{"id":10598,"date":"2017-09-26T07:48:44","date_gmt":"2017-09-26T14:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10598"},"modified":"2017-09-26T07:49:37","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T14:49:37","slug":"the-strange-case-of-confederate-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-strange-case-of-confederate-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Case of Confederate Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson
\nNational Review<\/em><\/p>\n

Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much.<\/p>\n

How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery?<\/p>\n

To use a shopworn phrase, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good Ol\u2019 Rebels<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well before the end of Jim Crow, post-war leftist Hollywood still largely continued its soft mythologies of the Confederate Lost Cause. Perhaps the cinematic romance arose because of the lucrative fumes of earlier Gone with the Wind fantasies, which themselves might\u2019ve come from an understandable desire to play a part in \u201cbinding up the nation\u2019s wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

In George Stevens\u2019s mythic Shane (1953), the tragedy of the post\u2013Civil War heroic gunslinger seems eerily tied to his past as an against-the-odds ex-Reb. In contrast, the movie\u2019s odious villain, Unionist Jack Wilson, is a hired gun and company man (brilliantly portrayed by then newcomer Jack Palance).<\/p>\n

Wilson shows off his bought cred by gunning down a na\u00efve southern sodbuster, \u201cStonewall\u201d Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.), accompanied by slurs about the Confederacy. (\u201cI\u2019m saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You too.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the movie\u2019s final shootout, replaying the Civil War provides the catalyst for more violence. This time Shane \u2014 and the heroic South \u2014 wins for good, with a payback Civil War exchange with Wilson:<\/p>\n

Shane: I\u2019ve heard about you, Jack Wilson. <\/em><\/p>\n

Wilson: What have you heard, Shane? <\/em><\/p>\n

Shane: I\u2019ve heard that you\u2019re a low-down Yankee liar. <\/em><\/p>\n

Wilson: Prove it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wilson is then blown back across the barroom under a hail of bullets. Even out on the Wyoming range, the Hollywood subtext is that sodbuster homesteaders can find a former Confederate loser to protect them, with courage and chivalry, against the northern corporatists trying to steamroll them. The noble savior Shane, we are assumed to believe, had no part in slavery or insurrection but was fighting for his southern soil in service to the Confederacy.<\/p>\n

Part of the dark mystery and tragedy of John Ford\u2019s anti-hero Ethan Edwards in The Searchers originates in Edwards\u2019s edgy Lost Cause mettle \u2014 and acts of bravery that never seem to result in his own positive outcome. His prior stint with the Confederacy is alluded to not just to remind the audience of his unrepentant side but also to emphasize the origins of Edwards\u2019s formidable skills, doggedness, and principles \u2014 especially valuable in times (and only during such times) when frontier law fails and such assets are necessary, even if acquired in nihilist service to the losing side.<\/p>\n

John Ford drew on that Confederate romance of noble opponents in several films, from Stagecoach (1939) to The Horse Soldiers (1959). A common theme is audacity fueled by admirable past loyalty to a bad cause, a key ingredient in classic portraits of the tragic hero from Homer to Erwin Rommel.<\/p>\n

Hollywood Westerns \u2014 often in the 1950s and early 1960s \u2014 increasingly saw in the Confederate romance a way of reuniting the country, and they partook of the leftist pushback against a federal establishment. Indeed, it is hard to watch a Western in which a southern officer is portrayed purely negatively. At worst, they are daydreamers plotting to rebuild a western confederacy (Rio Conchos). At best, they play into the stereotypes that the better fighters of the South lost the war only because of overwhelming industrial output and manpower of the North \u2014 and thus former Confederates are especially valuable Indian fighters on the frontier, a safe space for them that is the United States but not the North.<\/p>\n

The True Grit movies have a larger-than-life Rooster Cogburn character, an anti-hero and former member of the Quantrill Raiders, the pro-Confederate rangers\u2019 gang that included Jesse and Frank James. John Wayne first portrayed Cogburn in 1969, in a finale to his earlier southern roles in John Ford\u2019s cavalry movies.<\/p>\n

In 1969\u2019s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Clint Eastwood mastered the art of portraying Confederates as noble opponents, especially in a haunting scene of an oppressive Union POW camp overseen by a psychopathic criminal commandant, set to the moving lyrics of Ennio Morricone\u2019s \u201cStory of a Soldier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eastwood later went the full Confederate, in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). The former son of the South, Wales becomes a 1970s cowboy version of Dirty Harry, serving as a jack-of-all-trades multiculturalist equalizer \u2014 fighting back against vicious northern red-leg marauders and in behalf of abandoned women, the poor, and Native Americans.<\/p>\n

The supposedly left-wing 1960s and 1970s, in fact, were the heyday of Confederate Chic. True, there were plenty of In the Heat of the Night portraits of the now-familiar racist white Neanderthals, but with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation, the romance of the Old South reappeared, updated and tweaked for the era of counterculture protest.<\/p>\n

The contemporary hippie style of long hair, beards and mustaches, resistance to government authority, twangy folk-song strains, and hard-edged metal all fed into the rural, down-home Confederate romance. Notions of slavery, segregation, and secession mysteriously disappeared. Southern attitude was no longer Bull Connor but airbrushed Sixties-era resistance, at least at the superficial level of pop culture.<\/p>\n

In Walter Hill\u2019s post-Vietnam The Long Riders (1980), the murderous Jesse James gang morphs into a sort of mix of Lynyrd Skynyrd with Bonnie and Clyde \u2014 noble outlaws fighting the grasping northern banks and the railroad companies\u2019 \u201cPinkerton Men.\u201d David Carradine and his siblings, playing members of the gang, appear like Woodstock rockers, with exaggerated southern accents, long unkempt hair, hippie buckskin, and a don\u2019t-give-a-damn Bay Area resistance attitude.<\/p>\n

When a clueless Unionist musician is caught in a cathouse playing \u201cThe Battle Cry of Freedom\u201d (\u201cRally Round the Flag, boys\u201d), a Younger brother (Randy Quaid) in the gang forces him to substitute \u201cI\u2019m a Good Old Rebel,\u201d sung by no less than California hipster Ry Cooder. The lyrics are unabashedly treasonous:<\/p>\n

I hate the Yankee nation And everything they do.
\n<\/em>I hates the Declaration of Independence too.
\n<\/em>I hates the glorious Union \u2019Tis dripping with our blood.
\n<\/em>And I hates their striped banner.
\n<\/em>I fought it all I could.<\/em><\/p>\n

The tough verses today might earn a Southern Poverty Law Center\u2013driven boycott of the film\u2019s soundtrack, or a visit from Antifa.<\/p>\n

Hipster Confederates<\/strong><\/p>\n

An earlier melodic and hit rendition of Robbie Robertson\u2019s (of The Band) \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,\u201d sung by civil-rights activist Joan Baez, helped resurrect and mainstream Baez\u2019s folk career. But Robertson\u2019s song is about the Union\u2019s slashing and burning its way through the sacred ground of the empathetic and slave-owning South \u2014 it\u2019s an unapologetic and romantic defense of Confederate rebellion:<\/p>\n

Like my father before me, I will work the land
\n<\/em>And like my brother above me, who took a Rebel stand.
\n<\/em>He was just 18, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave.
\n<\/em>I swear by the mud below my feet,
\n<\/em>You can\u2019t raise a Caine back up when he\u2019s in defeat.
\n<\/em>The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing
\nThe night they drove old Dixie down, and all the people were singing
\nThey went, \u201cNa, la, na, la, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The unlikely common denominator that brought together left-wing Sixties popular culture with Confederate cool was a mutual hatred of a supposedly big, square, soulless, and powerful Washington, hated for its insolence in Vietnam and for stifling the individual \u2014 as if the poor lost South had been once as defenseless as the Vietnamese in the face of such a godless steamroller, or as if the Carradine clan were like the Allman Brothers with six-shooters.<\/p>\n

Southern pop-music angst, hard metal, and crossover country and western channeled southern and Confederate themes, supposedly adding authenticity to mostly mainstream northern suburban American pop. Were rockers from the South popular versions of the 1920s and \u201930s Southern Agrarians (\u201cI\u2019ll take my stand\u201d) critics?<\/p>\n

Few pop icons (but see Neil Young\u2019s \u201cSouthern Man\u201d) dared in the 1980s to suggest that southern chic was somehow blind to the racism of the Confederacy rather than just defiant and anti-government. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd (\u201cSweet Home Alabama\u201d), the Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels (\u201cThe South\u2019s Gonna Do It\u201d), Confederate Railroad (\u201cSummer in Dixie\u201d), and even REM squared the circle of grafting old-style Confederate attitudes with hip counterculture, even if superficially and often nonsensically.<\/p>\n

In other words, Confederate Chic escaped the modern odium that often had been accorded the Lost Cause revisionism sweeping the country from 1890 to 1920, in part fueled by rising nativism and renewed commitment to Jim Crow.<\/p>\n

Instead, Southern rurality, agrarianism, traditionalism, independence, autonomy, anti-federal-government animus, and poverty all conveniently resonated with the alternative cultures that reappeared in the 1960s and that remain with us to this day. Apparently, a southern accent brought a little gravitas to the hippie\u2019s marijuana-laced nasal drawl, the same way that the working white man\u2019s \u201ctake this job and shove it\u201d was an earthier version of People\u2019s Park resistance.<\/p>\n

Folksy Racists<\/strong><\/p>\n

But in 2017, there still remains a disconnect: If stone-dead Confederate generals are now fair game for nocturnal sledgehammers, sandblasters, and cranes 150 years after the end of the Civil War, why haven\u2019t the thought police, on campus and off, Trotskyized Civil War chic, erasing its counterculture symbols?<\/p>\n

Is Ry Cooder\u2019s music apolitical the same way that a dead Robert E. Lee is just a stone? Or does his romantic rendition of Confederate-cause music (even within the fictional framework of cinema) condemn him \u2014 for the same reason that it is now a sin even to allow a bronze simulacrum of Lee to keep growing verdigris?<\/p>\n

Can Shane and Ethan Edwards remain our heroes? How did the Carradines and the Keaches (who played Jesse and Frank James) survive in Hollywood after turning former Confederates into modern resisters of the Deep State?<\/p>\n

The answer is a familiar with the Left: The sin is not the crime of romanticizing the Confederacy or turning a blind eye to slavery and secession per se. Instead what matters more is the ideology of the sinner who commits the thought crime. And how much will it cost the thought police to virtue-signal a remedy?<\/p>\n

Folksy Confederates still have their charms for the Left. All was forgiven Senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansman. He transmogrified from a racist reprobate who uttered the N-word on national television into a down-home violinist and liberal icon. A smiling and avuncular Senator Sam Ervin, of Watergate fame, who quoted the Constitution with a syrupy drawl, helped bring down Nixon; that heroic service evidently washed away his earlier segregationist sin of helping to write the Southern Manifesto.<\/p>\n

Progressives always have had a soft spot for drawling (former) racists whose charms in their twilight years were at last put to noble use to advance liberal causes \u2014 as if the powers of progressivism alone can use the kick-ass means of the Old Confederacy for exalted ends.<\/p>\n

Dixie Down or Up?<\/strong><\/p>\n

How strange in 2017 that establishment universities, and city councils and mayors, are found guilty of racism for allowing century-old icons of Southern Lost Cause pride to stand. They seek atonement by offering politically correct pieties, while they order their work crews out to the parks at midnight.<\/p>\n

But in such a Jacobin climate, shouldn\u2019t civil-rights activist Joan Baez, for example, be condemned retroactively for her thought crimes?<\/p>\n

She jump-started a second career in 1971 with her rendition of \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.\u201d Her likely motivation for redoing the tune, aside from natural career concerns, was that it\u2019s a powerful lyric piece and a magnanimous expression of empathy for the South\u2019s post-war poverty and humiliation. But for anyone else, romancing slavery and racism would still be a felony in the eyes of the Orwellian thought police.<\/p>\n

Instead Baez\u2019s perennial exemption is simply because she is, after all, Joan Baez.<\/p>\n

Apparently, it would be a lot creepier (and more work) to ban \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down\u201d from the airwaves and downloads than to put on a black mask and chip off Stonewall\u2019s nose, winning applause from CNN and MSNBC.<\/p>\n

For progressives, there are two Confederacies: the benign, hip mythology that channels counterculture defiance and that has been conveniently cleansed of slavery and secession, and the pernicious sort that imputes racism to its supposedly white-trash adherents.<\/p>\n

In other words, all Confederate romantics are bad, but some are not so bad after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much. How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery? To use a shopworn phrase, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1134,1133,1132,1124,1104,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2KW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11366,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ideology-of-statue-smashing\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":0},"title":"The Ideology of Statue Smashing","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Statue smashing is back in the news. One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down \u201cSilent Sam,\u201d a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. The bronze figure is portrayed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civil War"","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11718,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/waging-war-against-the-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":1},"title":"Waging War Against the Dead","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civil War"","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7734,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sherman-at-150\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":2},"title":"Sherman at 150","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 6, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Ricochet One hundred and fifty years ago this September 2, William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta after a brilliant campaign through the woods of northern Georgia. While Grant slogged it out against Lee in northern Virginia all through the late spring and summer of 1864\u2014the names\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Sherman1-300x330.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10586,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10586-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":3},"title":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Sam Davidson Victor, I enjoy reading your articles in the National Review. I never understood why this country has statues that honor people that took up arms against the United States. I do not think there are any statues honoring Lord Cornwallis, General\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10505,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-war-against-memory\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":4},"title":"Our War against Memory","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 22, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The new abolitio memoriae \u00a0 Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot \u2014 but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Civil War"","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11067,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-confederate-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":10598,"position":5},"title":"The Confederate Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 20, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren resurrect the race-based thinking of the antebellum South: \u2018One drop\u2019 and you\u2019re a bona fide minority. Senator Elizabeth Warren has doubled down on her insistence that she is Native American. 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