A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

11 July 2015

Recommended reading, Helena’s Confederate fountain

At Intelligent Discontent, Don Pogreba published an excellent essay by Keegan Boyar, a Ph.d candidate in history. Boyar attended the Helena City Commission’s meeting on the fountain:

…I was deeply shocked by the number of comments that denied the role of slavery in the Civil War and the impact of continued racism afterward, and I am worried that such a faulty understanding of our nation’s past will be reflected in the fountain’s new plaque.

It is clear to all reputable historians that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery, and the South’s fears that remaining a part of the Union would destroy the slave system at the heart of the South’s economy and society. This understanding of the Civil War is not based on political correctness gone mad, but rather on an objective reading of historical sources. The comments made by several community members at the council meeting to the effect that the Civil War was about states’ rights are seriously misleading, as the states’ right in question was that of slavery. Leaders of the Confederacy made it clear via speeches from the era what the conflict was about.

There’s more, so be sure to read Boyar’s entire essay, which mentions a letter to the Helena Independent Record by Helena’s Ed Noonan. Helena’s decision to place the fountain in Hill Park, reports Noonan, was made shortly after a weeks long showing of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film based on Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, and as notorious an example of cinematic propaganda as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Noonan concludes:

Like the rest of the country, the white audience for the film bought into the basic premise, “Breaking the Union was wrong. The inferiority of the colored race was correct.” It is hard then to look at the environment of the Helena community that placed the monument in Hill Park several months after this showing and see the monument only as a dedication honoring the Civil War dead. It also honors the racial understanding that the Confederacy represented.

Pogreba himself authored a fine blog post, Preserving History or Promoting Propaganda? The “History” of the Confederate Fountain, in which he quotes from Karen Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, published in 2003 by the University Press of Florida, and reviewed on Civil War Book Review by assistant Utah State University professor Jennifer Rittenhouse:

Most of Cox’s book is devoted to examining the UDC’s activities on various fronts in its peak period between 1894 and 1918. One well-illustrated chapter surveys the UDC’s role as “monument builders,” describing the fund-raising efforts and political negotiations behind the thousands of Confederate memorials unveiled in highly choreographed celebrations in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Women, Professor Rittenhouse notes, were the gender most intent on rehabilitating the south’s image:

Knowing more about the present of the 1890s and early 1900s, when the UDC was most influential, might also help to explain why women were more committed to the goal of vindicating the Confederates than their male peers. Although it does not address this important gender question directly, Cox’s book does suggest explanations for why it was women who “raised the stakes” of the Lost Cause. One possible explanation looks backward to the growth of the UDC from the Ladies’ Memorial Associations and their concern for their personal dead. Another explanation looks forward to the reality that, as Confederate veterans and their widows passed on, white southern women had to find new ways to maintain their organization’s relevance in a region that tolerated conservative women’s associations such as the UDC far better than any other kind. Both of these explanations relate to white women’s status and roles within the South, and attention to the question of why women wanted vindication more than men might have allowed Cox to develop her book’s significance as gender history much more fully.

Nevertheless, by focusing on women and the remarkable influence of the UDC, Karen Cox has filled in an important part of the story of the Lost Cause and its impact on southern society in the early twentieth century and beyond.

Many Montanans rely on Montana historian Ken Robison’s 2013 book, Confederates in Montana Territory: In the Shadow of Price’s Army, the forward to which was written by Richard L. Thoroughman of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the male analogue of the UDC. Robison also wrote an essay on the fountain that was published in the Great Falls Tribune in 2012. In that essay, Robison cites James Loewen’s Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, but does not connect the fountain to the UDC's campaign to present their granddaddies as military heroes instead of as soldiers supporting slavery. He should have.

University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher wrote The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, and Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Here he is on YouTube explaining the Lost Cause.

Anyone who doubts that the southern states attempted secession to preserve slavery should read Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephen’s Cornerstone speech and the various states’ declarations of succession. Here’s an excerpt from Mississippi’s declaration:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.

Members of the tourism board in Helena that’s charged with drafting language for a plaque explaining the history of the Confederate fountain should read all of these books, essays, and documents.