War icons conjure up a bitter past
From the Confederate battle flag to statues, Texas tries to come to terms with legacy that hasn't much gray area
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published February 11, 2007
AUSTIN, Texas -- The Civil War ended nearly 142 years ago, for most of the country anyway, but bitter battles over how zealously that war should be remembered are suddenly erupting here in the Texas capital.
First, rock musician Ted Nugent wore a shirt featuring the Confederate battle flag--a banner sometimes employed by Southern white supremacist groups--at the Jan. 16 inaugural ball for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, prompting criticism from civil rights groups.
A few days later, the state's elected land commissioner, arguing for a more "balanced" view of history, marked Confederate Heroes Day--an official state holiday commemorating Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday--by accepting a donation from the Descendants of Confederate Veterans for an archive preservation project.
Over at the flagship campus of the University of Texas, officials said they will soon convene a committee to decide what, if anything, to do about four statues of Confederate leaders, including Lee and President Jefferson Davis, that greet visitors at the main campus entrance.
A state district judge in Austin is weighing a challenge to the removal from the Texas Supreme Court building of two plaques that commemorated the Confederacy.
And all of this is occurring in the shadow of the towering Texas state Capitol, where several statues and inscriptions honor the sacrifices of soldiers who fought to defend states' rights--and the rights of Southerners to keep black slaves.
"It's confounding, this continuing idolatry of the Confederacy," said Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas branch of the NAACP and a persistent critic of Confederate nostalgia, "because if you cut it to its very essence, what's being said by the symbolism is that the Old South was right and slavery was OK."
Not true, countered Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner, whose great-grandfather was a corporal in the Confederate Army.
"Many believe the War Between the States was solely about slavery and [that] the Confederacy is synonymous with racism," Patterson wrote in an op-ed article in January. "That conclusion is faulty, because the premise is inaccurate."
Conflicted emotions
The Civil War has long conjured deeply conflicted--if seldom expressed--emotions across the American South, variously evoking feelings of pride, shame, grievance and outrage depending on the role of one's ancestors. The recent controversies in Texas have shown those emotions to be as raw as ever.
The essential conundrum: Is it possible to honor the nobility of individuals who were engaged in an ignoble cause?
To Bledsoe, and many African-Americans, the answer is clearly no.
"You don't walk through a Jewish neighborhood waving a swastika and say, `I just want to do this because my great-uncle fought for the Nazis and I'm proud of the fact that he reached the rank of general,'" said Bledsoe, an Austin attorney. "What the Nazis did was wrong. And fighting to enslave human beings was wrong. The Confederates were fighting for an immoral cause. There is no way you can change that."
Larry Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas, reached a similar conclusion with regard to the Confederate statues on campus when debate over possibly removing them began in 2004, near the end of his tenure.
"There is no question that many from all races interpret some of our statues as displaying a kind of institutional nostalgia for the Confederacy and its values," Faulkner wrote in an open letter to the campus. "Most who receive that message are repelled."
In fact, the Confederate leaders depicted in the bronze statues--Lee, Davis, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston and Postmaster General John H. Reagan--had nothing at all to do with the university, which opened nearly 20 years after the end of the Civil War. The statues were commissioned by a university benefactor early in the 20th Century.
But even the suggestion that statues or plaques commemorating Confederate history ought to be removed--or that there is anything wrong with celebrating Confederate Heroes Day, or donning Confederate regalia--riles Confederate descendants' groups and Patterson, the only elected official in Texas who has publicly endorsed their cause.
To them, the secession of the 11 Confederate states was about more than slavery--it was a principled reaction to the North's interference in what Southerners perceived as their sovereign rights. And when the fighting started, they contend, most of their ancestors took up arms in defense of their homes and families, not the institution of slavery.
`Hackles up'
"When you start saying we cannot honor the birthday of Robert E. Lee because he was a Nazi, that's when I get my hackles up," Patterson said in his office, filled with Confederate and other military mementos reflecting his family's five generations of military service. "Probably one of the greatest Americans that ever walked the face of this country was Robert E. Lee, whether you measure him by his military prowess, by his humanity or by his enlightened thought for the 1860s."
Patterson notes, for example, that Lee freed his family's slaves five years after he had inherited them from his father-in-law and that he expressed private opposition to slavery in a letter to his wife in 1856. By contrast, he asserts that President Abraham Lincoln's primary motivation during the Civil War was not freeing the slaves but preserving the Union.
Patterson hastens to add that he does not condone the South's use of slaves. "We had this terrible practice, this indefensible practice," he said. And he agrees that government displays of the Confederate battle flag are inappropriate, given its close association with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups.
"All too often," Patterson said, "the introduction of a young black man in the South [to that flag] is when a pickup truck blows by and a beer bottle comes flying out and on the back of the bumper is a Confederate battle flag."
But the solution to the Confederate controversy is more, not fewer, public memorials, Patterson said--more memorials honoring African-American and Hispanic leaders, for example.
"We have a disproportionate representation of white history," he said. "Instead of tearing down the monuments of the South, we need to be building monuments of all the folks in the South and in Texas that have been somewhat ignored."
The University of Texas tried that approach in 1999, erecting a statue of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. some distance from the Confederate statues. After the monument was vandalized twice, the university installed security cameras to monitor it.
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hwitt@tribune.com
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