FUTURE of the SOUTH, LOST CAUSE DELUSIONS, STATUTES, ETC?

Believers in the Lost Cause delusion (that slavery played very little part, if at all, in secession and Civil War), are, fortunately, becoming a dying breed.  Those who are left sometimesvmake up for lost numbers by joining with the neo-Nazis and demonstrations against taking down Confederate statutes.  Millenials are the least intolerant generation yet.  “Yankees” are moving in the South by the millions and have been for years.  Fewer southerners go to public schools where white supremacists dominate the curriculum.  Some southerners actually read real history books by Eric Foner and W.C. Davis.  They realize Caleb Foote is a story-teller, not a historian.  His use of footnotes masks little if any qualifications to write accurate history. Hopefully this delusional world view of the lost cause on the way out. Get rid of the statutes now.  They are coming down eventually anyway.

Here’s one man’s view, By Tony Horwitz  [from the WSJ, a Conservative Republican, pro-business journal  I hope there’s no one out there who is thinking ‘he can’t be a Southerner because he’s a Jew. There were a lot of Jews lynched in the South.

http://jewishcurrents.org/august-15-jews-and-lynchings/

“Walt reconnected last week by email, addressing me as “Jewboy” and praising the Nazi creed. He had seen an article I’d written on the violent far-right protest in Charlottesville and chided me: “Uppercase letters for ‘White Nationalists,’ if you please.”

I’d last heard from Walt in 1995, when I met him at a Confederate battle-flag rally while researching a book on Civil War memory in the South. He invited me to his home and talked at length about his views on nonwhite “mud people” and their supposed Jewish puppet masters.

This time, he would only converse electronically, replying to most of my queries with links to neo-Nazi websites that he said spoke for him. “The person you met all those years ago does not exist,” he wrote. “Gone with the wind, if you are into Confederate metaphors.”

[Don’t kid yourself, there are still people who talk t Jews like this. I guess Walt has left the True Cause, neo-Confederate and preservationist movements and joined the neo-Nazis]

Hearing from Walt again stirred me to track down others I’d met in my Southern travels, to get their perspectives on the changes in Civil War remembrance over the past two decades. They didn’t agree on much, but there was one consensus: that celebration of the Confederacy has steadily ebbed—and that the recent bloodshed in Charlottesville will accelerate this retreat among all but die-hards and extremists. [Some of these, like Walt have moved on to the alright and Nazis .  . . .

 “Most millennials have zero investment in the Confederacy and its symbols,” says John Coski, who often speaks to students as the historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. For them, “The flag and statues are expendable, or they’re wrong and need to be challenged.”

With this shift, and a sharp rise in immigrants to the South, Mr. Coski says there’s no longer a “critical mass” of white Southerners raised to honor and defend symbols of the Confederacy, and “reasonable people in that camp don’t want to be associated with the unsavory types waving rebel flags in Charlottesville.”

Robert Lee Hodge feels this personally, as a namesake of the Confederate general whose Charlottesville statue became a flashpoint. When I met Mr. Hodge in the 1990s, he was part of a re-enactment unit so “hard-core” that members crash-dieted to better resemble the gaunt rebels in sepia photographs. He still does re-enactments and belongs to a Tennessee camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Hearing from Walt again stirred me to track down others I’d met in my Southern travels, to get their perspectives on the changes in Civil War remembrance over the past two decades. They didn’t agree on much, but there was one consensus: that celebration of the Confederacy has steadily ebbed—and that the recent bloodshed in Charlottesville will accelerate this retreat among all but die-hards and extremists.

“Most millennials have zero investment in the Confederacy and its symbols,” says John Coski, who often speaks to students as the historian at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. For them, “The flag and statues are expendable, or they’re wrong and need to be challenged.”

With this shift, and a sharp rise in immigrants to the South, Mr. Coski says there’s no longer a “critical mass” of white Southerners raised to honor and defend symbols of the Confederacy, and “reasonable people in that camp don’t want to be associated with the unsavory types waving rebel flags in Charlottesville.”

 “

But by around 2000, she now says, demand for Scarlett had faded: The “Southern belle thing” became “politically incorrect.” She retired from the role. Looking back, she thinks that she was “blind to a lot of racism and hate.”

But by around 2000, she now says, demand for Scarlett had faded: The “Southern belle thing” became “politically incorrect.” She retired from the role. Looking back, she thinks that she was “blind to a lot of racism and hate.”

“I was loved and accepted because I was perceived to be ‘one of them,’ ” she says, offering a nostalgic portrayal of the gauzy romance of belles, cavaliers and benign masters. A descendant of Confederates, she opposes displays of the rebel flag as “hateful” but thinks that the statues of Lee and others should remain, as reminders of the danger of their beliefs.

With this shift, and a sharp rise in immigrants to the South, Mr. Coski says there’s no longer a “critical mass” of white Southerners raised to honor and defend symbols of the Confederacy, and “reasonable people in that camp don’t want to be associated with the unsavory types waving rebel flags in Charlottesville.”

 met Melly Meadows McCutcheon when she was a young Vivian Leigh look-alike near Atlanta, with a thriving career portraying Scarlett O’Hara at civic and corporate events. She appeared at promotions for the city and state, the 1996 Summer Olympics and even companies in Japan.

But by around 2000, she now says, demand for Scarlett had faded: The “Southern belle thing” became “politically incorrect.” She retired from the role. Looking back, she thinks that she was “blind to a lot of racism and hate.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-charlottesville-new-shades-of-gray-in-a-changing-south-1503688365