I can’t say that I was that surprised by the news this morning that Shenandoah County, Virginia’s school board voted overwhelmingly to reverse an earlier decision in 2020 to rename two public schools that honor Confederate leaders.
Ty Seidule, author of _Robert E. Lee and Me_, has published a long Washington Post letter to the editor about the Shenandoah blunder. Here's the gift link for anyone who'd like to read it:
It will be recalled that Brigadier General Seidule, U.S. Army, Retired, aspired as a young man to become a gentleman like, as he then thought, Lee had been. His book shows the long evolution of the outlook that vividly appears in the letter. It also shows a lot about the evolution generally of Civil War memory, in my view.
Seidule served in the combat part of the Army for a decade before getting a history Ph.D. at Ohio State. He chaired the West Point history department before retiring. He served as vice chairman of the commission that renamed Army posts that had been misnamed for Confederates.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Did George Santayana learn this in Virginia?
Re KML's specific sentiment: "I am pretty confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere". Sorry for my pessimism but that wave is at least seven years old.
Now it's May 13, 2024. It is a month past the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination ... April 14, 1865.
I'd bet that nobody in the four days before 4/13/1865 thought "The South (Would) Rise Again". But it did in Reconstruction, culminating in an open racist (from guess where: Virginia!) who successfully masqueraded as a Democrat (from: New Jersey!) for World Democratization in the White House.
And again after their games against African Americans (and other groups) were exposed and defeated (mostly) peaceably by a wave of Civil Rights Acts, nationwide peaceful (on the part of the marchers) marches.
It resurfaces in Shenandoah County, yet again. (in: Virginia!)
Seven years ago, in 2017, some "very fine people" staged a vile demonstration in Charlottesville, VA. It's only an hour's drive from this high school to Charlottesville, VA. An hour's drive, but also apparently just an hour's history in the minds of Shenandoah County, VA, residents.
Verily, verily, I say unto we: 159 years is like a month in the minds of the 'unreconstructed'.
Lincoln's sermonic Second Inaugural Address announced a kindly approach for the reconstruction of the nation. What survived? Seemingly, only the phrase: "one of (the factions) would make war rather than let the nation survive".
After 159 years, where does the USA stand? In a tight and desperate race for the 2025 presidency. (Wife and I just plunked another C-note into our homie's, Kamala, race!)
The man (whose name I try not to speak) opined that this very fine faction rioting with hate-chants was equivalent to the peaceful counter-demonstrators. He speaks again in his 2025 presidential campaign. He proposes a totalitarian future for us in virtually the same words that Hitler and Mussolini shouted.
These things can work in both directions. I write the following paragraph in a half-hearted effort to be optimistic.
My own ancestors in Japan nurtured a political grudge from 1600 to 1868. Patient, after 250 years, they fomented a revolution (after the US kindly 'opened' Japan by the threat of force) that took another 15 years to cook, boil over, and win. My ancestors' side revolted against a totalitarian dictatorship and installed a government fashioned after Western models. (Including a navy fashioned on the Brits' and its army fashioned on the Prussians. How did that turn out?)
It's been only 159 years for America.
A quarter-century ago, I visited Vietnam with a former refugee. He took me to a vast desolate tract of Mekong Delta mud with miles-long culverts intended to ferry produce from soon-to-have-been-verdant farmlands. My friend's father had been internally deported to work that land, and it was never productive. Why? The land was poisoned by a heavy metal probably washed down over centuries from the Himalayas.
When the land is poisoned, no seeds will sprout whether planted by Communists, Imperialists, or just peasants.
When the minds of children of the Old Confederacy continue to be poisoned for generations their children's schools named after traitors who are lionized, when and how do we end the cycle? In Greek times, Hercules defeated evil personified as a Hydra, and used its trick against it to kill it when combat failed.
However, when do we end the cycle when we repeatedly continue to use persuasion and Democratic Values?
KML is years in advance of me in education, sensitivity to nuance, and having resided in a post-Confederate state. Yet this is how I see it from the Left Coast. (Added disclosure: Any of these sentiments traceable to my having been born just across the Potomac River and raised just across the Potomac River from Virginia, please attribute to the relief and even, joy, of one nearly-condemned to repeat Virginia's past.)
> Sorry for my pessimism but that wave is at least seven years old.
Well, there's this development in Shenandoah County, true enough.
But my own further thought on that is that one of its effects might actually be beneficial: lots of schoolkids and others will be exposed to the details of the controversy. Even if little Susie's uncle Calhoun J. Beauregard gets a renewed license to pollute conversations with his odious conflation of benign, pleasant Southern culture with crimes-against-humanity Confederate culture, people are going to hear conversations about, well, the phrase that names Kevin's Substack: civil war memory. I'm for that, though maybe not at the price of those school renamings.
Anyway, I'm just trying to think what it would mean for such a wave not only to exist, but to gather momentum. Would the wave wash over the renamed Army posts? What about that Confederate Memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery? Would Monument Avenue in the former capital of the Confederacy be repopulated with statues of Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals?
Are some kids going to be encouraged to do as my friends and I did in the era of a Civil War centennial that was all about battles and generals and valor, with nothing about emancipation and abolition? We didn't play cowboys and Indians; we played Yankees and rebels, and lots of us gloried in imagining ourselves to be Confederate Major Mosby, about whom there'd been a TV series called "The Gray Ghost." Would the wave bring back that kind of stupid adulation of mass-death-causing treason?
I'm still with KML. I don't think such a wave can generate itself. But then, I also didn't think we'd ever see a raving racist post-truth madman--Confederacy-apologist madman--as president.
I remember watching some of the Mosby series, I was 10 when it ended. Young that I was, I don't remember if Mosby's status as an enslaver was dramatized. On our side of the Potomac the kids on my block never played Blue/Grey, whereas, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett had big impacts. Faster than the Pledge of Allegiance, we learned that Davy kilt him a b'ar when he was.... Sic Semper marketing.
CW researchers in demonstrate that Mosby selected so many Marylanders even when he first established his ranger unit, his guerrillas freely traversed the river fords and "visited" Montgomery County. This is the site of Rockville, Monocacy, and my home of Silver Spring, near Jubal Early's deepest penetration. So much for my memory.
Make of this what you may: Maryland by the 1950s seemed embarrassed by its near-traitorhood in the CW and did its best to cloak its pro-CSA activities when it couldn't entirely bury them. It took my former state several attempts to ditch Roger Taney's statue in the state capital, and only recently finally succeeded to dump the State Song. (James Ryder Randall's 'My Maryland', paean to Baltimore seditionists trying to murder 'the despot', a.k.a. Abraham Lincoln.) Echoes, fainter at least, of the stronger waves rocking VA all over.
In any event, adults create school district curricula, adults create-produce-present TV and movie productions to fill the empty minds of children. Also, who decide to erect statues and (re)name public schools for enslaving traitors. (Mosby had one; Jackson had six.)
So why did MD at least act embarrassed when VA remains defiantly Grey for so long?
You may want to count Charlottesville as only a blip seven years past. It may be, but I never indicated the wave was self-generated. My count placed the event as many do as third in a series of waves from the same root source.
With you, I hope that this wave is among a receding tide. What this country needs is a good 5 cent...almanac.
Re: "I am pretty confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere": Me too.
In an odd way, to worry about such a wave calls to mind the worry that Thomas Jefferson's memory will be canceled. It's true that you can point to excesses in the general reconsideration of his slaveholding. If you ask me, that reconsideration is healthy overall. But I think Annette Gordon-Reed is right about all of that. She's the law professor who became a historian famous for her work on Sally Hemings, and who is now at Harvard. She says there's a simple question for deciding which public figures to continue holding in respect in public, and which not: Did this person add to or detract from the effort to build a more perfect union? By her criterion, Jefferson Davis is out, and TJ stays in--even though you can find examples of excessive zeal in holding him accountable by removing symbols of public esteem for him.
Anyway, the online comments beneath the Washington Post's report of these schools' renaming reached nearly 5000 within 27 hours. In my experience, FWIW, that's not a record, but it's huge--and given what the comments generally say, I think it's wise to be confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere.
But then, the Wall Street Journal--where I debate Lost Causers all the time in the online forum--didn't open their news report to online commenting. Maybe the Lost Cause counter-revolution is hidden, but coming!
Nah. This is America--slow, but not ultimately wrong, about the crimes against humanity these selfish Virginians have deliberately, morally grotesquely, and not so indirectly re-blessed.
Very sad. I saw a video on Democracy Now of a Black 8th grader speaking against this effort at the school board meeting. Maybe she and her friends will get it reversed again in a few years.
Thanks for adding to my knowledge with all of this background information. I've been following this story for a while since I live nearby, and whenever you've given your hopeful assessments of current trends, saying that America won't be going backwards again when it comes to the Lost Cause, I've thought about Shenandoah County. Really hoping this isn't the first among many backward steps in my part of the country.
You are very welcome. I think these decisions really reflect the individual character of the community in question. Like I said, I don't see this being replicated.
Ty Seidule, author of _Robert E. Lee and Me_, has published a long Washington Post letter to the editor about the Shenandoah blunder. Here's the gift link for anyone who'd like to read it:
https://wapo.st/3QOkhc2
It will be recalled that Brigadier General Seidule, U.S. Army, Retired, aspired as a young man to become a gentleman like, as he then thought, Lee had been. His book shows the long evolution of the outlook that vividly appears in the letter. It also shows a lot about the evolution generally of Civil War memory, in my view.
Seidule served in the combat part of the Army for a decade before getting a history Ph.D. at Ohio State. He chaired the West Point history department before retiring. He served as vice chairman of the commission that renamed Army posts that had been misnamed for Confederates.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Did George Santayana learn this in Virginia?
Re KML's specific sentiment: "I am pretty confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere". Sorry for my pessimism but that wave is at least seven years old.
Now it's May 13, 2024. It is a month past the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination ... April 14, 1865.
I'd bet that nobody in the four days before 4/13/1865 thought "The South (Would) Rise Again". But it did in Reconstruction, culminating in an open racist (from guess where: Virginia!) who successfully masqueraded as a Democrat (from: New Jersey!) for World Democratization in the White House.
And again after their games against African Americans (and other groups) were exposed and defeated (mostly) peaceably by a wave of Civil Rights Acts, nationwide peaceful (on the part of the marchers) marches.
It resurfaces in Shenandoah County, yet again. (in: Virginia!)
Seven years ago, in 2017, some "very fine people" staged a vile demonstration in Charlottesville, VA. It's only an hour's drive from this high school to Charlottesville, VA. An hour's drive, but also apparently just an hour's history in the minds of Shenandoah County, VA, residents.
Verily, verily, I say unto we: 159 years is like a month in the minds of the 'unreconstructed'.
Lincoln's sermonic Second Inaugural Address announced a kindly approach for the reconstruction of the nation. What survived? Seemingly, only the phrase: "one of (the factions) would make war rather than let the nation survive".
After 159 years, where does the USA stand? In a tight and desperate race for the 2025 presidency. (Wife and I just plunked another C-note into our homie's, Kamala, race!)
The man (whose name I try not to speak) opined that this very fine faction rioting with hate-chants was equivalent to the peaceful counter-demonstrators. He speaks again in his 2025 presidential campaign. He proposes a totalitarian future for us in virtually the same words that Hitler and Mussolini shouted.
These things can work in both directions. I write the following paragraph in a half-hearted effort to be optimistic.
My own ancestors in Japan nurtured a political grudge from 1600 to 1868. Patient, after 250 years, they fomented a revolution (after the US kindly 'opened' Japan by the threat of force) that took another 15 years to cook, boil over, and win. My ancestors' side revolted against a totalitarian dictatorship and installed a government fashioned after Western models. (Including a navy fashioned on the Brits' and its army fashioned on the Prussians. How did that turn out?)
It's been only 159 years for America.
A quarter-century ago, I visited Vietnam with a former refugee. He took me to a vast desolate tract of Mekong Delta mud with miles-long culverts intended to ferry produce from soon-to-have-been-verdant farmlands. My friend's father had been internally deported to work that land, and it was never productive. Why? The land was poisoned by a heavy metal probably washed down over centuries from the Himalayas.
When the land is poisoned, no seeds will sprout whether planted by Communists, Imperialists, or just peasants.
When the minds of children of the Old Confederacy continue to be poisoned for generations their children's schools named after traitors who are lionized, when and how do we end the cycle? In Greek times, Hercules defeated evil personified as a Hydra, and used its trick against it to kill it when combat failed.
However, when do we end the cycle when we repeatedly continue to use persuasion and Democratic Values?
KML is years in advance of me in education, sensitivity to nuance, and having resided in a post-Confederate state. Yet this is how I see it from the Left Coast. (Added disclosure: Any of these sentiments traceable to my having been born just across the Potomac River and raised just across the Potomac River from Virginia, please attribute to the relief and even, joy, of one nearly-condemned to repeat Virginia's past.)
> Sorry for my pessimism but that wave is at least seven years old.
Well, there's this development in Shenandoah County, true enough.
But my own further thought on that is that one of its effects might actually be beneficial: lots of schoolkids and others will be exposed to the details of the controversy. Even if little Susie's uncle Calhoun J. Beauregard gets a renewed license to pollute conversations with his odious conflation of benign, pleasant Southern culture with crimes-against-humanity Confederate culture, people are going to hear conversations about, well, the phrase that names Kevin's Substack: civil war memory. I'm for that, though maybe not at the price of those school renamings.
Anyway, I'm just trying to think what it would mean for such a wave not only to exist, but to gather momentum. Would the wave wash over the renamed Army posts? What about that Confederate Memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery? Would Monument Avenue in the former capital of the Confederacy be repopulated with statues of Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals?
Are some kids going to be encouraged to do as my friends and I did in the era of a Civil War centennial that was all about battles and generals and valor, with nothing about emancipation and abolition? We didn't play cowboys and Indians; we played Yankees and rebels, and lots of us gloried in imagining ourselves to be Confederate Major Mosby, about whom there'd been a TV series called "The Gray Ghost." Would the wave bring back that kind of stupid adulation of mass-death-causing treason?
I'm still with KML. I don't think such a wave can generate itself. But then, I also didn't think we'd ever see a raving racist post-truth madman--Confederacy-apologist madman--as president.
I remember watching some of the Mosby series, I was 10 when it ended. Young that I was, I don't remember if Mosby's status as an enslaver was dramatized. On our side of the Potomac the kids on my block never played Blue/Grey, whereas, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett had big impacts. Faster than the Pledge of Allegiance, we learned that Davy kilt him a b'ar when he was.... Sic Semper marketing.
CW researchers in demonstrate that Mosby selected so many Marylanders even when he first established his ranger unit, his guerrillas freely traversed the river fords and "visited" Montgomery County. This is the site of Rockville, Monocacy, and my home of Silver Spring, near Jubal Early's deepest penetration. So much for my memory.
Make of this what you may: Maryland by the 1950s seemed embarrassed by its near-traitorhood in the CW and did its best to cloak its pro-CSA activities when it couldn't entirely bury them. It took my former state several attempts to ditch Roger Taney's statue in the state capital, and only recently finally succeeded to dump the State Song. (James Ryder Randall's 'My Maryland', paean to Baltimore seditionists trying to murder 'the despot', a.k.a. Abraham Lincoln.) Echoes, fainter at least, of the stronger waves rocking VA all over.
In any event, adults create school district curricula, adults create-produce-present TV and movie productions to fill the empty minds of children. Also, who decide to erect statues and (re)name public schools for enslaving traitors. (Mosby had one; Jackson had six.)
So why did MD at least act embarrassed when VA remains defiantly Grey for so long?
You may want to count Charlottesville as only a blip seven years past. It may be, but I never indicated the wave was self-generated. My count placed the event as many do as third in a series of waves from the same root source.
With you, I hope that this wave is among a receding tide. What this country needs is a good 5 cent...almanac.
Thanks for this report.
Re: "I am pretty confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere": Me too.
In an odd way, to worry about such a wave calls to mind the worry that Thomas Jefferson's memory will be canceled. It's true that you can point to excesses in the general reconsideration of his slaveholding. If you ask me, that reconsideration is healthy overall. But I think Annette Gordon-Reed is right about all of that. She's the law professor who became a historian famous for her work on Sally Hemings, and who is now at Harvard. She says there's a simple question for deciding which public figures to continue holding in respect in public, and which not: Did this person add to or detract from the effort to build a more perfect union? By her criterion, Jefferson Davis is out, and TJ stays in--even though you can find examples of excessive zeal in holding him accountable by removing symbols of public esteem for him.
Anyway, the online comments beneath the Washington Post's report of these schools' renaming reached nearly 5000 within 27 hours. In my experience, FWIW, that's not a record, but it's huge--and given what the comments generally say, I think it's wise to be confident that we are not looking at the beginning of a wave of similar changes in Virginia and elsewhere.
But then, the Wall Street Journal--where I debate Lost Causers all the time in the online forum--didn't open their news report to online commenting. Maybe the Lost Cause counter-revolution is hidden, but coming!
Nah. This is America--slow, but not ultimately wrong, about the crimes against humanity these selfish Virginians have deliberately, morally grotesquely, and not so indirectly re-blessed.
Very sad. I saw a video on Democracy Now of a Black 8th grader speaking against this effort at the school board meeting. Maybe she and her friends will get it reversed again in a few years.
Thanks for adding to my knowledge with all of this background information. I've been following this story for a while since I live nearby, and whenever you've given your hopeful assessments of current trends, saying that America won't be going backwards again when it comes to the Lost Cause, I've thought about Shenandoah County. Really hoping this isn't the first among many backward steps in my part of the country.
You are very welcome. I think these decisions really reflect the individual character of the community in question. Like I said, I don't see this being replicated.