[Excerpted from an interview with James Loewen - historian and author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.]
JL: A while back, [the Confederate flag] did come down from on top of the [SC] state capitol, which was just an astounding placement, if you think about it, because it implies—you know, the flag flying right over the place where the laws are made certainly implies that the laws are made in obedience to what that flag means.
So let’s look for just a minute at what that flag means, because, unfortunately, most of the people who are right now flip-flopping on the flag—and, again, it’s wonderful that they are reversing themselves—but most of them still don’t have, well, either the knowledge, perhaps, or certainly the guts, to actually say that they’ve been getting it wrong all these years. They need to say what the flag stands for.
The Confederacy seceded, many people think, for states’ rights. And I know they think this, because for the last, oh, at least seven years, and certainly for the last five years, while we’ve been in the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I’ve been going around the country, asking them, why did the South secede?
Now, this is the most important thing that ever happened in the history of this country. Because, of course, the secession of the South and its firing on various forts, particularly Fort Sumter, led immediately to the Civil War, which is far and away the most important thing that ever happened after we organized as a country.
So this is very important: Why did they do it? And you always get four answers. You get the South seceded for slavery; it seceded for states’ rights; it seceded because of the election of Lincoln; and it seceded over tariffs and taxes, or issues about tariffs and taxes.
JJ: Uh-huh.
JL: And then I ask people to vote, and what’s interesting is it doesn’t make any difference whether I’m asking them in Columbia, South Carolina, where I have; or Greensboro, North Carolina, where I have; or North Dakota, where I have; or an overwhelmingly Black audience in Memphis, where I have; or in Southern California; the answer comes out, almost always, the same, and here’s how it comes out: About 15%, sometimes 20%, say the South seceded over slavery. Sixty percent, sometimes 65, say the South seceded for states’ rights. About 2% say the South seceded because of the election of Lincoln. And about 10 to 30%—this is the one that varies the most—say that it was all about issues about tariffs and taxes.
So then we look at the facts, and it’s very interesting, the facts are perfectly easy to find. You mentioned my book, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. Well, they’re all in here. And they weren’t that hard for us to find when we put them in there.
The most important single statement is by South Carolina, because it seceded first, but every single state makes a similar statement when it leaves the United States. Here’s what South Carolina called its statement: “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” That kind of sounds right on point, doesn’t it?
JJ: Yes.
JL: And here’s what they say. They actually say, “We assert that 14 of the states have deliberately refused for years past to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own statutes for the proof.” Now, “constitutional obligations” sounds kind of vague, but they go right on to tell us exactly what they mean:
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
Well, that’s, of course, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and they then go on to tell us which states are exercising their states’ rights in various little ways and making various little interferences. They say, “The states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,” blah blah blah—they name 16 of them in all, ending up in the west with Wisconsin and Iowa—“have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states, the fugitive is discharged from the service or labor claimed”—so, in other words, it is all about states rights, except the South is against states rights. And what it’s really all about is, of course, slavery, the S-word.
JJ: It’s so difficult, though, to confront that, why—I’m shocked, actually, at the lowness of the percentage that respond with the answer of slavery. I would have thought that would have at least been a contender.
JL: Twenty percent. And that’s 20% if you ask in Seattle, you know; it doesn’t make any…Cleveland.
JJ: Right.
JL: So we completely misunderstand the most important thing that ever happened in the country. Now, why do we misunderstand it? Well, I’m going to give you two reasons.
The first thing we need to do, any historian will tell you, we need to look at when we started to misunderstand it. And we didn’t misunderstand it at the time; how could we? Mississippi, Texas, every single state, says, “it’s slavery, that’s why we’re leaving,” so we didn’t misunderstand it then.
We started misunderstanding it mostly between 1890 and 1940, and this is the era that historians call the nadir of race relations. “Nadir” is, of course, an English-language word meaning “low point.” Some people say “nuh-deer.” That’s fine too.
So during this era, 1890 to 1940, the United States goes more racist in its thinking, in its ideology, than at any other point.
This is when lynchings reached an all-time high, this is when so many towns across the North go sundown—that is, they throw out their Black populations, or if they don’t have any, they make a decision, formally or informally, that they’re never going to have any. And they post, some of them post, infamous signs at their city limits, like Manitowoc, Wisconsin, saying, “Ni gg er, don’t let the sun go down on you in Manitowoc.”
JJ: Uh-huh.
JL: So at this point, when the neo-Confederates start saying, no, no, no, it wasn’t about slavery, it was all about states’ rights, the white North really doesn’t have the gumption to argue with them, because they’re participating in racism so heavily themselves. So that’s one explanation.
But the other explanation is to look at today’s textbooks. And one I like to pick on is the largest textbook ever invented for middle school in this country; it’s called The American Journey. It’s a history of the United States. It’s allegedly by three famous historians: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley and James McPherson.
And so you would think that the stuff on the Civil War would be by McPherson, because he wrote what I think is the best single-volume history of the Civil War. But when you read it, it turns out it completely mystifies what secession was all about.
Now, McPherson knows; so what we know from this is, it turns out that these people who allegedly write the history textbooks don’t write them. The publishers write them, and then they rent their names and stick them on them. But they don’t even read them!
Now, when I’m lecturing about this kind of thing to college students, I say: Now look, if you are such an idiot that you actually buy your term paper for $9.95 from the web, I hope you at least have the brains to read the darn thing before you hand it in to your teacher. So I know that James McPherson never even read what he says about secession in this book, because he’d never put up with it.
JJ: He knows better.
JL: Yes.
JJ: One of the things that erasing that nadir period does—I mean, one of the problems with the way that’s integrated is—we have this idea that history has been a steady improvement, a steady march toward progress.
JL: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
JJ: We can’t really process the idea that it’s looped back, and things have gotten worse and—
JL: That’s right. That’s right. We don’t—and that’s the basic storyline. People often ask me, “OK, so you wrote this book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. What’s the biggest lie?” And that’s the biggest lie, that we started out great and we’ve been getting better ever since, kind of automatically. And now you people should vote. But that’s about all you really need to do, because otherwise, things take care of themselves.
And, of course, unfortunately, it’s not true. Things don’t take care of themselves. We have to take care of them.
more here:
fair.org
JL: A while back, [the Confederate flag] did come down from on top of the [SC] state capitol, which was just an astounding placement, if you think about it, because it implies—you know, the flag flying right over the place where the laws are made certainly implies that the laws are made in obedience to what that flag means.
So let’s look for just a minute at what that flag means, because, unfortunately, most of the people who are right now flip-flopping on the flag—and, again, it’s wonderful that they are reversing themselves—but most of them still don’t have, well, either the knowledge, perhaps, or certainly the guts, to actually say that they’ve been getting it wrong all these years. They need to say what the flag stands for.
The Confederacy seceded, many people think, for states’ rights. And I know they think this, because for the last, oh, at least seven years, and certainly for the last five years, while we’ve been in the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I’ve been going around the country, asking them, why did the South secede?
Now, this is the most important thing that ever happened in the history of this country. Because, of course, the secession of the South and its firing on various forts, particularly Fort Sumter, led immediately to the Civil War, which is far and away the most important thing that ever happened after we organized as a country.
So this is very important: Why did they do it? And you always get four answers. You get the South seceded for slavery; it seceded for states’ rights; it seceded because of the election of Lincoln; and it seceded over tariffs and taxes, or issues about tariffs and taxes.
JJ: Uh-huh.
JL: And then I ask people to vote, and what’s interesting is it doesn’t make any difference whether I’m asking them in Columbia, South Carolina, where I have; or Greensboro, North Carolina, where I have; or North Dakota, where I have; or an overwhelmingly Black audience in Memphis, where I have; or in Southern California; the answer comes out, almost always, the same, and here’s how it comes out: About 15%, sometimes 20%, say the South seceded over slavery. Sixty percent, sometimes 65, say the South seceded for states’ rights. About 2% say the South seceded because of the election of Lincoln. And about 10 to 30%—this is the one that varies the most—say that it was all about issues about tariffs and taxes.
So then we look at the facts, and it’s very interesting, the facts are perfectly easy to find. You mentioned my book, The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. Well, they’re all in here. And they weren’t that hard for us to find when we put them in there.
The most important single statement is by South Carolina, because it seceded first, but every single state makes a similar statement when it leaves the United States. Here’s what South Carolina called its statement: “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” That kind of sounds right on point, doesn’t it?
JJ: Yes.
JL: And here’s what they say. They actually say, “We assert that 14 of the states have deliberately refused for years past to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own statutes for the proof.” Now, “constitutional obligations” sounds kind of vague, but they go right on to tell us exactly what they mean:
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
Well, that’s, of course, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and they then go on to tell us which states are exercising their states’ rights in various little ways and making various little interferences. They say, “The states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,” blah blah blah—they name 16 of them in all, ending up in the west with Wisconsin and Iowa—“have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states, the fugitive is discharged from the service or labor claimed”—so, in other words, it is all about states rights, except the South is against states rights. And what it’s really all about is, of course, slavery, the S-word.
JJ: It’s so difficult, though, to confront that, why—I’m shocked, actually, at the lowness of the percentage that respond with the answer of slavery. I would have thought that would have at least been a contender.
JL: Twenty percent. And that’s 20% if you ask in Seattle, you know; it doesn’t make any…Cleveland.
JJ: Right.
JL: So we completely misunderstand the most important thing that ever happened in the country. Now, why do we misunderstand it? Well, I’m going to give you two reasons.
The first thing we need to do, any historian will tell you, we need to look at when we started to misunderstand it. And we didn’t misunderstand it at the time; how could we? Mississippi, Texas, every single state, says, “it’s slavery, that’s why we’re leaving,” so we didn’t misunderstand it then.
We started misunderstanding it mostly between 1890 and 1940, and this is the era that historians call the nadir of race relations. “Nadir” is, of course, an English-language word meaning “low point.” Some people say “nuh-deer.” That’s fine too.
So during this era, 1890 to 1940, the United States goes more racist in its thinking, in its ideology, than at any other point.
This is when lynchings reached an all-time high, this is when so many towns across the North go sundown—that is, they throw out their Black populations, or if they don’t have any, they make a decision, formally or informally, that they’re never going to have any. And they post, some of them post, infamous signs at their city limits, like Manitowoc, Wisconsin, saying, “Ni gg er, don’t let the sun go down on you in Manitowoc.”
JJ: Uh-huh.
JL: So at this point, when the neo-Confederates start saying, no, no, no, it wasn’t about slavery, it was all about states’ rights, the white North really doesn’t have the gumption to argue with them, because they’re participating in racism so heavily themselves. So that’s one explanation.
But the other explanation is to look at today’s textbooks. And one I like to pick on is the largest textbook ever invented for middle school in this country; it’s called The American Journey. It’s a history of the United States. It’s allegedly by three famous historians: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley and James McPherson.
And so you would think that the stuff on the Civil War would be by McPherson, because he wrote what I think is the best single-volume history of the Civil War. But when you read it, it turns out it completely mystifies what secession was all about.
Now, McPherson knows; so what we know from this is, it turns out that these people who allegedly write the history textbooks don’t write them. The publishers write them, and then they rent their names and stick them on them. But they don’t even read them!
Now, when I’m lecturing about this kind of thing to college students, I say: Now look, if you are such an idiot that you actually buy your term paper for $9.95 from the web, I hope you at least have the brains to read the darn thing before you hand it in to your teacher. So I know that James McPherson never even read what he says about secession in this book, because he’d never put up with it.
JJ: He knows better.
JL: Yes.
JJ: One of the things that erasing that nadir period does—I mean, one of the problems with the way that’s integrated is—we have this idea that history has been a steady improvement, a steady march toward progress.
JL: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
JJ: We can’t really process the idea that it’s looped back, and things have gotten worse and—
JL: That’s right. That’s right. We don’t—and that’s the basic storyline. People often ask me, “OK, so you wrote this book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. What’s the biggest lie?” And that’s the biggest lie, that we started out great and we’ve been getting better ever since, kind of automatically. And now you people should vote. But that’s about all you really need to do, because otherwise, things take care of themselves.
And, of course, unfortunately, it’s not true. Things don’t take care of themselves. We have to take care of them.
more here:
'That’s the Biggest Lie, That We Started Out Great and We’ve Been Getting Better Ever Since' - FAIR
"If you’ve got a Confederate statue at your county seat...I think it’s easier for you to grow up with a Confederate mindset."
fair.org
