NOT OVER THIS WAR YET?

A review of Tony Horwitz’s Confederate’s in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)

(Rating 5 of 5)

I should begin with a simple disclaimer.  I have absolutely no sympathy or respect for “the Lost Cause of the South.”  I do not see the entire event as “complicated.” It is actually very simple.  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.  He was first president who would not pay lip service to the institution of slavery as all of his fifteen predecessors had done, regardless of whatever their personal feelings on the matter.  He even dared to suggest that slavery in the territories of the United States should no longer be permitted and all new states admitted needed to be Free states.  This was so offensive to the leaders of the South that they went forth and committed treason by breaking up the nation and attempting to form their own where slavery could be practiced without challenge.  If you do not believe that go and read all the secession documents of the Southern legislatures, the Confederate Constitution, and speeches by Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens. 

            Nevertheless, the book is fascinating as Horwitz explores the South in the 1990s amongst those who care about the Civil War.  He comes across a diverse group of people from armature to hardcore reenactors, modern-day secessionists, and a famous historian in the now late Shelby Foote.

Confederate Reenactors

            Despite my disdain for the Lost Cause, I came to like many of the Southern characters that I came to know reading the book.  People like Rob Hodge one of the hardcore reenactors who distinguish themselves from those lesser reenactors they call “farbs.”  I do not have anything against the average Confederate soldier who took up arms for what he saw was an invader.  These reenactors also seem quite harmless.  They just excessive history buffs who want to know more about their ancestors and how they use to live, fight, and die.  I even felt very close to one of them, Mike Hawkins, who seemed the real world just disappointed him and he felt down about his life.  Hawkins finds his escapism following his own ancestor’s trials in the Civil War.  I can imprecated that.  As someone who has often felt let down by life, I often find an escape into the past but I do not take it to the same extremes that he does. 

            I also find some of the old Southern generals interesting, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  I think if I was from the South, I might view those men the same way a German might view Erwin Rommel, I would appreciate genius while still despising the cause that they served.  One of the scenes that I thought was interesting was the comparison to Jackson’s early death to that of famous musicians.

            “The analogy wasn’t airtight.  Morrison and Hendrix were sex-crazed hippies who OD’d on drugs; Stonewall was a Bible-thumping teetotaler who sucked on lemons and sipped warm water because he thought the human body should avoid extremes.  But Rob was onto something.  If Jackson had survived and failed to change the course of the War, his luster might have dulled by the South’s eventual defeat.  ‘Better to burn out than to fade away,’ Rob wailed, echoing Neil Young.” (p.229)

           
            One of things I appreciated about this book is that it does not shy away from controversy.  It could have just as easily focused on small groups of hardcore reenactors but instead Horwitz chose to take on some of the more difficult questions, such as “Is there any real way to remember the Confederacy when the driving cause behind it was slavery?”  Should schools be named after men such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, who in my mind was nothing but a war criminal and hatemonger who founded the Ku Klux Klan.

            In the end I must say that this a great book that I would highly recommend to people who are interested in people who are interested in the U.S. Civil War.

{Video was created by DontcallmeMikey72 on YouTube}

THE AGE OF NIXON

A review of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)

(Rating 4 of 5)

There is the Great Man Theory of history and there is Social (bottom up) Theory history.  Rick Perlstein gives us both with Nixonland .  He tells the story of how America seemed in the middle of a ‘liberal consensus’ with the Johnson landslide in 1964, and how the tide changed into a reverse landslide in 1972.   Nixon's reelection and even set the stage for greater conservative triumphs in the 1980s.  In Nixonland the reader views a transformation of the United States from the top to the bottom. 

In 1964, Johnson had crushed Goldwater in the election.  Since the rise of the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt, the liberals had reigned.  Even the one Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a moderate and, in some ways, an open liberal. But that liberal empire was about to fall, first the Vietnam War would tear the liberal alliance apart, then the extremism of various factions combined with a social white backlash against the progress of minorities at perceived expensive of themselves.

There is a lot enjoyed about this book, Perlstein doesn’t write in a ‘professional’ manner; he writes more like he is just talking to you.  (Which, I find refreshing.) With that said it is not always an easy read, for he often speaks using cultural allusions that if you don’t catch you might be a little lost. I really like how Perlstein refers to the movies of the time period and how each influenced a particular side in the culture war.  Good examples were Bonnie and Clyde influencing the young radicals and Patton influencing conservatives like Nixon.  (Although, I thought Perlstein’s statement about Planet of the Apes was a bit off.)  

      

“The lies went back to Harry Truman, the article explained.  Military aid to France had ‘directly involved’ the United States in preserving a European colony; the Eisenhower administration played ‘a direct role in the ultimate breakdown in the Geneva settlement’ and the cancellation of free elections scheduled for 1956. (President Nixon always said honoring Geneva was the reason we had to continue the war.) Kennedy—this in the Pentagon’s study’s words—transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ he had inherited into a ‘broad commitment.’  Lyndon Johnson laid plans for full-fledged war as early as the spring of 1964—campaigning against Barry Goldwater with the line ‘We seek no wider war.’

            What became known as the Pentagon Papers—three thousand pages of historical narrative and four thousand pages of government documents—was shocking to all but the most hardened antiwar cynics.  The expansion into genuine warfare began, the Times summarized, ‘despite the judgment of the government’s intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Viet Cong insurgency in the South…The bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months.’ To catalog the number of times Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon looked the American people squarely in the eye and said the exact opposite would require another book.” (p.574)

This book was published in 2008 as President Obama was going to have his triumph victory—a confirmation of the legacy of both the 1960s and 1860s.  In the last forty years right had reorganized, unified, and then complexly collapsed by the end of the first fifteen years of the 21^st century.  In some ways the new right of this current decade reminds me of the left of 70s.  Not similar in ideology of course, but in their approach to politics. 

“The New Politics reformers had fantasized a pure politics, a politics of unyielding principle—andantipolitics.  But in the real world politics without equivocation or compromise is impossible.  Thus an unintended consequence for the would-be antipolitician.  Announcing one’s inflexibility sabotages him in advance.  Every time he makes a political decision, he looks like a sellout.  The reformers fantasized an open politics, in which all points of view had time to be heard.  That meant that Tuesday session adjourned eleven hours after it began, at 6:15 a.m.—a fortunate thing, coolheaded Democratic strategists decided, terrified over what this all looked like on TV.” (p.695-6)

In the end I would highly recommend this book, it describes precisely how the country was knocked off track.  It doesn’t offer any solutions but it doesn’t have to, for it is descriptive not prescriptive.  Nixonland represents an embrace of extremes and a failure to listen.  

(Video was posted by on YouTube by Simon and Schuster)