Perhaps no individual played a bigger role in this alteration than President Woodrow Wilson. As a native Southerner, Wilson was a staunch Confederate apologist who spent his academic career rewriting American history as a means of concealing white supremacy and redeeming the Confederacy. In his 10-volume "A History of the American People," Wilson painted the enslavement of African Americans as a matter of "affection," describing a necessary, paternalistic order between master and slave. This arrangement, which Wilson described, saw slaves working merrily with "no wrong they fretted under or wished to see righted." Wilson lamented their freeing, calling them "pitiable because under slavery they had been shielded."
Wilson's new history featured the Ku Klux Klan as heroes determined to put the country back to its natural, racist order, and depicted white supremacist lawmakers enacting anti-democratic laws as faithful stewards battling "mischief" by limiting the damage done by "illiterate negroes." With this post-Confederate America taking shape dependent on white terrorism and prejudiced laws, Wilson saw a country primed for political and economic greatness.
His writings found purchase with an old friend named Thomas Dixon, a southern preacher so offended by a performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that he wrote a series of pro-Confederate novels using Wilson's histories as guidance. Dixon and Wilson had learned many of the same lessons together as students at Johns Hopkins University and kept in constant correspondence, so when Dixon's novels were adapted into D.W. Griffith's movie "Birth of a Nation." Wilson was thrilled and invited his friend and the cast and crew to the White House for a private screening.
In part because of Wilson's fake history and the success of the film, Lost Cause mythology took hold in America, leading to reinvigorated Confederate movements and nostalgia. Groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy began erecting monuments. Statues appeared outside courthouses and in public places, reminding African Americans that the Confederacy might have lost the war but still survived in the politics and culture of the United States.
Wilson used this resurgence for his own purposes. Seeing World War I as an opening for America to enter as a world power and broker for peace, he surrounded himself with propagandists he charged with scrubbing America clean of its crime — inequality, and primarily the tarnish of white supremacy — all with the goal of presenting to the rest of the world a nation of perfect equality and liberty. He succeeded in this, rebranding America as a champion of fairness while hiding its toxic racism.
These statues are markers of that revision and serve no purpose beyond reminding Americans that corrosive racist and elitist institutions still control power within the United States. Like the façade offered by Donald Trump, with his predilection for groping flags and spouting meaningless platitudes, they are only symbols obscuring actual reality. While Trump and his supporters protest attacks on "history," what they actually oppose is the destruction of a weaponized mythology that has served them and their white supremacist pursuits. What they actually fear is a reckoning with a story as hollow as the tarnished statues to which they cling.
JARED YATES SEXTON
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of "American Rule: How A Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People," to be published in September by Dutton Books. Currently is an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University.
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