If you were president, would it bother you if 2 million Americans died in the next few months from Covid-19? What about 1 million? What sort of financial hardships would you be willing to have the country endure to save many of those lives?
Because Austria reacted quickly and severely, the rate of new cases of Covid-19 has gone down in the past 24 hours. Italy seems to have reached its inflection point, when the rate of increase begins to slow. With any luck, Spain will reach its inflection point this week. To be clear, many more people will test positive and die as the curve flattens, but the point is that the rate of growth should continue to slow as long as the quarantine measures are still in place and working.
Today, President Trump said he’s thinking of rolling back social distancing measures before all the states have even enacted shelter-in-place orders. While public health measures are under state control, a shift of message from the White House could nonetheless encourage states to allow low-risk people back to the workplace. This suggests that Trump is comfortable with a certain number of deaths. Is he OK with .6 percent of the population dying? That would be roughly 2 million mostly elderly people, plus younger people who suffer from heart conditions, asthma, or autoimmune diseases. Do you think he’s fine with .3 percent dying?
If the nation’s low-risk (under 60) workers go back to the workplace, we’re likely to see a wartime draft situation. Millions would seek exemptions and the upper middle class would get their doctors to write notes to allow them to stay home. (Hell, their doctors help them get their dogs on planes!) Ironically, the uninsured, who don’t have access to doctors who can write them notes, would all be obliged to go back to the workplace. And despite the fact that the rate of death for the young who contract the coronavirus is low, some young people would inevitably die, and the blame would be placed squarely on the government. If you were president, how many deaths would you feel comfortable with?
The coils of razor-sharp concertina wire that drape the 18-foot-high border fence that runs like a scar through Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are low-tech weapons in a 21st century psy-op. Installed last year by the U.S. military ostensibly to add an extra deterrent to illegal crossings, it’s more likely intended to affect the hearts and minds of residents on the U.S. side than on anyone in Mexico.
For one, the wire is draped exclusively on the Arizona side of the fence, and two, crossings are relatively low within the city limits where much of the wire has been placed. Presumably, the Trump administration was trying to send a message to Americans that it was willing—and perhaps eager–to use lethal means to stop undocumented immigration. Walk up to the wire, as I did on a recent visit to the border, and you can imagine how its blades could easily slice into your flesh and even kill you.
I say psy-op because the sight of six coiled rows of concertina wire, which is mostly used by the military or in detention centers, is intended to provoke a reaction in those who see it in in person or in photos. It’s a clear display of aggression on the part of the U.S. Government. It also happens to be the physical embodiment of this president’s efforts to encourage Americans to distrust and fear countries and peoples outside our borders.
***
I’m keenly aware that America has often relied on the threat of enemies to give its diverse population both purpose and cohesion. Our rivalry with the Soviet Union justified the building of the federal highway system, hastened racial integration, and got us to the Moon faster. Likewise, in American politics, there’s nothing like stirring fear and disdain for the other side to get people to the polls. But what Trump has done over the past few years is less targeted, sloppier, and more about self-aggrandizing chest thumping than about forging unity or rallying Americans to step up their game.
U.C. Berkeley political scientist Wendy Brown argues that in an era in which so much labor and capital move across international lines, border walls are almost always more about political theater than actual deterrence. She thinks the demand for them comes from a desire to shore up people’s crumbling sense of national sovereignty. I suppose that the segments of society that think their nation is losing control of its destiny are the ones who feel they’ve lost control over their own. Whatever the case, walls and concertina wire are supposed to make those Americans feel better about being Americans simply because they are not them.
***
Most Americans’ understanding of international borders comes from the constant grandstanding over the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump certainly didn’t invent the issue. We even refer to our Southern boundary as the border. As such, in the American imagination, borders aren’t merely about jurisdiction or even culture. They’re not even about national security. Instead, they are hugely symbolic boundaries separating little old us from a menacing world. If only we can hold the line on the border, we are told, we can rid our society of all rapists, drugs, terrorists, criminals, and now viruses.
Of course, all borders are places of contrast and differentiation. In my travels, I like to ask people who live near one—international or domestic–what they think of their neighbors. Whatever the boundary, most people on one side will readily give you their opinion of what and who resides on the other side. Nebraskans like to say that Iowa stands for Idiots Out Wandering Around. Even the humblest of Tennesseans might tell you that Mississippi is like the “third world.” Lithuanians can tell you that going to Belarus is like going back in time, a bad time. And you know what Oregonians and Arizonans say about Californians.
A decade ago, after giving a talk at a university in Matamoros, just south of the border from Brownsville, Texas, an earnest Mexican undergraduate in a sweater vest asked me a question that would change how I think about the United States. “Why,” he asked plaintively, “are you Americans so scared of us Mexicans? After all, you are so powerful, and we are not.”
I could have given the young man a variety of cheap, easy answers. Fear of strangers, demographic change, or the history of nativism in America. But I felt the way he posed the question obliged me to go deeper. The average American, I told him, is not a small-scale Uncle Sam who speaks softly but carries a big stick. Believe it or not, I explained, despite our nation’s global power, the life of a typical American is actually full of an inordinate amount of insecurity. We talk a big, loud game to compensate for our fears. The flipside of the forward-thinking culture of opportunity is constant instability, and living with so much instability is not so easy.
The sight of the most powerful nation in history portraying itself as the hapless victim of impoverished migrants is unseemly at best. Talk of building a 1,000-mile-long wall is a testament to our profound sense of insecurity. It sheds light on the way Americans behave in the world—both as individuals and as a nation. Despite our military might, our posturing or even our largesse, we have an awful tendency to cower in the face of both real and imagined foreign threats.
If the world is a big, bad place from which we need protection, then what does that make Americans? Small and good, I guess. And isn’t righteous what Americans want to be seen as most, both as individuals and citizens of a nation? Our obsession with being protected from the world, then, is infantilizing. While Uncle Sam fights the bullies, the public remains innocent. Our hands are clean.
***
For decades, social scientists have said Mexican migration to the U.S. served as a social safety valve that released pressure on a corrupt system that left too many Mexicans un- or underemployed. Were it not for mass migration northward, the logic went, Mexico would have exploded in revolution years ago.
In our own way, Americans have offshored too many of our problems and relieved ourselves of responsibility for facing them head on. It’s always someone else’s fault. If we can only hold the line on the border . . .
***
The coronavirus pandemic has shown us that the well-timed closing of borders, however temporarily, can help slow down an aggressive virus. But it doesn’t stop it, and it doesn’t mean we don’t have to take care of the sick, help protect the most vulnerable, and prepare the public once it reaches our towns and neighborhoods.
This morning, my German father-in-law called to check up on my wife and me. She had never heard him so worried. “Why isn’t the U.S. Government testing Americans or dealing with the crisis? Why is it so slow to respond to this outbreak?” My wife, who became a U.S. citizen 6 years ago, was speechless. I wanted to tell her that now that she’s an American, she’s free to tell her dad that it wasn’t our responsibility. After all, it’s a foreign virus.
White racial violence in America has never been a random collection of individual or unrelated crimes of passion against minorities. It has generally been driven and justified through insidious ideologies that paint whites as innocent victims and nonwhites as threatening and aggressive.
In her posthumously published autobiography, journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells put it plainly: to justify the extralegal torture and murder of black men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, apologists for the violence had to brand all black men as “moral monsters and despoilers of white womanhood.”1
Mind you, slandering an entire racial group isn’t just a matter of casual racism. The ideology was articulated and refined by high priests from the finest universities. Brown University sociologist Lester F. Ward, for example, concluded that blacks were driven by the “imperious voice of nature” to rape white women and thus “raise his race to a little higher level.”2 In the meantime, the University of Pennsylvania’s Daniel G. Brinton, considered one of the founders of American anthropology, argued that white women had no “holier duty” than to guard the purity of their race, while white men had no higher duty than to protect white women.3
Through her investigations, Wells discovered that the rise in lynching in the South wasn’t about rape at all. The supposed mass phenomenon of black men violating white women was, she famously wrote, a “threadbare lie.”4 Lynching was just a new means of controlling blacks at a time when they were becoming more economically competitive with whites. The fragility of white women, it turns out, was the weapons of mass destruction of its day.
But that isn’t the only time in American history that whites have wielded female virtue and victimhood to justify aggression against nonwhites. The practice is exclusive neither to the history of lynching of black Americans nor to the American South. Indeed, it is integral to the way white supremacy has always been enforced in America.
***
The first woman in American history to have a statue erected in her honor was a symbol of virtuous violence against nonwhites.
In March of 1697, a Massachusetts-born Puritan named Hannah Duston was taken captive by Native Americans a week after giving birth to her twelfth child. Marched north for two weeks, during which time her newborn was killed by her captors, Duston and two other captives were left with an Indian family on an island located in what is now New Hampshire. With help from her fellow captives, Duston then killed and scalped ten Indians—six of whom were children—while they slept, then escaped, scalps in hand, in a canoe down the Merrimack River.
Back home, the Massachusetts General Assembly gave the escaped woman fifty pounds as a reward for the scalps. Cotton Mather, the most celebrated of Puritan ministers, wrote about Duston’s harrowing story no fewer than three times, making her the most famous woman of her day. Mather’s stories made clear that Duston’s murder of Indian children was justified by virtue of her having lost her own child as well as by the fact that she was beyond the boundaries—and laws—of her community. He compared Duston to Jael, an Old Testament heroine who saved the Israelites by driving a spike through the head of a sleeping enemy commander. The comparison further demonstrated that Duston’s violent acts were committed not just in her own defense, but on behalf of her people. The story, now a legend, thus allowed seventeenth-century Puritans to see their own violence against Native Americans as not only legitimate but virtuous.
***
I first learned of Hannah Duston two years ago at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. The hostess at an old-fashioned steak joint swore to me that one of her ancestors was famous for killing Indians.
No more than a month later, I was in a rental car heading up I-93 in Massachusetts on my way to see the surviving monuments erected in honor of a Puritan woman who died almost three hundred years ago. As a voluble, six-foot-three-inch-tall Mexican American man, I’m no stranger to the ways in which the fears of white women are wielded against nonwhite men and wanted to the see the archetypal symbol for myself. It was a little like ma- king a trip to the Rosetta Stone thinking that it would re- veal some truths about being big and brown in America.
The legend of Hannah Duston quieted down sometime in the eighteenth century, but it came roaring back in the 1820s. For the next six decades or so, the story of Duston’s bravery appeared in everything from children’s books to encyclopedias, U.S. histories to women’s magazines. By 1874, The Ladies Repository, a national publication of the Methodist Episcopal Church, declared that the story of Hannah Duston was “familiar to every school-boy.”5 The likes of Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Greenleaf Whittier all published versions and interpretations of her story.
Between 1861 and 1879, three statues of Duston were unveiled. Her legend reached full swing at a time when the United States was expanding westward and its pioneers were increasingly grappling with what was so inelegantly called “the Indian Problem.” When Duston killed Native American men, women, and children, University of Northern Iowa historian Barbara Cutter writes, “she represented an innocent nation defending itself against an evil threat. Her story could be used to morally justify American expansionism—both onto Indian lands and into the nation of Mexico.”6
Two of three Duston monuments still exist, one in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the town where Duston lived, and the other on the island north of Concord, New Hampshire, where she had been held captive. I circled around downtown Haverhill a few times before spying a nursing home with the unfortunate name of the Hannah Duston Healthcare Center. It was a cold Sunday in early March, and I felt like I had the city center to myself. I found the nearby statue decidedly imposing and to the point. Dressed in a long formal gown, her hair flowing over her shoulders, the figure of Duston stands righteously and threateningly. Her right hand holds a tomahawk at the ready, while her left points her index finger outward accusingly. It’s clear that whomever she’s about to whack deserves it.
The man who donated the statue in Haverhill in 1879 explained that the monument was not only meant to remind Americans of Duston’s “courage,” it was also intended to “animate our hearts with noble ideas and patriotic feelings.”7
After grabbing a quick lunch in Haverhill, I drove another hour into New Hampshire, about fifteen minutes north of Concord. I got out at a Park and Ride lot along the highway, next to a historical marker that lauded Duston as both a “victim” and a “famous symbol of frontier heroism.” The statue was not far off, on an island on the other side of a railroad bridge. Made of granite, with her nose apparently having been shot off, this 1874 monument to Duston is starker and more terrifying than the one in Haverhill. Her hair is flowing in the same way, but her neckline is much lower, as if she’s wearing an under- garment, thus accentuating her femininity. In her right hand, she holds a tomahawk by her side. In her left, she’s grasping a fistful of scalps at her waist that at first glance I thought was an upside-down bouquet of flowers.
In her insightful 2008 journal article “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized,” Cutter argued that the legend of Hannah Duston helped Americans to envision their national identity as female and to understand that the violence committed in her name was “feminine, and therefore justified, innocent, defensive violence.”8
But what Cutter failed to add was that this symbol of virtuous violence was as much a white racial ideology as it was a national one. It was wielded to control nonwhites not just beyond America’s expanding borders, but also within them.
***
As the U.S. fought its last Indian wars and the frontier closed, Hannah Duston faded away. But the belief that white female virtue could be wielded against nonwhites would live on, as America now needed to teach the peoples its growing empire was absorbing to behave by the rules of their new superiors.
For the most part, the work of “civilizing” Native Americans, Mexicans in the borderlands, newly arrived immigrant groups, and colonial peoples in Asia and the Caribbean fell to white women. It was a position that many relished, not least because it was a source of rare political power and freedom.
So successful did women become as urban reformers, special government agents, settlement house leaders, and missionaries both in the U.S. and abroad that “woman as a civilizing force” became a popular “rallying cry” for early feminists.9 Suffragists often pointed to white women’s new roles as ambassadors—and enforcers—of white Protestant American culture as proof that white women deserved equal political rights to those of white men. This newfound social status, however, required white women to uphold America’s racial hierarchy and treat both nonwhite men and nonwhite women as inferiors. Taking on roles as civilization workers, writes University of Florida historian Louise Michele New- man, therefore “limited the critiques white women could offer of the racism and sexism within their own culture because in the end they had to acknowledge that patriarchy had been key to their own racial advancement.”10
This dynamic allowed white women to comfortably advocate for equality of the sexes for themselves while still upholding white supremacy. For feminists, it also led them to deflect their criticism of the patriarchal aspects of their own culture and place the responsibility for the oppression of women on the nonwhite men they were trying to civilize. As Newman writes in her rigorously argued book White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, “white women often scapegoated the purportedly less enlightened men of ‘primitive’ cultures as the worse perpetrators of abuse.”11
Their growing professional clout among white men notwithstanding, white women sometimes expressed fear of being victimized by the nonwhite men they sought to elevate culturally. That’s hardly surprising, given that Anglo elites routinely characterized nonwhite males as preternaturally aggressive, hypersexual, or both. And, particularly during the height of lynching in the South, white female civilization workers also projected their fear of black men onto other nonwhite men they encountered. Even as white women were lauded for portraying the gentler side of American imperialism, their fear of nonwhite men helped maintain the racial order.
The politics of virtue and victimhood are alive and well at the start of the twenty-first century. Indeed, for some feminist—and other minority—activists the two are one and the same. But not everyone enjoys equal access to the status of victim.
Given their place in America’s racial hierarchy—below white men but above both nonwhite men and nonwhite women—white women are, to say the least, first among equals when it comes to minorities. Whether real or imagined, their fears are not only much more likely to be heard than those of other women, they’re also more likely to be weaponized.
That’s what Donald Trump is doing when he raises the specter of Mexican rapists to rally support for his anti-immigrant measures. It’s why so-called BBQ Becky and so many like her have become viral internet memes over the past few years. She’s the woman who called 911 to report a black family having a barbecue at a park in downtown Oakland, California. Righteous and confident while confronting the family, the complainant broke into tears when she talked to the police on the phone, then accused those she was harassing of threatening her. At the very least, what this spate of videos shows us is that plenty of white women feel disturbingly comfortable calling the authorities to resolve their grievances, however small, with nonwhite men. What are the chances that a black or brown man would call the cops on a white woman and assume they’d get a fair hearing, or a hearing at all?
In her 2019 book, White Tears/Brown Scars, Australian journalist Ruby Hamad advances the minority feminist argument that white entitlement is often masked by female victimhood and that nonwhites generally pay the price. American history certainly bears her out. There’s no greater symbol of that uncomfortable truth than Hannah Duston.
***
1. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 71.
2. Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (London: The Macmillan Company, 1903), 53.
3. Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (New York: NDC Hodges, 1890), 287.
4. Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record,” in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 79.
5. Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of Ame- rican Violence,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 2 (2008): 14.
6. Ibid., 26. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Ibid., 26. 9. Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The RacialOrigins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53.
10. Ibid., 8
11. Ibid.
(Hannah Duston grasping a fistful of scalps. Boscawen, New Hampshire. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez.)
David NeSmith, a 61-year-old self-described “Southern boy” and volunteer docent at the Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia, told me that he doesn’t believe in hyphenated identities. “I don’t like it when people call themselves Irish-Americans or African-Americans,” he said. “We should all just be Americans.”
Without skipping a beat and with no hint of irony, NeSmith then began to wax poetic about his passion for “holding on to our Southern heritage.” He is particularly proud of a red baseball cap he owns that reads “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” And then there’s the fact that he and his wife Janice are active volunteers at a county-funded historic site dedicated to the memory of the capture of the president of the Confederate States of America by federal troops.
Most Americans think the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army commander Ulysses S. Grant. But the real ending to the brutal sectional conflict came a month later on May 10, when two Union Army regiments tracked down an unrepentant and delusional Jefferson Davis, who was headed to Texas—with his family and a dwindling coterie in tow—in the hopes of retaking up arms.
Davis was captured in a pre-dawn raid near a creek by a hillside covered with tall yellow pine trees in Southern Georgia, roughly 85 miles from the Florida border. Two Union soldiers wound up dead from friendly fire, but once surrounded, Davis’ posse didn’t discharge a single shot. Perhaps the most salient and dramatic aspect of the capture, though, was the unfounded rumor that surfaced afterward: that Davis had been caught in women’s clothes. Northern cartoonists had a field day. A Harper’s Weekly illustration pictured Davis in a hoop skirt and bonnet, carrying a hatbox labeled “C. S.” for Confederate States.
For all the ink spilled about the American Civil War over the past six generations, too little has focused on the psychic toll of defeat, including the attendant fears of the loss of manhood that bedevil the losers of any armed conflict. After the war, Southern whites found themselves disconsolate and disoriented. Not only did they have to grieve the loss of loved ones; they were also forced to contend with the humiliating everyday realities brought on by profound economic, political, and social change. Post-war consolation came in the form of remembering the dead, making sense of defeat, and reconstituting their identities.
I came to Irwinville because I wanted to ponder the loss that lies at the core of Southern white identity. Defeat is a subject that Americans, who fancy themselves a nation of winners, don’t like to grapple with. But it’s impossible to understand the South without understanding both the pain of historic loss as well as the fear of more loss to come. To reach the Jefferson Davis Historic Memorial Site I drove 120 miles on a raw autumn morning along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway from the Alabama border through peanut farms, cotton fields, and pecan orchards, before taking a left on Jeff Davis Park Drive 13 miles east of Interstate 75.
The story goes that after witnessing Davis’ arrest, the landowner vowed to place the grounds permanently in the “hands of the Southern people.” I was the sole guest on the Friday afternoon I visited. The ranger was taking care of some business upstate in Athens and had left David and Janice NeSmith in charge. A sign on the front door notified visitors that the site would close early that day in advance of a high school football state championship game between the Clinch County Panthers and the Irwin County Indians in nearby Ocilla.
The monument itself—a bronze bust of Davis atop an uninspired granite shaft placed on the exact spot of his capture—left me cold. But the NeSmiths welcomed me warmly and were happy to chat about high school football, their upcoming 43rd wedding anniversary, the hazards of driving on red dirt roads in the rain, and the curious mix of insecurity, grievance, and resistance that whites from here call Southern pride.
***
Confederate soldiers who marched off to war in 1861 weren’t moved to action by deep loyalty to a brand new nation. Rather, it was their attachment to their individual states and local communities that sent them into battle. As historian W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the Southin 1941, “the armies had brought men together from four quarters, molding them to a common purpose for four years, teaching them more and more to say and think the same things, giving them common memories—memories transcending all that had gone before and sealed with the great seal of pain and hunger and sweat—binding man more closely to man, class more closely to class.” It was only after the war that the concept of the South took hold and the idea of Southern pride blossomed, and nobody remembered that they had initially gone to fight for Alabama or Virginia or South Carolina.
Because Southern identity emerged from the Civil War, the memory of the Confederacy remained essential, particularly initially, to its survival. “The Lost Cause” was the name given to the interpretation of the war that sprung from writings and activities that perpetuated that memory. In hindsight, the war took on a nobility and aura of glory it never had in real life.
The Confederate memorial movement—first at gravesites and then later in public squares—was the most broad-based cultural expression of the Lost Cause. For a half-century throughout the South, communities erected monuments that not only helped them make sense of the past, but established a forward-thinking Southern mythology based on the belief that their honor would be vindicated.
On April 6, 1910, the town of Monticello in central Georgia unveiled a 32-foot stone obelisk flanked by two Confederate soldiers, one a fresh-faced young private, the other an officer with a Van Dyke beard. Today, the monument’s two plaques are virtually incomprehensible—if not a little crazy sounding. On the monument’s south side, the inscription reads: “Crowns of roses fade. Crowns of thorns endure. Cavalries of crucifixions take deepest hold of humanity. The triumphs of might are transient. They pass and are forgotten. The sufferings of right are graven deepest on the chronicle of nations.”
On the north side of the plaque is inscribed a more prosaic but no less illuminating message: “To the Confederate soldiers of Jasper County, the record of whose sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty, in the service of their country, is the proud heritage of a loyal posterity. ‘In legend and lay, our heroes in gray, will forever live over again for us.’” I’m sure I’m not the only unsuspecting visitor who immediately wondered what “country” the inscription was referring to. I was so befuddled that I took a photo of the plaque with my phone and immediately sent it to a historian friend. Not only was he not certain of the answer, but he told me to Google the name Enoch M. Banks, a search that revealed the story of a poor academic at the University of Florida who was fired from his job in 1911 for arguing that the South “was relatively in the wrong” in the secession crisis. I left Monticello more confused than when I had arrived.
Believe it or not, the answer to the question at hand goes a long way in explaining why proud Southerner David NeSmith doesn’t see the irony in his complaining about hyphenated Americans.
From the beginning of their rebellion, leaders of the Confederacy compared their struggle to the American fight against British tyranny. Jefferson Davis insisted that the South’s withdrawal from the Union wasn’t a rejection as much as a recommitment to the principles upon which the United States was founded. As historian Reid Mitchell has argued, the Confederates “regarded themselves as the true Americans.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, once the war was over, white Southerners found it relatively easy to reconcile their Confederate and American identities. It turns out that a nationalism put together on the fly can be relatively easily dismantled. Plenty of bitterness did remain, however. It was directed not at the United States, but against the North, which many Southerners believed had usurped the national government and wielded its power to humiliate them. Defeat had left white Southerners with something of a collective chip on their shoulders.
As such, subsequent generations were more than eager to prove their honor and valor to their condescending Yankee brethren. The Spanish-American War provided the first significant opportunity in 1898. With the nation caught up in a wave of patriotism, Southern soldiers thought it acceptable again to don the blue uniform. The Atlanta Constitution reported that former Confederate soldiers were “profoundly loyal to the Stars and Stripes and are eager to exhibit their fidelity upon the field of battle.” The many veterans who were too old to fight encouraged young men to enlist. By the end of the conflict, Southerners had proven their loyalty to the Union while celebrating the memory of the Confederacy. The war had helped confirm, wrote Louisiana State University historian Gaines M. Foster, that the Confederate tradition “blended readily and smoothly with American nationalism and mission.”
By the time the townsfolk of Monticello, Georgia filled their square in the spring of 1910 to proudly inaugurate their new Confederate memorial, Southern whites were fully back in the American fold while remaining unapologetic in their defense of their region’s right to secede. And while they didn’t bemoan the end of slavery, Southern whites remained intent on restoring white supremacy. By 1914, all Southern states had passed segregation laws, and nothing represented the triumph of white supremacy more than the formal, legal establishment of two separate and unequal societies. The post-Civil War white South had finally invented a new social system—and regional tradition—in response to abolishment of slavery. If that weren’t enough, in November 1912, Southern-born Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States. White Southerners viewed his election not only as a kind of vindication, but evidence that their region once again ruled the Union.
Segregation laws were, of course, designed to control and contain African Americans. But they had the simultaneous effect of reining in whites. The Civil War and subsequent Northern occupation had already left white Southerners defensive of any real or perceived intrusion from outsiders. Now, the emergence of Jim Crow further fueled the climate of strict social conformity. The South, W.J. Cash argued, adhered to what he called “the savage ideal,” “whereunder dissent and variety are completely suppressed, and men become, in all their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of each other.”
But presumably all this conformity paid some sort of psychic dividends. While Northern whites had to fight for jobs and jockey for social position in polyglot cities, Southern whites—no matter how poor—could comfort themselves with the illusion that the subjugation of blacks gave all whites equal standing.
In 1928, Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips concluded that despite the South’s vast diversity, the shared essence of the region was a “persistent defensive self-containment” and a “common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” That, he wrote, was “the cardinal test of a Southerner.”
But the Civil Rights Movement, which gained momentum in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, began to threaten the certainty of that rule. So deeply identified was the South with segregation that observers wondered whether the end of segregation would spell the end of the South as a distinctive region. Despite the long road toward civil rights still ahead, in his 1957 book, Epitaph for Dixie, Arkansas journalist Harry S. Ashmore was certain that nothing could “turn back the forces that are reshaping the Southern region in the nation’s image.” A year later, another Arkansan, historian C. Vann Woodward, warned, “The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is any longer any point in calling himself a Southerner.” Now that such things as the poll tax, the white primary, and the Jim Crow railway car were beginning to vanish, white Southerners, he wrote, “were suddenly aware of the vacant place they have left in the landscape and of the habit of depending on them in final resort as landmarks of our regional identification.”
At the same time, the South was losing another mark of regional distinction. In 1938, on the occasion of the release of a federal economic study, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Over the next four decades, however, the regional poverty rate converged so considerably with the national norm that by the 1970s, the place that once seemed—in the words of Southern literary historian Fred Dobson—“poor, violent, pessimistic, tragic, and mysterious” had suddenly transformed into a place some were calling “successful, optimistic, prosperous, and bland.” In 1977, the personification of a kinder and gentler South, Jimmy Carter, became president of the United States.
A year later, Mississippi-born novelist Walker Percy gave a lecture at the University of Georgia in which he concluded that Carter’s election was part and parcel of a larger phenomenon: “The South had entered the mainstream of American life for the first time in perhaps 150 years.” Not only did he find this transformation plain “boring,” but he feared the South would become a “quaint corner” of a suburbanized coast to coast Sunbelt whose spiritual heartland would lie somewhere between Dallas and Los Angeles. Alas, he figured, progress has its costs.
So, once again, the white South feared it would lose whatever it was that made it unique. Indeed, as University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers has written, “From its very beginning, people have believed that the South, defined against an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, more real, more unified and distinct, was not only disappearing but also declining.”
One bulwark against that decline is a hugely popular business that gives Southerners the feeling that the region’s homespun past is still present: the Cracker Barrel chain. Founded in 1969 as a combined restaurant and gift shop styled as an old-fashioned country general store, Cracker Barrel first positioned itself next to Interstate highway exits in the Southeast before going national in the 1980s. Today the publicly traded corporate eatery serves traditional “down home” Southern comfort food in 42 states, and each restaurant features a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs and a stone fireplace with a shotgun and a deer head above the mantel. Clearly, you don’t have to be Southern to soak up its nostalgia.
In 1966, the Birmingham, Alabama-based publisher of an 80-year-old agriculture journal launched a lifestyle magazine called Southern Living. Filled with recipes, interior design ideas, and regional travel tips, Southern Living became, according to National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts, the “lifestyle Bible” of the white South’s “genuine and aspiring upper middle class.” By 1985, when it sold to Time, Inc. for $498 million, it had become the most successful regional magazine of its kind.
But clearly not everyone can afford to entertain that version of Southern culture. One of the biggest effects the end of segregation had on Southern whites was the highlighting of the inequality that had always existed among them. “The fiction that all whites are equal as long as blacks were suppressed was shot to hell,” historian James C. Cobb told me. Cobb, a distinguished University of Georgia professor emeritus who literally wrote the book on Southern identity, invited me to spend a warm late summer day with him in Athens, Georgia talking about Southern history.
During a drive through town, a walk on campus, and hours in his small office where he has a black velvet painting of Elvis Presley behind his desk, Cobb explained to me that the Confederate battle flag is often the last bastion for poor whites looking for a way to assert some status. “You’re not going to find too many middle-class white Southerners waving rebel flags these days,” he said. “You just don’t feel the need to assert your whiteness when you own a rambling McMansion.” On the other hand, if you’re poor, white, and feeling anxious about your place in the world, “waving the rebel flag is a statement about being white when you think being white is the only thing you’ve got.”
He talked at length about the persistence of white Southern identity in a globalized world. Here, he says, like in so many places around the globe, folks are trying to retain some local distinctiveness in the face of a homogenizing planet. Like so many latter-generation ethnic Americans who fear the prospect of full assimilation, large numbers of Southerners have refused to disappear into a homogenized, placeless, post-ethnic whiteness.
Nowadays they are doing so by repackaging Southernness and selling it in the marketplace. And the very act of commodifying culture, Cobb says, automatically makes it a little performative.
As if to prove a point, Cobb invited me to a brunch hosted by Lee Epting, this college town’s premier caterer, a man one local paper has called part set designer and part historian. The brunch was held in a circa-1800 plantation house Epting had transported from South Carolina and then furnished with antiques. The food that morning—which included grits, fried chicken, and biscuits and gravy—was fabulous. But as Epting likes to say, a good party is full of stories. As the token Yankee—the modern definition of which I learned that day means “not a Southerner”—I got an extra serving of stories. Epting walked me through the house explaining the provenance of this or that artifact and identifying the faces in the family photos he had on the walls. But my host saved the best for last. Just before I was about to leave for another meeting on campus, Epting took me outside to show me an old fashioned three-hole outhouse. He said he had gotten a call a few years ago from a man who wanted to sell him a house he swore William Tecumseh Sherman had slept in during his infamous march to the sea. While the house turned out to be built after the Civil War, Epting says he then stumbled across a nearby outhouse, which, he claims, was actually built in 1842. He snapped it up and quickly brought it back to Athens. Now he has the pleasure of telling his most gullible out-of-town guests that this is where General Sherman shat.
Tragic Prelude by John Steuart Curry, Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas.
February 2020
I was already a little fidgety before I turned off U.S. Highway 169 to head west toward the tiny town of Lane, Kansas. I had just heard the radio announcement of a tornado warning in Franklin and neighboring Osage, Douglas, and Miami counties, and this native Southern Californian was feeling that adolescent surge of emotion that can be described only as a mixture of terror and “Oh, Man, this is so cool.”
Lane, population 225, was dead quiet on this Tuesday morning in early March. There was still snow on the ground from a storm the week before, and I didn’t see a soul as I parked and got out to read the historical marker that bears witness to one of the most consequential acts of political violence in American history.
I had come to Lane to walk the ground along Pottawatomie Creek where, on the night of May 24, 1856, abolitionist John Brown had four of his sons drag five proslavery men from their cabins at gunpoint and then hack them to pieces with broadswords.
Not surprisingly, the marker, put up by the Franklin County Historical Society, doesn’t do justice to either that night’s violence or its meaning. “This massacre in ‘Bleeding Kansas,’” it reads, “was one of the most famous events running up to the Civil War.” I didn’t get the feeling that the town received—or even wanted—many visitors.
As the sign suggests, the incident along the Pottawatomie wasn’t the only act of violence committed in the region in the years leading up to the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 mandated that white residents of the new territories would decide whether slavery would be legal within an emerging state’s borders. Inevitably, this sparked a struggle between proslavery and antislavery settlers, both of whom flooded into the territory hoping to shape not just the state, but America’s future. Between 1854 and 1861, political violence was endemic to the area, eventually descending into guerrilla warfare. Thus the bleeding.
More than his ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, it was these murders—as the historical marker calls them—that led critics to cast John Brown as insane, a characterization that was particularly popular in high school textbooks between 1890 and 1970.
Brown moved to Kansas in the fall of 1855, just as the proslavery and free-state activists began to view the political stakes as all or nothing. If Kansas entered the Union a slave state, abolitionists feared, all other new territories in the West would likely follow suit. Southerners, of course, feared the opposite.
The log cabin Brown lived in during his twenty months in Kansas is now a museum and memorial park ten miles north in Osawatomie, a town founded in 1854 by abolitionist members of the New England Emigrant Aid Society. There, the museum’s curator, Grady Atwater, walked me through the exhibit and took great pains to paint a sympathetic portrait of Brown. He argued that the incident at Pottawatomie Creek was more an act of self-defense—of both family and community—than it was an offensive raid. Furthermore, Atwater said, “It wasn’t just the events of that night that made people call Brown crazy,” he said. “It was also because he believed blacks were the equal of whites. So then he had to be insane.”
An old yellow tourism poster on the museum window calls Osawatomie, not without some reason, the place “where the Civil War started.” Outside on the grounds, a striking, life-size bronze statue of Brown, a rifle slung over his right shoulder, stands guard.
What distinguished Brown from his fellow abolitionists was his belief that violence was necessary to rid the nation of the sin of slavery. If slavery was a state of cons- tant war against blacks, he figured, it should be met in kind. Brown had no patience for the pacifism of his fellow abolitionists, who thought they could change the world through eloquent speeches. While he had believed in the need to mount a war against slavery before he arrived in Kansas, he had not yet acted. Historian and Brown biographer David S. Reynolds calls the Pottawatomie Massacre “an impetuous expression of long-delayed retaliation for years of Southern violence against Abolitionists and against blacks.” It was there, he explains, that John Brown “gave the South some of its own medicine.”1
It’s no secret that the antebellum South was a particularly violent place. That, in part, explains why proslavery partisans committed significantly more acts of violence than did free-staters. Between 1855 and 1858, for example, thirty-six people were murdered in Kansas in the struggle over slavery; twenty-eight of those were free-state settlers. Of the eight proslavery people murdered, five were killed that May night along Pottawatomie Creek.
***
I wanted to drive up to Topeka in time to take in the Kansas Museum of History before it closed. The tornado warnings had expired, and the sky was blue. On the drive, I tried to recall all that I thought I knew about John Brown. He led a racially mixed group of men in an attack on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in the hopes that it would inspire a mass slave revolt. The failed attempt is widely considered one of the primary precipitators of the Civil War. His hanging in Charles Town, West Virginia, transformed him into a martyr for the abolitionist cause, a posthumous reputation for which he longed.
My favorite item in the history museum wound up be- ing this fabulous diorama of a buffalo on the prairie, a calm brown beast in a vast field of tall, dry grass and yellow wildflowers. But around the corner was the display I came to see. It was low-tech and interactive, placed at a height presumably to engage schoolchildren with the question it posed in silly game-show democracy style. “John Brown: Hero or Terrorist? You Decide.” I was relieved to see that the black sliding pegs were all hovering closer to the hero side.
It says a lot about America that, in a country in which no fewer than twelve presidents actually owned human men, women, and children, it’s the likes of a John Brown who is labeled “controversial.” George Washington, for example, came into possession of his first ten human beings when he was only eleven years old, and while the museum at his home in Mount Vernon goes to great lengths to educate the public on the people the nation’s first president kept in forced servitude, it does not ask visitors to decide whether he was a hero or not.
Given that John Brown gained his national infamy here, Kansas has had a particularly difficult time wrestling with his memory. In 1937 native son and nationally known artist John Steuart Curry was asked to paint murals on the walls of the state capitol in Topeka. What he painted was an enormous wild image of John Brown called “Tragic Prelude.” Brown’s eyes are ablaze. There is blood on his hands. He has a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other. A tornado is creeping up behind him.
The local reaction to the mural was fierce. The Kansas Council of Women issued a statement insisting that the “murals do not portray the true Kansas. Rather than revealing a law-abiding progressive state, the artist has emphasized the freaks in its history—the tornadoes, and John Brown, who did not follow legal procedure.”2 Hurt by the rejection from his home state, Curry never finished the series of murals and left Kansas.
***
The victims at Pottawatomie Creek were not chosen indiscriminately, but their murders were intended to instill terror. And they did, far beyond what anyone could have imagined. Shrieking newspaper headlines spread news of the incident throughout the country. Southerners misinterpreted the incident to cast all abolitionists as lawless assassins intent on killing any law-abiding citizen who fought to preserve slavery. Before Pottawatomie, abolitionists were dismissed as cowards who’d avoid violent conflict at all costs. After it, the specter of a wild- eyed John Brown inspired fear among the defenders of slavery. The ensuing manhunt of Brown on charges of murder also set the stage for his becoming a hero in the North.
Without using some sort of counterfactual theory to argue that slavery would have eventually collapsed after so many years, it’s hard to say that history didn’t vindicate John Brown. Bloodshed was, indeed, necessary to end slavery in America. Brown’s legend lived on in popular verse and song to inspire Union soldiers as they fought the Confederacy. His personal battle to end slavery, for which he ultimately gave his life, should be remembered today not in terms of a binary choice—Brown was both a terrorist and a hero—but as an example of moral complexity, the need to understand the difference between legality and morality, and as the story of a great American who started the war that ended a system that made human beings the property of others.
***
1. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 159.
2. M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 131.
I’m tempted to say that as a little boy I found God in the swirly patterns on my bedroom ceiling. Some of my earliest memories are of me, a lifelong asthmatic, huffing and puffing on my twin bed looking upwards trying to make heads or tails of the stucco moonscape that was my window into another world for more days than I care to remember. A psychologist I went to in college once summed up the origins of my, well, let’s say complicated character, in one simple yet brutal sentence. “You spent too much time alone as a child,” she said just before my session was up. That was a fun walk back to class.
Gazing at the uneven texture of the stucco above me helped me escape from the prison to which my little lungs had me condemned. Was that a tree? No maybe it was a hand. And the more I stared at this or that blob, the more it didn’t matter what it was or represented. It was like looking at a desert landscape at dusk, when all the dangerous, jagged edges of daytime melt together into a mysterious, fluid, and ultimately comforting silhouette on the horizon.
So it wasn’t God that I found in my second floor bedroom as much as it was an escape hatch to a place where I could conjure up the meanings of patterns and shapes or just lie back and appreciate the wonderful blobbiness of it all.
I wasn’t raised in a religion. There was no talk of Jesus or the saints or angels when I was a boy. I came to my desire for transcendence on my own and clearly out of a need to escape my circumstances. Looking back, I figure that I had two choices when suffering a bad asthma attack. I could fantasize about having my dad rush me again to the emergency room at the hospital I was born at in Hollywood or I could fixate on the mysterious world just a few feet above my head.
As I grew older, I came to desire a more sophisticated understanding of my relationship with whatever it is that exists above this plane on which we live our natural lives. I read the tracts of medieval saints and books by contemporary theologians, but I never truly replaced my initial childhood instinct that that which is sacred is simply whatever it is that takes us above the constraints, the smallness, and the pain of our lives and let’s us take deeper, healthier, more robust breaths of air—both literally and figuratively–than our current conditions allow.
Sure, over time I came to understand the blob I looked to at 6 years old to be the source of life, the essence from which we came and would perhaps return. But I could never imagine that source to be some sort of image of perfection, let alone a perfect being. Consequently, I don’t have a particularly comforting image of a God or Gods. I don’t believe in an all-knowing supreme being who understands all my pains and doubts. If God is the source of all life, I certainly can’t believe that He is still planning all this craziness. At the very best, I can imagine that She is the source of life in the way that a hiker in the wilderness is the source of a campfire that got way out of her control. I guess you could say that in my mind, God is a bit of a hapless figure.
I realized this last year after stumbling onto The Wounded Angel, which is, as it turns out, the most beloved painting in Finland. I had taken refuge in Helsinki’s Ateneum, Finland’s National Gallery, on a gloomy 14°F degree January day and never expected to be so moved by its prized possession. The 1903 masterpiece by symbolist Hugo Simberg is disturbing, melancholy at best. Two sullen boys are carrying an injured angel on a stretcher, her forehead is bandaged and her wing bloodied. Her head is down as if dejected and she seems to be using all her strength to keep herself upright on the journey. Poor angel.
I walked away from the painting that day thinking about other pitiful depictions of supernatural beings. I recalled César Vallejo’s glorious 1918 poem, “Dios”, in which he speaks to, and of, the Almighty with such tenderness.
But I feel God. And it even seems that he sets aside some good color for me. He is kind and sad, like those that care for the sick; he whispers with sweet contempt like a lover’s: his heart must give him great pain.
The poem (translation here by Robert Bly) ends with a beautiful tribute to a deity Vallejo sees as something of an awkward, somewhat impotent, figure.
I consecrate you, God, because you love so much; because you never smile; because your heart must all the time give you great pain.
So, it seems, our image of God doesn’t have to be perfect or all knowing or all-powerful for us to be drawn to Him and new ways of understanding our lives and the world we live in.
Last night, I walked my friend Frank home through L.A.’s Koreatown while he tried to explain to me the theological rationale for why Jesus, the Son of God, expressed such sorrow before he died. There are few passages of the Gospels more moving than “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Frank explained that these words were a sign of Jesus’ humanity, and that Jesus had to suffer as a man—”had to let sin overcome him”–in order to save us from our own sin. I told him I couldn’t follow the logic, and he laughed.
Because to me, it’s enough that this God-Man figure is depicted as suffering like a human, that these images resonate with our own experiences on earth, and, ideally, help us learn to take pity on others, to empathize, to realize that it’s the pain, the imperfection, the desire to transcend it all, that makes us all human in the first place.
I’ve long been moved by the brief passage in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 masterpiece “Brideshead Revisited” in which poor Sebastian, who is sliding into alcoholism, seeks common cause with his friend Charles against his family and the world that would seek to control him.
Sebastian: “Shall we get really drunk tonight?” Charles: “It’s the one time it could do no conceivable harm.” Sebastian: “Contra mundum?” Charles: “Contra mundum.”
In this bittersweet context, the phrase—“against the world” in Latin–is as much a call to friendship and brotherhood as it is a declaration of resistance to social forces, however well intentioned, that would have us submit to them.
It’s in that dual spirit that I launch this website on which I will share my thinking on a variety of things that spin inside my head. Inevitably, some of the items will be inspired by the thoughts I had the good sense never to share in a commercial publication. Ideally, however, most posts will be driven by my desire to figure things out, a practice I still find makes the ways of the world seem a little less arbitrary and ridiculous. Plus it’s fun.
