(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

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this, CW. I've never heard of Foote before, and I only know about the American Civil War in the vaguest of terms, so I'm always interested to hear people's thoughts on it. I think your Southern states are a lot like our Quebec in that they remember the history of our respective nations quite differently than the rest of us. Very different point of view. It's almost like another country within the larger country, a separate political/cultural body. Even though we strive for unity, it feels like we'll never really be unified.

I hope you have a good July 4! It's too bad you can't make this year's Gathering -- I'd like to meet you one day!

[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]

I think mamculuna would agree that the US South has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. There are still some areas where things are far from perfect. But the socially acceptable, vicious, day to day, personal degradation of black people in the south, that I remember from personal experience, seems to be a thing of the past.

I hope you and all our friends have a safe journey and happy weekend together in New York!

[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]

Thanks for letting us know. I greatly admired Foote, and your comments are exactly right. He spoke for the South in a voice that the rest of the world could hear, in more ways than one.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, CW, and again, well-said. I believe the South has changed, though I don't deny that the things experienced by Sara and Darby in Tennessee (see his post below) are still possibly happening--but not often in my experience. Overt racism has become socially unacceptable, and for middle and upper class blacks and whites, there's in many ways an easier relationship here than elsewhere, because of cultural similarities. Of course, covert racism is alive and well here, just as it is in the rest of the country.

However, the memory of the Civil War and the past do set the south apart, and I suspect as Scroll says, we're in some ways similar to Quebec. I thought Burns' series and especially Foote's part in it painted a good picture of those feelings. Much as I believe the Confederacy was totally based on racism (and quite evil as a result), I think there are some to whom The Lost Cause (as it once was known) also had roots in the English Civil war, and the Scottish and Irish subjugation by the English, since those led many of the ancestors of the Confederates to emigrate in the first place. I don't imagine most of those who feel the "Southerness" the most strongly are conscious of those historical roots, but I think they are there.

Whedon tapped into this in Firefly, too, I think.

[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.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about that this morning.

It seemed very much "The Lost Cause" swirled around the notion of the virtues of a budding English-style nobility/aristocracy in the South. Northerners from the war onward have wondered why the common Confederate solder fought so fiercely for what seemed to be mostly the benefit of a few wealthy planters. Yet it's very clear that the developing class system (which would have left most people second-class citizens) was far more acceptable to the average Southerner of the 1850's than outside imposition of law of whatever nature.

[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).