Rejecting the cult of the Confederacy
President Woodrow Wilson transformed government into an engine of white supremacy when he took office in 1913. His administration segregated a federal workforce that had been integrated for 50 years and imposed separate white and “colored” bathrooms in federal buildings. As the historian Eric S. Yellin shows in his iconic book “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” segregation was just a prelude. The goal was to drive African Americans from influential jobs and confine them to a “controlled and exploitable class of laborers.”
The Wilsonians paid homage to the icons of white supremacy when they named military bases for Confederate traitors who had waged war on this country with the aim of keeping Black people in chains. This gesture of federal fealty ratified the “Southern way of life” at a time when African Americans were being hanged, shot and burned alive before cheering crowds all over the former Confederacy.
The naming honor was part of the alchemy that transformed America’s best- known enemies of the Republic into secular saints. The long- running myth that the rebel generals had no connection to racism became insupportable when contemporary white supremacists swaddled themselves in Confederate symbols.
Congress broke with the myth of the noble Confederates last year, when it voted to expunge from Defense Department assets “names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia” that commemorate the Confederate States of America. The same legislation established the Naming Commission, which has proposed new names for nine Army installations in the South. This exercise has thrown a spotlight onto the Wilsonian role in the process that granted treasonous generals their federal halos.
A Crowning Achievement
By the time the Virginia- born Wilson came to office, a cult of the Confederacy known as the
Lost Cause had succeeded in popularizing an extravagantly racist version of Southern history. This telling cast slavery as a benign institution beloved by the enslaved, and it valorized the Ku Klux Klan for violently suppressing Black political expression after Emancipation. The Lost Cause presented Confederate generals as honorable men who fought to secure “states’ rights” instead of human bondage.
Legal scholar Michel Paradis argues that the naming honor was “one of the crowning achievements” of the Confederate propaganda machine. It put rebels who had nearly destroyed the Union on an equal footing with those who had paid a high price to preserve it. It also eased the way for the military champions of slavery to be enshrined at influential houses of worship, including the Washington National Cathedral. It elevated the architects of Jim Crow during the Southern reign of racial terror that would last into the 1960s.
Among the first federal honorees were Gen. Robert E. Lee, who opposed citizenship rights for free Black people and had allowed his Civil War forces to
does. This explains why each joule of energy deployed in the US economy emits roughly 15% less CO2 than it did a decade ago.
The Inflation Reduction Act relies on these new economics.
Some of the clean energy tax credits, for instance, generate benefits that are three to four times as large as the costs. That kind of cost- benefit balance was not true 10 years ago. “Climate policy is much less expensive today,” Greenstone said. “We are picking the fruits of that.”
The bill that passed in the Senate could lead to a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, compared with 2005, the Rhodium Group estimates. That’s not quite the 50% cut the US promised in Paris in 2015, but it’s close.
To hit its target, the US must continue down a steeper path than it has followed for the past 20 years. If the Congressional Budget Office’s projections of economic growth hold true, then by 2030 the US must ensure that the production of each dollar of GDP releases only 189 grams of CO2, roughly half of what it releases today.
Unfortunately the fracking revolution has already yielded most of its gains. So has the compact between China and Germany that delivered cheap wind and solar energy. Further carbon reductions will likely require America’s political class to embrace more expensive solutions.
Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise” and “The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.”