A Southern Heritage, Impressive and Unstained

In the debate over the Confederate flag, its defenders commonly make two claims:

1.     The flag is central to southern heritage

2.     The flag has no racist connotations, because the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states rights.

I’m not arguing #2, because I think it’s evident from innumerable statements by southern individuals and legislatures that the only “right” the South was defending was the right to own slaves.

            But there are two other more interesting points.  As James Loewen has pointed out (http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths-about-why-the-south-seceded/2011/01/03/ABHr6jD_story.html) the South was energetically  resisting the rights of the North by demanding the return of fugitive slaves, and seeking federal help, both judicially and militarily, to abrogate the rights of states like Massachusetts to enforce its own laws.  (There’s an interesting parallel: English courts decreed in 1722 that a slave who stepped onto English soil was thereby free. 

            But on to #1, where the story get more complicated and leves room for a different discussion.  Here’s another side: yes, that flag flew for four years, and meant a great deal to some Southerners.  But without it, the South would have 240 years of pre-1861 heritage, and 150 of post-1865 heritage, including enough history for any region or even country.

Quick, make a list of the greatest Southerners in American history before 1861.  Then erase those who lived under the Confederate flag.  Aside from Jefferson Davis and the Civil War generals, you’d still have the vast majority of the list.  For example, you’d have 17 signers of the Declaration of Independence, including its author.  Also 25 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 8 presidents, the consensus greatest Supreme Court Chief Justice, Senators Calhoun and Clay, Dolly Madison, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Stephen F. Austin, and on and on.

Odd notes: as governor of Texas Sam Houston refused to support secession and was removed from office; and Andrew Johnson, the last Southern president before LBJ (okay, Woodrow Wilson if we’re going by birth state), was  a diehard Unionist and the only Senator from the South to remain in the Congress during the war. Only President John Tyler  saw and supported secession, for the last nine month of his life (April 1861 to January 1862).

Then there’s the 150 years after the flag came down, during which a president from a former slave state integrated the U.S. military, four Supreme Court justices from former slave states voted to end school desegregation in 1954, a Texan pushed through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and southern presidents have appointed more than 2/3 of all African-American cabinet members.  Oh, and the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Carter, Gore, and the Virginia-born Wilson.

Finally, without the Confederate flag “Southern heritage” would include Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, etc. etc., not to mention at least half of America’s greatest musicians.

So let’s agree with Southerners that the Confederate flag represents 1% of its history, just as the Nazi flag represents 8% of the history of a unified Germany.  Then let the South join the rest of us in celebrating the other 99%.

It’s a Book, People!

Reading the initial comments about Harper Lee’s  Go Set A Watchman, I'm wondering if our obsession with the virtual world has caused even professional journalists to confuse reality and fiction.  Commentators are shocked that Atticus Finch at age 72 is (was?) prejudiced against African Americans. They're talking as if he's a real person who changed views as he got older.  Please remember this: he's a name in a book, given certain qualities by a writer who used the same name for someone in another book.  Apparently he's not the lawyer who lost the case of a black man accused of rape, since that's supposedly peripheral to this book, and that trial ends in an acquittal.  (I admit I haven't read the book, but I'm talking about the reactions. You don't have to have seen a play to know that the member of the audience who leapt onto the stage to slug the villain was also confused.)

A few simple facts: Watchman was written before Mockingbird. So Atticus was 72 before he was 52 to 55, as he was in Mockingbird.  In, say, 1955 he was an elderly racist, but by 1960 he was a middle-aged idealist.  So he is evidently another Benjamin Button.  Or, he's just a name, so is Scout, and, by the way, Jem is not really dead, because he never lived.  Harper Lee wrote two books about the same characters, or rather about characters whose names she didn't change.  The books are about two alternate realities, and Lee made no attempt to connect them, nor should we. Now if Watchman were a sequel, we could ask why Lee never cleared up how Atticus had changed.  But it's a prequel in the real world, as Lee tested out what her characters were like, then went, as they say, in another direction.

Let's put it this way: authors create alternate realities.  Sometimes they create an alternate reality and carry it through several books.  Then we can look at changes: How does Bilbo change as he ages in Tolkien’s writing?  Does Snape change or does he hide his true character until the last Harry Potter?  But when an author sits down to write a book, he or she can start fresh every time and build a new world. Shakespeare's Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 is not the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and it would be foolish to debate how he changed from one to the other.  (For one thing, he's dead in the histories before he's wooing in the comedy, at least as Shakespeare’s authorship went.) 

The confusion seems to be caused by the simple fact that Harper Lee wrote about a man named Atticus twice.  Take another character written about by several people: is Shakespeare's Brutus, whom even Marc Antony extols for his principles, the same Brutus condemned to the lowest circle of hell in Dante?  Is Dante saying Roman morality was inadequate?  No, because again, Dante puts Brutus in hell centuries before Antony praises him.  Again, Odysseus is either a tired soldier trying to get home (Homer), an arrogant defier of the limits God has put on humans (Dante), a sneaky, cynical pragmatist (Shakespeare), or a courageous explorer showing the indomitability of the human spirit (Tennyson). But Harper Lee writing in the 1950s and Harper Lee writing a few years later, are two different people, at least as creative minds.  As T.S. Eliot put it, “every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.”

Trying, as some are already doing, to use Atticus’s “change” to analyze American racism is as inappropriate as asking gerontologists to decide whether Alzheimer’s or some other brain condition is behind his alleged alteration.  Let’s spend our time trying to figure out how living racists can be led to change, whether by reading Mockingbird, studying history, or hearing the stories of actual victims of racism.

Moving On

Dear Friends,

Welcome to my new blog.  If you saw my farewell at readerweeper, you know some of what's below:

readerweeper.blogspot.com is now a Diary on the Daily Kos (dailykos.com) where it joins a world of political commentary.  This new site, "Old Artificer,"  will provide a broader commentary on literature and society, with more accent on solutions, celebrations, and general observations. Not that there won't be an occasional screed, but wityh politics over on Daily Kos, they will be fewer and perhaps more subtle -- or not.

So if you want to stick around, you can choose the bitter, the sweeter, or both.

Hope to hear from you.

DrReader45