Posted on 05/20/2003 7:21:29 AM PDT by RonF
WASHINGTON (NNPA) - A civil war over whether a Boy Scout Troop in Virginia should retain the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has ended with Lee suffering yet another defeat. After nearly 40 years of protests, the executive board of the Robert E. Lee Council of the Boy Scouts of America, with more than 21,000 scouts assigned to 600 troops, voted last week to change the council's controversial name. The new name of the council will be selected later.
"Upon recommendation of the officers of the Robert E. Lee Council, Boy Scouts of America, I move that the council change its name and immediately start taking steps to select a new name to be submitted to the council on or before the Annual Business Meeting in June 2004," the May 8 resolution reads. It was passed by approximately two-thirds of the 60-member board. The council, which ended segregation within its troops in the early 1960s, spreads across more than 30 localities in Virginia, including Henrico, Chesterfield and the city of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy.
Over the years, African American parents, leaders and some scouts have grown increasingly uncomfortable with being associated with a unit that honors a Confederate leader. "The leadership of the council thought it would be in the best interest of the future of the council," said Robert A. Tuggle, an executive for the Boy Scouts of America in Richmond. "Responsible people came to this decision." The Robert E. Lee Council, first chartered as the Richmond, Virginia Area Council in 1913, changed its name to the Robert E. Lee-Virginia Council on April 6, 1942. It subsequently dropped the Virginia reference.
African Americans who have fought for another name change applauded the news. "My feeling is that it's about time. If I was talking to a man and not for the paper I would use stronger language," said Earl Taylor, a 60-year veteran scout leader who has been among those fighting for the name change for more than 35 years. "The victory is for those people who overcame their old attitudes. My concern now is to recruit the people who stayed away because of the name."
Taylor, a member of the Capitol District committee, which answers to the Lee Council, said he stopped inviting people to join after finding that some potential recruits were offended that the Robert E. Lee patch is worn on one sleeve (a patch with the American flag is on the other). Robert E. Lee is viewed as a hero to the Confederacy by many White southerners. To many Blacks and some Whites, he is anything but a hero. He espoused White supremacist views as he defended slavery, the key issue of the war. Rather than accept the abolishment of slavery, many Southern states defected from the Union. In declaring war on what would eventually become the United States, confederates were viewed as traitors. "The Boy Scouts stand for one nation and one flag," Taylor said. "Robert E. Lee died a man without a country. The Confederacy was a violation of America." Lee died in 1870. His citizenship was restored posthumously in 1975 by Congress.
Arthur Almore of Midlothian, Va., has a son in the Cub Scouts but Almore prohibited him from wearing the shirt. "I would like to thank the president of this council, Richard McCullough, and its executive director, 'Al' Tuggle [Al Tuggle is the Council Executive - RonF], and the members of the board for no longer requiring African American adults and youth to convey the ideology of White supremacy," Almore said. Almore's family history is steeped in scouting. His grandfather, Thomas C. Almore Sr., earned scouting's highest adult service award, the Silver Beaver, for starting a troop for blind youth in Jackson, Miss. His father, Thomas C. Almore Jr., was an Eagle Scout, the highest Boy Scout award for youth.
Tuggle denies the group was pressured to change the name. However, he was not unaware that the Richmond Free Press,an influential Black-owned weekly, campaigned for the name change. "I read the stories," Tuggle said. "They were not discussed in the meeting." But Almore does credit the Black press in helping to bring about the name change. "Once again the Black Press has given coverage to issues of importance to the African American community that the so-called mainstream press has elected not to cover," Almore said.
Tuggle said the next step in the name-change process will begin with the board selecting a special committee to solicit suggestions for a new name; the board is expected to select a new name by next summer. Edgar Toppin, a civil war, reconstruction and Black history professor at Virginia State and Virginia Commonwealth universities, said this action might have an educational value. "I don't think they've ever understood the Black perspective on anything," he said. "It's just a very obtuse and narrowly pointed focus that they have and they've always thought that Black people should just be glad to live in the South, and that Black people should accept their version of history. And we don't."
Toppin says that Lee still cast a long shadow over Virginia. "Robert E. Lee is often portrayed as sympathetic and kind and all that but he was still part of a system that was oppressive and defensive toward Black people," Toppin said. "For many White people, of course, that is their great, great, great hero. Black people generally find anything connected with the Confederacy as offensive."
What unit was that?
Can't his words speak for themselves? He said what he said, it's been printed in context, and the wording is quite clear. Lee may admit that circumstances dictated he accept otherwise, but his approval of slavery and preference for a white army was quite plain.
I don't know their numerical designation, though I have seen the battle site and will happily give you directions to it if you so desire. It's literally 10 miles beyond the middle of nowhere on one of those country roads that are barely a lane and a half wide with passing zones and single lane bridges. You have to drive about an hour southwest of Richmond to find it off the sid of the highway, then a travel ways up the road. There's a small park department display there that documents the battle's details including an engraving of the black confederate troops in action, excerpts from witness accounts, and the details of their mustering near Richmond about a month prior.
In full context, they certainly can. But as you would have it, that means only that sentence you quoted while the rest of the letter, which details a plan for emancipation across several paragraphs, is ignored. In other words, you were and are still trying to make chestnut horses out of horse chestnuts.
How is that any different from the line you quote, which is similarly circumstantial rather than absolute? Does it not say, after all, that continuation of slavery was strictly a product of circumstances, that as a policy it was to function onl "at present in this country" but in no way as an absolute? Yet you plaster this forum with that out of context quote as if it were some absolute declaration by Lee that he adored and supported slavery as if it were not an evil.
By contrast, when Lee notes that the circumstances have changed making emancipation both possible and favorable, you dismiss it because of the circumstantial element. Why is that, non-seq? Why does a statement of circumstance "count" as an absolute in one case, while another finds itself voided by a circumstance of an identical nature?
Is Lee evil for essentially saying "slavery, though wrong, may exist under circumstance X because it is a preferable condition to X's alterntive of bloodshed"
If so, why do you not apply similar credit to him for saying "circumstance X has been supplanted by circumstance Y, and under circumstance Y slavery should be abolished."
Inconsistency undermines your entire argument, non-seq. It effectively reveals that argument for what it is - far from being an honest historical evaluation, it is a politically motivated smear job against Lee.
Because in the second paragraph he had clearly stated his belief that slavery was the best relation that could exist between the races as currently intermingled in the south, and that he would have preferred to use white soldiers. That's why.
...but only under an earlier circumstance. That circumstance changed, and with it Lee saw both a possibility and a need to adopt emancipation. You dismissed this second fact as a product of circumstance yet the belief you continuously misquote is itself the same - contingent upon another circumstance. In short, your position is self contradictory and inconsistent.
And you dismiss the first fact, which is that in Lee's expressly stated opinion slavery was his preferred relationship between black and white. The fact that he reluctantly admits that if the south is to survive then blacks must be conscripted does not alter the fact that he would rather that the south was not forced to do so. The fact that he admits that the white population has been drained dry so that black soldiers have become a necessity does not alter his stated preference for a white army.
Not at all, tu quoque boy. I readily acknowledged the section you quoted, though in full context, along with its circumstance contingency. You, on the other hand, dismiss the second part of the letter (i.e. the remainder) as circumstantially dependent while failing to acknowledge that the very same is true of the part you quote. In doing so, you demonstrate great inconsistency in both your argument and your standards of proof, thus signifying that it is not so much an argument of historical merit but rather one of a political agenda.
That's right.
The confeds didn't claim that right. They simply threw a temper tantrum and went away with the ball when they thought they were losing.
Problem is the ball wasn't theirs.
I think the problem is you are still talking about northerners and southerners.
What is that gabage. It's all old eastern stuff to me, north or south.
My ancestors high tailed it out iof Missisip not long after the civil war to Texas and haven't looked back.
Well you made it farther than I thought before starting with the name calling.
I simple descriptive remark that accurately characterizes your behavior is not namecalling, non-seq. If you do not desire that description, you should not depend so heavily upon tu quoque rationalization.
As I said, you have no idea what you are talking about, and your name calling proves it. Have fun in CA.
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 familys history of war and conflict during the 1800s 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 Historys 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 1890s Anarchist, or the 1920s Trostkyite or the 1930s German-American Bundsman or the 1960s 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.
Lets 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 MClellan(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. Lees 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, Harpers 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 Harpers 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, Lincolns 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 Sandbrugs 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 Americas 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 Geographics 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 Lees Lieutenants: A Study in Command that studied the military command aspects of the Army of Northern Virginia and Lees subordinate Generals.
In the 1942 Charles Scribners Sons, New York edition of Lees 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 its 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 nations 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 Days 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, lets 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 1890s.
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 1930s.
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 .
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