I Thought the Civil War was Over

Here's an interesting and disturbing thought: apparently for a sizeable number of people in the U.S. south, the Civil War is not over, it's just in remission. Now, I spent some years growing up in Tennessee and I'm familiar with the phrase "The South will rise again," but I didn't think anyone took that seriously. More than that, I've always had the impression that Southerners are among the more patriotic folks in this country.

According to this book I just read, Confederates in the Attic, there's a lot more below the surface south of the Mason-Dixon Line than most of us think. This book by Tony Horwitz, subtitled "Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War," is largely about the reenactors who dress up as Union and Confederate troops and stack reenactments of Civil War battles. However, as the author researched his subject he found a lot more than he bargained for. Here's the passage from the book that I find most chilling:

After the quiz, I went with the Curtises and a couple named the Crowders to a Southern-style restaurant chain called Morrison's. We loaded our trays with un-Confederate heaps of cornbread, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. I was about to shovel in the first bite when Violet Crowder loudly cleared her throat. Then she turned to her four-year-old son, Warren. "Lord," he intoned, "we thank thee for this meal and especially for the great and wonderful Confederacy."

. . . (skipping a couple paragraphs)

Her son sat quietly completing a connect-the-dot picture of the rebel flag and filling in a coloring-book map of America: gray for the Confederacy, blue for Union, green for border states. "Warren," his mother said, "tell this nice man from Virginia, is there anything you hate more than Yankees?"

"No sir! Nothing!" he shouted.

All right, these are people in the 1990s (the book was published in 1998) who are raising their son to worship an entity that ceased to exist 130 years before, and to hate his fellow countrymen. These people are members of a group called the Children of the Confederacy and which, says the author, "was designed to prep youngsters for Confederate citizenship in rather the way that Future Farmers of America readied teenagers for agricultural life." The group has a 16-page "Catechism" with gems such as this:

Q. What was the feeling of the slaves towards their masters?
A. They were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them.

Are you getting queasy yet?

Maybe it's because I live in Colorado, where racial harmony is very much the norm, but I really had no idea that racism is still so prevalent in other parts of the country. Horwitz goes into that quite a bit, telling about his discussions with Blacks, Whites, red-necks, liberals, and everyone else. The picture he paints is not pretty. The one bright hope he touches on is that for the younger generations the issue of racism is receding. Perhaps in the last 10 years it has receded even further.

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for president it will be interesting to see just which states he takes in the election. If he wins in the South I'll feel a lot more optimistic than I did when I finished reading this book.

Random Interesting Tidbits from WWII France

I just finished reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, by William Shirer, about how the government and military of France came to be so weak and divided that Nazi Germany could sweep in and conquer the nation in just one month. This is a book that is hard to put down but it is also hard to keep reading at times because it is downright painful to witness the short-sightedness and timidity that led to bloody catastrophe.

I'm not going to get into that; you can read the book yourself. It's worth reading.

What I want to make note of are just a few of the surprising bits of information I ran across in the book.

For example, when France was on the verge of collapse they continued to have one of the strongest navy fleets in the world. Great Britain was extremely worried about those ships falling into German hands. The French were guaranteeing the British that they would never allow that to happen, but considering all the other failed guarantees France had given in so many other situations, it is not surprising that the British were a bit doubtful.

Winston Churchill was not timid. He gave the order for the seizure of all French vessels possible and sinking of the rest if that were the only recourse. Most were seized with little bloodshed but at Mers-el-Kebir, in French Algeria, the two navies fought a lop-sided battle that resulted in the sinking or destruction of all but one of the French ships in the port. The French soon capitulated to Germany and the Petain dictatorship made common cause with Hitler.

That led to another of the points I want to note. With the French government at Vichy now on the side of the Axis powers, the Nazis were able to walk into the French African possessions. This of course was the setting for the Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall flick "Casablanca." When the time came for the British and American troops to invade North Africa, the French fought them. Approximately 1,500 French and a like number of Americans killed each other in that initial battle. Sort of like if the Kuwaiti military had fought the U.S. military when the Americans came in to free Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

Lastly, I remembered from childhood that Charles De Gaulle was the leader of France at that time. During the period the book covers he was a colonel and then a general, and he did not capitulate, but rather went on to lead the French resistance (I'm not clear on details here, haven't read about that yet). I guess I just assumed that he became president after the war and that he headed the Fourth French Republic.

Well, not exactly. First off, De Gaulle did not immediately become the French head of state. He eventually did become the last Premier of the Fourth Republic and then he became the first President of the Fifth Republic. Apparently they rewrote their constitution again at that point. I'm only assuming that the government of France today is still the Fifth Republic.

So those are the particular things that struck me. Of course the whole book really struck me. Everything is so clear in hindsight but there are always at least a few people who see it clearly in foresight. If only it weren't so difficult to figure out who those people are and who they are not.