoff is around the middle of the sixteenth Century. Certainly the English Civil War is still in progress, and the American Civil War may simply have been an upswelling of it.
The past four hundred years have been the Era of Revanche (again, as with the politique du pire, French is the only language that actually has words for what is really going on; we would literally rather die than call a thing by its true name).
I don’t know if I totally agree with the Boo about not celebrating my heritage around the Civil War. I remember visiting Gettysburg as a kid and looking for an anscestor who may have died there. I remember too being as absolutely clear as an 1860 radical republican that the “right” side won. It became a part of me that embraces American Exceptualism (in the better sense, not misused sense). I have always been uncomfortable in the South, in part for its past, and in part for the mutual surveillance culture tarheeldem described. And in part because I often did not feel welcome even if I was treated politely.
So as much as the South may want to honor their heritage, I too want to honor my Northern heritage which would not let treason and slavery stand.
That said, I came to fully appreciate the saying, “The southern man cares less about how close the black man gets, but most of all how high he gets. The Northerner cares less about how high the black man gets, so long as he doesn’t get too close.” I’ve found racism everywhere.
In my own extended family I have a 13 year old boy with a father of Polish immigrants raised in NJ and a mother of Greek immigrants raised in San Juan. He has a confederate flag on his bedroom wall. I guess it is all part of his Duck Dynasty worldview. His parents love him and support his interests because they think (I guess) the flag is benign.
But I m also going to guess they said in the last week that the deaths in SC had nothing to do with the flag and that while they love their gay cousins and partners, they still are against gay marriage because that’s not what God intended marriage to be for.
I think Snopes put it pretty well.
It should be note that SPLC does not consider Sons of Confederate Veterans a hate group.
Didn’t need it as much before then because they had their white sheets and burning crosses and the signs that informed Black people where they could and couldn’t tread.
As far as I know the burning crosses thing only really took off at the end of the second klan in the 40s, previously they didn’t have to bother with quite so many scare tactics since mashing faces was applauded was applauded.
The first Klan didn’t bother with burning crosses, nor did the White Shirt, Red Shirt and whatever other terrorist groups that the establishment ginned up during the federal occupation and especially in the runup to the 1876 election.
They just went and assassinated local black political leaders. Or burned them out. A Congressional investigation done during the period has as comprehensive a list of incidents as is available, and it is on the Internet Archive. More than likely scholarship has extended that list from contemporary accounts.
As a kid, I played Cowboys and Indians. Then Mrs. P, sixth grade, introduced us to the cultures of southwest native communities. As we grew up, Native Americans expanded our education and awareness. Those playtoys mostly disappeared with the childhood of the Boomers.
Disney’s recent “The Lone Ranger” bombed for many reasons (Depp’s weird Tonto for one), but primarily because we’ve learned to accept that the Western mythos was a lie; the white guys weren’t the good guys. Still a long way from doing the right thing for the decedents of native populations, but a good step nevertheless.
“We didn’t know” stops being an acceptable rationalization the moment “we know” becomes irrefutable. While there are no shortage of historical points when “we know” was or should have been prevalent, no excuse for any of the anti-African-American racism and bigotry after 1965. One hundred years to “get used to it” is long enough.
“I can recall seeing the death notices of some of the last of the Confederate soldiers; generally they had been the young drummers of their hometown units.”
Charlie Cook was born in 1953. Let’s say he could read the paper when he was eight – in 1961. And let’s say there were 10-year old drummers in 1865.
That would mean that the youngest conceivable drummers would have been 106 years old when Charlie Cook saw their death notices.
The verified last Confederate soldier died in 1951, and a few others who couldn’t be disproved died in 1952 and 1953. There were two phony claimants who died in 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_Confederate_veterans
Was Cook reading the paper when he was six?
I don’t believe that Cook remembers any such death notices. I think Cook isn’t lying so much as that he remembers the romanticized past, not the true past.
The “last” was profiled in Life magazine in the time frame of the Civil War Centennial is my memory.
Walter Williams. Died 1959, when Cooke was six.
Almost certainly an imposter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Williams_(centenarian)
Where I think this first round will wind up is that at a minimum sometime after July 6, the South Carolina legislature will remove the flag from the Confederate memorial on the Statehouse grounds and retire it to a museum, likely with interpretation of the controversy and photos of Bree Newsome taking it down. That museum exhibit will probably not roll out for another decade if I know the SC Department of Archives and History.
What I am advocating to my South Carolina friends is that the Confederate flag be removed from all buildings owned by units of government, state and local. That commercial uses of the Confederate flag be subject to the the market. That private uses, which are protected by freedom of speech, likely will remain; those will eventually be stigmatized at some point in history.
And that the organizations and networks that advocate domestic violence and white supremacy be stigmatized and rooted out.
We’ll see what the response is.
Most of those weighing in are ready to see the flag at the Statehouse go–some because of its association with these murders.
These middle class, suburban, conservative Republicans in a couple of cities in South Carolina. Most are retired from a variety of occupations, some from fairly responsible positions in transnational corporations, most notably Michelin. But they are in the area represented by most of the No votes currently on the Post and Courier’s ongoing whip count.
No surprise that the business community, particularly the international businesses that do business in S.C., will eventually be the impetus that gets that flag off public buildings. I agree that’s the place to start.
Our former and only black mayor came out a week or so ago advocating the removal of Confederate monuments in the city. Actually there’s only one and the other is a house/museum with a confederate cannon-ball out front that was actually built in the city during the war. Obviously he’s not of the same mind as John Lewis, vis-a-vis his view about not changing the name of the Edmund Pettus bridge. The monuments are part of our history and should remain. They are mostly a monument to the soldiers who died during the war.
It is really the appearance of legitimizing white supremacy as a future option is what has to removed. Some monuments and shrines are more tightly tied than others.
For now, my sense is that all Confederate flags on buildings owned by units of government need to come down. And I don’t think that that really is that many in most places. Most places long ago went to US and state flags alone.
The symbolism shifted from heritage to hate…
It’s not like it has to be one or the other. It’s like the argument that the Civil War was about states’ rights. Well it was, yes, but people don’t go to war to defend rights in the abstract. They have to feel that their rights are threatened or denied, and in this case the right that was threatened was the right to keep slaves.
And nobody’s heritage is an abstraction either. And sometimes it isn’t pretty.