In the film’s most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the foreigner into becoming one of those bloodiest, ax-wielding forest supermen so beloved in Nazi folk-iconography … .
The black population of South Carolina—where the film is set—is basically depicted as happy loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely) freemen.26
The church burning, writes Foreman, replicates the Nazi atrocity in the French village of Oradour sur Glane in June 1944. “German director Roland Emmerich” may just have “a subconscious agenda.”27 By shifting Oradour to South Carolina, he and screenwriter Robert Rodat “have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour … implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis … .”28 This is the type of film, wrote Foreman, that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used in “efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.”29
“Lighten up, man!” one is tempted to say. Unfortunately, at work here is a mind deeply conditioned and steeped in antihistory. An affecting portrayal of a father and seven loving and dutiful children represents the “cult of the family.” Their heroic fight together to overthrow British rule and win America’s freedom is “fascist.” Martin’s thirteen- and ten-year-old sons are like “Werewolf boy soldiers” of the Reich, because they are “tow-headed” and “Aryan-looking.”30 To Foreman, the fascists are everywhere.
No more than Spike Lee can Foreman tolerate a depiction of slaves or freedmen as proud American soldiers and patriots. Yet, this is but a cinematic portrayal of a forgotten slice of our history. Free Negroes did soldier and fight in the Revolution, under Jackson at New Orleans, and for the Union, and for the Confederacy under Bedford Forrest. The over-the-top reaction to Gibson’s Patriot testifies to how our cultural elites have indoctrinated our newest tribe of scribblers in an almost reflexive hatred of America’s past and of the men we once revered as patriot-fathers.
TO OUR NEW cultural elite, America’s Civil War was a revolt of slave owners and traitors to destroy the Union to preserve their odious institution, and the Lost Cause was ignoble and dishonorable. Hence, the Confederate flag should be as repulsive as a Nazi swastika, and only white racists and the morally obtuse would defend that bloody banner. As for Lee and Jackson, they led hundreds of thousands to their deaths in an evil cause, and if the NAACP demands we rid the public square of all plaques, statues, or flags of the Confederacy, they are not only within their rights, they are morally right.
Not long ago, stories of the pioneers, soldiers, settlers, and cowboys who “won the West” and tamed a continent in an historic struggle against an unforgiving nature, outlaws, and Indians were the stuff of books, films, and TV shows that enthralled not only Americans, but the rest of the world as well. But the revisionists have done their work. No film today would dare paint Indians as backward, capricious, or cruel. Rather, as in Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, Indians are seen as early environmentalists who cherished, nurtured, and protected the land and wildlife they depended on. These peaceful, trusting people were cheated, murdered, and massacred by amoral white men who butchered their way across the plains, slaughtering the buffalo and corrupting the Indians they did not wantonly kill. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry are now the role models for the Einsatzgruppen.
ONLY YESTERDAY
To see how America’s heroes of old have been cast out of the Pantheon by the Taliban of Modernity, consider:
• Washington’s Birthday, once a national holiday for the Father of Our Country, a soldier and statesman without equal in American history, greatest man of the eighteenth century, has been replaced by “Presidents’ Day,” when we can all recall the greatness of Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, and William Jefferson Clinton.
• The New Orleans School Board has taken Washington’s name off an elementary school. Its new policy prohibits honoring “former slave owners or others who did not respect opportunity for all.”31 That rules out Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Taylor, and Grant, as well as Clay, Calhoun, and Robert E. Lee.
Should African Americans, tens of thousands of whom carry these great names, go to court to get them changed? Is it Andrew Jackson, the Indian killer, or Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate legend, whose name Jesse Jackson proudly carries?
• Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was last year declared persona non grata in New Jersey. The legislature twice defeated a bill that would have required public school students to recite in class each day a brief passage from the Declaration. Every Democrat in the statehouse voted “no” on the Declaration, which was denounced as “anti-women, anti-black and too pro-God.”32 State senator Wayne Bryant, an African American, led the fight to spare students from the indignity of having to recite Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” Bryant berated the bill’s sponsor: “You have nerve to ask my grandchildren to recite the Declaration. How dare you? You are now on notice that this is offensive to my community.”33
• Andrew Jackson, who seized Florida from Spain for the United States, is the target of an American Indian Movement campaign. Calling Jackson a “genocidal maniac” who served as a “Hitler prototype,” AIM wants to prevent America’s seventh president from being honored in the annual Springtime Tallahassee parade.34
“Old Hickory” has trouble in North Carolina, too. There, a self-described “vice chief” of the Tuscaroras, Robert Chavis, wants U.S. 74, now Andrew Jackson Highway, to be renamed American Indian Highway. “Andrew Jackson is no hero to us. He’s like Hitler. He’s a killer,” says Chavis, who claims to have four thousand signatures on a petition to effect the name change.35
As the face of the U.S. twenty-dollar bill is now graced by a portrait of “King Andrew,” who was a slave owner, an Indian fighter, and the president who signed the law that moved the Cherokees out of Georgia and the Carolinas to Oklahoma, this could get interesting.
• Custer National Battlefield has lately been renamed Little Big Horn National Battlefield, as the Indians consider the massacre of Custer’s entire command a great victory. Alongside the small obelisk that now honors the American dead of the Seventh Cavalry will rise a monument to the Indians who killed and scalped them and mutilated their bodies.36
• Militant Indians have demanded that all sports teams drop Indian names. In 2001, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission agreed, arguing that the collegiate use of Indian team names and mascots is “disrespectful and offensive” and creates a “racially hostile educational environment.”37 We were not told when exactly it became so. But with political correctness now the prevailing orthodoxy on campuses, the campaign is succeeding. The Dartmouth Indians are now Big Green, the Stanford Indians are now Cardinals, and St. John’s University’s Redmen are now the Red Storm. North Dakota, however, decided to retain “Fighting Sioux” after an alumnus threatened to withdraw his 100-million-dollar pledge if the name was changed.
The Washington Redskins and Atlanta Braves have also balked, as Braves’s fans continue to use their famed “tomahawk chop,” though it is said to be insulting to the inventors of the tomahawk. The Portland Oregonian has adopted a policy of refusing to mention team names that include the words indians, braves, redmen, redskins, or chiefs.38
• In San Jose, California, Indian and Hispanic rage prevented a statue of Thomas Fallon, the American adventurer who captured the town in the Mexican War and became its mayor, from being placed in a public park. “The statue is an insult to our ancestors, people who were lynched here,” said Pascual Mendevil of Pueblo Unido, “It’s like a red flag to racists out there that it’s open season on Mexicans.”39 San Jose, however, does boast a new statue of Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent god of the Aztecs, whose empire never came close to reaching San Jose.
Perhaps Mexicans and Indians should reconsider Quetzalcoatl. The Aztec emperor Montezuma II was a deeply superstitious fellow, terrified that Quetzalcoatl would return from the east
to claim his throne. When his emissaries reported that Cortes and his bearded white men were ashore at Veracruz, the fearless Montezuma and his court went into a panic.
• In St. Augustine, Florida, oldest city in the United States, founded by Columbus’s lieutenant Ponce de Leon, removal of Ponce’s bayfront statue is being demanded by American Indians. The Spanish explorer, mortally wounded by an arrow in his search for the Fountain of Youth, is said by the Indians to have been a “genocidal maniac.”40
• In Southampton, Long Island, the local Anti-Bias Task Force is demanding the scrapping of the town’s seventy-year-old official seal, a medallion featuring a white man in Pilgrim dress and an Indian in a loincloth. The seal reads, “First English Settlement in the State of New York,” and has in its background a square-rigger and the rock called Conscience Point, where the first colonists, from Lynn, Massachusetts, landed in 1640. The seal is on road signs and all town documents.
“The seal represents one race, one gender and one part of history,” protests task force ex-chair Susana Powell. “History did not start in 1640. Native Americans were here long before that.”41 Adds the Anti-Bias Task Force chairman Robert Zeller, the seal is inaccurate. “They didn’t wear loincloths here the year round, it was too cold.”42 Perhaps the seal can be altered to put the Shinnecock Indian into something nice from L. L. Bean.
BUT IT IS the South and anything associated with the Lost Cause that is today’s inflamed front of the culture war. In 1898, President McKinley, a veteran of Antietam, could go to Atlanta, stand for the playing of “Dixie,” wave his hat to his old enemies, and recommend the preservation of Confederate graves—a splendid gesture that helped heal a country about to go to war with Spain. Today, McKinley would be charged with giving moral sanction to a racist cause. One hundred years after McKinley’s beau geste, America’s cultural elite is almost slavishly on the side of those who wish to dishonor every banner and disgrace every leader associated with the Confederate States of America.
• In Richmond, which was defended for four years by his Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s portrait was ordered removed from a display of famous Virginians, and the painting was then desecrated by vandals.43 On Monument Avenue, where statues of the four great sons of the Confederacy stand—Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and Davis—a statue of black tennis star Arthur Ashe stands in their midst, put there to disrupt and contradict the symbolism. Lee-Jackson Day has been severed from Martin Luther King Day, and many believe it will soon be terminated in Virginia, where both Confederate heroes lie buried.
• After a decade-long boycott led by the NAACP, the Confederate battle flag was ordered down from the South Carolina capitol, which still bears the scars of the shelling by Sherman’s army, which burned Columbia to the ground. South Carolinians wanted to keep the flag where it had flown since 1962, after President Eisenhower urged Americans to memorialize the centennial of the war. But what South Carolina wanted did not matter. Conventions were canceled. Entertainers and athletes threatened not to appear in the state. The legislature capitulated, and the flag came down, moved to a battle monument on the capitol grounds. But that did not satisfy the NAACP. The boycott continues until the flag disappears.
• Georgia, threatened with a boycott, abolished its state flag, which had a replica of the Confederate battle flag, prompting ex-Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson to thank the governor, “who fought to get rid of the swastika.”44
• In Texas, on the orders of Gov. George W. Bush, two plaques to Confederate war dead, paid for from a Confederate widows’ fund, were removed from the state Supreme Court building.45
• In Florida, on February 2, 2001, Gov. Jeb Bush removed the Confederate battle flag from atop the state capitol in Tallahassee, where it had flown since 1978.46
• In Mississippi, students at Ole Miss have been forbidden by court order from waving tiny battle flags in the stadium. Boycotts of the state were threatened if Mississippi’s flag was not altered to remove the replica of the battle flag. But when the issue was put to a statewide vote, in April 2001, the old flag won by two to one.47 It seems that Southern politicians of both parties, to pacify minorities and placate a national cultural elite, are ignoring the will of the people they are elected to represent.
• In Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, there is a stone memorial to the freedman Hayward Shepherd, the baggagemaster who was the first man killed in John Brown’s terrorist raid on the federal arsenal, which was crushed by marines led by Bvt. Col. Robert E. Lee and Lt. J. E. B. Stuart.48 The memorial, near the corner of Potomac and Shenandoah, was put there in 1931 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. An inscription states that Hayward Shepherd exemplified “the character and faithfulness of thousands of Negroes who, under so many temptations throughout subsequent years of war, so conducted themselves that no stain was left upon a record which is the peculiar heritage of the American people and an everlasting tribute to the best of both races.” While the stone has been covered for years, repeated efforts to have it removed have thus far failed.
• At Point Lookout Cemetery in southern Maryland, a Memorial Day tradition of putting tiny Confederate flags on the graves of the four thousand Southern soldiers who died in the Union prison there was ended by the Department of Veterans Affairs.49 In 1997, Maryland ordered a recall of the license plates issued to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which carried a tiny image of the battle flag. The SCV was the only one of 215 nonprofit organizations to have its plates rejected.50
• At Antietam, a campaign is underway to prevent the erection, even on private property, of any statues to the Confederate commanders at that bloodiest of battles on American soil. Of 104 statues there now, only 4 honor Southerners.51
• In Selma, the Alabama town defended by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a statue to the Civil War legend has been repeatedly trashed. The city council wants it down. Memphis’s City Council has proposed turning the city’s Confederate Memorial Park, which also features a statue of Forest, into a memorial park for cancer victims.52
Forrest was the greatest cavalry commander America has ever produced, and though a slave trader before the war who “embraced the Klan as a weapon in a savage fight for individual and sectional survival,” Forrest “thrust [the Klan] away soon after he saw that it injured, instead of aided, the best interests of the South and the nation.”53 Following a lynching in 1874 in Trenton, Tennessee, General Forrest threatened to “exterminate the killers.”54 By 1875, he was urging that blacks be “allowed entry into the practice of law and anywhere else they were capable of going. Even the Great Emancipator, another Southerner born in a log cabin, never said that … .”55 As columnist Walter Williams writes, Forrest always praised the bravery of the black soldiers who served in his command: “[T]hese boys stayed with me and better Confederates did not live.”56 But America is not as big a country today as the America that paid homage to Bedford Forrest as a peerless fighting man.
• “Gilmore Surrenders Virginia’s Heritage” ran the headline over the front page story in the Washington Times.57 Gov. James S. Gilmore III, President Bush’s choice as national chairman of the Republican party, had just abolished Confederate History Month after the NAACP threatened a boycott of Virginia if the governor did not terminate the tradition.
“Va. Scraps Tribute to Confederacy” was the Washington Post page one headline.58 “Striking at a core belief of the Confederate remembrance groups,” wrote the Post reporter, “Gilmore expanded the resolution to say for the first time, ‘that had there been no slavery there would have been no war.’”59 Heritage groups argue that Lincoln’s refusal to let South Carolina., Georgia, and the Gulf states depart in peace brought on the war.
The Post story quoted only one critic of Gilmore and was heavily weighted with comments supporting an end to Confederate History Month. With this decision, the Post suggested, Gilmore’s national career was now on an upward trajectory:
Black leaders generally hailed Gilmore’s revised proclamation as a posit
ive step that could be a political boost to the white conservative Republican who … may have his eye on a Senate seat … .
Tony-Michelle Travis, an African American who teaches government at George Mason University, said any aspirations for federal office that Gilmore may have could be bolstered by what she called “his [the governor’s] effort to reach out.”60
• “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” is no longer Virginia’s state song. It was removed because it contains the phrases “darkey’s heart” and “old massa,” though it was written in 1875 by the black composer James Bland, a New Yorker, who also wrote “Oh Dem Golden Slippers.”61
• Book-banning has begun. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from which “all modern American literature” proceeds, as Hemingway said, has been removed from school reading lists across America. Twain’s great satirical attack on slavery, hypocrisy, and prejudice in antebellum America has as its central black character the slave Jim, a man of great dignity and moral courage. But to black educator John Wallace, who has made a career attacking it, Huckleberry Finn is the “most grotesque example of racist trash ever given our children to read … . Any teacher caught trying to use that piece of trash with our children should be fired on the spot, for he or she is either racist, insensitive, naive, incompetent, or all of the above.”62
Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Lionel Thrilling thought Huckleberry Finn an American classic, but who are they to contradict John Wallace?
Not far down the target list is Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the segregated South before World War II, which inspired the film of the same name that gave Gregory Peck his finest role as the lawyer Atticus Finch. To those who detest the book, To Kill a Mockingbird represents “institutionalized racism.”63
The Death of the West Page 17
