Not the PBS Version of the Civil War

One of the few good things about those PBS March fund raisers is that they give us the opportunity to revisit Ken Burns’ epic documentary on the Civil War. Viewed through the lens afforded us by the constitutional crisis facing the country in the post-cold war, post industrial age it is now in raises serious questions about that war’s still unresolved issues. And just in case listening to Shelby Foote once again drawl that the war forever shaped what this country would become—for better or worse—was not chilling enough for you given the political arc the nation is currently on, one could turn to Susan Dunn’s review of Gordon Wood’s latest work, Empire of Liberty, in the current New York Review of Books and read:

“The South, Wood recognizes, stood apart, as many Southerners disdained not only work, which they deemed fit only for slaves, but also commerce and industry. While the North plunged into the future, nostalgic southerners turned to the past, clinging to the agrarian myth of yeoman farmers leading independent, virtuous lives on the soil as well as to the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation.”

It took almost one hundred years for this country to begin to dig itself out from the reign of terror against Black Americans initiated after a rigged presidential election ended Reconstruction and withdrew Federal troops from the South. In fact, it was only with the re-introduction of U.S. Army troops and Federal marshals in the 1950s and ‘60s that desegregation and voting rights would be restored. The South, however, has proved itself still unprepared to give up its version of Camelot, a neo-feudal domain in which the teeming masses—both white and black—toil to keep the deserving few in their aristocratic enclaves. The reaction to Reconstruction was terrifying, and the reaction to the New Deal social contract, the counter-revolution initiated during the Reagan administration, is proving to be almost as horrific.
In some ways, what we are now experiencing as a nation is even worse in that the present counter-revolution is no longer restricted to the terrain of the old Confederacy. The Great Migration that took place after WWII made race a national problem. By the late 1960s, the shocking newsreels of delicate white Southern women hysterically shouting obscenities at a handful of black children attempting to enter previously all-white schools were replaced—or joined—by white Northern women no less committed to the task of protecting their school age children from the prospect of rubbing shoulders with their darker brothers and sisters.
The aftermath of those cataclysmic years, euphemistically called the Civil Rights Era, was the destruction of just about every American city of any size. Few Americans can go home again. Where once there was an urban culture shared by average Americans of all classes, there is now the prospect of endless malls, suburban sprawl, enclaves of privilege, some tiny pockets of re-“gentrified” (read white) neighborhoods within the old city walls. Schools in the North are now more segregated than many in the South.
In an age of euphemism, we no longer have ghettos, we have “inner-cities.” The rust belt, large expanses of the old industrialism, are now as much a symbol of a lost golden age for Northern whites as the decaying old plantation houses once were for Southerners. The suburbs created by the baby boomers now have their own problems and have lost their original purpose as bedroom communities for middle class workers who commuted to their jobs back in cities that no longer exist. (New York City even has a billionaire mayor that does all he can to keep the “poor” out of his rose zone, silk-stocking district, literally throwing up road blocks to automobile traffic on Manhattan streets.)
When segregationist Dixiecrats finally switched parties and created the new Republican Party in the South and the white ethnic working class in the North underwent a similar transformation, abandoning their traditional affiliation with the Democratic Party to become so-called Reagan Democrats, it created the impression that, in this country, it is all about race. That impression is, of course, an illusion. Far more deeply embedded in the genome of the nation’s character and its charter documents is fear of the mob.
The founding fathers who finally had their way with their version of a blueprint for a republic and a democracy never imagined a polis that granted universal suffrage or even majority rule. A recurring image in Burns’ Civil War documentary is Richmond, Virginia under siege. Always hovering in the background is the Virginia State House planted on a hill overlooking the city, a reborn Parthenon atop a New World Olympus. Slaveholding aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson took their classical antecedents very, very seriously. Athens, too, had been a slave state. Freedom and liberty were never intended for the illiterate or barely educated masses. They would either not know what to do with freedom, or worse, actually begin to exercise it. For those who preferred to take guidance from the Christian Bible rather than Plato and Aristotle, there was ample evidence that only the mad or the quixotic would attempt to create a world in which all men were truly created equal. “The poor shall always be with us.” History was replete with examples of what occurred when zealots agitated slaves, serfs or workers to take up arms and demand true equality.
And it is never the truly poor who represent a danger. It is the newly well fed, the newly literate, healthy and learned enough to begin to understand the dimensions of the disparity between the washed and the unwashed. Fuelled by the flames of injustice ignited by their new understanding, such men and women are dangerous indeed. Mansions are invaded, destroyed. Privileges are torn away, “the aristocratic idyll of a leisurely, gracious life of family, hospitality, books and slaves on a lovely plantation,” gone. This insight, this immutable truth about what really drives so-called conservative Americans must finally be confronted, namely, the core belief that universal prosperity and a life free of fear—even if so elusive an outcome could be realized—is dangerous and, yes, evil. It is this fundamental belief that explains the outright antipathy to universal health care, to a proper education for all, to adequately funded hospitals, libraries, cultural institutions, to, dare we say it, socialism, or worse, Europeanization.
In such a world view, prosperity itself poses dangers. During boom periods, periods of enormous wealth accumulation, there seems to be little excuse not to address the needs of a society that years of benign neglect have allowed to grow. One obvious way of dealing with an embarrassment of riches, of course, is merely to redistribute wealth to our latter-day plantation aristocrats. (The Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest are a recent example.) This leaves little wealth in the hands of the vast majority or even in federal, state or local coffers to address growing needs. In the closing days of the apparently golden Clinton administration, when an actual surplus had been allowed to accumulate, Bill Clinton looked ahead, (pre-Monica Lewinsky), to a simple agenda, namely the dedication of the nation’s resources to three specific areas—race, education and a modern rail transit system. After a decade of Republican rule, a three trillion dollar surplus had been converted into a thirteen trillion dollar deficit, thereby guaranteeing that there would be no funds for misguided social programs, no Europeanization of our exceptional Homeland.
Even regressive tax structures and foreign wars, however, could not so disastrously impact the common wealth as a financial crisis that was the inevitable byproduct of years of giving prerogatives to the richest Americans to accumulate wealth unbound by any regulation. All of the organs of government—not merely the SEC, but all government watchdogs from the FCC to the FDA to the EPA and the entire alphabet of gatekeepers that had provided some safety from outright profiteering and know-nothingism—had been gutted. This was accomplished by a form of neglect that few could characterize as “benign.” It was an era more accurately called an era of malign neglect in which government regulators seemed at best incompetent, but more accurately devoted to sabotaging the very missions of the institutions they were employed to oversee. This cancer within government came to extend beyond the economic and social health of the nation to its very constitutional framework. It is one thing to appoint an OSHA administrator who will choose to overlook exploited migrant workers losing their fingers on chicken farms, another to appoint an Attorney General of the United States who will look the other way while prisoners of war are being tortured in their cells or “rendered” to clandestine sites to be tortured by foreign governments.
Once upon a time, patrician scions of families of old wealth could be seen pacing the corridors of power in Washington or in the state houses and city halls. No longer do the children of the most affluent now seek positions in government, preferring to stay on the plantation and influence events behind the scene. Government has become too vulgar, too messy. The ground has been ceded to less delicate types and the result has been rampant corruption and decay pretending to be a more populist form of government in which women and minorities have come into the ascendancy. Once upon a time, those who had accumulated great wealth, embarrassed by their riches (or perhaps fretting over putting them at risk at the hands of mobs with pitch forks) built libraries and concert halls and shelters for the poor.


Still the richest nation in the world, even the Great Recession has not stripped us of certain of the trappings of our wealth. There may be calls to close school libraries as extravagances, but while the bookshelves may be emptied, the long shelves of supermarkets, the true icons of American wealth, continue (so far) to be burdened with more varieties of sugar-laden breakfast cereals than anyone can count. Mall parking lots are still full of new cars (though there may be a form of creeping socialism emerging in their homogeneity, four-door Cadillacs being almost indistinguishable from their KIA cousins). It seems that so long as Americans can reassure themselves via HD color TVs and fully stocked stores from which they still have the luxury of selecting some other needless item, they will continue to pretend to be unaware that a new Civil War has been going on right under their noses, as if in a parallel dimension. (That the battle rages while a Black American occupies the Oval Office is a nice irony.) There has not been one Fort Sumter, but many, and ground continues to be lost. The great question facing this country is what will happen when the vast majority of Americans who were raised to believe in the wholesome values they see symbolized in the nation’s flag, and who try to live by them, come to realize that what we are experiencing in this country is truly nothing less than a second Civil War.