Anderson Files: Fake history of Civil War fuels MAGA

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Jan. 19, 2023

Volume XXX, number 22

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Fake history of Civil War fuels MAGA

by Dave Anderson

At the end of the 1950s, the organizers of the planned four-year-long official centennial celebration of the Civil War decided to avoid mentioning slavery or emancipation as much as possible. Historians Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin tell the story in America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.

They note that the commission presented the war as “a kind of colorful and good-natured regional athletic rivalry between two groups of freedom-loving white Americans.” The commission’s brochure, called “Facts About the Civil War,” described the military forces of the Union and the Confederacy as “the Starting Line-Ups.” The pamphlet didn’t include the words “negro” or “slavery.”

The war inspired “the beginning of a new America,” according to Carl S. Betts of the federal Civil War Centennial Commission. He said:

“The story of the devotion and loyalty of Southern Negroes is one of the outstanding things about the Civil War. A lot of fine Negro people loved life as it was in the old South. There’s a wonderful story there — a story of great devotion that is inspiring to all people, white, black or yellow.”

Things started going haywire. The first scheduled observance was to be the commemoration of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The commission called a national assembly from participating state civil war centennial commissions in Charleston.

A Black delegate from New Jersey was denied a room at the headquarter’s hotel due to the state’s segregationist laws. In response, four Northern states announced they would boycott the meeting.

Newly inaugurated President Kennedy suggested that the business meetings be shifted to the non-segregated federal Charleston Naval Yard. Then the South Carolina commission seceded from the federal commission. Ultimately, there were two separate observances.

President Eisenhower created the commission. It was led by Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, a grandson of the Union’s predominant commander, and his deputy Karl S. Betts, a public relations expert and former highschool friend of the president. Historian Robert J. Cook says, “Both men were hard-line anti-communists, conservative Northern Republicans who conceived the centennial as a compelling national pageant that would genuinely excite Americans, young and old.”

Cook writes that in Montgomery, Alabama — the first capital of the Confederacy — the centenary of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as Confederate president was celebrated with beard-growing contests in period costume, a Confederate belle beauty contest and a spectacular fireworks display.

Meanwhile, the state’s governor, George Wallace, would become a national figure challenging the federal government and the Civil Rights movement. White supremacists would go on a bloody terrorist rampage throughout the South.

Under Kennedy, Grant and Betts would be replaced by professional historians, Allan Nevins and James I. (‘Bud’) Robertson. In 1962, the re-organized commission hosted an event at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the issuing

of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and told an aide that the white South would now become Republican for a generation. That was an understatement. Mainstream historians accepted the Confederate view of the war for many decades. Deeply racist books and movies like Birth of A Nation and Gone With The Wind influenced the public. The progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s shook things up, and this was reflected in new historical scholarship and popular culture. The post-war Reconstruction Era had TODAY, THE PARTY been portrayed as a dark time when savage OF LINCOLN favors a former slaves and corrupt Northern whites ruined new white nationalist the South. The new historians portrayed the order. Or maybe they just period as a grand experiment which granted want to turn the clock equal citizenship to Blacks and esback to the 1950s. Or tablished public school systems. They were maybe the 1850s? inspired by a 1935 pioneering work on the era by Black historian W.E.B. DuBois. Blacks became judges and state legislators. There were 20 Black federal congressmen and two Black senators. The Southern white elite would fight back with terrorism through the Ku Klux Klan. They were shocked at how many poor whites were joining the Republicans. Meanwhile, the Northern economic elite became alarmed at the militant unrest of immigrant workers in their region. They became sympathetic to their class brothers in the South and there was a national reconciliation in 1876. Today, the party of Lincoln favors a new white nationalist order. Or maybe they just want to turn the clock back to the 1950s? Or maybe the 1850s? This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

Boulder’s police shouldn’t pick their own oversight

by Eric Budd

In November 2020, the City of Boulder established a Police Oversight Panel after a series of incidents in which Boulder police officers used excessive force and unjustly targeted community members. However, in the years since the panel was formed, the committee has not been empowered to address issues of discipline, foster public discussion, nor drive systemic change for policing in Boulder.

After a panel member recently resigned in protest, the efficacy of the panel’s charter has been called into question and disagreements between the panel and the chief of police have become public. Following these incidents, members of the Boulder Police Foundation, the pro-police group Safer Boulder, and Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold have added new layers to the tension by challenging the selection of the new appointees to the oversight panel.

Boulder’s push to create a police oversight panel began in 2019 after public outcry about the treatment of Zayd Atkinson, a Black student at Naropa, who was confronted by Boulder police and surrounded by officers while picking up trash outside of his apartment. The incident drew national criticism, sparked a large protest in Boulder, prompted Boulder City Council to host a community meeting, and led to the implementation of the Police Oversight Panel.

As outlined in Boulder Ordinance 8430, the Police Oversight Panel reviews complaint investigations and case files, and makes recommendations to the Boulder Police Department’s Professional Standards Unit, which conducts investigations. Boulder Police Department’s (BPD) chief of police receives recommendations and makes a final determination on the conduct and any associated discipline.

The challenges to effective police oversight became apparent in the past year. The second annual report on police oversight highlighted a particular incident where the oversight panel disagreed with the assessment of the police chief regarding use of force. “Panel members were given body camera footage from the June 2021 arrest and said they saw an officer place his