Trump, Tulsa and Gratuitous Misogyny

Perhaps I cannot fully escape my Catholic upbringing that stressed that the difference between good and evil and the call to treat others as one would want to be treated.  The Church turned out to be full of evil itself as demonstrated by the still ongoing sex abuse scandal that touches literally every part of the globe.  Yet the concept of good and evil remains relevant as does the so-called Golden Rule. Donald Trump embodies evil and a shredding of the Golden Rule.  Fanning hate, division, and never ending lies are the norm for Trump as is the denigration of others, especially non-whites and non-heterosexuals. What is most appalling about Trump and his supporters is that they know the are guilty of misogyny but simply do not care.  Selfishness and in Trump's case, narcissism, are a defining feature as is a desire to trumpet a white supremacy message even as the majority of Americans are facing the reality of the nation's historic racism and the brutality many blacks have suffered at the hands of whites. Trump's decision to hold a MAGA rally in Tulsa underscores the evilness of Trump's agenda. While moving the rally date to the day after Juneteenth, Trump knows precisely the message he is sending by holding a rally in Tulsa, the site of one of the worse massacre of blacks in the 20th century.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Trump's sick message to his followers.  Here are highlights:

Trump has decided to push his first post-pandemic campaign rally to the day after Juneteenth. Known as Freedom Day, Juneteenth commemorates the date in 1865 when the last remaining enslaved blacks in Texas learned, two years late, that the Emancipation Proclamation had set them free. He was wise to listen to his African American friends and advisers on that score.

But he is still plowing ahead with a rally in Tulsa, the wrong city for a “Make America Great Again” event in this incendiary moment for our country. Tulsa was the site of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in U.S. history. In 1921, an angry white mob attacked homes and businesses in a thriving community known as “Black Wall Street,” killing some 300 people and leaving thousands homeless. In another time, and perhaps with a different president, a trip to Tulsa could be an occasion for absolution or remembrance, a chance to talk courageously about healing America’s gaping racial wound.

But for this administration, the decision to hold a rally in that city constitutes an act of diabolical irony. A man who rode to the White House on a hot gust of racial grievance will be visiting a place where white resentment exploded into two days of epic terror, wiping one of history’s most prosperous black communities off the map.

All these years later, they are still trying to find where the bodies of black victims were buried in Tulsa, still trying to calculate the loss of property and income, still trying to determine who set the fires and flew the planes that dropped burning balls of turpentine onto black-owned buildings, still trying to piece together the full history because there was a concerted effort to erase that, too, from news archives and history books.

[T]he voters who allegedly want to make America great again already know Trump is their guy. He doesn’t need to send up a dog whistle to win their approval. But he does crave their roar of affirmation. Why else hold a rally in the midst of a pandemic?

Trump’s office has reportedly been crafting a speech on race. That’s a complicated exercise for a president whose default is to divide and demean.

If this president wants to visit Tulsa on the day following Juneteenth, let’s follow that city’s lead and make sure everyone in America knows about the Tulsa massacre and Juneteenth history.

This would also be a very fine pulse point to talk about the racial bitterness toward black financial success that led white people to burn a prosperous Oklahoma community to the ground. White violence against black aspiration occurred elsewhere: Rosewood, Fla., in 1923; Springfield, Ill., in 1908; and Elaine, Ark., in 1919. It happened after both world wars to returning black servicemen, whose military rank and training conflicted with America’s subordinate station for black men.

The birtherism movement that challenged the fact of Obama’s citizenship was fueled by those who had difficulty accepting a black family in the White House — a backlash that elevated the person who lives there today. This is not to say that racial resentment percolates in everyone who voted for Trump. We know that is not true. But we also know that a number of studies have shown it was a factor for a large percentage of voters. Trump’s appeal was not just about economic anxiety.

[L]et’s make sure that we accept the tragic message from Tulsa: Black success matters, too.

Macron Tears Down Trumpism

During an address to a joint session of Congress French President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated that he is everything that Donald Trump is not: young, handsome, well spoken, able to show empathy for others, and cares beyond simply himself.   Indeed, he looks and acts presidential while Trump comes across as crude, not overly bright trailer park trash with money.  I will confess that I love the French and that Paris is perhaps my favorite city in the world.  I also - unlike, I suspect far too many Americans - know that France is America's oldest ally and that but for the French fleet which blocked British reinforcements, the battle of Yorktown would have likely been lost by the American army under George Washington.  Likewise, many of the founding principles of America embraced by the Founding Fathers trace back across the Atlantic to French writers.  Thus, it was proper that Macron reminded Americans of everything being lost under the toxic Trump/Pence regime.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Macron's speech.  Here are highlights:

Before French President Emmanuel Macron delivered an address at a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, the headlines about his trip to Washington centered on his apparent “bromance” with President Trump.  

But on Wednesday, as his three-day visit drew to a close, Macron shifted the story dramatically. In his speech to American lawmakers, he offered a comprehensive rejection of the main tenets of Trumpism, excoriating “extreme nationalism” and protectionism, championing climate-change science and defending the international liberal order. “You can play with anger and fear for a time,” Macron said, alluding to the themes that fuel right-wing nationalist movements in the West, “but they do not construct anything.”

 

Macron went on, urging his American audience to look beyond borders and walls. “We can choose isolationism. But closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world,” he said. And he bristled at the rise of autocrats and illiberal democrats, which include some leaders favored by Trump: “I don’t share fascination for new strong powers and the illusion of nationalism,” he said.

 

Macron also cast a skeptical eye at Trump's efforts to slap tariffs on imports from allies and undermine existing free-trade deals. To Macron, this bid to boost American manufacturing jobs at home — combined with Trump's dismissals of climate change as a “hoax” — was counterproductive and shortsighted.

“Some people think that securing current industries and their jobs is more urgent than transforming our economies to meet the challenge of global change,” he said. In the final analysis, he suggested, the impasse cannot last. “In the long run, we will have to face the same realities,” he said. “We’re just citizens of the same planet.”

There's no “Planet B,” Macron pointed out, echoing an earlier argument he made about there being no “Plan B” for the Iran nuclear deal that Trump wants to dismantle. Then he drew thunderous applause from Democrats with this confident declaration: “I am sure one day the United States will come back and join the Paris agreement.”

 

Macron also played the role of the proud transatlantic ally. He hailed the historic French-American friendship and the two countries' shared sacrifices from World War II to the current fight against Islamist militant groups in various parts of the world. And he predictably appealed to a love of liberty and the many other cultural connections between the two countries.

Macron also summoned legacies largely ignored by Trump. . . . . . “Human rights, the rights of minorities and shared liberty are the true answers to the disorder of the world,” Macron said to Congress. Meanwhile, across the street at the Supreme Court, the Trump administration pressed its case to impose blanket travel bans on certain Muslim-majority countries.

There are few things Washington officialdom loves to discuss more than the importance of American leadership in the world. Macron did not disappoint. He reminded Democrats and Republicans that the nuclear deal Congress approved in 2015 was worth defending, and that the alternatives — a confrontation that may lead to war with Iran — would “replicate past mistakes.”

 

He also told his audience of the importance of the world order that “you built,” pointing to the institutions and international norms developed after World War II.  . . . . “You are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it,” he added, calling on Washington to help build a new world order “based on a more effective, accountable, and results-oriented multilateralism.”

 

Macron “solidified his standing as leader of the West (to the extent there still is a West) by his call today before Congress for an updated liberal world order to meet regional, global challenges,” tweeted Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a doyen of the Washington policy establishment. “His problem is a lack of partners in Europe and here in U.S.”

 

“The most likely result is that the American president won’t pay attention to what Macron was trying to say — indeed, that he won’t even understand that he has been so openly challenged,” wrote Post columnist Anne Applebaum. “And that may have been the point, for Macron’s speech will be perfectly understood in France, in Europe, and even in the United States (at least outside the White House).”

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, an inveterate Atlanticist, echoed the sentiments of many in her milieu with a tweeted jab at Trump: “It has been too long since a President delivered a speech in Washington about the need to defend democracy and support international cooperation.”

Poland Seeks to Outlaw References to Polish Complicity with Nazis

A Polish police officer checks a Jewish man's documents at the Kraków Ghetto, 1941

A story in the Washington Post shows just how far tight wingers will go to rewrite history in the hope of erasing references to their complicity in moral turpitude or even war crimes.  The story relates to a pending law in Poland that would make it a crime to acknowledge the fact that even though Poland was occupied by Hitler's Nazi regime, there were plenty of Poles only to willing to participate in the genocide against Jews and other horrors.  Yes, there were many Poles who tried to do the right thing and oppose the Nazi agenda as resistance fighters and by other means, but the shocking truth is that a large number were complicit - something the right wing wants to wash away from public memory and rewrite history so that only Germans were involved with, in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the murder of over 1 million men, women and children. With the Trump/Pence regime pushing a racist, bigoted and homophobic agenda, will Trump loyalists including morally bankrupt evangelical Christians want to sanitize history to delete their own complicity, if not active engagement in moral wrongs?  The effort in Poland shows the critical need that history tell the whole story lest future generations forget just how horrible individuals can be when confronted with evil - especially those who park themselves in church pews on Sundays and seemingly forget the Gospel message the moment they walk out the church door.  Here are article highlights:

A diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland appeared to be deepening on Sunday as Poland’s deputy chief of mission, Piotr Kozłowski, was summoned to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem over a law approved by the Polish parliament making it a criminal offence to mention Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.

Polish lawmakers voted Friday for a bill that would fine or jail people who blame Poland or Poles for Nazi atrocities committed on its soil during World War II, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The law still needs final approval from the Polish Senate and the country’s president.

It comes as the country has become more nationalistic. Tens of thousands of people chanted and marched through Warsaw last year in an annual gathering of Europe’s far-right movements, and the majority party has sought to protect Poland's image.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Kozłowski the vote's timing was “particularly surprising and miserable," pointing out that Friday was the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was also the 73^rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland.

Polish officials say the law would not limit Holocaust research or the freedom of expression.  Even though several death camps, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau, were built on Polish soil, Poles say they should be referred to as Nazi extermination camps or camps in occupied Poland, disassociating Poland from the Nazi crimes committed there.

The bill, which would jail even foreigners for up to three years for using terms such as “Polish extermination camps,” passed the lower legislature overwhelmingly. For the country's ruling Law and Justice Party, it's part of a years-long effort to prevent people from “slandering the good name of Poland,” as officials once put it.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Center, . . . . said the law was “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.” . . . . restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion,” read the Yad Vashem statement.

[B]etween these broad strokes of Nazi genocide and Polish heroism, some Poles also turned on Jews — or at least helped Germans kill them. . . . Villagers in Jedwabne, for example, reportedly locked about 300 Jewish residents in a barn and burned them alive in 1941, the BBC wrote. Some modern-day Poles deny the story or blame Germans for pressuring the villagers, but others see evidence of willing complicity throughout the occupation.

Jan Karski, a famed Polish resistance fighter, once told an interviewer of the “ruthless, often without pity” attitude some of his countrymen held for Poland's large Jewish population.

“The truth is that local authorities were often left intact in occupied Poland, and many officials exploited their power in ways that proved fatal to their Jewish constituents.”

Some Poles welcomed the forced removal of their Jewish neighbors from their homes, he wrote. Some happily enriched themselves at the expense of their dispossessed neighbors, and some “did not recoil from committing acts of murder, rape and larceny — not always orchestrated by the Germans.”

Richmond: Inauguration Day 2018.

As I said in a Facebook post, it has been a wonderful and inspirational day here in Richmond as our friend, Ralph Northam was sworn in as Governor, along with Mark Herring who is in his second term as Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax takes office as Lt. Governor (and the second black to be elected to statewide office in America - former Governor Doug Wilder was the first). In the early days of the nation, Virginia provided leadership and inspiration for the founding of the nation and so-called American ideals.  Yes, the Commonwealth was stained by slavery and later by the Jim Crow era and many lest than honorable aspects.  I like to believe that Virginia has turned a corner and is forging a path back to the values of its glory days, if you will.  In the 2017 Virginia elections, Virginians elected a statewide slate of Democrats and resoundingly rejected Trumpism and the reverse Robin Hood agenda proposed by GOP candidate Ed Gillespie and still espoused by Congressional Republicans.   Ralph Northam's inaugural address was, in my view, brilliant and sets the tone for Virginia to recapture it's leadership role that it once had in the founding days of the nation.  Most importantly, it calls for a return to a moral code utterly lost in the current White House administration and among evangelical Christians and others who support the vile occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Here is the speech in its entirety (some would say it's a politician's speech, but knowing Ralph, he means every word):

Mr. Speaker, Lt. Governor Fairfax, Attorney General Herring, members of the General Assembly, justices of the Supreme Court, Judge Tyler, honored guests, Pam, Aubrey, and Wes, my fellow Virginians.

I am truly humbled that you have taken the time to be with us on such a special day for our commonwealth.

Today we carry out the peaceful transition of power.  Americans invented this ritual.It dates to our earliest days as a country.  It makes us American. And at this hour, more than 1.3 million Americans protect this right.  They serve in our armed forces overseas and right here at home.

They put their lives on the line to protect our way of life and we should always be grateful for their sacrifice.  Please join me in thanking them for their service.  If you ask the men and women who serve why they stepped forward, the answer is often the same:I volunteered.  Because it was my duty. Virginians understand that. Because our commonwealth was founded on public service.

But the way ahead hasn’t always been smooth.  In a church on a hill 15 blocks from here, Virginia’s first elected governor helped launch the American Revolution when he cried, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

But at the bottom of that same hill, one of the country’s largest slave-trading markets was coming to life.  A place where Virginians would sell men, women, and children for profit.

Our history is complex in Virginia.  It includes good things, and bad. But no other place on earth can claim it. This unique heritage endows us with a responsibility to shape the future — to leave this place better than we found it. That’s the Virginia way.

It’s a model that Governor Terry McAuliffe and his wife Dorothy have followed these past four years. Virginia is better off today because of them, and Pam and I are proud to have been their partners. Two hundred thousand new jobs. $20 billion in capital investment. Voting rights restored for 173,000 Virginians. 10 million more school breakfasts served to children who need them. First state in the nation to functionally end homelessness among veterans.

That’s a record to be proud of, and I am ready to build upon it! The McAuliffe administration has been about putting the needs of the people you serve first. Those values defined my upbringing from the earliest days I can remember.

My mother taught children who were learning English as their second language how to read. She worked in health care, nursing sick people back to health on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. She volunteered with the hospice, comforting people in their final hours. She taught me that, no matter who we are or where we come from, we are all equal in the beginning – and the end. 

My father, who grew up on a farm on the Eastern Shore, served in the Navy during World War II, a member of America’s greatest generation. He became a commonwealth’s attorney and a judge just as his father had before him.

Before my brother joined the Navy and I joined the Army, my father always encouraged us to play sports. I think he knew we would learn the importance of teamwork and the fundamental truth that success isn’t about one person’s individual contributions, it’s about the team.

Watching the things my parents did, for our family and for our community, taught me a lot growing up. But the greatest lesson I learned came from watching how they did those things. Their humble and steady service to the people around them taught me what strength looks like. It taught me that you don’t have to be loud to lead.

I was blessed to grow up on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and to call it my home. As a kid I spent hours behind our house, crabbing and fishing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. To this day that is where I find peace.

When I was just old enough to take to the water myself, my dad helped me build a rowboat and launch it, with strict instructions: stay close to home. As I grew and became more comfortable, I began to take longer trips away from the shore, until I was ready to head out into the open water. I remember standing with my father as I prepared to embark, and like all good dads, he knew I was nervous even before I did. He said, Ralph, remember — when you get out there, you can always trust your compass.

If things get dark or foggy, if you can’t find your way — keep your eye on the compass.It’ll always bring you home safely. He was right about that compass. As I got older and took various jobs on the water, working on a deep sea fishing boat and as the captain of a ferry to Tangier Island, I came to trust that compass to guide me when the way ahead was not clear.

My dad’s advice stayed with me when I reached the Virginia Military Institute and was given a different kind of compass, in the simple words of the VMI honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those who do.” Those words have stuck with me all these years because they’re so clear. They have become a kind of moral compass for me. They always call me back home safely.

Virginia and this country need that more than ever these days. It can be hard to find our way in a time when there’s so much shouting, when nasty, shallow tweets take the place of honest debate, and when scoring political points gets in the way of dealing with real problems.

If you’ve felt that way, I want you to listen to me right now: We are bigger than this.We all have a moral compass deep in our hearts. And it’s time to summon it again, because we have a lot of work to do.

We’re going in the wrong direction on health care in Virginia and America. More people need coverage, not less. It is past time for us to step forward together and expand Medicaid to nearly 400,000 Virginians who need access to care.

We should also resolve together today to refrain from any effort to curtail a woman’s constitutional right to make her own decisions about her health. 

If we are going to build a healthier Virginia for everyone, we must address the public health crisis of gun violence. Gunshots kill more people in Virginia every year than car accidents, but if you walk into the right gun show, it’s easier to get a firearm than it is to rent a car. I am ready to work with you to make Virginia safer by passing smart reforms that keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them.

We have to acknowledge that the incredible economic progress we have made in Virginia has been uneven.  As technology companies and skyscrapers rise in many regions, other parts of Virginia are watching blue collar jobs move out while the opioid crisis moves in.And those challenges are not limited to rural areas. In far too many places in Virginia, your ZIP code determines not just how well you will do, but how long you will live.

Here in our capital city, a child born 2 miles that way can expect to live to about age 63.But a child born 5 miles in that direction can expect to live 20 years longer. You don’t have to be a doctor to know that something’s wrong.

The solutions to these problems are not easy. But we do know what they are. The way ahead starts with access to quality health care and public education for every Virginian, no matter whom they are or where they live. It depends on smart interventions in the case of addiction or mental health challenges and a focused economic development strategy that connects the right people with the right skills and the right jobs.

As governor, I will approach these challenges with the same skills I learned as a doctor. Over the years I have taken care of thousands of children. Never once have they or their families asked me if I'm a Democrat or a Republican, nor have I asked them.

Each patient is a person in front of you, who’s sick. A child who needs your help, and who deserves every opportunity to thrive. Doctors are taught that we have a responsibility to do everything we can to make them better.

A good doctor trusts science and brings no pre-conceived notions to the examining table. A good doctor listens first, to what a patient is saying and not saying. A good doctor understands that a symptom may have a hidden cause. The pain in a child’s belly could be an ulcer, for example. Or it could be from hunger because the pantry at home is bare and the last time she ate was at school lunch yesterday.

We learn quickly that the problems patients are having are usually more complex than the symptoms we can see on the surface. And getting them back to health means devoting the time and resources it takes to alleviate those root causes.

As governor, I will draw on these lessons. I will remember that Virginians didn’t send us here to be Democrats or Republicans – they sent us here to solve problems. I will remember that no one has a monopoly on good ideas.

The path to progress is marked by honest give and take among people who truly want to make life better for those around them. I will remember that treating symptoms of problems may be easy in the short-run, but getting to the root of the problem and solving it from the bottom up is always more effective in the long-run.

When we make decisions, we’ll apply this test. • Does this action do the most good for the most Virginians?• Have we been transparent with the public about what we are doing and why we are doing it?• And finally, is there a better way forward that we haven’t yet considered?

The guiding principle of this administration will be simple: we will work together to make our commonwealth work better for all Virginians, no matter who they are or where they’re from.  We cannot rest until every family and every community has the same access to opportunity that others do.

Here are my personal commitments to you.• I will always tell the truth.• I will strive every day to maintain the trust you placed in me on Election Day.• I will always put Virginia’s interests first.• I will work with anyone whose policies help Virginia. And when they do not, I will oppose them.• I will visit every city and county while I’m governor, and every public college and university.• I will continue to personally care for patients at RAM, Virginia’s Remote Area Medical clinic — and keep pushing to cover more and more Virginians.• I will be there personally to welcome Virginia National Guardsmen and women when they return home from overseas.• And my door will always be open to you.

Here’s the last commitment I make to you. And it’s the most important. It comes from an experience that has shaped the way I practice medicine and public service.

Shortly after I left the Army and began practicing as a child neurologist, I met a young couple whose son was living with severe autism. I examined the little boy, and his case was tough. So I explained to his mother that nothing I could do would alter her son’s condition or improve his quality of life. Well, more than a decade later, a woman approached me in the grocery store. She reminded me that I had seen her son years ago, and that she and her family chose not to return for a follow-up.

She asked me if I knew why they had not returned, and I confessed to her that I did not, and that I hadn’t really thought much about it. She looked me in the eye and said, “Dr. Northam, when you said you couldn’t help us, you took away our hope.”

I can still hear her words to this day. When I told her that I was unable to help her son, I diagnosed the problem correctly. But I missed the opportunity to provide the one thing her family still needed the most: And that was hope.

From that moment on, I have recognized the incredible power of hope and my responsibility to preserve it in the people I serve. Hope is not just a source of comfort for the afflicted – it is a wellspring of energy to fight for a better tomorrow, no matter the odds.

I am committed as your governor to fight every day for the hope that tomorrow brings - for all of us, not just some of us. Because it can be. If we work together, tomorrow can be better for the nearly 400,000 Virginians who are one illness or accident away from bankruptcy because they have no insurance.

Tomorrow can be better for the families in rural communities who are praying for new jobs so their children don’t have to move away to build happy lives.

Tomorrow can be better for the children who are sitting in crowded and crumbling schools across this state, tired and distracted from too little food and too much violence in their communities.

Tomorrow can be better for the men and women who depend on clean air and water for their livelihood and for the children who will inherit the environment we pass on to them.

Tomorrow can be better for people who too often face discrimination, harassment or violence because of their race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

If we work together today, tomorrow will be better for all of the Virginians who have placed their trust in us to fight for them every day.

This country is once again looking to Virginia to lead the way. Let us lead with humility and optimism, telling the truth, learning from history and removing every obstacle to progress for all Virginians. Let us rely on the compass we all carry to show us the way ahead.

I ask you to join me. Let’s get to work. Thank you so much.

Inaugural Ceremony on the steps of the Virginia Capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson

The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues

Before I continue, let me disclose for the record, that I have my own Confederate ancestors through my maternal grandmother, a New Orleans belle in her youth.  Not only were some of these family members of the past in the Confederate army (I would qualify for membership in the sons of Confederate Veterans if I were ever to apply, which I won't), but one was even a prisoner held in a Union prison camp in Michigan for a period of time.  No one still living can comment on whether any of these ancestors were slave owners, but there is a good chance that they were. 

I have read a great deal about the Civil War and the Southern effort to undo Reconstruction's empowerment of former slaves.  Sadly, Virginia - which has so often been on the wrong side of history- was a leader in this effort.  Thus, I am well aware of the horrible things done after Reconstruction ended and whites regained virtual total political, social, and economic control.  Knowing the "real history" of the Old South and the Jim Crow era, there is no way I can support the Trump/Pence and alt-right effort to bring back the Jim Crow era and to exalt white privilege (no moral person can).  I am also cognizant of the fact that the Confederate monuments now embroiled in controversy in Charlottesville and elsewhere were for the most part erected when Jim Crow laws were reaching their pinnacle.  Their purpose?  To intimidate blacks and to send the message that white privilege was untouchable.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

[A]ll the way to 1890 there were very few statues or monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders.

[Here's an] oversimplified summary:

1861-1865: Civil War.
1865-1875: Reconstruction Era.
1875-1895: Reconstruction Era ends. Blacks are steadily disenfranchised, allowing Southern whites to enact Jim Crow laws. In 1896, Jim Crow is cemented into place when the Supreme Court rules it constitutional.
1895-1915: With blacks disenfranchised and Jim Crow laws safely in place, Southern whites begin a campaign of terror against blacks. Lynchings skyrocket, the KKK becomes resurgent, and whites begin building Confederate statues and monuments in large numbers.
1915-1955: Jim Crow reigns safely throughout the South.
1955-1970: The Civil Rights era starts after the Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that Jim Crow laws are unconstitutional. Southern whites mount massive and violent resistance, and start putting up Confederate monuments again.

Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.

No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.

Too many have said "let the monuments remain, they are part of history."  Sadly, they typically do not know all of the real history.   The Old South was not the pretty picture of Gone With the Wind. Behind the beautiful plantation homes there was much suffering and brutality - some inflicted by falsely labeled "pragons of virtue" like Robert E. Lee. Even Lee's great grandson has said he id OK with the removal of the monuments. 

Why Maintaining Confederate Statutes is NOT About Protecting History/Heritage

One of the main cries of apologists for the white supremacists who went on a rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend is that maintaining statutes honoring Confederate figures is honoring history and Southern heritage.  Never mind that these statutes sit not in museums where they could be used for history lessons but instead in public squares often near court houses and city halls.   In the case of the Lee statute in Charlottesville that triggered white supremacists' wrath on others, it used to sit literally in the courthouse square where it no doubt sent a message to black Virginians - as was the intent behind it in the first place.  Thus, those who bleat that these statutes represent history ignore the purpose behind them.  Anything rather than have to face the reality of their own feelings or the motivations of hate groups.  A piece in The Atlantic makes the case for the removal of such statutes and their relegation to museums and other locations that do not give a stamp of approval to what lay behind the South's rebellion: slavery and maintaining it as an institution. Blather about state's rights is merely a well crafted smoke screen.  Here are article highlights:

On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led—white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

But like Lee’s soldiers, today’s defenders of white supremacy are fighting for a losing cause, a defeat that their violence will only serve to make deeper and more lasting than it otherwise would have been. Across the United States, the statues are starting to topple, the streets renamed, the memorials removed. These visible inscriptions of white supremacy into the American landscape are being erased. . . . . This was the rising tide of change that the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem.

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville.  . . . . His defenders today insist that Lee’s heroism lay not least in his laying down his sword when the war was done, deciding to “promote harmony once he recognized defeat.” The speakers at the dedication likewise stressed Lee’s role as a peacemaker; one went so far as to imagine the statute depicted “not the lurid splendor of the battlefield,” but instead, Lee riding to Lexington to begin his tenure as a university president.

Yet this is not what the statue depicts. Not this one, nor the others. Where are the statues of Lee seated at Appomattox, signing the terms of that surrender? Where are the marbles and bronzes of Lee the college president, wearing civilian clothes, ensconced behind a desk piled high with paperwork? Why is this peacemaker always immortalized girded for war? . . . . And the reconciliation he offered was between whites—it pointedly excluded those he had held as property, whose freedom the war secured, but whose equality he bitterly contested.

Lee himself, after the war, encouraged a friend to banish the 90 newly freed women, children, and old men working on his plantation. The government could pay for their care, Lee advised; better to replace them with white labor. “I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.” That is the harmony Lee promoted.

Lee’s army was ordered to respect white property, but chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband—to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command; it took as many as a thousand back to Virginia.

Lee’s army, retreating in defeat, released some, but most were hauled South to the auction block. For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. . . . . At the Battle of the Crater, Lee’s army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because “we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us.” This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases—these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy—first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

 Much in history is ugly and not something to be honored or glorified. Pretending that the ugliness did not occur or wrapping it in the "Lost Cause" myth, however, does not change the real facts.  Defenders of these statutes ignore the hideous crimes committed by the Confederacy while at the same time longing for the white supremacy that it and the Jim Crow laws embodied.  Decent people should not mindlessly defend the indefensible by merely pretending they are protecting history.  Indeed, the history they are protecting is a false one compared to the ugly reality.

Is the Myth of American Exceptionalism Dead?

As a history major well versed in America's history and as someone who has traveled a fair amount overseas, I have never been a fan of the myth of American exceptionalism (most countries hold similar myths about themselves, perhaps the British in particular).   The to subscribe to the concept, one must deliberately ignore a great deal of ugliness that is a core part of America's history and more or less hold a negative view of anyone different than one's self.  Not surprisingly, white evangelical Christians subscribe to the myth of American exceptionalism - a new "hymn," Make America Great Again" is now a licensed piece of Christian worship music -  more than most.  A column by conservative David Frum in The Atlantic looks at the fraying of the myth of American exceptionalism in the age of Trump, a man who is anything but exceptional except perhaps in the volume of his lies and his malignant narcissism.  Indeed, as the column points out, America may be exceptional - but in a very negative way. The topic is most appropriate to ponder on the 4th of July. Here are highlights:

Tomorrow, the Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate their independence, the birth of a free nation. Leading the celebrations will be a president mysteriously dependent on a foreign power—a president who lavishly praises dictators and publicly despises the institutions of freedom, not only the free press but also an independent judiciary and other constitutional restraints on his will.

This is a Fourth tinged with sad ironies. Can we put the occasion to any good use? Near the end of a much more terrible national ordeal, Abraham Lincoln urged Americans: "Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from.” Good advice. We should try.

A traditional theme of the rhetoric of the Fourth is the celebration of “American exceptionalism.” That phrase has acquired a boastful overtone, which is why President Obama famously handled it so diffidently. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

“American exceptionalism" began its career, however, not as a boast, but as a question.

“Why is there no socialism in the United States?” asked a Marxist German in 1906. According to Marxist ideology, the United States—as the most highly developed capitalist nation—should have led the way toward proletarian class-consciousness. When that did not happen, Marxists squirmed to explain the deficiency away. Non-Marxists took up the inquiry after World War II. With a Labor government nationalizing railways and steelworks in Britain—Germany shattered by Nazism—and communism holding Russia, China, and half of Europe in its grip, the United States stood out as a lonely beacon of liberalism. Again America seemed a special case that needed explaining. This time the explanations came from fellow-liberals who admired the American exception, which is how the phrase acquired its secondary and more positive meaning.

Over the next decades, however, as both democracy and market economics became accepted facts across the developed world, the question changed form. Even pre-Trump, it was hard to argue that the United States was a consistently more liberal society than Germany or Britain, let alone Denmark or Canada. In some ways, yes: Free speech is more protected in the United States than other places. In some ways, no: The right to vote is better protected almost everywhere else in the democratic world than in the United States.

But most of the compliments Americans paid themselves half a century ago ring hollow in the 21st century.  . . . . . Who your parents were and where you came from matters probably more in the United States than in most other advanced economies, at least if statistics on upward mobility are to be believed.

America’s uniqueness, even pre-Trump, was expressed as much through negative indicators than positive. It is more violent than other comparable societies, both one-on-one and in the gun massacres to which the country has become so habituated. It has worse health outcomes than comparably wealthy countries, and some of them most important of them are deteriorating further even as they improve almost everywhere else. America’s average levels of academic achievement lag those of other advanced countries. Fewer Americans vote—and in no other democracy does organized money count for so much in political life.

As I said: pre-Trump. Now the United States has elected a president who seems much more aligned with—and comfortable in the company of—the rulers of Turkey, Hungary, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines than his counterparts in other highly developed countries.

That result forces a reshaping of the question of American exceptionalism.

“Why was the United States vulnerable to such a person when other democracies have done so much better?” Part of the answer is a technical one: The Electoral College, designed to protect the country from demagogues, instead elected one. But then we have to ask: How did Trump even get so far that the Electoral College entered into the matter one way or another?

Thinking about that question forces an encounter with American exceptionalism in its most somber form. If, as I believe, Donald Trump arose because of the disregard of the American political and economic elite for the troubles of so many of their fellow-citizens, it has to be asked again: How could the leaders of a democratic country imagine they could get away with such disregard?

Nor has that elite learned its lessons. Look at the progress of the Republican health-care bill through the House and Senate. The authors of the bill are acutely aware of how despised it is, how much more despised it will be once it goes into effect: That’s precisely why they have broken through all normal legislative processes, why they do not hold hearings, why they conceal its elements, why they outright lie about its effect.

Only in America, as the saying goes. This Fourth of July, however, it is harder to say with pride.