Given all the hoopla over SVR and its unrepudiated League of the South ties, this story from the Washington Post (via the St. Albans Messenger, if you please) by Neely Tucker caught my eye. It suggests that Richmond, Virginia, may lose its 117-year-old Museum of the Confederacy, either to relocation or to a name change that omits the word ‘confederacy.’
Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a “tipping point” that was going to affect “its very existence.”
More after the jump.
Really, there are just so many reasons! The problem is bad location there in Richmond, the capital of the Old South, next door to the “White House of the Confederacy, home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis” and a National Historic Landmark, to boot. It’s at the end of a dead-end street, lacks parking, is nearly “swallowed by a surrounding medical complex” (emphasis added). It faces competition from roller coasters at a nearby amusement park.
Eventually, a perhaps more plausible reason is brought forward:
a historic shift in the mind-set of the white South, whose psychological underpinnings were held together for more than a century by the romantic ideal of “the lost cause” of the Confederacy. This held the antebellum world as a largely mythological place, a land of moonlight and magnolias, of “Gone With the Wind,” of mint juleps and Henry Timrod’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery”:
Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies . . .
(The Messenger edited out the poetry).
Lee’s uniform, J.E.B. Stuart’s plumed hat, letters, battle flags, locks of hair from those who died in the holy cause** became “sacred relics” housed in a shrine to the Confederacy.
And finally, there is, of course, the reason no one wants to talk about: race.
Meanwhile, an even more probable reason for the old museum’s decline is a nearby $13-million American Civil War Center providing artifacts and testimony from three points of view: the South, the North, and from blacks. The new center is packing in paying customers.
One Richmond writer quoted in the article suggests that a lot of the local citizenry are “just sort of embarrassed” by the museum of the holy relics of the War Between the States, especially when contrasted with the new Civil War Center.
Context, they say, is everything. And in the Richmond of the “New South,” nearly half the residents are not descended from white southerners; they’re snowbirds or immigrants. To them, writes Tucker, paraphrasing one source, “the Confederacy is irrelevant.”
We can applaud the New South in moving past its attachment to a heavily edited and romanticized view of an ugly history, just as we applaud and respect politically moderate and progressive Germans for coming to terms with past fascism and the “Final Solution,” and Amercans — especially Democrats — who come to terms with FDR’s order to forcibly relocate and detain Japanese Americans in prison camps after Pearl Harbor solely because of their race.
At the same time we regard as dangerous and pathological and even pathetic the attachment of fascists everywhere to the symbols of German Nazism. Attachment to the symbols of the Confederacy are clearly of the same ilk.
Too bad the secessionists in our neck of the woods haven’t gotten that message.
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* In my southern Maine childhood, we mocked confederate nationalism with this saying: “Save your Dixie cups — the South will rise again!” I don’t know where it came from, but I thought it was widely known until I read this to my midwestern-raised spouse and had to explain the title.
** A concise version of the “holy cause” (or causes of the War Between the States): some combination of state’s rights; preservation of slavery as the economic underpinning of the region; cultural and economic independence of the fast-growing industrialized North; and continued control of the federal government by a virtual oligarchy of slave-owning plantation holders based on a skewed census that counted 5 slaves as 3 people.