As evidenced by Dylann Roof and millions who share his views if not his soul sickness, the right has been most effective and destructive in reweaving the history of the Confederacy. In a piece in the Washington Post this week, James Loewen describes the decades’ long work of Southern “historians’” to turn the Civil War from an insurrection mounted to defend human slavery into a ‘war between the states’ sparked in large part by an imperious federal government bent on robbing the South of its liberty.
Loewen reminds us of how hard Civil War apologists work to shape our collective memory. Kentucky is a border state that never joined the confederacy; 90,000 Kentuckians volunteered for the Union army, nearly triple the number that fought for the rebellion. Today Kentucky has 2 Union monuments and 72 Confederate monuments. It may be that conservatives care more about the past or are more susceptible to nostalgia. But erecting all those monuments took effort. The right is willing to make it because, like Orwell, it sees the point of controlling the past.
Republicans are even fonder of twisting the story of America’s birth. In 1984 Ronald Reagan added the word ‘shining’ to the phrase “city on a hill” from John Winthrop’s famed sermon to Puritans bound for Massachusetts. Winthrop’s message to his flock was to behave, because the whole world was watching: ”We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” Reagan’s message was almost the exact opposite; that whatever America did must be good because God chose it to be the envy of all nations, a notion Winthrop would have heard as sinful pride and that helped inspire the reckless self-reverential folderol known as “American Exceptionalism.” (John Kennedy was the first modern president to invoke the sermon. In a lustrous speech in Boston days before his inaugural he perfectly echoed Winthrop’s call to rise to the challenge of the hour.) Our founding has so much to teach us but so much of what is taught now is false.
Since Reagan’s death the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, brainchild of noted social-contract shredder Grover Norquist, has labored to name something after Reagan in every county in America. I’d say they’re halfway there. They also want his name on currency, and a federal holiday in his honor. Norquist thinks the more stuff he names after Reagan the more taxes he can cut. I think he’s right. Such is the power of propaganda.
Of course, the price of propaganda is ignorance. The more we fete Reagan, the harder it is to tell people what a train wreck his fiscal policies were; harder still to make them believe he ever apologized to Gorbachev for calling Russia an evil empire—he did– or went to Reykjavik boldly hoping to dismantle both the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. He did that, too; we just don’t know it.
You’d think a left rife with college professors and other readers of books could fight this battle at least to a draw, but outside academia it barely put up a fight. A few lonely voices—Lewis Lapham and Stacy Schiff spring to mind–urged all who are in any sense progressive-minded to fight those who propagandize history. But up to now it was a tough sell. Among the many horrid lessons of Charleston is a new awareness of the price we pay for our neglect. We know now if we didn’t before just how many stand at the ready to pour hate into the vacuum of ignorance.
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The myth of the Confederacy may be the worst lie we tell, but countless others need correcting. There are lots of ways to do it, all with practical impact. If you fear the erosion of the right to privacy or the rule of law, you might think it time to remove J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI headquarters in Washington. (Feel free to consider this essay a Kickstarter for that project.) We are right to celebrate the heritage of millions of Italian Americans who came to our shores. But what of the millions of Americans who got here 10,000 years before them? Might not Columbus share his weekend with those whom we systematically exterminated? And speaking of heritage, the deal to lower the flag at South Carolina’s capitol included a promise to spend millions on a shrine to it somewhere off premises. Shouldn’t such a shrine await construction of a bigger one to the millions of proud South Carolinians who spent the Civil War years in bondage?
The right says the left wants only to disparage America. If nothing else, the last few weeks should teach us to question the depth of the right’s oft-proclaimed love of country, just as we’d question the spirituality of the publicly pious. It seems when the right isn’t busy kicking other people out of America, it’s busy threatening to leave. (See the borderline secessionist and outright nullification sentiments voices by so many Republican presidential candidates.) The funny thing is there is so much about this wonderful, diverse nation that, given the chance, liberals could teach conservatives to love. You can’t really love what you don’t really know.
The poet William Blake had a theory that we all move from innocence, a joyous state in which all chimney sweeps seem happy and well, to experience, a sadder one in which we perceive their ill health and general misery. But Blake said there’s a third state we can attain in which we see suffering but still rejoice in life. He called this state, for some reason, organized innocence. We need a patriotism that is the moral equivalent of Blake’s organized innocence, an informed patriotism that lets us see all that we are, the bad and the good; a mature love of country that begins as it should in our love for one another and in our devotion to truth. It is to such patriotism that a true knowledge of history invites us.
Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism.
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