Bluestem has to wonder if Powerline's John Hinderaker is merely trolling, rather than misremembering the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Dartmouth 1971 grad attended college. Via True North, we stumbled across this gem in Confederate Battle Flag, RIP:
Those who now attack the flag say that it is a symbol of racism and an affront to African-American citizens. This is a relatively new idea, I think. When I was a college student, one of my friends, who was from Alabama, had a Confederate flag hanging over his bed. (“The South will rise again!” was his mantra. He turned out to be right about that.) It didn’t occur to us then that the flag had anything to do with race. Of course, race relations were better then.
Perhaps the gentleman from Alabama didn't share much else about his home state other than the battle flag and the mantra.
How nice were race relations in Alabama in this era?
Had Hinderaker remembered much about race relations in Alabama, he might have picked a different example, as the image of the ad distributed by George Wallace's supporters in the 1970 Alabama Democratic primary eerily prefigures Dylann Roof's screed at the church about African-Americans taking over.
In 2006, Associated Press reporter Phillip Rawls wrote in Book rates George Wallace’s ’70 campaign as the nastiest:
Political campaigns didn't get any dirtier than George C. Wallace's 1970 race for governor, a back-alley brawl that featured unabashed racism, altered photos, betrayal of friendships and personal attacks on family members.
As if it wasn't infamous enough, writer Kerwin C. Swint gave it the top spot in his new book, "Mudslingers: The Top 25 Negative Political Campaigns of All Time."
"It was the last openly racist campaign in America," said Swint, who put the campaign ahead of even the notorious Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams presidential race of 1828 that focused on the legality of Jackson's marriage.
Swint, a political scientist at Georgia's Kennesaw State University, said the 1970 Alabama campaign finished No. 1 in his book because it was more recent and combined the most dastardly tactics. "It's very much deserving," said former Gov. Albert Brewer, a former Decatur resident who was the loser in the race.
For Wallace, the 1970 race was a fight for his political life because if he had lost to Brewer, his former ally, then Wallace wouldn't have had a political stage to mount his campaign for president in 1972. The fight became even more intense when Brewer led Wallace in the Democratic primary — putting the two in a runoff for the nomination, which was tantamount to election at the time.
Veteran Alabama black political leader Joe Reed, who was one of the targets of Wallace's wrath in 1970, called it "the most racist campaign in the history of the state. Before that, people talked about maintaining segregation. But this was a personal attack."
An African-American classmate shares a different story about the flag on campus
Perhaps things were nicer at Dartmouth than Alabama during Hinderaker's undergraduate years. Unfortunately, an article in the college newspaper suggests that his premise about the confederate flag being viewed as completely neutral wasn't quite the case for his African American peers on campus. In Afr. Americans have early roots at College, Mike A. Hamilton reported:
The first African-American affiliated with the College was Caleb Watt, who served as founder Eleazar Wheelock’s manservant, according to Director of Alumni Relations Nelson Armstrong ’71.
According to Armstrong, while classes before the 1960s had as few as four or five black students per class, there were between 15 and 20 in his, the class of 1971.
Daniell attributed this slow growth in part to the general civil rights trend.
“We [African-Americans] were few and far between,” Armstrong said. “We were glad to see each other around campus.”
Armstrong noted that during his time as an undergraduate — a period marked by changes in race relations — there were many non-black students who helped their African-American counterparts feel more at home.
“But the feeling of isolation was tough,” he added. “The community wasn’t prepared for [African-Americans].”
And the “College on the Hill” wasn’t without its share of racism.
Armstrong remembers two students running down Main Street waving Confederate flags, in addition to the more common methods of name calling. “You certainly didn’t go everywhere on campus and feel welcomed,” he said.
While Hinderaker has no recollection of the Confederate flag as "a symbol of racism and an affront to African-American citizens," his African American classmate Armstrong experienced something far different at Dartmouth.
Photo: An ad circulated by George Wallace's supporters in the 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary campaign. Via Filmwonk.net.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes the "not about slavery" lie as one that was carefully crafted by Confederate diplomats looking to win European backing.
From www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/
[After listing various examples of Southern slave camp owners' bellicose desire to forcibly annex Cuba and Mexico and other areas as places where slavery could flourish]
Thus in 1861, when the Civil War began, the Union did not face a peaceful Southern society wanting to be left alone. It faced an an aggressive power, a Genosha, an entire society based on the bondage of a third of its residents, with dreams of expanding its fields of the bondage further South. It faced the dream of a vast American empire of slavery. ...
[...]
As the Late Unpleasantness stretched from the predicted months into years, the very reason for the Confederacy’s existence came to threaten its diplomatic efforts. Fighting for slavery presented problems abroad, and so Confederate diplomats came up with the notion of emphasizing “states rights” over “slavery”—the first manifestation of what would later become a plank in the foundation of Lost Cause mythology.
The first people to question that mythology were themselves Confederates, distraught to find their motives downplayed or treated as embarassments. A Richmond-based newspaper offered the following:
-- ‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork. --
Even after the war, as the Lost Cause rose, many veterans remained clear about why they had rallied to the Confederate flag. “I’ve never heard of any other cause than slavery,” wrote Confederate commander John S. Mosby. The progeny of the Confederacy repeatedly invoked slavery as the war’s cause.
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | Jun 24, 2015 at 10:12 PM