(no subject)

[cactuswatcher]

Somewhat lost here in the Far West in coverage of the President's adress was news of the passing of novelist and historian Shelby Foote on Monday. Foote was widely recognized after his appearance in Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War in which he quoted from and summarized passages of his monumental 3 volume history of that war. Foote was from Tennessee and of a generation of southerners that was steeped in racism and denial about Civil War and its causes. I had cousins who were born farther north, but grew up in rural Tennessee from a very young age. The Civil War was a subject that often came up on our visits to Tennessee. Southern pride about the subject was both understandable and a little confusing at the same time to us kids. We northern cousins were often treated to ridiculous, angry denials that the South had lost. We northern cousins grew to understand many Southern adults were even more hot about the subject. They tended both to deny that secession and the war were mostly over slavery and to believe fervently, if silently, that the blacks were at the same time mostly responsible for the war. In those post World War II days, anger at the North had genuinely faded. But the issues over the 'rights' of locals to treat their fellow men as poorly as they wished, were flaring that anger up again. So it was with great interest I read Shelby Foote's history. Not only is it fine history, it is a monument to balance and reason from a man who grew up in a society that normally could not think objectively about the subject. Shelby Foote was one of America's quiet heroes.

Comments

[darbyunlimited.livejournal.com]

I've never read any of Foote's writings, but I did live in Tennessee for a few years. What amazed me most was what passed for appropriate conversation topics among near-strangers (as long as the strangers were white). I have to admit to being dumbstruck the first time I heard it seriously proposed that blacks would have been much better off today if slavery had continued.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

My aunt was born and bred in Northern-loving Kansas. Though she was always a warm loving individual, she took on some of the worst of the values of her husband from Tennessee. She was a school teacher and after integration, she was certainly dismayed at the academic problems black children had, but she quickly stopping thinking that segregation had any merit whatsoever.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

I know that there are still people like this around, but that attitude is not acceptable on a public level here anymore than it is in the North. I suspect mountain people, to whom African-Americans are much less familiar, may feel freer to act that way. But I taught in a community college, with plenty of working class people, and the only student I ever encountered who felt that racist comments were acceptable was a Mexican immigrant. The whites may have felt it, but they knew they couldn't say it. In recent years, that is.

I'm sorry you had that experience, but it's not true of the whole region, any more than the cross-burning last May represents the feelings of everyone in Chicago.