Monumental cynicism

by | Sep 22, 2017 | Editor's Blog, North Carolina | 6 comments

Yesterday, the Republicans leaders of the legislature told the State Historical Commission to deny Governor Roy Cooper’s request to move Confederate monuments from the grounds of the state Capitol to the Bentonville Battlefield. Their request makes two things clear: The law they passed was meant to protect the monuments, not establish an orderly process for removal like the GOP claimed, and, second, they want to make this fight about race to drive out their base.

Senator Phil Berger called Cooper’s request political theater, but it’s Berger who using the stage to advance his cause. He could have let the Historical Commission debate the matter and issue an opinion. Instead, he let the press and his base know that he’s standing up for the statues because he wants the argument to play out in the 2018 elections.

Midterm elections usually hurt the party in the White House and Republicans need something to drive their base to the polls. The fight over hundred-year-old monuments is just what they’re looking for. Native rural white Southerners who make up a large portion of the GOP base want the statues to stay. Younger people, especially African-Americans, want them gone. It’s a wedge issue and dog whistle that would make Jesse Helms proud.

When the law originally passed, Republicans claimed that it was put in place to insure decisions weren’t made based on “flames of passions.” Berger’s letter exposes the lie of that rationale. He could have allowed the Historical Commission to deliberate and make a decision. Instead, he inserted himself into the debate to further politicize an emotional issue. His argument defends all of the statues, not just those on the Capitol grounds.

More than 700 statues in 31 states memorialize the Confederacy. Most were put up in the early days of Jim Crow at a time when white Southerners were disenfranchising African-Americans and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Putting them on government property, especially in front of courthouses, sent a clear message to African-Americans.

Berger claims he wants to prevent the state from trying to “rewrite history” but that’s exactly what the current monuments were intended to do–and did so successfully for almost a century. If Berger’s sincere, he should also urge the current monuments be put into historical context and recognize that they were originally erected at a time when any opposition to them was being suppressed through violence and intimidation.

But Berger’s not going to do that. He’s letting his base know that he’s with them and hoping for a fight that inflames passions. And like gerrymandering and his voter suppression law, he’s letting African-Americans know that their opinions and history really don’t matter much.

Berger and the Republican leadership’s sense of history is really quite good. They understand that race is still a potent and driving force in Southern politics. Today, they’re cynically exploiting it for political gain and betting dividing North Carolina is better than uniting it.

6 Comments

  1. Steve

    Cynicism

    • Thomas Mills

      Thanks. My proofreader is off this year.

  2. Leake Little

    As much as I admire your moral compass Thomas this is a fight better left on the battlefield… You’re correct that the GOP uses this and similar issues to excite their base, in much the same way that Southern Democrats used race to foment secession and the Civil War, but in this case they use it to bait identity politics which mainly splinter the Democratic base. These types of fights are better left to the courts to determine. Most of the monuments were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, not the men who controlled the political establishment at the time. It’s difficult to equate the genteel women of the South with the perversity of Jim Crow laws passed by their husbands; however, since none of us were alive at that time it is best to let the courts decide present conditions. Jim Crow did not create the monuments, and Jim Crow was reversed by Constitutional amendments. The monuments are now cultural artifacts, not political statements (no matter how many white supremacists try to co-opt them).

    • Christopher Lizak

      As Confederate statues fall, the group behind most of them remains silent:
      http://www.newsweek.com/united-daughters-confederacy-statues-monuments-udc-653103

      “The earliest members were women who lived during the Civil War or grew up in its aftermath, according to Cox, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor and author. The group began erecting monuments “because Southern white men who are defeated can’t go around building monuments to themselves,” Cox says. “The unnamed goal of the organization was vindication: to vindicate these men from the defeat.””

      Kris DuRocher, an associate professor of history at Morehead State University, has made similar claims. “Like the KKK’s children’s groups, the UDC utilized the Children of the Confederacy to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future,” she wrote in her 2011 book Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South. In a 1999 interview with Democracy Now!, another historian, James M. McPherson, accused the organization of practicing “thinly veiled support for white supremacy.”

      • Leake Little

        Thanks Chris! Great stuff. I appreciate the opinions of the folks cited but one would be hard-pressed to find anything in the literature, charter, or actions of the UDC to promote white supremacy. Despite the inferences by well-meaning observers on the subject the women were largely intent on supporting war veterans as many of the same had done for the Spanish American and First World wars. To single out these women for performing the same services after an inglorious war as they had for more honorable, subsequent wars is disingenuous at best and smacks of intellectual dishonesty at worst. Are we all to blame for the sins of the father or in some cases the spouse? What about memorials for other notorious wars such as Vietnam? I think most come to the mature conclusion that veterans of wars, especially of the most horrific sort, deserve some domestic support and acknowledgement for their service. That is not my argument for the existence of these monuments now but it is certainly the main purpose that they were dedicated in an earlier time. Historians do not own the past, nor do any of us. Moral outrage over anachronistic practices doesn’t expand liberty and freedom as well as legal precedent. Let the courts decide.

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