The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

A recent PPP survey showed that 37 per cent of Mississippi Republicans said they would back a Confederates States of America if a new Civil War broke out, compared to just 9 per cent among Democrats. It gives you a pretty good indication where the Dixiecrats went after the landmark 1964 Civil Rights legislation and shows that Dixie is far from dead in a lot of people's minds.

The open feud between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel over the Republican Senate primary appears to have opened up deep wounds, but such pro-Confederate feelings aren't confined to Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan has mounted recruiting drives in several states, notably South Carolina and Georgia where they indiscriminately left "goodie bags" on door steps with the hope of luring persons who are upset about the ongoing immigration "crisis."

Yet, anytime someone brings up race the radical right seems to cringe as if we live in a post-racial society. Eric Holder once again came under fire for making racially-charged statements in a recent interview with ABC News. Conservative pundits were quick to jump on these comments, claiming he was race-bating.

Of course there was no such race-bating in Mississippi when Chris McDaniel's camp called for election monitors in the run-off, afraid Black Democrats would vote twice in the cross-over primaries? No such proof was ever presented, yet McDaniel has yet to admit defeat. He's gotten support from Ted Cruz and other conservative Congressional leaders in another run-off.

Then you have all these conservative blogs scouring local media for any form of reverse racism, like this incident where an Iowa kid was apparently considered "racist" for wearing all white and waving a "W" sign during school spirit week. I guess we can't say The Daily Caller is race-bating either. These stories pop up on Yahoo! news, as lead stories seem to be based on the number of hits on their search engine.

Part of the problem resides in the South's inability to let go of the Civil War. Wherever you go you find memorials to the battles, to the soldiers lost, to the generals who led the battles. The biggest is Stone Mountain with its massive engraved image of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Re-enactments of the battles can stretch out for days and have become big tourist draws. Southerners are quick to point out all these reminders are a matter of pride not racism, but for such a short-lived Confederacy, it seems to live deep in the heart 150 years later.

The Lost Cause comes back again and again and again. It is repeatedly evoked in music. Even The Band, which hails from Canada, paid tribute to the Old South in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Robbie Robertson called it a "beautiful sadness" when he heard Southerners evoke Old Dixie. A little naive considering this was the late 60s. Ralph Gleason, in a Rolling Stone review, likened the song to Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Many persons have since covered the song, oddly enough even Richie Havens, although I imagine he saw something else in the song that others didn't.

It is a beautiful song, like the softly sung Dixie, but the ugly truth remains that the Old South was institutionalized racism and that this racism continues to persist. Evoking Dixie doesn't do anything to heal those wounds.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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