Why it was felt in 1942 that the change was necessary in the first place? Why was this change picked? What were the feelings were about it at the time? The answers to these questions would be very interesting to know......RonF
Well, Ron, in order to know how Americans thought in 1942, you have to take your mind back to those times and even to the times before. Let's take a trip.
As I have posted to you before on Post # 70 here, Ron, my family’s history of war and conflict during the 1800’s was played out in Cuba and not in the American Civil War. My concern with this issue, as a present day American and as someone with a love of History, is the systematic demonization of American History’s traditional American heroes by the forces of Political Correctness. Yes, some may say that it matters not if Robert E. Lee is demonized by Political Correctness, but, as I have documented in Post # 70 here, that demonization, once allowed to take root unchallaged, then proceeds to attack even George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln himself.
I've waited to draft my reply to you regarding “What were the feelings about it at the time” until this weekend, Ron, when I would have more time to go up to my time machine on the third floor of my 1889 house and travel back to the times you wonder about and before. I have spent countless hours back in those times and I feel I do know the mindset of the average American of those past times.
We know about the past from what has been told to us and from has been written down by people long since dead or dug up out of the ground. Even in our own times, we know about our own world through what the news media tells us and what we discuss with each other. Currently, we have heated debates about people with names such as George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein. But how do we really know such people exist? The only U.S. Presidents I have ever seen in the flesh were John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and I once shook hands with the latter. How do you or I know what to think about George W. Bush except to read or hear what America, as a whole, says about him now, in our own times.
Although I was wise enough to know that a History degree won't pay the mortgage, I have always had a love of History. During my Navy days, I lived in all four corners of the U.S. and, in over 23 years of browsing through flea markets, library sales and used book stores, I have acquired quite a collection of period books on American History ranging from over a dozen 1760's, 1770's and 1780's books found in the "junk room" of a Charleston, South Carolina antique shop for the grand price of $1.00 per book to hundreds of books and magazines and original and reproduced texts of newspapers ranging from the 1700's through the present.
It is these "primary sources" of the mindset of Main Street America that must be consulted when the question of "What did the average American....not the 1890’s Anarchist, or the 1920’s Trostkyite or the 1930’s German-American Bundsman or the 1960’s Weather Underground Radical but, rather, the average American......think about X, Y or Z during the year ****?"
I have spent countless hours with these hundreds of time machines during the past 23 years since I started my, as my wife calls it, "old, moldy book collection".
What “America” though about the Confederacy in general and Lee in particular is an evolution.
To the South, of course, the South meant “we” and the North meant “them”. To the North, of course, the South meant “them” and the North meant “we”.
It took a while after the Civil War to return to some semblance of “us”.
Let’s start our evolution in January of 1861 before the bombardment of Fort Sumter on 13 April 1861.
On 16 January 1861, the New York Times referred to the looming crisis as “The National Troubles”. The Southern politicians are referred to as “the secessionists”.
By 5 April 1861, Southern readers who wrote to the New York Times to argue the Southern cause were referred to as “Southern people” who “express a strong hope” that matters would work out peacefully. During these times,the tone was far more civil in the New York Times that a Dixie Chick thread on FreeRepublic today.
By 15 April 1861, Fort Sumter had been bombarded and the New York Times tone went from “secessionists” and “Southern people” to “Treason so vile”. A recruitment poster for a Philadelphia regiment urged “No compromise with traitors and no argument but a knock down argument” as a Northern soldier is seen running a Southern soldier through with his sword.
By early 1862, the New York Times headlines routinely referred to Confederate Generals simply by last name although Union Generals were always respectfully addressed as “General M’Clellan”(sic), etc.
By July 1863, the war had dragged on long enough that a grudging respect was being developed and by 9 July 1863, after Gettysburg, the New York Times headline announced “Gen. Lee’s Retreat”.
By the time of Appomatox, “Gen. Lee”, had become somewhat of a sympathetic figure in the New York Times while Jeff Davis was still lower than whale scat at the bottom of the ocean. The 13 April 1865 New York Times headline announced that “Gen. Lee Wants to Go to Europe With His Family”. The accompanying story told how Lee “is much affected by late events is said to have been deeply moved at the calamity which had overtaken his army. Davis has deserted him and is retreating on his own account. Gen. Lee, however, fought as long as there was the least chance and surrendered only when he could do nothing else”.
The period after the Lincoln assasination and the Reconstruction brought about much sectional hatred. The America that had been so tired of war learned to rekindle the hatreds that brought about the war. During this era, Harper’s Weekly political cartoons by Thomas Nast routinely depicted Confederate veterans as filthy murderers and portrayed Irish-Americans as drunks with simian faces. The “Bloody Shirt”, as the re-fanning of Civil War era hatreds was referred to, was constantly waved by politicians of that era.
By the time of the Spanish-American War, America had decide that two thirds of America could not go on perpetually hating the other one third of America. The Civil War veterans were getting long in the tooth. The passions were as far back as the Vietnam passions are today. It was time for a change.
The American Consul General to the Spanish Colonial Government in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American War was General Fitzhugh Lee, the nephew of Robert E. Lee and a former Confederate cavalry commander. In the 1899 book, “The Official History of the War with Spain”, the Northern author, Murat Halstead praised the selection of “General Fitzhugh Lee” to the delicate position of Consul General as “undoubtedly a judicious selection” as Lee was “a man of good nerve and military experience”. By 1899, the fact that “General Fitzhugh Lee” had earned his rank and “military experience” in the Confederate Army no longer mattered. By 1899, Americans, North and South, saw each other again as Americans just like whites and Native Americans now see each other as Americans regardless of who was shooting at whom at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
By 1901, President McKinley had been assassinated. The virulent anti-Southern tone of Harper’s Weekly had changed. In a cartoon named “Entering the Hall of Martyrs” the ghost of McKinley, a Union veteran, was seen escorted into the “Hall of Martyrs’, where Lincoln and Garfield were waiting for him. McKinley was escorted by two grieving allegorical figures. One allegorical figure had a headband labeled “North”. The other allegorical figure had a headband labelled.....”South”.
By 1901, “The Bloody Shirt” had been buried.
By 1913, the veterans of both North and South gathered together at Gettysburg for the 50th Anniverssary of that Battle. Old Union and Confederate veterans embraced each other as brothers and exchanged ceremonial Battle Flags. Speeches were made that rejoiced in the burying of the “Bloody Shirt”:
"Comrades and friends, these splendid statues of marble and granite and bronze shall finally crumble to dust, and in the ages to come, will perhaps be forgotten, but the spirit that has called this great assembly of our people together, on this field, shall live for ever."...........-Dr. Nathaniel D. Cox, July 2, 1913 at Gettysburg.
Confederate veterans of Pickett's Division and Union veterans of the Philadelphia Brigade trading ceremonial battle flags on July 3, 1913 at the Gettysburg 50th Anniverssary Reunion
By 1934, Douglas Southall Freeman had completed his monumental four volume biography of Robert E. Lee, “R. E. Lee” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1935.
By 1936-37, the U.S. Government issued U.S. commemorative Postage Stamps honoring the Army and the Navy. The Army commemorative set included a stamp honoring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. By this time, America considered Robert E. Lee an American hero just as today, Osceola and Tecumseh are considered American heroes.
By 1940, Carl Sandburg published his Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biography, “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years”. In that book, Sandburg, Lincoln’s premier biographer described Robert E. Lee as follows in 1940:
“Long ago he (Robert E. Lee) had opposed slavery. He favored the Union but could not fight against his native state……In Texas, he (Lee) had told army associates, ‘I fear the liberties of our country will be buried in the tomb of a great nation…If Virginia stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution) then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life’. The break came hard for Lee”.
That, Ron, is how Carl Sandburg described Robert E. Lee in Sandbrug’s Pulitzer Prize winning biogrphy of Abraham Lincoln that was published in 1940.
Our time travel has now taken us to 1942. America is at war with Nazi Germany and Japan. I am now browsing through the May 1942 issue of “The National Geograpgic Magazine”. The Buick ad stresses how Buick Buick now builds ”better war goods” rather than better “automobiles”. Articles includes “As 2,000 ships are born” which starts out by saying that America’s job is now to “build ships faster than our enemies can sink them!”
As we turn the pages, one article deals with Tidewater Virginia. On page 653, there is a photo of the William & Mary College in Williamsburg. The May 1942 National Geographic caption reads:
“Portraits of Eminent Americans Grace William & Mary Library: Robert E. Lee (right, top) ; College President Bryan (lower, left)”
By 1942, Ron, to the average American that bought War Bonds, loved apple pie and subscribed to National Geographic, Robert E. Lee was simply, in National Geographic’s own words, an “Eminent American”.
By September of 1942, Douglas Southall Freeman had followed up his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Lee with Volume One of a new multi-volume project called “Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command” that studied the military command aspects of the Army of Northern Virginia and Lee’s subordinate Generals.
In the 1942 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York edition of “Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command” that I am now browsing through, Freeman writes in his “Foreword” on 21 September 1942 in Richmond, Virginia:
“In times less out of joint (World War II was now raging), publication of this study would have been delayed until it could have appeared in it’s entirety. The disadvantages of issuing a three-volume work as if it were a serial story are manifest; but something, perhaps, may be gained by printing in the first year of this nation’s greatest war, the difficulties that had to be overcome in an earlier struggle……The Lee and the ‘Stonewall’ Jackson of this war (World War II) will emerge. A Second Manassas ( a very elegant Confederate victory) will follow the blundering of backward-looking commanders and of inexperienced staff officers during any Seven Day’s Battle (a series of battles where an inexperienced Confederate Army squandered many opportunities) the new army must fight.”
Our time travel could go forward to 1988 when James Mc Pherson, a historian with unmistakeable Northern sympathies that some Southereners on these Civil War threads view with great distaste described Robert E. Lee in his Civil War history “Battle Cry of Freedom” as follows:
”….a gentleman in every sense of the word, without discernable fault unless a restraint that rarely allowed emotion to break through the crust of dignity is counted a fault.”
However, Ron, let’s just leave our time machine now that we are in 1942.
You know more about Boy Scout history than I do, Ron, so you know that Boy Scout Councils and Districts are often named after American heroes from Davy Crocket to Seminole Indian Chief Osceola.
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, viewed Robert E. Lee as a great American.
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, viewed Robert E. Lee as an American military hero at a time when America was desperately searching for military heroes.
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, never imagined that the day would come again in America when the old “Bloody Shirt” would be dug back up from where America buried it in the 1890’s.
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, never imagined that the day would come when Robert E. Lee would be considered “a symbol of racism” by some any more that they could ever imaging that:
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, never imagined that the day would come in America when Robert E. Lee would be considered “a symbol of racism” by the Boy Scouts of America any more that they could ever imaging that American thought would ever be governed by a doctrine called “Political Correctness” whose very name came straight out of Nazi writings in the 1930’s.
In 1942, Ron, the average American, both in the North and in the South, never imagined that even Abraham Lincoln himself would someday be demonized as a racist by Americans following a doctrine called “Political Correctness”.
Abraham Lincoln a Racist?: Black American historian presents evidence
In 1942, at the disaterous beginning of World War II with the defeats of Pearl Harbor and Bataan fresh in their minds, Americans were looking for American heroes in general and American military heroes in particular.
In 1942, Robert E. Lee was considered one of the greatest American military heroes that America had ever produced.
So that, Ron, is why “then” in 1942 and why “Lee” and why at “Richmond” which was the geographic area that Robert E. Lee defended with some of the greatest feats of arms in American military History .