As another Doper whose Euro-Southern roots date back to the early days of Jamestown and who has American Indian and probably African ancestry besides, and who having grown up gay and intelligent on a farm 20 miles from a Podunk town in rural Alabama (and as such is no great fan of the usually uninformed and hypocritical “traditional values” crowd), and as a descendant of numerous Confederate veterans (some of whom came from families that didn’t own their own land and some of whom came from families that owned many slaves) I’ll take a brief retirement from my self-imposed SDMB retirement long enough to give this a try.
In the first place, there’s really not as much veneration of the Civil War as non southerners might think. You rarely hear it mentioned and, as with Wilford Brimley, those de rigeur statues of men holding muskets in town squares are many years removed from their erection. It’s really not a subject of daily conversation.
That said, it is a lot more recent than you may think. The Civil War is still in living memory if living memory is defined as (and by some historians it is) “what the oldest generation still alive in large numbers can remember hearing first hand when they were young of the experiences of the oldest generation still alive in large numbers at that time”. In other words, the oldest generation still alive in large numbers in the south/American in general would be Brokaw’s “greatest generation”- those who were young adults in WW2 (so, let’s say, those born about 1920). When they were young, the oldest generation would have been those born around the 1840s/1850s- a few Civil War veterans and a lot more civilians who remembered the war and the Reconstruction. In another few years the Civil War will be outside of living memory and it will be interesting to see what affect that has on the “already far more homogenized [and not always for the better] due to franchises and mass media/pop culture than many would suspect” South.
That ‘that’ said, I’m 41 years old: I was born after the JFK assassination and have no memory of MLK or RFK and grew up with color television in a central AC house, and yet as “recent” as I am, my parents’ wedding in 1952 was attended by two former slaveowners (my mother’s step great-grandmother/biological great-aunt and her sister, both of them born in the 1850s and both of whom inherited slaves when their father died in 1861). While I have no memory of the event, when I was a baby my parents put me on the lap of my great-grandmother Louisiana’s friend ‘Aunt Maudie’, about 102 years old and born under slavery, strictly so that I could say “I was held in the lap of an ex-slave” (my parents were both majorly into tradition/history/connections, and yes- b.i.o.n., white people really did have black friends in the 1960s (and 1860s, and 1760s, and 1660s- the fact that the races were not equal under the law did not prevent affections from forming, and as I’ve said many times there’s nothing remotely simple about race relations in the south today or at any time in the past- on the individual level all bets are and have always been off= I grew up hearing fascinating stories about the friendships and romantic entanglements twixt the races in my family alone, my favorite being that of a one-legged Civil War veteran uncle and how he avenged the rape of his biracial daughter).
So, I am proud to be a Southerner if “pride” is defined as “having no shame in, but having a strong interest in and a real sense of connection to” the place and its culture, much the way I have gay pride. That said, I detest the oversimplification of large groups of people (even though I’ll admit I say Yankees & Fundies) and of history in general. This extends to those who wave the Confederate battle flag and seem to have no clue that
1- It’s not even the frigging Confederate flag
2- It’s a flag that was popularized far more by the (nationwide) revenant KKK movement of the 20th century than the Civil War
However, one need look no further than this thread to see that, like slavery, the South holds no monopoly on mythmaking or painting with mile wide brushes. (And as always I’m appalled by how people who would probably go apeshit over someone painting all Muslims/all black people/all gays/all Christians/all atheists with the same mile wide brush think nothing of using one to slap on a few paints to all Alabamians or all southerners as if we were all of exactly the same mindset; Alabama’s the most biodiverse state in the nation in terms of flora and fauna and its people aren’t that much more homogenous.)
It should be remembered, for example, that “my fellow Alabamian” George Wallace (a man my father knew well and who I dined with* [his niece was my 6th/7th grade “girlfriend]) had massive support outside the south even as early as 1964, a year after the Birmingham church bombing that killed 4 little girls (one of them the best friend of “my fellow Alabamian”, then 9 year old Condoleezza Rice). In 1972, the year he was shot, he won the Michigan primary by 51% and had enough support from California to the “liberal” northeast to cause both Nixon and McGovern to view him with real concern, and while he was famously heckled at Harvard but received standing ovations at speeches everywhere else he went including northern states
At the same time, there was a very sizeable contingency in his home state who despised him, one that included my parents (my father was a Wallace appointee at one time, my mother was friends with his first wife Lurleen, and both of my parents taught his children and stepchildren). With my parents as with many of his detractors their dislike of him was not racially based (frankly he was far better than the alternatives- he at least knew that the racist rhetoric he was spewing for the camera was bullshit and was in fact a racial moderate**) but because he was such a “give ‘em what they want to hear” populist who, as you regrettably have to if you want to be elected, appealed to the lowest common denominator for their votes. It’s also worth remembering that Wallace continued to be elected, often by landslides, long after blacks received the vote, and the black vote in Alabama was always overwhelmingly for Wallace. He was no more evil than any populist and probably less evil than many.
As for That Damned War®©™, I won’t rehash what others have stated and what I’ve said many times before ***in- Og- knows- how- many- other- threads, though I will add a couple of things I don’t remember having mentioned before.
1- The reason most southerners fought in the war was because they didn’t have much of a choice. The Conscription Acts made military service mandatory for all males 18-35 who were not engaged in necessary industries or otherwise able to argue or bribe their way out of it, the high age later increased to 45 (and by the end of the war if you were 9 or if you were 89 and could pull a trigger they’d accept you as a volunteer- they were even inducting slaves into the army).
2- I have no problem conceding that the war was begun by Southern plutocrats to preserve slavery; the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. I am irked, however, by those who believe the war on the Union’s part was fought to end slavery; it quite simply was NOT, at least not in the beginning. Lincoln clearly stated that he had no intention of proclaiming emancipation but only to preserve the Union (it’s one of history’s ironies that by starting the war the Southern plutocrats ended the practice sooner than it probably would have died without the war) and that the North was no more monolithic than the South. There were abolitionists and anti-secessionists who served as generals in the Confederate army and there was no shortage of anti-War sentiment (and sure as hell no shortage of racial hatred) in the North.
As for Civil Rights, Rosa Parks was from Alabama and Martin Luther King was from Georgia and assassinated in Tennessee. From the same era, Eldridge Cleaver left the south when he was a baby and his family never moved back, and Malcolm X was born in Omaha, assassinated in New York City, and never lived south of the Mason Dixon line. More of the worst racial riots in American history happened outside of the south than inside, and while Montgomery, AL had racially segregated schools so did Las Vegas, Chicago, and Hyannisport, Massachusetts. Byron de la Beckwith was a [California born] bastard from Mississippi who murdered Medgar Evers, but the biggest bigoted bastard of the time was J. Edgar Hoover, a native and resident of D.C… In 1939 Hattie McDaniel was prevented from viewing the world premiere of Gone With the Wind due to ridiculous race prejudice in Atlanta, but in 1952 she was denied burial in Hollywood Cemetery for the same reasons (in spite of the fact the cemetery included the graves of mobster Bugsy Siegel, the dogs who played Rin Tin Tin, and one of the chimps from the Tarzan movies) but to far less reportage. The point of all these is that the South does not hold a monopoly on 20th century racism.
I am curious whether those who think it is impossible for southerners to be proud of their heritage without promoting racism would think it is possible for any of the possible to exist:
1- Vietnam veterans who are proud of their service but don’t promote the murder of innocent civilians such as those killed in North Vietnam, Cambodia or the My Lai Massacre
2- People who are proud to be Americans yet don’t support the war in Iraq (or, for that matter, people who are proud to be Americans and fully support the war in Iraq, whichever is the opposite of how you feel about the war)
3- People who are proud to be American but don’t promote the genocide of the American Indians (and who regardless of where they live occupy land that once belonged to some Indian tribe or other)
4- Descendants of veterans of Sherman’s troops who are proud of their ancestry but don’t promote war crimes against civilians (white or black)
5- Black people who have pride in their race but don’t promote the misogynistic or racist lyrics and substance abuse of rappers
6- Gay people who have pride in being gay but don’t promote cannibalizing gay Milwaukeeans or having anonymous rest area sex
These aren’t rhetorical- I’m curious if you think they’re possible when those who take reasonable pride in southern ancestry do so at the detriment of racial responsibility and reason.
*Ever seen a T-bone covered in ketchup? It ain’t pretty.
**If that sounds hard to believe, it’s true and echoed by pretty much every biographer of any background. He is an exercise in the Vonnegutian adage of ‘careful what you pretend to be’- the miniseries about him starring Gary Sinise is mostly predicated on this quite explicable if unpardonable dichotomy.
***That one contains an interesting quote by Alexis de Tocqueville at the bottom.