(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

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

The Mind of the South by WJ Cash, which you probably know, does a very good job of explaining how working class white southerners were hooked in to the glorious whiteness of it all.

(And of course the ancestors of the mountain people who are now the proudest wavers of the Confederate flag were often not Confederates at all--Cold Mountain has flaws, but it's accurate on that part).

All of this has not changed, to my thinking. Current local and national conservatives have just learned to play to it (see the "southern" style of George W Bush, and the way he presents the US as the gallant but ultimately victorious underdog. He manages to make guerrillas sound like an Evil Empire).