AUDASE

'Gone With the Wind': The real Southern heritage

by Susan Grigsby   DAILY KOS

　

Dr. Samuel Green, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at Stone Mountain, Georgia on July 24, 1948, flanked by two children

Southerners have got to realize that Margaret Mitchell was a writer of fiction. She did not chronicle the romance of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. She made it up. Of course, she was helped by historians like Edward A. Pollard, author of the 1866 whitewash of the war, The Lost Cause (The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates). She was also helped by the articles of Jubal Early, and the autobiography of Jefferson Davis, all of whom claimed that, in spite of all written evidence to the contrary, the Civil War was not fought over slavery. But it was always a fairy tale.

Southerners stole people. They robbed people of their freedom. And they did not just rob them of their liberty and their labor, they robbed them of their progeny. They robbed their descendants of a future. This is the heritage of the South. This is the infamous Lost Cause that many today still consider so noble that they have enshrined it into a veritable altar at which we are expected to pay homage. Or at the very least respect.

I don't respect treason.

I was born and raised in Chicago, perhaps the most segregated city in the United States, populated by racist blue-color workers who succeeded in keeping the migrants from the South, who came with hearts full of hope, locked up in crowded tenements. Who refused them mortgages and robbed them of their right to buy a home that could provide a foundation for the American dream that they wanted for their children. I writhe in shame when I think of what my hometown did and how its residents rioted when Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit. Bull Connor had nothing on Chicago bigots.

The difference between myself and the Southerners who insist that their flag represents their heritage, is that I don't deny what that heritage is. I recognize the evil that was done in my name, not just to blacks, but to the people who lived here long before the Europeans even knew that the Americas existed. I am ashamed of what was done and lack any desire to dress it up, to build statues to it, and demand that its victims honor and respect it.

The South needs to realize that it is not, nor has it ever been, a separate nation. It failed to achieve that. Its heritage is the same one shared by every Yankee from Maine to Washington—save the treason, of course. And the slavery. Confederate soldiers were not the only ones who died — their treason resulted in the deaths of at least 750,000, and perhaps as many as 850,000, Americans. The Union dead deserve respect. They died to make men free. Not to keep them enslaved.

The peace terms offered to Robert E. Lee by Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox were incredibly generous. Officers were allowed to retain their side arms and baggage, all troops were permitted to take their own horses home with them after giving a parole that they would no longer fight the United States. So noble were both generals at Appomattox that the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was called "the Gentlemen's Agreement."

And Grant, on hearing a rumor that the was a movement to arrest Lee for treason, said that he would resign his command of the Army before he would execute such an order. Lee refused to countenance any talk of a continuing guerilla war.

This is how the South repaid that generosity and lack of malice: They agreed to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops after a little more than a decade's enforcement of Reconstruction, and the promise to provide equal rights of citizenship to all residents of the South, regardless of color.

They lied.

Immediately after the removal of U.S. Army troops, steps were taken to disenfranchise blacks, while their numbers were used to inflate the representation of the Southern states in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Slavery was re-introduced in the Southern states through the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, eventually allowing blacks to be sentenced to prison for theft of as little as $10. While in prison, their labor was sold by the state to whoever was willing to pay, including many Northern entrepreneurs. There was no responsibility assigned to the purchasers of such labor. They never worried about the health of their slaves because they were so easy to replace.

Within 20 years, of the almost 1 million men who died in that war, only monuments remained. There were no real changes to the Southern economy, which was always based on slavery, or the Southern attitudes, which were always based on white supremacy. The rest of the nation, focused on the gilded age of the robber barons, had little energy to spare for the men and women they fought to free and who were now just as tightly enslaved under Jim Crow as they had been before the war.

This is the heritage the Southerners want us to respect and to honor. This heritage of deceit, treachery, and hate.

From Ira Katznelson's work, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, in his inaugural address of 1909, William Howard Taft stated:

"It is not the disposition or within the province of the Federal Government," Taft declared, "to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs."

And that made the Southern victory in the Civil War official.

According to Katznelson, "the southern historian Ulrich Phillips searched, in the late 1920s, for 'the central theme of southern history,'" and found it in "the South’s commitment to white supremacy":

"white folk [are] a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained— that it shall be and remain a white man’s country." This, Phillips approvingly concluded, was both "the cardinal test of a Southerner" and "the central theme of Southern history," whether "expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude."

In 1934, W. T. Couch, director of the University of North Carolina Press, summarized white southern racial views in "The Negro in the South," quoted by Katznelson:

There is no question as to what the dominant opinion is. It holds that the Negro is inferior to the white man, and shades all the way from the prevailing opinion of two centuries as given in the Dred Scott Decision to the less extreme opinion that the Negro, while inferior, nevertheless has some rights and should be encouraged to develop a culture parallel to and dependent on that of whites.

In the middle of the greatest economic depression that the nation has ever known, the South once again refused any accommodation to its doctrine of white supremacy. (The skinheads are not new, they have been around in the South since the days of the colonies. Nothing has ever been able to trump white supremacy.) Social Security could not be passed unless blacks were excluded from any benefits, and so all agricultural and domestic workers were not covered. In the South, where the overwhelming majority of American blacks lived, they were allowed no other occupations. This I have never been able to understand. This selfish, soulless Southern attitude that not only were whites superior, they were to be the only ones to derive any benefit from the taxes that blacks paid.

Ralph Bunche, writing in the early 1940s, discussed the heterogeneity of the South, writing that the only things the Southern states had in common was:

... its traditional adherence to the doctrine of white supremacy . . .
and to the political derivative of that doctrine— a blind allegiance to the one party system.

This is the real Southern heritage. It is not found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind. It is found in a belief that for some reason white men and women are superior to all whose skin color is any different. There is no other separate Southern heritage except treason.

It is a heritage that should cause them to writhe in shame. It is a heritage of the kidnapping, subjugation, forced breeding and selling of a free people. It is a heritage of treason and treachery. And hate.

It is time they got over it.