Confederate Tributes Are Losing Their Patron Saint

Confederate Tributes Are Losing Their Patron Saint

By Brent Staples, The New York Times

With an appreciative preface by Andy McLeod

Each week, I have the substantial privilege of spending several hours at Arlington House, the fascinating historic site that anchors @ArlingtonNationalCemetery.? As a volunteer, I greet tourists, answer routine questions, and help explain the complicated, layered importance of the Greek Revival mansion poised dramatically across the Potomac River from and above #washingtondc.

Arlington House was once the residence of Robert E. Lee, the Army colonel who became a “general” only when he betrayed the US and joined the traitorous forces of a would-be slave nation, the #Confederacy. Arlington House was also the home of as many as 200 slaves whose enforced labor made possible the comfortable lives of Lee and his wealthy family.

In assisting, in a very small way, the vital educational and memorial missions of @ArlingtonHouse, one is keenly aware of the long, tragic “valorization” of the Lee and of the hollow “myth of the noble Confederate,” as Brent Staples, of the New York Times editorial board, describes in this April column.

The re-redesignation (re-naming) of Arlington House -- dropping its formal association with the disgraced Lee -- ?is sought by members of the #Virginia Congressional delegation and is, in turn, opposed by contemporary apologists for human bondage and #treason.

Similarly, the surrounding 600-acre National Cemetery is undergoing difficult, salutary change.?A sardonic (at best) memorial to Confederate dead stands today, paying tribute furtively (in Latin) to “the victorious cause,” “the lost cause,” and “our dead heroes.” ?It is scheduled for removal, despite the efforts of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

“I think it’s the cruelest monument in the country,” said Ty Seidule, a retired Brigadier General who served on the Congressionally created Renaming Commission that mandated that 1,100 bases and other DoD assets honoring the Confederacy receive new renames. “The (Confederate) statue represents all the terrible lies of the Lost Cause,” he believes.

Similarly, the surrounding 600-acre National Cetmerey is experiencing difficult, salutary change. A sardonic (at best) memorial to dead Confederate soldiers stands today, paying tribute furtively (in Latin) to "the virtuous cause," "the lost cause," and "our dead heroes." It is now scheduled for removal, despite the efforts of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

“I think it’s the cruelest monument in the country,” said @TySeidule, a retired Brigadier General who served on the Congressionally created Renaming Commission that mandated that 1,100 bases and other DoD assets honoring the Confederacy receive new renames. “The (Confederate) statue represents all the terrible lies of the Lost Cause,” he believes.

Staples summarizes the current progress:?“The decision to expunge Confederate tributes from military assets reflects a welcome, if belated, declaration that the men who nearly destroyed the country in defense of the right to own human beings are unworthy of federal veneration. That it took so long to reach this realization reflects the extent to which the lie of the Lost Cause still holds sway in the United States.”

Staples summarizes the current progress:?“The decision to expunge Confederate tributes from military assets reflects a welcome, if belated, declaration that the men who nearly destroyed the country in defense of the right to own human beings are unworthy of federal veneration. That it took so long to reach this realization reflects the extent to which the lie of the Lost Cause still holds sway in the United States.”

Confederate Tributes Are Losing Their Patron Saint

By?Brent Staples

The New York Times

April 27, 2023

Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.

It stands to reason that Woodrow Wilson would be the president to bring us Army bases named for traitors who waged war on this country with the goal of preserving #slavery. He took office in 1913 with a team of white supremacists who announced themselves by requiring?separate white and colored bathrooms?in federal buildings. The Wilsonian inflicted a neo-Confederate regime on the capital that was felt in far corners of the nation.

The North Carolina newspaperman?Josephus Daniels?had the bloodiest résumé in the Wilson cabinet. A decade and a half before going to #washingtondc, he was a?principal instigator?of a murderous coup in Wilmington with the goal of removing Black people from positions of authority in city government.

His Raleigh newspaper,?The News & Observer, stoked white rage by equating Black political power with the rape of white women and trafficking in cartoons like one that depicted a giant black bat with “Negro rule” inscribed on its wings, a foot on a?ballot box and white women?trapped in its?claws. On Nov. 10, 1898, throngs of white men burned and murdered at will, driving Black officials and their allies from Wilmington. The state legislature then?disenfranchised?African Americans.

The coup was rooted in an influential civic religion known as?the Lost Cause. The Lost Causers venerated racial terrorism as a means of suppressing Black political influence. They romanticized slavery, portraying African Americans who lived in chains as happy and well cared for. They recast the pro-slavery war as a just struggle for “states’ rights” while elevating the dead Confederate general Robert E. Lee to the stature of a patron saint.

The Wilsonian were plying these waters when they gave Lee’s name to Fort Lee in Virginia. The myth of the noble Confederate that was used to justify the naming honor was bankrupt from the start. Some rebel honorees were known at the time to be profoundly incompetent as soldiers and leaders. At least one honoree was a state Ku Klux Klan leader. Yet another,?the execrable George Pickett, was a war criminal.

Lee is widely regarded as a brilliant tactician. But he also did nothing to stop his soldiers from systematically kidnapping free Black citizens into slavery. During the Gettysburg campaign, African Americans who found themselves in his army’s path fled in large numbers to avoid being dragged south and sold at auction. The #CivilWar diarist Rachel Cormany reported that some were hunted down by soldiers on horseback and herded into custody “just like we would drive cattle.” In the eyes of these soldiers, every Black person was a runaway slave.

Denial and Jim Crow

As recently as a decade ago, U.S. military officials stood by the anemic fiction that Confederate base names had nothing to do with race hatred. But that position rang hollow each time Confederate ideology figured in episodes of racist violence. The connection was crystal clear in 2015, when a gunman sought to instigate a?race war?by killing nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.

Congress finally parted company with the myth of the noble Confederate in 2021. It overrode a presidential veto to order the Defense Department to rid its assets of “names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia” that commemorate the Confederate States of America. The?legislation?established a commission that brought forward?new names for nine Army installations in the South.

The main event of the?renaming?project unfolds on Thursday in Virginia, when Fort Lee is rechristened Fort Gregg-Adams. This change derives its emotional power from the fact that the saint of the lavishly racist Lost Cause is being replaced by two African Americans who served in the Army during the Jim Crow era.

Lt. Col. Charity Adams?served with distinction during World War II as commander of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in Europe. Her quietly dignified memoir, “One Woman’s Army,” offers a close view of the racism men and women in uniform faced both inside and outside the military.

While visiting her family in Columbia, S.C., she encountered hooded Ku Klux Klansmen who had turned out in force in an attempt to intimidate her father, who was the president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. On another occasion, she was traveling in a first-class train car when an enraged white passenger demanded that a military police officer check her credentials. “That woman over there is wearing an officer’s uniform,” the passenger said, according to her memoir, “and I am sure she is an impostor. Why, she’s a ‘Negra.’” While stationed in Europe as a major, she was threatened with court-martial for standing her ground against a racist general who had insulted her. She nonetheless thrived, leaving the service in 1946 as the second highest-ranking officer in the Women’s Army Corps (formerly the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps).

Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg commanded logistics units around the world and was among the African Americans who applied for training in 1948, the year President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which was supposed to?end segregation in the armed forces. When he arrived as a second lieutenant two years later at Fort Lee, Mr. Gregg found himself barred from the whites-only officers’ club, also named for the general. The camp commander?was attempting to build a separate?club for colored officers only, in open defiance of Truman’s order, as the Black press reported soon afterward.

In the summer of 1951 — a full three years after the order — the African American investigative journalist James L. Hicks reported that Fort Lee was running under #JimCrow rules, even requiring separate-colored hours at its swimming pools. Mr. Hicks wrote pointedly that the base “named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee is actually being operated by Major R.C.L. Graham as though it is still one of the Confederate states and as if General Lee himself were its commanding officer.”

General Gregg is now 94 years old, and last week he returned triumphant to Fort Lee for a ceremony that changed the name of that officers’ club?to the Gregg-Adams Club.

Invading West Point

Confederate displays in public places were sometimes erected for the purpose?of threatening African American communities or expressing white opposition to the civil rights movement. A similar system played out during the mid-20th century at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the nation’s most prestigious service academy.

Ty Seidule, a retired brigadier general and visiting professor of history at Hamilton College, explores this?period in his memoir, “Robert E. Lee and Me.” He explains that West Point rejected “all things Confederate” — and declined to honor former students like Lee — during the 19th century but it changed course after 1929, when African American cadets returned to campus after a nearly half-century absence. “As I would discover time and again,” he writes, “integration and efforts at achieving equal rights brought Confederate memorialization. West Point allowed the return of Robert E. Lee when African American cadets arrived at West Point in the 20th century.”

Mr. Seidule reports that the Army refused a proposal by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to give the academy a portrait of Lee wearing the gray uniform of the Confederacy but allowed a portrait of him from his time in Union blue, before he joined the leadership of the rebellion. “Now that Lee was back, his likeness would multiply over the next 70 years.” In the meantime, the academy would become known as “a perfect hell for Negroes” who dared enter.

The valorization of Lee continued in?1950, when the secretary of the Army, Gordon Gray, ordered West Point to add a portrait of Lee wearing Confederate gray at the “height of his fame.” Mr. Seidule argues that this more frankly Confederate Lee portrait reflected the secretary’s resistance to Truman’s desegregation order. “Gray couldn’t stop integration,” Mr. Seidule writes, “but he could highlight Lee.”

The decision to expunge Confederate tributes from military assets reflects a welcome, if belated, declaration that the men who nearly destroyed the country in defense of the right to own human beings are unworthy of federal veneration. That it took so long to reach this realization reflects the extent to which the lie of the Lost Cause still holds sway in the United States.

END OF BRENT STAPLES COLUMN