Wanting Your Extinction

(10/29/2023) Last Thursday, a Robert E. Lee descendent responded to a Washington Post article celebrating the unauthorized destruction by smelting of the general’s statue previously standing in Charlottesville. He posted to Twitter (renamed “X”) that he finally realized the museum administrators hated the general’s defenders so much that they want extinction of the family name.  According to Elon Musk, the descendant’s revelation was not paranoia. Twitter’s new boss replied to the thread: “They absolutely want your extinction.”  While Musk has no Confederate ancestors, he has plenty of experience with censorious social justice activists.

The following day The New York Times published an article applauding the smelting. The editorialist celebrated because George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020 triggered the destruction of another hundred Confederate statues. Unfortunately, recent evidence suggests that the Floyd judgment is a hoax; that it was the result of public opinion, not facts.

A court deposition in another Hennepin County Minnesota case has shed more light on Floyd’s death. Court documents show that County attorneys faced pressure to convict Policeman Derek Chauvin with public opinion. The documents surfaced in an unrelated sex discrimination case.

The latest evidence suggests Chauvin will seek to have the new evidence reviewed so that he may show that he was convicted in the media. If true, it might also suggest that any opinion contrary to the Black Lives Matter dogma prevailing at the time, was also railroaded.

The conversation surfaced in former Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy’s 2022 sex discrimination complaint against County Attorney Mike Freeman.

Additionally, it should be noted that The New York Times, editorial board sometimes makes glaring errors. During an MSN interview in 2020, Times Editorial Board Member Mara Gay displayed glaring arithmetic weakness. When she learned that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg spent $550 million on a Presidential campaign, she remarked that Bloomberg should have given one million dollars to every man, woman, and child as an incentive to win their vote. She evidently concluded that America’s population of 330 million was well under the $550 million he spent thereby enabling a gift of $1 million to each American. She missed six decimal points in her division. The true amount is $1.66 per person. 

Although Gay blamed her error on a freelance reporter, the magnitude of the mistake is of such a scale that she should be ashamed to try and shift blame. Gay also got the Brian Williams show to bail her out. It stated afterward that “we” quoted an erroneous Tweet. In truth, it was Gay who quoted the Tweet. 

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My latest two books are novels. In the first, Firepower: The Greatest Spy Story Never Told, a family secret leads the North to tardily deploy the repeating rifle, an obviously superior weapon and monopoly for the Union side.

The second one is Pat and Tom: A novel of Confederate generals Pat Cleburne and Tom Hindman. Although from an obscure hometown, the two quickly demonstrate leadership capabilities before pushing to arm black volunteers for the Confederate armies. One is killed in battle and the other murdered.

The Process of Writing History

(October 5, 2023) Earlier today I listened to an online discussion by a group of five “public” historians about the “process of writing history.” (The “public” descriptor signifies that the historian typically works as either a battlefield park ranger or a guide at a private museum.) Academic historians typically work for private and public colleges and consider themselves to be of a higher caste.)

Be that as it may, the “process of writing history” is code terminology emphasizing that the historian should rely upon primary sources and cite them in footnotes. It inevitably leads to criticisms that Shelby Foote falls short of being a serious historian because he eschewed footnotes. His critics complain that his avoidance of footnotes makes it hard to trace his sources. 

That may have been true in the pre-Internet era but the ubiquity of Google’s search engine provides an easy way to test the accuracy Foote’s quotes. Consider the following examples:

One On page three of the first of Foote’s three volume narrative of the war he quotes Jefferson Davis as saying, “All hope of relief in the Union is extinguished.” A Google search of the expression reveals that academic historian Kenneth Stampp also quoted the phrase in the same context. 

Two Foote similarly quotes Lincoln as saying: “All I am I owe to my angel mother.” Google verifies the quote. 

Three On page nine Foote quotes Jeff Davis’s black overseer when the slave accepts blame for a mistake: “I rather think sir, [the error was] through my neglect.” Google also verifies the text, and the context in which it was used. 

Since there was no World Wide Web when Foote wrote his one-million-word Civil War: A Narrative, the impressive point is how often Foote accurately quoted his subjects.

History told as stories is never forgotten. — Rudyard Kipling

My latest two books are novels. In the first, Firepower: The Greatest Spy Story Never Told, a family secret leads the North to only slowly deploy the repeating rifle, an obviously superior weapon and monopoly for the Union side.

The second one is Pat and Tom: A novel of Confederate generals Pat Cleburne and Tom Hindman. Although from an obscure hometown, the two quickly demonstrate leadership capabilities before pushing to arm black volunteers for the Confederate armies. Their chivalry leads one to be killed in battle and the other to be murdered.

How Prophets Predict

(October 4, 2023) Prophets predict the future by seeing the present clearly. It is the truth that they discern about the present that informs them of the future. Consider the first wave of Confederate icon and statuary deletion that started in 2015. Perceptive observers realized that it revealed a profound truth.

Specifically, it unmasked the cultural elite’s hatred of America’s traditions and history. That hatred was not limited to Confederates;  it applied to nearly all the conventional heroes of American History. It became evident to former President Trump on August 15, 2017, when he responded to media heckling about Confederate statuary in Charlottesville, Virginia: 

“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee… I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop? … [Jefferson] was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue?”

The Washington Post quickly published an Op-Ed by George Mason law professor Ilya Somin who claimed there was no slippery slope. Three years later Portland residents toppled a Washington statue. A year after that New York City removed a bust of Thomas Jefferson that had stood for nearly two hundred years. A Theodore Roosevelt statue was removed from the New York Museum of Natural History. According to CBS News, at least 33 Christopher Columbus statues have been removed. 

My latest two books are novels. In the first, Firepower: The Greatest Spy Story Never Told, a family secret leads the North to only slowly deploy the repeating rifle, an obviously superior weapon and monopoly for the Union side. 

The second one is Pat and Tom: A novel of Confederate generals Pat Cleburne and Tom Hindman. Although from an obscure frontier town, the two quickly demonstrate leadership capabilities before pushing to arm black volunteers for the Confederate armies. Their chivalry leads one to be killed in battle and the other to be murdered.

Public Historians Lament

(October 3, 2023) Recently I listened to three historians discuss the changing ways that popular culture develops an understanding of the Civil War. As “Public Historians,” each has a background of working for museums or battlefield parks. All three agree on two points. First, today’s visitors arrive with little knowledge of the war. Second, 20-30 years ago guests typically had more knowledge because of public touchstones such as the 1993 movie Gettysburg or the Killer Angels novel upon which it was based. The same applies to the 1939 Gone With the Wind movie and its 1936 source novel of the same name.

One participant mentioned that years ago the rangers would roll their eyes when visitors confessed that such touchstones shaped their interpretation of the war. He, and his fellow rangers, were anxious to dispel the so-called myths of public Civil War Memory.  But now, he confessed, he would now rather that the public had a traditional conceptualization of Confederate history than none at all. Without a foundational knowledge, the public is growing less interested in learning more, which is bad for the Civil War history business.

None mentioned that the re-education they’ve been selling over the last thirty years might be responsible for the decline of public interest. When talking among themselves they do not imagine that the history they teach may be every bit as distorted as the so-called Lost Cause interpretation. As much as they dislike the Lost Cause, they consistently fail to appreciate that the older scholars who created it never censored their predecessors.  In contrast, today’s dominant South Bad/North Good interpretation is intolerant of the slightest deviation.

If today’s “Public Historians” want to attract more visitors for their parks and readers for their books, they should stop demonizing the Confederate soldier by destroying his statuary.  Instead they should defend the statues.

My latest two books are novels. In the first, Firepower: The Greatest Spy Story Never Told, a family secret leads the North to only slowly deploy the repeating rifle, an obviously superior weapon and monopoly for the Union side.

The second one is Pat and Tom: A novel of Confederate generals Pat Cleburne and Tom Hindman. Although from an obscure hometown, the two quickly demonstrate leadership before pushing to arm black volunteers for the Confederate armies. Their chivalry leads one to be killed in battle and the other to be murdered.

History told in the form of a story is never forgotten. — Rudyard Kipling