[ The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan
at the US military academy made headlines. One member of the
commission which recommended its removal is a historian of the US army
and the lost cause myth.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘CONFEDERATES WERE TRAITORS’: TY SEIDULE ON WEST POINT, RACE AND
AMERICAN HISTORY  
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Martin Pengelly
September 5, 2022
The Guardian
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_ The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan at
the US military academy made headlines. One member of the commission
which recommended its removal is a historian of the US army and the
lost cause myth. _

Col. Ty Seidule, credit: Stars and Stripes

 

The discovery of a plaque showing a member of the Ku Klux Klan at the
US military academy made headlines. One member of the commission which
recommended its removal is a historian of the US army and the lost
cause myth

 

In a 36-year army career, Ty Seidule served in the US, Germany, Italy,
Kenya, Kosovo, Macedonia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He retired a
brigadier general.

An emeritus West Point history professor, he now teaches at Hamilton
College
[[link removed]].
His online video, Was the Civil War About Slavery?
[[link removed]], has been viewed
millions of times, and in 2021 he published a well-received
[[link removed]] book,
Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the
Lost Cause.
 

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the
Lost Cause
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By Ty Seidule

St Martin’s Press / Macmillan Publishers; 304 pages

January 26, 2021

Hardcover:  $27.99

ISBN:  9781250239266

 

St Martin’s Press / Macmillan Publishers
Outside academia, Seidule is a member of the Naming Commission
[[link removed]], a body set up in the aftermath
of the police murder of George Floyd and the protests for racial
justice it inspired, tasked with recommending changes to military
memorials to Confederates who fought in the civil war.

Asked how the US military
[[link removed]] came to name bases,
barracks, roads and other assets after soldiers who fought to secede
from the union and keep Black people enslaved, Seidule said: “The
first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers
saw the Confederates as traitors.

“That’s not a presentist
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That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced
his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as
[Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said
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did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.

“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first
memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So,
why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West
Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point
reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to
integration.”

Seidule rejects the notion that memorials to Lee and other
Confederates – PGT Beauregard, a West Point superintendent fired for
sedition, William Hardee, a commandant who fought in the west –
might be claimed as symbols of reconciliation.

“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people,
at the expense of Black people.

“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United
States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 …
reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people
will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a
reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.”

Last week, the Naming Commission made headlines
[[link removed]] when
it highlighted a bronze at the United States Military Academy which
depicts a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

A detail from the lower left-hand corner of a panel at West Point
shows an armed man in a hood, with Ku Klux Klan written below.
(Photograph: AP  //  The Guardian)
Seidule told the New York Times
[[link removed]] that
though the Klan bronze fell outside the remit of the commission –
the racist terror group was founded after the defeat of the south –
the panel chose to highlight it “because we thought it was wrong”.

The commission has issued reports concerning military bases
[[link removed]] and
the military and naval academies
[[link removed]].
It will present its final report in October. Speaking to the Guardian,
Seidule cited such ongoing work as reason not to discuss the Klan
plaque further. But West Point did so on its Facebook page
[[link removed]].

It said: “There is a triptych (three bronze panels) at one of the
entrances of Bartlett Hall [the science centre] that depicts the
history of the United States. The artwork was dedicated on 3 June 1965
… As part of the middle panel titled ‘One Nation, Under God,
Indivisible’, there is a small section that shows a Ku Klux Klan
member.

“The artist, Laura Gardin Fraser
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wanted to create art that depicted ‘historical incidents or
persons’ that [documented] both tragedy and triumph in our
nation’s history.”

Noting that the work was dedicated to graduates who served in the
second world war and the Korean war, West Point added: “The academy
strives to graduate diverse leaders of character for our nation.”

Lee did not lead the Confederacy. Its president was Jefferson Davis, a
former secretary of war and senator from Mississippi. But Lee, who
died in 1870, became the most-memorialised Confederate.

Asked why, Seidule said: “If you think of Confederate monuments, of
the burning of books which the United Daughters of the Confederacy did
in the early part of the 20th century, to ensure that textbooks said
the right thing, really it’s that every religion needs its God. And
in a way, that’s what Lee became.”

Today, conservatives are banning books
[[link removed]] in
attempts to control teaching of history, race, sexuality and other
culture-war issues..

Seidule concentrates on his historical work. Lee, he said, was in part
idealised for lack of other options. James Longstreet enjoyed
battlefield victories but after the war “fought for biracial
democracy in New Orleans. So you can’t use him.

“While Lee ended up losing hugely, completely defeated, his armies
destroyed, he was successful for a time before that. And so he was
seen by the white south as their best general, as their ideal. And by
the 1930s, he comes to represent something not just in the south, but
among white Americans in general.”
 

Beyond West Point, the Confederate battle flag has become a symbol of
rebellion, reaction and racism more potent than any statue or
building. On 6 January 2021 it even flew in the halls of Congress,
when Trump supporters attacked.

Again, Seidule rejects any notion that use of the flag might in any
way be excused.

“We have to remember that it really didn’t mean that much
different then than it does now. In 1863 it represented the Army of
Northern Virginia, which was fighting to create a slave republic. Now,
some people say it reflects rebellion. But remember, this was
rebellion to create a slave republic. And so, to me, it is a symbol of
all that America is not.

A Capitol rioter stands outside the Senate chamber. 
“It’s a symbol of insurrection, it’s a symbol of somebody that
would not take the results of a democratic election. I grew up with
it, my dad had Confederate flags over the mantle. I know how powerful
these symbols are.

“One thing we often do with the civil war as historians is we let
the smell of gunpowder seduce us into thinking about the war as
American football, [about the] Xs and Os of military history, without
understanding the purpose. That’s the thing I always come back to:
why this cruel war?”

Seidule’s next book will be about events at West Point towards the
end of another cruel war: Vietnam. In 1971, Richard Nixon decided he
wanted to oversee “a moral rebirth” of an army in disarray.

“OK,” Seidule says, “that’s great. But the next thing he does
is go to Trophy Point”, the focal point of the West Point campus,
high over the Hudson river. “If you’ve seen Battle Monument, you
know it says on there, ‘the War of the Rebellion’. Nixon says,
‘Where’s the Confederate monument?’ So he orders the
superintendent to put a Confederate monument on Trophy Point.

“And the Black cadets find out. And they nearly mutiny and they
write a manifesto based on the Attica uprising” – at a New York
prison in 1971
[[link removed]] –
“and [eventually] just so many things change.

“They put on a concert to raise money for sickle cell anemia
research, featuring Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, up at Michie
Stadium”, the home of Army football. “They bring Louis Farrakhan
to talk. They institute remarkable change, which I’m arguing comes
from one of the most successful protest movements in American military
history that nobody knows about, and eventually it kills the
Confederate monument.

“So that’s the book I’m writing now.”

_Robert E Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the
Lost Cause is published in the US
[[link removed]] by
St Martin’s Press
[[link removed]]_

_[Martin Pengelly is breaking news editor for Guardian US. Twitter
@MartinPengelly. Click here
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for Martin's public key]_
 

* Confederacy
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* slavery
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* Insurrection
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* traitors
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* Capitol coup
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* Civil War
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* Ku Klux Klan
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* KKK
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* Nazis
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* Naming Commission
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* Racism
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* white supremacy
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* South
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* Critical Race Theory
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* CRT
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* U.S. history
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* Robert E. Lee
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* Lost Cause
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