I worked for many years for a newspaper in Buenos Aires that was
majority-owned by a media company based in Charleston, South Carolina. When I
was about seven years into my career there—and nearly eight years into my life
as an American expatriate—I had pretty much decided that, at some point sooner
than later, I wanted to move back to my native United States. By this time, I
was general news editor of the paper, but I had never been to the headquarters
office in Charleston. While on vacation with my wife and brother-in-law, I
decided that as long as we were going on a road-trip, it might as well include
Charleston and a visit to headquarters. Maybe I could make the necessary
contacts there to provide me with a ticket back to life in the USA.
I had gotten my first taste of the South (as a society, not a region) in
1970, when I was in the Army before moving to South America. I’d done Basic
Training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, which was, I discovered somewhat to my
surprise, named after a Confederate general, Braxton Bragg, who had led his
rebel army in numerous major battles against the United States, in an effort to
overthrow the American republic and create a new, opposing nation the basic
tenet of which was to be the preservation of a long-standing tradition of
slavery as a mainstay of the Confederacy’s agrarian economy. Why, I wondered,
would a major US Army base be named after a leading proponent of insurrection
and rebellion against the United States? Why not, I wondered, just name a base
after America’s most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold? Worse still, Bragg was
one of some sixty West Point-graduate general officers who used all of the
experience they had gained in the Army of the United States to become the enemy
of that Union and to defend the enslavement of the ancestors of a race of
people who made up an important segment of the US population, and, indeed, of the
Army?
Despite being taught in school that there were other factors beyond
slavery between the industrialized North and agricultural South, it was clear
to me that the principal reason for the Civil War had been the issue of the
federal government seeking to dictate the abolition of slavery to the Southern
states. But I thought that this was a long settled affair. That it had ended
with the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court
House, Virginia, in 1865. Crass error on my part.
I was made painfully aware of this error on my first day in uniform.
Standing in formation in our brand new fatigues and painfully stiff new combat
boots, we were each asked by a drill sergeant to tell where we were from. It
was the typical humiliation exercise—part of the unwritten rulebook for drill
instructors—of proudly pronouncing the name of your home state, which you were
already missing, only to have the DI howl, “O-hi-o! Oh...hi...oh! Only queers and steers come from Ohio, maggot! Which
one are you?”
I noticed as the question made its way down the line that the only
northerners in my platoon were myself, a scared-stiff Jewish boy from the Bronx
and an older guy from Maine whose number had come up in the draft lottery right
after his student deferment for college had run out. Everyone else, to a man, be
they black or white, was from the South.
I had already been getting static from one of the DIs since we were
lined up at the Reception Center and counted off into platoons, while still
dressed in the civvies we’d come from home wearing. I always tended to dress
more formally than my contemporaries and that, combined with my then-willowy
frame and horn-rimmed spectacles, caught the guy’s attention.
Standing almost nose to nose with me, the broad stiff brim of his felt
campaign hat almost touching my forehead, he asked, “You a professor, maggot?”
“No.”
“No, what, shithead?”
“No, sir!”
“Sir? Sir!? I ain’t no goddamn
sir! I work for a goddamn living! You will address me as Drill Sergeant.
Do you understand?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
“I can’t hear you, maggot. Sound off like you got a pair!”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”
“I still can’t hear you!”
“YES, DRILL SERGEANT!”
“And are you a professor...a bookworm...a faggot intellectual?”
“NO DRILL SERGEANT!”
“Well, you sure as hell look like one, and I promise you, trainee, I am
going to bring smoke on your young ass!”
It was divide and conquer. They picked out someone to humiliate in front
of the rest so as to keep the pack in line. Nobody wanted to be the brunt of
that kind of withering exchange, so if the DI could reduce just a handful of
men to trembling masses of jelly, he’d have the others’ attention.
But when you were one of the victims, that’s what you were seen as in
the eyes of your peers and you had to overcome that imposed identification
right away or have it stick throughout training. These were prison-type rules,
since we were all captives here and the DIs were our jailers. And that wasn’t
always a metaphor. The fact is that several new recruits had come to the
reception center in the company of the military police. These were guys, I
found out, who’d been given a choice by the judge of going to jail or joining
the Army. They had apparently come directly from a holding cell to patriotic
duty.
So after asking what state we were from that first day in actual
uniform, they asked, “How many of you maggots are Regular Army?” meaning how
many of us had joined rather than being drafted. Oddly enough, I was one of the
few in my platoon to raise his hand.
“You, maggot?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”
“Really?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”
“Well, well, so the professor is Re-gu-lar Army! I am surprised all to hell!”
I was thinking, “Vindication. I’m in.”
“So how long you in for, O-hi-o?”
“Three years, Drill Sergeant!”
“Three years?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant!
“Three...fucking...years?”
“Yes Drill
Sergeant!”
“Well, I think it’s a pretty miserable fucking excuse for a human being
that only has three goddamn years to give to his country. Get the hell down and
knock out twenty-five, you maggot.”
When we were dismissed to go to our barracks and get our things squared
away before chow and the next formation, we were issued a dire warning. Our
particular platoon DI, who was five-feet-ten, a solid if lead-bellied
two-hundred-twenty pounds and African American, said, “One other thing,
maggots. In my Army there’s only one color—green. If anybody wants to dispute
that, you’ll do it with me.”
Then the sergeant turned on his heel and headed back to the cadre shack
and we trainees were left briefly unattended. As we broke ranks and walked to
the door of the barracks, I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. I turned to
see a tall, rangy drink of water with a crooked sardonic grin, who, had it not
been for the fatigues and the attitude, could have passed for a banjo-player
from the Grand Ole Opry. He was one of the other few who confessed to being
Regular Army. I was also pretty sure I remembered him as being one of the ones who
had arrived accompanied by the MPs.
“Hey,” I said with a friendly smile.
“Hey yourself, you Yankee, blue-balled, sumbitch,” he snarled as he
landed a left hook on me that I never saw coming.
I went down, dazed, in the red dirt of the company street. Some of the
other guys gathered around to see how this would play out, while others
wandered off to the barracks not wanting to get involved. Nobody sought to
restrain my attacker. I sat up slowly, desperately trying to shake clear my
head and saw the guy standing over me, legs spread, fists cocked. I thought,
“If I get up and ‘box’ with this guy, I’ll lose big-time. He won’t even let me
get on my feet before he hits me again. So as I dragged myself to my knees, I
shot my fist out and up, and the blow was right on target, catching him flush
in his unprotected groin. He went down and I was up, shining my brand new boots
on him to make sure he wouldn’t feel like jumping right up and hitting me
again.
It worked, and discouraged any of my other reluctant comrades from
bothering me. But it was clear to me from that point on that if the only “race”
in the Army was green, there were still minds in which blue and grey vividly
existed. And it wasn’t the last time I would hear insults about “goddamn Yankees”
and the honor of the Confederacy.
 |
| Granby Street in Norfolk as I knew in in 1970 |
I had a much better Southern experience during the seven months that I
spent in Virginia on my next assignment at the Army Element of the Navy School
of Music. I had a chance to occasionally rub elbows with the traditionally
urbane and genteel higher society of that early-American state. An Army buddy
of mine—who was from New York, had a doctorate in liturgical music, and had no
business being in the Army despite which he was drafted—had a Navy officer
friend who asked him to direct his church’s choir in Virginia Beach.
My friend had me singing tenor on Sundays because he had an
over-abundance of baritones and basses in the group. So we got to know people
who knew people. And then too, this buddy, who was older than I was by six
years, was a guy with refined tastes and he took me along on his tours of the
local cultural sites in Norfolk and the surrounding area, which was where we
worked and studied. He even ended up living off-base in a little century-old
bungalow behind the “big house” on what had once been one of Virginia’s
traditional antebellum plantations.
But even in that refined atmosphere there was a barely disguised
distrust of Yankees and a feeling that, until they got to know us, they should
assume that we were slippery, judgmental and up to no good, sticking our Yankee
noses in where they didn’t have any business being.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, years later, when, on my first visit
to Charleston, I was received by none other than the president and majority
owner of the publishing company. He even came in his own car to pick up my wife,
my brother-in-law and me at our hotel to show us around the flag-carrier paper
(the company owned a total of seven dailies, as well as other news media).
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| Charleston, South Carolina |
I knew enough about him to know that he was a liberal-minded
intellectual with a deep respect for democracy, and human and civil rights. He
was also a former Navy officer—like several of the top editors in the
organization, including a retired rear-admiral. (So much so that the editorial
offices upstairs were known as “battleship row”). I was introduced to all of
them and we all promised to talk more the next day.
The publisher had traveled widely and bought the controlling interest in
our paper in Argentina (his only foreign property) because it was unique—the
only English-language daily in the country and one of only a handful in Latin
America—and because it had long been a staunch and fearless defender of the
ideals that he cherished. He spoke a little Spanish and was quick to bring my
brother-in-law, who spoke no English, into the conversation.
That evening, he and his then-fiancée-later-wife showed us the sights in
Charleston and then took us to their favorite Greek restaurant for dinner. He
told us a great deal about the history of Charleston, its refined cultural
traditions, and his family’s long parallel history in the area. He was clearly
proud of that history and of his city. But his nostalgia was for the urbane and
highly cultured past and present of Charleston society, not, clearly, for the
Civil War or for the area’s less savory past in years leading up to the Civil
Rights Era.
The following day, my wife and brother-in-law went off sight-seeing, and
I met up with a group of editors and columnists from the organization.
“We thought it would be nice to all go to lunch together so we have a
chance to chat,” one of the editors said.
“Great,” I said.
“I thought we could go to my club.”
“Sure.”
He introduced me to the others presenting me as, “This is Dan Newland,
the Yankee boy that runs our editorial department down in Argentina.”
The Yankee boy? So what was he, the Johnny Reb that ran the editorial
department in Charleston? I bit my tongue but thought, “Okay, here we go.”
“So where did the boss take you to supper last night?”
“A nice little Greek...”
“Oh lord! Not that god-awful place. He’s always taking people there.
It’s embarrassing. I don’t see what he sees in it.”
“I thought it was lovely.”
“You’re just being polite. Did he make you drink that rot-gut retsina as well?”
“I quite liked it.”
“You’re way too kind. Today I’ll take you to a real Charleston
institution.”
It was all very pleasant but there was an undercurrent that made me
squirm a little. There was a lot of joshing about my being a Yankee, fond
mentions of the antebellum glory of the city, with a barely perceptible hint
that it was people like mine, Ohio Yankees, who had destroyed all that. The
other editors and columnists seemed less than comfortable as well and kept
trying to talk shop with me. The host editor’s message seemed to be, you’re not
just foreign because you live in Argentina, but also because you’re a Yankee.
Before we left for lunch at his club, he presented me with Lord Ashley Cooper’s Dictionary of
Charlestonese, a lovely tongue-in-cheek study of Charlestonian
pronunciations written by Frank Gilbreth, one of the columnists (a.k.a. Ashley
Cooper) accompanying us to lunch. Frank was also the best-selling author of Cheaper By The Dozen. We hit it off from
the outset. The editor seemed to forget that Frank, although a transplanted
Charlestonian for the past thirty-two years, was a Yankee from New Jersey and
educated at the University of Michigan.
“Frank here has been kind enough to write this guide for Yankees like
yourself who are always at a loss to understand us,” our host said with a wry
chuckle.
The club was posh and steeped in tradition. It was in the harbor
district, and looked onto Fort Sumter. He made sure we were seated at a table
where I would have a clear view of this iconic Civil War relic of the
Confederacy.
“You a Civil War buff, Dan? Lots of Yankees who come down here are.”
“Not really,” I said. “Most of my knowledge of it stems from the Civil
Rights Era.”
 |
He said, "The Stars and Bars still flies above
the Statehouse here." |
“Well, that right out there is Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began.”
“Yes,” I said, “that part I remember from history class. Quite a view.”
“It’s practically a shrine here. You know, the Stars and Bars still flies
above the Statehouse here.”
We ordered drinks. Bourbon for him, scotch for me.
“Not a bourbon-drinker?”
“Nope, never acquired a taste for it. My brother is though.”
“Well, if you ever move to the South, you’ll want to learn to like it.”
I wasn’t paranoid or crazy. There was definitely a “you and us” thing
going on here even if I refused to participate.
While we all talked shop, waiting for our steaks and seafood, we ordered
another drink. As the host editor was finishing his second bourbon, he tried
again to bait me and this time it worked.
“Know what it means to renege, Dan?”
What is this, I wondered, a vocabulary test in case I ever work here?
But, okay, I was game. If nothing else, to see where he was going with this.
I had a pop of my scotch and said, “Sure. To welch on a commitment.”
“No,” he said with a wry grin, and then carefully pronouncing it so I
would get the joke, he said “Re-NEGE
is what they do when the change shifts down at the carwash.” And then he
laughed raucously at his own joke.
If he had been testing me to see how far he could push me with this Confederate
thing before he finally got under my skin, he had finally reached the limit. This
was where appeasement ended. He chuckled. The others fell silent. I gave him a
hard look, and then looked down at the ice in my scotch. Quickly one of the
other editors recovered and said brightly, “So Dan, tell us how you ended up in
Buenos Aires,” and that was the end of the renewed Blue and Grey hostilities.
I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of a piece of news
that I saw this week about the failure of the Ohio State Legislature to approve
a bill aimed at prohibiting the sale of Confederate memorabilia at this year’s
Ohio State Fair. Clearly, this is part of a broader debate going on right now
and sparking nationwide protests. But it got me analyzing what it was that had consistently
bothered me about what I’ve always considered a futile and divisive attempt by
some white Southerners and some white Northerners to rekindle discussions
regarding a cruel and needless Civil War prosecuted and settled a century and a
half ago at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Part of what bothers me about it is that I am indeed an Ohio Yankee. That
doesn’t mean I hold any animosity toward the South. On the contrary, I’ve spent
a lot of time in the South over the years and have met a lot of wonderful
Southerners—whom I know only as fellow humans and fellow Americans. I simply
grew up feeling repugnance and shame regarding the well-deserved reputation of my
country, as a whole, as one of the staunchest and most long-standing defenders
of slavery anywhere on earth.
As such, I was always proud that my state had been a major first stop on
the so-called Underground Railway, the network of abolitionists who aided and
abetted fleeing African Americans in their bid to escape from slavery in the
South and to find a new life as free men and women in the North. Ohio was a
sanctuary state, a haven for members of an entire race of people held in
bondage for more than two and a half centuries, simply because of the color of
their skin.
I was proud too that Ohio had provided not only hundreds of thousands of
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| Ohio general and future president U.S. Grant |
troops but also many of the most prominent generals who fought in that bloody half-decade
conflict to not only save the republic but also to root out the scourge of
slavery and, once and for all, fully implement the country’s founding
principles of individual rights, equality and freedom for all—a struggle that,
unfortunately, as witnessed by current nationwide protests, continues today. Indeed,
the leader of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, was from Ohio, as were nearly a
score of major generals including such historic names as Sherman, Sheridan,
Custer, Garfield, McPherson and McCook. The state also furnished over fifty of
the Union’s brigadier generals.
Ohio’s immigrant German farming communities, like the one that I hail
from, were also well represented in the anti-slavery effort, not the least of
which was the Ohio Ninth Infantry that originated in my native Auglaize County
under then-Colonel (later Brigadier General) August Willich of St. Marys, a little town about the size of my own and
ten miles west. Willich was a former
Prussian Army officer, who brought his knowledge of war with him and made good
use of it in that bloodiest of American tragedies.
 |
| Ohio immigrant August Willich of St. Marys |
There were so many fellow German-Ohioans under his command that his
infantry was nicknamed “Die Neuner”.
He led those Ohio immigrants in major battles including Shiloh, Stones River,
Liberty Gap, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Peachtree Creek and Resaca. Willich
spent long months in a Confederate prison as a POW before being released in a
prisoner exchange. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Resaca
(Georgia)—and never fully recovered from his injuries after returning to his
home in St. Marys. A radical communist who considered his countryman Karl Marx
to be “too conservative”, Willich’s zeal in fighting the American Civil War was
clearly ideological and based on his repugnance toward the institution of slavery
embodied by the Confederacy.
My conclusion in thinking about all of this in the midst of current
unrest and renewed divisiveness across the US came as something of a revelation
to me. Basically it is that it has nothing to do with North and South, Blue and
Grey, Yankee and Rebel, or any other political and regional discussion between
white Americans. It boils down, rather, to the two and a half century US
institution and tradition of slavery and whether we as white people, still
support it as “just another part of our history”—albeit one that is vile and
contrary to everything that our nation claims to stand for. It isn’t an
historical discussion about the industrialized North subjugating the agrarian
South. It is about whether we accept slavery, with no moral judgment, as “just
how things were back then.” Which, to my mind, is no different than if today’s
Germans accepted the Holocaust as “just another chapter in our history” and as “just
the way things were back then.”
It is also about whether we continue to honor and glorify, not the
South, but the Confederacy as simply part of a cruel Civil War in which all is now
forgiven and in which the leaders of the Confederacy and their symbols have been
somehow “sanitized”. Whether we accept those Confederate leaders simply as fellow
Americans who were in disagreement with Washington about issues that have grown
hazy over time. Whether we continue to be willing to leave slavery out of the
discussion of efforts to keep alive the practice of honoring symbols and
historical players that are emblematic of only one thing—the dark chapter that
the enslavement of an entire race has played in our history.
In the end, I have concluded, it is not a discussion that we white people
can have or “own”. It’s not ours on which to have an opinion. It is only a
valid historical discussion within the history of our African American
fellow-citizens. And efforts to keep the symbols and “heroes” of the
Confederacy in a place of reverence, rather than within the context of insurrection
and slavery, is one of the last hurdles on the road to true racial equality in
America.
