Our fake history
Just ignore all of that, please
THE DEATHS that came at Antietam? They never happened. First Bull Run? Is that a rodeo sport? Gettysburg? Wasn’t there a speech there or something?
Jim Crow? Doesn’t he play third base for the Cardinals? Reconstruction? Somebody mentioned that in history class once. Civil rights, or the lack thereof throughout American history? Wasn’t that all settled back in the ’60s?
It is remarkable how many folks throughout the South are trying their best to push our history to the back of the bus, shunning the whole thing, hoping never to have to answer questions about it. Because the answers might be uncomfortable. What’s most remarkable—that is, somebody should remark on it—is that these erasers of the past tend to be from the port side of American politics. Those who should be leading the effort to confront our collective past are instead leading the effort to delete it all from memory.
Down in New Orleans, the very Democratic mayor from a very Democratic family—Mitch Landrieu of the New Orleans Landrieus—is trying to take Robert E. Lee’s name and image out of Lee Circle. Lee Circle. We don’t know what the new name would be, but Mitch Landrieu Circle just doesn’t have the same ring.
Similar efforts are happening all over the decidedly (and happily) former Confederate South. The city council in Charlottesville, Va., voted to get rid of Gen. Lee and the horse he rode in on. In Louisville, they moved a 70-foot-tall monument to little Brandenburg, Ky., where there’s less foot traffic and even fewer folks to ask questions. Here in Arkansas, the last session of the Legislature moved Robert E. Lee’s official recognition from January to October. Why? To celebrate his death rather than his birthday? How morbid. There have been some objections. “We can’t erase history,” says Thomas Strain Jr., a high muckety-muck with the national Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Of course we can! The Soviets proved that over and again. When a comrade fell out of favor, he was simply erased. Made a non-person. In Soviet propaganda films, extras were edited into certain scenes to make sure Those Who Cannot Be Named (or seen) were blocked from view. Books and the photographs therein were edited even more easily. Such doings make for interesting reading. For best example, there’s 1984 by an author named Orwell.
You can’t erase history? Tell it to Confederate Boulevard in Little Rock, Ark.—or rather the street formerly known as Confederate Boulevard. And that street wasn’t even named for the old rotten Confederacy but for a hospital for Confederate veterans that had once stood there. But, according to our betters, the name itself was doubleplusungood.
“You can’t whitewash history,” said state Sen. Gerald Allen of Alabama, who introduced a bill in his state last year to protect old monuments.
Of course you can, Mr. Senator. It’s happening all over. We wonder, what’s next? Washington, District of Columbia, is named after two men of their times, too. An American president/general/Founding Father of some note, plus a citizen of Genoa who explored the world on some small boats famously named the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Or do they still teach that kind of stuff in our schools?
Of course, neither of those men was perfect, both being human. And in some circles they are controversial today. Will we have to re-name our nation’s capital to keep certain folks from clutching their pearls upon hearing the name?
“We have to come to grips with our past,” a councilwoman in Charlottesville told the Wall Street Journal—after voting to drop Confederate names from two city parks.
No, ma’am, we do not. We don’t have to come to grips with any of it. We, as flawed Americans and flawed Southerners, can ignore our past completely. As so many folks are trying to do. All it takes is some spackling paste, maybe a heavy truck for the monuments, and city council types who’d rather forget that this country ever had a past. At least a past that doesn’t include only Betsy Ross, T-model Fords and the moon landing. Having reminders of the United States’ full history around here might interfere with our digestion. Such things as slavery, The War, Jim Crow, Dred Scott and the Missouri Compromise are best left to the dusty academics in their even dustier libraries. There, they can safely explain our past. Should anybody really want to know.
IF THE history books are to be believed, Arkansas and the rest of the South were once a part of a rebellion and a war that a president named Lincoln once called the Late Unpleasantness. The war was fought over slavery, the union of states, bitter regional fueds and, it should be noted, because the South made a historic, triumphant, glorious and idiotic decision to fire on a federal facility named Fort Sumter. No matter the efforts of our national park-name editors, that will not change.
If these people want a narrative-free history for the (still) United States of America, some of us will resist. To the barricades!
Or at least to the page proofs. As John Lennon once said, we’re all doing what we can.