Look how it ended up!
1. My emails were answered! Especially by Grantham.
2. Nikki Tinker gets her money from Republicans and Armenians and EMILY’s List, among others.
3. Tim Chavez has fixed his link so you can view the video. It’s not the smoking gun he claims, I don’t think. But it did piss off the Sheriff’s spokesperson, so that’s good fun. I’m imagining, right now, a tag team wrasslin match with Weikal and the Ask a Mexican dude in one corner and Chavez in the other.
4. EMILY’s List condemns Tinker’s ad, but doesn’t ask for their money back. That’s too bad.
5. I was supposed to make a shirt this evening, but I broke my computer with all my cats wearing pants files are. And by “broke” I mean “Doesn’t even start anymore.” Which is pretty impressive, if you think about it.
Filed under: Random Things
[...] B. asks and answers her own questions on where Nikki Tinker’s money to create of those racially and religiously [...]
As a military historian, I’m still pissed at her for the Nathan Bedford Forrest attack. Don’t come at me anyone, please, for defending the KKK. It is so easy for us modern southerners to forget that ALL of us would have been Forrest during his time. I give regularly to the Southern Poverty Law Center and despise racism, but I also have a painting of the Wizard of the Saddle in my home office. I totally understand why black folks would be offended if that picture was in my office at school and I would never put it up. But if we reject N.B. Forrest then we’d better dig up James K. Polk, the great senatorial defender of slavery for two decades. Y’all just burn down the Hermitage as well.
Just keep in mind that you would have been just like Forrest had you grown up in West Tennessee in the first half of the 19th century
Any reading of the man’s life would change most folk’s opinion of him. The best biography is Bryan Steele Wills “A Battle from the Start.” An apt title considering that Forrest’s father died when he was 17 leaving Nathan the head of his household and responsible for the survival of his mother and 8 siblings. They were dirt poor and there was no social welfare system so he took the only job a semi-literate man with one skill, fighting, could find then: he became a slave overseer. that means he managed slaves for a fat-ass plantation owner who didn’t want to dirty his hands with such a terrible job.
Bedford saved his money and went into the slave trading business. Now, I find that as detestable as any of you, but it was pretty much the only path he could follow to ensure the wealth and future survival of his own family. And rich, respectable people would never be slave traders as they looked down on the men who did that job despite owning slaves themselves. He went from dirt poor to being one only ten millionaires in the prewar South.
He then volunteered to be an enlisted man in the Confederate Army and rose to the rank of Major General despite having no formal education of any kind. He was a natural military leader and virtually invented the modern concept of mobile warfare. He is still studied, and admired, by military leader across the globe. The German armored warfare expert Erwin Rommel, who refused to kill Jews by the way, studied Forrest intensely and modelled his mobile warfare strategy on Forrest’s “Get there the firstest with the mostest” tactics. Moreover, Forrest led his men from the front, being shot in combat three times and personally killing 31 men in close combat. He also had 29 horses shot from underneath him. WHAT A MAN!
As for his founding of the Klan. That will remain a black mark on his character. But you shouldn’t judge if you weren’t a southerner then with the entire social order you had understood for two centuries suddenly destroyed, your personal fortune spent to fight the war, and your native state occupied by northerners. He was, by the way, the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, but Basil Duke and General John Brown Gordon of Georgia were the driving force behind the founding and the racist nature of the organization. As a side note, a statue of John B. Gordon, another exceptional general, stands on the grounds of the Georgia statehouse with his sword pointing across the street at Georgia State University, the most racially diverse college in the States. I would agree with moving that as it could be a constant reminder of our terrible, racist past.
Forrest left the Klan and called it dishonorable when the night riding raids began against black folks. He even told several Klan members that black men were now free and that white southerners would have to learn to live with them.
My point with this post is that as a historian I get really tired of the trite usage of historical figures by people who know virtually nothing about history. As a southerner, I’m damn proud of Martin Luther King, a fellow southerner, and Fannie Lou Hamer and all of those who WON their full freedom during the Civil Rights Movement. But I’m also proud of those starving, shoeless boys who fought one of the greatest lopsided wars in history, despite the terrible cause. Most southern boys fought to keep an invader off their soil
And I’m glad they lost so that black folks could begin the ongoing process of winning their freedom.
By her, I meant Tinker, not the glorious Aunt B.
Well …. There was surely more to Forrest than his founding the Klan. I’m not a military historian, but I understand that he is a very important figure in the development of certain military tactics. That means that his tactics ought to be studied, and, where appropriate, used.* But that can, and ought to, be separated from his involvement with the Klan, and I don’t for a moment think that “anyone” in a defeated territory ought to be excused for terrorizing those even less powerful than themselves i order to keep them from taking up their (equal) rights.
*BTW, Rommel “refused to kill Jews” only if that means “refused to kill Jews outright.” He had no problem with sending Allied Jewish POWs to concentration camps where a large number of them were starved to death. But he certainly was more fastidious than Forrest.
Casey,
I agree that within the context of the times the Klan as a civilian vigilante group might have been necessary, but the ways that it has been twisted and changed over time overshadow its beginnings.
Its use of hate, racism, jingoism and ignorance against various groups(often to serve personal agendas) since the post civil-war days have moved it into a whole other category. I can’t imagine a situation where their political endorsement would ever be a positive thing.
I don’t debate the value or history of Nathan B. Forrest as a figure, but unfortunately he has been co-opted as symbol in ways he probably didn’t plan for.
BTW, Rommel “refused to kill Jews” only if that means “refused to kill Jews outright.” He had no problem with sending Allied Jewish POWs to concentration camps where a large number of them were starved to death. But he certainly was more fastidious than Forrest.
Actually, that isn’t true. In fact, he refused to kill captured Free-French troops and was praised by Jewish leaders in North Africa for refusing to follow orders to deport Jews. What happened to Allied POWs after they were processed was beyond his power.
And Forrest’s racism disgusts me as well. The best way to tear down my argument would be to point out the Fort Pillow massacre. He claimed that his “boys” lost control and shot black soldiers for better than an hour before he could regain control of them. But Forrest was a frightening man who could have regained their control.
I hope nobody thinks I’m defending Forrest’s racism or the Klan. I just despise the idea that the South must surrender it’s military history. I also agree that Forrest has been co-opted by the White Supremacist movement. My Master degree is in American Race Relations. I’m disgusted with the overt racism of groups such as the League of the South that are becoming mainstream.
Rommel didn’t harm Jewish civilians (or any civilians, as far as anything I have ever heard — he was absolutely blameless in that regard) in North Africa, but his troops certainly turned in Jewish POWs for ’special treatment’ in France after Normandy.
You are very clearly not defending Forrest’s racism. I just think that saying “anyone in that situation at that time would have done exactly as he did” is off base. Plenty of people in his exact situation at that time didn’t do those things. Since you have used the Rommel analogy, let’s point out that no German military leaders formed paramilitary groups to attack Jews returning home after April, 1945.
NM,
First, I hope folks know my main objection is the ideological attack on Cohen becuase he help fund the Forrest statue. If he really did do that.
Well said. Most Confederate soldiers accepted defeat and went home. But the 12 years after the Civil War were, in fact, an continuance of the war. A low-level insurgency took place under “Redeemers” such as Wade Hampton, John Brown Gordon, and many others. Unfortunately they won by 1876 when the North gave up trying to reform the South.
You are correct that no German paramilitary groups formed to specifically attack Jews. But hardline SS men did continue, and still do, the struggle through the Odessa group and others. But they mostly tried to flee Germany rather than fight on. However, the stated goal of Odessa was to continue the Nazi cause and see the Final Solution to fruition. Odessa even arranged for escaped Nazi scientists and intelligence experts to aid Syria and Egypt in the Arab-Israeli Wars.
I accept also your saying that I shouldn’t have said “anyone” would continue the fight and attack black folks. Also, having just been in Normandy two months ago, you are correct about the turning over of Jewish prisoners for special treatment. Rommel was a Nazi party member and his best troops in the Normandy Invasion were Waffen SS.
NM, clearly you’ve read a good bit of military history. I’d love to continue talking with you about it by email so we don’t clog up Aunt B’s blog. cobbcc@roanestate.edu
What Cohen did, if I understand it correctly, was to oppose moving a statue of Forrest out of a public park and renaming the park something other than Forrest Park. I am inclined to think that he was wrong about this. But I doubt he would have paid a penny to fund such a statue (isn’t it older than he is?) or would have supported naming a park after the guy in the first place.
That makes sense. I’m torn on the subject of what to do with Confederate monuments. The war was about the defense of slavery. The Confederate battle flag should certainly be removed from all state flags and should be taken down from all public buildings. Black folks shouldn’t have to look at that symbol on public buildings. But I can’t support Jesse Jackson’s desire to see all Confederate monuments destroyed. I can certainly see why the black students of Georgia State wouldn’t want John Brown Gordon pointing his sword at their school.
I don’t know if you folks in Middle Tennessee know about Mariville High School, one of the best football programs in the state. They are still called the Rebels, but have outlawed Rebel flags at home games. Some fans break the rules and they bring out the flags at road games. One of their rivals, Heritage High School, burns a Confederate flag at their prep rallies before games.
> you would have been just like Forrest had you grown up in West Tennessee in the first half of the 19th century
That’s true. But who we praise today, and who we demonize today, will shape how people are tomorrow. Don’t demonize him because he had a choice to be other than he was; demonize him so that people, especially children, today learn that being that way is not acceptable (even if, perhaps, it was considered acceptable by the majority of the population at one time).
@nm
It’s not just named after forrest, he’s buried there. The proposal wasn’t just to rename the park but to move the remains to another location at taxpayer expense.
Oh, that is a bit different then. Where will it stop? Will Tennessee move Polk off of the statehouse lawn because he defended slavery and invaded Mexico?
We have a racist past and can explain historical nuance to our children. They can be taught to both reject our racist roots and to admire historical figures who had flaws.
What will future generations say about us being such lard asses when 60% of the planet lives on near starvation wages? Or that we buy products everyday produced by slaves, political prisoners, or wage slaves in Asia? Are we so great just because we have sent such practices overseas?
Oh, thanks for the clarification, VE, I wasn’t aware of the part about the body being buried there. I still think I would decide differently than Cohen if it were mine to decide (although I would want the body exhumed, transferred, and reburied with all respect), but I can be much more understanding about not wanting to disturb the grave of even such a person than about a statue alone. And I understand that the city council and mayor (whose decision it was) agreed with Cohen on this, isn’t that right?
First of all, please don’t take the discussion to email. I think it’s interesting and you never know, even when a conversation wanders, what fruitful things might come of it. I mean, it’s fine if you guys would rather talk about it in email. I just hate for you to leave because you don’t think the discussion would be welcome here.
Second, frankly, I have no idea what to do with the likes of Forrest, but to me, holding on to him, for better or for worse, makes a hell of a lot more sense than, say, holding onto the Confederate Battle Flag.
And isn’t that the question? How do you acknowledge the genius of a man on the side of evil? For me, I’m uncomfortable removing most reminders of him (though I will laugh and laugh and laugh when someone finally brings down that monstrosity on I-65), because he did exist and he was a celebrated and important figure in Tennessee and U.S. history, but isn’t it about time that we acknowledge that his story should be a tragic lesson? That even people who are military geniuses can squander their gifts on evil? That they and their whole society can tell themselves stories about who they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing that allow them to continue evil even when it’s staring them right in the face?
It should be a story in self-deception. Not a celebration.
NM, yes, the mayor, who was black (I mean, he is still black, I’m not sure if he’s still mayor) was actually the one who blocked the disinterment and renaming of the park.
Wow Aunt B! You should be a historian. Your comments about talented, and even good folks, fighting in evil causes is spot on. Many of the soldiers who fought for Nazi Germany weren’t Nazis and were far from evil. They were soldiers ordered to fight for their nation in a global war.
The same with Confederates. Robert E. Lee was a strong man of faith who disagreed with slavery. But his comment was: “how can a I draw my sword against Virginia, which is my home?” Patrick Cleburne, an Irish-born Confederate general from Helena, Arkansas, replied to his brother, who lived in Ohio, asking how he could fight for the slavocracy: “These people have welcomed me into their community. They are my friends. I own no slaves and never will, but am with my community through wheel and woe.”
Even with old Forrest, do none of you respect the way he took care of his family at a young age? Or how he overcame a poor start in life that makes overcoming modern poverty look like a cake walk? The northern soldiers and generals who fought him admired him, why must we stop doing so? Or that he sacrificed his own personal fortune to feed, clothe, and arm his soldiers? I would say that he is someone we should be both proud of, but chagrined at the cause our ancestors fought so well for.
My question would be, how many great Americans do we intend to dig up and get rid of? Benjamin Franklin considered ony Anglo-Saxons and Germans to be truly white and deserving of American citizenship, should he be rejected? Woodrow Wilson watched “Birth of a Nation” in the White House and called it “History like lightening, sad but true.” Want to throw the man away who cooperated with labor and gave us workplace regulations, then saw us through World War I? This list could go on for page after page. As John Locke argued so long ago, people are largely a blank slate and are programmed by community and family.
I still stand by a modified version of what NM took offense to: none of you know what you would have done had you lived during Forrest’s time. And we have just as much to be proud of, and ashamed of, in our own time. I doubt that future histortians are going to write up our consumer-driven empire as an enlightened time. Nor is it healthy to attempt to erase history. The Soviets used to do that. When an important person fell out of favor, their pictures and articles about them were cut out of encyclopedias and textbooks. Sometimes, they came back into favor and were pasted back in. Let’s not become that silly, please.
I have no beef with Lee not drawing his sword against Virginia. His drawing his sword against the United States of America, which he had sworn an oath to defend, was treasonous. He could stood at home.
But I don’t get the way that some people think that we have to either condemn or celebrate our history and the figures in it, as if there were no such thing as nuance. Is there a person in this world who is all bad or all good? Who has never done anything wrong? Who has never done anything right? Can’t we say, “look at the practical basis for a working state Franklin helped to put together, and isn’t it a shame that he wasn’t free of ethnic bigotry”? Or “how shameful that Lee was a traitor, but at least he freed some of his slaves when none of his neighbors would have done such a thing”? Or “wow, Steve Cohen is an admirable progressive, but he needs to be more sensitive to his constituents’ feelings about Forrest”?
NM, I think we agree.
Altough, Lee was not a traitor in the modern sense. Americans at that point held loyalty to state first. And he resigned from the U.S. military before joining the Confederate. Maybe a slight difference, but even the majority of his enemies didn’t view him as and traitor.
Would you expect him to watch Union armies march across Virginia and just ignore it?
I had a nice long response all written and then it got et by my keyboard. I’m taking this as a sign, and won’t try to recreate it. I’ll just say that if Lee felt that strongly about VA he shouldn’t have been taking oaths to protect another state (the US).
I will also say that if the army men involved had thought more about right and wrong and less about the tragic romance of their situation, in that awful mid-19th century way, the whole country might have been better off. Really, it’s as if they thought they were Siegfried or something. Although I suppose that asking them to be the only Victorians who didn’t try to escape into mushy romanticism is a bit unfair.
NM,
Buddy, you are projecting the way we think now back to then. Men such as Lee had to make an agonizing decision. Some of them chose the other path and fought for the Union. Surprisingly, a few northerners, such as John Pemberton even fought for the south. But the decision was a difficult one: between local community and the nation. Most chose the local community. If the rest of the nation invaded my native North Carolina, I’d fight for the Old North State still today. It is my home and has been the home of my family for 200 years.
Once again, you don’t know what it would have been like to make that decision. And you are showing a modern sense of federalism that Americans didn’t develop until after the Civil War.
I do take your point about the Victorian love of romanticized war that the South so bought into.
And I know the feeling about losing a post. My original post on Forrest was lost like that and I almost didn’t send another. I also wish someone would take up my challenge of explaining to me what right we as modern Americans have to criticize anyone. We are not morally superior to our southern ancestors. The slaves are just on other continents now. It is sort of like the British factory-owning abolitionists who decried the evils of slavery while processing tons of southern cotton in their textile mills.
The sad irony is that the roots of American and European industrialism were those of cotton plants planted by enslaved black hands in southern soil. The same is true of everyone of us who shop at The Gap, Old Navy, Polo, etc. Those companies use coerced labor and we contribute to it.
Well, I’m all for condemning if it means that at least we know. My biggest fear is that we’re having a discussion 95% of the population of the United States wouldn’t get and wouldn’t be bothered to get. I mean, I hate to tell the fine people of Memphis, but I’m willing to lay good money down that a majority of kids who graduate from Memphis high schools have no idea who Forrest is and therefore don’t give a shit one way or another that the park is named after him nor that he’s buried there.
If having him there spurs them to learn about him enough to decide if they’re pissed off, I’m tickled.
I strongly disagree with the concept that only a perfect person or society can criticize others. I also don’t think that it’s useless to use current standards to evaluate past events, even though for full understanding we must use both past and present standards. Otherwise, why look at the past? All you get is, gee, they did what they did and it has nothing to do with us.
Oh, shoot, yes, thanks NM, I forgot to say that I agree completely with you. Of course we should pass judgment on the past and people’s actions. Yes, they were different than us, and yes, times were different. But they aren’t alien to us. They are us.
I never said anything about a society needing to be perfect to criticize others. What I pointed out is that our society, and you by participating in it, still do the same things that southerners did, we just don’t see it everyday because it is on other continents. Hell, it isn’t even always on other continents: the UN asserts that there are around 250,000 immigrant slaves in the U.S. right now. A historian uses history to point out continuing flaws and that sure is a plank sticking out of our collective eyes.
And a historian must attempt, as much as it is possible, to turn off our own beliefs when evaluating past events and peoples. We do judge, however, but words such as traitor, evil, vile, etc. cloud judgement. Certainly, many folks, especially in East Tennessee and North Alabama decided against supporting the Confederacy and even fought against it. My own hillbilly family decided to bushwhack both sides for profit. We were probably the closest thing to real traitors in that war.
NM, I just think you are making it too simple: Lee fought for the Confederacy, Lee bad man. That is just not anywhere near approaching the nuance of the choices the man faced and all people during that war faced. I hope you don’t think I’m talking down to you. I’ve enjoyed this discussion and respect what you and Aunt B have said.
Grant pretty much said it best as he watched Lee’s beaten army surrender: “Never in history has a noble people fought so well and so hard for such a disgusting cause.” That expresses exactly what I think about the South during that terrible war: as a collective group they were wrong, but individuals had to make the devestasting choice of loyalty to folk and place or nation. I pray we never have to make the same choice.
By the way, I may be a bit vested in this as I’m completing my first novel. An attempt at myth making more than history titled “Noble Son of Arkansas.” It is the first in a series of three books about the last year of the war seen through the eyes of Patrick Cleburne. The man was a man of conviction who fought to defend his community and traitor simply does not fit him.
A modern example would be: are the insurgents in Iraq traitors for fighting against the elected government, or Patriots who can’t stand to see their country occupied? Back to our past, were our Founding Fathers traitors, as the Brits saw them, or Patriots? And what of the 1/3 of Americans who remained loyal and fought for the King, where they Patriots or traitors? All in the perspective isn’t it?
Sorry the post is so long. It just that this is the first true discussion worth having I’ve had in my one year of blogging. NM and Aunt B we probably won’t ever agree on this topic, but I have seriously enjoyed debating with the two of you. Again, sorry I’m so long winded. Just a fun escape from the damned book for a day.
Please, no apologies. I’m lucky in that way, to have readers who really know their shit, who have deeply held beliefs and the chops to back up their opinions. Smart, smart folks.
And these discussions are interesting because they’re hard, because it’s not just about people in the past, but about people’s families and how we feel about being Americans and belonging and such. And people were complex (are complex) and made hard choices that we still have to live with.
And I think it’s important to remember that many people in the whole country were caught up in a kind of mass delusion. Isn’t that the whole bitter joke at the heart of Huck Finn? That, out of all the people Huck meets in that story, there’s only, out of the whole lot of them, one actual man (though Twain is not so foolish as to not also poke fun at him) and that man was legally not a man.
That you could look out across a field of people and not only not recognize them as human but in many cases refuse to recognize them as kin but as property to be owned takes a kind of willful delusion.
And yes, we may have similar willful delusions now, but it’s hard to think of another one that still engenders such feelings of loyalty in people.
It’s both important to continue to clear away that delusion and to keep in mind how easy it is to succumb to something similar ourselves.
Very well said. My parting question, which has no answer, is: I wonder if Robert E. Lee would have made the same choice if he could have seen the ensuing hundred years of poverty, ignorance, subjegation by northern industry, and race hatred that the South endured afte defeat in 1865? If you’ve never read it, C.V. Woodward’s “Burden of Southern History” brilliantly explains those hundred baleful years.
Alright, I better get back to writing before Cleburne’s ghost comes back and kicks may ass for shirking.
NM, I just think you are making it too simple: Lee fought for the Confederacy, Lee bad man.
But that isn’t remotely like anything I’ve said here.
Then I apologize for misunderstanding you.
Golly, Casey, I even used him as an example of how we must be nuanced about the past. I wrote: Can’t we say,… “how shameful that Lee was a traitor, but at least he freed some of his slaves when none of his neighbors would have done such a thing”
I do think that any military man, and any 19th-century man, would have regarded oath-breaking as treasonous, regardless of whether they were federalists in the modern sense. I know that most of Lee’s neighbors were slaveowners who did not free any of their slaves. I do think that a lot of the Civil War officer corps (on both sides) acted on the basis of emotions more suitable to the Neibelungenlied than to what was actually happening. How in the world is that equivalent to “Lee bad man”?
NM,
Didn’t I apologize? And, no, he didn’t break an oath. Resigned from the U.S. military, thus disolving his allegiance to the United States. That was the official method that all southern military officers switched allegiance from teh U.S. to the C.S. military. It was regarded as legal by Winfield Scott who accepted Lee’s resignation personally.
Thus, your calling him a traitor, in my opinion had no validity. Again, he made what he thought was the moral decision to defend his home state. Calling someone a TRAITOR is a pretty darn harsh statement.
Yes, you apologized. You also said that you didn’t understand what I had meant, so I was trying to clarify it. I’m not to drag the discussion out further than you want to keep it going. Clearly, you and I don’t agree in our evaluation of some of Lee’s decisions. Parts of my assessment of Lee are harsh; parts are complimentary. That’s ambiguity.
Well said. I hope we continue to talk with each other and Aun B. A good talk.
Yes, indeed. Made me think.