I remember watching the 1952 film “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which was a biography of composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa.
There’s a scene in which Sousa and his band are playing a concert in Atlanta, and they’re being poorly received…until they play “Dixie” again and again. The crowd immediately turns from booing to wild applause once they hear “Dixie,” and I always thought it was just painting a simplistic, two-dimensional view of Southerners and their love for that song (as it depicts the crowd as only wanting to hear “Dixie”, and thrilled to hear it again and again).
However, according to the Wikipedia article, the scene (like many in the movie) is based on actual events depicted in Sousa’s autobiography, and it’s suggested that the crowd’s reaction to the song is fairly accurate.
I’m also from South Carolina. Never heard Dixie played other than as a trend of novelty car horns when The Dukes of Hazzard was popular, playing the same 11 notes. Only ever heard the lyrics on Loony Tunes cartoons.
I also can’t remember once hearing anything about “Southern pride” or the Civil War from my grandparent’s generation. Looking back, it seems kind of odd that I didn’t. During genealogical research, I’ve found several direct ancestors who fought for the South in the Civil War, including a great-great-great-grandfather that died of pneumonia at the age of 27 three months after enlisting. His body was buried somewhere in Charleston because they weren’t able to bring it home. (I only know these details from the research done by a distant, unknown cousin found on the internet—none of this survived in my branch of the family.) My great-great-grandfather was only two years old at the time, and I’m sure that he had “issues” with the whole losing his father in the war thing and must have had things to say to my great-grandmother about it. And my grandmother was 15 when he died, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was around opinions about the situation, too. But any stories or complaints heard must not have merited mention to me.
I wonder to what extent that these racist cultural elements have become a part of the lives of black southerners. Would it be strange for a black person to whistle Dixie? Is that stuff reviled in the African American community, or normalized?
I read somewhere that only half of black people want to remove Confederate statues, so I wondered if that survey was limited to black southerners, what would it look like?
I don’t have much experience in the south in case it’s not obvious. I spent a year in Gainesville but never talked to anyone.
There’s some evidence that Lincoln not only liked “Dixie,” but thought it was appropriate for the North to take it from the South after the end of the Civil War.
Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became a clothesmaker for, and a close acquaintance of, Mary Todd Lincoln, wrote a book in 1868 called Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Early in the book, she talks about a short speech Lincoln gave on board a steamer on the James River in Virginia in 1865:
If we could, as Lincoln suggests, somehow reclaim the song from the people who use it to promote white supremacism, i think there’s a possibility it could be rehabilitated. But it’s pretty heavily tied up with the redeemers’ ideas about the Lost Cause.
Wow, you and Starving Artist should get together and form the Wishful Thinkers’ Historical Society.
The interesting thing is that, while you ask about people sitting around in poverty, your source doesn’t once mention poverty rate.
Overall poverty in the United States was over 30% at the start of the 1950s, and was still about 20% at the end of the 1950s, despite a booming economy and low unemployment rates. Yes, poverty levels improved in the 1950s, but they improved just as much, or even more, in the 1960s under the Great Society and War on Poverty programs of the Johnson administration. National poverty levels reach an all-time low in the early 1970s.
Do you really think that all people shared equally in the rise of suburbia and white-collar jobs? Hell, black families who moved into new suburban developments, even in the North and West, often had bricks thrown through their windows, crosses burned on their lawns, and mobs howling on the streets outside their houses. And blacks who tried to take advantage of government housing assistance through the FHA and similar programs, found themselves redlined, unable to get insured mortgages and, in many cases, forced to buy houses under usurious contracts that often left them worse off than renters, building no equity as they paid their loans, and subject to losing everything with a single missed payment.
If you’re actually interested in the post-WWII luxury and prosperity enjoyed by black Americans, you can read about it in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ great article from a few years back in the Atlantic Monthly.
Sure. That’s always true. There were groups under Stalin who prospered, because they were essential to maintaining his bureaucratic state. There were groups who looked back on the era of the Generals in Argentina, or Pinochet in Chile, as “a great era” because they were among the beneficiaries of state power. There are plenty of people in China who probably aren’t very interested in hearing about the country’s human rights violations, because they’re thriving under the state capitalist system as members or allies of the ruling party. Attila the Hun and Tsar Nicholas and Pol Pot and Fidel Castro all produced periods in which some members of their societies prospered.
I’m not suggesting that the United States was anywhere near as bad as these authoritarian regimes. And the 1950s is known as the Age of Affluence by historians for a reason. But if all you’re going to look at is the stuff you like, and ignore the stuff that makes you uncomfortable, you’re not really a historian at all, just a cheerleader.
I am simply pointing out that not everybody who looks bck at the 50s as a good era are racist or bigotted.
They may have other reasons for viewing it that way.
It is incredibly narrow minded to judge the motives of other people through your (your collectively) narrow world view.
And I never said I thought the 50s was all that great, I supplied reasons why Other people can feel that way.
There are those of us who ARE capable of seeing how other people think and uderstanding why they think that way.
Sorry for those of you who can’t view the world through anything other than the narrow lens of racist and bigotry.
The stupidity and self righteousness on this board is astounding, for a board that claims to be ‘fighting ignorance’.
Every aspect of Southern culture will soon be taken away from us.
Hell, the left leaning loonies will be desecrating our cemeteries before long. You may laugh now, but just wait. It’s just a matter of time before the vandalism starts.
It took us a hundred years to recover Southern pride after the horror of the Reconstruction years. There was unimaginable poverty and hunger in the south.
A 150 years of healing ripped open by a bunch of crazies on the left.
Now the attacks start all over again. Robbing our culture of anything we treasure.
I know first hand the suffering under Reconstruction.
We had finally put all that behind us. The country had healed.
The few racist groups were marginal and could be ignored. Their numbers dwindling with each new generation. The Klan would have been gone in another generation.
Attacking Southern monuments and culture is the greatest recruiting tool you could have ever given to to the racists & radical right.
Instead of dying out, their numbers will grow exponentially. I am genuinely frightened what will happen in the next decades
The seeds of the next American Civil War may have been planted by this stupidity.
As one of those who IS capable of seeing how other people think and understanding why they think that way, could you please share with this benighted soul an explanation of why such people appear to ignore the tremendous disadvantages faced by the victims of Jim Crow policies when deciding to construct a perception of the era as a halcyon golden age? Surely, even if they managed to avoid noticing them at the time, they have had half a century and more of having such things pointed out to them.
ISTM that even stipulating that they were not racists and bigots, it takes a pretty narrow lens on their own eyes to allow them to consider the Jim Crow era to be absolutely a “better” time.
Yes, they could, but those are all based entirely upon ignorance or selfishness. Either not knowing or not caring that the 50’s were a pretty shitty time for quite a number of American citizens, but only remembering their own fond memories of the era.
We had a small Confederate rally yesterday. A few people stuck in the past. An anachronism dying out that would have been gone in another generation.
People in the South have walked this tightrope for a hundred years. The vast majority of us want nothing to do with the racists.
Everyone knew those old ideas would quietly die out over time. No one had to get hurt. The fire had almost died out. A lot of progress had been made since the ugly incidents in the 1950’s and 60’s. Attitudes had changed among most people.
Then the Left just had to throw gasoline on the dying embers.
Just leave these people alone. Let them live out their lives and the next generation can put this stuff behind them.
What makes you think so? It’s been a century and a half already.
But you voted for Trump. So what are we to think? And do please explain how repudiating racism, as “the vast majority” of you wanted, involved a tightrope. Were you afraid of falling into something beyond your control?
What happened to being responsible for your *own *actions? “The Left” didn’t make you embrace racism, you did it your own damn selves, didn’t you?
That’s what the last generation thought, and the generation before them. Maybe sterner measures are needed, wouldn’t you say?
What makes you so confident about this? The Confederacy ended over 150 years ago, and there are still Confederate rallies, generations later. These asshole and idiots pass their hatred on, and recruit new people by appealing to notions that white Americans are being unfairly treated.
It’s even more hilarious that the blame for conflict over this, in your mind, falls on the shoulders of the anti-racists and the anti-Confederates.
It’s called family history. Mine involves multiple generations of sharecroppers. We lived side by side with black people. Worked side by side in the fields trying to eke out a living. My grandparents’ neighbors in Louisiana were black and they were close friends. Working and farming together for their entire lives. People leaned on each other to survive. My dad’s navy induction records indicate he had rickets from malnutrition.
I’m not going to try and describe the horror of Southern Reconstruction. There are entire historical books on the subject.
The entire economy was in a shambles. Cities were destroyed. Manufacturing gone. Farms burned.
It took well over sixty years to recover and then the Great Depression set us back again.
History and first hand experience aren’t the same thing.
Reconstruction was from 1865 to 1877. If you were not alive during those years, you do not have first hand experience of the “suffering of Reconstruction.”
Good lord. Racist assholes not from Charlottesville who travelled to Charlottesville to throw a rally weren’t throwing gasoline on any embers? Sorry, you give those fuckwads a pass if it’s easier for you, but don’t expect others to.
