Everything's Bigger in Texas, Including Confederatardation

[CountDeMoney]

Where the Confederacy Is Rising Again
In east Texas, a group of true believers is helping build the largest Confederate monument in a century. Is the state itself helping keep the memory alive?
By John Savage
Politico.com
August 10, 2016


In July 2015, with national controversy over displays of the Confederate flag at a ferocious peak, five Texas Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the state's top elected officials arguing that some of the dozen Confederate memorials at the Texas state Capitol "espouse a whitewashed version of history." The letter came a month after a 19-year-old white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, a hate crime that jump-started a national conversation about the meaning of Confederate symbols.

The letter was sent to Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus. Only Straus responded. In November, he ordered a House committee to review the "historical intent and significance" of the monuments and make recommendations to the State Preservation Board. When the review finally takes place, likely in the few months right before the November elections, Texas lawmakers will find themselves in a tough spot: They will be forced to either deny historical truths about the Confederacy, or potentially face the wrath of a devoted, active and organized subset of conservative Texans. Monument supporters and protesters alike are anxious they will be on the losing end of the committee's recommendations.

Nowhere has the national re-examination of Confederate emblems been more riven with controversy than the Lone Star State. In cities across Texas, monuments have been vandalized, and sharp-edged arguments have erupted over the renaming of schools dedicated to Confederate icons. Last summer, in the north Texas town of Denton, a 22-year-old man carrying a loaded AR-15 confronted a 69-year-old black man protesting a Confederate monument in the town square. In May 2015, at the University of Texas at Austin, vandals spray-painted "Emancipate UT" on a larger-than-life bronze statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. (After heated debate over what to do with the statue, the University emancipated the Confederate icon from his prominent public location.) And in the past few months, the Houston Independent School District voted to rechristen eight public schools that had been named after Confederate heroes, a move that has sparked a lawsuit.

Throughout this tempest, the Texas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an aging army of deeply religious, federal government distrusting, neo-Confederate true believers, has emerged as a steadfast defender of Confederate iconography. The Texas SCV only claims about 5,000 members, but their ideology carries significant weight in the state. SCV members sued the University of Texas in an effort to stop the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue. They distributed more than 1,000 Confederate flags in Fort Worth after the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo banned the Confederate battle flag. Wherever someone wants to rename a school or remove a statue that honors the Confederacy, the SCV's members soon follow.

But the Texas SCV is not only fighting against the disappearance of Confederate symbolism, they are behind the construction of what is likely the largest Confederate memorial built in a century—a multi-ton shrine nearing completion in an east Texas town near the Louisiana border. For the SCV, this battle is not just about protecting a Confederate heritage, it's about resurrecting it, restoring that heritage so that they will continue to have something to protect.

With tempers flaring across Texas and with lawmakers set to debate the historical accuracy of the Capitol's Confederate memorials in the waning months of the 2016 election, the men of the SCV say they're misunderstood. And while they acknowledge the recent success of their opponents in other states, they insist that in Texas, the Confederacy will prevail.

***

The first time I called Jim Toungate, the adjutant of the Williamson County chapter of the Texas SCV, he invited me to his home in Georgetown, a central Texas community about 30 miles north of Austin.

When I arrived, it took Toungate, a wide, mustachioed 72-year-old, several minutes to open the door of his limestone-veneered ranch house. He had stubbed his toe, he said after letting me in, and "it was bleeding like a stuck hog—real ugly."

Toungate offered me a cup of coffee, and hobbled to the kitchen to brew it, passing a flat-screen television tuned to Fox News. Above the TV set, a shelf was lined with Minié balls, cannonballs and books with titles such as The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War and Unwavering Duty: Jefferson Davis. Toungate said he was a student of history—had been his whole life—but has really "kicked it up a notch" since he retired seven years ago after four decades working for the railroads.

"People don't realize the true history of the South," Toungate calmly said as he spooned the ground beans into a coffeemaker. "It's really a crying shame."

We sat down at his kitchen table, which was covered with maps of Israel. In January 2016, Toungate took a 12-day trip to the nation and was "re-baptized in the Jordan River," he said. Toungate says that he faithfully listens to sermons on CD from Endtime Ministries, a Plano-based ministry that preaches that Armageddon is nigh.

I told Toungate that as a 41-year-old white man who grew up in North Carolina, I spent my formative years surrounded by gauzy renderings of the Old South. I remember learning about the chivalry of Southern soldiers from my Cub Scout leader and taking plantation tours that all but omitted slavery. But I also learned—I don't remember exactly where—that slavery underpinned the Confederacy. I asked Toungate how he could square his Christianity with this hard truth.

"I had five grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy, and they were religious people who didn't treat black people badly," Toungate said, earnestly, his Southern drawl growing thicker as he spoke. "They were fighting for states' rights, not slavery." According to Toungate, before secession, the federal government mistreated Southern states by issuing unfair tariffs. "Thirty thousand blacks fought for the Confederacy because they loved their masters," Toungate argued, offering the fact as proof that "slavery could not have caused the war."

After pouring the coffee, Toungate took me to his study. Flags covered the walls: a Gadsden flag, a Texas flag, a "Come and Take It" flag, and several large Confederate battle flags. "This is the history of my family. We fought in the War Between the States, the War of 1812, and the Revolutionary War," he said, pointing to the flags.

But the Ku Klux Klan uses the Confederate flag—isn't it a symbol of white supremacy? "The KKK also uses the U.S. flag," Toungate said. "No one's saying we should stop flying that."

Toungate led me into a walk-in closet filled with Confederate uniforms. He opened a shiny black gun safe and handed me a black-powder rifle and six-shooter. "The weapons are replicas of guns made around the time of the War Between the States," he explained.

Toungate collects the flags and guns because they connect him to his ancestors. "It's my family's heritage," he said. "It's important to me."

***

Despite the sincerely held historical views of Toungate and his ilk, almost all professional historians agree on the cause of the Civil War. "The Confederacy's agenda was about expanding slavery," says Kevin Levin, founder of the popular blog Civil War Memory and author of the forthcoming book, Searching for Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth.

As I related the arguments that Toungate had told me—the claim that Southern states seceded to protect their rights from a tariff-imposing federal government, for instance—Levin exhaled a knowing sigh. He often hears this claim from SCV members, he said, and it is simply not true. What about the 30,000 African-Americans fighting for the Confederacy? "Another myth," Levin says.

Levin pointed to the words of Confederates themselves, particularly Texas' Ordinance of Secession. The document, which officially separated Texas from the Union in 1861, declared that African-Americans were "rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race." It says that Texas seceded because non-slave-holding states "demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the Confederacy." The document does not mention tariffs or any state right other than the right to own black people.

Toungate waved off the document when I showed it to him later. "People have a distorted view of the Confederacy because liberal Northern historians wrote the history books," he insisted. But these are primary sources, I noted, the words of the Confederates themselves. Toungate went silent for a beat, and then changed the subject. "I'm sick of the federal government wasting money," he said, and "people living off welfare."

Levin understands why some people cling to a Southern-fried understanding of the Confederacy in the face of contradictory primary evidence. "A lot of these people have ancestors that fought for the Confederacy and that personal connection, of course, colors how they view the event," he said. Slavery, after all, was abhorrent. Who wants to admit that their family members fought to preserve it?

The SCV's rejection of unequivocal historical fact, can, in part, be attributed to what psychologists call "motivated reasoning," says Sander van der Linden, a Princeton University psychologist and director of the school's Social and Environmental Decision-Making Lab. When people are emotionally invested in a belief, says van der Linden, they are inclined to accept information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and to dismiss conflicting evidence. It helps explain climate change denial, Young Earth creationism, the anti-vaccine movement, and the belief that Obama is a closet Muslim (which, incidentally, Toungate also believes).

Neo-Confederate adamancy is as much about reactionary politics and identity as it is about history. It's a declaration of values, a way of seeing the world, and its prevalence divides along political lines. Polls show that Democrats tend to view Confederate symbols, such as the battle flag, as emblems of racism, while Republicans more often see them as representations of Southern heritage.

And in Texas—the epicenter of anti-government angst, the home of the last two Republicans elected president, where Democrats haven't won a statewide election in 22 years—conservatism and Confederate mythology continue to dominate.

***

To understand how neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" mythology continues to pervade modern Texas, I met with a former colleague who now teaches social studies in the same county where Toungate lives. A gray-haired Army veteran, he greeted me in a Starbucks parking lot, carrying a plastic bag full of state-approved history textbooks. One book published by McGraw-Hill Education, features a section titled, "The South Secedes," which states that "the majority of Southerners viewed secession as ... a necessary course of action to uphold people's rights." The section does not list specific rights.

Asked about the oddity of casting individual liberty as the Confederates' primary belief, the teacher, who requested anonymity out of fear for his job, pointed to Texas' state curriculum standards on the Civil War: "Students are expected to identify the causes of the Civil War, including sectionalism, states' rights, and slavery." At the time of their adoption in 2010, a member of the state board of education said that the standards listed slavery third because it was a "side issue to the Civil War."

The Texas Education Knowledge and Skills guidelines for teaching the Civil War offer a crystal-clear example of how the state curriculum politicizes history, says Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat who served on the State Board of Education from 1984 to 2012. The history standards, she told me, "whitewash slavery." In a 2011 report, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank focused on education policy, echoed that opinion, calling the TEKS social studies standards a "politicized distortion of history." "Slavery ... is largely missing," the report reads. "Sectionalism and states' rights are listed before slavery as causes of the Civil War, while the issue of slavery in the territories—the actual trigger for the [Civil War]—is never mentioned at all. During and after Reconstruction, there is no mention of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or sharecropping; the term 'Jim Crow' never appears. Incredibly, racial segregation is only mentioned in a passing reference to the 1948 integration of the armed forces."

Don McElroy, the conservative Republican who chaired the State Board of Education in 2010 when the Civil War standards were adopted, vehemently disagrees with the Fordham Institute's view. "We wanted to remove the liberal bias from the standards and restore the biblical foundations of our country," he told me via phone. "I think we did that, I really do."

In his book, Race and Reunion, Yale historian David Blight argues that after the Civil War, Southern whites coped with crushing defeat by justifying why they had seceded. Reluctant to admit the Civil War was fought over slavery—a moral anachronism in much of the world at the time—many Southerners framed the war as a fight for states' rights. Blight argues that Southern whites worked, through memorials and monuments, to etch the false narrative in the nation's collective memory.

Giving Confederate monuments places of pride in town squares and in front of government buildings proved an enduring way of shaping public memory. Across Texas, at least 178 publicly sponsored symbols honoring the Confederacy occupy prominent positions, including monuments, schools and roads dedicated to Confederate icons. Most were erected at the turn of the 20th century, as Confederate veterans were beginning to die of old age, and a second wave of dedications came during the 1950s and 1960s, presumably in response to African-Americans' fight for civil rights.

But in 2016, Texans haven't stopped erecting new memorials to the Confederacy.

In Orange, a small east Texas city on the Louisiana border, the privately funded Confederate Memorial of the Wind is nearing completion. With 13 large Greek columns and 26–32 Confederate flags, it will be the largest Confederate monument built in a century, according to the SCV.

Granvel Block, former Texas SCV Commander and the mind behind the monument, says that surging public sentiment in favor of removing Confederate memorials has galvanized the neo-Confederates into action. Despite the opposition of many of Orange's residents, the SCV is determined to finish the Confederate Memorial of the Wind.

Once completed, their monument will stand at the intersection of Intestate 10 and Martin Luther King Jr Drive.

***

No place more clearly reaffirms Texas' continued support of Confederate mythologizing more than the State Capitol and its grounds in Austin, which feature at least a dozen memorials, statues and other nods to the Confederacy. Perhaps the most prominent, the Confederate Soldiers Monument, dominates the southern entrance to the Capitol grounds. It is impossible to miss: an 8-foot statue of Jefferson Davis atop a 23-foot-tall granite base with four 7-foot bronze Confederate soldiers standing at his feet. The inscription etched into the memorial's base dedicates the sculpture to Confederate soldiers who "Died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution." "The people of the South animated by the spirit of 1776," it continues, "to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact in 1861. The North resorted to coercion."

Other memorials at the Capitol include an almost 50-foot-tall monument honoring a Texas Confederate brigade; a Confederate seal on the floor of the Capitol; several portraits of Confederate heroes, including a painting of Jefferson Davis in the state Senate chamber; and a plaque erected by the Texas Division of the Children of the Confederacy in 1959. The plaque reads, in part: "the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery."

The July 2015 letter in which Democratic lawmakers asked for a review of the Capitol's pro-Confederate monuments calls out that plaque's statement as an "outright falsehood." In an email to me, state Sen. Rodney Ellis, one of the letter's signatories, said that it is undeniable that the memorials are "part of an effort to rewrite history." "The Texas Capitol — the face of our state government," said Ellis, "ought not to celebrate individuals whose notoriety stems from their service in defense of human slavery."

But Toungate and the other Texas SCV members I spoke with vow that removing or altering the memorials would mean surrendering to politically correct, liberal distortion.

During my last visit to Toungate's home, his television was again tuned to Fox News, and two pundits were discussing the rise of Donald Trump. (Most of the neo-Confederates I spoke with said they support Trump.) During a commercial, I told Toungate that I understood the love he had for his ancestors, but it seemed unequivocal that the Confederacy fought for slavery, and by extension, white supremacy.

"You've been listening to Northerners who have moved down here and are raising Cain about Texas being racist," Toungate said. "Confederate men were good Christians, and they don't deserve to be treated like dirt."

[MadBurgerMaker]

Syt's thread was better. 

[CountDeMoney]

Syt is gone, but feel free to bump his thread if you're feeling too defensive, and I will be more than happy to drag my nutsack all over it as I lip-sync pucker my bunghole to The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Why would I be care enough to be defensive about what people build essentially under a bridge in Orange? 

Syt's thread had an illustration.  Better.

E:  That was more than a year ago, actually.  I wonder why these morons haven't finished their masterpiece yet.

[CountDeMoney]

WELL SYT ISNT HERE AND IM TRYING TO DO THE BEST I CAN

*Breaks dish in sink, puts hand on forehead, slight sob*

[MadBurgerMaker]

 

I got you covered:



http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,13009.0.html

Granvel Block is a helluva name.  I really don't think you could be anything but a....former?... fake Lt Commander in some crazy town Confederate organization with that on your driver's license.

[Eddie Teach]

God Bless Texas

[CountDeMoney]

lol, looks like a silhouette of a guitar in the grass, so I guess it can double as a memorial to the Confederacy and Lyle Lovett.

[MadBurgerMaker]

   I was just looking at that shit on google earth.  They need to mow. 

[frunk]

Oooo, you can receive Texas Division Crest.  I assume it whitens as well as cleans.

[Valmy]

I almost feel bad for my ancestors. They published a declaration declaring their intention to start a war to preserve slavery and their descendants insist they were liars. But maybe my ancestors were PC Liberals trying to distort the truth about themselves or something.

Anyway here is what my ancestors said about why they seceded: https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html

The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holdings States in their domestic institutions--a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.

Psst: they are talking about fugitive slave clause.

In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

Really this needs to be on those Confederate monuments. I mean you would print the Declaration of Independence on Revolutionary War monuments right?

For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.

Can you believe it? The Feds did not pass a law outlawing abolitionists from electing representatives to Congress!!111 I mean geez talk about a violation of the spirit of 1776!

By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.

They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a "higher law" than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.

They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.

Really they make the Northerners sound way more heroic and united in their opposition to slavery than they really deserve.

They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.

'They' being John Brown and his posse.

They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.

Outside agitators.

They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.

I swear these last three seem to be almost exclusively about John Brown and a tiny minority of abolitionists.

They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.

This is the only line in the whole document to maybe mention tariffs. But far from impoverishing the slave-holding states 1860 was their biggest year ever in the cotton crop. But one would think instead of storming on and on about slavery they might lead with this if it was the primary reason. And again I thought the Democrats had decisively won this debate and the tariffs were only what the Federal Government needed to operate, which is what the Confederate government also intended to do.

They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.

Also something they should put on the Confederate monuments,.

Oh and here is the Texas Declaration of Secession's version of the 'We Hold These Truths to be Self Evident':

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

LOLZ I mean really.

And the only time God or Jesus is to invoked is to declare that Blacks are inferior by divine law. So why being a good Christian is supposed to excuse anything I have no idea.

I swear to God I have no idea how these idiots get around ignoring the fucking Declaration of Secession. It is like they are claiming the people in 1860 were liars or something.

But just to be clear about these people when I was in the Texas Military Museum and when I got to the Civil War this document was right there transcribed and invited people to read. Of course the sort of people who visit that kind of museum STILL voted that secession was right EVEN WITH THIS DOCUMENT EXPLAINING IT WAS ALL ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY AND SLAVERY. So it is pretty obvious that in fact they agree with it.

I mean I can forgive the people of 1860 for various reasons but I have little patience for Neo-Confederates.

[Lettow77]

Confederate identity expresses itself too frequently as a sort of Republican Plus regional variant right-wing extremism.  Southern identity politics need to tack to the center in a major way. There should be a Southern party that supports reparations, handouts and autonomy for the colored community.

[Malthus]

I almost feel bad for my ancestors. They published a declaration declaring their intention to start a war to preserve slavery and their descendants insist they were liars. But maybe my ancestors were PC Liberals trying to distort the truth about themselves or something.

Anyway here is what my ancestors said about why they seceded: https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html

That declaration is awesome. 

[Valmy]

The other states' are pretty good as well. At least Texas mentions something that could be about Tariffs. The others don't.

I like the one for Mississippi: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp short and uses small words.

That they list for reasons for secession:

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

So the Mississippians were leaving the Union because of a law passed 30 years before they joined the Union.

[Malthus]

The other states' are pretty good as well. At least Texas mentions something that could be about Tariffs. The others don't.

I like the one for Mississippi: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp short and uses small words.

That they list for reasons for secession:

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

So the Mississippians were leaving the Union because of a law passed 30 years before they joined the Union.

I'm a sucker for these sorts of historical documents. 

I remember once coming across the act of the legislature of Upper Canada outlawing slavery - in 1793. I was researching something quite different at the time.

In typical colonial fashion, the Act itself is the opposite of inspiring - it's a long-worded compromise: slave-owners are to get compensation, existing slaves to be gradually emancipated, no new slaves to be introduced.

The only inspiring bit is in the preamble" "Whereas it is unjust that a people who enjoy Freedom by Law should encourage the introduction of Slaves ... ". Then goes on to spell out the compromise.

Lacks, somewhat, the rhetorical flourish of a John Brown.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Against_Slavery