On the Confederacy, Civil Rights, and Donald Trump

As a boy growing up in Chicago, I fell in love with the Confederacy. It seems strange now. I was living in the state of Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln." The "Great Emancipator" was also one of my heroes. 

How could I venerate the Confederacy? I saw little lead Civil War soldiers in a toy shop. I bought boxes of Confederate ones because I liked their uniforms better than the Union ones. 

They were more colorful, more “romantic” than the dull dark blue Yankee uniforms. Ironically, toy soldiers of both sides in the war were made in the UK by a company called Britains. [Image: Confederate Soldiers by Britains.] My soldiers had red caps and a cannon. These look like plastic. Mine were lead, but lead is toxic, thus it isn't used any longer. Playing with lead toy soldiers may explain my brainless drivel.

I thought it was sad that such gallant men had lost the Civil War. The dashing General Robert E. Lee should have had the ultimate victory. He would have, I concluded, if those nasty Union Generals Grant and Sherman hadn't played dirty by outnumbering him. [Below: Lee with Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson.]

That is the level of thinking that still exists in too many parts of America today, though with less innocence than my thinking at the time. I was an ignorant little boy, with malice toward none except bullies. I knew nothing about the reality of slavery, the cancer of racism, or the true causes of the war.

Later I learned about those realities, and the viciously racist society that followed so-called emancipation. I learned that the greatest tragedy of the Civil War was not that the wrong side won, but that the victors did not go nearly far enough to ensure equality and justice. 

The attempted "Reconstruction" of the former Confederate states (1867-1876) was abandoned too early, leaving southern white elites in firm control. They passed and enforced rigid segregationist laws, violating the human rights of the emancipated. For decades, most people in other states looked the other way or were openly sympathetic. Many took part in bloody race riots, especially in the 1920s, in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Tulsa.

Between Reconstruction and the 1960s racist and racialist ideas flourished in the USA, with little if any check from government. Lynchings became common events, with the victims numbered in the thousands. 

Many films and stories, such as Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, romanticized the “Old Plantation South,” glorified “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, and vilified or infantilized black people. The phrase "Moonlight and Magnolias" summed up this misplaced nostalgia. The reality featured the Ku Klux Klan, cross burnings, mob lynchings, and miscegenation laws.

Outside the South, de facto segregation was a fact of life. Instead of being written into law, it was enforced by isolating blacks in ghettoes through housing red lines, which ensured they would go to segregated schools by the "accident" of where they lived. 

In the 1940s, Americans of all racial and ethnic makeups fought a war against fascism and racism abroad, but nothing much changed at home, at least right away. 

Yet some minds were changing. Significant institutional and legal change, accompanied by many a tragedy, finally came with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Progress was uneven, but progress there was.

Unfortunately, much of that progress was rolled back during Donald Trump’s neo-fascist presidency, which brought violent racism once again out of the American closet. Under Trump, it began to seem as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. 

Trump's defeat in 2020 seemed to herald the Confederacy's ultimate fall from grace. If Trump should win the current (2024) election, the ideology underlying the Confederacy may rise again worse than before, linked with fascism and authoritariamism. This election is that important.