150 years of PC
by digby
I’m sure that most people don’t know what Adam Serwer tells us here. But they may be learning it now:
Even after the narrative of a benign and honorable Confederacy fell out of favor with historians, it continued to dominate American popular culture in film and literature, from The Birth of a Nation to The Dukes of Hazzard. The damage wrought by this interpretation of history is immeasurable. It is only now unraveling.
Most important, it was always untrue: Slavery was the cause of the war, white supremacy was the cornerstone of Confederate society, the individual valor of Confederate soldiers cannot hide that the cause for which they fought was one of the worst in human history, their defeat was not solely due to the North’s structural advantages, and they — not the Union — were the aggressors. Though taking down the Confederate flag may itself be of little practical consequence, the backlash against the stars and bars is a result of a monumental shift in popular memory that has the potential to shape our politics just as the Lost Cause once did.
Shortly after the war, Blight writes, former Confederate Gen. Jubal Early gained control of the Southern Historical Society and used it to “launch a propaganda assault on popular history and memory.” Later groups like the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to “control historical interpretation of the Civil War.” In this interpretation, popularly known as “Lost Cause” mythology, the Confederacy was fighting for some vague conception of liberty, not the right to own slaves; its soldiers were unparalleled warriors defending their homeland who were only defeated because of the Union’s structural advantages; and the postwar subjugation of black Americans was a necessary response to lawlessness. Professional historians like those of the late 19th/early 20th century Dunning School bolstered the popular perception that granting equal rights to black Americans after the war was an immoral and tragic error, thus justifying the imposition of racial apartheid in the South.
If political correctness is the suppression of uncomfortable truths in order to avoid offense, then the American popular perception of the Civil War and its aftermath is the result of one of the most effective and devastating campaigns of political correctness in American history. The reversal of the popular understanding of the war and Reconstruction is possible only through the hard work of historians and popular writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates bringing their findings to a broader audience.
When I was in the 8th grade we spent the hole yer in history class studying the Civil War. And I learned that the southern fighters were particularly valorous, that the slaves were actually very content and that it was all about States’ Rights not slavery. We watched “Birth of a Nation” and there was no criticism of its politics. I did my report on John Wilkes Booth and found out that he was a misguided patriot fr his cause.
Granted, that was back in the dark ages. But it wasn’t in the South. It was in California.
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