Historian Receives Death Threat + Decline of Civil War Reenactments

     . . . . Historian and journalist, Minisha Sineha (her specialty is African American abolitionists and their writing) wrote this piece pointing out what our current administration and POTUS share with Andrew Johnson and his disastrous period in the White House:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/25/opinions/what-happened-the-last-time-a-president-chose-americas-enemies-over-its-friends-sinha/index.html?

She then delineates what is different between then and now:

  Quote Congressional Republicans in the 1860s, tempered in the fire of the Civil War, put their country before a traitorous President. They first passed the Tenure of Office Act of 1867 to protect Republican Cabinet members and office holders from Johnson. When Johnson violated the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, congressional Republicans drew up articles of impeachment against him. 
Congressional Republicans today, in contrast, have not lifted a finger to protect Justice Department officials and special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation from the threat of interference by Trump. In fact, they have aided and abetted the Trump administration's undermining of both.

The consequence for writing this piece is that Sinha received a death threat from an individual who knew her home address and other personal information -- cops were able to track him down in about 24 hours. Guess where the guy threatening to kill her lives . . . . 

https://twitter.com/profmsinha?lang=en

Always knew being an honest historian was a dangerous thing. 

Alas, today there are no Grants and Shermans to keep the wrecked ship of state from going under prior to the next election when Johnson was thrown out. 

This is also went up yesterday - today:

"Civil War Reenactors in Decline" in the NY Times -- PAYWALL: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/style/civil-war-reenactments.html?

Focus of the story is the annual Battle of Gettysburg reenactment. Great photos! 

  Quote “Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do,” he said. “We were paying tribute to the fighting man.” 

“It wasn’t ‘I’m racist and I want to glorify slavery,’” he said. “Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn’t stand anymore.” 

Brad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said: “Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 1861 and 1865 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward.” 
It’s a vision of history placed in narrow context. The military details are meticulously researched and recreated down to the stitching of a uniform, but the broader social and political realities of the Civil War — the profound struggle over slavery and emancipation, racism and equality, citizenship and disenfranchisement — are largely confined to the margins. 

Still, those issues can’t be ignored. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where demonstrators wore swastikas and carried Confederate flags, and where an anti-racist protester named Heather Heyer was killed, at least two smaller Civil War re-enactments were canceled. That the battle flag Confederate re-enactors carry is still used as a means of intimidation makes it hard to defend as a purely historical object, independent of its racist implications. 
“You build a comfort zone for the hobby to function,” Mr. Keefer said. Pointing to the Confederate camp, he said: “And give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t at Charlottesville.” . . .

This is what happens when ignoring history and / or insisting on lies as history, and constantly pushing them out there as historical truth -- and there is a lot of that withing reenactment.

  Quote Some Confederate re-enactors, including Kenny Glass, 46, an emergency medical technician from Selma, Ala., said that slavery had little to do with Southern secession, an assertion that is at odds with historical scholarship. 

“I’ve been called a racist, a bigot, everything you could think of in the world when people find out I do this,” Mr. Glass said. “I tell them they need to learn their history. It wasn’t fought over slavery. It was fought over Southern rights, that’s just the way I see it.” 
Part of the problem is that the historical beliefs have modern day implications. Scrutiny of Civil War re-enacting from outside — as well as introspection and concern about its future on the inside — reached a fever pitch after the violence last year in Charlottesville, Va. But it built along with protests in many cities that demanded the removal of Confederate statues and monuments from state grounds, spurred by the murder of nine black worshipers in South Charleston, S.C., by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. 

 Last year a pipe bomb was found at a reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Creek (the culminating action in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign): 

  QuoteA month later, a threat was made against participants in a parade that commemorates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

So, along with aging out, video games etc., white supremacy terrorism is having an effect on suppressing our Civil War's reenactment participation. 

So one can see why these two pieces of journalism seem to go together, right?  The forces of white supremacy commit  and / or try to commit violence, down to murder, of those they hate and disagree with, even  where innocent children are found.

Yet -- the anti-white supremacy, anti-bigotry, anti-immigration ban, anti-corporate money in elections, anti-voter repression, pro environmental and consumer regulations, pro gun regulation people -- are called uncivil because their words hurt the feelings of white supremacists, etc.

Consequences: From Ebony and Ivy to Today's Campus Life

Two articles that should be considered together when thinking about our institutions of higher "learning."

This, a report from the NY Times of the neck  Ol Miss'd  James Meredith statue desecrated with a lynch noose and CSA flag,  + other racial incidents common on that campus;

and this report-history on fraternities from the Atlantic Monthly.

This is just the first paragraph!

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Historical enlightenment, of how the past keeps crawling into the present, is to read these two articles in the context of Ebony and Ivy League, Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder.

Recall, Ol Miss was founded in 1848.  This is when Mississippi was the richest state in the Union, with the most millionaires, slaveholders all, who literally owned almost all the state and also owned the majority of its inhabitants. This is Jefferson Davis's world, which got the U.S. to go to war with Mexico to increase the wealth of the south generally and Mississippi's in general.  By this time Mississippi herself was no longer a slave consuming territory, but looking for territory to which she could sell her "overstock."

1848 was the chronological heart of the fire eater philosophy's successful conversion of southern thinking: slavery is God's will, the the most superior way of life, confirming that slaveowners were born to rule everyone else, no matter what their skin tone's heritage -- they were right, everyone else was wrong, and by god NO FRACKIN' TAXES! NO PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS! NO TAXES FOR FEDERAL GUMMIT OR LOCAL EITHER.  NOTHING WHATSOEVER FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD!  ANYONE WHO WANTS PUBLIC GOOD IS FIT ONLY TO BE A SLAVE!  By 1850, losing the battle to force California's addition to the Union as a slave state, the fire eaters organized and held the first Secession Convention, in Nashville.*

Therefore, they lost the war that the fire eaters themselves forced upon the U.S.. Other associated attitudes came with fire eater philosophy, that supported their cultural assumptions, presumptions and behavior, further contributed to their inevitable defeat:

-  somebody else do it, I don't do -- that's for slaves;  I talk and give orders that must be obeyed on pain of whipping, slave and even death, if I so choose;

-  non-cooperation; refusal to take orders but only give them;

-  blowharding, blowharding, blowharding NO CONTRADICTION instead of dealing with facts and real information;

- devotion to a slave economy, that then perforce was an economy of credit only -- credit 100% dependent upon possession of the slaves in which credit was literally embodied -- and no hard, dependable currency or specie.

History does repeat itself, sadly.

---------------------------

* This is not strictly true.  The New England Federalists held a secession convention in Hartford in 1814, in opposition to the War of 1812.  However, the official minutes of the meeting left out the secession discussion, when the minutes were published.

The Fargo Forum's History of the KKK in North Dakota

This is news, at least to me.  I'd no idea, until today's Fargo Forum put up a history of Ku Klux Klan. Evidently the Forum went into their archives about  KKK activity in the Red River Family because of this:

Three mischievous fans of the Roughriders’ hockey team flouted a taboo when they recently wore hooded Ku Klux Klan robes to taunt the opposing squad. But the Red River High School hockey spectators might not have known just how prevalent the Ku Klux Klan once was in the Red River Valley – nor that Grand Forks, home of Red River High, was a hotbed for the group, which railed against Catholics, blacks, Jews, Asians and foreigners.

Some Fargo residents are outraged that there are members of the Fargo community  who were outraged by the fans demonstrating support for their sports team by donning KKK robes and masks.  It's all in good fun, right? dressing up in the robes of those who lynched and in many others ways shoved a reign of terror upon unnumbered communities throughout the U.S. in the teens and twenties and into the thirties, and did it as much so in North Dakota as in Tennessee?  So what's the problem? Get grip!  Lighten up!  Laugh a little!  This ain't no thang.

It is history, and we know all too well how easily history repeats itself.

Excellent work, Fargo Forum. Thank you for showing, not telling us, so to speak, that none of us anywhere can be too vigilant when it comes to representing bigotry and the evil it performs in even the slightest of a positive light.

A Ku Klux Klan robe, modeled here on a mannequin, is part of North Dakota State University’s Emily Reynolds Costume Collection. The historic robe is not used in classes and is not on display to the general public. The garment was found in the 1950s by a man who worked as a Fargo trash collector. An NDSU employee discovered the robe and hood at an auction sale and bought it for $18, according to a 1990 NDSU Spectrum story.

Evidently grandpa died and the kids, cleaning out the closets, chose to throw out his old KKK robes instead of donating them along with rest of his clothes to the Salvation Army.

There are links to more photos and related stories that provide a profile of a Red River Valley KKK member of those days.  It isn't what you think, and it's shocking, because one of them at least, is an immigrant himself, from Croatia.

Ishmael Reed on the NYer

In Counterpunch.

Racist Humor or Just Racism at the New Yorker? Remnick's Latest Blunder, by Ishmael Reed.

Reed runs down the long tradition and history of racism at the magazine within the context of the cover. As usual, I don't personally agree with every one of Reed's assertions, but mostly, I do. And as usual, Reed is worth reading, because he provokes you to think.