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truepennyOver on Electrolite, a discussion has got going about the Civil War [American, that is. --Ed.] and how one ought to conceptualize it.
I am much too shy to jump into a discussion like that, but it's making me think.
I grew up in East Tennessee, although both my parents are of Yankee extraction (the ancestors involved in the Civil War were all on the Union side). East Tennessee wanted, at the time of the secession, to secede in reverse and become the Free State of Franklin, but, being surrounded by slave states, they couldn't pull it off. This fact is not taught in Tennessee History, a class which all seventh graders are required to take; I learned it from my mother, who was commenting on the sad facts that most people who live in E.Tenn. now are rabidly proud of their Confederate heritage.
I was certainly NOT taught in school that the Confederates were right; my high school history teachers were men with complicated relationships with the South and their own heritage. And although my high school was racist--more about that in a minute--it was not white supremacist. No swastikas that I recall, no skinheads. But a lot of Confederate flags on the pick-up trucks of teenage boys.
I had a long conversation once with a colleague in the department here (now teaching at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and I hope he's stirring up the hornets) about the racial divide in Southern high schools. He's African-American, and from Virginia, and what was interesting about that conversation was that our perception of racism in high school was essentially the same. The black kids and the white kids just didn't mix, except in certain narrowly defined arenas, like sports teams and chorus and band--arenas which also dissolved the class divide.
My high school was very weird in terms of class; somebody would have a fascinating sociology paper if they went and did some observing. The raison d'être of my hometown is the Oak Ridge National Labs, so the middle and upper classes tend to be scientists, or people who are part of the support apparatus for the scientists. The scientists come from all over, and their kids tend to be fairly urbane. The Asian, Hispanic, and otherwise neither Caucasian- nor African-descended kids tended to get lumped in there, although I don't know that all of their parents were scientists. (Oak Ridge did not, when I was in high school over ten years ago, have a noticeable Hispanic population; that may well have changed.)
Then there's what you might call the native population: the poor whites and the (mostly poor) blacks. So the class divide was triangulated: children of scientists and other cosmopolitanites, poor whites of Appalachian descent, and African-Americans. The three groups remained largely separated; I had friendships with members of both those other groups, but they were uneasy and awkward and not very close.
When I was in junior high, one of the very popular girls got removed from a particular position (president of Student Council? Homecoming Queen? she was the sort of girl it could have been either) because she was dating an African-American kid. I do think it is a tribute to the eroding effects of time that none of us students understood really what the fuss was about, but the administration was very sure. One of the most amazing things about moving to the Upper Midwest was--and still is--seeing what in my childhood were referred to ominously as "mixed-race couples" and not having anyone even blink.
So, yes, slavery was an abomination upon the face of the earth; there's a reason I know all the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," although it's slightly jingoistic nonsense and I know perfectly well that many of the causes of the Civil War were economic. I have neither patience nor sympathy nor tolerance for the whites who think they want the Confederacy to rise again. The violence and bloodshed and horror necessary for the South to admit that freedom equals Civil Rights appalls and shames me.
But one thing I do know is that Reconstruction didn't, and that a lot of the reason that people in the South wave their Confederate flags is not so much about slavery or race as it is about the myth that before the Civil War, the South was prosperous and powerful. I think a lot of people don't really think about the whole slavery part; what they know, remember, and believe is that the Yankees won the war, and that therefore Yankees are rich and Southerners are poor, and that the deep economic depression which is still hanging over the South like a storm front was caused by the South losing the Civil War. Never mind the fact that most of them would have been dirt poor in the Antebellum South. It's the dream that has power here.
Please note, I'm not saying any of that is true; what I'm saying is that the racial and economic problems have gotten conflated, and that as the years have passed, and the new status quo has been assimilated, the economic grievances are the ones that have come out on top. I'm also not saying that the white people of the South aren't racist, that this has become purely a matter of economic oppression, because boy howdy would that be a lie. But it is also true that I've seen more KKK activity in the seven years I've lived in the Upper Midwest than I ever saw in Tennessee. And that frightens me. (I also know, before![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scarcrest has to point it out, that that's partly a factor of living at the east end of the state rather than the west. But still.)
Driving through rural Tennessee can be an alarming experience--and not just because of the JESUS SAVES signs posted on random trees at the side of the road. The small towns are like ghost towns. The store fronts are half-empty and mostly haven't seen a facelift since the 30s, if then. The aftershocks of the Civil War haven't died down, either for African-Americans or for the communities of the mid-South--which were poorer than the Deep South states to begin with and which were the sites of many of the battles.
I think the thing that matters, and the thing that children need to be taught about, is the death. The sheer, stupid, brutal waste of human life. Despite the fact that Tennessee is littered with battlefields, I don't recall a single field trip to a Civil War site (Nice, politically-correct visit to Cherokee, North Carolina? Check. Shiloh? Say what now?) or any particular attention to that phase of Tennessee history. Which becomes the more appalling when you discover, as I just did (all praise the mighty power of Google!), that there was a battle for Knoxville--less than an hour away from the institutions of public education in which I was being taught. In fact, the hospital in which I was born, Fort Sanders, was named for the fort by which that battle is usually identified. I am completely serious; I did not know that until two minutes ago.
And that's just dumb. Because I think that's the place where maybe this long-festering, resentful, bigoted stupidity could be levered open. When I was a rising senior and doing college interviews, my parents and I stopped at Gettysburg, and I remember standing there, looking across that rather lumpy and uninspiring piece of terrain, and having it hit me. Hard. It wasn't just history; it was people dying. It was horrifying. And if a grumpy, miserable, and self-centered sixteen year old could get that (it was a bad trip, let's not get into the gory details), then maybe other people could, too. If they were given the chance.
I am much too shy to jump into a discussion like that, but it's making me think.
I grew up in East Tennessee, although both my parents are of Yankee extraction (the ancestors involved in the Civil War were all on the Union side). East Tennessee wanted, at the time of the secession, to secede in reverse and become the Free State of Franklin, but, being surrounded by slave states, they couldn't pull it off. This fact is not taught in Tennessee History, a class which all seventh graders are required to take; I learned it from my mother, who was commenting on the sad facts that most people who live in E.Tenn. now are rabidly proud of their Confederate heritage.
I was certainly NOT taught in school that the Confederates were right; my high school history teachers were men with complicated relationships with the South and their own heritage. And although my high school was racist--more about that in a minute--it was not white supremacist. No swastikas that I recall, no skinheads. But a lot of Confederate flags on the pick-up trucks of teenage boys.
I had a long conversation once with a colleague in the department here (now teaching at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and I hope he's stirring up the hornets) about the racial divide in Southern high schools. He's African-American, and from Virginia, and what was interesting about that conversation was that our perception of racism in high school was essentially the same. The black kids and the white kids just didn't mix, except in certain narrowly defined arenas, like sports teams and chorus and band--arenas which also dissolved the class divide.
My high school was very weird in terms of class; somebody would have a fascinating sociology paper if they went and did some observing. The raison d'être of my hometown is the Oak Ridge National Labs, so the middle and upper classes tend to be scientists, or people who are part of the support apparatus for the scientists. The scientists come from all over, and their kids tend to be fairly urbane. The Asian, Hispanic, and otherwise neither Caucasian- nor African-descended kids tended to get lumped in there, although I don't know that all of their parents were scientists. (Oak Ridge did not, when I was in high school over ten years ago, have a noticeable Hispanic population; that may well have changed.)
Then there's what you might call the native population: the poor whites and the (mostly poor) blacks. So the class divide was triangulated: children of scientists and other cosmopolitanites, poor whites of Appalachian descent, and African-Americans. The three groups remained largely separated; I had friendships with members of both those other groups, but they were uneasy and awkward and not very close.
When I was in junior high, one of the very popular girls got removed from a particular position (president of Student Council? Homecoming Queen? she was the sort of girl it could have been either) because she was dating an African-American kid. I do think it is a tribute to the eroding effects of time that none of us students understood really what the fuss was about, but the administration was very sure. One of the most amazing things about moving to the Upper Midwest was--and still is--seeing what in my childhood were referred to ominously as "mixed-race couples" and not having anyone even blink.
So, yes, slavery was an abomination upon the face of the earth; there's a reason I know all the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," although it's slightly jingoistic nonsense and I know perfectly well that many of the causes of the Civil War were economic. I have neither patience nor sympathy nor tolerance for the whites who think they want the Confederacy to rise again. The violence and bloodshed and horror necessary for the South to admit that freedom equals Civil Rights appalls and shames me.
But one thing I do know is that Reconstruction didn't, and that a lot of the reason that people in the South wave their Confederate flags is not so much about slavery or race as it is about the myth that before the Civil War, the South was prosperous and powerful. I think a lot of people don't really think about the whole slavery part; what they know, remember, and believe is that the Yankees won the war, and that therefore Yankees are rich and Southerners are poor, and that the deep economic depression which is still hanging over the South like a storm front was caused by the South losing the Civil War. Never mind the fact that most of them would have been dirt poor in the Antebellum South. It's the dream that has power here.
Please note, I'm not saying any of that is true; what I'm saying is that the racial and economic problems have gotten conflated, and that as the years have passed, and the new status quo has been assimilated, the economic grievances are the ones that have come out on top. I'm also not saying that the white people of the South aren't racist, that this has become purely a matter of economic oppression, because boy howdy would that be a lie. But it is also true that I've seen more KKK activity in the seven years I've lived in the Upper Midwest than I ever saw in Tennessee. And that frightens me. (I also know, before
scarcrest has to point it out, that that's partly a factor of living at the east end of the state rather than the west. But still.)Driving through rural Tennessee can be an alarming experience--and not just because of the JESUS SAVES signs posted on random trees at the side of the road. The small towns are like ghost towns. The store fronts are half-empty and mostly haven't seen a facelift since the 30s, if then. The aftershocks of the Civil War haven't died down, either for African-Americans or for the communities of the mid-South--which were poorer than the Deep South states to begin with and which were the sites of many of the battles.
I think the thing that matters, and the thing that children need to be taught about, is the death. The sheer, stupid, brutal waste of human life. Despite the fact that Tennessee is littered with battlefields, I don't recall a single field trip to a Civil War site (Nice, politically-correct visit to Cherokee, North Carolina? Check. Shiloh? Say what now?) or any particular attention to that phase of Tennessee history. Which becomes the more appalling when you discover, as I just did (all praise the mighty power of Google!), that there was a battle for Knoxville--less than an hour away from the institutions of public education in which I was being taught. In fact, the hospital in which I was born, Fort Sanders, was named for the fort by which that battle is usually identified. I am completely serious; I did not know that until two minutes ago.
And that's just dumb. Because I think that's the place where maybe this long-festering, resentful, bigoted stupidity could be levered open. When I was a rising senior and doing college interviews, my parents and I stopped at Gettysburg, and I remember standing there, looking across that rather lumpy and uninspiring piece of terrain, and having it hit me. Hard. It wasn't just history; it was people dying. It was horrifying. And if a grumpy, miserable, and self-centered sixteen year old could get that (it was a bad trip, let's not get into the gory details), then maybe other people could, too. If they were given the chance.
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 02:17 pm (UTC)I think--and I'm appalled at myself even as I type this--that I know more about the English Civil War than I do about the American Civil War. I've taken a graduate seminar in English Civil War literature; I've written papers about Andrew Marvell and Richard Lovelace and John Milton; I've read The Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson and the pamphlets of Gerrard Winstanley. But that's all nice, safe, academic knowledge. Whereas the American Civil War ... English doesn't have a distinction, but it's the difference between savoir and connaître.
The American Civil War is an American cultural malaise. We get very stupid and impassioned about it, and I think if we could let go of the war and try to solve the problems left in its wake, we would ultimately be a lot better off.
But it's easier to be angry and resentful.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 03:18 pm (UTC)What was I trying to say? I don't even know.
I think it was something about the American tendency to ignore the fact that other places have history, and that their history is affected by our history and vice versa. Many of the things that most infuriate me about American cultural thinking are directly descended from the Puritans who settled in New England, in large part because the Restoration had left them out in the cold. And, as you said, people in England were directly and vitally affected by the progress of the American Civil War. In other words, I think I was trying to apologize for the parochial short-sightedness of the post I made. And managed exactly the opposite. Go me. :(
I've never had a comparable experience wrt the English Civil War as I did at Gettysburg. Possibly that's because I've never been to England and therefore never stood on a relevant battlefield. What I was trying to say was that this does not make the English Civil War any less important or less relevant--Cromwell's policy in Ireland still has a lot to answer for--simply that it makes it more distant for me and therefore easier to think about in a detached fashion.
And I don't know what that point was supposed to be in support of, either. I just don't know. Take the fool away, gentlemen.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-10 04:01 pm (UTC)And I'm sure there are Americans who don't particularly mind if Irish terrorists blow up children, just as there are Americans who never cared how women were treated under the Taleban--until it became politically expedient for us to have a reason to invade Afghanistan--Americans who don't care about the thousands of children dying of hunger in Africa and India, or the Hell's dance floor North American interference has made of South America. There were Americans who were DELIGHTED when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I've talked to one; in 1992, he still referred to the Japanese as "Japs." He told me that in Oak Ridge, when the news came of the bombings, they danced on the tennis courts all night long.
We're a big, stupid, short-sighted bully of a country. We could use our power for good, and we don't, and I hate it.