Don't You Forget about Me

The Breakfast Club and Remembering the American Civil War

Yesterday, April 9th, was the 158th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to American forces at Appomattox Courthouse, Pennsylvania. His soldiers began to retun to their homes. Within a few weeks Jefferson Davis, the head of the insurrection would be captured. The war was over, though not without its costs. John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865 ushering in new president Andrew Johnson. Rebuilding of the nation—less than one hundred years old—was necessary.

Of course, Johnson turned out to be one of the worst presidents in American history. One could argue that there have been few who were more ill-suited for the job. And Johnson’s plans for Reconstruction may have damned us all. At issue here were his plans to quickly bring southern states back into the fold. The Tennessean Johnson reasoned that since the Confederate government was never legitimate and thus, states never left, the United States needed to get back to being the United States. African Americans, whom the rebellion had waged war over to ensure the continuation of chattel slavery, received few protections from white southerners who created laws known as Black codes to maintain the antebellum social order. The federal government passed the 14th and 15th Amendments as well as the Reconstruction Act of 1867 to help guarantee Black freedoms, but largely abandoned Reconstruction and the process of creating a new United States with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in 1876.¹ Some centennial.

Had Reconstruction succeeded, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been necessary, nor would the Voting Rights Act of 1965.² But it didn’t and even those landmark laws of the mid-60s failed to undo hundreds of years of inequality in the United States. And it sure as Hell wouldn’t have seen the rise of Confederate statues as a testament to the ideals of the antebellum South.³

Heather Cox Richardson writes a lot about how those ideals manifested themselves in policies and actions in the years following the War all the way until today. She’s got a terrific book about it called How the South Won the Civil War. You might wanna give it a look. My guess is you already follow her and if not, you might want to.

My thoughts here are a bit different in I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves through movies, tv shows, and other mediums. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) may be the most damning film in American history in its portrayal of Ku Klux Klansmen as the white knights of the South who defended Southern honor and Southern women from freedmen, depicted as savage and bestial. The film reflected feelings by some in American society about race relations and helped to fan flames of Jim Crow violence against African Americans in the United States. Gone with the Wind (1939) is another of these films. You probably know this one, which sets the story of a passionate romance amidst the fall of Atlanta. This film educated generations of Americans about race and the Civil War. The problem is that it lied. The war was never about Southern honor and there was nothing romantic about the continued enslavement of human beings. There are certainly other films that do this kind of damage.

We see the legacy of The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind in The Dukes of Hazzard, a television show set in a fictional Georgia county which aired between 1979 and 1985. The show tracked the (mis)adventures of the Duke Boys, Bo and Luke, who with the help of family and friends outwit the crooked local government represented by Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg and his inept sheriff (and symbol of law enforcement) Rosco P. Coltrane.⁴ The other main character—perhaps the most famous relic of the series—was the Dukes’ 1969 Dodge Challenger, named the General Lee. Emblazoned with the battle flag and wielding a carhorn that played “Dixie,” the General Lee was a symbol of the new memory of the Old South—one that said that white Southerners understood right from wrong and acted accordingly now and in the past.

Where I’m from in western Kentucky, many white residents have clung hard to these relics of an imagined antebellum. Locals adamantly protected the statue of Robert E. Lee on the court square in the town of Murray. And a meme of the General Lee has been used to justify their outrage over a single can of beer sold in Canada that supports LGBTQ+ rights. It was seeing this meme on facebook that inspired this post. I’m posting below for context.

I must admit that I did not know how to respond when I first saw the meme. Do I confront the person who posted? Do I respond in kind with another meme that makes fun of that person? Should I even be part of these debates? Didn’t I earn a Ph.D. in history so I could discuss history at another level? These are parts of an internal dialogue I have about finding my audience and platform that I’ll discuss at another time. I chose to write this piece instead, though I originally intended to just give some book recommendations and be on my way.

But in 1985, my generation was only a few years removed from playing our my Dukes of Hazzard racetrack set or eating our Good Ole Boy Happy Meals. And we aged just fast enough to be hit in 1993 with Ted Turner’s hot mess of Gettysburg. That movie is a triumph of both sidesism and wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-the-people-fighting-for-slavery-weren’t-so-bad. It’s another Lost Cause narrative ostensibly made palatable by Jeff Daniels’ Joshua Chamberlain and a moving score by Randy Edelman. My entire high school was ushered into the film theater, fed the film without any sort of contextualization or analysis, and assured of its authenticity.

The posters of the above meme haven’t thought to question between the beer can and the General Lee because they have yet to question the car, the Confederate Flag, or the role of racism in creating the antebellum South or the American Civil War to begin with. The beliefs of and in a South repressed by the outside, whose culture must be defended were clearly reinforced before most ever hit adulthood. Changing those belief systems afterwards becomes nearly impossible due to a psychological principle known as confirmation bias. Essentially, once opinions about a position are formed, people will actually double down on their beliefs when presented with information that proves the opposite. This is not coincidentally part of why the idea of a leftwing indoctrination by college professors simply does not happen.

So this meme and its reasoning perplexes me. One image is of a transgender woman enjoying a popular beer consumed by many other Americans. The beer has a picture of the woman on the can. The other is of a fictional tv show with a car that features the battle flag of a treasonous revolt against American democracy. The meme tries (and fails) to draw direct comparisons between the two. The two are not the same.

I think about the prominence of the Confederate battle flag in Dylann Roof’s murder of nine African Americans at a Charleston church in 2015. I think about how it what it meant for a rioter used it inside the United States Capitol during a new attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. And I think about how the Republican-super majority Tennessee legislature just expelled Democratic representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson not for protesting gun violence in the state but for having the audacity to be Black while doing so.

I think about the promise of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps not the Founders’ intent since many of them held the ancestors of contemporary Americans in bondage, but the words themselves: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think about the promise we make to each other each day by continuing to commit to the American experiment:

Don't you, forget about me
Don't, don't, don't, don't
Don't you, forget about me

I think of the tremendous work left to be done.

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What I’m reading

I’d intended this to be a quick post tonight but obviously that didn’t happen. Instead of only lamentations, I thought I’d offer some solutions. First off, I’m not a Civil War or Reconstruction specialist. This is obviously far from an exhaustive list. So what I have to offer you are books I think are well-written, engaging, and easily consumable by larger audiences. I’m also not compensated in any way for these books.

This Vast Southern Empire by Matthew Karp. Karp shows you how slaveholders rose in power to exert their influence over American foreign policy.

Black Slaves, Indian Masters by Barbara Krauthamer. Chattel slavery was practiced in many Indigenous societies. This book looks at questions of Indian citizenship for freedmen and freedwomen following the Civil War.

Finally, there’s Narrative of the Life by Frederick Douglass. It’s like $5. If you haven’t read Douglass yet, now is the time to do so.

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Podcast:

We’ve been really busy lately taping episodes featuring Con Air, Carrie, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and more. We’ll be taping another five episodes this week. On Wednesday, look out for Drew McKevitt and I to talk about Dirty Harry and the rise of gun culture in the United States. In the meantime, we’ve got a bunch of stuff for you to see now. Check out an episode or two and let me know what you think:

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And finally, join in this Sunday, April 16 at 8pm eastern on Amazon Prime as we talk immigration, families, and Chinese history with The Joy Luck Club. I hope to see you there.

Hey if you like what we’re building here, keep sharing it with friends. Thanks for being part of this.⁵

1. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/activities/handout-a-rutherford-b-hayes-and-the-disputed-election-of-1876?gclid=Cj0KCQjwxMmhBhDJARIsANFGOSuWHZzY2PMqDUceU8ylzmo1SEduvx9KfCYJXM17PFsFx0s9iZcJ_RgaAvJqEALw_wcB

2. The 2013 SCOTUS ruling in Shelby County v. Holder undid a major portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You can read more about it here: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/shelby-county-v-holder

3. There are a couple of really good books out there right now dealing with Confederate statues and memorialization. One is Karen Cox’s No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. The other is Adam Domby’s The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory.

4. The naming of the show’s primary antagonist is peculiar here. James Poniewozik drew attention to it in 2015 and I think he’s onto something here. Poniewozik talks about the idea of the “Good Ole Boys” going up against one regime after another. I think it points to the idea that Southerners today view Jefferson Davis as somewhat disposable. Robert E. Lee far outshines the man in the imagination and while Lee can be seen as saving Southern honor by surrendering and assuring the welfare of his men, Davis’ capture in May 1865 seems cowardly and un-Southern. Throwing Davis’ name as a foil then becomes a way of saying that these Southern men choose their own path—they just get there in a racecar waving the Confederate battle flag to God and anyone else who might see it.

5. Special thanks to Elizabeth Venditto and Robert Greene II for taking a look at this draft. I’d originally wanted to work in more of The Breakfast Club into the piece but it wasn’t quite working.