Forrest's legacy in the postwar South

[Lettow77]

Although Forrest's legacy in the North is a comfortably continuous history of condemnation, what he means to Southerners has been more fluid. Earliest treatments of Forrest were ones of simple veneration; little context was needed, given that earliest biographers such as Wyeth were his contemporaries, and in the main shared his outlook and differed from him only in that Forrest's greatness secured him a primacy among his peers. Significant challenge to prevailing opinion on Forrest first emerged some time after his death, due to several events. For one, the Klan had begun to be discredited, and Forrest's participation within it discrediting by association. More crucial, however, was the success of Lost Cause writers and a mood of national reconciliation that pushed Lee to the first rank of American heroes. Lee was a gentle, genteel man of moderation, humility and compassion, eloquent and refined; both armies had sought to woo him to their service, and across America as well as in distant Europe his massive, brilliant (and deleteriously wasteful) offensives captured the imagination. He was a man North and South could shake hands on, and he was everything that Forrest was not.

    The apostles of the Lost Cause movement, most notably Jubal Early, were disproportionately coastal Confederates who continued to exalt their marble man at the expense of a brutish rube like Forrest, whose massacre accusations, forcible impressment of conscripts, and persistent avoidance of the enemy's main strength did not play as well as Lee's enormous set-piece engagements and Christlike temperament. So Forrest, if not discredited, faded from Southern consciousness when compared to Lee or even Stonewall Jackson, who from his wartime death continued to cast a long shadow over the South as an unassailable figure of righteousness who could not be meaningfully criticized. 

   The next serious re-assessment of Forrest in the Southern imagination would come with the Nashville Agrarians, who brought a complex world-view dictated by their particular circumstances to understanding of the general. The Great Depression, and the rise of ideological thought, provided democracy and the industrialist, capitalist model with major threats to its legitimacy. Intellectuals within the South formed a reactionary wing of the dissent that arose across the western world, and Forrest, perhaps more so than Lee, enjoyed pride of place as an emblem of Southern civilization, in contrast to and opposition with American capitalist society. (That these intellectuals were predominately Tennesseeans doubtlessly played a role.)

    From among the Agrarians, Andrew Lytle produced Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company, which celebrated Forrest as the last great man of Feudalism in western civilization, a strongman who provided for others, kept his pacts with his dependents, and was ruled by honor and personal vitality and energy, physically cutting down his enemies upon the battlefield.  Forrest was the vital symbol of a South that was a conscious continuation of medieval Europe in opposition to the "noble experiment" conducted by revolutionary, puritanical ideologues from the Massachusetts Bay colony to the New Deal. In this narrative, Forrest is a human figure, a knight of whom chansons can be sung, but more flesh and blood than rarefied nobility of the Southern feudal framework such as Lee.  As fascism developed in Europe, the same allure that drew traditional legitimists and far-right traditionalists across Europe to its fold were analysed as well. Richard Weaver makes the profound statement "The South would have been hard put to distinguish between some of the slogans of the New Order and the tenets of its own faith, sealed with Confederate blood and affirmed in many a postbellum oration. That the Southern whites considered themselves Herrenvolk in relation to the Negro is one of the obvious features of our sociological landscape, and belief in the influence of blood and soil is powerful with them, as with any agrarian people..the restoration of medieval concepts in Europe might almost have seemed the Confederate's dream of reversing history and regaining the way of life which he lost in 1865."

    In so doing, Weaver addresses the South's ready compatibility for fascism, and indeed, with his populist appeal, organization of mass movements of violent resistance, and unbending will, Forrest makes for a convincing Fascist hero. These interpretations of Forrest and the South were inextricably linked with each other, and it is important to emphasize that while they associated both with the repudiation of the American societal model and with repressive far-right systems, this was not a condemnation, but rather a flirtation with ultrareactionary (with its agrarian, pastoral emphasis, strongly reminiscent of Carlism) ideology that America has seldom seen before or since.


   From the high tide of the Agrarian movement, the coming of Civil Rights and the centennial again struck down Forrest. A general sentiment of nostalgia with regards to the war overwhelmed the country a century after the conflict, and Lee was once again indispensable as the sanitized saint of American soldierly virtue. As racial attitudes permanently shifted against segregation and blacks began to win widespread acceptance in their push for a general equality, Forrest's baggage as the General in charge at Fort Pillow and the shadowy ruler of the Klan became a greater burden than ever before. Perhaps for this very reason, Forrest remained a favourite amongst "unreconstructed" Southerners of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and, more latterly, the League of the South, but nonetheless at the present time might be said to be at the nadir of his acceptance, condemned by Northerners and rejected by most Southerners as an indefensible and inveterate supremacist.
   
    The final epilogue of Forrest's legacy can be seen in the present controversy over his final resting place. In February of 2013, the Memphis city council, after years of discord, ruled to rename Forrest Park, where the General and his wife are interred, (and the equestrian statue erected over it paid for at no small cost by the then-impoverished citizens of Memphis in the turn of the twentieth century) to  Health Science Park, an inoffensive and nondescript name with no connection to the park, its founders, or the man buried there whose name has become too venomous for the predominately African-American city to tolerate. In response, the Klan rallied out in protest, threatening thousands of supremacists marching down Memphis's boulevards. On the rainy Saturday in which they appeared, a scant fifty bigots arrived to muddle the matter of Forrest's name. It is a sad coda to Forrest's saga.

[grumbler]

I don't think that those comparing the Lost cause movement to fascism understand fascism very well.  The Lost Cause was about rebellion, while fascism was about obedience.  The Lost Cause was about serving one's own interests, while fascism was the subordination of the individual interests to the interests of the state (or, in the case of the Nazis, the race).  I'm not a fan of the Lost cause, but it was feudal and individualistic, and fascism was industrial and corporatist.

[Neil]

The only thing that really unifies them is the belief that the first and only resort when dealing with political opposition is extreme violence.

[Lettow77]

 I don't think Weaver understood fascism very well at all- he refers to it as a medieval restoration, after all. To be fair, his speculation was before the war and Fascism had more coherently solidified.

The idea that fascism is more altruistic than Southern nationalism was interesting to hear as an opinion- I think even amongst the elite of Southern culture which was indisputably serving its own interests, there was a rabid sense of identity politics and an arising view of the South to be strived for for its own sake, not just as a set of commercial interests but the manifestation of an already-archaic set of values and world-view.  It's pretty yukkuri delicious stuff.

Edit: another point is that rather than comparing the two directly,

As fascism developed in Europe, the same allure that drew traditional legitimists and far-right traditionalists across Europe

is a better indicator- 1920s-30s Fugitive types were much closer to the reactionary fellow travelers that fell in with Fascism than anything parallelling Fascism itself.

[Neil]

You shouldn't just throw in random Japanese words that are unknown to your audience.

[Razgovory]

I don't think that those comparing the Lost cause movement to fascism understand fascism very well.  The Lost Cause was about rebellion, while fascism was about obedience.  The Lost Cause was about serving one's own interests, while fascism was the subordination of the individual interests to the interests of the state (or, in the case of the Nazis, the race).  I'm not a fan of the Lost cause, but it was feudal and individualistic, and fascism was industrial and corporatist.

Yeah, they were real keen on black rebellion down there.  If the Lost Cause was individualistic they wouldn't lynch people who happened to disagree with them.  You should probably have stopped your post after the first three words.

[Lettow77]

You shouldn't just throw in random Japanese words that are unknown to your audience.

Yukkuri has a profound personal significance- By itself it would only be slowly or calmly, but i've put considerable effort into setting up Yukkuri as a personal belief system.

Broadly, Yukkuri emphasizes the value of leisure over labor, and puts a romanticized patina over inefficiency and continuity. Glorifying an inexpensive and modest lifestyle and satisfaction with the meek and subdued is another facet. The past is a reflecting mirror that shows the way to the future due to a profound resistance to change. This is accepted as untenable, so another aspect of Yukkuri is the gradual and graceful decline, so appreciated in Japanese concepts like wabi-sabi or, more notably, mono no aware. 

Thus, my usage of Yukkuri is particular to myself and I do not use it in its direct Japanese usage, but as the expression I have used for some four years now of my own personal philosophy.

[Monoriu]

You shouldn't just throw in random Japanese words that are unknown to your audience.

Yukkuri has a profound personal significance- By itself it would only be slowly or calmly, but i've put considerable effort into setting up Yukkuri as a personal belief system.

Broadly, Yukkuri emphasizes the value of leisure over labor, and puts a romanticized patina over inefficiency and continuity. Glorifying an inexpensive and modest lifestyle and satisfaction with the meek and subdued is another facet. The past is a reflecting mirror that shows the way to the future due to a profound resistance to change. This is accepted as untenable, so another aspect of Yukkuri is the gradual and graceful decline, so appreciated in Japanese concepts like wabi-sabi or, more notably, mono no aware. 

Thus, my usage of Yukkuri is particular to myself and I do not use it in its direct Japanese usage, but as the expression I have used for some four years now of my own personal philosophy.

This has to be one of those occasions where the explanation is even more confusing than the original. 

[Lettow77]

A brief search confirmed I have been earnestly using the word Yukkuri in this meaning on languish since January of 2012. It is a pillar of my life to which I owe a great deal.

[lustindarkness]

His best legacy is the existence of Forest Gump.

[Razgovory]

He uses strange words, and words that have definitions exclusive to him.  It's just his thing.

[Grinning_Colossus]

I don't think that those comparing the Lost cause movement to fascism understand fascism very well.  The Lost Cause was about rebellion, while fascism was about obedience.  The Lost Cause was about serving one's own interests, while fascism was the subordination of the individual interests to the interests of the state (or, in the case of the Nazis, the race).  I'm not a fan of the Lost cause, but it was feudal and individualistic, and fascism was industrial and corporatist.

Here's what someone who understood fascism very well had to say about the Confederacy:

"This is the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system which is a blot on the history of this people. Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In this spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality."

- Adolf Hitler

[The Brain]

[grumbler]

Adolph Hitler was one of the great scholars of Southern history.  He is more famous for his piercing analysis of German history, but his history of the American South may have been even more prototypically Hitlerian.

[grumbler]

Oh, and GC:  you do know that quote is a fake, don't you?