Old Glory Revisited

[Brandenburger Toro]

On the old board, I attracted rather a lot of perfectly understandable disagreement for my confessing a sneaking contrarian fondness for the Confederate flag, despite its connotations of slavery.

As Jim Webb's name has been touted as potential Obama VP material in recent days, not least by my boy Alex Massie, I've run into
this a few times. It sums up, just perfectly, some of the heterodox thoughts I have regarding the US Civil War, as well as chiming with some of Taylor's (has he made the switch? It's a damn shame if not) recent thoughts on the role and place of soldiers.

Thinking aloud here, argue it in any direction you see fit.

[Incandenza]

Old Glory Revisited

Old Glory is the US flag. I think you mean Stars & Bars (though that's technically not what you usually see for the Confederate Flag, which was the Battle flag of the Confederacy and not the national Confederate flag).

[Wyatt Earp]

Old Glory Revisited

Hmm.

I've never been with Gus Tomato on this question of squaddies and whether or not they're cunts. I live in a country that owes its continued existence to the success with which it fought a war. Kipling's disapproving line about "making mock of uniforms that guard you when you sleep" makes sense to me, as it did to Orwell.

And yet where does that leave us, as makers of ethical judgements? If we're not pacifists, and don't dislike soldiers en masse? It surely leaves us judging the ends of wars: how just they are in themselves, and how proportionate are the means.

It's on that basis, and not because Johnny Reb was an arsehole,* that I reject the Stars and Bars. And it's on that basis that I distance myself from some of the other things the British armed forces have done over the years, including of course over in your part of the world.

(* OK, first 70's Dutch football joke? My money's on Spearmint Rhino.)

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

inca - really? I was never certain, but I assumed the reference to still flying it "down by the courthouse" in Okie From Muskogee meant Stars'n'bars...

Wyatt - those are excellent points. Like I say, my regard is both contrarian and conflicted - on the whole I'm against, but I am large and contain multitudes.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Here's the boy Massie himself on Webb as Veep.

I like the symbolism a great deal, but think it comes down to how you get Hilaryites back on board if she makes it really vicious. And from that point of view, I like Kathleen Sebelius a lot.

[ursus arctos]

Old Glory Revisited

Toro, Inca's (very unsurprisingly right).

Muskogee is in Oklahoma, which wasn't part of the Confederacy. It wasn't even a state at the time, but rather the "Indian Territory".

The song's reference to the them flying the (US) flag is to contrast that kind of old time patriotism with the "draft card burning" "LSD tripping" "Marijuana smoking" "long haired hippies" in the other verses.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Well yeah, I got that, it's just I thought he was making a stronger statement of contrast than he was. Like, did anyone actually object to flying the Union flag outside public buildings? The song kinda implies they would/did.

'course, Oklahoma not being confederate should have been the key, had I known my history. Or is it geography?

[ursus arctos]

Old Glory Revisited

It's both, but we wouldn't expect an poorly-educated foreign kid like you to know either.

And yes, when I was a rather young long haired hippie, I used to get really upset about the flag, because it had been co-opted by the Nixonian right into a symbol of unquestioning support for the War. It was anything but neutral.

[Incandenza]

Old Glory Revisited

I haven't read the full Webb speech, only skimmed it. But this jumped out at me: "the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction". I guess you could say that he's talking about the Confederate army in the Reconstruction, but still, I think that's revealing. How many African Americans do you think would consider Reconstruction to have been a humiliation?

[ursus arctos]

Old Glory Revisited

That was exactly the point at which he lost me completely.

[Incandenza]

Old Glory Revisited

But I think the point is moot anyway. Even if Obama wanted Webb, I think the party would try their hardest to put the kibosh on that--there's no way they'd want to give up his Senate seat. A possible Obama VP (if not Hillary) would probably be a governor, or some retired military figure (Clark?), I imagine.

[Gangster Octopus]

Old Glory Revisited

ursus arctos wrote:

It wasn't even a state at the time, but rather the "Indian Territory".

Surely "Injun"...

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Well, two things on that, Inca. One, you have to bear in mind the audience. He was talking to white southerners, about the experience of white southerners. Secondly, I don't think it's at all an exaggeration to talk of administration by - effectively - an occupying force as a "bitter humiliation". It's just for that reason that the US bases in Saudi are so inflammatory, and that the Iraq plan is such a mind-bogglingly bad idea. Now, that raises the question of whether you can abstract the justice of the occupation out of the picture. I'm not sure you can. But to my mind, at least, he makes a good case for showing why many in the South would have been justified in perceiving it as unjust.

[Incandenza]

Old Glory Revisited

There was very little Union military presence in the South after the war. Here's what Eric Foner has said:

The idea that the South was under military rule and military occupation is really a myth. The Union army was demobilized very, very fast at the end of the Civil War. Some people thought, too fast, because there was so much chaos and violence in the South. By 1866, there are 10,000, 12,000, maybe 15,000 soldiers left in the South. But most of them are in Texas, fighting the Indians. You could go for months and months in the South without ever seeing a federal soldier. There were small encampments of federal soldiers around. And if there were outbreaks of violence, they would sometimes be brought in to try to suppress it. Sometimes the Freedmen's Bureau would call in a few soldiers to arrest a planter who refused to pay his workers or something like that. But no. Law and order was in the hands of governments, not of the army. And military rule was very, very brief. And the occupation was quite short-lived, really, in any practical sense.

Now, if by occupation you don't mean a military force, but a federal effort to see that laws the local political forces see as unjust, then I guess it was an occupation, but forgive me if I don't see the federal government trying to ensure that blacks had their civil rights honored and were treated fairly in civil society as a bad thing.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Well, wasn't the perception that much of the administration was done by a load of profiteering gougers? Hence the continuing potency of the terms "yankee" and "carpetbagger". The government's stated justification and the actual justification supposed by the "bitterly humiliated" may well have been at variance.

Again, comparisons with modern-day Iraq don't seem totally inapposite.

[Wyatt Earp]

Old Glory Revisited

Toro, can you clarify something. Are you disputing the contention that Reconstruction would have been experienced as a "bitter humiliation" only by Southern whites? And are you disputing that much of that "humiliation", as is a matter of record, concerned the fact that blacks had a role in government? And that it was this, rather than the "immigration" of Northern whites, that was reversed by the Redeemers as soon as they got the chance?

Webb also rides roughshod over the scalawags, who, for sure, formed a minority of whites, but whose very existence makes Webb's tacit implication that the White South all experienced the War's aftermath in the same way a gross simplification.

[ursus arctos]

Old Glory Revisited

Toro, would you feel the same away about a German Webb speaking at a WWII memorial about the "bitter humiliation" of post-Versailles reparations?

One can't look at the term without a sense of its historical context, and that concept of "humiliation" was a cornerstone of the post-Reconstruction governments that established Jim Crow. Webb knows that, and his audience knows it even better than he does.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Are you disputing the contention that Reconstruction would have been experienced as a "bitter humiliation" only by Southern whites?

No.

And are you disputing that much of that "humiliation", as is a matter of record, concerned the fact that blacks had a role in government? And that it was this, rather than the "immigration" of Northern whites, that was reversed by the Redeemers as soon as they got the chance?

Again, no. As I say, Webb points out convincingly why the Southern secession, and the attitudes of Southerners to it and its aftermath cannot be attributed all and only to support for slavery. That it was "much", even overwhelmingly, to do with slavery can't be disputed. But that doesn't mean the more appealing aspects of it don't form any part - I'd guess a disproportionate part - of the southern white psyche.

Webb also rides roughshod over the scalawags, who, for sure, formed a minority of whites, but whose very existence makes Webb's tacit implication that the White South all experienced the War's aftermath in the same way a gross simplification.

I can't see any such implication, tacit or otherwise.

[Incandenza]

Old Glory Revisited

toro toro toro toro wrote:

Well, wasn't the perception that much of the administration was done by a load of profiteering gougers? Hence the continuing potency of the terms "yankee" and "carpetbagger".

That was the line pushed by Southern whites upset at no longer having an enslaved labor force, and one pushed by historians writing racist histories eulogizing the Old South lost to "Northern aggression" up through the 20th century, but one that is strongly challenged by mainstream historians today.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Hang on, Inca - I'm talking about the perception there. Whether or not the perception was true according to modern historians is not really relevant to the experience of humiliation.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Toro, would you feel the same away about a German Webb speaking at a WWII memorial about the "bitter humiliation" of post-Versailles reparations?

One can't look at the term without a sense of its historical context, and that concept of "humiliation" was a cornerstone of the post-Reconstruction governments that established Jim Crow. Webb knows that, and his audience knows it even better than he does.

Just seen this - it's a good question.

I think the "bitter humiliation" is an important causal factor in that historical story, too. I don't think Webb makes any attempt whatsoever to justify what followed; his entire opening gambit concerns the attempt to make sense of his attitudes to the monument, given the reprehensibility of its slavery/Jim Crow connotations.

He's trying to understand, not to justify. But he's not being afraid to understand, either himself or others, no matter what their attitudes. I'm reading it as, in a sense, a companion piece to Obama's Big Race Speech - that's part of what I think makes him tempting as a "post-racial" fit for the candidacy.

Maybe I'm being very naive here...

[Ginger Yellow]

Old Glory Revisited

And so I am here, with you today, to remember. And to honor an army that rose like a sudden wind out of the little towns and scattered farms of a yet unconquered wilderness. That drew 750,000 soldiers from a population base of only five million-less than the current population of Virginia alone. That fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. That saw 60 percent of its soldiers become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead. That gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership it trusted and respected, and then laid down its arms in an instant when that leadership decided that enough was enough. That returned to a devastated land and a military occupation. That endured the bitter humiliation of Reconstruction and an economic alienation from the rest of this nation which continued for fully a century, affecting white and black alike.

This seems more like hagiography to me than calibration to an audience. The passage that follows is better, but there's some dodgy stuff in here.

"and then laid down its arms in an instant when that leadership decided that enough was enough"

Apart from the thousands of people who waged a vicious campaign of terror against black people and white supporters of their rights for the next 100 years, of course.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

Well, hang on. That's a totally unfair criticism when his speech is explicitly about the role of the soldier in a formally organised military force.

[Ginger Yellow]

Old Glory Revisited

Yes, but it's like saying the IRA laid down its arms after 1921.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Old Glory Revisited

True.

So, the vast majority of them did, and nothing relating to the conduct of a regular army follows from the conduct of the fanatics that didn't, no?